An Inconvenient Truth and An Intolerable Summer
An Inconvenient Truth and An Intolerable Summer
Greenhouse gas emissions have not only heated the earth to its hottest temperature in millennia; they have also made heat waves more intense. The journal Nature said in 2004 that “severe heat waves are now four times as likely to occur because of increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.â€
A roundup of news coverage from this week’s heat wave in the U.S. and Europe gives a sense of what we can expect in the future:
Nevada: “Reno set a record for heat Sunday, breaking an 81-year-old record, according to the National Weather Service.”
Czech Republic: “The temperature in Prague climbed up to 34.3 degrees centigrade today and beat the 141 year old record of the day by 0.6 degrees.”
South Dakota: “Saturday’s statewide high temperature that unofficially tied a South Dakota record set 70 years earlier is likely to stand, a National Weather Service employee says.”
Britain: “Britain sweltered on the hottest July day for nearly a century as the current heatwave reached its peak.”
California: “Indio (122 degrees), Palm Springs (118), Riverside (108), Sun City-Perris (108), San Bernardino (107), Temecula (106) and Moreno Valley (104) all set record highs Saturday, according to the National Weather Service and records kept by The Press-Enterprise.”
Arkansas: “Another scorcher today after record temperatures were set in some Arkansas cities yesterday. Monticello reached 109 degrees Wednesday and in Little Rock a record of 104 degrees for the date was set.”
New Hampshire: “It reached 95 degrees in Manchester. That beats the previous high for the date of 93 degrees. The old record was set in 1968.”
New York and Connecticut: “Dangerous heat settled over the Central Plains and Northeast for another day Tuesday, producing record high temperatures in New York and Connecticut, said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Weather Service.”
North Dakota: “In Bismarck, the temperature broke a record and Dickinson tied a record.”
Kansas: “…a day that saw a record high temperature of 109 for Wichita, topping by 2 degrees the mark set during the legendary heat wave of 1980.”
Germany: “Germany’s national meteorological service said July was on the way to being the hottest since records began in many parts of the country.”
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog Roll
At this point isn’t the entire Northern Hemisphere reaching record temps? Britian was talking about pavement melting, France, and Germany are worried about deaths from heat stroke.
July 20th, 2006 at 6:56 pmI hope this means the reptiles take over the earth again.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:00 pmCheck out this image of the one-month forecast for Canada… it shows how the entire country will be experiencing above-average temperatures for the next thirty days. Makes it kinda hard to say that there isn’t something strange afoot…
July 20th, 2006 at 7:01 pmhttp://weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/saisons/image_e.html?img=mfe1t_s
I think Earth is becoming more like Hell everyday. Heckuva Job!
t-mac
July 20th, 2006 at 7:03 pmAnd here in Dallas, Texas we had another 103 day today, looking for a record hot summer. Of course many Texans, especially politicians don’t have to worry about the heat, they live in the “state of denial”. It’s always cool and comfy there.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:04 pmThat is all hollywood or the liberal media, that is all it could be. Cons don’t need no stinking science, don’t you know?
July 20th, 2006 at 7:16 pmBut Bush battled global warming because he spoke at the NAACP today, so Hell must’ve frozen over.
Did you know that Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” was written to coincide with the Bush administration? It’s true! It doesn’t just work with The Wizard of Oz.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:24 pm#5,
It seems the cockroaches have already taken over, they are in the Whitehouse with human suits on.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:32 pmAll thermometers have a liberal bias, so does your sweat glands, oh and the Sun does too.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:32 pmThis is why I always tell Seixon that we are all going to Norway and live with him.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:34 pmAs an avid snowskiier stuck in Arizona, I have noticed this pattern since the late 80’s when our ski areas started to really suffer, as they never did before. The ski are has been in existence since 1939. We used to ski until May, nowadays, no-way.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:38 pmConservitives know global warming is NOT HAPPENING. Global schorching is taking place. Or as GWB would say “its global hotting!!”
July 20th, 2006 at 7:59 pmBut… but…. Michael Crichton already said this is not happening….
Who am i supposed to believe, Crichton or my own lying eyes?
July 20th, 2006 at 8:01 pmFrom a USAToday article, and why people get confused on the issue.
quote
Scientists find errors in global warming data
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Satellite and weather-balloon research released Friday removes a last bastion of scientific doubt about global warming, researchers say.
Surface temperatures have shown small but steady increases since the 1970s, but the tropics had shown little atmospheric heating — and even some cooling. Now, after sleuthing reported in three papers released by the journal Science, revisions have been made to that atmospheric data.
Climate expert Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, lead author of one of the papers, says that those fairly steady measurements in the tropics have been a key argument “among people asking, ‘Why should I believe this global warming hocus-pocus?’ ”
After examining the satellite data, collected since 1979 by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, Calif., found that the satellites had drifted in orbit, throwing off the timing of temperature measures. Essentially, the satellites were increasingly reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime ones, leading to a false cooling trend. The team also found a math error in the calculations.
“Our hats are off to (them). Global warming’s pace over the past 30 years has actually been quite slow, a total increase of about 1 degree Fahrenheit
unquote.
July 20th, 2006 at 8:01 pmFor Truth,
July 20th, 2006 at 8:03 pmSkiing in AZ?
You must be joking…!
that is one hot place. I was at my grumpiest in AZ on my x-country trip in ‘88.
Swore like a sailor for the lack of “shade”trees!
Dog Days I did a post related to this early yesterday morning. When you see the visual of it, it’s frightening. It looks like a glimpse of Hell! Dog Days
July 20th, 2006 at 8:05 pmits really hot in NY
July 20th, 2006 at 8:07 pmGregor,
July 20th, 2006 at 8:08 pmSo I’m assuming you saw Jason’s wonderful comments earlier today?
Ala Bugs Bunny, “What a Ma-roon!”
L. Ron Hubbard says Global Warming is blocking you, and that you can become “clear” if only you would work it out on the clay table.
July 20th, 2006 at 8:18 pm#22,
July 20th, 2006 at 8:19 pmYou missed, “And take vitamins’!
*yawn*
can we agree that global warming is a terrible awful thing and move on a bit to the destruction of life by the bush crime family and its henchmen in afghanistan, iraq, lebanon….
these endless thrice daily posts about some conservative finger-sniffer claiming that all is well, countered by someone with a brain saying the finger-sniffer is wrong gets rather old…
they are idiots. case closed. don’t give these anti-scientific, limbaugh-panty-sniffers the time of day. to hell with them. may they rot in hell and die beneath a fast moving hummer with a bush ‘04 sticker.
if you want to ‘progress’, quit fighting the wars you have already won!!!
July 20th, 2006 at 8:20 pmSo I’m assuming you saw Jason’s wonderful comments earlier today?
Comment by trueblue — July 20, 2006 @ 8:08 pm
I even replied to them.
There was no making him understand why Crichton’s opinion carries no weight, and that paying attention to his book (whatever it’s called) is like reading Jules Verne to get a better understanding on space travel.
July 20th, 2006 at 8:24 pmHi Gregor,
I too got irritated with his “logic” and left the thread.
Unfortunately, he can vote, and procreate….
July 20th, 2006 at 8:28 pmhttp://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/
July 20th, 2006 at 8:35 pmToday he discusses the Bush Regime/ Pink Floyd synchronicity…
funny
Hot enough for you little angels of war yet?
July 20th, 2006 at 8:39 pmI guess I should invest in some ice cream company.
July 20th, 2006 at 9:12 pmI too got irritated with his “logic†and left the thread. Unfortunately, he can vote, and procreate….
Comment by trueblue
Ah, yes, my dear little trueblue, but can he do both at the same time? ;)
July 20th, 2006 at 9:18 pmThank goodness Enron is no longer controlling the energy market! Remember the rolling blackouts that trashed California’s economy the summer after Bush got “elected” Commander in Chief?
July 20th, 2006 at 9:22 pmGoodbye Greenland Ice Sheet RIP
Hello Hurricane Chris!
July 20th, 2006 at 9:33 pmHave ya noticed how hot it started gettin’, right after Joe Friday died? Things went to hell in a hurry right after Joe cashed his chips in. He didn’t put up with trolls actin’ a fool either…he always had the last word; it was always a spot-on zinger! It’s true…if I’m lyin’-I’m fryin”!
July 20th, 2006 at 9:36 pmwhy does tp even leave these global warming threads open for discussion? if there’s consensus, so be it. all i see are refutations of the skeptic blatherings being made in the posts and then certain commenters jumping in to simply muddy the waters again with quotes from michael crichton (second-rate author) and bill gray (paranoid 20th century scientist). anyone reading the comments comes away with a very muddled version of reality (and an excuse to not consider solutions), thanks to the right-wing ‘when you lie, all you need is a tie’ debating method.
seriously, if i want the gourdhead version of global warming, i can certainly just hop right over to junkscience or seixon’s site and read it. creating a forum here to allow truth-distorting skeptics to dispute the scientific consensus just helps undermine the process of moving from the debate to the solution, which is where we should already be.
the global warming threads should be closed to comments altogether, unless they relate to discussing solutions. of course, threads on all other political (and open for discussion) topics should by all means be left open.
i’m just sayin’ – if the debate’s over, then act like it’s over. you just perpetuate the false notion that there’s still a debate with these threads.
anyone?
(and don’t give me that ‘freedom of speech’ b.s., skeptics – this is not a government website. exercise your freedom of speech on powerline. oh, i forgot… you can’t.)
July 20th, 2006 at 9:40 pm#37
p rex
yes!! well said. thank you… but, i think think progress has a minimum daily requirement of three global warming ass-clown stories…
well, maybe someone will read my two posts above and yours and give it some thought before they give valuable time to another set of anti-science idiots!
July 20th, 2006 at 10:08 pmHey Joe Sixpack,
You’re probably not still out there,
But that was some funny you-know-what!!!!!!
Thanks for the laugh!
July 20th, 2006 at 10:16 pmI always like hearing from you.
Joe Six-
July 20th, 2006 at 10:19 pmThanks for the horrible visual in my head, BTW!
The examples listed are indeed worthy of note, but as a long-time environmentally aware Liberal with many Conservative family and friends, I already know what their response to those examples would be:
“That just proves that temperatures have been this high before. It’s nothing new.” and “just part of the cycle”.
You can’t make the case by citing seperate isolaed incidents. You have to show a PATTERN and a string of unique events that have never appeared before.
Gore’s citing of the fact that “ten of the past 13 years are the warmest on record” hold far more weight than reporting that temperatures are doing *again* what they once did long ago.
July 20th, 2006 at 10:22 pmSenator Imajackoff from Oklahoma says that Al Gore is doing this to get the 2008 Presidential nominatiton.
July 20th, 2006 at 10:23 pmThe corporate oil machine which placed Dubious and his Backdoor Boys in office took a gamble with global climate systems and have lost.
July 20th, 2006 at 10:25 pmDubious and Rummy and Deadeye took a gamble with their military machine and have lost.
When handed a bag of lemons, make lemonade.
I got a job fighting wildfires this summer, no lack of work, and I get to be with real people and do real honest to goodness, meaningful work. Not just in preventing loss of property, habitat, crops, etc., but I get to work with the younger generations (on my crew, I’m a real geezer at 51) and share with them a bit of background for why things are the way they are…….
I’m also a distinct minority on the crew. Everyone else is either Native American or Hispanic. Now, who can possibly be more blessed with an oportunity to learn and prosper than I?
The real world is leaving Dubya’s Denialists in the dust.
Forget ‘em and focus on what we are going to have to learn to survive the aftermath of the 6.5 years we have lost………………………
Global Warming and Flag Burning: The connection revealed
July 20th, 2006 at 11:13 pmhere.
Due to warming effects in the Earth’s atmosphere, cyclones are more likely to hit cities in the NE United States than at any time since the 1940’s. Because the Jet Stream has retreated north of the Canadian border, cooling effects from the ASrtic will not occur. Thanks, W, we are screwed. On top of that, we have entered a positive feedback loop.
July 20th, 2006 at 11:32 pmThe Xtians are ecstatic by these recent events, i.e. monster hurricanes, scorching temperatures, escalating war in the middle east, korea threatening nuclear war, W declaring Jihad against the pagan muslims, the queer revolution, stem cell cloning, and random terrorist acts. All of these just serve to cement their knowledge that the Apocalype is close at hand and they are soon to be Raptured.
July 20th, 2006 at 11:49 pmSwore like a sailor for the lack of “shadeâ€trees!
Comment by trueblue
So you probably went through Gila Bend? The true hell on earth.
July 20th, 2006 at 11:54 pmin other news,
July 20th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
bill clinton pulls a mccain….
July 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
letter to america from the president of iraq, saddam hussein:
July 21st, 2006 at 12:07 am
buchanan on the us-sanctioned murder of lebanese civilians:
July 21st, 2006 at 12:15 am
substantially reduce both the domestic and international populations using primarily the strategies of both economic and biological warfare, as well as enforced starvation and open military warfare whenever possible. The Primary motive for: so-called “Social Security Reform, Cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and Public education grants and scholarships, “the Bush Tax-Cuts,†the elimination of the Pension Funds, “Tax-Reform†and the U.S. Government’s planned Biowarfare Bird Flu Pandemic, is to reduce the population and “solve†the so-called “Demographic Problem†(Overpopulation) by bringing a significant number of people to an earlier death!
AIDS has already been documented to be Bio-warfare by the U.S. government, and other cooperating governments, directed primarily against People of Color, Gays and those with blood clotting disorders deemed to be genetic liabilities for the human species. (See 1986 AIDS Poster and 1987 AIDS newspaper and other documentation published by the United Front Against Racism and Capitalism-Imperialism.) The AIDS virus is actually the Icelandic Sheep virus, known as the Visna-Maedi Lentivirus, which has been adapted to the human T4 helper lymphocyte through standard cell culture techniques. The AIDS virus should never be referred to as “HIV†because AIDS is not a human virus! The AIDS virus is a Bioweapon designed by the United States government with assistance from the French during the 1970’s. The supposed “dispute†between Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute and Robert C. Gallo of the National Institutes of Health (the point man on the AIDS Biowarfare Operation at that time) over the supposed “discovery†of the AIDS virus was carried out in order to cover up and divert attention from the reality that the AIDS virus was not “discovered†at all but is a Bioweapon painstakingly developed by adapting the Visna-Maedi Lentivirus, to the human T4 Lymphocyte through standard cell culture techniques. As explained below the National Institutes of Health and the Pasteur Institute are essentially one organization, not competing entities! From its origin in Icelandic sheep and goats the Visna-Maedi Lentivirus was then passed through bovine species in 1972 (“Isolation of a Virus From Cattle With Persistent Lymphocytosis,†Journal of the National Cancer Institute, M.J. Van der Maaten et al, [1972], 1647-59), before finally adapting it to humans in the middle and late 1970’s (“Infection of Human Cell Cultures with Bovine Visna Virus,†Journal of General Virology, J.A. Georgiades et al, [1978], 38, 375-381). This is easily documented by comparing the genomes of the 3 viruses.
Lentiviruses are found only in ungulates (hoofed animals) and are found in no primate species normally in nature, which can easily be confirmed by books on viral taxonomy published before 1980, after which date they were all rewritten by the Bio-Warfare criminals. It is further incriminating that the so-called “bovine Visna-like virus†was first documented at the U.S. Biowarfare laboratory in Ames Iowa in the above paper by MJ Van der Maaten, who later wrote papers with the AIDS Biowarfare Chief at that time: Robert Gallo! The Visna-Maedi virus had never been reported previously in the thoroughly and exhaustively studied bovine species! It had not been discovered because it is not found in bovine species in nature. Nor is it found in nature in primates of any kind, cats or any other species including humans. The Visna-Maedi Lentivirus was also deliberately placed in various species other than sheep and goats in order to give the impression that it was “widespread.†The Biowarfare Criminals expect us to simply suspend disbelief in such phony “discoveries!†Today leadership of the AIDS Biowarfare Operation has been passed to Anthony Fauci. This number one Bio-Warfare criminal of the United States, Anthony Fauci, has even been installed as the Editor of Harrison’s Textbook of Internal Medicine (!), the multi-authored bible of Internal Medicine, in order to censor anything which might conflict with the U.S. Government’s concocted Big Lies about AIDS and as well as assorted garden variety lies of commission and omission involving diagnosis and treatment in many other areas of medicine. It should be noted, that the New York Native was begun in 1981 for the sole purpose of covering up the central fact, among its mostly Gay readership, that AIDS is Biowarfare by the U.S. Government. Act-Up was organized for the very same purpose and to vent, deflect and mislead the anger of targeted victims and their supporters into false reformist pleas to the U.S. Government Biowarfare criminals to please be nice, while getting them arrested in so-called “civil disobedience†in order to get them perpetually involved with the criminal justice system and otherwise mislead and systematically demoralize many well-meaning people. All the AIDS activist groups cover up the truth that only by organizing around the central fact that AIDS IS BIOWARFARE BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT can a movement be built which will finally bring the AIDS pandemic to an end. That movement is Socialism!
The Reason Why U.S. Led Biowarfare Criminals
Have Revised the False “Monkey Theory†of AIDS:
It should be noted that the U.S.-led Biowarfare criminals originally falsely claimed that AIDS had a “natural origin†in African Green Monkeys. On the basis of this phony claim a huge body of false literature was built up over almost 20 years with literally thousands of entirely fraudulent articles published using what was actually the genetically-engineered (genetically-adapted) Visna-Maedi Virus adapted to Green Monkeys in hundreds of “peer review journals†such as Science, Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature New Biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, the British Medical Journal, etc., etc., etc., as well as thousands of media articles in order to brainwash the masses! In 1999 the capitalists suddenly discarded their ridiculous Green Monkey Theory (Species jumping–bestiality and eat monkey meat-bushmeat theory! Good Grief!) and introduced the equally absurd Chimpanzee Theory! The reasons for this was that 1.) Green Monkeys are ubiquitous in Africa but 2.) So-called “Simian AIDS (SIV)†does not appear in Green Monkeys anywhere in nature—only in the capitalists’ biowarfare laboratories.) and 3.) African countries were in the process of building up their own modern research facilities where it was certain to be reported that Green Monkeys do not naturally carry the “simian AIDS†virus (so-called SIV). Chimpanzees on the other hand are an endangered species and their locations and their much smaller populations are all conveniently known down to the last chimp and controlled by the U.S.-led biowarfare criminals. So these Biowarfare criminals have now gone and infected a group of their Chimpanzees “in the wildâ€(!) in Camaroon with their genetically-adapted “simian AIDS†virus in order to be able to falsely claim that “fecal samples (in the half of the chimp communities which they were able to deliberately infect) proveâ€(!) that it was actually those Chimpanzees all along! (Science, “Chimpanzee Reservoirs of Pandemic and Nonpandemic HIV-1,†B.H.Hahn, et al., 25 May 2006 [DOI: 10.1126/science. 1126531] (in Science Express Reports) and the New York Times, May 26, 2006 by Biowarfare propagandist Lawrence K. Altman. One more Big Lie! Repeated over and over and over again like all Big Lies in order to make it appear to be “true.†Another huge body of concocted literature is now in the process of being accumulated to “prove†this phony new cover story for the capitalists’ AIDS Biowarfare Weapon. During the last 20 years prior to the decision to falsely accuse Chimps as the culprits the capitalists infected 26 species of African monkeys with the AIDS virus in a desperate attempt to support their false claim that lentiviruses are naturally found in monkeys.
