Climate Skeptic

Someone Actually Looked At The Finances of Climate Alarmists

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.

I Was Wrong

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.

Wow, What Planet Does This Woman Live On?

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."

Interesting, but Surprising only Because it is Being Admitted

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.

Just Like WWII

From Climate Progress, via Tom Nelson:

I’m watching Morning Joe on CNBC — the joys of having a baby who wakes up at 6:30 am — and a guy from Time magazine is discussing their major forthcoming cover story that has a picture of the soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima, but now they are raising a tree.

Kudos to Time for making the clear analogy to World War II — that is the only way we are going to beat 450 ppm.

Just like WWII  -- because it will cost trillions of dollars and left socialists in control of half the world?

For the Children

Jim Peden has a very funny comment to this post on Anthony Watts blog.  Since it is sometimes hard to find a comment in the middle of a long string, I will reproduce it here (I hope Jim does not mind).  I will also refer you to Jim's web site, where he has a long and excellent summary of a number of the issues with global warming catastrophism.

The essential elements of an effective global panic consist of two parts:

First, one needs to identify a potential source of a world-wide catastrophe. Second, one needs to convince everyone that that actions of man are about to trigger that catastrophe. This is best illustrated by this following theoretical example:

It is well known that a “Super Volcano” lies under Yellowstone park. This volcano went undetected for many years, because its sheer size is so large it escaped notice when looking for something more familiar in size.

The consequences of another eruption of this monster can be fairly well predicted. First, it will simply blow away a fair-sized piece of Montana, and falling ash will bury cities for many miles beyond. The atmospheric ejecta will blanket a large portion of the earth, blocking out the sun and producing a “nuclear winter” for a significant portion of mankind. Crop failures and other effects of rapid cooling will lead to the death of untold billions of both human and animal inhabitants.

In fact, there are some significant geothermal and other indicators in Yellowstone that suggest this monster is again on the move. This has sparked at least one major television presentation discussing the potential for another eruption and the obvious catastrophe that would follow if it does. But this information in itself has not created much in the way of panic. Most citizens are resigned to the fact that mega-disasters, should they occur, can not be prevented by human action because they are part of the natural behavior of the planet and worrying excessively can not change anything. Don’t worry, be happy, we’re all in this together.

To turn the Yellowstone Super Volcano into a world-wide panic, we need a convincing piece of junk science as a trigger. Taking our cue from the “man-made CO2 is causing global warming” hoax, here’s one distinct possibility as far as Yellowstone is concerned:

Professor Wilfred Brimstone at the University of Mongolia has developed a model which clearly shows the buildup of human population on both the east and west coast of the United States is putting excessive pressure on both sides of the North American plate. The accumulation of vast amounts of additional weight in the form of people, buildings, automobiles, and other man-made items is creating such an excess of plate pressure at the edges, that magma is being forced laterally toward the center of the country, and in particular towards a weak crust zone in Montana centered at Yellowstone park. In the same manner as popping a pimple by squeezing from two opposing sides, the “coastal weight effect” is squeezing the magma beneath the crust and causing a rapid pressure buildup of the Yellowstone Super Volcano. Man’s greed to live near the ocean has tipped the balance of nature, and it is now only a matter of time until Yellowstone blows its top.

….. unless we take quick action to arrest and reverse this process.

It is critically important to immediately evacuate everyone from both coasts, and dismantle all heavy structures and begin transporting them to the center of the country, redistributing them evenly over a wide area until the overall plate pressure has been suitably equalized and the danger has passed. Senator Barbara Boxer has introduced a bill which will impose a stiff tax on any item weighing more than six ounces in order to pay for the weight relocation. A new $100 million Center for Building Weight Studies is currently under construction in Santa Barbara.

If you do not want to be dislocated from your present home, former Vice President Al Gore has just formed a new company, Relocation Unlimited, in which you can invest in “weight offsets” and not have to move. For a price, Mr. Gore will arrange have an equivalent weight of ordinary dirt dug up and relocated instead of your own 3 bedroom ranch.

It is also of immediate importance that we educate our children in the nature of this pending disaster that their parents’ over-building has created. Children everywhere should quickly make costumes that resemble blocks of concrete and conduct ritualistic marches in the general direction of the central Midwest. This, combined with the waving of signs and the singing of Kumbaya will quickly spread the word throughout the public school system and draw the attention of the mainstream media which is also critical to this effort. Working together, we can all stem this rapidly looming disaster.

incidentally, you can purchase your STOP YELLOWSTONE NOW t-shirts by visiting our online store, and our book by the same name is available on Amazon.com. A prime time television special is currently in production.

Did I get it right?

James A. Peden
Shoreham, Vermont on a chilly Sunday Morning

My Brief Answer

In this article, a UK trade union makes the following demand:

Unison is proposing that chief executives responsible for climate-wrecking schemes should be hauled up before school children to explain their actions.

Here is my brief response:

I run my own business and would love the opportunity to explain to school children why those who try to frighten them about their effect on climate have more to do with controlling them than helping them. I would love to explain why global warming alarmism is hugely exaggerated. Unfortunately, this platform never exists because alarmists, beginning with Al Gore, evade and avoid debate at all costs.  Putting me in front of school children to tell my story on global warming is exactly what alarmists don't want.

My son today asked me why we live in a world with so many problems.  I responded that he needs to check his perspective.  On a historical scale, compared to anyone from any prior generation, our life is a piece of cake.  The reason things seem so bad in the media is because politicians and others want us to give up our rights.  No one gives up their rights voluntarily, but sometimes can be tricked into doing so in an "emergency."  It is therefore in the best interest of those who want power over us to try to convince us that there is some kind of emergency out there.

