Global Warming is Dead, Big Al Sells Out to Al J.

Blink blink…

Wow…

Al Gore sells out to oil funded media giant Al Jazeera.

One’s mind boggles.

From WUWT:

Middle East “Big Oil” funded media outlet buys Al Gore’s CURRENT TV with plans to infiltrate offer the English Al Jazeera channel into American homes –  my Irony Meter pegged.

Will it be the “All Al” channel now?

Here’s the rest of this yummy story.

Update 1/3: Twitchy grabs some tweets having fun at Gore’s richly deserving expense.

 

Al Gore’s (un)Reality Show

Update 8/6:

Mr. Gore expresses his frustrations with trying to push his fantasies against reality. Defeated Gore unleashes: ‘It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company

The Hockey Schtick pokes some holes in Gore’s “argument”

More on the Failure of Al Gore

Original post:

Al Gore is preparing an event, for Sept 14, to show the world his delusion of climate change.

Well, I don’t think it’ll amount to much, but WUWT has a post on how Al’s delusions might be challenged.

Plenty of comments and plenty of suggestions appear there. Most of the comments are suggestion arguing with the facts to counter the delusions, but I think that’s a poor idea.

There are no facts supporting CAGW, and a lot that counter CAGW, but still the hysteria goes on. There’s too much emotion, money (taxes, investments, fraud,) power (control,) and greed wrapped up in it for it to go away.

So here’s a better suggestion, I think. A commenter says:

I am reading Ann Coulter’s new book, “Demonic” and it has good lessons about dealing with a mob and the warmists do fit that description. This post recommends reasoned arguments. Mobs do not respond to reasoned arguments. You need to provide them with mental pictures based on good arguments such as:

• Headline: “Electricity prices to double.” followed by a picture of the sweltering poor unable to afford air conditioning.
• Headline: “Greens stop coal plant in Africa.” followed by a picture of a hut where burning dung has to be used to cook food.
• Video of some idiot saying, “Energy prices will necessarily skyrocket.”
• Video of the unemployed in Montana where an aluminum plant was shut down because the greens in California will not allow power plants to be built.

Get the picture? Every time the warmists show a picture of a polar bear, show a picture from Detroit.

I think this is one of the very best suggestions in the whole thread. It’s not Gore’s beliefs which are destructive, it’s the policy changes that he and his ilk wish to inflict upon us.

So let’s show the consequences of those policies.

How about a video of people trying to manage with their 6 hour a day eletrical alotment, then the camera pulls back to show that it’s us, under Gore’s policies.

People freezing in the UK because the windmills are frozen/broken and not generating anything. The video can open with the green elites (eg: Gore) living high in their heated mansions with all the lights on.

Show the relatively clean industries that are being shut down, for green reasons, and then being moved to China (and elsewhere,) where there are no restrictions on pollution. A big net loss, but the greens feel happy as long as they don’t think too deeply about it.

Show the Gov types adding up their new tax revenues while the sidebar to the video show unemployment climbing.

Show the toxic chemicals and manufacturing that goes into making electric vehicles and some types of wind and solar devices.

Show a video with a guy in coveralls making remarks about CO2 pollution and how it’s bad for everything, then opening up his greenhouse, which is at 1500 ppm CO2, and showing the lush growth.

Make it sexy enough and you might get some media outlet to run with it, since they do love scandals and scare stories.

CAGW isn’t about facts, it’s about emotion, power, and money. So we need to show who’s profiting from the policies, who’s paying for the policies, and who’s dying from those policies.

Another comment that provides a good starting point:

Rather than tackle gore on science, how about on behavior. how a person acts tells you much more about what they truly believe, as compared to what they say.

For example:

1. gore lives in a big house and creates lots more co2 than the average person. does he want us all to live like he does? if not, then why does he live like this?

2. gore has 4 children yet is going around telling women to have less children. apparently at the same time he was going around trying to spread his own seed, if events with tipper are any indication.

3. gore in the past made his money selling tobacco. an addictive substance that causes great harm. reportedly his sister died of lung cancer. gore is a rich man. he says he regrets selling tobacco. has he set up a substantial trust fund with his wealth to pay victims of tobacco?

4. gore was heavily invested in co2 tracing before ccx was sold. has he simply moved his investments into another co2 vehicle such as redd? has he filed a conflict of interest statement?

5. gore says sea levels are rising dangerously but bought a property vulnerable to sea level rise. does this make sense if sea levels are rising dangerously?

6. gore in his movie misrepresented the connection between temperature and co2 in the ice cores. he used a clever wording to overcome the causation problem with temperature leading co2, to imply that temperature was caused by co2.