The U.S. Biowarfare Criminals Prevent the Development
of an Effective Recombinant Vaccine for AIDS!
The U.S. government has meanwhile gone to great lengths to prevent development of an effective AIDS vaccine, permitting work to be carried out only on vaccines which use the AIDS envelope lipoprotein. The U.S. government (NIH) refuses any funding of an AIDS vaccine which utilizes the viral RNA itself under the false pretext that the vaccine might infect people. This is despite the fact that deleting the SOR gene makes it impossible for the virus to replicate and would permit use of all of the AIDS RNA to be used in the vaccine, minus the SOR gene. This would make an extremely effective recombinant vaccine but BioWarfare Criminal Anthony Fauci, & Co. do not permit that to occur. See below. In 1982 Anthony Fauci also blocked development of the Panicalli/Paoletti Recombinant Vaccine for genital herpes under the false pretext that the risk of meningitis from the vaccinia based vaccine contraindicated its use. But the vaccinia based Smallpox vaccine had been used previously to vaccinate millions of people worldwide for generations and eliminated the scourge of Smallpox with very few side effects. The U.S. Biowarfare establishment welcomes and encourages venereal disease and does its best to spread venereal disease because the threat of venereal disease conservatizes sexual practices which in turn conservatizes the population politically. In polls Republicans were found to be far more conservative in their sexual practices for example with the Democrats wanting the woman to be on top in sex a far higher percentage of the time. (The polls did not include Communists, but generally it is acknowledged that basketball players and revolutionaries make the best lovers!)
While blocking development of vaccines for AIDS and Herpes the U.S. Biowarfare establishment has encouraged vaccines for all the childhood diseases including chickenpox (also caused by a herpes virus) and recently approved a live attenuated vaccine for Herpes Zoster (Zostavax)! The vaccines for all of the childhood diseases were created because multiple and polyvalent vaccinations are known to cause vaccinosis (see below), autism and set the stage for various other types of autoimmune disease which appear up to many years later in a high percentage of victims of multiple and polyvalent vaccination–see below. This is deliberately designed to bring a larger number of people to an earlier death and provides the perfect cover, because the masses have been led to believe that all vaccinations are good and never bother to ask why the government would support developing multiple completely unnecessary vaccines for the relatively harmless childhood diseases, which they absolutely require by law that children receive (!), when the childhood diseases themselves have heretofore been a normal part of growing up and provide lifelong immunity! On the other hand most people do not ask why the government absolutely refuses to permit development of vaccines for Herpes or for global pandemics like AIDS using all sorts of ridiculously clumsy lies, and then reports—but then hides—the fact that 20 million doses of a human vaccine for Bird Flu have already been produced. (See below.) Anthony Fauci recently falsely claimed “it is impossible to develop enough vaccine in less than 6 years†when it had already been reported that 20 million doses of vaccine for human Bird Flu have already been manufactured for the ruling class and their hangers-on, and that the Chinese produce 100,000 doses of Avian Bird Flu vaccine a day and also possess a vaccine for the human strain of Bird Flu! The Chinese vaccine is the reason that there have been no cases of Bird Flu in birds or humans in 2006 in Vietnam. Thailand, which has a large chicken exporting industry with high security, has had no human cases in five months and none in birds in six months! See further below.
SARS is also a Bio-warfare agent, but the capitalists stopped with SARS because the Peoples’ Republic of China, one of the capitalists’ main targets, demonstrated that it could be completely neutralized through quarantine in 2003 in those areas in which it had been reported. The capitalists now cover this up and falsely claim that “SARS spread throughout the China in 2003,†which was never even remotely the case. The objective is to paint the Chinese as liars, irresponsible and incompetent, the ideal place to release their newly created U.S. H5N1 Reasssortment Virus Bioweapon, which they have designed at the so-called Centers for Disease Control, (See Below) and then to blame the victim. But because of certain recent actions and policies by the People’s Republic of China the capitalist’ original plan to release their genetically engineered reassortment H5N1 Bird Flu Bioweapon in China as a claimed “natural mutation†has been thwarted and undermined so that release in China would not be credible. This forced the capitalists to resort to spreading the H5N1 Bird Flu among wild birds and domestic poultry worldwide in patterns, which are impossible to explain by normal wild bird migratory patterns or normal means of transmission, in order to beat the drum and try to build a false momentum of “Inevitability†of a human Bird Flu Pandemic. This effort fell flat despite every effort to foment hysteria by the capitalist media. Focus on human-to-human cases among family members in Indonesia has also been used to make the fraudulent claim that the H5N1 is “mutating.†(See below.)
The Capitalists Strategy and Tactics in Developing
a Maximally Virulent Bird Flu Virus:
The H5N1 Bird Flu is actually very easy to catch from infected birds—it is not “difficult to catch†as the Biowarfare Criminals falsely claim! The reason that the Bio-Warfare Criminals at the CDC have developed a maximally lethal H5N1 reassortment virus (see Wall Street Journal article below) is because studies of serum collected in 1992 in China have documented that 7% of the 500 million rural Chinese population—which translates into 35 million people in rural China—have already caught the H5N1 Bird Flu and have the antibodies to the H5N1 strain of bird flu to prove it. This means that they have had sub-clinical infections and have recovered without incident. This was reported in the New York Times, November 5, 2005, by Peter Palese, Chief of the Department of Microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Palese’s report is based on the key 1992 paper by Bird Flu authority, K.F. Shortridge: “Pandemic influenza: a zoonosis?†Seminars in Respiratory Infections, 7 (1),11-25. This means that the H5N1 Avian Flu Virus regularly and easily infects humans in addition to birds but does not cause disease in humans normally except in a tiny number of cases where the death rate is very high due to genetic susceptibility aka familial predisposition! In other words contrary to the Big Lie of the capitalist Bio-Warfare Criminals the H5N1 Avian Flu Virus is extremely unlikely to evolve on its own into a lethally efficient human-to-human virus! The irony here is that Shortridge now covers up the significance of his own previous work and today falsely warns of the supposed “imminent danger†of H5N1 mutating to a human-to-human strain, which is not supported by the scientific facts! This indicates that either he has joined the ranks of the Biowarfare criminals since that 1992 paper, or he may have been part of the biological warfare network for most of his professional existence and has simply chosen to cover up the key findings which totally refute the Big Lies of the U.S. government’s Bio-Warfare propagandists.
Recent News Reports of Zero New Bird Flu Cases in
Most Countries Have Forced the Capitalists to Postpone the
Date For Unleashing Their Planned Global Pandemic while they
Attempt to Reposition Public Opinion to Accept it’s “Inevitabilityâ€
Big Lie Campaign by the so-called World Health Organization
Falsely Claiming “An Increase!â€
The most recent reports of decreased Bird Flu reports have stymied and thrown a damper on the U.S. Biowarfare Department’s plans to unleash their virulent human-to-human strain of H5N1 Bird Flu for the moment. It was reported that “there has been not a single case of Bird Flu in wild birds detected in all of Africa in all of last winter†and that “In Europe there have only been a few cases detected in wild birds since April 1st, the height of the migration north.†New York Times, May 11, 2006, and that “there have been no cases of Bird Flu in poultry or humans in 2006 in Vietnam and in Thailand there have been no cases in poultry in 6 months and for 5 months in humans,†(New York Times, May 14, 2006.) It appears that an increasing number of countries may be fully aware of the clumsy plans of the United States Biowarfare criminals and simply do not want to go through with this little Bird Flu number to please the Bio-Warmongering United States. In order to raise awareness this Analysis and Theses has been distributed to the consulates of various Member States of the United Nations and earlier editions have been blogged all over the Internet. This edition exposes the capitalist’s objectives even more glaringly and completely undermines all of their medical sophistry and ridiculous pseudoscience. But the capitalists have put too much money and effort into their planned Bird Flu Pandemic to simply end it. The U.S. Government’s straining at the bit to unleash their Bird Flu Pandemic is also an expression of the dynamic of capitalism, now in its final stage of Permanent War, a stage which cannot be reversed. Capitalism cannot be “reformed.†The only solution is a Socialist Revolution in the United States. (See further below.)
Despite the near zero reports of Bird Flu in virtually all countries, with the lone exception of Indonesia where they have been able to successfully spread Bird Flu throughout the entire country (see below), the capitalists have simply mounted a Big Lie campaign to counteract the overall reality—Bird Flu ain’t go’in nowhere on its own and never has! In order to try to give some sort of “consensus†to the capitalists’ false propaganda campaign a conference was held in Rome on June 1, 2006 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health where those in charge simply overrode strong opposition in order to come up with pre-determined “conclusions†such as: “Migrating wild birds have played and will likely continue to play a role in transporting highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus, or bird flu, over long distances!†The first part may be true to a very limited extent, but just how did those birds get infected in the first place? From chickens in China?? No way! In light of the most recent reports of ZERO cases whatsoever detected in wild birds in Africa in all of last winter, as widely reported in May 2006, there was absolutely no evidence whatever to conclude that the second part is true either, namely that “Migrating wild birds…will likely continue to play a role in transporting highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus, or bird flu, over long distances.†The fact is that the only possible way that wild birds in Africa and Europe could be getting Bird Flu is by being directly inoculated with the virus by U.S.-led Biowarfare criminals who are trying to erect a phony backdrop prior to releasing their virulent human-to-human reassortment strain of H5N1 Bird Flu, which they openly brag they have developed at the CDC in the March 23, 2005 Wall Street Journal. See below. For example, the cases of Bird Flu in wild birds in France this past winter were found in areas over which there were no wild bird migratory flyway patterns for that species of duck!! (French TV News Channel 25) The capitalists intend to spread Bird Flu in a series of waves over several years and to always have it at the ready. That is the reason for such conferences and such fraudulent unsupported “conclusions.â€
Also, the finding at the Rome conference “that the Bird Flu virus was mainly spread through the poultry trade, both legal and illegal (smuggling!)†is totally farfetched, absurd and not credible even in the slightest, but it was nevertheless rammed down the throat of the June 1st conference attendees by the Biowarfare criminals who set the agenda for such “conferences.†Ignoring the most recent reports of no reports of Bird Flu in wild birds in Africa, the leaders of the conference nevertheless tried to implicate “wild birds in the spread of Bird Flu to more than 50 countries on three continentsâ€(!) but could not get a majority of the attendees to vote that “wild birds should now be considered a permanent reservoir of the virus.†The conference report falsely insisted: “If they are such a reservoir, there is a strong likelihood they will carry the virus with them in subsequent migrations,†but was forced by the conference attendees to include the statement: “Alternately H5N1 may subside naturally as infected animals die off, or it may mutate to a less aggressive form.†The conference concluded with a ridiculous blanket denial of the decreased reports of Bird Flu by Christianne Bruschke, the head of the so-called World Organization for animal Health (!), which focuses primarily on mass culling and quarantines of poultry to fight Bird Flu (!) and virtually never mentions the successful strategy of vaccinating chickens like the Vietnamese recently did using the Chinese vaccine, which the Chinese offer at greatly reduced prices!!! Instead Bruschke insulted developing countries and falsely accused them of underreporting Bird Flu cases “because those countries lack the resources.†This resolution was also a gimmick to try to get the infrastructure of the 2 above-mentioned Biowarfare front groups into more countries in Africa and Asia, under the false pretext of supposedly helping those countries “which are in the throes of serious bird flu outbreaks and are underreporting the extent of the problem,†(New York Times, June 1, 2006.)
In France in the Ain region this past winter Biowarfare agents entered a somewhat isolated and completely enclosed Turkey farm in a large barn and inoculated hundreds of turkeys with Bird Flu forcing the killing of all 11,000 turkeys in the barn which worked wonderfully to foment hysteria in France and Europe. In Germany one cat—one cat—died of Bird Flu on February 28th as reported by the BBC and elsewhere and the Germans bizarrely started shooting cats wherever they saw them, the hysteria was so great. But the poultry industry may also have gotten wise to what is going on and may have increased security. In any case the French declared the threat to be over and allowed their famous Bresse chickens, which live outside normally, back outdoors. The above fake science “conference†even created a new false name for Bird Flu: HPAI—“Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza!†But natural occurring H5N1 is not highly pathogenic except for that tiny minority of individuals who exhibit the genetic/familial susceptibility to develop virulent symptoms.
The capitalists’ Biowarfare front group known as the so-called World Health Organization (WHO) simply ignores the reports of zero new cases from around the world: “Fatalities from the virus have almost tripled this year compared with last year.†(New York Times, July 2, 2006) (!) While the capitalists mount a Campaign of Big Lies upon Big Lies to try to deny the decrease in Bird Flu, they also tip their hand in a June 30, 2006 “Epidemiology WHO report when they may intend to unleash their Biowarfare Bird Flu Pandemic: “Deaths from the disease surged in the winter for the last three years, so a rise in fatal cases can be expected late this year even if the virus does not mutate into a form more easily transmitted.†They never fail to repeat the fraudulent claim: “The risk of the virus becoming more transmissible remains high (!) because of the ‘widespread distribution of the H5N1 virus in poultry and the continued exposure of humans.’†The reports of zero new report of Bird Flu in poultry, wild birds and humans are completely disregarded. Furthermore the WHO now falsely concludes that because there has been a higher death rate among young adults the H5N1 Bird Flu virus “something in young adults must make them more susceptible—maybe “a cytokine storm because they have strong immune systems.â€(!) The fact that several of the countries which have the most deaths have totally skewed populations consisting mostly of young people is deliberately omitted, as are the above-mentioned Shortridge findings, which they try to counter by stating that “blood samples around recent outbreaks (!) show that few people carry antibodies to the virus†(!) It does make sense that Bird Flu outbreaks would occur in areas where few people have antibodies against Bird Flu! But they deliberately omit that 7% of the rural Chinese do possess antibodies against Bird Flu!! This contrived fraudulent report combines Big Lies of commission with Big Lies of omission, but it shows more than anything that the capitalists are very impatient to unleash their Human Biowarfare Bird Flu Pandemic. The New York Times concludes with a Big Lie of Biowarfare Criminal Michael Osterholm: “The more we see what H5N1 is doing, the less we know about what’s really happening with it.†This False claim of ignorance is made in order to provide the permanent option of unleashing their Planned Biowarfare Bird Flu Pandemic anywhere anytime! See below.
Cover-Up of the 1992 Shortridge Paper Goes Into High Gear!
In a desperate attempt to confuse the issue and cover up the crucial and determinative work by Shortridge in his 1992 paper (See above) the U.S.-led Biological Warfare criminals have proffered a preposterously false alternative explanation. The Biowarfare establishment has published 2 coordinated papers released simultaneously in an attempt to add false authority to their fraudulent claims that it is all merely a question of anatomy and cell types of where the receptors for the H5N1 virus are found! See Nature, Vol. 440 23 March 2006, Kawaoka et al. and Science, 23, March 2006, Kuiken et al. The authors absurdly claim that the only “rational explanation for why H5N1 viruses at present (our emphasis) rarely infect (THE FIRST BIG LIE) and spread between humans although they can replicate efficiently in the lungs (THE SECOND BIG LIE)†is that the receptors for the H5N1 Bird Flu virus (SAa2,3Gal) are found primarily but not exclusively (a key point!) in the lower lung which supposedly limits its spread among humans by coughs and sneezes in those who develop symptoms. There is no evidence whatsoever that the H5N1 Bird Flu “replicate(s) efficiently†in the lungs of normal people who actually contract Bird Flu (7% of the 500 million rural Chinese population) most of whom are not even aware that they had it! Specifically the H5N1 (SAa2,3Gal) receptors were found “on non-ciliated cuboidal cells at the junction between the respiratory bronchiole and alveolus†and on “a substantial number of cells lining the alveolar wall.†(This describes the substance of the lung tissue involved in gaseous exchange.) Receptors for conventional human influenza (SAa2,6Gal) on the other hand were found to be “dominant†on epithelial cells in the nasal mucosa, paranasal sinuses, the pharynx, the trachea and bronchi as well as the terminal and respiratory bronchioles, “with SAa2,3Gal (H5N1 Bird Flu receptors) being occasionally detected.†We are sorry, but receptor location and anatomy is pseudo-scientific sophistry and is not sufficient to explain why virulent symptoms develop in only a tiny percentage of those actually infected with Bird Flu and is not at all a credible explanation. These papers are just a few example of deliberate phony “science†pervasive on many topics.
First of all, the above papers acknowledge that receptors for the H5N1 Bird Flu virus are also found at those sites preferred by conventional human influenza, which accounts for the fact 7% of rural Chinese do demonstrate antibodies to the Bird Flu. Virulence in Bird Flu symptoms is therefore not due to anatomy, because this receptor anatomy is found in all individuals. The tiny percentage of those individuals infected with Bird Flu who develop virulent symptoms from the Bird Flu virus do develop infection in the lower respiratory tract and severe pneumonia which is fatal in slightly more than 50% of cases, but they develop those virulent symptoms because they have a genetic/familial susceptibility which makes them vulnerable to developing virulent infection in the lower respiratory tract! This is why so many reports of fatalities from Bird Flu are confined to families and closely related people such as the so-called “worrisome family cluster of human cases in northern Indonesia.†New York Times, May 25, 2006. The receptor anatomy described in the above 2 papers does however support human-to-human transmission between family members or relatives or the tiny minority of others who have the genetic/familial predisposition to develop virulent symptoms from the H5N1 Bird Flu virus! This is the most likely explanation for the reports of spread of Bird Flu among some family members in Indonesia and form part of the explanation for some of the previous reports of “clusters†of Bird Flu in families and in relatives from various countries, although the overwhelming majority of all the previous reports involved direct contact with birds.
Fanning the flames of hysteria the capitalist media deliberately attributed the human-to-human spread among family members in Indonesia to “slight mutations.†But as clearly explained here human-to-human spread is not due whatsoever to “slight mutations†of the H5N1 Bird Flu virus. This limited form of human-to-human transmission among closely related family members has always been possible with the H5N1 virus, but only among that tiny percentage of the population which possess the genetic/familial susceptibility to develop virulent Bird Flu symptoms in the first place! The capitalists want people to believe that the H5N1 virus, which has been around for decades, is now suddenly deciding to mutate in the direction of human-to-human transmission for the general population! This is the Big Lie. But Keiji Fukuda, coordinator of WHO’s global flu program, deliberately disinformed the Indonesian Health Minister Siti Sufari Fadillah as well as the Chinese People’s Daily on June 21, 2006 that all cases of Bird Flu in humans in Indonesia’s North Sumatra Province were “from animal (Birds) to human,†(!) when they knew very well that the circumstances of the recent Bird Flu cases among family members involved contact at a banquet with market worker coughing heavily from Bird Flu, who in turn spread it that group of closely related family members all of whom had the genetic/familial susceptibility to develop virulent Bird Flu symptoms.
From the other side of its mouth to the rest of the world, the WHO announced that they had “proof of the first confirmed case of human-to-human transmission.†The U.S.-led Biowarfare criminals who control the WHO obviously want to create a false picture of a Bird Flu virus “gradually and inevitably mutating†to virulent human-to-human transmission, which then ultimately results in a World Pandemic. The H5N1 virus has had several decades to do this and it never has and it never will naturally. See below. Nevertheless, the U.S.-led Biowarfare criminals have been very successful in Indonesia. As mentioned they have been able to contaminate batches of Bird Flu vaccine sent from China (see below) and have deliberately and systematically infected poultry in most of the 33 provinces in Indonesia indicating that they may have chosen Indonesia as the jump-off spot for their planned Worldwide Bird Flu Pandemic. This is further reinforced by the fact that there have been virtually zero new cases of outbreaks in poultry and in humans in all other countries, a fact which the capitalists downplay, while the number for both human cases and outbreaks in poultry has increased in Indonesia 2006! It should be noted that Keiji Fukuda of WHO is a close associate of Nancy Cox of the misnamed CDC who has developed a maximally virulent H5N1 Reassortment Bioweapon described in consummate detail in the March 23, 2005 Wall Street Journal. See below.