As a counter challenge, I would love for global warming alarmists to explain in return to school children why our generation enjoyed the benefits of economic growth and near universal wealth (at least by historical standards) but our kids on the other hand must accept poverty due to a grand global fetish surrounding a trace atmospheric gas and a few tenths of a degree of temperature change.

Using Climate Change as an Excuse

I think we are going to see more of this:  Using climate change as an excuse to cover failures that have nothing to do with climate change.  (via Tom Nelson)

Amidst the worsening political crisis hitting the Arroyo government brought about by ZTE-NBN scandal and all other issues raised since 2001, economic situation is also getting worst. For about 3 weeks, the country’s facing the issue on rice shortage. Ironically, government officials are singing different lyrics looking something or somebody to blame.

Senator Miguel Zubiri noted that climate change is a possible factor on low food production. While Senator Loren Legarda stated that without climate change Philippines can have higher agricultural production.

But available data from PAG-ASA show that the country’s recorded normal rainfall last year giving a very favorable condition for agricultural production. Also, few typhoons visited the country on the same year as compared to 2005 and 2006.

Clemente Bautista, National Coordinator of KALIKASAN People’s Network believed that the government is using the climate change as escape goat on the real causes of rice shortage.

Interestingly, the author says that in fact it may not be climate change, but the government programs aimed at CO2 abatement and global warming reduction that are to blame:

He lamented the current policies and program of the government to combat climate change which will further threaten our food security. He stated that Biofuels Act of 2007 introduced the commercialization of biofuel production. This will aggrevate problems on food security and landlessness. Biofuel act of 2007 will further strengthen the convertion of agricultural land to commercial use.

In His Own Words

In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Al Gore, 2006

Which, of course, reminds me of this one NOAA's Steven Schneider:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Update:  Here is a question:  If Al Gore purposely exaggerates the problem to increase the value of his investments in global warming and carbon trading companies, how is he any different from what,say, the folks at Enron were accused of?

Media Coverge of Climate Exposed

I won't do a comprehensive roundup, but just focus on one quote, from the Canadian Broadcasting Company:

News of accelerating effects of global warming, such as the recent collapse of a massive chunk of Antarctic ice and worsening cyclones and flooding, has put even more pressure on the UN talks to provide decisive action.

There are only two ways that anyone with a lick of information about climate could call the recent ice shelf collapse "evidence" of accelerating global warming:  Bias, or abject ignorance.  Here are four key facts that the CBC article ignores but I posted here:

• Global temperatures have been flat for 8-10 years, after being up substantially the decade previously.
• Recent ocean measurement work as reported on NPR show ocean temps. over last 5-6 years to be flat to slightly down
• 98% of Antarctica has cooled over the last decades and has built up ice pack -- 2% has warmed (in the Antarctic Peninsula). I will leave it to the reader to guess where Al Gore sent his cameras
• In August 2007, or about a half year ago, sea ice extent around Antarctica was the largest ever recorded (since measured by satellites in 1979). So, within the last 6-8 months, Antarctica had record sea ice buildup.

Given this backdrop, it is astounding that one could interpret the collapse of an ice sheet that happened faster than one scientist predicted as "accelerating global warming." I can't think of any mechanism where the behavior of an ice shelf would be a more sensitive measure of the pace of global temperature change than would be the direct measurement of air and sea temperatures themselves. 

An even minimally thoughtful analysis would argue that the ice shelf collapse is either 1) a natural cyclic event or 2) the result of a very local weather phenomenon.

And don't even get me started on the "worsening cyclones and flooding."  Where?  By what measure.  I challenge anyone to point to a single study that shows worsening cyclones or flooding.  The only ones I have seen that have purported to do so (such as "an Inconvenient Truth") have done so by ignoring the improvement in detection technology or the increase in real estate value along coasts and flood plains.  When the latter are accounted for, no increases have ever been demonstrated.

There are reasonable ways to argue that the earth has warmed over the last half-century.  Citing an ice shelf collapse or increased media coverage on flooding (which creates the impression there is more) as evidence are not among them.

This is Pretty Priceless

I am sorry posting has been light of late, but in the mean time, this is priceless (via Tom Nelson);

“Sir David King, not realizing he had been ambushed, launched into his usual exaggerated, alarmist presentation (he actually knows remarkably little about the science of climate, and makes an ass of himself every time he opens his mouth on the subject). The six sceptics heard him politely until one of them, who told me the story, could contain himself no longer. When Sir David said that the snows of Kilimanjaro were melting because of “global warming”, my informant pointed out that, in the 30 years since satellite monitoring of the summit had begun, temperature had at no instant risen above –1.6°C, and had averaged –7°C (Molg et al., 2003); that the region around the mountain had cooled throughout the period (Cullen, 2006); that the recession of the glacier had begun in the 1880s, long before any anthropogenic influence (Robinson, Robinson & Soon, 2007); and that the reason for the long-established recession of the Furtwangler glacier at the summit was ablation caused by the desiccation of the atmosphere owing to the regional cooling. It had nothing to do with global warming.”
[…]

“Sir David King, embarrassed at having been caught out, said he had never been so insulted in all his life. He flounced out of the meeting, followed by the rest of the British delegation. To Dr. Ilarionov, two conclusions were evident: first, that the supporters of the “consensus” position had based their argument on known scientific falsehoods and were accordingly unable to argue against the well-informed sceptics; secondly, that, as he put it at the time, the British Government were behaving like old-style imperialists. The breakdown in relations between the UK and Russia began at that moment.”

Why Do We Only Look At Skeptic's Money?