7. etc. etc.

These points would seem to be the sorts of things that the average person would use to evaluate whether gore can be trusted. most people would skip the science because it isn’t their specialty. what most people look at is behavior to judge if the person is truthful or not. most people recognize that folks don’t always tell the truth, even to themselves.

Why Al Gore Fails

Update 8/12/11:

Global warming is melting Al Gore’s brain

 

Original

A nice analysis of Al Gore and why his “leadership” of the Global Warming crowd is so damaging to that same crowd.

Once out of office, he assumed the leadership of the global green movement, steering that movement into a tsunami of defeat that, when the debris is finally cleared away, will loom as one of the greatest failures of civil society in all time.

Gore has the Midas touch in reverse; objects of great value (Nobel prizes, Oscars) turn dull and leaden at his touch.  Few celebrity cause leaders have had more or better publicity than Gore has had for his climate advocacy.  Hailed by the world press, lionized by the entertainment community and the Global Assemblage of the Great and the Good as incarnated in the Nobel Peace Prize committee, he has nevertheless seen the movement he led flounder from one inglorious defeat to the next.  The most recent, failed global climate meeting passed almost unnoticed last week in Bonn; the world has turned its eyes away from the expiring anguish of the Copenhagen agenda.

Sweet. Here’s the rest: The Failure of Al Gore

Here’s part two: The Failure of Al Gore: Part Deux

The article was via the Daily Bayonet.

Part three: The Failure of Al Gore Part Three: Singing the Climate Blues

One blog that I visited briefly, an eco-blog, was disappointed in the 10:10 video as it hardly qualified under the “working to win hearts and minds” line of thought.

As far as I can tell, none of the leaders of the green/warming movement, and that definitely includes Al Gore,  are attempting to win hearts and minds. Unless it’s skeptical hearts on a platter and minds that are in thrall to our glorious and enlightened rulers/elite.

It’s more like, “Ok, STFU you mindless morons and do as we, your enlightened betters, tell you.”  Sorry Al, we don’t want to sacrifice from our meager insignificant lives so that you can live like a king.

As WaPo says, it’s not really about the climate anyway. It’s about control.

More on deep green and marxism. Power and control.

The Greens Aren’t Very Nice, Are They?

Update 8/6/11:

Recently, radical environmentalists have waged a campaign to stifle free enterprise and economic freedom. Here are some of their recent skirmishes, ranging from crop destruction in Australia to attacks on toy companies like Lego and Disney…

Original Post:

C3 Headlines notes some of the things the alarmists have said about the skeptics. Brings back fond memories of the Spanish Inquisition… I guess they feel their gravy train is being threatened.

From:  Hate Unleashed: What’s Driving The Hate Speech & Violence Threats of Global Warmistas?

• James Hansen of NASA wanted trials for climate skeptics,  accusing them of high crimes against humanity
• Robert Kennedy Jr. called climate skeptics traitors
• Yvo de Boer of the UN called climate skepticism criminally irresponsible
• David Suzuki called for politicians who ignore climate science to be jailed
• DeSmogBlog’s James Hoggan wants skeptics treated as war criminals (video)
• Grist called for Nuremberg trials for skeptics
• Joe Romm encourages the idea that skeptics will be strangled in their beds
• A blogger at TPM pondered when it would be acceptable to execute climate deniers
• Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel called for skeptical forecasters to be decertified
• Bernie Sanders compared climate skeptics to Nazi appeasers.
• [Not to mention Greenpeace declaring that “they know where you live”] Here’s the current page, where Greeenpeace posts its case for “that quote was taken WAY out of context,”  and here’s an article regarding the original post. Hopefully GP took the writer into a dark back room and made it very clear to the fellow that their goal is to win hearts and minds, not spit on them. Personally, I think they took him into the party room and gave him a round of “high-fives.”

ClimateQuotes collects, you guessed it, quotes from other wild and wacky alarmist types. For example, here’s their Al Gore page.

And then, there are various other quotes by various extreme types…

Let’s not forget the 10:10 video. These are such lovely people.

7-15C in Just Decades

The Al Gore View of Global Warming basically states that the world is doomed, unless (snarky remarks deleted.) The ward does seem to have warmed by  maybe .6C or so over the last 120 some odd years. The Gore crowd claims this is unprecedented, rational people point out that the historical record says that it isn’t.

As I mentioned in the previous post, 1500 year cycles, there were a number of times during the last ice ages where temps rose 7-8C in a matter of decades. Before SUVs were invented or any fossil fuel was being burned.