Developing virulent symptoms is not the case in the overwhelming majority of the population who are readily infected with H5N1 Bird Flu, because the majority of the world’s population does not possess the genetic/familial predisposition to develop virulent symptoms! The authors of the second paper admit that “other variables…influence the binding avidity (preference), such as type of SA (sialic acid of the receptor site) and glycosylation and sialylation of the hemagglutinin close to the receptor binding site.†These factors all vary obviously and there are other variables in the equation as well including the status of specific areas of the immune system. In another effort to counteract recent reports of a decreased incidence of Bird Flu and to create confusion and lies about Bird Flu, the New York Times, June 4, 2006 reported “Human (Bird) Flu Transfers May Exceed Reports†which merely cites what they falsely claim to be an “increased incidence†of human-to-human transmission among family members. Their main source of information is a biochemist (!) in Pittsburgh, Henry Niman, who they pump up as some sort of “Internet hero,†who is used by the Biowarfare criminals to foment hysteria over Bird Flu by reporting human-to-human transmission among family members while covering up the Shortridge findings reported above and the obvious reason why virulent Bird Flu symptoms are often found in more than one family member—genetic/familial predisposition.
There is no proof whatsoever that normal individuals who do not possess the specific genetic/familial susceptibility to develop virulent Bird Flu Symptoms would develop virulent symptoms even if those cells deep in the alveoli—the lung substance itself—were inoculated with the present H5N1 viruses found in nature. The proof for this is that among the 35 million Chinese who demonstrated few or no symptoms to their infection with Bird Flu there were undoubtedly more than a few individuals where the H5N1 virus may have penetrated to the alveolar gaseous exchange area of the lung, but this 7% of the rural Chinese population did not possess the genetic/familial susceptibility to develop virulent symptoms! However this is NOT the case with the new recombinant lethal human-to-human H5N1 strain(s) which the Centers For Disease Control openly brags that they have developed in the March 23, 2005 Wall Street Journal!! See below! The authors of the first paper described above may very well be the political descendants of Unit 731, the Japanese Biowarfare unit guilty of myriad gruesome war crimes, which was captured by the United States in WWII and immediately integrated into the U.S. Biowarfare program! See “Unit 731†by Williams and Wallace, 1989, The Free Press division of MacMillan, Inc.
The capitalists previously have pretended to be confused about the pattern of Bird Flu infection in Turkey! See New York Times, January 11, 2006, page A10: “A Scientific Puzzle (!?): Some Turks Have Bird Flu Virus but Aren’t Sick,†which mentions that 3 children in one family have died while others are infected but have no symptoms. So disingenuous! Such a Big Lie! Three children in one family should underscore the reality that their virulent symptoms were due to their genetic/familial susceptibility just like it is in Vietnam, Indonesia and China!! This is no big puzzle. The family members who do not express the virulent symptoms do not have the genetic/familial susceptibility because not all family members have the same genetic make-up. Incidentally, Vietnam, which vaccinated all its poultry with the Chinese vaccine, reported that there have been no outbreaks in either poultry or humans in 2006! (See further below.) The reason that some smaller countries have had more cases than China is obviously that the genetic susceptibility of population subgroups varies even to identical strains of influenza virus. The Chinese susceptibility is simply not the same as the Vietnamese or the Indonesians or the Turkish! (In this case the H5N1 strain has been the same in all these countries although recently there has been another H5N1 strain reported in Indonesia.) Nevertheless, the Biowarfare criminals who masquerade as “experts†pretend to be “confused†but continue to spread the Big Lie which is repeated in every news story: “While H5N1 Bird Flu does not readily infect humans or spread from person to person, scientists are worried (!) that it could acquire that ability setting off a worldwide human pandemic.†New York Times, “Recent Spread of Bird Flu Confounds Experts,†March 6, 2006. Right! This article exposes the unfolding newly revised strategy of the U.S.-led Biowarfare criminals to unleash a Biowarfare Bird Flu Pandemic targeting the entire human population on Earth. See below.
The Biowarfare criminals make the false claim that the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus will supposedly evolve to human-to-human transmission by infecting humans at the same time that they are supposedly simultaneously infected with another conventional flu virus. The Big Lie that humans can supposedly be infected with 2 Flu viruses simultaneously is even repeated in government-controlled “peer review journals†and over and over again in the media. For example, professional liar Elizabeth Rosenthal falsely insists in the February 9, 2006 New York Times: “Genetic rearrangement is most likely to occur in a human body when a person is simultaneously infected with the bird flu virus and a human flu virus that can swap genes…The likelihood that such reshuffling will occur increases with each uncontrolled bird outbreak and each farmer who becomes infected.†This is all a Big Lie! These statements are entirely baseless. See below. The first part of the Big Lie is to repeat it over and over again until it is accepted as truth or accepted as partly true, when it is often entirely false as are the above claims. The second part of a Big Lie is that most people only tell little lies and are entirely unprepared for a Big Lie. The facts remain that humans cannot be simultaneously infected with 2 flu viruses (see below) and therefore no such “reshuffling†can occur in humans nor in birds. These claims form the central Big Lie in the U.S. Government’s Planned Biowarfare Bird Flu Pandemic and are scientifically baseless and total rubbish and do not and can not occur naturally under any circumstances! (This does not mean that influenza viruses do not evolve, which they may in pigs! But pigs do not fly! Unless we read that this has indeed finally occurred in the New York Times or “peer-reviewed journalsâ€! The scientific and medical truth is so very inconvenient when capitalism needs a world pandemic to reduce the population of the planet by up to 50%!)
Humans and Animals Cannot Be Infected With 2 Different
Cold Viruses or 2 Different Influenza Viruses Simultaneously!
Every physician and microbiologist knows that a person or an animal cannot be infected with 2 different cold viruses or 2 different influenza viruses simultaneously! The reason that capitalists’ present explanation is deliberately false, concocted and completely impossible is that the first virus causes the body’s cells to produce interferon which prevents infection by a second virus! Proof of this beyond a shadow of a doubt is the indisputable fact that millions of people in China have antibodies to the H5N1 Avian Flu Virus which has been around China for a long time even before it appeared again in Hong Kong in 1997! (See Palese’s report of Shortridge, KF, et al above.) It is inconceivable that during that time that the H5N1 Avian Flu Virus would not have infected hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals who were already infected with a conventional influenza virus, or vice versa, if either were possible—which they are not! The “result†of such a high number of such putative simultaneous infections would surely have led to evolution of at least one highly virulent reassortment strain of the H5N1 Avian Flu Virus which would have then gone on to kill hundreds of millions of people in China and billions of people worldwide, which is the capitalists’ actual goal! Nothing of the kind has happened! Nor will it naturally! What has happened is that the so-called World Health Organization, rather than encouraging countries to vaccinate their bird populations as China is now doing for all of its 14.2 billion poultry, has instead pressured countries in the Far East and elsewhere, especially in developing countries in Africa, instead to mass murder (“cullâ€) hundreds of millions of birds, not only 1.) in order to help foment world hysteria and to help condition the masses to expect a human World Bird Flu Pandemic as supposedly naturally inevitable, but 2.) to reduce the human population in developing countries by depriving them of one of their main sources of high quality protein! See below.
The poultry industry in developed countries, in France and other European countries as well as many farmers in developing countries smell a rat and oppose the culling! The H5N1 Avian Flu Virus represents virtually no danger to the overwhelming majority of people and does not even kill most birds it infects! And different kinds of birds vary enormously in their susceptibility to Bird Fly. The so-called “millions of dead birds from Bird Flu†is another Big Lie because the overwhelming majority of bird deaths have been due to culling! There is a far higher probability that a person will be struck by lightning than die of Bird Flu. But the mass murder of the birds (culling) has also been used to give the false impression that a significant number of people will develop virulent symptoms if infected by the Bird Flu virus! The fact that the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus is killed by cooking and the significance of this fact is rarely mentioned and is neutralized by the capitalists’ central Big Lie that there is supposedly an increasing risk that a virulent human-to-human strain of Bird Flu will evolve, as the Bird Flu virus strangely “spreads†among birds into Europe and Africa consistent with no identifiable pattern of bird migration! This was even commented upon on French TV news earlier in 2006. The recent spread of Bird Flu will be further analyzed below. Meanwhile the capitalists have already cooked up a maximally lethal H5N1 Avian Flu Reassortment Virus in their laboratories at the CDC precisely as they themselves describe in their March 23, 2005 Wall Street Journal article (see below), in order to create a World Pandemic, thereby reducing the world’s population through Covert Mass Murder! And the capitalists ALSO have their highly virulent Reconstructed 1918 Spanish Flu virus ready to go right now! (See below!)
The Capitalist Openly Admit to Genetically Engineering
the Most Virulent H5N1 Avian Flu Virus Possible!
The capitalist Bio-Warfare criminals at the Orwellian Newspeak-named Center For Disease Control (?!) in Atlanta openly admit in an extremely detailed report in the Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2005, Page B1, entitled “CDC Aims to Create Experimental Pandemic Bird-Flu Virus,†that they are using a form of genetic engineering to create an Avian Flu virus which will spread from human to human as easily as from bird to bird! Using the H5N1 Avian Flu virus as their prototype the U.S. government reports that they have begun to design what is known as a reassortant virus by systematically:
“swapping genes of an H5N1 avian virus with the genes of an H3N2 virus, the strain behind the most recent flu outbreaks…Over the next six months, CDC scientists plan to substitute the eight genes of each virus one by one with the eight genes from the other virus in order to see which of more than 250 possible combinations create viable viruses. They will then incubate the viruses in canine tissue cells to see how well they grow. Eventually, the viruses which thrive in tissue culture will be tested in animals. Similar experiments are planned for later this year at Erasmus University, another major influenza-research center in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.â€
The Bio-Warfare Criminal directly in charge of what is actually a biowarfare bioengineering operation at the CDC, Nancy Cox, says she is searching “to find some gene combinations (which) work well together†and “We’re really hoping that by switching genes out one by one we’ll see which genes or gene combinations confer lethality.â€(!) These are her exact words! (We can’t wait!) Cox is carrying out the very same kind of research that her colleagues, Tumpey et al., are carrying out on their Reconstructed 1918 Pandemic Virus. Cox who fully understands that her objective is to create the virus which will be used in the Global Pandemic, falsely justifies this open quest to design the most lethal H5N1 Avian Flu strain possible in the shortest amount of time with the disingenuous clumsy lie: “This will help us assess the pandemic risk.â€(!) Oh, yes, yes! “Assess the pandemic risk!†Right! This is an example of a Big Lie which is carefully calculated to result in the mass murder of hundreds of millions of people.
China’s announcement in the New York Times, November 16, 2005, that it would begin vaccinating all 5.2 billion (now reported to be 14.2 billion), chicken, ducks, geese and turkeys against the H5N1 Bird Flu seriously complicated the United States initial plans to release their recently constructed human-to-human H5N1, a maximally virulent genetically engineered “Reassortment virus,†in China (See below!), where the U.S. has been frustrated in its previous attempt with its SARS Bioweapon to reduce China’s population! If Chinese poultry is all vaccinated there will be no credibility whatsoever to any U.S. claim the H5N1 Bird Flu has “jumped species in China†if then a human-to-human strain suddenly “breaks out†of nowhere! There would be no sick birds for the human-to-human strain to have “jumped species†from. Many people will smell a rat! Not a bird! Not only that—if China demonstrates that it can vaccinate 14.2 billion birds it is obvious that they can easily vaccinate all of their 1.4 billion citizens with the vaccine they are now developing for a human-to-human strain! And it would also be in China’s interest to offer both their bird and human vaccines and their manufacturing technology to neighboring countries or any other country which requested it once their own population has been vaccinated, or even simultaneously while vaccinating their own birds and citizens. And China has done that exactly supplying Vietnam and Indonesia in August 2005 with their Bird Flu vaccines even before beginning their own program because those countries had human cases of Bird Flu and at that time China had none! But the United States Biowarfare criminals have deliberately contaminated a percentage of those vaccines in China and those which went to Indonesia with live virus! The capitalist media uniformly attribute the contamination to Chinese incompetence. The Washington Post, November 22, 2005, covered it up by saying it was due simply to “improper manufacturing of vaccines.†Don’t expect the U.S. Government to avail itself of any offers of assistance from China because it wants to reduce its own population here as well, while they sabotage and work diligently to discredit the vaccines there. (See below)
According to the above November 16, New York Times report, in 2004 there were 50 outbreaks of H5N1 Bird Flu in birds in 16 Chinese provinces, with 11 more outbreaks peaking this autumn, concentrated in and around Liaoning Province. The unusual cluster of cases in birds in Liaoning Province the Chinese have attributed to “fake flu vaccine which (was contaminated) with active virus.†It sounds very much like the batches of bird flu vaccine used at that location and were indeed deliberately contaminated by our old friends from Fort Detrick and Co. According to the Times report Chinese flu vaccine is normally nearly 100% effective in birds, so deliberate sabotage sounds most likely. Bloomberg News, December 2, 2005 reported that China arrested 10 people, including executives from the Inner Mongolia Junju Group Co.’s pharmaceutical unit in connection with distributing the contaminated vaccines in Liaoning Province. China would not reveal the undoubted connections of those “executives†to the United States pharmaceutical industry, which historically has been closely tied to and synonymous with, the U.S. Biowarfare establishment because it would have an unacceptably adverse effect on China’s economy and formal relationship with the United States. The United States has the only motive to sabotage and discredit the Chinese vaccine! Why? In order to be able to be able to falsely claim that the human-to-human strain of the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus Bioweapon which the capitalists have now created at the Center for Disease Control (see above) and which they originally intended to release in China, has suddenly “jumped from birds to humans!†When China’s birds are all vaccinated against bird flu this pretext disappears entirely!
In a further demonstration of how determined the U.S. Biowarfare criminals are to try to discredit the People’s Republic of China by falsely accusing it of “covering up the number of Bird Flu cases in China†and in order to set the stage to possibly reactivate their original plan to unleash their planned Bird Flu Pandemic in China (see below) the capitalist media have ruthlessly attacked a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 354:25, pp.2731-2, June 22, 2006 signed by 8 Chinese researchers, which reported that a patient who died in China in 2003 whose clinical manifestations were consistent with SARS, had actually died of H5N1 Bird Flu. (Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2006.) In order to try to discredit that report which demonstrates that China is bending over backwards to report all cases of Bird Flu, the U.S. intelligence community sent several false emails to the New England Journal which supposedly originated from the key author of the report, Dr. Cao Wuchun, with a false request not to publish the report!! Cao completely denied sending any such emails, and at the request of the New England Journal faxed a signed statement verifying that he and his colleagues stood by what they had reported! In order to inject confusion and try to make it appear that the Chinese were covering up The New England Journal immediately announced that they had no earlier examples of his signature for comparison! Who do you believe? (New York Times, June 24, 2006.)
The fraudulent emails were obviously sent in order to create the false impression that the Chinese were lying and covering up rather than making all such material available! As of June 24, 2006 there have been only 19 cases of Bird Flu in humans in China. The United States does not want to accept the facts because those facts have interfered with (but may not prevent) the U.S. plans to unleash the H5N1 Bird Flu Pandemic in China. The U.S. also wants to discredit the Chinese Bird Flu Vaccine for poultry, which the U.S. does not want to reach other countries in Asia other than Vietnam, for example where it has terminated all cases of Bird Flu, or Africa which are primary targets for extermination with the U.S. Government’s Planned Bird Flu Pandemic, or even populations in the United States. They also do not want it to become widely known that China already has a Bird Flu Vaccine for humans or for poultry. The capitalists want to be able to try-try again to start up a Bird Flu pandemic in birds and poultry, which isn’t happening (except in Indonesia), in order to set the stage for later release of their maximally virulent ready-to-be-released virulent human-to-human reassortment strain of the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus. The U.S. government has already told its masses to expect no help whatsoever from the government in the way of vaccines or even hospitalization in the event of a pandemic. This while the government works overtime to close hospitals using economic warfare against the American people under every possible pretext!
The indisputable fact is that genetic subtypes do vary from population to population and from country to country. This is certainly also the case for the genetic susceptibility to develop virulent symptoms from the H5N1 virus! The findings by Shortridge that 7% of the 35 million rural Chinese already have antibodies to Bird Flu shows that it is the U.S. who is lying, NOT China. (See above.) Most of the outbreaks in Asia of H5N1 Bird Flu in humans who have developed virulent symptoms have been in Vietnam, 92 out of 128 cases reported last year with 42 fatalities. Vietnam, which vaccinated all its poultry with the Chinese vaccine, recently reported that there have been no outbreaks in either poultry or humans in 2006! Thailand, which has a highly developed government protected poultry industry has not had a human case in nearly a year or one in poultry in six months!(New York Times, May 14, 2006.) But Indonesia received shipments of the Chinese vaccine certain lots of which had been contaminated by the U.S.-directed Biowarfare criminals! It was also reported that “In thousands of samples collected in Africa this winter, the bird flu virus, A(H5n1), was not detected in a single wild bird…†according to specialists from Wetlands International who were deputized by the Food and Agriculture Organization. New York Times, May 11, 2006.
Without any reported human cases of Bird Flu it would have required an act of faith to believe that a human-to-human strain could suddenly emerge in China. It should also be remembered that U.S. “Special Services†have penetrated the so-called World Health Organization (WHO) for decades and would be able to accomplish contamination of a batch of vaccine with no problem! After all, the Agency For International Development (AID), a front group for the CIA along with the WHO and NGOs were evidently instrumental in spreading the AIDS epidemic in Africa through “preventive (sic) skin testing (the PPD TB Skin test) and vaccination†of an unsuspecting and totally vulnerable population virtually begging to be vaccinated. In Africa it is understood that if you have not received an injection then you have not been to a doctor! (See Editorial, New York Times, Nov. 26, 2005.) The U.S. “intelligence community†apparently also spread AIDS in the Chinese countryside, which was later blamed on the practice of poor farmers selling their blood to make ends meet, a practice which certainly exists and which has become well known. But the AIDS virus didn’t just come from nowhere! It was brought in by the so-called U.S. “intelligence community,†which closely monitors domestic living conditions and everything else in China, and realized what was an ideal means to spread their AIDS Bioweapon in rural China, even if it required trekking into the Chinese countryside to do it! Or alternatively infecting a farmer(s) who were returning to the countryside!