I would be happy to leave funding sources and related ad hominem attacks out of climate discourse completely, but, given these attacks seem to be an element of, oh say, 99% of all media articles on the topic, why is the scrutiny completely directed at skeptics?  Sure, ExxonMobil has probably spent a couple of million dollars funding skeptics.  But here is an example of $1.3 billion put behind the alarmist position.  And this is just one such example.  Gore just raised a $5 billion fund whose success or failure entirely depends on alarmists winning the political debate.  These are direct incentives powerful people now have to lobby the government for climate "action" of some sort, whether or not it makes sense, just as ADM lobbies Congress for corn ethanol subsidies that have been proven to make no sense environmentally or economically.

Great Description of the Climate Debate

Peter Foster via Tom Nelson:

The environmental movement has also been astonishingly successful in co-opting education systems, and highly skillful at exploiting universal psychological tendencies to social conformity and deference to "authority." The suggestion that climate change is primarily a "moral" problem has been a masterstroke, of which the masterstroker is Al Gore.

Invoking morality is a powerful weapon in shutting off debate. It employs the so-called "psychology of taboo" to place some claims -- for example, that climate change may be natural, beneficial, or practically unstoppable -- beyond the pale. Those who promote such notions must therefore be evil, or psychologically unbalanced, or in the pay of powerful corporations.

Invoking the authority of science and the democratic value of "consensus" are again both designed to cut off rational analysis. This leads to the strange phenomenon of the discussion of policy alternatives becoming delinked from likely results, as with the responses to Mr. Baird's announcement this week. Thus the finer points of carbon taxation and/or cap-and-trade systems are debated with little or no concern about the fact that they will achieve little or nothing in terms of changing the global climate.

It is clear that American public opinion is an outlyer in this great march towards green socialism.  Often, climate alarmists ascribe this to America's supposed disinterest in environmental issues.  But this argument does not stand up when one looks at the facts.  The US over the last 40 years has a much better environmental record than, say, the more pious Western Europe.  Our water and air are cleaner, our forests continue to expand, and the only reason Europe doesn't discuss problems with endangered species as much as the US is because they have already killed all theirs. 

No, the real reason the US is an outlyer in opinion is that it does not have the culture of blind deference to public authority that Europe has, which has led Europeans into the hands of one authoritarian after another over the last centuries.  In 1808 it was Napolean; in 1908 it was the Kaiser, and later Lenin and Hitler; in 2008 it is Al Gore.

Asymmetry in Press Coverage

It would be perfectly acceptable to me to solely cover the science associated with global warming, rather than having dueling ad hominem attacks.  However, since as hominem attacks and press coverage based on funding sources has become a staple of at least one side of the climate debate, I must observe the following irony:  Scientists who receive $2 million from Exxon are tainted.  But Al Gore is not, despite the fact that his net worth has increased by at least $35 million, mostly from being paid to speak on global warming or from investing in companies whose value depends on the expectation of government action on global warming.

Either leave the money out of the discussion altogether (my preference) or at least be symmetrical in whose money is being investigated.

More Evidence Climate Scientists Can't Measure Anything Correctly

Note this from Davos via Tom Nelson:

Friedman adds that Exxon Mobil has “done a number” on the debate with PR. Brilliant says that their role is to get information to people, as much information as they can. Page says that success is the best message — that is, if they had three-cent power, everyone would come.

Gore, from the audience, takes issue with Brilliant, saying that getting information out is no longer sufficient. “That’s the way the world used to work. The world doesn’t work that way anymore. The reason that the tobacco industry was able to continue killing people for 40 years ater the surger General’s report…. they understood the power of strategic persuasion. They went about it in a very careful, organized, and well-funded way.” He says we are “vulnerable to strategic persuasion campaigns if the other side assumes that we should just get the information out there.” He says Exxon Mobil has funded 40 front groups to “in their own words position global warming as theory rather than fact.” He concludes: “We need to take them on, Goddamnit.”

Using what rational metric could anyone argue that ExxonMobil and the oil/power industry is winning or dominating the PR war on global warming?  Gore and company are leading this race 1000:1.  Every media story is sympathetic to their side.  Every public school course teaches it their way.   The entire scientific grant process is tilted to make sure only global warming believers get funding.  Exxon has been outspent thousands to one in funding research.  Only a few lone bloggers and scientists even keep the skeptic's issues alive.   If climate scientists really have such a warped perspective on measurement, can we really trust them to be measuring temperature correctly?

Gore's frustration is that, despite this 1000:1 PR advantage, his side is still losing the hearts and minds of average Americans, who are far less likely to think in lockstep with their country's "elites" than are Europeans.  His definition of Exxon controlling the debate is having Exxon be able to excercise its free speech rights at all.  And since he "takes them on" at every turn, my guess is what he means by this exhortation is to actually use the coercive power of the government to shut Exxon and other skeptics up completely.

Off By a Factor of 300,000

From a summary of a speech by Al Gore:

The temperature of Venus is 455 degrees because CO2 floats in the air. This is where is we are heading because we are drawing it out of the Earth, trapping it and increasing temperature.

