"Global Warming"
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie matching the category "Global Warming".
There are more than a few of my readers who wonder, often with some disdain, why I am a climate change skeptic. One reason is ClimateAudit.org. Steve McIntyre and a group of statistically proficient, data aware people, have been dogging the Climate Science Team’s efforts for several years. Every week they find a few examples of data which has been “adjusted”, “fixed” or “cherry picked”. Every week their Freedom of Information requests are stonewalled by “scientists” who claim the data is “confidential” or their personal “intellectual property” or “lost”. Every week there is information about one “proxy” or another which is contra the AGW hypothesis.
I certainly don’t believe that Steve is always right. But I do see an awful lot of CYA, stonewalling and bad faith on the part of the “climate science” community. If this sort of thing happened once it would be no big deal; but there is a pattern emerging and that pattern suggests, strongly in my view, that the “climate science” community knows that their data is not quite so straightforward as the St. Algores of the world would have us believe.
Now because the “climate science” community invested so heavily in the idea that “the science is settled, the debate is over” they cannot admit that there is a great deal more work to do before the “science” in in any shape to prescribe policy. Because, the second they do, the fact that Kyoto is a fraud and that the IPCC wears very few clothes indeed will begin to seep down to the guilty masses stuck making earth saving choices when they request a paper bag or turn up their furnace on a cold winter’s night or realize they actually prefer incandescent light. And when all those eco friendly soccer mums realize they have been hoodwinked by the climate scientists and the politicians who cater to them, they are going to be really, really angry.
Written by jay on July 20th, 2008 with 8 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming".
Lord Monckton handed the IPCC its head in a devasting paper delivered to the American Physical Society. The muckety mucks of that society, afraid of being accused of impiety by the increasingly embattled warmists, posted the paper with the following disclaimer:
“The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its
conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the
world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society
disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”
Lord Monckton is just the tiniest bit pissed - the paper had been scientifically reviewed and revised in accordance with the review by a referee of the APC’s choosing - and fires off a brilliant, and mockingly polite rejoinder. It you like elegant scientific debate, and, hey, who doesn’t, this is a brilliant piece.
Written by jay on July 19th, 2008 with 10 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming".
Results: We identified a significant negative association between daily average temperature and cardiac mortality among persons over 55 years of age. A 5°C increase in temperature was associated with a decrease in death rate by a factor of 0.971 (95% CI: 0.961, 0.982). Conclusion: Cold temperatures may be an important triggering factor in bringing on the onset of life-threatening cardiac events, even in regions with relatively mild winters. Public health efforts stressing cold exposure while out of doors may play a prominent role in encouraging a reduction in cold stress, especially among seniors and those already at higher risk of cardiac death. informaworld
Too bad the indications are towards global cooling; but if they are wrong, and they might be, good news on the heart attack front.
Written by jay on July 17th, 2008 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and CPC and Canadian Politics and Liberals.
The Liberal Party’s Green Shift announced on June 19th marked the most aggressive anti-poverty program in 40 years. The ‘shift’ will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oil patch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians. Ken Boshcoff Liberal MP
A number of bloggers have pointed out that at least Boshcoff is honest.
It is time for the West (and Newfoundland and Nova Scotia) to make it very clear to the Boshcoffs and the Dions that this sort of a revenue grab will have a single consequence: the end of Canada as a nation. I am old enough to have been around for NEP I and I saw the anger first hand in British Columbia and Alberta. Now Saskatchewan will join the party.
Think Bloc Quebecois in Parliament and an activist, separatist, movement at a regional level. Paint this revenue grab “Green” is not going to work simply because “Green” is not selling as it did when Dion was elected leader of the Liberal Party.
There will be a lot of industry solutions to this problem: reducing investment, reducing production, using carbon sequestration as a weapon (goofy as it is as science, its costs can be passed right along to the silly buggers in Ontario in the form of higher oil prices). But there will also be a final recognition that there is really very little Eastern Canada can do for the New West save sanctimoniously claim to be raping us in the name of Green rather than Greed.
