Penn Jillette on The Greenest Convention Ever

Yeah!

Hannah Montana: What is global warming? I don't know, I just sing about that.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
8/26/2008 4:57:38 PM

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, are big fans of Hannah Montana – and maybe there’s a reason why.

Teen star Miley Cyrus, known as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel TV series television of the same name, is now crusading for global warming alarmism. But she admits she isn’t really sure what it means. Disney also owns ABC, a network that often hypes climate change alarmism.

Read more (link)

Edmund Contoski: Global Warming, Global Myth

Do you ever wonder how communism could last for 70 years in Russia? Surely there was plenty of evidence, for decades, that the system was failing: food shortages, declining life expectancy, increased infant mortality, low standards of living, primitive hospitals, and sanitation facilities lagging far behind those in Western Europe and America — not to mention pollution far worse than in the West. But to diehard communists, the facts did not matter. All the observable negatives of collectivism were trumped by ideology. The same is true of the ideology behind global warming.

Read more at Liberty Foundation (link)

Daniel Henninger: Mrs. Pelosi's Enviromania

What is the impact of high level of gas prices? Alternative energy? What a bizarre idea!

Daniel Henninger:

For years, hyperactive environmentalists have burned votive candles to the spirit in the sky, hoping she'd levitate energy prices high enough to make alternatives to oil economically feasible. That day has come. Result: The oil has hit the fan.

With gasoline over $4 and with life as they love it in the suburbs being shut down, did people call for the windmills? Nope. A heavy majority want to drill the bejeezus out of anywhere in America we can find familiar black slop.

No one has been hit harder by this unexpected truth than Nancy Pelosi and her green brigades.

Fearful of an up-or-down vote on drilling for oil in, of all places, our own country, the Pelosi House and Harry Reid's Senate shut down Congress. House Minority Leader John Boehner calls drilling the greatest issue Republicans have had in his political lifetime. A party flat on its back is ready to run on oil pumps.

More at WSJ (link)

Penn & Teller: Being Green

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

A job for Parsons descendants: British Kids Encouraged To Become “Climate Cops”

A leading British energy company blitzed the newspapers with full page colour advertisements this weekend which encourage children to sign up as "climate cops" and keep "climate crime case files" on their families, friends and neighbours.

The ads, run by Npower, promote a website at www.climatecops.com where "trainees" must complete three missions before they can join the "elite cadets" and "train to become a climate cop".

These missions basically consist of a barrage of eco propaganda which the child must simply engage in in order to be accepted as a special agent of the green brigade.

The site offers a selection of downloads, including a pack of “climate crime cards“, which instruct recruits to spy on families, friends and relatives, encouraging each of them to build up a written “climate crime case file”.

"Report back to your family to make sure they don’t commit those crimes again (or else)!” one section states, before reminding recruits to keep a watchful eye on parents and even extend their web further. "What about the homes of aunts and uncles, or friends from school?" it suggests.

Read more: Steve Watson, Infowar.net (link)

Norwegian Meteorological Institute: There is more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago

Piers Akerman:

The latest blow to the Government’s apocalyptic prophet is news from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that there is more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago.

According to the Barents Observer there are open areas in this area in most years during July - but this year the area is covered by ice.

A fortnight ago a Norwegian research ship, Lance, and a Swedish ship, MV Stockholm, got stuck in the ice in the area and needed to be freed by the Norwegian Coast Guard.

While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.

Read more: The Daily Telegraphs Blogs (link)

Oooops! Bangladesh gaining land, not losing.

DHAKA (AFP) - New data shows that Bangladesh's landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh's landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.

The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year and most of it comes to rest on the southern coastline of the country in the Bay of Bengal where new territory is forming, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.

But Sarker said that while rising sea levels and river erosion were both claiming land in Bangladesh, many climate experts had failed to take into account new land being formed from the river sediment.

"Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea," Sarker said.

...

More at News.Yahoo.com (link)

WSJ: Kyoto's long goodbye

President George W. Bush achieved some significant changes to the global warming status quo at the recent G8 summit in Japan. From today's Wall Street Journal: Kyoto's Long Goodbye:

One of the mysteries of the universe is why President Bush bothers to charge the fixed bayonets of the global warming theocracy. On the other hand, his Administration's supposed "cowboy diplomacy" is succeeding in changing the way the world addresses climate change. Which is to say, he has forced the world to pay at least some attention to reality.

That was the larger meaning of the Group of Eight summit in Japan this week, even if it didn't make the papers. The headline was that the nations pledged to cut global greenhouse emissions by half by 2050. Yet for the first time, the G-8 also agreed that any meaningful climate program would have to involve industrializing nations like China and India. For the first time, too, the G-8 agreed that real progress will depend on technological advancements. And it agreed that the putative benefits had to justify any brakes on economic growth.

In other words, the G-8 signed on to what has been the White House approach since 2002.

Read more...

Source: A Dog Named Kyoto (link)

Australian Scientist Doubts the Climate Doomsayers

David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005:

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.
The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.
But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts.

Read more:
David Evans: No smoking hot spot. TheAustralian.News.com.au (link)

Phosphates and Nitrogen. Not global warming.

Ed Struzik, Canwest News Service, Published: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 (link)

EXCERPT: After a remarkable 37-year experiment, University of Alberta scientist David Schindler and his colleagues have finally nailed down the chemical triggers for a problem that plagues thousands of freshwater and coastal ecosystems around the world.

Fifty years ago, no one knew what exactly caused algae blooms to appear on lakes and rivers. There was some evidence to suggest that carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous, which are associated with agricultural runoff and waste water, were responsible. But small-scale experiments weren’t able to show which were more important.

Schindler seemed to solve the problem when he and his colleagues conducted a number of groundbreaking experiments in northern Ontario in the 1960s and early 1970s. In a famous 1974 aerial photograph published by the journal Science, two portions of their experimental Lake 226 were highlighted. One side was treated with carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous. The other was treated with just carbon and nitrogen.

The side receiving phosphorous rapidly developed a huge bloom of blue-green algae. The side not receiving phosphorous remained in near-pristine condition.

Schindler’s latest series of long-term experiments shows that nitrogen removal completely fails to control blue-green algae blooms. He proved this by manipulating nitrogen and phosphorus levels on Lake 227 for 37 years. Nitrogen control, he found, only encouraged algae blooms.

Read more…

Conclusion? Phosphates and Nitrogen. Not global warming. (link)