I found this in a WUWT comment:

“The Greenland (Arctic) and Vostok (Antarctic) ice cores are particularly informative, offering fine temporal resolution and continuity. This has revealed surprising oscillations of climate on a millennial scale within the main 100-kyr cycle. The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) identifies some 24 interstadials through the last ice age with average temperature rising rapidly by ~7 C over just decades. Further ice and sediment cores from around the world are demonstrating the global scale of these major climatic events.”

From: Hewitt, G. 2000. The genetic legacy of the Quarternary ice ages. NATURE, Vol. 405, 22 June 2000 (www.nature.com)

Here’s a  2004 paper from the same author (and it’s a Royal Society paper)

Our climate has been cooling for ca. 60Myr, with the Antarctic ice sheet forming ca. 35 Ma and the Arctic icecap growing from ca. 3 Ma. The Quaternary Period has been dominated by Ice Ages, which involve repeated global cooling and increasing advances of these ice sheets. These oscillations are paced by regular eccentricities in the Earth’s orbit around the sun every 100, 41 and 21 kyr. The large ice sheets, surrounding permafrost, lower global temperature and reduced water availability caused great changes in the distribution of species, which can be seen in the fossil record (Bennett 1997; Williams et al. 1998). Recent work with cores from ice sheets and sea beds confirms the effects of millennial-scale change in climate nested within the main 100 kyr cycle. These involved changes of as much as 7–15 °C over a few decades, which then lasted for hundreds of years, and there is fossil evidence that these, including the Younger Dryas ca. 11 ka, caused shifts in species distributions.

Full paper (PDF) here: Genetic consequences of climatic oscillations in the Quaternary

7-15C over a few decades, from perfectly nature causes, and we’re supposed to hand over the world’s economies to Al Gore & Co over Zero.6C?

Heh. Global Warming Causes Everything

Well, after all the remarks on consensus, arguments over a couple of tenths of degree, etc., this post puts things back in persepective. There’s an argument over warming because believers (Al Gore, Hansen, and the more extreme types) believe that Global Warming causes all problems.

From the excellent American Thinker blog (2007 post:) Everything is Caused by Global Warming

Marc Morano Speech at 2010 CPAC

From Climate Depot

I’m watching the speech and he makes a couple of killer comments. Paraphrasing here…

The decision to have Al Gore being the Global Warming spokesman. Are you nuts? Given American political reality?  (Of course, Obama has been clear on what he and the left think of most of America, but it was still a pretty bad PR move.)

Given the US distrust (richly deserved) of the UN you’re going to have the UN drive the Warming Mitigation strategy? Ok, that pretty much guarantees that the US will never be entirely on board.

My note: Of course, given that most of the world prefers socialism, communism, and dictatorships I don’t think it’s possible to have a Governmental agency that America would trust.

He’s right on about the politics and goals of the warming movement and discusses the next eco scares being test-marketed.

“man made climate theory is now akin to ancient astrology”

“ordinary people see through man-made climate fears, but educated people are very vulnerable.”

Obama gets credit for slowing the sea level rise.

We have to keep fighting because they (Al Gore & Co) will regroup.

1. Morano video Part 1

2. Part 2

The Death of Global Warming???

The SPPI blog has a guest post titled, “The Death of Global Warming.” It’s an interesting post, worth reading, even though it’s from a true believer.  I’m going to add a few comments here.

First off, though, “Global Warming” died years back when the term was changed to the meaningless Climate Change. This was a simple acknowledgment that there is no there, there, despite what the alarmists try to push. Note that no one on the believer side is worried about global cooling. Fact is, the climate does change and has been for billions of years. And yes, I know that Climate Change is short for Catastrophic Man Made Climate Change. My remark still stands.

Also note that the small amount of warming that we might have actually seen (and which we haven’t seen for a few years) is an entirely separate thing from the hysterical alarmism that created the Copenhagen conference.

The global warming movement as we have known it is dead.  Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away…

The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.

After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all…

With this in mind, ‘climategate’ — the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists — looks sinister rather than just unsavory…

That the Global Warming Movement is dead is a very good thing and it’s very hard to build a case on bad science. By the way, the emails were leaked by an insider, not hacked.

Ok, now lets get to what I want to comment on…

The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had — which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources…

Serious and troubling, based on what? There is zero evidence that warmer temperatures, if, in fact, those are actually in the pipeline, are a bad thing. Cooler temps certainly are a bad thing, as can be seen by the death stats. Greatly cooling temps would be disasterous, unless you like the idea of living under a permanent glacier.

CO2 is also a good thing and the evidence that it is a pollutant is nill. Regardless of what effect it may have on climate. See this post for more about CO2.

