>>>> Hmmm... movies versus scientific consensus... I wonder which closer
>>>> approximates reality?
>> I've never seen either of these movies. But one is reputed to be
>> accurate by most climatologists.......
>
> A Bad Week For Al Gore
>
> Paul Joseph Watson
> Prison Planet
> Friday, July 6, 2007
>
> The religion of man-made global warming has had its orthodoxy shot to
> pieces again right before an assorted gaggle of hypocrites and control
> freaks, led by Al Gore, prepare this weekend to unleash Live Earth,
> one of the most sophisticated and carefully packaged political
> propaganda assaults in recent years.
>
> This rejuvenated religion of Pagan earth worship took another blow
> from hard science just today, after it was revealed that the oldest
> plant DNA ever discovered showed that "the planet was far warmer
> hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed," again
> underscoring the fact that climate change is a routine and natural
> phenomenon that has occurred throughout earth's history.
>
> "They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages,
> 116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F)
> higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt
> away," reports Reuters.
>
> In another development, scientists examining the world's deepest ice
> core samples concluded that records of greenhouse gases varied wildly
> over the course of 800,000 years, producing temperatures that differed
> as much as 15 C (27 F) at different periods of time.
>
> These two new scientific papers, allied to the understanding that CO2
> emissions lag behind temperature increase by hundreds of years,
> reinforce the reality that we live on a volatile and constantly
> changing planet.
>
> The earth's climate has always been shifting and is dependent on ice
> age cycles and the activity of the sun. Today we see global warming
> and climate change on every planet and moon within the solar system,
> largely due to increased sunspot activity. For humans to think that
> they can contribute to significant climate change models that have
> domineered the planet for eons before human civilization existed
> betrays a supreme level of arrogance and self-importance.
>
>
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI4NTc0YWMzNTA3ZjRmYmJiMDRjNmI5...
>
> This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-
> warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science
> fiction.
>
> The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very
> serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's
> 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising
> sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.
>
> Where's the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the
> recent Policymaker's Summary from the United Nations' much anticipated
> compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel
> on Climate Change's medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse
> gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by
> 2100. Gore's film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.
>
> Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the
> concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing
> rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn't changed appreciably
> for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently
> pronounced the IPCC's methane emissions scenarios as "quite unlikely."
>
> Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.'s new projection is about 30-
> percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. "The projections
> include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and
> Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993," according to the IPCC,
> "but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future."
>
> According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005,
> Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing
> that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when
> multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4
> percent per century.
>
> "Was" is the operative word. In early February, Science published
> another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice
> loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.
>
> Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find
> any support for Gore's hypothesis. Instead, there's an unrefereed
> editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal
> Climate Change - edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University,
> who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose "the right balance
> between being effective and honest" about global warming - and a paper
> in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only
> reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.
>
> These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to
> "do" something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami.
> And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago,
> the real clock must be down to eight years!
>
> It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with
> politicians about various "solutions" for climate change. The Kyoto
> Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming
> by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That's too small to measure,
> because the earth's temperature varies by more than that from year to
> year.
>
> The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto - i.e.,
> less than nothing - for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which
> themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around
> 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to
> dictate our energy policy for today).
>
> Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes
> that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with
> ethanol over the next decade. But it's well-known that even if we
> turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace
> only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on
> global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the
> U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food
> supply to please a political mob.
>
> And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol
> efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from
> transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of
> gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below
> present levels - resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than
> Kyoto allows.
>
> And there's other legislation out there, mandating, variously,
> emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get
> there if we can't even do Kyoto?
>
> When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient.
> And it's not just Gore's movie that's fiction. It's the rhetoric of
> the Congress and the chief executive, too.
>
> - Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at
> the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion
> of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
