Welcome to the latest edition of the PowerBlog’s GLOBAL WARMING CONSENSUS WATCH, a weekly news recap where we highlight the continuing strength and enduring permanence of the universal scientific consensus on the causes and effects of global warming.
THIS WEEK: A fungus among us – again; more on Mars; are weather satellites creating more hurricanes?; Live Earth isn’t totally worthless; Laurie David is the GREATEST HERO IN AMERICAN HISTORY; and human sacrifice on the altar of environmental religion.
All this can be yours – after the jump!
- Welcome back, St. George: An interesting tidbit over at Planet Gore about the St. George’s Mushroom:so named because in days long gone it could be harvested on the saint’s day, 23rd April. However, a few decades ago, the average fruiting time for this fungus was mid-May. More recently, this has moved forward to 22nd or 23rd April, making the name apt once more. Although reported as a sign of current climate change, the other implication is, of course, that the climate in this country was indeed warmer in centuries gone by.
- Red Planet Getting Redder: More confirmation this week that Mars is also experiencing some climate change, and by golly, it seems familiar:
Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.
Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.
If only there were some common thread linking the two planets, perhaps some heavenly body that generated heat the the two held in common that could help to explain this phenomenon…
- Weather Satellites Cause Hurricanes! Oh, I’m sorry. I misread the article. It seems that the reason that there are so many more hurricanes these days is that we just didn’t notice the ones that didn’t make landfall:
…the Houston Chronicle’s Eric Berger calls attention to a new paper by the National Hurricane Center’s Chris Landsea, which suggests that hurricanes may not be more numerous now than they were in the first several decades of the 20th Century. Instead, he suggests, we’ve simply gotten better at spotting hurricanes that don’t make landfall than we were in the years before we started launching weather-watching satellites into space.
- While We’re on the Subject of Hurricanes: We’ve got another scientist off the reservation – a hurricane forecaster saying that it’s “crazy” to blame humans for global warming:
The United States’ leading hurricane forecaster said Friday that global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming, and the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years.
William Gray, a Colorado State University researcher best known for his annual forecasts of hurricanes along the U.S. Atlantic coast, also said increasing levels of carbon dioxide will not produce more or stronger hurricanes.
He said that over the past 40 years the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined compared with the previous 40 years, even though carbon dioxide levels have risen.
Gray, speaking to a group of Republican state lawmakers, had harsh words for researchers and politicians who say man-made greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming.
“They’re blaming it all on humans, which is crazy,” he said. “We’re not the cause of it.”
Via Hot Air
- “So when you’re playing you feel like a preserved moose on stage?” “Yeah.” More proof that good things can come from bad ideas: There’s a new Spinal Tap short film. Rob Reiner managed to take some time away from misappropriating taxpayer funds in California in order to put together a reunion of the world’s greatest heavy metal band for the Live Earth concerts this July, as well as a 15 minute film updating us on the lives of Nigel Tufnel, Derek Smalls, and David St. Hubbins (named, of course, for the patron saint of quality footwear). It’s comforting for me to know that St. Hubbins has always been “anti-devestation.” If you’re a Tap fan, you can see the film here.
- Global warming is a terrifying crisis and we all should make inconsequential changes in our lives to fight it: Check out the responses to these two questions from an interview with Laurie David, producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and partner in crime with Sheryl “One Wipe” Crow:
4 So how do you react to the Bush administration’s stance on global warming?
It’s terrifying. I’ve spent a lot of time saying to people that I believe the changes are going to come when these guys are still in office. I don’t personally believe we have two years to waste before we start solving this. I’m not focused on ’08. I’m focused on right now. Here’s a perfect analogy: if you had a choice between being in a 5 mile-per-hour car accident or a 50 mile-per-hour car accident, what would you choose? I would choose everything we have to do avoid the larger collision ahead.
5 What changes have you made in your own life?
I don’t believe everyone has to do everything. I don’t do everything. It’s about everyone doing something. I have changed as many lightbulbs as I could to (higher efficiency) bulbs. I started a new idling rule at the school carpool lane (cars dropping and picking up kids can’t idle their engines more than 30 seconds). I bring a garment bag to the dry cleaners (instead of having the dry cleaners wrap her clothes in petroleum-based plastic). I drive a hybrid.
Now, I realize that I don’t operate in the same level of fame and media attention that Laurie David does, but seriously – if you’re a big global warming alarmist and you’re being interviewed on that topic, don’t you bring your A game? She gets points for the first response: Global Warming is “terrifying”; we have little to no time to waste in dealing with it; we need to do “everything” to avoid the catastrophe. That’s some Grade-A crisis hyping there. But after laying out a scenario of pure terror and catastrophe, she’s personally responding by… changing lightbulbs? Shutting the car off instead of letting it idle? That’s it?!? That’s like finding out there’s an armed madman outside your house and responding by putting away the good china and calling your legislator to complain about rising crime rates.
If global warming is as much of a crisis as David and Gore and the other alarmists want us to believe, I would hope that their actions would match their rhetoric. But based on what I’ve seen – which amounts to driving hybrids, swapping lightbulbs, and engaging in carbon offset schemes – I don’t get the sense that any of the celebrity GW endorsers truly believe what they’re saying.
- Human sacrifices to the false god of the environment: In a Reuters article entitled “Poor nations brake greenhouse gas rise: U.N. draft,” Hu Tao of China’s State Environmental Protection Agency claimed that China’s one-child policy may be helping to slow the rise of global temperatures:
He said China’s one-child per couple policy introduced in the early 1980s, for instance, had a side-effect of braking global warming by limiting the population to 1.3 billion against a projected 1.6 billion without the policy.
“This has reduced greenhouse gas emissions,” he told a conference in Oslo last month. China is the number two emitter of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, behind the United States and ahead of Russia.
Well, that’s a convenient spin on China’s policy of forced abortions. Well, we know that modern environmentalism compares favorably with a religious system, and since there’s a strong belief that primitive societies are better for the earth than modern technological societies, why not just adopt some primitive religious practices as well? After all, the Earth is obviously an angry god, and it needs to be appeased before we can hope to live in harmony with it again.
