Man, today is a bumper-crop day for Anthropogenic Global Warming news, on both the denier and proponent fronts. Let’s see, we’ve got ol’ Big Al Gore over in England pushin’ his summer save-the-planet rock concerts, and in his Sun Online conversation with Victoria Newton he makes another of his outrageous, unconvincing, unproven “inconvenient” statements:

AL GORE is a man on a mission to save the planet – and is enraged that everyone else seems more interested in saving Paris Hilton.

The former US Vice President turned environmental campaigner is doing his best to raise awareness about global warming.

He believes we have just TEN YEARS to begin saving the planet before it is too late.

But he struggles to get his message across when TV networks are donating the majority of their airtime to American socialite Paris Hilton’s stint behind bars.

Let’s see, according to the high-priest of the Holy Order of Global Warming Alarmists, we’ve got “just TEN YEARS to begin saving the planet”! Quick, somebody bring me my tranques. Yeah Al, anytime you’ve got ten YEARS to BEGIN doing anything, it’s a real, panic-inducing emergency, that’s for sure — NOT!

Of course, ol’ Big Al is really tweaked because the media’s fascination with Paris Hilton has bumped his doom & gloom caterwaling way back to the inside pages of cat-box liners everywhere and off the local news in mass. I mean really, your 4, 5 & 6-o’clock newscasts don’t have room for Al & the Global Warming Alarmists when there’s a wailing, skanky, poor-little-rich-girl bein’ socked into one of Sheriff Lee Baca’s cruisers and hauled back to the pokey! Now, that’s news! Compared to all-Paris-all-the-time, one more round of the-planet’s-gonna-die-like-tomorrow-or-somethin’-if-we-don’t-stop-bein’-us is a big, fat “yawn”.

Not to be outdone by either ol’ Big Al or our favorite-jailbird, Ms. Hilton, the new Korean Secretary of the U.N. is blaming the genocide in Darfur on, you guessed it, man-caused global warming. My, but that’s “convenient”.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday.

“The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change,” Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

“This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming,” the South Korean diplomat wrote.

“It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought,” Ban said in the Washington daily.

{…}

“For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out,” he said.

Not that all that killing has any other “factors”, like long-term tribal conflicts, Islamic faction conflicts (both sides are Muslim), systematic breakdown of governments all over the continent of Africa, to name but a few. But no, like good little Leftists all over the planet, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon can’t hold individuals responsible for their own behavior — there just has to be some external cause, but that’s another conversation.

On the anthropogenic-climate-change-skeptics front there’s Bill Steigerwald’s column in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review where he writes:

Remember in January when the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its good friends in media trumpeted that 2006 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States?

NOAA based that finding – which allegedly capped a nine-year warming streak “unprecedented in the historical record” – on the daily temperature data that its National Climatic Data Center gathers from about 1,221 mostly rural weather observation stations around the country.

Few people have ever seen or even heard of these small, simple-but-reliable weather stations, which quietly make up what NOAA calls its United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN).

But the stations play an important role in detecting and analyzing regional climate change. More ominously, they provide the official baseline historical temperature data that politically motivated global-warming alarmists like James Hansen of NASA plug into their computer climate models to predict various apocalypses.

Wow! Now that’s scary, huh? Those “politically motivated global-warming alarmists” have data from 1,221 “simple-but-reliable weather stations” to back up their most alarming claims, such as that “2006 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States” and that this “allegedly capped a nine-year warming streak ‘unprecedented in the historical record[.]‘” Well, I dont’ know . . . maybe not. Steigerwald has dug deep into this and found out the following:

But Anthony Watts of Chico, Calif., suspects NOAA temperature readings are not all they’re cracked up to be. As the former TV meteorologist explains on his sophisticated, newly hatched Web site surfacestations.org, he has set out to do what big-time armchair-climate modelers like Hansen and no one else has ever done – physically quality-check each weather station to see if it’s being operated properly.

What? You mean that the NOAA doesn’t verify that their weather-data-collecting stations are providing accurate data? The industrial-world is teetering on the brink of self-inflicted financial suicide via excessive carbon taxes and setasides and our modern way of life is being demonized and faces a direct onslaught by folks that are slaves to this data from collection locations and resources that we don’t even know whether or not these stations meet NOAA standards? What?

To assure accuracy, stations (essentially older thermometers in little four-legged wooden sheds or digital thermometers mounted on poles) should be 100 feet from buildings, not placed on hot concrete, etc. But as photos on Watts’ site show, the station in Forest Grove, Ore., stands 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. In Roseburg, Ore., it’s on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., it’s next to a drum where trash is burned.

Watts, who says he’s a man of facts and science, isn’t jumping to any rash conclusions based on the 40-some weather stations his volunteers have checked so far. But he said Tuesday that what he’s finding raises doubts about NOAA’s past and current temperature reports.

“I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment.“

D’ya think? That means that around 7.5% of the NOAA stations that Watts’ group has inspected are delivering skewed data. If those stats hold, that means that at least 91 of these stations would be found faulty. That’s not good odds, that’s not good data. And when you also learn:

NOAA explained that it had updated its 2006 report “to reflect revised statistics” and “better address uncertainties in the instrumental record.” This tinkering is standard procedure. NOAA always scientifically tweaks temperature readings for various reasons — weather stations are moved to different locations, modernized, affected by increased urbanization, etc.

If one is at all honest you have to ask, “What does NOAA actually have, data wise?” Yeah? What? . . . waiting . . . still waiting! The B.S. (bad science ) behind the belief of man-caused global warming just doesn’t stand up to scientific inquiry. We’ve had that discussion here at Okie Manor not all that long ago. Another scientist-skeptic, Bob Carter, professor of environmental science at James Cook University in Australia has an article in today’s Couriermail.com.au where he addresses statements like the one made by NASA chief Michael Griffin when he made his original statement questioning the urgency of addressing man-caused global warming even though he did believe that it was indeed fact.

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

In the comments Carter is taken to task for being a “mouthpiece” for “Big Oil” and “Big Industry”, two of the GW alarmists’ favorite demons. A commenter named Jeff throws down a challenge to Carter and those that think like him:

Give me one peer-reveiwed, published scientific paper that actually casts doubt on Global Warming and it’s human causes and I’ll never mention the subject here again. Just one that points to sunspots, the moon, the wobble of the Earth’s orbit or the prevalence of extra-marital sex in our society as the pre-eminent cause of Global Warming instead of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide etc.

I can tell you now you won’t find one, not in Nature, not in Science, not in Geophysical Letters or any other scientific journal – and if it aint (sic) in a scientific journal baby, it ain’t science! Not even Prof Carter has published one. He can’t because he has no evidence to back up his viewpoint!

I’m gonna leave that up to Okie on the Lam’s favorite environmental chemist, Glenn Speck. Let me know when you have a retort to this guy, Glenn and I’ll post it. Be sure and go to the Couriermail.com.au article and post in the comments, too. That’ll learn ‘em!

Actually, probably not . . . sigh.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Global Warming B.S.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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