Climate Scientists Turn to Hollywood?

Word is out that frustrated climate scientists -- who have seen public support for their alarmist cries fall after various scandals and various researchers admit that the world has cooled in the last 15 years -- are now turning to Hollywood for help in, uh, "educating" the public.

So what was "The Day After Tomorrow"?

But the story seems to indicate that it isn't just "scientists" who are looking to Hollywood, but "government scientists."

One effort, announced at the meeting, will recruit Hollywood to help scientists tell their stories. NAS and the University of Southern California will team up to draw on USC’s expertise in film, TV, websites, and video games. The partnership will be the first between a federal agency and a film school.

“Entertainment media has been pretty much untapped as far as science literacy goes,” Dr. Fink says. A huge portion of the public doesn’t go to science museums or watch science programming on TV, she says. “Those are the eyeballs we’re trying to capture.”

Did you catch the "partnership between a federal agency and a film school"?

The U.S. government teemed up with Hollywood during World War II to produce films. But that was a time of war and it wasn't hard to persuade most Americans that the fight was a just cause. Producing propaganda to convince a skeptical public that we need to let the government, perhaps even a world government, control our thermostats and tax us through higher energy prices, seems like the wrong thing to do in a free society.

Unless, of course, you have no intention of keeping your society free.

A High Degree of Climate Uncertainty

Just one more thing that science has figured out on global warming, er, climate change.

In a report about a 2007 Chinese dust cloud that circled the earth completely in only 13 days, there is this interesting conclusion:

The dust cloud measured about 3 km (1.9 miles) vertically and up to 2,000 km horizontally and it stayed that way even after one full trip around the globe.

"The reason why the cloud structure was very well maintained was because the dust was uplifted ... where the atmosphere is very stable," Uno said.

Researchers believe dust particles trigger the formation of high-altitude cirrus clouds -- although experts have no idea whether such clouds warm or cool the earth.

Maybe they should consult Archbishop Algore.

Who is the Real Climate Change Nazi?

Algore doing his best Churchill impression before a "world forum" in London.

"Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.” He added: “We have everything we need except political will but political will is a renewable resource.”

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as the threat during World War 2.

Maybe when the climate sinks several big ocean liners, traps and kills a few million Jews and Catholics into stifling hot concentration camps, and forms alliances with several rogue nations, we'll come around, Al.

Until then, keep a stiff upper lip.

More Chilly Inconvenience

The Gore Effect covers the entire planet!

Since the release of "An Inconvenient Truth" by the former Vice President, the Earth has cooled .74 degrees Farenheit.

Details here.

To Fight Global Warming, U.N. Will Steal Our Wealth, Jobs

Are you ready to live under global government?

If Tim Geithner's slip-up on being open-minded to a one-world reserve currency wasn't enough to convince you that we have turned off on the road to hell, consider the implications of a 16-page "note" being circulated by the United Nations to those who will attend a "mammoth negotiating session" on global climate change in Bonn, Germany, next week.

A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

Those and other results are blandly discussed in a discretely worded United Nations "information note" on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an "effective framework" for dealing with global warming.

The 16-page note, obtained by FOX News, will be distributed to participants at a mammoth negotiating session that starts on March 29 in Bonn, Germany, the first of three sessions intended to hammer out the actual commitments involved in the new deal.

Consider the points:

1. Trillions of dollars in wealth transfers. You don't transfer wealth from poor countries to rich countries. That means we are the targets of this U.N. scheme.

2. Millions of job losses, and gains. Who loses and who gains? See point No. 1.

3. New taxes (see point No.1).

4. Industrial relocations (see point No.2)

5. New tariffs and subsidies and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes under the supervision of the world body (U.N.)

All of this openly discussed in a memo we weren't supposed to know about.

There is nothing in the United States Constitution that would permit our Congress or President, or any group acting in their name, to agree to this. Even if man-made global climate change were real -- and it isn't -- we would have to amend the Constitution in order to surrender our sovereign rights, and most Americans would say no to this.

Please, people, wake up! The world-wide socialist movement is hiding itself in the environmental revolution, no longer "red" but "green." Don't let them enslave you in exchange for false security for a threat that does not exist.

More Evidence for Global Cooling

Nope. The science isn't settled.

