Friday, November 7, 2008

So much for my original plan

I am starting this blog with the intention of presenting a fairly organized blow by blow, one item at a time, description and discussion of the many aspects of the global climate change controversy.

The goal is to avoid including opinions and unsubstantiated statements and to document with references as much as possible. Too much of what is being published in the news, and even in some journals, is written in terms which are designed to create an emotional response in the reader, opinions are mixed wantonly with selected facts, and avoid stating the whole picture or all of the conditions of the story.

The bottom line: there is no credible basis for the global warming "crisis". It is called "climate change" now as even the alarmists have to admit that we are currently in cooling phase - and we are supposed to fight "climate change", even when it goes down? But, they say, have faith, it will go up.

So, for each post, I plan to pick a topic and try to clearly state the situation from both sides and let the reader decide which is more believable. One warning here is that the global alarmist side does not have much in the way of hard science behind it, in which case I will have to present their opinions, anecdotal material, and projections.

Is my point of view biased? No, it is realistic. If there is no real science involved, it is impossible to present some. I am a scientist, I cherish scientific integrity, and I believe that one cannot make crucial, real world decisions without knowing the real facts and science involved. It is a crime to take advantage of the public trust by misrepresenting science and facts to create a non-existent crisis for which all have to pay.

Keep in mind that you need to identify in yourself two ways of thinking: faith and confidence. Faith is an irrational and unfounded belief in something, while confidence is a firm trust based on fact or experience. I do not have faith in gravity, I have confidence in it. There is a big difference; faith can allow one to believe in something regardless of the facts. Confidence only derives from the consistency and validity of the facts or experiences.

Imagine trying to convince someone that they can warm themselves by standing in front of an open refrigerator. They'd quickly lose confidence in you. But, recently one of the global climate computer models was reprogrammed to deal with the fact that it had (miserably) failed to predict the last 9 years of climate cooling. They effectively reprogrammed it to include a temporary cooling cycle and then published the "fact" that their model predicts cooling and that "in fact" warming can cause cooling!!! Yet, because much of the public has faith in the news, they believe this complete nonsense.

Imagine reading a headline that says that the Earth has failed to warm as predicted according to computer models. Whoa! The Earth cannot fail. It is the models which have failed to model the Earth's climate. Since when are computer models to be believed over reality? There are so many variables in the climate that it is impossible to include the all of the starting parameters, and the interactions are so complex that we cannot predict the weather very well beyond a week from now, let alone years down the line.

So, now I must trash my original plan and point at the concern of my day.

I read a report in the news of "the 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which sells state allowances required by electric power plants to emit carbon dioxide."
And then I read about the President-elect's plan to push through legislation for a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions.

This is really scary stuff. I hope to relate in later blogs the details of the following statements, with references, but I have to say at this point that cap-and-trade will cost every person in the country dearly as a hidden tax. The money generated by this new trading economy will benefit a small number of people (Al Gore's carbon trading business GIM was banked with Lehman Bros. In the last few years, he's reportedly gained $150 million; not bad for having <1 million not long ago) and the government, garnering funds supposedly for developing alternative energy sources. We will develop those anyhow. And you can guess that the money will be put to many other uses as good plain old gov't income.

Here's the problem: CO2 is incapable of warming the planet. It was well above 440 ppm (at 380 ppm today) back in the 1940's (180 years of chemical CO2 data, number 1, "the paper"; for a short version, AIG News) and the temperature dropped while CO2 was high. There is just too little CO2 to do what they say. It is a trace gas. (More of the science of this in a later blog.)

In quick summary, the IPCC:
- refuses to recognize any possible effects from solar activity (the real science says the opposite),

- assumes all natural climate cycles and influences are swamped out by manmade CO2 (an unfounded, draconian assumption),

- artificially and fraudulently attributes water vapor with contributing to warming (it does not, but does quite the opposite),

- inflates the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere from 5-10 years to 200 years to make their projections work by claiming that our emissions are accumulating, and

- lets the public assume that all CO2 increases are manmade (it is far from the truth).

They also let the public assume that, if we stop emitting CO2, the CO2 will eventually go down, but that we have to start now to allow it to go down decades from now. They are building in the idea not to expect results while they rake in their (our) carbon trading dollars. Talk about something for nothing - this is the perfect nonperformance scam. Nothing will happen and you pay for it!

In fact, the experiment of decreasing CO2 emissions has already been done. During the Great Depression, our emissions dropped about 30% (graph on page 13) and the temperature rise and CO2 rise at the time did not falter, at all! Other records of longer time frames also show that temperature increases preceded CO2 increases, and NOT the other way around. It's called outgassing by the oceans.

The bottom line to this is that they want to alter the economy of the US and the world, creating a carbon economy which will cost us all money for something which is not a real problem. In fact we need the CO2 to increase food production. Greenhouse growers habitually add CO2 up to 1000 ppm to make their plants grow faster.

And, of course, with the planet cooling, we will need every advantage in growing more food as the world population increases this century.

By the way, the Arctic ice cap is easily a month ahead in freezing up this Fall. It has made a miraculous recovery for something predicted to disappear altogether, but that's another topic.

Here's another aspect of the problem. This is coming to the US, just wait:

“Every adult in Britain should be forced to carry ‘carbon ration cards’”

Key concept is "Control by Carbon", but really it's control by the government and radical environmentalists (Gore (wealthy Mr Howell), Pachauri (Gilligan), and Hansen (the "Professor") as the figureheads) and lots of money changing hands.

Cheers, C. Higley

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