Bye guys, best of luck; hope you can do something about that air pollution problem - you know the real one not the CO2 BS. But of course you are…you are losing manufacturing jobs. Fast. And you will, of course, lose more as investment in the oil patch decreases because (you morons) nearly 50% of that investment ends up in Ontario. So no body will be able to say that the Eastern Bastards are not doing their bit to be green: they are actually hollowing out their economy….Bravo, but excuse us if we are not willing to hollow out ours.
Written by jay on July 12th, 2008 with 6 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and CPC and Canadian Politics and Liberal Leadership and Liberals and business and economics.
Since 1980, average air temperatures in Europe have risen 1 °C: much more than expected from greenhouse-gas warming alone. Christian Ruckstuhl of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland and colleagues took aerosol concentrations from six locations in northern Europe, measured between 1986 and 2005, and compared them with solar-radiation measurements over the same period. Aerosol concentrations dropped by up to 60 per cent over the 29-year period, while solar radiation rose by around 1 watt per square metre (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034228). “The decrease in aerosols probably accounts for at least half of the warming over Europe in the last 30 years,” says Rolf Philipona, a co-author of the study at MeteoSwiss, Switzerland’s national weather service. new scientist
Bad news for the warmists I’m afraid. ‘Cause just as Europe’s skies have cleared so have North America’s. Which would tend to account for pretty much all of the effect that Jim Hansen and the team have claimed to observe without even considering the urban heat island effect which they have been trying to pretend does not exist or, if it does, has been fully accounted for in the model.
Frankly, given the lack of sunspot activity and the general decline of global temperature over the last ten years, I have to bet that things are going to get colder. And I note that the Swiss do not even mention CO2….Hmmm.
Written by jay on July 11th, 2008 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming".
“We know that they will pass on part of their costs to their consumers because they cannot eliminate the emissions overnight, with all the goodwill of the world. We know that,” he said.
Big polluting oil companies would pay a hefty price for emissions, but the Liberal carbon tax plan projects any costs passed on to consumers at the pump would be minimal as global pressures would keep prices from Canadian companies competitive. the ottawa sun
Poor Dion, he really has not a clue. “Global pressures” are what drove oil to the $140 a barrel mark today; but gas, heating oil, natural gas and coal fired hydro are subject to exactly no “global” pressure because there is no “global” market for gas in your car or oil to keep you warm next winter.
If M. Dion is counting on “global pressure” he is simply being silly. Canada is a net exporter of oil and natural gas. We will certainly have to meet world price on those exports and the extractors will have to eat whatever the eventual cost of “Son of NEP” is. And they will be fine with that because both oil and natural gas prices are at historic levels. And they will sell downstream in Canada at the same price the world is paying.
However, the price of your liter of gas is only indirectly related to the world price of oil. Next week, having blown our $100.00 BC Government rebate on the traditional, Scott Reed approved, beer and popcorn, British Columbians will be paying about 2 cents a liter more at the pump. This will have nothing to do with the world price of oil; it will be entirely about the tax Campbell is imposing on carbon. No refinery or gas station is going to just “suck it up”, rather they are going to pass it through as they pass through the .10/liter federal excise tax and assorted provincial taxes.
The world market price determines the cost of the inputs; but the tax - any tax - is levied on the downstream outputs.
Strangely, my monthly bottle of Jameson without the tax would cost about $7.00 instead of near enough to $30.00. And, strangely, if the BC Government added another $2.00 per bottle “anti-fun” tax it would cost $32.00. The lads at Jameson are no more likely to absorb the tax than the Saudies will pay for Gordo’s gas tax.
However, Dion and the people advising him are, apparently, just dumb enough to think the average Canadian is simply too stupid to notice.
Written by jay on June 26th, 2008 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and Canadian Politics.
watch the oil tankers bobbing about the Gulf. A popular flutter among the gambling rich recently has been to hire a tanker, fill it with oil (it will hold two million barrels) and park it in front of a refinery. Watch the price; if you lose your nerve, you can quickly dock and sell your cargo; but a $1 rise means you’ve netted $1.5 million. During the 1979–80 oil shock, 30 tankers were famously moored off Manhattan. Their owners spied on each other for any sign of movement until market spirits fell abruptly, and all 30 simultaneously raced to dock. the spectator
Tony Curzon Price writes a bit about oil prices and how the high price of oil is likely due to speculation. He takes The Economist to task on the basis that the “free market” is not working.