Findings of a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee show that there are natural climate swerves, or switches, that take place every so often. Most importantly, we don't understand them very well yet, so it is nearly impossible to separate what is natural climate change from what is human-caused.

Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.

"Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other. Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.

"In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.

"The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000."

A good question for an objective thinker: How do we know whether to raise or lower carbon emissions, if doing so artificially might contribute to an ultra-cooling or heating result?

A better question: Do we take any remedial action at all considering the major players in climate change involve the sun, the earth's rotation, and natural processes like ocean currents, natural carbon "breathing" by the planet itself, volcanism and, possibly, the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation?

"But if we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand -- first the natural variability of climate -- and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

If anyone attempts to answer our questions by telling you they are irrelevant, or that we cannot afford to dwell on them while we lose valuable time to "save the planet," then you know that they are merely trying to panic us into ceding control of our thermostats, our wallets and control of our government so that they may gain political and economic power.

Go tell 'em to cool it. Apparently the planet is.

Global Warming Update: Debates Heats Up as Climate Cools

Some marvelous news items to ponder this week, starting with a funny piece from the Flint (MI) Journal where, baby, it's cold outside.

It's Time to Pray for Global Warming

If you're wondering why North America is starting to resemble nuclear winter, then you missed the news.

At December's U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan, Poland, 650 of the world's top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?"

I asked myself, why would such obviously smart guy say such a ridiculous thing? But it turns out he's right.

The earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since; it dropped dramatically in 2007 and got worse in 2008, when temperatures touched 1980 levels.

Meanwhile, the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center released conclusive satellite photos showing that Arctic ice is back to 1979 levels. What's more, measurements of Antarctic ice now show that its accumulation is up 5 percent since 1980.

In other words, during what was supposed to be massive global warming, the biggest chunks of ice on earth grew larger. Just as an aside, do you remember when the hole in the ozone layer was going to melt Antarctica? But don't worry, we're safe now, that was the nineties.

Dr. Kunihiko, Chancellor of Japan's Institute of Science and Technology said this: "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other ... every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so." Now why would a learned man say such a crazy thing?

There's more, and he's got a great punch line.

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But global warming (er, climate change) enthusiasts, never fear. Dr. Jim Hansen - not to be confused with the late, great Muppets guy, Jim Henson -- of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, self-proclaimed climate guru, is telling us that there is little time left.

President Obama Has Four Years to Save Earth!

That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added. Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen.
...
Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations. As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals.

The weird thing is that NASA itself, along with NOAA, is monitoring ice levels and is reporting the increased ice coverage. Apparently Hansen isn't in the loop. Or maybe he doesn't want to be.

Naturally, Hansen's solution is massive carbon taxation and a halt to any new development of coal-fired generating plants. My prognostication is that his solution will leave Americans impoverished and cold.

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Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has a few questions for President-elect Obama's pick for "Science Guy."

In nominating John Holdren to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy - the position known informally as White House science adviser - President-elect Barack Obama has enlisted an undisputed Big Name among academic environmentalists. Holdren is a physicist, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and author or coauthor of many papers and books.

He is also a doom-and-gloomer with a trail of erroneous apocalyptic forecasts dating back nearly 40 years - and a decided lack of tolerance for environmental opinions that conflict with his.

Jacoby goes on to list eight questions - actually only seven, since No.3 seems to be missing - that dwell on Holdren's incorrect forecasts of the past, or his flip-flops on predictions. Question No.1 is amusing:

1. You were long associated with population alarmist Paul Ehrlich, and joined him in predicting disasters that never came to pass. For example, you and Ehrlich wrote in 1969: "If . . . population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come." In 1971, the two of you were adamant that "some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century." In the 1980s, Ehrlich quoted your expectation that "carbon dioxide-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020." What have you learned from the failure of these prophecies to come true?

And there's No.5!

6. In 2006, according to the London Times, you suggested that global sea levels could rise 13 feet by the end of this century. But the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea levels are likely to have risen only 13 inches by 2100. Can you explain the discrepancy?

The others are as illuminating, especially as Holdren apparently has little regard for open debate on anything that he has pronounced as settled science.

You think maybe there's a chance that White House will be pushing for cap-and-trade or, worse, carbon taxes?