Now it has failed.  Not everything that has come out of the IPCC and the East Anglia Climate Unit is false, but enough of their product is sufficiently tainted that these institutions can best serve the cause of fighting climate change by stepping out of the picture…

Absolutely. The issue, of course, is whether the media leaves its staunchly alarmist position and whether those in power become more skeptical. If these things don’t happen then the 2013 IPCC report will likely be more of the same and it will be left to the bloggers to do the media’s (and Gov’s) job for them. Any new UN climate group might not be named “IPCC,” but we can be pretty sure their goals will remain the same. They might do a better job of covering up iffy science, but I don’t believe they will actually disown the hype in favor of reality. Unless they hop onto a cooling bandwagon, like we saw in the 70s.

The global warming campaigners got into this mess because they had a deeply flawed political strategy.  They were never able to develop a pragmatic approach that could reach its goals in the context of the existing international system.

They were never able to substantiate their extreme claims in any way, that’s why they’re in this mess. Their proposed programs are intended and designed to shackle western civilization and centralize a lot of power and money with government, not help people with any of the claimed problems of warming.

If a large asteroid was on a course to slam into the Earth I think you’d see some serious cooperation. You’d have a few skeptics and a few who would want that asteroid to hit (wipe out the horrors of civilization,) but most people and Gov’s would be right on board.

Without a commitment from the United States to pay its share of the $100 billion plus per year that poor countries wanted as their price for compliance, and without US participation in other aspects of the proposed global approach, the intricate global deals fall apart.

Does anyone believe that any of that $100 billion would go to anything that would have any effect on the climate? All it would do is increase the number of Government palaces and increase the number of exotic cars and toys among the ruling classes of those countries (remember that people like Castro, Chavez, and the late S. Hussein are/were very rich from siphoning off cash flows to their accounts.)  The people would still be screwed, but western countries would have their leg irons, which is, after all, the whole idea.

Countries would cheat, either because they chose to do so or because their domestic systems are so weak, so corrupt or so both that they simply wouldn’t be able to comply…

This is the best argument for adaptation as opposed to economy crushing mitigation, even if warming was real and was dangerous.

The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road.  Basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip.  The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank. Don’t think this won’t have consequences…

Yes, the phenomenon is dead, because if it isn’t dangerous then there is no reason to crush our economies to prevent it. The proponents have failed miserably to build the case that warming is dangerous, much less catastrophic. Lots of hype, zero science (science showing warming is not science showing that warming is dangerous.)

1. Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip – Given Ms. Palin’s leanings I’d say the score in her favor is much higher. Objectively, her view on warming is far closer to reality than Gore’s (or Obama’s)
2. an arrogantly clueless establishment – The Western world has shed a lot of blood to get rid of arrogantly clueless leaders over the last few hundred years. There’s no reason to go back under the thumb of people who want to rule us for their own good. We’ve been there. The next job is to get the rest of the world out from under the boots of these people.
3. invoking faked ’science’ – Hide the decline, IPCC using WWF as a trusted source, climate theories ripped to pieces by engineers and other scientists, huge majorities of scientists saying AGW is crap, and so on.
4. cockamamie social mandates – That sums it up nicely. The mandates are about power and money, not about helping anyone (except maybe carbon traders.)
5. mainstream media that is totally in the tank – Which has been proven repeatedly.
6. Don’t think this won’t have consequences – Is that a threat? Those consequences aren’t climate related so does this mean that the watermelon crowd will will get even more shrill over the non-existent threat?

Temperature, Measurements, and Engineering

Just a few thoughts on the reliability of measurements and related stuff.

Engineers Vs. Scientists.

There are various papers available, written by Engineers, on the issues with global warming/cooling, aka climate change. Believers typically dismiss them with something like, “But they’re not climate scientists…”

In my view real data (you go out and measure something) always takes precedence over theory. If the data doesn’t match the theory then fix the theory. (I assume that the ruler is accurate and the person holding the ruler is using it both honestly and competently.) Then the data has to be used somehow.

An engineer will take that data and make something that, hopefully, works. For example: NASA builds a probe, launches it, and put it very close to its target point. Whether that point is in Earth’s orbit, or on the moon, or on one of Saturn’s moons the theories used obviously work.

At the other end is the scientist (or organization) who only needs to convince a policy maker of the accuracy of his claims. An extreme example is Al Gore. Gore is certainly not a scientist, he did very poorly in his college science classes, and nothing he said is supported by the science, yet policy is based on that “science.” He’s certainly a very good marketer, presenting to a market that very much wants what he has to sell, so there’s no real need for real science in his presentations. (It’s interesting that the believers atack skeptics and not Al Gore, or more hysterical types.)