The United States Reaction to the Chinese Announcement
That They Intend to Vaccinate All of their Poultry Merely
Digs Them in Deeper, Exposing Their Biowarfare Objectives:
The capitalists reacted predictably and pathetically to the Chinese Government’s announcement that they intended to vaccinate all of their poultry against Bird Flu. First, in the December 2, 2005 New York Times article falsely entitled: “Experts Doubt Bird Flu Tallies From China And Elsewhere,†the capitalists, without calling the Chinese government liars outright, continue to make the false accusation that the Peoples’ Republic of China, as well as Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia are all supposedly reporting a falsely low number of human cases of bird flu. On the basis of no scientific evidence or documentation whatsoever these Biowarfare propagandists falsely claim that the actual number of human cases of bird flu in all of these countries is much, much larger than that which has been reported! The Reason that the U.S. pushes this Big Lie of a supposedly large number of human cases of bird flu is that they are trying to enhance the credibility that their H5N1 Reassortment Virus, which they have created (See above) and which they initially intended to release in China or elsewhere in the Far East, has a natural origin of mutating from birds. This is also the Reason why the WHO Biowarfare criminals complain in the very same article that the Chinese government does not provide them with “samples of viruses from each bird flu outbreak.†The U.S.-led Biowarfare criminals which control the leadership of the WHO wanted to be able to release a maximally virulent human-to-human reassortment strain of H5N1, which is genetically close to the strain(s) which cause the outbreaks in birds in China! If the U.S. releases their World Pandemic H5N1 Bird Flu human-to-human Bioweapon in China and that Pandemic Virus is NOT related to any of the Chinese strains, then that would help confirm that the Pandemic virus was brought into China from outside by the U.S. Biowarfare Criminals under the cover of the World Health Organization by. The Chinese know this and therefore have not cooperated with the WHO in this matter. To hand over all infectious agents to the United States would be setting themselves up. The Chinese definitely smell a rat! Maybe more than one! Based on impossible-to-explain outbreaks in Africa and Europe in early 2006, which fit no known bird migratory patterns, the capitalists indicated that they had changed plans and had decided to release their human-to-human strain elsewhere very likely in Africa or even in Europe. But the most recent reports of zero new cases of Bird Flu in Africa and Europe have completely stymied even those plans! (See above.)
The reason that the World Health Organization (WHO) chose not to directly insult the Chinese by saying that they do not believe that the Chinese government is deliberately “hiding (human) bird flu cases†and lying about it, which they most likely are not doing in any case, but says rather that “(Chinese) systems to diagnose a virus-like symptoms are often poorly developed and under financed in the rural areas with the most cases,†is that the World Health Organization does not want to alienate the Chinese, or other governments, because the U.S. wants access to those rural areas!! The WHO spokesman, Dick Thompson, is clearly on the defensive and trying to assuage and reassure the Chinese when he is quoted in the December 2, 2005 New York Times: “We’re not nosing around, but we may be able to provide some technical expertise.â€(!) Oh, you’re not nosing around? Right! Sure! And the Chinese—they need your technical expertise??? According to G. Donald Ritter, a highly respected Veterinarian, who was among a group of scientists sent by the United States to Bejing in the first week of November 2005, in the November 20, 2005 New York Times: “If any country could inoculate all its poultry China (is) it. It’s labor intensive. But they’ve got more people and labor than anybody.†Ritter also added: “They can gear up to make tremendous quantities (of vaccine—100 millions doses a day!) and it’s not tremendously expensive.†So much for needing the technical expertise of the WHO! But on the other hand the Chinese do not want to alienate the U.S. and the WHO.
Despite this the U.S. Biowarfare criminals have tried to cast as much doubt as possible that the Peoples’ Republic of China can attain their stated goal of vaccinating 14.2 billion poultry in a year’s time. The U.S. Biowarfare propagandists deliberately ignore the fact that 100 million doses of bird flu vaccine are produced every day in China, and through transparently phony anecdotal “accounts†even try to claim that China has a shortage of vaccine in the rural areas, the very areas that China is actually vaccinating right now! (See New York Times, December 2, 2005). Demonstrating their utter desperation and their all out effort to try to sabotage and discredit the recently begun Chinese Program to vaccinate all 14.2 billion poultry, the U.S. Biowarfare criminals, in a December 16, 2005 New York Times unsigned widely distributed AP article reporting China’s sixth case human case of Bird Flu and a new Bird Flu outbreak in poultry resulting in the death of 1,640 birds and the culling of 15,000 birds to stop the outbreak, falsely attributed to the Peoples’ Republic of China the claim that they have “largely COMPLETED a campaign to vaccinate all of the country’s 5.2 billion domesticated birds†(Emphasis added.) This number (5.2 billion) is now magically reduced back down from 14.2 billion to add credibility to the false attribution), a campaign which was just begun in October 2005!!! Although China began its vaccination program in October 2005, by December 2nd it had already vaccinated 3.1 billion poultry using 2 vaccines, one for chickens and one for ducks, geese, etc. But those lots of vaccine which were deliberately contaminated by the USA have also slowed the vaccination program in all countries which have received them so that certain areas have to be repeated, according to Bloomberg News, December 2, 2005. Indonesia was one of those countries and is the indubitable reason why we now have reports of Bird Flu coming out of that country.
The U.S. objective was obviously to create the impression that China’s program to vaccinate all of its poultry is a failure! Which it is NOT! The United States has tried to sabotage and falsely DISCREDIT the Chinese vaccination project in order to create a window of credibility through which to unleash in China their own H5N1 Bird Flu Reassortment Virus Bioweapon created at their misnamed “Centers for Disease Control!†See above. With the new reports of zero new cases in Africa and Europe the capitalists may try to go with their original crazed plan to release their Bird Flu Bioweapon in China or elsewhere in the Far East. It should be noted that the so-called World Health Organization, which has been penetrated by U.S. “special services†for decades, previously easily gained access to the targeted Black populations in Africa where they and the so-called Agency For International Development (AID), a documented front group for the Central Intelligence Agency, with assistance from the United Nations’ so-called Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), systematically spread and continue to spread the AIDS virus throughout Sub-Saharan Africa using primarily the Tuberculosis PPD skin test. See the AIDS Biowarfare literature mentioned above. The Chinese are under some pressure not to be seen as alienating the WHO or the United States, one of their main trading partners, so they cannot just out and out accuse the U.S. of sabotaging their vaccine program and planning to release their human-to-human H5N1 Reassortment Virus in China! The Chinese tactic in this situation has been not to respond to provocation but simply to cut out the infection (pun intended), arrest those directly involved and go on.
When the capitalists finally unleash their Biowarfare Bird Flu Pandemic they will naturally announce that they have “proof of human-to-human transmission,†or that the newly reconstructed 1918 Pandemic Virus has “escaped.†See below. (Once again, please note that human-to-human transmission has always existed among the tiny minority who possess the genetic/familial predisposition to develop virulent Bird Flu symptoms, which explains the reports of transmission between family members, relatives and others in this population subgroup.) But as explained above if the U.S. releases their H5N1 Bird Flu Bioweapon in China it will not have a genetic sequence supporting a claimed mutation from H5N1 Bird Flu in China, because the Chinese will not turn over samples of H5N1 from Bird Flu outbreaks in birds in China! See above. This is the main reason that the capitalist Biowarfare Criminals may choose to release their virulent human-to-human strain of H5N1 elsewhere, where they can easily release both their own H5N1 bird flu strain and their genetically engineered human-to-human reassortment virus (con
July 21st, 2006 at 12:17 amThe objective of the USSR was to try to convince the U.S. not to break out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as well as the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Salt I Nuclear Weapons Treaty. In order to temporarily accomplish these objectives and avoid a nuclear war, which is the inexorable outcome of a nuclear arms race, Gorbachev in 1988 simply surrendered to the U.S. threat of a nuclear war. Dismantlement of the Soviet Workers’ State followed the surrender. This is one reason why a Socialist Revolution must be carried out here in the United States, the center of capitalism, in order to be successful. At that point the stage will be set for abolishing class society worldwide and with that the basis for the elimination of all wars. The stage will then be set for solving all of the problems of humankind. The obstacles to achieving a Socialist Revolution in the United States are formidable but definitely not insurmountable.
The Dialectical and Historical Materialist Worldview
We live in a world of nation states. All nation states are dictatorships of one class over another class, either the capitalist class over the working class or vice versa. There is no “democracy†for the workers under any form of capitalism, which is rule by an insignificant minority against the overwhelming majority who produce all the wealth and goods and services. Communism is a stateless society, which has never been practiced and can never be practiced until capitalism is abolished worldwide. Within the framework of the class dictatorship there can either be a hard or a soft dictatorship. The hard dictatorship of capitalism is known as Fascism, which has several historical variants such as the Nazi variant, the Mussolini variant, the Latin American Police State variant. The United States is run by Fascists but the United States is not yet a Fascist state because Fascism requires the complete crushing of the labor movement, combined with a mass base of support of the petit-bourgeoisie: doctors, lawyers, small business people and those who directly serve the capitalists. Today due to reasons presented herein only 12.5% of workers are unionized down from 35% in the 1950’s but the labor movement is not completely crushed at this time. Although the naked dynamic of capitalism inexorably results in Fascism, if it is not directly overthrown in a Socialist Revolution, the capitalists would prefer to avert that inexorable outcome for as long as possible in order to attempt to perpetuate the false illusion of “democracy†in their hardening class dictatorship by means of their staged “elections.†On the other hand, all Workers’ States are hard dictatorships, of necessity in order to counter both external and internal attempts to restore capitalism. With the outcome of the U.S. presidential “elections†decided upon in advance, there is no longer “democracy†even for the capitalists themselves. The last U.S. presidential election which permitted “democracy†for different capitalist factions was the 1960 election where Kennedy bought a few more votes than Nixon. Some “democracy!†“Democracy†under capitalism is simply a euphemism for capitalist dictatorship and enslavement. That should be clear, especially in Iraq most graphically, even after the recent “elections†staged in order to try to legitimize a U.S. puppet (comprador) regime. It should be noted that 87% of the South Vietnamese people voted in elections to install the U.S. puppet regime during the Vietnam election! In order to achieve a true democracy it is first necessary to expropriate the capitalist class, which can only be carried out through Socialist Revolution, not through elections. To be successful the Socialist Revolution must be carried out here in the United States. That would abolish class society worldwide, immediately end the basis for all major wars and finally end war altogether and set the stage for solving all problems of humankind, which must be addressed immediately! What prevents it? Anti-Communism and the fact that the capitalists run their own opposition. Anti-Communism has as much basis in truth as the U.S. claim that there were “weapons of mass destruction†in Iraq. See below. It is important for all progressive people to be able to learn and expose the various lies which form the basis for Anti-Communism.
None of this is rocket science but it is all being covered up, hiding in plain sight, and the U.S. government’s propaganda Big Lies, for the most part, are simply repeated in the capitalists’ media (a privatized arm of the U.S. government’s “intelligence communityâ€) without being totally refuted and thoroughly exposed in every detail in order to educate the masses. In addition, this material and much more is covered up also by the leadership of all of the fake “left†groups. People and political groups are defined by what they say and by what they don’t say, as well as by their actions and by their non-actions. Instead the limited and partial exposure of capitalist statecraft which does appear never involves these ongoing topics and is never carried out in logically precise irrefutable detail and almost never in advance as done here. The only groups in the spectrum of government-controlled and government-operated fake “opposition†groups which handle topics involving capitalist statecraft usually are right-wing Conspiracy Theory groups and anti-Communist single issue groups, whose versions of events invariably contain multiple pieces of straw man disinformation deliberately introduced for the express purpose of discrediting their central claims. Conspiracy Theory is handled primarily by the John Birch Society Fascists, some Anarchists and some “independents.†As far as the fake “left†is concerned, the capitalists would never carry out an assassination of their own president, e.g. in 1963 where Nixon is documented with photo-overlay evidence to have organized the assassination of JFK using the so-called “Watergate Burglars†disguised as the so-called “Dealey Plaza Tramps.†And they would never carry out the assassination of political opposition leaders domestic and foreign; and the capitalists would never be so dastardly as to design the AIDS virus which targets primarily Blacks and Gays, or deliberately create a World Bird Flu Pandemic. Heavens to Betsy, No!
The purpose of the fake “left†is to monopolize, monitor, manage and mislead the opposition and above all—render the opposition Anti-Communist and keep the masses diverted from the real solution—Socialist Revolution in the United States and the World—by always in practice leading their well-meaning but deliberately misled members to believe that capitalism can reform itself, which the capitalists prove every day is not possible. The fake “left†also covers up the central issue, crucial to building and organizing support for a new system based on human need not private profit, namely that there was no “collapse of the Soviet Union,†but a rather surrender to the threat of a nuclear war followed by dismantlement! But the former Soviet power structure actually remains in place. The CIA reported in 1989-90 that they had no data whatsoever which would support an “economic collapse of the USSR.†The “collapse†propaganda is a Big Lie designed to demoralize the entire world against the solution—Socialist Revolution and set the stage for undermining support for the social programs in the capitalist countries, which have existed only because of the existence of the Soviet Union—“we’re as good as you, we take care of our people too.†The fake “left†lies, through lies of commission and omission, on virtually every topic because the primary purpose of the fake “left†is to impersonate opposition to the capitalist dictatorship by talking tough and saying nothing just like any capitalist demagogue. They represent a barrier to genuine Communist leadership while they deliberately lead the masses to defeat, generally behind unreal pacifist and idealistic slogans, such as “Bring The Troops Home†and “Solidarity Demonstrations to support progressive movements and issues, but always keeping away from the solution of Socialist Revolution in the United States! See below. Single issue groups such as 911truth.org, etc. are anti-Communist reformist groups whose purpose is also to keep the masses away from the real solution—Socialist Revolution in the United States—by leading their confused members to believe that capitalism can reform itself and that “all you need to do is get the truth out and people will see!†Huh? See what? See nothing! So far the capitalists have succeeded in their deception and misleadership. This is because of the present Correlation of Class Forces. Once again it is vital to remember that all wars are won and lost on moral and every movement begins with the call! Let’s not permit the capitalists to keep us demoralized and divided. Genuine Communist organization is what counts and we must begin to organize everywhere.
The “Anti-War Movement†is led by these political police agents just as is the leadership of all of the labor unions at the present time. All demonstrations against the war march under pacifist slogans such as, “Bring Home The Troops.†This slogan is aimed at the capitalists themselves? Pacifism is an organized deception designed to make the masses believe falsely that capitalism can be made peaceful. But capitalism is fundamentally dependent on war and mass murder to steal new resources and new markets and can never be made peaceful. The objective of this police agent-led “opposition†is to initially get millions of people who are opposed to the war into the street and then to demoralize those very masses when the government totally disregards them. This same exact scenario was used during the Vietnam War when the high point of the anti-war movement was in 1969 with a demonstration of over a million people in Washington, D.C. And it had no effect on the government policy and then there were the shootings at Kent State. This combination had the effect of demoralizing and scaring the masses opposed to the war. Finally, in 1975, 2 years after the Peace Accords had been signed and it was clear the U.S. had no intention of leaving Vietnam, the enlisted men in Vietnam turned their weapons around on their officers and mutineed. In San Francisco the recruits sat down on the wharfs and refused to get into troop ships. Only at that point did the U.S. evacuate from Vietnam and they did it in a hurry as you can see from the footage made of the helicopters lifting off from the roof of the U.S. embassy and CIA headquarters in Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh City. The reason for the hasty retreat was that the U.S. government did not want the awareness of mutiny to spread back into the general population and demoralize the U.S. masses from supporting future U.S. invasions—such as Iraq. The capitalists also did not want the masses to realize that the one and only way to end all capitalist wars is to organize a mutiny in the armed forces as the first step in building a system based on human need not private profit. There have been many other invasions since Vietnam. Invasions and overthrow of the governments of Grenada, Panama and Haiti are a few examples. When that U.S. mutiny occurred in Vietnam in 1975 the overwhelming majority of the U.S. masses opposed the Vietnam War but the supposedly organized “opposition†of the “anti-war movement†itself had completely lost its momentum, but not by accident. It’s leadership set it up to deliberately demoralize the masses to organized opposition against the Vietnam War! Only the determined stalwarts persisted in the anti-Communist “Peace Movement.â€
Today, the leadership of most Conspiracy Theory Groups is also composed of subjective political police agents. In the past this may not always have applied in all instances. The Far-Right (Fascist!) John Birch Society, which was originally run by anti-Communist crazies, is an example. The purpose of Conspiracy Theory groups, is to try to intimidate and demoralize the Working Class and everyone else! Conspiracy theorists do not to focus on the class struggle, which is the exact opposite of the fake “left†which permits no mention of actual capitalist statecraft and conspiracy as mentioned above, but instead focus on supposedly all-powerful elite secret capitalist societies and their closed meetings such as the Bilderberg Conference, etc. They seek to relegate their members and adherents to a state of worship and fear of these elitist capitalist societies with the implication that they are much too powerful to be successfully opposed or overthrown, which has already happened with the 1917 Russian Revolution and in China and Cuba. The reality is that these elitist groups and meetings do exist, but the conspiracy theorists cover up the fact that the capitalist system, which all of these groups either actively or passively support in practice (because they do not call for its overthrow do not call for a Socialist Revolution) is fundamentally based on war, mass murder, exploitation and super-exploitation. Conspiracy groups are vehemently anti-Communist, having the same position as the U.S. government on the most important issue of all—maintaining the capitalists in state power!
Venezuela Leads The Way!
Already the capitalists’ areas of exploitation and super-exploitation are slipping away from them in South America. Hugo Chavez the Venezuelan President is leading the way in his country for what will happen in the United States after the Socialist Revolution is achieved here. Chavez is transforming the Venezuelan economy by founding state companies (the opposite of privatization), seizing abandoned private factories and establishing thousands of cooperatives and worker-run businesses. He is also creating state banks and a state-to-state barter system to trade items as varied as cattle, oil and cement, while simultaneously tightly controlling and taking a larger share from the multinationals and other capitalist concerns operating in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez is a hero. This winter the Chavez government has supplied inexpensive heating oil to the Poor living in the South Bronx, USA, through the Citco Oil company which it controls, while the U.S. government and Con Edison are waging economic war against the people of the United States! In response we can almost certainly expect some sort of desperate crazed provocation by the United States government to be used as a pretext to try to invade Venezuela.
Capitalism is in its Final Stage of Permanent War, Which is
Potentially the Most Ideal Pre-Revolutionary Situation Possible!
The negatives of capitalism far outweigh the positives and have for a long time! The choice we have is to remain passive passengers on this Titanic, which is going only one way—down with us on it, or we can begin to call for and organize a Socialist Revolution, which will provide the solution to the entire complex of problems created by capitalism-imperialism which now directly threatens all life on Earth. In order for alternative viewpoints to be heard equally as loud as those of the capitalist dictatorship the capitalists must first be deprived of the ability to send bodies of armed men against the masses. The capitalist class must be disarmed!! That is why the Pre-Condition for Socialist Revolution in the United States and any developed country is Mutiny in the armed forces, which is what happened in Russia in 1917 when the Russian army mutineed during WWI. That’s our model just as the Paris Commune was their model, but just as they did not make the mistakes of the Commune, we will not make their mistakes and there will be no more center of world capitalism to contend with! That is why we must begin by supporting the only position with successful historical precedent and call for Mutiny in Iraq as in Vietnam—the Real Reason the Vietnam War Ended in 1975! There is no “third way†or alternative to capitalism-imperialism, which can not be reformed through any form of elections within the constantly hardening capitalist dictatorship, or by any other means such as “Impeach Bush†or “Impeach Blair,†which are just strategies designed to deceive the masses and bring those opposed to the capitalist dictatorship back into the fold. Impeaching Bush or Blair would not change anything because the capitalist class dictatorship would not have changed The strategy, tactics and techniques of achieving a Socialist Revolution in the United States are discussed further below and in future posts.
The Declaration of Independence:
No Founding Document of the United States Enshrines Capitalism as the Permanent Economic System! On the contrary, The Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson is a actually a Transitional Document which does authorize a Socialist Revolution in the United States as the Only Prudent and Appropriate Response to the Level of Tyranny, Oppression and Threat to Human Civilization and Indeed All Life on Earth, which the United States Capitalist Class Dictatorship has Subjected Upon the Entire World!
