Its been a while since I’ve written anything here. Its not for lack of interest, but rather I think that others have been doing an admirable job on daily or weekly posting. The blog roll in the right hand column contains most of those sites.

I’ve taken a hiatus because I do have other things to do and haven’t wanted to do a half-assed job at making meaningful posts here. I still remain committed to determining the truth, whatever that may be, about AGW and CC, although the latter is much easier to deal with… climate changes, humans have little control over it, get over it.

Of late, I’ve been interested in the human climate of fear, what Michael Crichton called A State of Fear. This has been brewing in my mind as the Swine Flu “pandemic” is currently failing to live up to its designation to the despair of the media. Global Warming/Climate Change fits in with the climate of fear as does our western obsession with killing 99.9% of germs in our houses, an obsession that I believe will come back to bite us firmly on the behind as we subsequently weaken our resistance to infection by eliminating challenges to our immune systems.

I’m still amazed how we, as a society, can propose to spend trillions of dollars bailing out big businesses and big banks and propose to spend even more on reducing this or that gas in the atmosphere to “save” future populations while we do nothing on a global scale to save the people who are dying from the ravages of poverty today.

I remember reading the Population Bomb in the 1970s in which we were told that the “carrying capacity” of our blue marble was 1.2 Billion souls, any more would ensure destruction of our species through starvation. Today we share the marble with close to 7 billion others and obesity is a recurring problem… go figure. Now we are to believe that a small increase in global temperature will kill us off. I think that the prognosticators then and now have distinctly underestimating the resilience of homo sapiens. 

Not overly coherent, but that’s what I’m thinking today.

From Irin News …

CHAD: Panic, outcry at government charcoal ban

Photo: IRIN

The Chadian government says its ban on tree-cutting for household fuel is essential to fight desertification (file photo)

N’DJAMENA, 16 January 2009 (IRIN) – A government ban on charcoal in the Chadian capital N’djamena has created what one observer called “explosive” conditions as families desperately seek the means to cook.
“As we speak women and children are on the outskirts of N’djamena scavenging for dead branches, cow dung or the occasional scrap of charcoal,” Merlin Totinon Nguébétan of the UN Human Settlements Programme (HABITAT) in Chad, told IRIN from the capital. “People cannot cook.”
“Women giving birth cannot even find a bit of charcoal to heat water for washing,” Céline Narmadji, with the Association of Women for Development in Chad, told IRIN.

The whole story can be seen at the Irin News website. Unintended consequence is something that happens when you don’t consider the downstream consequences of your intended goals. If the Chadian government wants to slow down or stop the deforestation of the country, then the must provide an alternate, though not alternative) source of energy for cooking. Diesel generators are an alternate source, they can run on biodiesel to make them more politically correct. Solar cookers are another solution. Starving the people is not a suitable alternative under any circumstance. Unless, and until, people in Chad and similar locals are provided with a reliable supply of affordable energy, they will do what they have to do to survive. Making that illegal only makes them criminals, it does not solve anything.

The article goes on to say “Chadians must find other ways to cook and forget about charcoal and wood as fuel,” Environment Minister Ali Souleyman Dabye recently told the media in N’djamena. “Cooking is of course a fundamental necessity for every household. On the other hand…with climate change every citizen must protect his environment.”  Officials said the ban includes only charcoal made from freshly-cut trees, not that made from dead wood lying about. But all wood and charcoal is being blocked from entering N’djamena, residents said.

Soldiers and police on 14 January dispersed crowds who gathered in the capital to protest the government’s action as well as the overall high cost of living, people in the capital told IRIN.
“They hit demonstrators, who were mostly women,” said the women’s association’s Narmadji, who was among the marchers.
“Until the government makes a change we will not give up,” she said. “Better to die swiftly and en masse than to continue dying slowly as we are now.” Then she added: “We are already dead.”

So you can’t use locally grown wood to make charcoal, but we also won’t let you use wood grown anywhere else either. The message is clear, Chad’s poor must inevitably starve to assuage the goals of the environmental left.

I fear that most of these decisions are thought up by environmentalists sitting in comfort in some “club” office in Europe or North America. Perhaps if they moved to Chad and lived the lifestyle of the poorest people, they would change their tune.

Thanks to Ian for the tip.

That famous consensus

This comes from The Spectator courtesy of Melanie Phillips…

Saturday, 7th February 2009

Yet another example of the ‘research’ masquerading as science that is used to reinforce the man-made global warming fraud. One of the difficulties the green zealots have had is that Antarctica has been not warming but cooling, with the extent of its ice reaching record levels. A few weeks ago, a study led by Professor Eric Steig caused some excitement by claiming that actually West Antarctica was warming so much that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Warning bells should have sounded when Steig said

What we did is interpolate carefully instead of just using the back of an envelope.

To those of us who have been following this scam for the past two decades, ‘interpolate carefully’ makes us suck our teeth. And so it has proved. Various scientists immediately spotted the flaw in Steig’s methodology of combining satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The flaw they identified was that, since Antarctica has so few weather stations, the computer Steig used was programmed to guess what data they would have produced had such stations existed. In other words, the findings that caused such excitement were based on data that had been made up.

The rest of the story is on the Spectator website.

Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has done an analysis of the Steig paper with some amazing results. Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That has a few pictures of the “Harry” weather station showing how it was buried deep in the snow, no suspect data there according to some “scientists.”

It makes you wonder how far some people will go to “prove” their theories. When you know the answer, its easy to get the desired results. real science looks to the data first then check that against observation, then moves on to a test a hypothesis. In climate science, the hypothesis becomes theory then law before the data is scrutinized. In any other circumstance, it would be laughable, but governments worldwide are throwing billions of their taxpayers’ money at half-baked notions about climate change.

New York Times (02/02/09) P. B4; Nicholson, Chris
”University of Michigan engineers have set up a solar-powered satellite dish in Entasopia, Kenya, that provides the small village access to the Internet through several computers. In many rural areas in Africa, mobile phones have become the main mode of communication. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using cell phones increased almost tenfold to reach about a third of the population, many of whom do not have landlines, according to the International Telecommunication Union. However, many of the cell phones are designed more for talking than for Web browsing, and wireless data networks in the area are slow and have spotty coverage. Satellite connections are now faster and more reliable, which is why companies such as Google, which funded the University of Michigan project, are looking to use satellites to provide Internet connections to the estimated 95 percent of Africans who do not currently have it. The dish in Entasopia, which is designed to operate for months in harsh conditions with little maintenance, along with two other satellite dishes in equally remote villages, is part of a larger effort by Google to provide small communities with new tools to access the Internet. Google paid for the final design of the stations and the monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. Google is uncertain whether these satellite stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, due to the cost of the equipment and bandwidth. Bandwidth fees for stations such as the one in Entasopia can cost up to $700 a month, though slower connections cost less.”

Apparently, Google feels that it is more important for people in Africa have Internet service. In many parts of Africa people are dying from hunger, poor sanitation, and tainted water. What they need is cheap energy to alleviate the need to forage for cooking fuel, foraging that destroys habitat and affects the local ecosystems.

So what does all this have to do with climate? Al Gore constantly harps on about the Snows of Kilimanjaro disappearing. More studies have indicated that the snows disappear because of deforestation at the base of the mountain, not increased temperatures at the summit. Giving the people a source of energy would allow them to reforest the slopes. Internet access will not. While Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania, not Kenya, the principle is the same regardless of the location.

From Canada’s national broadcaster…

But governments should reconsider emissions cuts

Last Updated: Tuesday, December 9, 2008 | 5:46 PM ET CBC News

 

There is no clear evidence that global warming is an imminent danger to the world, says Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Even so, it would be good for governments to go further with proposed cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions to deal with dire predictions made in a 2007 panel report, he told the Associated Press in an interview on Tuesday.

"I don’t think we should jump to conclusions if we get material that is based on the last one or two years," he said. But governments should rethink their responses to the panel’s 2007 report, which predicted sea levels would rise by 40 centimetres to 1.4 metres even if drastic cuts were made in carbon emissions.

Now he has warned that if gigantic ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica melt, the sea could rise even more, flooding coastal areas and islands and causing widespread environmental disruptions.

The report recommended large drops in carbon emissions after 2015 to contain the changes, but governments should reconsider whether even those targets go far enough, Pachauri said.

He made the comments at a meeting in Poznan, Poland, where more than 10,000 delegates and environmentalists are trying to hammer out an international treaty to cut greenhouse gases. It is intended to to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Pachauri is worried that the negotiators would leave the key decisions to the end of the meeting, producing "a weak agreement that doesn’t really address the problem."

I’m not sure what to make of this one. Climate change is not an imminent danger, but we need to do something to stop climate change. Sounds a bit schizophrenic to me. Still if the head climate guru at the IPCC says that global warming is not an imminent danger…

Well, Watts Up With That by Anthony Watts won the award for the best science blog, good going Anthony! The best superlative we have in Canada would be… not bad! Kate over at Small Dead Animals won the best conservative blog award, not bad! And Lubos Motl at The Reference Frame won best European Blog, nicely done Lubos!

Also of note, retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, James Hansen’s former supervisor, publicly declared himself a skeptic and said that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Better late than never I guess. The whole story is at Senator Inhofe’s blog.

Every week we hear of more and more scientists who are now questioning AGW.  Maybe, just maybe, the tide is turning.

Likewise, we are starting to see more peer-reviewed research articles that question many of the tenants of AGW and catastrophic climate change. Since alarmists are hung up on the whole peer-review process as being the only true path to all that is good and holy, these new articles should come as a shock.

Well it looks like Watts Up With That will be crowned this year’s winner. Congratulations to Anthony Watts!

WUWT has proven to be a reliable resource for those who haven’t drowned in the Kool-Aid. There was a lot of traffic at a couple of the AGW blogs denouncing WUWT, the voting netizens seem to believe otherwise.

From Belgium via the Flemish newspaper ‘De Standaard’

http://www.standaard.be/Krant/Beeld/?oDay=07&oMonth=01&oYear=2009

Here’s wishing everyone a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

Looks like all is quiet on the hurricane front in the Atlantic Basin. A few storms offshore NA but no cyclonic action.

On the west coast, we are bracing for storm force winds today. No cyclones, just big winds. Nothing abnormal, it happens every year.