The “theory” doesn’t need to work, especially when the crowd that it’s marketed to energetically joins in the defense of the “theory.” All it needs to do it be presented to the believers. If marketed properly then new believers can be created. This is one of the reasons that children are a target market for An Inconvenient Truth.

Somewhere in the middle of these extremes are the guys who measure the Earth’s temperature and then graph it. Now I don’t know how you could hold these measurements to the same standard as putting a probe within a few feet of your target point near a moon, but they have to be better than someone who merely needs to pursuade, right? Which brings us to the infamous Hockey Stick and NASA’s GISS measurements.

First, the Hockey Stick. Al Gore puts it up and everyone oohs and ahhs at his proof. Nevermind that…

• It did away with a Medieval Warm Period that hundreds of peer reviewed papers show to be warmer than current times (we’ll ignore, for now, periods prior to the MWP that may have been warmer still)
• It did away with a Little Ice Age that is at least as well supported as the MWP
• It used very iffy math which would generate a hockey stick shape from random data.

A newer version of the Hockey Stick, featured in the IPCC 2007 policy summary had a couple of interesting features. A couple of the proxies used to help create the graph up to 1960 or so were neatly trimmed at that point. Why? Because the data from those proxies went in the wrong direction. Briffa & Co (who did the graph) hid the decline by trimming inconvenient data. At the end the blade of the hockey stick was based mostly from one tree.

It seems that the Hockey Stick was designed to the persuasion standard and not to engineering standards.

Is it any wonder that some of use question these guys?

Next up is the GISS set of rulers. One would think that an organization that could do what it does with space probes could do the same with climate studies, right? NASA has a certain well deserved reputation from the space program.

• So then, why does 1934 keep changing status as the warmest year of the 1900s?
  • Air Vent: 1934 – 1998 Gissmatic
  • Here’s another view of the adjustments to the data
  • James Hansen of NASA made an error about the temps at one point. Does it matter?
• Why are the surface stations in such bad shape?
• Why did NASA remove so many stations recently? When most of the stations remaining are in cities, at low elevation, near airports, and so on?
• What do the NASA emails (released by the Freedom of Information act) suggest some mucking about with the temperature records (searchable PDF of the emails here)
• Some even say that NASA was manipulating data

NASA recently released a report that stated that 2009 was one of the warmest years ever and that 2000-2009 was the warmest decade. Obviously if we have been warming then the most recent decade is the warmest. Keeping in mind that decent thermometers have only been generally available since 1880 or so. Nasa says…

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years –1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest on record.

here’s the rest of the press release

Now, if 2005 is the warmest (remember, it used to be 1934) and if 1998, ’02, ’03, ’06, ’07, and 2009 are the same, then where’s the warming? Especially with all those cool years inbetween the others?

Also, given the above and given that Dr. Hansen, the man in charge of NASA’s GISS, is an alarmist of the first order, is it any wonder that there’s some mistrust of this data? One is tempted to ask: James Hansen: Would you buy a used temperature data set from THIS man?

Inconvenient Facts for “An Inconvenient Truth”

Once upon a time Al Gore came out with his Science Fantasy/Horror flick An Inconvenient Truth (AIT.) Like an good fantasy it took a bit from “what’s real” and ran from there to interesting conclusions.

What’s interesting about the AIT story, of course, is that people want to base real policy on this fictional work. Here are a couple of links to sites pointing out some of Gore’s fictional points.

From 2006: Lord Monckton’s reply to Gore and a 2nd pdf on the same topic.

2007: A similar debunking from CEI

2007 : How incredibly rational: UK Judge rules that AIT cannot be shown to school kids without a disclaimer pointing out various errors in AIT. Here.

2007: Steyn on Gore – A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al’s Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to “alarmism and exaggeration” and identified nine major factual errors.

2006: A sampling of Scientists’ remarks about AIT

2007: A Harvard editor seems to have an issue with Gore’s hypocrisy. Here’s Newsbuster’s take.

2007: Some questions to ask the Alarmists

2007: Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?

Now, I really don’t begrudge Gore the chance to make a buck, or a lot of bucks. More power to him. If he wants to have a home that’s 50x the size of mine and jet all over the world in a private jet, well, that’s pretty damn cool.

What I DO mind is that he’s selling the Gov on policies that will crush everyone else’s right to try to achieve the same thing. Not to mention what those policies it will do to the people in the undeveloped world. Kindof like Communism. The Exhalted Leaders lead the good life (and so do their associates) while the people suffer.