Using actual science, rather than an activist's alarmist logic:

The arithmetic of absorption of infrared radiation also works to decrease the linearity. Absorption of light follows a logarithmic curve (Figure 1) as the amount of absorbing substance increases. It is generally accepted that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already high enough to absorb almost all the infrared radiation in the main carbon dioxide absorption bands over a distance of only a few km. Thus, even if the atmosphere were heavily laden with carbon dioxide, it would still only cause an incremental increase in the amount of infrared absorption over current levels. This means that a situation like Venus could not happen here. The atmosphere of Venus is 90 times thicker than Earth's and is 96% carbon dioxide, making the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration on Venus 300,000 times higher than on Earth. Even so, the high temperatures on Venus are only partially caused by carbon dioxide; a major contributor is the thick bank of clouds containing sulfuric acid [7]. Although these clouds give Venus a high reflectivity in the visible region, the Galileo probe showed that the clouds appear black at infrared wavelengths of 2.3 microns due to strong infrared absorption [8]. Thus, Venus's high temperature might be entirely explainable by direct absorption of incident light, rather than by any greenhouse effect. The infrared absorption lines by carbon dioxide are also broadened by the high pressure on Venus [9], making any comparison with Earth invalid.

Not to mention the fact that Venus is a lot closer to that big yellow thing that Al Gore denies has any real effect on changing temperatures on Earth.

Barney the Dinosaur Also Threatened

Apparently, global warming is so terrifying that it is killing off mythical creatures:

Nessie hunter Robert Rines is giving up his search for the monster after 37 years....

Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.

This Explains a Lot

The following is about a study on Marijuana use, but it could easily be about the media treatment of you-know-what:

The saddest part of Mirken's article is this response from an American editor to his suggestion that reporters should have asked about the possible influence of confounding variables, such as dental hygiene and use of other drugs, on the link between marijuana and bad gums:

We are dealing with a peer-reviewed journal study, and I don't feel at all comfortable going beyond what they are publishing. That is not our role.

Any journalist who doesn't feel comfortable going beyond what appears in a medical journal to put a study's findings in context and offer caveats where appropriate has no business writing about science. Reporters can't be experts on everything, but they can ask smart questions and seek informed comments regarding a study's potential weaknesses. If news organizations refuse to do so on the grounds that the study was peer reviewed and therefore must be faultless, they might as well just reprint researchers' press releases. Which is pretty much what they do, all too often.

More on Chartsmanship

A week or so ago, I had an extended post on a number of issues I had with this chart from the GISS, showing "areas in 2007 that were warmer (reds) and colder (blues) than the mean annual temperature from 1951-1980:"

I had many issues with this chart, not the least of which was the fact that it fills in data for large swaths of the earth for which we have no data.  However, another point I made was that the GISS is essentially fibbing here by using a straight cylindrical projection of the Earth.  We all know from junior high school that there are a lot of ways to project the globe onto a flat sheet of paper, all of which are imperfect. 

However, for a chart like this, one really needs an equal area projection.  In an equal area projection, a square inch at the equator represents the same surface area as a square inch at the poles.  The GISS is NOT using an equal area projection.  In fact, in the projection they are using, the area at the poles is wildly exaggerated.  Since the north pole is the area of the earth with the most anomolous measured warming, the chart visually overstates the amount of global warming.

In my post, I did not know how to reproject the map, so I took a wild stab at it using manual skews in Photoshop.  I thought maybe the GISS did not show the map correctly because it was hard to reproject the data.  It turns out, though, that there are some good free tools available to do just this kind of task.  With these tools I was able to convert the chart above to an equal-area projection (using the Eckert IV method):

One can see that the visual message is certainly different when projected correctly.

This tool was so simple it took me less than 10 seconds to make this reprojection.  But here is the hilariously ironic part:  The source of this fabulous tool that the GISS should have used is ... the GISS! Here is the tool on the GISS site.  Its free and a lot of fun.

Chartmanship -- A Picture that Sparked A Thousand Words (of Criticism)

Note this chart used by Andrew Revkin:

The description of the chart is as follows:

Map shows areas in 2007 that were warmer (reds) and colder (blues) than the mean annual temperature from 1951-1980. (Credit: NASA/GISS)

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  Let me see if I can come up with a thousand words as to what is wrong with this picture.

• Every school kid knows that this sort of projection of the world greatly exaggerates the size of the poles and Greenland.  Since most of the red here is at the poles, then visually its impact is exaggerated.  For example, the top row of pixels at the top which constitute a fair percentage of the map actually represent a tiny plot of land at the pole.  That row of pixels represents an area at least 10x smaller than does the row of pixels at the equator.  I don't have with me at work a good graphical tool to apply a spherical transform to the map, so I approximated it with a couple of linear skews.  This would be a more realistic map, except it still  exaggerates the area at the pole (see here to confirm it is a decent approximation)

Flip your eyes between the two of them -- already we see a huge visual difference in impression.  (Update:  better version here, using a tool from the GISS no less!)

• The coloring in and of itself makes a point.  The whole world has warmed a half degree or less in this period, but the dark red makes it look sizzling
• Here is the next trick -- if you want to make a strong impression of growth, make sure to find the low point in the historical record and compare to that.  So, lets look at history:

Hey, what do you know?  1950 to 1980 represents a low point in the trend.  Since they were trying to make a point about warming accelerating, then it might have made more sense to look at the warming since, say, 1998 -- ie over the last decade.   Unfortunately, that chart would be all blue, since temperatures throughout this century have been lower than 1998.

• There are four most frequently cited academic rollups of world-wide temperature anomaly.  They are:  GISS (surface), HadCrut3 (surface), RSS (satellite) and UAH (satellite).  Their current values are all shown here.  So, does the NY Times (and other catastrophists) take the average?  The median value?  No, silly.  They take the outlier which shows far more warming than the other three, which is the GISS.
• The GISS surface measurement system is rife with errors.  But the one I want to mention here is that, outside of the US, the temperature measurement points are very spotty.  Some points in the ocean are over 1000 miles from a thermometer, but still are colored on this chart  (yes, there is some grey I suppose for "no data" but that gray should be a lot more prevalent. )  If you only plotted data for 250km squares where the GISS actually has the data do make this comparison, without the mythical extrapolation into unmeasured areas, the chart should look like this:

How did they fill in all that grey area?  You tell me because Hansen certainly isn't talking.

