Just don't tell me the debate's over…
What the heck is Clive Palmer up to? But more importantly, what on earth possessed Al Gore to appear with him at a press conference in Canberra? From being the world’s top climate guru to slumming it with Australia’s most unpredictable politician – how are the mighty fallen.
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There's an OWS protester under there, somewhere…
The Gore Effect at work, yet again! As the Occupy Wall Street movement embarks on its protest against “global warming”, Central Park receives the largest October snowfall since records began, as NOAA/NWS reports (thanks to WUWT):
…RECORD DAILY MAXIMUM SNOWFALL SET AT CENTRAL PARK NY…
A RECORD SNOWFALL OF 2.9 INCHES WAS SET AT CENTRAL PARK NY YESTERDAY…OCTOBER 29. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF TRACE SET IN 2002.
…RECORD OCTOBER SNOWFALL AMOUNT SET FOR CENTRAL PARK NY…
CENTRAL PARK RECORDED 2.9 INCHES OF SNOWFALL ON OCTOBER 29 2011 SINCE SNOWFALL RECORDS BEGAN IN 1869…AN INCH OF SNOWFALL HAS NEVER BEEN RECORDED IN THE MONTH OF OCTOBER.
As the saying goes: buwahahahahahahahahaha!
More Gore-bull
Al Gore claims that “global warming” is causing more extreme weather events, because his investments will go south if he fails to keep up the fear. Note the irony that he was speaking at a “low-carbon investment conference”. You really can’t make this stuff up – just follow the money:
“Observations in the real world make it clear that it’s happening now, it’s real, it’s with us,” he said. Failing to take action meant the world would face a catastrophe. [In other words, his bank balance would face a catastrophe – Ed]
He added that nearly every climate scientist actively publishing on the subject now agreed there was a causal link between carbon emissions and the sharp increase in intense and extreme weather events seen across the globe. (source)
Gore cited the Pakistani floods as evidence of this claim. But unfortunately, the official report into the floods found NO LINK to climate change. Read the whole Guardian article – it’s a scream.
And it is strange that deaths from such “extreme weather events” are at their lowest for over a hundred years, even taking into account the greater reporting of such events thanks to better monitoring facilities:
Despite concerns about global warming and a large increase in the number of reported storms and droughts, the world’s death rate from extreme weather events was lower from 2000 to 2010 than it has been in any decade since 1900, according to a new Reason Foundation study.
The Reason Foundation report chronicles the number of worldwide deaths caused by extreme weather events between 1900 and 2010 and finds global deaths caused by extreme weather events peaked in the decade running from 1920 to 1929, when there were 241 deaths a year per million people in the world. From 1930 to 1939 there were 208 deaths a year per million people. But from 2000 to 2010 there were just 5.4 deaths a year per million people in the world. That’s a 98 percent decline in the weather-related death rate since the 1920s. Extreme weather events were responsible for just .07% of the world’s deaths between 2000 and 2010. (source)
Al "Three Monitors" Gore
Remember Greg Combet nonsensically branding the Coalition’s position on climate a “white carbon policy” a few days ago? Now we have Al Gore (who he? – Ed) comparing sceptics with racists.
Gore, like Combet, has no arguments left and has abandoned any pretence of his cause being grounded on some kind of scientific basis. Now it’s all about morals, a sure sign that he, like Combet, Gillard etc, is a busted flush. Gore is now fully unhinged, desperate to keep the climate bandwagon rolling to protect his green investments:
“There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with — you’re much younger than me so you didn’t have to go through this personally — but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won.”
“We have to win the conversation on climate,” Gore added.
When Bogusky questioned the analogy, asking if the scientific reasoning behind climate change skeptics might throw a wrench into the good and evil comparison with racism, Gore did not back down.
“I think it’s the same where the moral component is concerned and where the facts are concerned I think it is important to get that out there, absolutely,” Gore said.
As usual when figures like Gore and Combet try to justify their belief in the climate religion by resorting to ridiculous comparisons to issues of race or morality, we should be satisfied that their argument is well and truly lost.
Read it here (thanks to WUWT).
Out of touch
Al Gore is so last decade. But he’s tried to reinvent himself with the relaunch of a new website, the Climate Reality Project (www.climaterealityproject.org). But even those who are convinced that AGW is a major problem are criticising Gore’s approach. From The Conversation:
Talking to those in the tent isn’t necessarily a problem. There are certainly times when you need to drum up the enthusiasm of the base.
But there is one aspect of the campaign that does need to be critiqued: the mindless and counter-productive demonisation of “Big Oil” and “Big Coal”. This echoes a regular refrain of The Greens here in Australia.