Mr. Price seems to be incapable of understanding the critical role speculators play in discovering price. He quotes George Soros “Oil prices are high because of a series of self-feeding beliefs, which, as George Soros says, are ‘intellectually unsound, potentially destabilising and distinctly harmful’. Soros has it about right and I have to bet he is short in the oil market.
Markets correct, often violently. The oil market is no different. Sometime in the next few days, weeks or months, the tankers will rush to port. When they do the price will fall and the shorts will make perhaps the biggest killing ever seen on the planet. And what they are being paid for is providing the needed correction to a market in which real supply and real demand are in rough balance but there is a perceived gap. That is the value of the short seller in any market.
Written by jay on June 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and International and business and economics.
Real world…It’s getting colder.
click for the big version
Combined with no sunspots this is not good news.
Climate change - as opposed to the consensus about global warming - does not go in one direction. A warmer planet would not be grand but we could deal with it. A colder planet, on the other hand would mean millions of very marginal people would die.
Those freezing winters of our youth were years where the grain harvests in Saskatchewan were maybe 50% of what they are today.
I would love the warmists to be a little bit wrong…the shark has jumped after all. But I pray to God that they are not entirely insane. ‘Cause if they are we are in for a Little Ice Age and that will be fatal to millions.
Written by jay on June 4th, 2008 with 5 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming".
Get out your gas masks and tin hats. We are under attack from a noxious army of doom-troopers demanding that we treat climate change as a rerun of the Second World War. In the latest move to militarise everyday life, the Environmental Audit Committee of MPs has seriously proposed energy rationing, aka “personal carbon credits”.
What next? Little (green) Hitlers patrolling the streets yelling “Put that high-energy light out!”? Or a campaign to bring back rickets? Everybody from the Prince of Wales to liberal newspapers and former Labour ministers now compares climate change to the war. Baroness Young of Old Scone, head of the Environment Agency, says this is “World War Three”. If it’s not breaking the Official Secrets Act, could somebody explain what on earth they are on about? The notion of a “war on carbon” makes even less sense than the glorious “wars” on terror/drugs/crime/whatever. times of london
The good news is that all over Europe people are fighting back against the science challenged doomsters:
After hundreds of angry drivers shut down highways in England yesterday in protest against green automobile taxes, and drivers and fishermen in France and Spain paralyzed their ports and roads in a fuel-tax protest, politicians began to signal Europe’s ambitious emission-control policies may soon have to be abandoned.
While Europe has led the way in using tax incentives to encourage people to buy low-emission cars and to build carbon-neutral houses in order to meet Kyoto targets, it has become increasingly apparent that inflation-battered voters are no longer willing to go along. globe and mail
No one who has spent more than ten minutes thinking about it could ever have expected the regular, normal, work a day, people of the West to buy into the Climate Change hysteria once it actually cost them something. A fact that Kyotoists like M. Dion has not quite come to grips with.
As the cost of making the bogey man of Global Warming go away begin to actually bite, there will be two results: first, people will vote against governments which make their lives more expensive. Second, people are going to want their governments to take a good hard look at the “science” and the cost benefit analysis of attempting to counter global warming by reducing carbon emissions. They are not going to like what they find.
Jigs up, shark’s jumped: time for the nattering nannies of global warming to find another cause around which to build an authoritarian state.
Written by jay on May 29th, 2008 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming".
But, as we manage this transition to a low-carbon economy, we must also do more to help the oil market operate more efficiently. Globally, producers and consumers share common interests in market stability. So instead of Opec going its own way, there should be an enhanced dialogue between producers and consumers about the advance of nuclear, coal and renewables and about greater energy efficiency - as well as about future oil reserves. guardian
Fatuous twaddle and, if you follow the link, lots more where that comes from.
Brown is not an idiot; he must know that “enhanced dialogue” between producers and consumers will result in nothing.
The basis of dialogue is power and until the West weans itself from oil - which is going to take a while - the reality is that money talks and bullshit walks. Jumpers all round in the increasingly colder England.
Written by jay on May 28th, 2008 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and tech.
« Older articles
No newer articles