• I am no longer going to accept any climate scientist as a serious scientist (and not just a biased mouthpiece) who insists on using the faulty and patchy surface temperature record over satellite measurement.  As I said previously:

Satellite temperature measurement makes immensely more sense - it has full coverage (except for the poles) and is not subject to local biases.  Can anyone name one single reason why the scientific community does not use the satellite temps as the standard EXCEPT that the "answer" (ie lower temperature increases) is not the one they want?  Consider the parallel example of measurement of arctic ice area.  My sense is that before satellites, we got some measurements of arctic ice extent from fixed observation stations and ship reports, but these were spotty and unreliable.  Now satellites make this measurement consistent and complete.  Would anyone argue to ignore the satellite data for spotty surface observations?  No, but this is exactly what the entire climate community seems to do for temperature.

• Some of the data is just plain bogus on the chart, part of the GISS/Hansen "higher must be right" approach to measuring temperature.  The Satellites show Antarctica cooling:

The surface temperature record shows the same thing

There is one area warming - the relatively small Antarctic Peninsula.  It should be orange in the map above (and is) but the rest of the orange in Antarctica is a mystery.  Though this would not be the first time people tried to extrapolate Antarctic trends from the tip of this peninsula (Gore did it in his movie and 60 minutes did it the other day).  This is a bit like measuring US temperature trends from Key West.  More on Antarctica here.  By the way, the GISS chart without all the extrapolation that I show only has the hot area on the penninsula.  All the other hot zones comes from, where?  James Hansen's imagination?

Update:  Here is a similar map by satellite, which avoids the coverage issues as well as urban and other surface measurement biases.  The story here is much more interesting, particularly the very different experience between north and south, something not predicted by greenhouse gas theory.  One can see that there has definitely been warming, but mostly concentrated at the north pole.

Here is the last monthly image, for December, 2007:

Update:  I have been getting a lot of new readers of late, including a number of commenters who disagree with me fairly strongly.  Welcome.  Here are some general thoughts:

1. Excepting some ads for Viagra and cell phones, I have never and will never delete a comment on this site.  Folks are welcome to fill up the comment threads with contrary opinions. For those distrustful of the motives of skeptics, may I observe that sites like RealClimate cannot make this claim and routinely flush comments that don't agree with the local prevailing doctrine, so make of that what you will.
2. I almost never respond to comments in the comment thread itself.  I like to think about and digest the comments for a while, and then incorporate them or respond to them in later posts.  Trying to respond in real time in comment threads results in flame wars, not reasoned discussion. 
3. Unlike many skeptics, I accept that atmospheric CO2 produced by man can warm the earth.  The IPCC and most climate scientists believe that the greenhouse gas effect alone may warm the earth about a degree over the rest of this century, an amount that would be a nuisance rather than catastrophic, and likely lost in the random noise of natural variations.
4. However, I do not believe the earth's climate is dominated by strong positive feedbacks and tipping points.  It is this feedback hypothesis in climate models that multiplies warming to 3-4-5 degrees or more over the next century.  In climate models, the catastrophe comes from feedback, not greenhouse effects, and I think this is a bad hypothesis.  Believers in catastrophic warming have an interesting problem reconciling Mann's hockey stick, which points to incredible stability in temperatures, with a hypothesis of very high positive feedback, which should make temperatures skittish and volatile.  I also think that the hypothesis that aerosols are masking substantial amounts of warming is weak, and appears to be more wishful thinking to bail out model builders than solid science  (while there is some cooling effect, the area of effect is local and shouldn't have a substantial effect on global averages).
5. I think the surface temperature record as embodied in the GISS analysis is a joke.  I cannot respect scientists who eschew obviously superior satellite measurements for the half-assed surface temperature record just because it doesn't give them the answer they want to here.  The fact that the leader in fighting for surface temeprature measurement over satellites is James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the ultimate dark irony.  It's like Bill Gates campaiging for increased abacus use in schools.
6. I have built models of complex systems for years.  I have been guilty many times of allowing seamingly reasonable assumptions to compound into meaningless results.  Unfortunately and embarassingly, I have also been guilty of tweaking, plugging, and tuning models to better match history in order to build confidence in their future predictions.  I see all too many of these same behaviors amoung climate modellers. 

Six Degrees of Global Warming

No, not six degrees of actual temperature increase, but six degrees of separation between every activist's issue and global warming.  As pointed out by Tom Nelson, it should be increasingly obvious to everyone what some of us have been saying for years -- the global warming scare is not driven by science, but is a vehicle for pushing a broad range of socialist / progressive issues.  Today's example:  Dams on the Klamath River case global warming.  The mechanism?  Well, its a little hard to grasp because the article is so poorly written (don't they employ editors on this paper?) but apparently the dams increase algae which in turn off-gasses methane which is a greenhouse gas.  Of course, common sense says this effect is trivial, and ignores other effects in the entire system, but the author treats it like he is playing a trump card.

This is Six Inches

There is an old joke that goes "why do women have poor depth perception?  A:  Because men tell them [holding two fingers very close together] that this is six inches."

I am kind of reminded of that joke here, where the graphic on this eco-catastrophist page shows a 3-foot sea level rise engulfing the botton half of San Francisco's Transamerica building (hit refresh if you don't see anyting happening on the top banner).  Even the moderately catastrophist IPCC shows less than half of a meter of sea level rise over the next 100 years, not three feet.