It’s as if somewhere out there “Big Oil” and “Big Coal” equivalents of Mr Burns, Mr Potter, Blofeld, Siegfried of KAOS and the Pentavirate are cooking up campaigns not to provide electricity and transport solutions, but to destroy humanity.
Ridiculous.
Those who got into the coal and oil industries did so for the simple goal of making a profit by providing us with the energy we need for the modern economy. They didn’t do it to be evil. They don’t want to destroy the world. They are not the nefarious oligarchs that so many would have you believe.
Yes, we now know that the carbon pollution produced by the coal and oil industries is a big problem for society. We all need to wean ourselves off such carbon intensive energy.
But we’re not going to do it by misrepresenting people’s intentions and calling them names. We’re not going to do it by punishing people who acted in good faith.
We’re only going to convince people to change by lining up their profit motive with everyone’s need for a low-carbon economy.
Yes, that’s right. We need to support the fat cats, just as we need to support anyone else in transition.
We need to encourage those who invest in coal and oil to move their money to less carbon-intensive investments. Incentive, not invective.
These captains of industry are not our enemies. They need to be our allies in de-carbonising the economy. (source)
There is little to disagree with here. But the problem is that environmentalists are, by and large, socialists. What the authors are suggesting here is environmental capitalism, which the Greens could not possibly accept alongside their Marxist social agenda. For them, “profit” does equal “evil” – which is why the Greens will never be a serious force in politics.
And let’s not forget, just as coal and oil corporations are there to make a profit, so is Al Gore, and a mighty big one he’s made so far…
As Judith Curry notes:
Al Gore is preaching to his (shrinking) choir. On the other hand, Grant and Lamberts provide a refreshing approach that might actually lead to productive dialogue on the climate/energy debate. (source)
(h/t Climate Etc)
Bureau's David Jones
The floodgates are open. The unfalsifiable hypothesis of dangerous man-made global warming comes to the rescue and provides the answer to the terrible Queensland floods. We can all now self-flagellate, wailing that driving our SUVs is to blame. Over a quarter of a million Google hits for +queensland +flood +”climate change” in the last week alone. But hang on a minute, when there was a drought in Australia, climate change caused that too. Referring here to New South Wales and the Murray-Darling Basin, where there have also been recent flooding rains:
IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.
It was the 11th year in a row NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin had experienced above normal temperatures. Sydney’s nights were its warmest since records were first kept 149 years ago.
“There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming,” said Dr Jones. “It is very easy to see … it is happening before our eyes.” [There is debate about the cause, however – Ed]
The only uncertainty now was whether the changing pattern was “85 per cent, 95 per cent or 100 per cent the result of the enhanced greenhouse effect”. [Apparently not according to Jones – Ed]
“There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent. Certainly, in terms of temperature, that seems to be our reality, and that there is no turning back. (source)
But now that Queensland is under water, Jones has another story:
“We’ve always had El Ninos and we’ve had natural variability but the background which is now operating is different,” head of climate monitoring and prediction at the Australia Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne David Jones said.
“The first thing we can say with La Nina and El Nino is it is now happening in a hotter world,” he told Reuters, adding that meant more evaporation from land and oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger weather patterns.
“So the El Nino droughts would be expected to be exacerbated and also La Nina floods because rainfall would be exacerbated,” he said, though adding it would be some years before any climate change impact on both phenomena might become clear.
Everyone’s a winner, ignoring the pointless weasel-word caveat at the end. Droughts: climate change. Floods: climate change. I’ve said it before, but will say it again: what evidence would show that climate change was not taking place? In other words, what conditions would falsify the hypothesis? I won’t wait for an answer, because there isn’t one. Everything strengthens the case for AGW, in the alarmists’ view.
And Keith “Travesty” Trenberth chimes in as well:
Prominent US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors.
He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.
“The rapid onset of La Nina meant the Asian monsoon was enhanced and the over 1 degree Celsius anomalies in sea surface temperatures led to the flooding in India and China in July and Pakistan in August,” he told Reuters in an email.
He said a portion, about 0.5C, of the ocean temperatures around northern Australia, which are more than 1.5C above pre-1970 levels, could be attributed to global warming.
“The extra water vapor fuels the monsoon and thus alters the winds and the monsoon itself and so this likely increases the rainfall further,” Mr Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said.
“So it is easy to argue that one degree Celsius sea surface temperature anomalies gives 10 to 15 per cent increase in rainfall,” he added.