Some people think that a Socialist Revolution in the United States is some sort of foreign idea which would not work in the United States. That is absolute nonsense! In fact, the author of the Declaration of Independence provided the remedy, the solution, for today’s situation in this founding document of the United States. The underlined sections document that today Thomas Jefferson would fully support a Socialist Revolution in the United States and that he would be declared a Communist. Which would be correct! Jefferson was the most politically intelligent and far-sighted of all of the Founding Fathers of the United States. The capitalist system is not enshrined in ANY founding document of the United States! All that is necessary in the last sentence of the Declaration is to substitute the words—the capitalist system—in place of “the King of Great Britain,†and it applies to today. The Declaration of Independence clearly authorizes and calls for a Socialist Revolution in the United States today!
This document was written with careful foresight by one of the greatest intellectuals of the American bourgeois revolution and the world at that time. Most people have not read the Declaration of Independence since they have been children and then they are usually taught to learn only the first 2 lines and to forget the rest! The essence or gravamen of the Declaration of Independence makes up most of its text and appears below in the underlined sections. The fact that Jefferson wrote the document to apply not only to American revolutionary times but in fact expressly designed it to protect us from intolerable crimes of all future governments, in particular the destructive capitalist economic-political-social system in the present day, is covered up by the capitalist educational system, which clearly understands its true meaning and significance! (For example, if an attempt is made to enter a comment which contains the underlined sections below on certain Blog sites the entry is rejected with programmed X-marks crossing out each word written by Thomas Jefferson!) All of this naturally is covered up by the phony “opposition†such as the “United Action Center,†ANSWER, United For Peace and Justice, Move-on, Workers World Party, the so-called “Revolutionary Party,†the Socialist Workers Party, Spartacist League, Workers League, Communist Party USA, the Progressive Labor Party etc., etc. Proper use of this document can greatly increase the acceptance of a revolutionary change in the form of the State and supports the call right now for a Socialist Revolution in the United States. It is important to cite this founding document whenever calling for a Socialist Revolution in the United States. The founding fathers all signed this document, which states: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of…the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…it is their right, it is their duty, to…throw off such Government…to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…and “to provide new Guards for their future security…†This obviously does not mean to hold new “elections.†It calls for laying a new foundation and principles, which in today’s context means to organize the state and society on a different basis of class ownership, which is the only means to achieve the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
The handwriting is on the wall! It is time to organize! It is your right and it is your duty!
_____________________________________
July 21st, 2006 at 12:23 amyo depperman…
no one’s going to read all that.
please provide links, not prohibitive blocks of text. you’re just clogging the thread.
get your own blog if you want to inundate the web with excess verbiage.
July 21st, 2006 at 12:38 amWow, depperman. You really type fast!
July 21st, 2006 at 12:43 am(nobody reads that, so give it up)
Any post over 100 words should be truncated at that point.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:36 amI migght mention that my “PgDn’ key is getting flakey.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:41 amWalt, it’s an interesting tactic now. Rather than debate, simply copy and paste large blocks of text.
I don’t think anyone bothers to read those posts, and they’re easy to scroll past. I wonder, does a Reich-winger like being ignored?
July 21st, 2006 at 1:51 amGeorgia where I live is horribly hot and dry as well > it’s becoming difficult to keep my garden alive and even my grape vinyard is suffering > if the heat continues my grape crop will fail?!
July 21st, 2006 at 2:27 amDepperman’s post is also complete horseshit. We’re only beginning NOW to get a handle on how T4, T8 and B lymphocytes work. There is NO WAY that something attacking T4 lymphocytes was engineered back in the 70s. He also completely fails to mention that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, many of them from Uncle Sam, to develop new drugs for AIDS, and to cure it. Also to develop a vaccine.
Back to the topic of this thread: let’s not just complain about global warming, let’s do what we can to get out the vote this Nov. to elect as many Democrats as possible, and then hold their feet to the fire about global warming, war, etc. Let’s push to cut defense spending and divert some of those bucks into a Manhattan project to make alternatives to fossil fuels more feasible.
July 21st, 2006 at 2:28 amSomebody tell William guy on this thread to drop dead tonight or he can go out in the heat tomorrow and drop dead > lol.
July 21st, 2006 at 2:37 amGWB = Global Warming Bush
July 21st, 2006 at 6:44 am“hottest temperature in millennia”
Ehhh… the link for that says 400 years, and the NAS report only gave the “millenia” thing a “plausible” rating. The misinformation never stops at Think Progress. Also, I’m not sure what this posting of temperature records is supposed to demonstrate.
Nevada: “Reno set a record for heat Sunday, breaking an 81-year-old record, according to the National Weather Service.â€
Ah, so it was about as warm in Nevada 81 years ago. Go figure.
Czech Republic: “The temperature in Prague climbed up to 34.3 degrees centigrade today and beat the 141 year old record of the day by 0.6 degrees.â€
Ah, so it was about the same temperature in the Czech Republic 141 years ago. Interesting.
South Dakota: “Saturday’s statewide high temperature that unofficially tied a South Dakota record set 70 years earlier is likely to stand, a National Weather Service employee says.â€
So it was exactly as warm as it is now 70 years ago in South Dakota. Wow.
Britain: “Britain sweltered on the hottest July day for nearly a century as the current heatwave reached its peak.â€
So it was as warm in Britain now as it was 100 years ago. Golly gee.
Etc, etc, etc.
Completely pointless.
July 21st, 2006 at 7:43 amWe, in our country, had already a couple deaths this year caused by heat. And the Drought Alert system is on. And the worse (August) is still in the future.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:02 am“hottest temperature in millenniaâ€
[...A couple of stupid comments about proven facts...]
Etc, etc, etc.
Completely pointless.
Comment by Seixon — July 21, 2006 @ 7:43 am
You also are the stupider and most self-absorbed troll in the Global Warming threads, and it’s a proven fact. And based in your post’s trend, I’ll predict that you will write a lot of long and meaningless posts after this one, in this thread and other threads, specially the ones about Global Warming.
See? Prediction based in past facts works. Just wait for the results to confirm it.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:19 amSo it was as warm in Britain now as it was 100 years ago. Golly gee.
Etc, etc, etc.
Completely pointless.
Comment by Seixon — July 21, 2006 @ 7:43 am
I am sure if the reverse were true (record low temps) you would be the first to point it out. The “point” is these are occurring at the same time in North America and Europe. This alone prove anything? No. Couple it with many other “facts”-Yes! What is completely pointless is your polarized/ or paid view on the subject.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:22 amI am sure if the reverse were true (record low temps) you would be the first to point it out.
Perhaps only to bug you guys, since everyone with common sense that records here and there is meaningless in the bigger picture. Thus I don’t see the point of Payson’s post at all, other than to say, yes, we’re having a warm summer this year. Just like we did x amount of years ago. Big whoop.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:37 amPerhaps only to bug you guys, since everyone with common sense that records here and there is meaningless in the bigger picture.
Comment by Seixon — July 21, 2006 @ 8:37 am
Yeah, like the record deep dive of the Titanic. Meaningless to the bigger picture. But not so meaningless to the passengers.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:58 amWilliam must know how to copy and paste… he does not have the intelligence to type that much.
July 21st, 2006 at 9:08 amMy biggest confusion about those who doubt global warming is simply that the solutions proposed to reduce global warming are just good conservation practices. Even if the data is wrong (which I doubt), the solutions are not asking people to totally change their lifestyle (which is a very luxurious in the US as compared to poor nations). The global warming solutions are only good resource management. Why is that so bad? Is it just arrogance that Americans do not have to conserve–that would imply responsibility to the rest of the world which would be construed as subserviance! My bad.
July 21st, 2006 at 9:35 amHere in southeastern Kansas it has been hell the last several days – Sunday it was 103, Monday it was 106, Tuesday it was 107, Wednesday 108 and Thursday 110. We do what we can to conserve energy – hanging clothes out to dry, turning the thermostat up a degree or two, we switched to the energy saving light bulbs all thru the house and we turn off any lights or appliances not in use. We have been hunkering down in the house with the shades pulled during the day in this heat wave and pray the power doesn’t go out. We’re planning on installing some kind of solar system to help out. It is an appalling state of affairs that our congress can’t see the freight train about to hit us all. I can’t imagine how the poor people of Iraq stand it there with precious little power.
A very welcome break in the weather today – only supposed to be in the 80’s.
July 21st, 2006 at 9:56 amActually, the proposed solutions are asking for lifestyle changes – just not unreasonable ones.
The sad thing is, I just saw a bunch of polls the other day (can’t remember the site) that showed how most Americans now believe G.W. is real but they aren’t willing to change their lifestyles to stop it. It boggles the mind.
July 21st, 2006 at 10:08 amThe irony is that we don’t even need oil. we have enough renewable energy resources to kick the oil addiction once and for all. over 70% of global warming greenhouse gases are created by automotive exhaust. It’s outdated 19th century technology that we don’t need. Here are some alternatives:
- Solar power and photovoltaics
- Wind power gas turbines
- Geothermal power
- hydroelectric power
- controlled thermonuclear fusion (do not confuse nuclear fusion with nuclear fission power. They are completely different. Take a look at the ITER project in France)
- Biomass and ethenol
- Hydrogen power
Remember, any heat gradient can be converted into electricity. How do you think thermal transducers work? The chemical energy stored in fossil fuels means nothing when we have a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction emmitting plenty of heat radiation right above us. With all the progress made in thermoelectric efficiency optimization, why not use some of it for electric power production (both stationary and propulsive).
Why switch to renewable energy?
1. Global Warming: Prevent the increasing threat of global warming which will not just have a devastating impact on human life, but all macroscopic life.
2. Job creation: All of the above mentioned potential power production industries will provide countless jobs to farmers/land owners, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, materials engineers, nuclear engineers, business administrators, accountants, software designers, janitors, etc.
3. A stonger economy: The average American spends over $35 a week on gasoline. Imagine what would happen to the economy if the average American could save that money and re-invest it into the economy. That’s a lot more money saved than what people are “saving” from Bush’s tax cuts.
4. Terrorism and war: Lets be honest, the war in Iraq is about oil. In fact, much of why middle eastern terrorism exists is because of oil. Why does Bin Laden hate us so much? Because we have military bases in Saudi Arabia! Why do we have bases there? To protect the oil refineries there. Remember, 7% of the Unites States economy comes from Saudi oil. We really shouldn’t be making such business deals with that sharia-law enforcing theocracy.
5. Oil’s invasion of American politics: Both Bush and Cheney are oil men. Oil has become so big and so corrupt that even those in office have become the same as the oil men that lobby them. If there were no big oil, we wouldnt have guys like Bush and Cheney sneaking their way into Washington and into power. Big oil has saturated our government. This is a government ruled by the people no more.
For a cleaner environment, a stronger economy, a more honest political system, a friendlier foreign policy, safer homeland security, and for the quest towards scientific progress we have to get off of oil! I urge all of you to write to your congressman and ask them what they are doing to make the switch to a greener energy source. Make yourselves heard and you will have the power to bring change to the way Americans look at automotive transportation.
July 21st, 2006 at 10:19 amDon’t forget OTECs!
July 21st, 2006 at 10:31 am
i’ll turn on my AC on high in my SUV that causes me to use more fuel that makes the atmosphere hotter that makes me turn on my AC even higher to use more fuel that makes the atmosphere even hotter blah blah blah…..
July 21st, 2006 at 10:34 amGood post!!
July 21st, 2006 at 11:18 amA couple of thoughts …
1) Given that “average” earth temperatures (and I’m talking the entire existance of earth, not just the last couple thousand years) are actually higher than the average right now, does this influence global warming theory in any way? Could the earth be rebalancing back to where it is “normally”?
2) Given that the North and South poles have been entirely without ice in the past (many times, in fact), how do we account for those telling us it’s hotter now than it’s ever been. It’s hotter now than we’ve ever measured … but it is 100% not hotter now than it’s ever been … not even close.
3) What accounts for the volatile changes in weather and temperature on the earth that occurred outside natural disasters and prior to human interaction/intervention … why did the earth warm and cool so dramtically in the past and could this shed light on today?
4) Why do people argue that melting “polar ice” will cause sea levels to rise? Does your glass of water overflow when your ice melts in it? (If they mean polar ice that’s upon land, then I get it … but this needs to be more explicitly stated)
5) Why don’t I hear much about the “ozone depletion” that so worried me about 10 or 15 years ago? Has this gone away or have we moved past this idea scientifically? If we have moved away from this scientifically (hint, many have) does this lead us to believe that a similar phenomenon could occur with today’s science?
6) If the environment and fossil fuels are so bad, why do and did so many in the liberal community prevent and call for less nuclear powered energy sources? Do they bear some of the blame? Can we all say they were misguided and that the science used against nuclear power (and the scare tactics) could offer a glimpse at the same people’s claims about other topics?
7) Why do we ALWAYS assume that while the “science” of yesteryear was indeed often based upon inferior technology and thus gleaned inferior results, today’s science is at the pinnacle of potentiality? Is the argument “we don’t know because we don’t have the ability to predict it yet” hogwash especially since we continually prove more adept scientifically? Is it possible that, no matter the time period, science always bases assertions on the means they have to collect data and that this data has often been found to be faulty by those who followed up years later? Are scientists who say this about Global Warming out of line or could those who profess “certainty” about their conclusion crappy scientists (scientists don’t usually do this … those who like what their data infers certainly do though)?
Any thoughts … too many thoughts ????
July 21st, 2006 at 1:14 pmGiacomo-
Great points!! and all true…..but I think al bores “INCONCEIVABLE!” Truth has too large of a “fan base” (clueless-lefties) that eat this stuff right up…….hey-it gives them something to complain about……
July 21st, 2006 at 2:30 pm#86 Mike – Luckily the ideologues of the Republican party are constantly inventing talking points. If not, “smarties” like Giacomo and pinheads like you would’n know what to “think”…
July 21st, 2006 at 2:42 pmren,
Once again sexion is a retard and once again misses the point…
We are setting records and then beating those records every year for the last 10 years. the last three were quite note worthy. We are breaking records that we have just set and you dont get that, that is just retarded…
Eh, yes, recorded temperatures, as in for the last 150 years. As even the examples here demonstrate, it was still hotter back 70-150 years ago in some places, and beyond 150 years the temperatures were more than likely as hot as now at some point within the past 2000 years.
Not to mention variables such as coverage of the Earth in temperature recordings and many other factors that the “smart” people like you seemingly don’t give one damn about. Yawn.
July 21st, 2006 at 2:45 pmSo if Reno broke an 81 year old record, what was the excuse for it being so hot 81 years ago? Global warming? C’mon folks, get a clue.
July 21st, 2006 at 4:12 pmSeixon,
July 21st, 2006 at 4:13 pmTemperatures have been recorded in the far past by glacial ice. At the North pole, this record extends back about 110 to 135 million years. The South pole is another issue as a saline sea exists under about 80 million years of accumulation. Scientists are wary of disturbing the evidence that lays there. In addition, tree rings provide climate trends that extend back about three to five thousand years. The thermeter is only about 300 years old. What is disturbing is that existing data indicates that the Earth has entred a positive feedback loop in the global warming issue.
I bet Seixon still thinks Elvis is alive too…
July 21st, 2006 at 6:14 pmBut Bush does not deny global warming –anymore. He just says that there is a debate about whether man is causing it.
Because that due to humans burning fossil fuels CO2 levels increased from 280 ppm to 380 ppm in a little more than 120 years and that global temperatures have gone up during the same period of time is just a mere coincident.
Yep. According to Lindzen, Spencer, Singer and Michael Crichton — all received the Nobel Prize for being the biggest whores of science since tobacco was said to be good for your health.
July 21st, 2006 at 7:11 pmwhy do global warming skeptics hate humanity?
July 21st, 2006 at 9:30 pmwhy do global warming skeptics hate progress?
Don’t reply to the forner Seixon. He is irrelevant and an idiot, to boot.
July 21st, 2006 at 10:04 pmGlobal warming is nothiing short of a fear tactic. That if we don’t all stop driving tomorrow, we will all suffocate in heat. It’s the libs way of spreading fear. Remember when libs blamed conservatives for trying to spread fear regarding islamofacism? You tell me what is the bigger global threat? Throat cutters or SUV’s.
And I really don’t understand why libs are called progressives? Killing babies and euthanizing elders is progressive? The only thing progressive about liberals is their belive in taxes. Oh yes…..Libs LOVE their progressive tax system.
July 23rd, 2006 at 8:46 pm[...] And finally: Global warming leads to more severe heat waves, and the skyrocketing temperatures have led to more shirtless men in the UK. British lawmakers are considering banning “public nudity of the middle-aged shirtless man variety.†Said one official, “But one of the things that is depressing for anyone going shopping is the numbers of shaven-headed men, mainly in their 30s and 40s, who seem to think people want to see their torsos.†[...]
July 27th, 2006 at 9:07 amI see, so we are using anecdotal evidence now to prove global warming. OK then, in my city, in Ohio, we had one of the coolest springs ever. So that counteracts one of the examples above. All I need to do is find 10 more examples, and that will mean beyond a shadow of a doubt that global warming is not happening. You say that my logic is horrible? It is the same logic used in this article.
Global warming that is caused by increased CO2 levels would show temperature changes in the atmosphere first, according to all models. Yet the atmosphere has not heated at all, only surface temperatures have increased. So that must mean the models are wrong. But if that’s the case, then who is to say that warming will continue long into the future, since those predictions are based solely on those same models which have proven to be wrong? Perhaps the warming is caused by fluctuations in the sun, which has been argued extensively (and derided by those with a financial stake in the CO2 argument), and fits the data much better than the CO2 argument. So what is our fix then, shoot ice cubes at the sun? Or wait for this particular cycle, which has happened many many times in the past, to change (as it has done many many times in the past)? Temperatures worldwide were much warmer hundreds of year ago than they are now, yet nobody burned fossil fuels then (ok, they burned wood). How is that explained? Did something drastic happen to then cause the earth to cool? Or did it cool on its own as a natural cycle, as it has many many times in the past?
Suppose you are a scientist or a professor looking for grants concerning global warming. If you ever wanted to get a 2nd grant, which way do you think your research had better lead? It is basically paying for the results you want. If you come back with a study that concludes that our warming is caused by the sun’s fluctuations, and that there is nothing we can do to change it, what do you think the odds are you will get a second grant? Zero. But these tactics have caused science by consensus, rather than science by fact. Let’s get enough people togther, and have them all say the same thing, and soon, no one will be allowed to even debate or question their theories, we must accept them, period. We are there right now with global warming. There is not a single scientist who can predict the climate accurately anywhere on the earth a week from now, yet we are supposed to blindly believe that they can predict with certainty the climate 100 years from now?
July 28th, 2006 at 5:23 amAugust 22nd, 2006 at 1:58 pm
2006 Tropical Storm Season Now Below Normal…
2006 Tropical Storm Season Now Below Normal
(21 August 2006) What a difference a year makes. After the record-breaking 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the 2006 season is now below normal.
As of yesterday (20 August) three tropical storms will have formed in the Atlantic in an “average” year, which is the same number that have formed this year so far. Because of multi-year averaging, that means that today (August 21) slightly more than three storms would have formed, making this year (statistically speaking) just below normal.
In the hurricane category, this year is decidedly below normal, with no hurricanes so far, while by this date 1.5 hurricanes have formed in the average of years 1944 though 2005.