By the way, memo to environmental activists:  If you want to sway middle America to your cause, complaining that global warming will flood San Francisco may not get the results you want.  HT:  Tom Nelson

Penn on Warming

From Crackle: Penn Says - Weather Opportunists

This is pretty funny

Link emailed by a reader:

A new menace to the planet has been discovered and validated by a consensus of politically reliable scientists: Anthropogenic Continental Drift (ACD) will result in catastrophic damage and untold suffering, unless immediate indemnity payments from the United Sates, Europe, and Australia be made to the governments of non-industrial nations, to counteract this man-made threat to the world's habitats....

The continents rest on massive tectonic plates. Until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 18th century, these plates were fixed in place and immobile. However, drilling for oil and mining for minerals has cut these plates loose from their primordial moorings and left them to drift aimlessly.

The First Argument, Not the Last

The favorite argument of catastrophists in taking on skeptics is "all skeptics are funded by Exxon."  Such ad hominem rebuttals to skeptics are common, such as...

...comments like those of James Wang of Environmental Defense, who says that scientists who publish results against the consensus are “mostly in the pocket of oil companies”; and those of the, yes, United Kingdom’s Royal Society that say that there “are some individuals and organisations, some of which are funded by the US oil industry, that seek to undermine the science of climate change and the work of the IPCC”

and even from the editor of Science magazine:

As data accumulate, denialists retreat to the safety of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page or seek social relaxation with old pals from the tobacco lobby from whom they first learned to "teach the controversy."

Here is my thought on this subject.  There is nothing wrong with mentioning potential biases in your opponent as part of your argument.  For example, it is OK to argue "My opponent has X and Y biases, which should make us suspicious of his study.  Let's remember these as we look into the details of his argument to see his errors..."  In this case, pointing to potential biases is an acceptable first argument before taking on issues with the opponent's arguments.  Unfortunately, climate catastrophists use such charges as their last and only argument.  The believe they can stick the "QED" in right after the mention of Exxon funding, and then not bother to actually deal with the details.

Postscript:  William Briggs makes a nice point on the skeptic funding issue that I have made before:

The editors at Climate Resistance have written an interesting article about the “Well funded ‘Well-funded-Denial-Machine’ Denial Machine”, which details Greenpeace’s chagrin on finding that other organizations are lobbying as vigorously as they are, and that these counter-lobbyists actually have funding! For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank “advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government”, got, Greenpeace claims, about 2 million dollars from Exxon Mobil from 1998 to 2005. The CEI has used some of this money to argue that punitive greenhouse laws aren’t needed. Greenpeace sees this oil money as ill-gotten and say that it taints all that touch it. But Greenpeace fails to point out that, over the same period, they got about 2 billion dollars! (Was any of that from Exxon, Greenpeace?)

So even though Greenpeace got 1000 times more than the CEI got, it helped CEI to effectively stop enlightenment and “was enough to stall worldwide action on climate change.” These “goats” have power!

Most skeptics are well aware that climate catastrophists themselves have strong financial incentives to continue to declare the sky is falling, but we don't rely on this fact as 100% or even 10% of our "scientific" argument.

This is Science??

This, incredibly, comes from the editor of Science magazine. 

With respect to climate change, we have abruptly passed the tipping point in what until recently has been a tense political controversy. Why? Industry leaders, nongovernmental organizations, Al Gore, and public attention have all played a role. At the core, however, it's about the relentless progress of science. As data accumulate, denialists retreat to the safety of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page or seek social relaxation with old pals from the tobacco lobby from whom they first learned to "teach the controversy." Meanwhile, political judgments are in, and the game is over. Indeed, on this page last week, a member of Parliament described how the European Union and his British colleagues are moving toward setting hard targets for greenhouse gas reductions.

Guess we can certainly expect him to be thoughtful and balanced in his evaluation of submissions for the magazine.  "seek social relaxation with old pals from the tobacco lobby"??  My god that is over the top.

Thoroughly Appropriate Quotation

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it."

HL Mencken, via Tom Nelson

Anatomy of a Global Warming Scare Story

I could consume myself debunking nutty links in the press between problem X and global warming, so I try to focus more on providing layman's views of various scientific discussions.  But this example by Tom Nelson is quite illustrative.

Climate Biases Still Solidly Frozen in Place

I thought this Google screen shot from Tom Nelson was pretty funny.  You actually don't even need the second article to see the irony.  The Daily Green headline reads "Arctic Sea Ice Freezes Slowly" while the actual text reads, as you can see even in the Google excerpt, "Arctic sea ice refroze at a record pace."  (click for larger view)

By the way, since this story came out, freezing no longer lags history and Northern Hemisphere snow and ice coverage exceeds the averages of past Decembers.  More on Arctic ice here and here.

Northwest Passage

The other day, when I mentioned the irony of the AP publishing a story about Artic ice melting on the same day it was announce the Artic ice was growing at a record rate, I forgot to deal with the bogus claim in the article that this was the first time the Northwest Passage had ever opened.

This myth is discussed here.   In summary:

the Northwest Passage was successfully navigated in 1906, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, 1957, 1969, 1977, 1984, 1988, and 2000.

2007: The Hottest Year for Climate Rhetoric

While 2007 will be one of the coolest years in over a decade, there is a 95 to 99% chance that it is the hottest year in the last one thousand for climate rhetoric.  If I had to bet, I would guess that Al Gore is probabaly going to be Time's Man of the Year, giving him the trifecta of politically correct recognition this year. 

The disconnect with actual science couldn't be any more stark.  While skeptics have been losing the media battles, the science in 2007 really helped add a lot of ammunition to the skeptic's arsenals.  Almost every major study that actually involved looking at actual climate rather than bits in a computer has tended to undermine or cast doubt on the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming. 

