The conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute has released a “report.” What do you think?

Question

The report is titled the “Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change Summary for Policy Makers”.

http://heartland.temp.siteexecutive.com/pdf/22835.pdf

The report seems to be a summary of every ill-conceived, non-peer reviewed argument made by the skeptics over the past few years. (1) There are graphics on the Sargasso Sea “published” by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

(2) They try to confuse the NASA-GISS global temperature record with that of the temperature mean from the lower 48 states; this is Dr Jello’s favorite trick of the trade. (3) They attack the hickey stick graph one more time.

(4) The report includes the fully discredited 1991 ”discovery” by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in "strikingly good agreement" with the length of the cycle of sunspots.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/254/5032/698

Answer 1

I think the thing to understand is that for the skeptics, it's not about the science.  It's about something else.  The quote from the Heartland guy at the opening of the publicity event is quite telling:  

"Once lost, freedoms are often very difficult to retrieve."

That is an emotional appeal and has nothing to do with science.  Look at the title of Stossel's closing talk:  "Freedom and its Enemies."  Skeptics are by and large scared of anthropogenic climate change being true, rather than objecting to it out of any sort of deep understanding of the science.  For them, it *has* to be false, because if man is affecting climate, someone is going to take something away from them.

These are the same men, by and large, who objected to things like African-Americans getting the vote, the emancipation of women, g*y rights etc. because they see life as a zero sum game.  Any gain in freedom by another group is somehow see as an assault on their "freedom."  They also are scared of people who have the right to tell them "no," whether it is a woman in the bedroom or the black kid taking up "their" seat on the bus.  Similarly, they see a call for a need for collective action to address climate change as the government "taking away" their freedom.  As if freedom is equal to driving a huge truck and owning a huge screen television.  

So it is not surprising to me they cling to the same stale scientific canards.  They simply don't have the courage to "man up" and face the truth.  Any little bit is enough to keep them thinking they are still the "real men of courage" and all of the people who timidly suggest that "gee, maybe consuming less wouldn't be so bad" are the pansies.  Who knows, maybe these studly guys will inherit the Earth.  The planet seems to have a sense of cosmic irony, if they get what they want they're probably going to deserve it.

Answer 2

Ok guys I will throw this to you

Have fun

• Cool News About Global Warming

By Bill Steigerwald

FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, March 03, 2008

You've no doubt seen the stories about strange snowfalls in Saudi Arabia. A brutal winter in China. The heaviest snow cover in North America, Siberia and elsewhere since 1966.

And if you are a vigilant observer of the global warming debate, you know how inconveniently cold it is in the Arctic this winter for Al Gore and his army of climate alarmists.

But how cold is it, Johnny?

Well, NASA says recent satellite images show that the allegedly endangered polar ice cap -- which will melt completely one of these summers and kill off all the polar bears if we don't slash our greedy carbon footprints and revert to the lifestyles of medieval peasants -- has recovered to near normal coverage levels.

That's what Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Canada's CBC News -- the Canadian government's version of NPR/PBS - on Feb. 12.

As far as Google's search engine knows, Comiso's comforting report has appeared nowhere but in Canada.

There's even better news for polar ice-pack lovers from ice expert Gilles Langis, who says Arctic ice is now even thicker than usual in spots. A senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, he's another scientist you shouldn't expect to see talking to Anderson Cooper on the next episode of CNN's "Galaxy in Peril."

Meanwhile, in other news too climatically incorrect for U.S. mainstream media to touch, California meteorologist Anthony Watts says January 2008 was the planet's second-coldest January in 15 years.

Even more shocking, the average temperature of Earth dropped significantly from January 2007 to January 2008. As Watts explains on his Web site wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com, he determined the lower figure by crunching data from four major public and private global tracking sources.

You may remember Watts from last summer. He popped up in this paper and on Fox News because of his self-funded project to quality-check 1,221 ground weather stations around the country that are used by NASA to measure the "official" average annual temperature of the United States.

So far, Watts and his volunteers have checked out more than 500 weather stations (none in Western Pennsylvania) to see if their temperature data can be considered credible. As he details on his other Web site, weatherstation.org, nearly 70 percent of the sites fail to meet the government's own standards because they are not 100 feet from a building, are on blazing rooftops, sit next to air-conditioner exhaust fans, etc.

Watts was shocked and surprised to find such unequivocal proof that Earth's temperature has cooled in the last year, he said to me Wednesday. But he's very cautious about what it means in either the short or long run.

Calling it a "fluctuation" and "a large anomaly" compared to the 30-year running temperature average that climatologists use, he emphasized that the cold spell is "no indication that global warming is over" but does "illustrate that the driving mechanisms behind our planet's climate are still very much in control of changing the climate and that the planet's not in the death grip of CO2 just yet."

A careful, honest man of science, all Watts would say for sure was that his findings and all the strange cold-weather events of this winter prove only one thing so far -- that "Mother Nature is still in control of things, not us."

--------------------------------------...

Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at [phone]. E-mail him at: [e-mail].

Answer 3

It looks like a nice collection of old, superceeded data, cherrypicking, and flat-out misinformation which we've come to expect from the AGW denial movement.  Nice to have it all collected in one report, courtesy of our good friend Fred Singer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer

I could go through it point-by-point and explain why every argument is wrong, but we've seen it all before and really don't need to go through it all again.  That's what the Heartland Institute wants us to do.

Answer 4

I'm very surprised.

I would have thought they'd at least have tried to make it look good.  They have a few people there with some smarts.

Answer 5

If you look at the graph, even the "corrected" one shows correlation.  I can't verify any of the graphs and am skeptical of them all but since solar sunspot activity related to magnetic anomalies from the sun seemed to be previously correlated, it stands to reason that solar magnetic influence on Earth's magnetosphere may in fact alter cloud formation.  It seemed to me that they were only arguing about the latest warming which presumably the authors are blaming on human influence.  Since, altering clouds can have unpredictable results, it only serves to futher demontstrate that there are too many unknowns to accurately predict the climate, past, present and future.  Those that pretend they can predict the future are ignorant of the facts IMO.