Reason for the Season?: Cooler Sea Surface Temperatures
Part of the reason for the slow season is that tropical western Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are running about normal, if not slightly below normal (see graphic below, which shows SST departures from normal).
In contrast, at the same time last year SSTs in the same region were running well above normal.
The cooler SSTs in the Atlantic are not an isolated anomaly. In a research paper being published next month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists will show that between 2003 and 2005, globally averaged temperatures in the upper ocean cooled rather dramatically, effectively erasing 20% of the warming that occurred over the previous 48 years.
Global Warming?
The slow hurricane season and the cooling sea surface temperatures might be somewhat surprising to the public. Media reports over the last year have suggested that, since global warming will only get worse, and last year’s hurricane activity was supposedly due to global warming, this season might well be as bad as last season. But it appears that Mother Nature might have other plans.
The Rest of the Hurricane Season
With only 3 named storms compared to 9 on this date last year, it is nearly impossible at this late date to have a season anywhere near as busy as last season, which totaled 27 by the end of the year. The most recent prediction from the National Weather Service (see first graphic, above) is for there to be 12 to 15 named storms by December — only half of last year’s total. It now looks like that prediction might be too generous.
While it is still possible for this hurricane season to end up above normal in activity and reach that forecast, each day that passes without so much as a tropical ‘depression’ makes that target less and less likely.
http://www.weatherstreet.com/hurricane/2006/hurricane-atlantic-2006-below-normal-season.htm
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Former Greenpeace Co-Founder Praises US for Rejecting Kyoto
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
December 08, 2005
Montreal (CNSNews.com) – A founding member of Greenpeace, who left the organization because he viewed it as too radical, praised the United States for refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
“At least the [United] States is honest. [The U.S.] said, ‘No we are not going to sign that thing (Kyoto) because we can’t do that,’” said Patrick Moore, who is attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal.
Moore noted that many of the industrialized nations that ratified the treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions are now failing to comply with those emission limits. Moore, who currently heads the Canadian-based environmental advocacy group Greenspirit Strategies helped found both Greenpeace in 1971 and Greenpeace International in 1979.
“Canada signed [Kyoto] and said, ‘Oh yeah, we can do that,’ and then it merrily goes on its way to increase CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions by even more than the U.S.,” Moore told Cybercast News Service.
Other industrialized nations — including Japan and at least 11 of the 15 European Union nations that ratified Kyoto — are struggling to meet their emission targets.
As Cybercast News Service previously reported, many organizations attending the Climate Change Conference have declared the Kyoto Protocol “dead” because of the signatories’ lack of compliance. The treaty establishes a 2012 goal of having top industrialized nations cut their industrial emissions 5.2 percent below the level that was produced in 1990.
“I think this whole Kyoto process is a colossal waste of time and money,” said Moore, who rejects alarmist predictions of human-caused ‘global warming.”
The U.N.’s 11th Annual Climate Change Conference in Montreal failed to impress Moore, who is there to promote nuclear energy.
“There is nothing concrete going on here. There is nothing good happening here as far as I can see. [The participants at the U.N. conference are] just spending a whole pile of money and auguring and talking,” he added.
Moore also slammed the movement he helped found, accusing today’s environmental groups of being co-opted by the political Left.
“The Left figures it owns the environmental movement and that has corrupted the movement greatly,” Moore said. “The [left-wing] influence has brought great dysfunction into the environmental movement. [It's turned it into] an elitist movement.”
Moore said he decided to leave Greenpeace in 1986 after the group became too radical and he could “no longer agree with the policies that were being espoused.”
The final straw, according to Moore, came when he failed to persuade Greenpeace to abandon its campaign to ban chlorine worldwide.
“I pointed out that chlorine was the main element used in our medicine and adding it to drinking water was the biggest advance in public health in human history,” Moore said. “[My argument] just fell on deaf ears. [Greenpeace] didn’t care about any of that because a global chlorine ban was a good campaign [for them].”
Even though he was a pioneer of the movement, liberal environmentalists spare no criticism of Moore, frequently referring to him as a “traitor” and an “Eco-Judas.”
Moore dismissed the criticism and asserted that the green movement has steered off course from its original mission.
“I think it’s in a dismal state — I think almost across the board, whether it’s in energy policy or agriculture policy regarding their zero tolerance on GM [genetically modified foods] or in forestry policy,” Moore said.
Bjorn Lomborg
In The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg challenges widely held beliefs that … The Skeptical Environmentalist is a useful corrective to the more …
http://www.lomborg.com/books.htm
Contact: Sloane Lederer, 212-924-3900 x394, slederer@cup.org
Early Praise for
THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST
Measuring the Real State of the World
Bjørn Lomborg
“This is one of the most valuable books on public policy – not merely environmental policy – to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years. . . . The Skeptical Environmentalist is a triumph.†– The Economist
“Those who abandon long-held faiths are often strident advocates of their new views. But Dr. Lomborg displays little of the convert’s zeal. His aim is not to preach free-market solutions for every problem or to deny that threats to the environment exist.†– Nicholas Wade, Science Times, New York Times
“. . . a superbly documented and readable book.†– Wall Street Journal
“The Skeptical Environmentalist marks a critical environmental moment. . . . We can forget those dreary old idols: Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown with his Worldwatch Institute, Greenpeace and all the others. They have been exiled into the darkness. Eco-optimism can begin to rise over the Earth. After Lomborg, the environmental movement will begin to wither.” — National Post
“Bjorn Lomborg’s good news about the environment is bad news for Green ideologues. His richly informative, lucid book is now the place from which environmental policy decisions must be argued. In fact, The Skeptical Environmentalist is the most significant work on the environment since the appearance of its polar opposite, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in 1962. It’s a magnificent achievement.” — Washington Post Book World
“. . . think of The Skeptical Environmentalist as a young geek’s answer to Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. . . .
Lomborg pulls off the remarkable feat of welding the techno-optimism of the Internet age with a lefty’s concern for the fate of the planet.†– Rolling Stone
“The Skeptical Environmentalist should be read by every environmentalist, so that the appalling errors of fact the environmental movement has made in the past are not repeated.
A brilliant and powerful book.”
–Matt Ridley, Author of Genome
“. . . Lomborg has penned a very persuasive new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World . . . . For anybody who delights in seeing smelling little orthodoxies exposed, this book will come as a special delight. . . . But facts are stubborn things. And Lomborg’s facts aren’t likely to go away.†– Detroit News
“So, do read The Skeptical Environmentalist. There will be something you agree with, and something that makes you bite the carpet. That’s money well spent these days.†– Philadelphia Inquirer
“Bjørn Lomborg is an outstanding representative of the “new breed” of political scientists–mathematically-skilled and computer-adept. In this book he shows himself also to be a hardheaded, empirically oriented analyst. Surveying a vast amount of data and taking account of a wide range of more and less informed opinion about environmental threats facing the planet, he comes to a balanced assessment of which ones are real and which are over-hyped. In vigorous and what needs not to be done about those turning out to be pseudo-problems.”
– Professor Jack Hirshleifer, Department of Economics, UCLA
“When Lomborg concludes that ‘…the loss of the world’s rainforests, of fertile agricultural land, the ozone layer and of the climate balance are terrible…’ I agree. But we also need debate, and this book provides us with that in generous amounts, including 2,428 footnotes. If you, like I do, belong to the people who dare to think the world is making some progress, but always with mistakes to be corrected, this book makes important reading.”
–Professor Lars Kristoferson, Secretary General, WWF Sweden
“Bjorn Lomborg raises the important question whether the costs of remedying the damage caused by environmental pollution are higher than the costs of the pollution itself. The answer is by no means straightforward. He has written a pioneering book.†— Richard Rosencrance, Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
“. . . a remarkable book, probably the most important book on the environment ever written.†– Daily Telegraph
“The well-publicized, but failed doomsday predictions made by some well-known environmentalist writers have inspired a number of rejoinders. This is the best one, by a wide margin. Its author teaches statistics in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. He has marshaled an extremely impressive array of data to buttress his optimism about long-term and current trends in environment and development. On the environmental side, the book covers traditional problems like food, energy, water, and pollution, but also future problems like biodiversity and the greenhouse effect. In each of these areas, he argues that environmental problems can be managed (and in many cases have been managed already), and that trying to turn the clock back will be costlier in economic as well as human terms. On the development side, Lomborg points to encouraging trends in life expectancy, welfare, the decline of population growth, and the reduction of hunger. While he may occasionally make things difficult for himself by insisting that the world is making progress in virtually every area, this is also what makes the book such an impressive tour de force. . . . â€
– Nils Petter Gleditsch, Editor, Journal of Peace Research, Research Professor, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Professor of International Relations, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
“At last a book that gives the environment the scientific analysis it deserves, and provides understanding of the problems, the risks and the solutions. Essential reading.â€
– Lewis Wolpert, Department of Anatomy and Biology, University College London
“. . . . Lomborg’s book is a warning to scientist who have abandoned statistical prudence in their work.
Anecdotal science can become biased science or lead to wrong conclusions. The magnifying glass of crisis-focused media, the scramble for competitive grants funding among scientists, and the need for pressure groups to sustain themselves, obscure less obvious and often less dramatic trends. And in particular the obscure a great deal of good news for the poor.
The concern for the environment and for the global food situation is honorable. We are all for a better environment and high biodiversity, and against food insecurity. There is a general consensus against pollution of the environment, wasteful food production methods, inequalities in access to food. There is a growing awareness of the dangers of global climate change. Lomborg does not argue against these legitimate concerns. He argues against lax and biased use of data, particularly of time series. He warns that it is degrading science by allowing bits to be picked out of context. He is afraid that pompous statements based on flimsy evidence that also attract the media and the politicians constitute a threat to the integrity of science itself. If, in the long run, opportunistic behavior of scientists leads to disregard of some of the basic tools of science – and statistical analysis is certainly one of them – then science itself will ultimately be the loser. . . .
Lomborg questions most of our common views about the environment, the global food situation, and strategies for development assistance to the poor. He may not be right on all issues, but his plea for scientific stringency in analysis, and his exposure of false environmental prophets, are all very credible.â€
– Stein W. Bie, Director General, International Service for National Agriculture Research
“. . . [Lomborg’s book] presents the nature and extension of the problems we are faced with, as well as the ways along which they are being challenged and the results that are being obtained. The outcome is a hopeful view which should hearten all those who feel anxious about poverty and environment.â€
– Jonas H. Haralz, Former Executive Director of the World Bank for the Nordic Countries
“Based on facts and figures that are common ground to all sides of the ecological debate, this book will change forever the way you think about the state of the world. It is a remarkable, no, an extraordinary achievement.â€
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:50 pm– Tøger Seidenfaden, Executive Editor-in-Chief, Politiken
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:51 pm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/56456.stm
Correspondence on the Kyoto Protocol
Edward I. Koch
Saturday, April 24, 2004
Following is correspondence on the Kyoto Protocol that I think you will find interesting.
March 18, 2004
Professor Richard N. Gardner
Columbia Law School
435 West 116th Street
New York, New York 10027
Dear Professor Gardner:
On the Charlie Rose show recently you conveyed your support of the Kyoto Treaty and criticized President Bush’s opposition to it. I am interested in knowing why you support the treaty in view of the fact that 95 U.S. Senators, Democrats and Republicans, voted against it.
As you know, the treaty totally exempts China and India which, in the aggregate, comprise 40 percent of the world’s population, from any environmental controls. It was recently reported in the media that China has taken the place of Japan as number two, after the U.S., in the use of fossil fuels.
Under these circumstances, do you suggest that the President and 95 Senators change their position and ratify the treaty? If so, why?
All the best and many thanks.
Sincerely,
Edward I. Koch
***************************************************************************
April 5, 2004
Dear Mayor Koch:
Thank you for your letter of March 18. I certainly agree with you that the Kyoto Protocol is unacceptable in its present form. My problem with the Bush Administration is that they have given the impression that global warming is not a real problem and that the United States is unprepared to take on any international obligations to deal with it.
I was in Madrid when President Bush made his first announcement about Kyoto, and I can tell you it created a very negative reaction across the entire political spectrum, as has been true of other Bush Administration policies with respect to the Comprehensive Test Ban, the Biological Weapons Protocol, and the International Criminal Court.
One of the most damaging mistakes was the promulgation of the Bush doctrine of preventive war, which all of our allies find unacceptable, as well as totally irrelevant to the war on terrorism. The enclosed essay of mine will explain way.
With best wishes.
Richard N. Gardner
************************************************************************************
April 13, 2004
Dear Mr. Gardner:
Thanks for your April 5th response. In continuing my inquiry, it is not my intention to badger you but rather to debate the issues.
I believe the criticism of President Bush on the Kyoto Protocol by you, Senator Kennedy and others is unfair irrespective of how you otherwise feel about him. In your letter to me you agree that “the Kyoto Protocol is unacceptable in its present form.†You then defend your criticism of the Bush Administration for not supporting the protocol by stating that it has “given the impression that global warming is not a real problem. …â€
If you would not accept the current Kyoto Protocol, why did other nations accept it? I agree with you that global warming and cooling are phenomena that have reoccurred through the eons. During the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, the New York City area was under thousands of feet of ice. During the Medieval warm period, the world was warmer than it is today. This warm period was followed by the “little ice age,†which lasted for some 300 years and from which some scientists say we are still recovering. All this global warming and cooling occurred long before the industrial age, so obviously, it was not caused by human activity. Yet, like you, I side with those who believe remedial action is required. Nevertheless, those with a contrary opinion cannot be dismissed as dummies.
Senator Ted Kennedy, who voted with 94 other U.S. Senators to reject the Kyoto Protocol, like you, berates President Bush for rejecting the treaty. Again, I believe your and his criticism of President Bush in the media without at the same time stating your objections to the Kyoto Protocol is deceptive.
You are opposed to the Bush Administration having ended the ABM Treaty, as the treaty allowed it to do, so as to be free to deploy a missile shield. I am not. Do you rule out the possibility of a rogue nation like North Korea using the bomb or a nation like Pakistan with rogue scientists making the bomb available to terrorists? Has the feared Soviet nuclear buildup predicted by Bush’s opponents occurred as a result of terminating that treaty? No.
With respect to your support of the International Criminal Court, do you doubt that under today’s global political situation there would have been a clamor in some west European countries and surely in developing countries to indict as war criminals President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice? I don’t believe they are war criminals. Do you? The Belgium government, not wanting to lose the U.N. facility scheduled to be paid for by the U.S., ended its own court comparable to the International Criminal Court which had indicted President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon. Did you approve of those indictments?
You refer to the Bush doctrine of preventive war as “totally irrelevant to the war on terrorism,†and you refer to your essay on the subject which, regrettably, was not enclosed with your letter. I believe one of the great doctrines today, rivaling the Monroe and Truman doctrines, is the Bush Doctrine and his statement, “[We will] make no distinction between the terrorists who committed [the September 11] acts and those who harbor them,†a concept which you undoubtedly believe is within the concept of preemptive war.
With hindsight, shouldn’t France and England have ejected Nazi German troops from the Rhineland which they had occupied in violation of the Versailles Treaty in 1936? If they had, do you think World War II might have been avoided and millions of lives saved?
I look forward to hearing from you.
All the best.
Sincerely,
Edward I. Koch
**************************************************************************************
E-Mail Received from Mr. Gardner’s Assistant:
… Amb. Gardner is travelling and will not be able to respond to Mayor Koch for several weeks. However, in the meantime, attached is the essay referred to that was not enclosed in Gardner’s letter to Koch. Thanks.
****************************************************************************************************
E-Mail From Ed Koch to Mr. Gardner’s Assistant:
I have your e-mail reporting that Ambassador Gardner is traveling. Is it not possible to refer my e-mailed letter to him by e-mail or fax? I would appreciate your doing that.
All the best.
Ed Koch
******************************************************************************************************
Response from Mr. Gardner’s Assistant:
No, I’m sorry it’s not. But I will certainly let him know of it.
*******************************************************************************************************
March 22, 2004
The Honorable Edward M. Kennedy
United States Senate
SR-315 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-2101
Dear Senator:
I saw your interview with Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” yesterday. You were superb in stating your position on a host of issues, particularly on Iraq.
In one of your responses you stated, “Look, this nation, this president, brought us unilaterally to war. They have had a unilateral foreign policy where they rejected the Kyoto Treaty. …”
I don’t believe it was a unilateral action on the part of President Bush to reject the Kyoto Treaty in that 95 Senators voted to reject it in Senate Resolution #98. You were one of those who voted “yes” in the unanimous vote to reject it. I would ask whether in retrospect you regret not supporting the Kyoto protocol which exempted both China and India from any requirements limiting their use of fossil fuels. The Resolution resolved that “it is the sense of the Senate that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997, or thereafter, which would.”
It was recently reported that China is now the second highest user of fossil fuels replacing Japan. The United States, of course, remains number one.
I would appreciate receiving your comments on this matter.
All the best.
Sincerely,
Edward I. Koch
*****************************************************************************
No Response to Date
Edward I. Koch is the former mayor of New York City. His commentary for Bloomberg radio is republished here. You can hear his weekly radio show by going to http://www.bloomberg.com/radio.
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:54 pmGlobal Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus
Richard S. Lindzen
Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Most of the literate world today regards “global warming” as both real and dangerous. Indeed, the diplomatic activity concerning warming might lead one to believe that it is the major crisis confronting mankind. The June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focused on international agreements to deal with that threat, and the heads of state from dozens of countries attended. I must state at the outset, that, as a scientist, I can find no substantive basis for the warming scenarios being popularly described. Moreover, according to many studies I have read by economists, agronomists, and hydrologists, there would be little difficulty adapting to such warming if it were to occur. Such was also the conclusion of the recent National Research Council’s report on adapting to global change. Many aspects of the catastrophic scenario have already been largely discounted by the scientific community. For example, fears of massive sea-level increases accompanied many of the early discussions of global warming, but those estimates have been steadily reduced by orders of magnitude, and now it is widely agreed that even the potential contribution of warming to sea-level rise would be swamped by other more important factors.
To show why I assert that there is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons, I shall briefly review the science associated with those predictions.
Summary of Scientific Issues
Before even considering “greenhouse theory,” it may be helpful to begin with the issue that is almost always taken as a given–that carbon dioxide will inevitably increase to values double and even quadruple present values. Evidence from the analysis of ice cores and after 1958 from direct atmospheric sampling shows that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has been increasing since 1800. Before 1800 the density was about 275 parts per million by volume. Today it is about 355 parts per million by volume. The increase is generally believed to be due to the combination of increased burning of fossil fuels and before 1905 to deforestation. The total source is estimated to have been increasing exponentially at least until 1973. From 1973 until 1990 the rate of increase has been much slower, however. About half the production of carbon dioxide has appeared in the atmosphere.
Predicting what will happen to carbon dioxide over the next century is a rather uncertain matter. By assuming a shift toward the increased use of coal, rapid advances in the third world’s standard of living, large population increases, and a reduction in nuclear and other nonfossil fuels, one can generate an emissions scenario that will lead to a doubling of carbon dioxide by 2030–if one uses a particular model for the chemical response to carbon dioxide emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I’s model referred to that as the “business as usual” scenario. As it turns out, the chemical model used was inconsistent with the past century’s record; it would have predicted that we would already have about 400 parts per million by volume. An improved model developed at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg shows that even the “business as usual” scenario does not double carbon dioxide by the year 2100. It seems unlikely moreover that the indefinite future of energy belongs to coal. I also find it difficult to believe that technology will not lead to improved nuclear reactors within fifty years.