Bali Updates

I have had several emails asking me for more Bali coverage.  Which reminds me that I have never really explained what I am trying to do with this blog.  My goal is to be a reporter of the science side of climate.   There are many skeptics blogs out there, but I didn't see enough science on them for my tastes.  There are a number of good climate science blogs, but most cater to a knowlegeable community of insiders.  I am working to demystify some of the science and present it for the layman.  This does not mean that I never touch on issues like Kyoto or the Bali conference, but it means that I don't try to report all the blow by blows, particularly when I have not yet gotten my Christmas shopping done ;=)

If you want to follow all of the back and forth at Bali and day-to-day in climate from the skeptic's viewpoint, Tom Nelson has been very busy, linking away every day, of late acting like the Instapundit of the skeptic community.

Congrats to the Associated Press

I want to congratulate the Associated Press and the Arizona Republic for running this story:

Scientists fear Arctic thaw has reached 'tipping point'

On the exact same day that this was published:

Arctic Sea Ice Re-Freezing at Record Pace

The record melting of Arctic sea ice observed this summer and fall led to record-low levels of ice in both September and October, but a record-setting pace of re-freezing in November, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.

Still, the extent of sea ice recorded in November was well shy of the median extent observed over the past quarter century, as the image from Nov. 14 (above, right) shows. The dramatic increase in ice is evident, when compared to the record-low amount observed Sept. 16 (below, right). In both images, 100% sea ice is shown in white, and the yellow line encompasses the area ion which there was at least 15% ice cover in at least half of the 25-year record for the given month.

The re-freeze continues in December, such that the ice coverage is pretty much at the median level today.  The AP/Republic article is admirably free of any new facts except the oft-repeated "Arctic ice at all-time low,"  all-time of course meaning not all-time but in the last 30 years that we have been able to observe by sattellite.  And neither article bothers to mention the high coverage record that was set in the South Pole this very same year.

The AZ Republic article is mostly made up of dueling catastrophists competing to see who can have the most dire forecast:

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

Anytime you see someone use the word "tipping" point in relation to climate, you should immediately be skeptical.  Tipping points imply runaway positive feedback, something that is a feature of nuclear fission but is generally not a feature of stable natural processes.  TJIC said it well the other day:

Wow, it’s almost as if there are negative feedback loops that keep the system centered, despite occasional perturbations.

Which is odd, because to listen to the global warming alarmists, one concludes that:

(a) the environment is a delicately balanced system that can be pushed, by the least little perturbation, into a runaway positive feedback loop, turning the Earth into another Venus.

(b) over the last 200 million years there have been asteroid impacts, brightenings and darkenings of the sun, and massive volcano eruptions, but the Earth’s environment has always returned to a slow oscillation around a moderate middle point.

Updates:  New NASA study says Artic melting part of a natural cycle.  Post here debunking the myth that the Northwest Passage was never opened prior to 2007.  More on tipping points in this post.

Climate Activism is about Socialism, Not Science

The first is from Ronald Bailey, at Reason, in a dispatch from Bali:

Without going into the details, the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework (GDR) proposal foresees levying the equivalent of a climate "consumption luxury tax" on every person who earns over a "development threshold" of $9,000 per year. The idea is that rich people got rich in part by dumping carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels into the atmosphere, leaving less space for poor people to dump their emissions. In one scenario, Americans would pay the equivalent of a $780 per person luxury tax annually, which amounts to sending $212 billion per year in climate reparations to poor countries to aid their development and help them adapt to climate change. In this scenario, the total climate reparations that the rich must transfer annually is over $600 billion. This contrasts with a new report commissioned by the U.N. Development Program that only demands $86 billion per year to avoid "adaptation apartheid."

The second link comes via Tom Nelson, and is from Emma Brindal, "Climate Justice Campaign Coordinator" for Friends of the Earth Australia.

A common theme was that the “solutions” to climate change that are being posed by many governments, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels are false and are not rooted in justice. Another point was that as this current ecomonic system got us here in the first place, a climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.

I would love to put Emma Brindal on stage and ask her even for a simplified explanation of a good median forecast for climate sensitivity and why.  I'd bet a million dollars she would flounder in any debate on the science.  Because it is not about the science.  Its about Ms. Brindal's long-standing desire to attack freedom and capitalism, and climate catastrophism being a convinient vehicle, at the moment, to reach that goal.

This Warning Could Be Attached to All Global Warming Reporting

The NRO has appologized for the reporting and editing surrounding W. Thomas Smith's recent trip to Lebanon.  But in reading their appology, it struck me that it could apply to nearly all global warming reporting.  Let me show you:

Having reviewed his work, we cannot vouch for the accuracy of his reporting. In general, too much of [the reporter's] information came from sources who had an incentive to exaggerate the threat [global warming poses to the world] — and these sources influenced his reporting for the whole of his trip. While we agree that that threat is very real, our readers should have had more information about [the reporter]’s sources so that they could have better evaluated the credibility of the information he was providing.

I apologize to all of our readers. We should have required [the reporter] to clearly source all of his original reporting from [Bali]. [The reporter] let himself become susceptible to spin by those [advocating the catastrophist global warming position], so his reporting from there should be read with that knowledge. (We are attaching this note to all his [global warming] reporting.) This was an editing failure as much as it was a reporting failure. We let him down, and we let you down, and we’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Don't Panic!