Yep, dead easy if you can just pick and choose a model to fit whatever weather phenomenon is currently occurring. Even the token scientist drafted in to say that there’s no link to climate change manages to link it to climate change:
It’s a natural phenomena. We have no strong reason at the moment for saying this La Nina is any stronger than it would be even without humans,” said Neville Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne and president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
But he said global atmospheric warming of about 0.75C over the past half century had to be having some impact.
“It has to be affecting the climate, regionally and globally. It has to be affecting things like La Nina. But can you find a credible argument which says it’s made it worse? I can’t at the moment.” (source)
Well, it has to be one or the other. Either the warming is affecting La Niña or it isn’t. And of course, none of this says anything about the cause of the warming.
And we here in Australia are all deeply honoured that the Mighty Goracle has used “our” floods as “evidence of climate change.” If Big Al thinks so, it must be true. (source)
(H/t Bishop Hill)
Full of climate misinformation
Not sure if Al is being serious here, but a recent blog post from Al “Three F-ing Huge Monitors” Gore [what’s the carbon footprint of that little set up? No, wait – “do what I say, not what I do”, isn’t it?] seems to indicate that he thinks Australia’s climate protests are something to be imitated, and pins the credit on his misleading “Climate Project” slide show:
Around the world, when politicians fail to act to solve the climate crisis, people are taking action:
“Tens of thousands of protesters – and a few skeptics – have taken to the streets across Australia to urge the major political parties to take action on climate change.”
“Both Labor and the coalition have failed to take decisive action to cut Australia’s pollution levels in the run-up to the federal election, Walk Against Warming rallies in Australia’s capital cities heard on Sunday.”
It is my hope we see activism like this here in the United States. A special thanks goes out to those I trained in Australia to give my slide show. They played a major role in the events:
“In Sydney, Al Gore’s Climate Project presenter, Nell Schofield, attracted huge cheers when she said Australia’s lack of political action on climate change was “not only embarrassing, it is morally reprehensible”. (source)
Unfortunately for Al, the protests were a dismal failure, with numbers down yet again, as ACM reported:
MORE than 40,000 turned up in 2006, but just 10,000 people participated in the Walk Against Warming, an annual march through the city to protest against government inaction on climate change. (source)
Let’s hope the rest of the world takes Australia’s lead, just as Al wants.
(h/t Climate Change Fraud)
Separating
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
Former US vice president and anti-global warming campaigner Al Gore and his wife Tipper have told friends that they will separate after four decades of marriage, an aide said Tuesday.
“They’ve asked for privacy during this time, for them and their family,” said Kalee Kreider, of the Office of Al and Tipper Gore.
Kreider confirmed that the Gores — whose affection for each other was evident at social gatherings in Washington for 40 years, notably during his failed 2000 White House run — had let friends know of their plans by email.
“We are announcing today that after a great deal of thought and discussion, we have decided to separate,” they said in the message, first reported by the online publication Politico.
“This is very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration. We ask for respect for our privacy and that of our family, and we do not intend to comment further,” they said.
Read it here.
Clearly stressed by so much climate spin…
… the desperate get going. In this case, Al Gore, who is wheeled out like some old relic to peddle more meaningless alarmism based on hopeless computer models to the gullible twits at Copenhagen:
Gore cited new scientific work at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, whose Arctic ice research is important for planning polar voyages by Navy submarines. The computer modeling there stresses the “volumetric,” looking not just at the surface extent of ice but its thickness as well.
“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said. His office later said he meant nearly ice-free, because ice would be expected to survive in island channels and other locations. [“Some” of the models? So I guess “others” didn’t – guess which ones Al chooses – Ed]
Asked for comment, one U.S. government scientist questioned what he called this “aggressive” projection.
“It’s possible but not likely,” said Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. “We’re sticking with 2030.”
Even the US government is embarrassed by Gore’s wild predictions. And anyway, what’s the big deal about Arctic ice anyway? If the planet is warming, there’ll be less ice – it doesn’t prove human causation. Gore sounds like Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun: “There’s a 50:50 chance of no ice in 5 years, but there’s only a 10% chance of that.”
Read it here.
Update: The Times picks up Gore’s error, and as Marc Morano says, Gore is no longer getting a “free ride” from the media:
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.
[…]
Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
[…]
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”
Failed politician writes dire poem about climate change = front page news. Try not to puke when you read the Goracle’s attempts at literature:
One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sunVapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune’s bones dissolveSnow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quicklyThen dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning’s celebrationUnknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrupsPassion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rungThe shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools (source)
The debate is over: Al Gore is a freaking awful poet.
Australian Climate Madness 
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