Nevertheless, we have already seen a significant increase in carbon dioxide that has been accompanied by increases in other minor greenhouse gases such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons. Indeed, in terms of greenhouse potential, we have had the equivalent of a 50 percent increase in carbon dioxide over the past century. The effects of those increases are certainly worth studying–quite independent of any uncertain future scenarios.
The Greenhouse Effect.
The crude idea in the common popular presentation of the greenhouse effect is that the atmosphere is transparent to sunlight (apart from the very significant reflectivity of both clouds and the surface), which heats the Earth’s surface. The surface offsets that heating by radiating in the infrared. The infrared radiation increases with increasing surface temperature, and the temperature adjusts until balance is achieved. If the atmosphere were also transparent to infrared radiation, the infrared radiation produced by an average surface temperature of minus eighteen degrees centigrade would balance the incoming solar radiation (less that amount reflected back to space by clouds). The atmosphere is not transparent in the infrared, however. So the Earth must heat up somewhat more to deliver the same flux of infrared radiation to space. That is what is called the greenhouse effect.
The fact that the Earth’s average surface temperature is fifteen degrees centigrade rather than minus eighteen degrees centigrade is attributed to that effect. The main absorbers of infrared in the atmosphere are water vapor and clouds. Even if all other greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) were to disappear, we would still be left with over 98 percent of the current greenhouse effect. Nevertheless, it is presumed that increases in carbon dioxide and other minor greenhouse gases will lead to significant increases in temperature. As we have seen, carbon dioxide is increasing. So are other minor greenhouse gases. A widely held but questionable contention is that those increases will continue along the path they have followed for the past century.
The simple picture of the greenhouse mechanism is seriously oversimplified. Many of us were taught in elementary school that heat is transported by radiation, convection, and conduction. The above representation only refers to radiative transfer. As it turns out, if there were only radiative heat transfer, the greenhouse effect would warm the Earth to about seventy-seven degrees centigrade rather than to fifteen degrees centigrade. In fact, the greenhouse effect is only about 25 percent of what it would be in a pure radiative situation. The reason for this is the presence of convection (heat transport by air motions), which bypasses much of the radiative absorption.
What is really going on is schematically illustrated in Figure 1. The surface of the Earth is cooled in large measure by air currents (in various forms including deep clouds) that carry heat upward and poleward. One consequence of this picture is that it is the greenhouse gases well above the Earth’s surface that are of primary importance in determining the temperature of the Earth. That is especially important for water vapor, whose density decreases by about a factor of 1,000 between the surface and ten kilometers above the surface. Another consequence is that one cannot even calculate the temperature of the Earth without models that accurately reproduce the motions of the atmosphere. Indeed, present models have large errors here–on the order of 50 percent. Not surprisingly, those models are unable to calculate correctly either the present average temperature of the Earth or the temperature ranges from the equator to the poles. Rather, the models are adjusted or “tuned” to get those quantities approximately right.
It is still of interest to ask what we would expect a doubling of carbon dioxide to do. A large number of calculations show that if this is all that happened, we might expect a warming of from .5 to 1.2 degrees centigrade. The general consensus is that such warming would present few, if any, problems. But even that prediction is subject to some uncertainty because of the complicated way the greenhouse effect operates. More important, the climate is a complex system where it is impossible for all other internal factors to remain constant. In present models those other factors amplify the effects of increasing carbon dioxide and lead to predictions of warming in the neighborhood of four to five degrees centigrade. Internal processes within the climate system that change in response to warming in such a manner as to amplify the response are known as positive feedbacks. Internal processes that diminish the response are known as negative feedbacks. The most important positive feedback in current models is due to water vapor. In all current models upper tropospheric (five to twelve kilometers) water vapor–the major greenhouse gas–increases as surface temperatures increase. Without that feedback, no current model would predict warming in excess of 1.7 degrees centigrade–regardless of any other factors. Unfortunately, the way current models handle factors such as clouds and water vapor is disturbingly arbitrary. In many instances the underlying physics is simply not known. In other instances there are identifiable errors. Even computational errors play a major role. Indeed, there is compelling evidence for all the known feedback factors to actually be negative. In that case, we would expect the warming response to carbon dioxide doubling alone to be diminished.
It is commonly suggested that society should not depend on negative feedbacks to spare us from a “greenhouse catastrophe.” What is omitted from such suggestions is that current models depend heavily on undemonstrated positive feedback factors to predict high levels of warming. The effects of clouds have been receiving the closest scrutiny. That is not unreasonable. Cloud cover in models is poorly treated and inaccurately predicted. Yet clouds reflect about seventy-five watts per square meter. Given that a doubling of carbon dioxide would change the surface heat flux by only two watts per square meter, it is evident that a small change in cloud cover can strongly affect the response to carbon dioxide. The situation is complicated by the fact that clouds at high altitudes can also supplement the greenhouse effect. Indeed, the effects of clouds in reflecting light and in enhancing the greenhouse effect are roughly in balance. Their actual effect on climate depends both on the response of clouds to warming and on the possible imbalance of their cooling and heating effects.
Similarly, factors involving the contribution of snow cover to reflectivity serve, in current models, to amplify warming due to increasing carbon dioxide. What happens seems reasonable enough; warmer climates presumably are associated with less snow cover and less reflectivity–which, in turn, amplify the warming. Snow is associated with winter when incident sunlight is minimal, however. Moreover, clouds shield the Earth’s surface from the sun and minimize the response to snow cover. Indeed, there is growing evidence that clouds accompany diminishing snow cover to such an extent as to make that feedback factor negative. If, however, one asks why current models predict that large warming will accompany increasing carbon dioxide, the answer is mostly due to the effect of the water vapor feedback. Current models all predict that warmer climates will be accompanied by increasing humidity at all levels. As already noted, such behavior is an artifact of the models since they have neither the physics nor the numerical accuracy to deal with water vapor. Recent studies of the physics of how deep clouds moisturize the atmosphere strongly suggest that this largest of the positive feedbacks is not only negative, but very large.
Not only are there major reasons to believe that models are exaggerating the response to increasing carbon dioxide, but, perhaps even more significantly, the models’ predictions for the past century incorrectly describe the pattern of warming and greatly overestimate its magnitude. The global average temperature record for the past century or so is irregular and not without problems. It does, however, show an average increase in temperature of about .45 degree centigrade plus or minus .15 degree centigrade with most of the increase occurring before 1940, followed by some cooling through the early 1970s and a rapid (but modest) temperature increase in the late 1970s. As noted, we have already seen an increase in “equivalent” carbon dioxide of 50 percent. Thus, on the basis of models that predict a four degree centigrade warming for a doubling of carbon dioxide we might expect to have seen a warming of two degrees centigrade already. If, however, we include the delay imposed by the oceans’ heat capacity, we might expect a warming of about one degree centigrade–which is still twice what has been observed. Moreover, most of that warming occurred before the bulk of the minor greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere. Figure 2 shows what might have been expected for models with differing sensitivities to a doubling of carbon dioxide. What we see is that the past record is most consistent with an equilibrium response to a doubling of about 1.3 degrees centigrade–assuming that all the observed warming was due to increasing carbon dioxide. There is nothing in the record that can be distinguished from the natural variability of the climate, however.
If one considers the tropics, that conclusion is even more disturbing. There is ample evidence that the average equatorial sea surface has remained within plus or minus one degree centigrade of its present temperature for billions of years, yet current models predict average warming of from two to four degrees centigrade even at the equator. It should be noted that for much of the Earth’s history, the atmosphere had much more carbon dioxide than is currently anticipated for centuries to come. I could, in fact, go on at great length listing the evidence for small responses to a doubling of carbon dioxide; there are space constraints, however.
Consensus and the Current “Popular Vision”
Many studies from the nineteenth century on suggested that industrial and other contributions to increasing carbon dioxide might lead to global warming. Problems with such predictions were also long noted, and the general failure of such predictions to explain the observed record caused the field of climatology as a whole to regard the suggested mechanisms as suspect. Indeed, the global cooling trend of the 1950s and 1960s led to a minor global cooling hysteria in the 1970s. All that was more or less normal scientific debate, although the cooling hysteria had certain striking analogues to the present warming hysteria including books such as The Genesis Strategy by Stephen Schneider and Climate Change and World Affairs by Crispin Tickell–both authors are prominent in support of the present concerns as well–”explaining” the problem and promoting international regulation. There was also a book by the prominent science writer Lowell Ponte (The Cooling) that derided the skeptics and noted the importance of acting in the absence of firm, scientific foundation. There was even a report by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reaching its usual ambiguous conclusions. But the scientific community never took the issue to heart, governments ignored it, and with rising global temperatures in the late 1970s the issue more or less died. In the meantime, model calculations–especially at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton–continued to predict substantial warming due to increasing carbon dioxide. Those predictions were considered interesting, but largely academic, exercises–even by the scientists involved.
The present hysteria formally began in the summer of 1988, although preparations had been put in place at least three years earlier. That was an especially warm summer in some regions, particularly in the United States. The abrupt increase in temperature in the late 1970s was too abrupt to be associated with the smooth increase in carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in testimony before Sen. Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space, said, in effect, that he was 99 percent certain that temperature had increased and that there was some greenhouse warming. He made no statement concerning the relation between the two.
Despite the fact that those remarks were virtually meaningless, they led the environmental advocacy movement to adopt the issue immediately. The growth of environmental advocacy since the 1970s has been phenomenal. In Europe the movement centered on the formation of Green parties; in the United States the movement centered on the development of large public interest advocacy groups. Those lobbying groups have budgets of several hundred million dollars and employ about 50,000 people; their support is highly valued by many political figures. As with any large groups, self-perpetuation becomes a crucial concern. “Global warming” has become one of the major battle cries in their fundraising efforts. At the same time, the media unquestioningly accept the pronouncements of those groups as objective truth.
Within the large-scale climate modelling community–a small subset of the community interested in climate–however, the immediate response was to criticize Hansen for publicly promoting highly uncertain model results as relevant to public policy. Hansen’s motivation was not totally obvious, but despite the criticism of Hansen, the modelling community quickly agreed that large warming was not impossible. That was still enough for both the politicians and advocates who have generally held that any hint of environmental danger is a sufficient basis for regulation unless the hint can be rigorously disproved. That is a particularly pernicious asymmetry, given that rigor is generally impossible in environmental sciences.
Other scientists quickly agreed that with increasing carbon dioxide some warming might be expected and that with large enough concentrations of carbon dioxide the warming might be significant. Nevertheless, there was widespread skepticism. By early 1989, however, the popular media in Europe and the United States were declaring that “all scientists” agreed that warming was real and catastrophic in its potential.
As most scientists concerned with climate, I was eager to stay out of what seemed like a public circus. But in the summer of 1988 Lester Lave, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote to me about being dismissed from a Senate hearing for suggesting that the issue of global warming was scientifically controversial. I assured him that the issue was not only controversial but also unlikely. In the winter of 1989 Reginald Newell, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lost National Science Foundation funding for data analyses that were failing to show net warming over the past century. Reviewers suggested that his results were dangerous to humanity. In the spring of 1989 I was an invited participant at a global warming symposium at Tufts University. I was the only scientist among a panel of environmentalists. There were strident calls for immediate action and ample expressions of impatience with science. Claudine Schneider, then a congressman from Rhode Island, acknowledged that “scientists may disagree, but we can hear Mother Earth, and she is crying.” It seemed clear to me that a very dangerous situation was arising, and the danger was not of “global warming” itself.
In the spring of 1989 I prepared a critique of global warming, which I submitted to Science, a magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The paper was rejected without review as being of no interest to the readership. I then submitted the paper to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, where it was accepted after review, rereviewed, and reaccepted–an unusual procedure to say the least. In the meantime, the paper was attacked in Science before it had even been published. The paper circulated for about six months as samizdat. It was delivered at a Humboldt conference at M.I.T. and reprinted in the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
In the meantime, the global warming circus was in full swing. Meetings were going on nonstop. One of the more striking of those meetings was hosted in the summer of 1989 by Robert Redford at his ranch in Sundance, Utah. Redford proclaimed that it was time to stop research and begin acting. I suppose that that was a reasonable suggestion for an actor to make, but it is also indicative of the overall attitude toward science. Barbara Streisand personally undertook to support the research of Michael Oppenheimer at the Environmental Defense Fund, although he is primarily an advocate and not a climatologist. Meryl Streep made an appeal on public television to stop warming. A bill was even prepared to guarantee Americans a stable climate.
By the fall of 1989 some media were becoming aware that there was controversy (Forbes and Reader’s Digest were notable in that regard). Cries followed from environmentalists that skeptics were receiving excessive exposure. The publication of my paper was followed by a determined effort on the part of the editor of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Richard Hallgren, to solicit rebuttals. Such articles were prepared by Stephen Schneider and Will Kellogg, a minor scientific administrator for the past thirty years, and those articles were followed by an active correspondence mostly supportive of the skeptical spectrum of views. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll of climate scientists in the American Meteorological Society and in the American Geophysical Union shows that a vast majority doubts that there has been any identifiable man-caused warming to date (49 percent asserted no, 33 percent did not know, 18 percent thought some has occurred; however, among those actively involved in research and publishing frequently in peer-reviewed research journals, none believes that any man-caused global warming has been identified so far). On the whole, the debate within the meteorological community has been relatively healthy and, in this regard, unusual.
Outside the world of meteorology, Greenpeace’s Jeremy Legett, a geologist by training, published a book attacking critics of warming—especially me. George Mitchell, Senate majority leader and father of a prominent environmental activist, also published a book urging acceptance of the warming problem (World on Fire: Saving an Endangered Earth). Sen. Gore recently published a book (Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit). Those are just a few examples of the rapidly growing publications on warming. Rarely has such meager science provoked such an outpouring of popularization by individuals who do not understand the subject in the first place.
The activities of the Union of Concerned Scientists deserve special mention. That widely supported organization was originally devoted to nuclear disarmament. As the cold war began to end, the group began to actively oppose nuclear power generation. Their position was unpopular with many physicists. Over the past few years, the organization has turned to the battle against global warming in a particularly hysterical manner. In 1989 the group began to circulate a petition urging recognition of global warming as potentially the great danger to mankind. Most recipients who did not sign were solicited at least twice more. The petition was eventually signed by 700 scientists including a great many members of the National Academy of Sciences and Nobel laureates. Only about three or four of the signers, however, had any involvement in climatology. Interestingly, the petition had two pages, and on the second page there was a call for renewed consideration of nuclear power. When the petition was published in the New York Times, however, the second page was omitted. In any event, that document helped solidify the public perception that “all scientists” agreed with the disaster scenario. Such a disturbing abuse of scientific authority was not unnoticed. At the 1990 annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Frank Press, the academy’s president, warned the membership against lending their credibility to issues about which they had no special knowledge. Special reference was made to the published petition. In my opinion what the petition did show was that the need to fight “global warming” has become part of the dogma of the liberal conscience–a dogma to which scientists are not immune.
At the same time, political pressures on dissidents from the “popular vision” increased. Sen. Gore publicly admonished “skeptics” in a lengthy New York Times op-ed piece. In a perverse example of double-speak he associated the “true believers” in warming with Galileo. He also referred, in another article, to the summer of 1988 as the Kristallnacht before the warming holocaust.
The notion of “scientific unanimity” is currently intimately tied to the Working Group I report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued in September 1990. That panel consists largely of scientists posted to it by government agencies. The panel has three working groups. Working Group I nominally deals with climate science. Approximately 150 scientists contributed to the report, but university representation from the United States was relatively small and is likely to remain so, since the funds and time needed for participation are not available to most university scientists. Many governments have agreed to use that report as the authoritative basis for climate policy. The report, as such, has both positive and negative features. Methodologically, the report is deeply committed to reliance on large models, and within the report models are largely verified by comparison with other models. Given that models are known to agree more with each other than with nature (even after “tuning”), that approach does not seem promising. In addition, a number of the participants have testified to the pressures placed on them to emphasize results supportive of the current scenario and to suppress other results. That pressure has frequently been effective, and a survey of participants reveals substantial disagreement with the final report. Nonetheless, the body of the report is extremely ambiguous, and the caveats are numerous. The report is prefaced by a policymakers’ summary written by the editor, Sir John Houghton, director of the United Kingdom Meteorological Office. His summary largely ignores the uncertainty in the report and attempts to present the expectation of substantial warming as firmly based science. The summary was published as a separate document, and, it is safe to say that policymakers are unlikely to read anything further. On the basis of the summary, one frequently hears that “hundreds of the world’s greatest climate scientists from dozens of countries all agreed that.|.|.|.” It hardly matters what the agreement refers to, since whoever refers to the summary insists that it agrees with the most extreme scenarios (which, in all fairness, it does not). I should add that the climatology community, until the past few years, was quite small and heavily concentrated in the United States and Europe.
While the International Panel on Climate Change’s reports were in preparation, the National Research Council in the United States was commissioned to prepare a synthesis of the current state of the global change situation. The panel chosen was hardly promising. It had no members of the academy expert in climate. Indeed, it had only one scientist directly involved in climate, Stephen Schneider, who is an ardent environmental advocate. It also included three professional environmental advocates, and it was headed by a former senator, Dan Evans. The panel did include distinguished scientists and economists outside the area of climate, and, perhaps because of this, the report issued by the panel was by and large fair. The report concluded that the scientific basis for costly action was absent, although prudence might indicate that actions that were cheap or worth doing anyway should be considered. A subcommittee of the panel issued a report on adaptation that argued that even with the more severe warming scenarios, the United States would have little difficulty adapting. Not surprisingly, the environmentalists on the panel not only strongly influenced the reports, but failing to completely have their way, attempted to distance themselves from the reports by either resigning or by issuing minority dissents. Equally unsurprising is the fact that the New York Times typically carried reports on that panel on page 46. The findings were never subsequently discussed in the popular media–except for claims that the reports supported the catastrophic vision. Nevertheless, the reports of that panel were indicative of the growing skepticism concerning the warming issue.
Indeed, the growing skepticism is in many ways remarkable. One of the earliest protagonists of global warming, Roger Revelle, the late professor of ocean sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who initiated the direct monitoring of carbon dioxide during the International Geophysical Year (1958), coauthored with S. Fred Singer and Chauncy Starr a paper recommending that action concerning global warming be delayed insofar as current knowledge was totally inadequate. Another active advocate of global warming, Michael McElroy, head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, has recently written a paper acknowledging that existing models cannot be used to forecast climate.
One might think that such growing skepticism would have some influence on public debate, but the insistence on “scientific unanimity” continues unabated. At times, that insistence takes some very strange forms. Over a year ago, Robert White, former head of the U.S. Weather Bureau and currently president of the National Academy of Engineering, wrote an article for Scientific American that pointed out that the questionable scientific basis for global warming predictions was totally inadequate to justify any costly actions. He did state that if one were to insist on doing something, one should only do things that one would do even if there were no warming threat. Immediately after that article appeared, Tom Wicker, a New York Times columnist and a confidant of Sen. Gore, wrote a piece in which he stated that White had called for immediate action on “global warming.” My own experiences have been similar. In an article in Audubon Stephen Schneider states that I have “conceded that some warming now appears inevitable.” Differences between expectations of unmeasurable changes of a few tenths of a degree and warming of several degrees are conveniently ignored. Karen White in a lengthy and laudatory article on James Hansen that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine reported that even I agreed that there would be warming, having “reluctantly offered an estimate of 1.2 degrees.” That was, of course, untrue.