Albert Einstein's dream is now a reality.  We have a new unified field theory:  Global Warming causes everything bad.   Via Tom Nelson and American Thinker, comes this list by Dr. John Brignell of links to articles in the media attributing various bad things to Global Warming.  Currently, his list has over 600 items!  Some excerpts:

Agricultural land increase, Africa devastated,  African aid threatened, Africa hit hardest, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end,  amphibians breeding earlier (or not),  ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, anxiety, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic lakes disappear, asthma, Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty...

itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, Kew Gardens taxed, kitten boom, krill decline, lake and stream productivity decline, lake shrinking and growing, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawsuit successful, lawyers' income increased (surprise surprise!), lightning related insurance claims, little response in the atmosphere, lush growth in rain forests, Lyme disease,  Malaria, malnutrition,  mammoth dung melt, Maple syrup shortage...

wheat yields crushed in Australia, white Christmas dream ends, wildfires, wind shift, wind reduced, wine - harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine - more English, wine -German boon, wine - no more French ,  winters in Britain colder, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, World in flames, Yellow fever.

All I can say is:

Cross-posted at Coyote Blog

Ending the Human Race to Prevent Global Warming

The other day, in this post on an article to help make families more green by our local paper, I observed that the paper seemed to be stopping short of the real CO2 remedies, and should have had this advice for the two families who collectively had nine kids between them:

In the next generation, no one is going to be having five and four kids.  Certainly those green Europeans would never do something as damaging as having four or five kids.  If you had aborted a few of the little darlings, just think how much CO2 you would have avoided?

Now of course I was being tongue-in-cheek, in that I would never give anyone such advice.  My point was in part to demonstrate that cutesie little pieces of advice like getting the kids to recycle more helped to reinforce the false impression that CO2 rollbacks to 1990 levels would be relatively easy.  But several readers wrote me that I was posting a straw man -- that no one in the green movement was seriously talking about limiting children.  WRONG!  My father-in-law, as much as I loved the man, was a long-time greenie who believed having more than two children was close to immoral, and felt that population growth was the number one environmental problem in the world. 

And check out this new green hero:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible "mistake" of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.

He refused, but Toni - who works for an environmental charity - "relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to "protect the planet". ....

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

Beware Media Exaggeration

The media wants you scared:

Spiegel talks about scientific teams, especially experts from GSF, that have analyzed several events that led to increased levels of radiation,

1. Hiroshima in 1945
2. Radioactive rivers and explosions in the Soviet Union preparing their nuclear bomb after 1949
3. Chernobyl 1986

In all cases, it is found that the actual effects of "radiation illness", including birth defects and delayed deaths, were several orders of magnitude below the description available in the media. For example, almost all people who died as a consequence of the Little Boy did so either instantly or within a few hours, because of burned skin. Casualties who died after a long time because of radiation illnesses were very rare.

Similar conclusions hold for the contaminated river and the 1957 Chelyabinsk explosion of a tank with 80 tons of nuclear waste produced by the Soviet Union as well as for the Chernobyl tragedy. There doesn't seem to be any reliable source that would really prove an elevated frequency of birth effects and similar complications. Among 6,293 men who worked in the chemical plant preparing the radioactive material for the Soviet bomb (without masks!), only 100 died of lung cancer related to radiation. Greenpeace's proclamations that 50% of adults in those regions are infertile seem to be pure silliness.

Which is not to say that radiation is anything to screw around with, or that it is not dangerous, just that its dangers have been exaggerated by orders of magnitude.  Just like some other natural phenomena I can think of. 

I posted similar findings about Chernobyl over a year ago:

Over the next four years, a massive cleanup operation involving 240,000 workers ensued, and there were fears that many of these workers, called "liquidators," would suffer in subsequent years. But most emergency workers and people living in contaminated areas "received relatively low whole radiation doses, comparable to natural background levels," a report summary noted. "No evidence or likelihood of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found, nor has there been any evidence of congenital malformations."

In fact, the report said, apart from radiation-induced deaths, the "largest public health problem created by the accident" was its effect on the mental health of residents who were traumatized by their rapid relocation and the fear, still lingering, that they would almost certainly contract terminal cancer. The report said that lifestyle diseases, such as alcoholism, among affected residents posed a much greater threat than radiation exposure....

Officials said that the continued intense medical monitoring of tens of thousands of people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus is no longer a smart use of limited resources and is, in fact, contributing to mental health problems among many residents nearly 20 years later. In Belarus and Ukraine, 5 percent to 7 percent of government spending is consumed by benefits and programs for Chernobyl victims. And in the three countries, as many as 7 million people are receiving Chernobyl-related social benefits.

Wow - exaggerated projections of catastrophe result in ill-considered government spending.  Who would have thought this could happen?

The Benefits of CO2

In the latest UN climate "warning,"  the UN argues that the costs of CO2 abatement are not all that high because we have to offset these costs with ancillary benefits of these actions.   Many, many folks have demonstrated that these numbers are way understated, but let's accept this premise for a moment.  If this approach is correct, then should we not also offset the expected harms from global warming with expected benefits, like a longer growing season, and this:

Carbon dioxide is not the dreaded greenhouse gas that the global warmers crack it up to be. It is in fact the most important airborne fertiliser in the world and without it there would be no green plants at all. In fact, a doubling of the levels of this gas in the atmosphere would bring about a marked rise in plant production -- good news for everyone, especially those malnourished millions who can't afford chemical fertilisers. Perhaps the time is ripe to really start worrying (again) about the fact that for the last 200 million years the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has been falling. Indeed it dropped to dangerously low levels during recent ice ages. The Plant Kingdom responded to this potentially catastrophic (no carbon no food) situation by producing the so-called C4 plants that can survive low CO2 by using sunlight more efficiently.