More ice??? Can't be!!!
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24102075-5001031,00.html
By Piers Akerman
July 31, 2008 12:00am
DAILY, new evidence emerges to demonstrate that Climate Minister Penny Wong is wrong.
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.
The mantra of less ice has long been coupled with the warning that rising sea levels will soon swamp coastal areas and both claims have been used to heighten fears about climate change and add a greater sense of urgency to calls for action now.
It follows last week's revelation from leading US hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that even in a dramatically warming world hurricane frequency and intensity may not rise during the next two centuries.
Once again real time events and science have defeated Senator Wong and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, despite their constant refrain that human-induced climate change is already occurring and we must act now to protect our prosperity and way of life.
Not only do eminent and vastly more knowledgeable scientists say otherwise, they point out that if the Earth is to warm (naturally) by even one degree and if carbon dioxide levels increase, we will be better off, not worse off.
Wong and Rudd's end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it predictions are bunkum, thousands of top scientists agree.
Among them is Dr S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, who established and served as the first director of the US Weather Satellite Service, now part of the global National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (the universally respected NOAA), and is a former chief scientist of the US Department of Transportation.
He is founder and director of the non-profit Science and Environmental Policy Project, a body which deals with sound science, not the highly theoretical and politicised junk science favoured by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which the Australian Government uses as its reference point for its heavy-handed tax and wealth redistribution plans.
Singer and a team of renowned international scientists earlier this year published a report titled "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate", under the banner of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
It should be mandatory reading for all who wish to participate in the climate debate - be they policymakers, private individuals or representatives of business organisations.
After rigorously examining the same data as the IPCC, particularly the claim that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (defined by the IPCC as between 90 to 99 per cent certain) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations," (emphasis in the original), and reached the opposite conclusion - namely, that natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause.
Unlike the hysterical IPCC report, which was riddled with errors and mis-statements, ignored available scientific data, and has already been contradicted in several major areas by more recent research, the NIPCC authors don't say that anthropogenic greenhouse gases cannot produce some warming, but they do say that the evidence shows that they are not playing a major role.
This report - so far unchallenged - undermines the exaggerated claims Wong and Rudd have been peddling.
It makes the point that computer models are unreliable guides to future climate conditions, that sea-level rise is not significantly affected by rise in greenhouse gases; that higher concentrations of CO2 are more likely to be beneficial to plant and animal life and human health than lower concentrations; and that the economic effects of modest warming are likely to be positive and beneficial to human health.
It modestly concludes that, while the science of climate change is far from settled, proposals to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gases are premature and misguided.
Its finding - that attempts to influence global temperatures by reducing such emissions would be both futile and expensive - should be at the forefront of any policy planning.
The Federal Opposition must not be stampeded by the Rudd Government into agreeing to sign on to its as-yet-unseen emissions trading system.
It must remember Australia didn't have to sign on to the flawed Kyoto Protocols to be a model citizen, and that when Rudd made signing the agreement the centrepiece of his environmental policy the Howard government had already ensured that the nation already met all its greenhouse targets.
Rudd and Wong want the electorate to believe that there is not a moment to be lost.
While policy made by panicky politicians is generally worthless, in this case it would not only cost millions of Australians their jobs, it would collapse the economy and steal the future from our children.