Most recently, I testified at a Senate hearing conducted by Sen. Gore. There was a rather arcane discussion of the water vapor in the upper troposphere. Two years ago, I had pointed out that if the source of water vapor in that region in the tropics was from deep clouds, then surface warming would be accompanied by reduced upper level water vapor. Subsequent research has established that there must be an additional source–widely believed to be ice crystals thrown off by those deep clouds. I noted that that source too probably acts to produce less moisture in a warmer atmosphere. Both processes cause the major feedback process to become negative rather than positive. Sen. Gore asked whether I now rejected my suggestion of two years ago as a major factor. I answered that I did. Gore then called for the recording secretary to note that I had retracted my objections to “global warming.” In the ensuing argument, involving mostly other participants in the hearing, Gore was told that he was confusing matters. Shortly thereafter, however, Tom Wicker published an article in the New York Times that claimed that I had retracted my opposition to warming and that that warranted immediate action to curb the purported menace. I wrote a letter to the Times indicating that my position had been severely misrepresented, and, after a delay of over a month, my letter was published. Sen. Gore nonetheless claims in his book that I have indeed retracted my scientific objections to the catastrophic warming scenario and also warns others who doubt the scenario that they are hurting humanity.
Why, one might wonder, is there such insistence on scientific unanimity on the warming issue? After all, unanimity in science is virtually nonexistent on far less complex matters. Unanimity on an issue as uncertain as “global warming” would be surprising and suspicious. Moreover, why are the opinions of scientists sought regardless of their field of expertise? Biologists and physicians are rarely asked to endorse some theory in high energy physics. Apparently, when one comes to “global warming,” any scientist’s agreement will do.
The answer almost certainly lies in politics. For example, at the Earth Summit in Rio, attempts were made to negotiate international carbon emission agreements. The potential costs and implications of such agreements are likely to be profound for both industrial and developing countries. Under the circumstances, it would be very risky for politicians to undertake such agreements unless scientists “insisted.” Nevertheless, the situation is probably a good deal more complicated than that example suggests.
The Temptation and Problems of “Global Warming”
As Aaron Wildavsky, professor of political science at Berkeley, has quipped, “global warming” is the mother of all environmental scares. Wildavsky’s view is worth quoting. “Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.” In many ways Wildavsky’s observation does not go far enough. The point is that carbon dioxide is vitally central to industry, transportation, modern life, and life in general. It has been joked that carbon dioxide controls would permit us to inhale as much as we wish; only exhaling would be controlled. The remarkable centrality of carbon dioxide means that dealing with the threat of warming fits in with a great variety of preexisting agendas–some legitimate, some less so: energy efficiency, reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil, dissatisfaction with industrial society (neopastoralism), international competition, governmental desires for enhanced revenues (carbon taxes), and bureaucratic desires for enhanced power.
The very scale of the problem as popularly portrayed and the massive scale of the suggested responses have their own appeal. The Working Group I report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested, for example, that a 60 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions might be needed. Such a reduction would call for measures that would be greater than those that have been devoted to war and defense. And just as defense has dealt with saving one’s nation, curbing “global warming” is identified with saving the whole planet! It may not be fortuitous that this issue is being promoted at just the moment in history when the cold war is ending.
Major agencies in the United States, hitherto closely involved with traditional approaches to national security, have appropriated the issue of climate change to support existing efforts. Notable among those agencies are NASA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy. The cold war helped spawn a large body of policy experts and diplomats specializing in issues such as disarmament and alliance negotiations. In addition, since the Yom Kippur War, energy has become a major component of national security with the concomitant creation of a large cadre of energy experts. Many of those individuals see in the global change issue an area in which to continue applying their skills. Many scientists also feel that national security concerns formed the foundation for the U.S. government’s generous support of science. As the urgency of national security, traditionally defined, diminishes, there is a common feeling that a substitute foundation must be established. “Saving the planet” has the right sort of sound to it. Fundraising has become central to environmental advocates’ activities, and the message underlying some of their fundraising seems to be “pay us or you’ll fry.”
Clearly, “global warming” is a tempting issue for many very important groups to exploit. Equally clearly, though far less frequently discussed, are the profound dangers in exploiting that issue. As we shall also see, there are good reasons why there has been so little discussion of the downside of responding to “global warming.”
A parochial issue is the danger to the science of climatology. As far as I can tell, there has actually been reduced funding for existing climate research. That may seem paradoxical, but, at least in the United States, the vastly increased number of scientists and others involving themselves in climate as well as the gigantic programs attaching themselves to climate have substantially outstripped the increases in funding. Perhaps more important are the pressures being brought to bear on scientists to get the “right” results. Such pressures are inevitable, given how far out on a limb much of the scientific community has gone. The situation is compounded by the fact that some of the strongest proponents of “global warming” in Congress are also among the major supporters of science (Sen. Gore is notable among those). Finally, given the momentum that has been building up among so many interest groups to fight “global warming,” it becomes downright embarrassing to support basic climate research. After all, one would hate to admit that one had mobilized so many resources without the basic science’s being in place. Nevertheless, given the large increase in the number of people associating themselves with climatology and the dependence of much of that community on the perceived threat of warming, it seems unlikely that the scientific community will offer much resistance. I should add that as ever greater numbers of individuals attach themselves to the warming problem, the pressures against solving the problem grow proportionally; an inordinate number of individuals and groups depend on the problem’s remaining.
In addition to climatologists, are there other groups that are at risk? Here, one might expect that industry could be vulnerable, and, indeed, it may be. At least in the United States, however, industries seem to be primarily concerned with improving their public image, often by supporting environmental activists. Moreover, some industries have become successful at profiting from environmental regulation. The most obvious example is the waste management industry. Even electric utility companies have been able to use environmental measures to increase the base on which their regulated profits are calculated. It is worth noting that about 1.7 trillion dollars have been spent on the environment over the past decade. The environment, itself, qualifies as one of our major industries.
If Wildavsky’s scenario is correct, the major losers would be ordinary people. Wealth that could have been used to raise living standards in much of the world would be squandered. Living standards in the developed world would decrease. Regulatory apparatuses would restrict individual freedom on an unprecedented scale. Here too, however, one cannot expect much resistance to proposed actions–at least not initially. Public perceptions, under the influence of extensive, deceptive, and one-sided publicity, can become disconnected from reality. For example, Alabama has had a pronounced cooling trend since 1935. Nevertheless, a poll among professionals in Alabama found that about 95 percent of the participants believed that the climate had been warming over the past fifty years and that the warming was due to the greenhouse effect. Public misperceptions coupled with a sincere desire to “save the planet” can force political action even when politicians are aware of the reality.
What the above amounts to is a societal instability. At a particular point in history, a relatively minor suggestion or event serves to mobilize massive interests. While the proposed measures may be detrimental, resistance is largely absent or coopted. In the case of climate change, the probability that the proposed regulatory actions would for the most part have little impact on climate, regardless of the scenario chosen, appears to be of no consequence.
Modelling and Societal Instability
So far I have emphasized the political elements in the current climate hysteria. There can be no question, however, that scientists are abetting this situation. Concerns about funding have already been mentioned. There is, however, another perhaps more important element to the scientific support. The existence of modern computing power has led to innumerable modelling efforts in many fields. Supercomputers have allowed us to consider the behavior of systems seemingly too complex for other approaches. One of those systems is climate. Not surprisingly, there are many problems involved in modelling climate. For example, even supercomputers are inadequate to allow long-term integrations of the relevant equations at adequate spatial resolutions. At presently available resolutions, it is unlikely that the computer solutions are close to the solutions of the underlying equations. In addition, the physics of unresolved phenomena such as clouds and other turbulent elements is not understood to the extent needed for incorporation into models. In view of those problems, it is generally recognized that models are at present experimental tools whose relation to the real world is questionable.
While there is nothing wrong in using those models in an experimental mode, there is a real dilemma when they predict potentially dangerous situations. Should scientists publicize such predictions since the models are almost certainly wrong? Is it proper to not publicize the predictions if the predicted danger is serious? How is the public to respond to such predictions? The difficulty would be diminished if the public understood how poor the models actually are. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to hold in awe anything that emerges from a sufficiently large computer. There is also a reluctance on the part of many modellers to admit to the experimental nature of their models lest public support for their efforts diminish. Nevertheless, with poor and uncertain models in wide use, predictions of ominous situations are virtually inevitable–regardless of reality.
Such weak predictions feed and contribute to what I have already described as a societal instability that can cascade the most questionable suggestions of danger into major political responses with massive economic and social consequences. I have already discussed some of the reasons for this instability: the existence of large cadres of professional planners looking for work, the existence of advocacy groups looking for profitable causes, the existence of agendas in search of saleable rationales, and the ability of many industries to profit from regulation, coupled with an effective neutralization of opposition. It goes almost without saying that the dangers and costs of those economic and social consequences may be far greater than the original environmental danger. That becomes especially true when the benefits of additional knowledge are rejected and when it is forgotten that improved technology and increased societal wealth are what allow society to deal with environmental threats most effectively. The control of societal instability may very well be the real challenge facing us.
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:56 pmA Bit of History for Global Warmers: Look at 1930
By Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor
August 04, 2006
(CNSNews.com) – People sweltering from a heat wave in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. might find cold comfort in the fact that the temperatures of the past few days are not the hottest on record. That “honor” belongs to a summer 76 years ago — decades before the controversy over “man-made global warming” began.
“From June 1 to August 31, 1930, 21 days had high temperatures that were 100 degrees or above” in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, Patrick Michaels, senior fellow for environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Cybercast News Service. “That summer has never been approached, and it’s not going to be approached this year.”
Between July 19 and Aug. 9 of that year, heat records were set on nine days and they remain unbroken more than three-quarters of a century later. “That’s hot,” added Michaels, who also serves as professor of natural resources at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va.
The summer of 1930 also marked the beginning of the longest drought of the 20th century. In 1934, dry regions stretched from New York and Pennsylvania across the Great Plains to California. A “dust bowl” covered about 50 million acres in the south-central plains during the winter of 1935-1936.
However, the first six months of this year were the hottest across the nation since the federal government began keeping records in 1890, according to Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who told NBC News that about 50 all-time high-temperature records were broken during the month of July.
But Michaels noted that high temperatures are common in the middle of the summer.
“Climatologically, the last week in July is the warmest week of the year on average, and when the atmospheric flow patterns get into anomalously warm configurations during this time of the year, temperatures will skyrocket,” he said.
Along with an unusual upper-air pattern, the Washington, D.C., area “was exceedingly dry” during the summer of 1930, Michaels stated.
“Generally speaking, when the ground is moist here, temperatures cap out in the high 90s,” he noted. “That’s because the sun’s energy is divided into evaporating water and directly heating the surface. If the surface is dry, then everything goes into heating the surface, and you get exceedingly hot temperatures like you saw in 1930.
“Big cities are getting warmer — with or without global warming — because the bricks and the buildings and the pavement retain heat,” Michaels added. For that reason, he prefers to compare temperatures in nearby rural areas. “There’s been very little change” in those areas, “so we trust the record to be a reliable indicator of base climate.”
Residents of the nation’s capital can look forward to some relief, as weather forecasts for the weekend call for a cooling trend. “If we were going to go into the 100s — the 103 and 104 degree range — we would have done it, but there’s just a little bit too much moisture in the surface to allow that to happen,” Michaels said. He noted, however, that temperatures are expected to rise again next week.
The mid-summer temperatures have provided more opportunities for environmentalists subscribing to the theory that man is responsible for the current global warming.
Jay Gulledge, senior research fellow for science and impacts at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told NBC News on Wednesday that “this heat wave and other extreme events we’ve seen in recent years are completely consistent with what we expect to become more common as a result of global warming, even though we can’t be definitive on any single event.”
Michaels acknowledged that “global temperatures have been warming slightly for several decades” and noted that the surface of the world “is a little bit warmer than it was in the 1930s” even though “temperatures dropped between 1940 and 1975.”
“Usually, the way the jet stream breaks out is very hot in the East and relatively cool in the West or vice versa,” he said. “This time around, it looks more like the summers of the 1930s,” but he dismissed the idea that the extreme temperatures of that time were caused by man-made “global warming” since “it wasn’t around then.”
Although the recent heat wave have not convinced Michaels that “global warming” is a severe problem, it was apparently enough to make a “convert” out of conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson.
“We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels,” Robertson said during his “700 Club” broadcast on Thursday. The high temperatures in some regions of the U.S. East are “the most convincing evidence I’ve seen on global warming in a long time,” he added.
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:57 pmMisled again: The Hockey Stick climate
History is flawed, and so is the process by which its author’s claims have been adjudicated
Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick
Financial Post
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Many people have heard the claim that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the warmest year. Environment Canada headlined them on pamphlets mailed across the country a few years ago. These claims interested us in verifying exactly how scientists were able to assert so confidently that the late 20th century was warmer than when the Vikings were farming Greenland (the Medieval Warm Period). Last year, the National Post profiled our published research, which had identified major flaws in what was called the Hockey Stick — a graph prominently featured in a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.
We knew that calling this icon into question would be controversial, but we did not expect it would spark a battle between two powerful committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and lead to the formation of a blue-chip panel of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Shortly after last year’s Post profile, The Wall Street Journal did a long article interviewing both us and the principal Hockey Stick author, Michael Mann. In that article, Mann was quoted as saying he would not be “intimidated” into disclosing the algorithm by which he obtained his results.
This attracted the interest of the U.S. House energy and commerce committee. Its members read our articles and became concerned about our allegations that Mann had withheld adverse statistical results and that his results depended on bristlecone pine ring widths, well known to be a questionable measure for temperature. In June, 2005, they sent questions to Mann and his co-authors about verification statistics and bristlecone pines, asked Mann for the algorithm he used and asked pro forma questions about federal funds used for their research.
This prompted a storm of controversy, ironically centring on allegations of “intimidation.” Various learned societies, none of which had been offended by Mann’s public refusal to provide full disclosure, were outraged that a House committee, representing the taxpayers who had paid for the results, should be trying to find out how he got them.
Then a turf war broke out. The House’s science committee felt that its jurisdiction had been impinged upon and asked the energy and commerce committee to butt out. After a few months of fencing in late 2005, the science committee asked the NAS to evaluate criticisms of Mann’s work, and to assess the larger issue of historical climate data reconstructions.
The NAS agreed to the science committee’s request, but only under terms that precluded a direct investigation of the issues that prompted the original dispute — whether Mann et al. had withheld adverse results and whether the data and methodological information necessary for replication were available.
In February, 2006, the NAS appointed a panel of 12 eminent academics involved in climate science but not directly involved in the temperature reconstructions of the past 1,000 years. They were not an entirely “independent” panel, as some were occasional co-authors with the Hockey Stick authors. But even this limited independence was a major departure from procedures of the IPCC, which permits authors actively involved in scientific controversy to summarize the research — even if they end up acting as reviewers of their own work!
In March, 2006, the NAS panel held meetings in Washington at which we made a presentation (along with Mann and seven other scientists in the field).
On July 6, the panel issued a 155-page report, which managed the delicate feat of accepting virtually all the criticisms of the Hockey Stick while still saying polite things about it. A European climate scientist, who understood the balancing act, wrote us afterwards to point out it was the most severe criticism of the Hockey Stick nowadays possible.
At the NAS panel, we said that Mann’s principal components were biased toward producing hockey stick-shaped series; the NAS agreed. We said that bristlecones were not a reliable temperature proxy; the NAS agreed and said they should be “avoided.” We said that Mann’s reconstruction failed important verification tests; the NAS agreed. We said that more than one test statistic should be reported when assessing statistical validity; the NAS agreed. We said that current methods underestimated the inherent uncertainty; the NAS agreed. On and on. On no occasion was any claim of ours refuted.
Our original articles argued that Mann’s data and methodology did not permit him to claim with confidence that 1998 was the “warmest year” of the millennium or that the 1990s were the warmest decade. The NAS panel even agreed with this. After observing that little confidence could be placed in reconstructions before 1600, they stated: Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium …”
Based on some other studies, they conceded that Mann’s reconstruction was still “plausible” but, contrary to the IPCC, they said it was impossible to put confidence intervals on this opinion.
The House science committee had asked the NAS panel to report on whether paleoclimate authors were withholding data and methods. The panel chairman said this topic was “too big” for them to answer. The NAS apparently plans a new panel on the generic subject of availability of scientific data.
The NAS panel drew attention to other recent studies claiming that the 20th century was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period. We’ve attempted to replicate these other studies as well, only to run into one obstacle after another in identifying data and methods — similar to the problems that led to the original congressional questions about the Mann study. In one case, the authors even refused to identify the sites from which data was collected for their study!
Despite these pointless obstacles, we know enough about the “other studies” to be confident that none of them meets the methodological standards now recommended by the panel. In fact, somewhat remarkably, two of the most recent studies even continue to use Mann’s discredited principal components series.
In its press release, the NAS headlined that the present era is the warmest in 400 years. However, long before anyone had ever heard of the IPCC or the Hockey Stick, this was the prevailing view of scientists, who coined the term Little Ice Age to refer to the period leading up to modern warming. It isn’t news to say the average temperature is higher now compared to the past 400 years. It was news in 2001 when the IPCC claimed with confidence that the 1990s were the warmest in 1,000 years. The real news from the NAS is that it disagreed and withdrew any claim to confidence prior to 1600.
At the NAS press conference, the panel was asked about “overselling” of the warmest-in-a-millennium claim and whether any lessons could be learned. Panel chairman Gerry North noted that the Mann paper was very recent when this claim was made and observed that it was “very dangerous to pull one paper out of the literature fresh before it’s had time to season.” However, the panel did not comment on IPCC procedures that invited this problem.
The IPCC lead author who selected Mann’s reconstruction for prominent display in the review of millennial temperature history was none other than Mann himself. At the time, he was a fresh and ambitious PhD, an odd choice to write the “consensus” review of climate history.
The system that allows such conflicts of interest has been severely criticized by some senior climate scientists, including Hans von Storch of Germany. However, the flawed process remains unchanged for the next IPCC assessment report, due in January, 2007. As reviewers of that report, we have expressed concerns to the IPCC about prominent use of graphics and empirical results from the lead authors’ own freshly published papers, which have not been in print long enough to have undergone adequate, independent review and assessment and, in some cases, not even long enough to meet IPCC publication deadlines.
In our opinion, most of the press coverage to date missed one of the biggest stories.
When asked at the press conference about lessons that could be learned, panelist Kurt Cuffey said the prominent use of the Hockey Stick graphic by the IPCC sent “a very misleading message.” He said the over-selling did not come from the “science community,” but from the “interaction of part of the science community with the broader public discourse and in particular with the way the [Mann et al.] reconstruction was used by the IPCC in the 2001 report.”
But haven’t we been told that the IPCC is the “science community?” If a knowledgeable observer such as Cuffey distinguishes the two, blaming the IPCC while defending the “science community,” shouldn’t we be trying to figure out exactly how the IPCC process ended up sending out a “very misleading message?” And if the process has not been fixed — and there is no evidence that it has — how do we know that the IPCC won’t send another equally “misleading” message in the upcoming Fourth Assessment report?
Steve McIntyre is a retired mineral exploration businessman who operates http://www.climateaudit.org.
Ross McKitrick is an associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph.
August 22nd, 2006 at 3:00 pm[...] [...]
April 13th, 2008 at 6:03 am