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Prince Albert II of Monaco is at the South Pole to raise awareness about
global warming (AP Photo/Monaco Palace)
With forty-six percent of American voters believing there is a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection environmentalists are facing an uphill battle. In a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, released today, a majority say global warming can’t be blamed on humans. Forty-four percent said long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who fault it on human activity.
“The wheels are falling off the global-warming bandwagon “said H. Sterling Burnett, an environmental- and energy expert at The National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas. “While climate action boosters continue to call for politicians to ignore reality – even in the face of mounting contrary evidence against catastrophic warming – scientists, the public and politicians are wising up”.
Dr. Burnett said the global average temperature has fallen to its lowest levels in 30 years, and noted that after two years of ice-cap melting in the Arctic, an abrupt turnaround occurred in 2008, with ice forming at record pace.
Still, Greenland is experiencing a farming boom growing broccoli, potatoes and hay, and the ice free Northwest Passage helps ship circumvent the Panama Canal, shortening a voyage between Seattle and Rotterdam with 25%. Countries are also scrambling to carve out the region. The Russians placed, for example, a flag on the North Pole’s sea floor last year, turning climate change – man made or not – into a geopolitical matter.
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Comments
I am amazed how a story about AGW's failure to convince is being spun to make it look as if the warming hype was real. Instead of spin and hype we need to look at the facts.
First, the Northwest Passage was sailed by a WOODEN ship early in the last century, which is a feat that is unlikely to be repeated in modern times when the ice cover is likely greater.
Second, it was likely that the Northwest Passage also had less ice cover in the 1930s when governments sent out ships to investigate the unprecedented warming that didn't last very long.
Third, there are not going to be many ships that circumvent the Panama Canal in favour of the Northwest Passage unless they have access to icebreakers that can clear the way for them. This summer's hyped (and failed) kayak trip to the pole was accompanied by an ice breaker that was named after the leader of the expedition that crossed the Passage in the wooden ship early last century. We can talk about ice free conditions when modern explorers can repeat that feat. Of course, given the rapid recovery of Arctic ice, we are unlikely to see anyone attempt such a stunt for quite some time.
We also need to keep in mind that polar ice cover is not just governed by global temperature changes. How much ice we have depends more on the phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation and on wind patterns than it does on surface temperatures.
Now that we have that out of the way, we need to get back to the real issue. The bottom line is that we have no evidence of surface warming for a decade and last year's average temperature is near the 110 year mean although CO2 concentrations are far above the average concentrations measured during that period. We also see several long cooling periods since 1885 even though the rise in CO2 concentrations has been persistent. If we look at anomalies, we find that there were more years in the top ten warmest from the 1930s than there were in the hyped up 1990s even though the 1990s data has overestimates warming because of the urban heat island effect and the elimination of stations after the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s.
The bottom line is that after billions spent on research that was supposed to prove the thesis that man's emissions of CO2 are driving temperatures higher the scientific evidence shows the opposite. CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas that has a very small logarithmic effect on climate. Its predicted fingerprint in the mid-troposphere has not been detected after 20 years of trying to measure it, which means that the effect has been overestimated by the IPCC and the AGW industry looking for grants and the passage of legislation that will divert wealth from normal people to special interest groups and connected companies that can cash in on the changes.
It is time to grow up and look at things as they are rather than as we imagined them to be.
Burnett is a liar when he claims that global average temperatures have fallen to their lowest level in 30 years. Preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that 2008 was tied for the 8th warmest year since the 1870s.
Don't read rants from the ill-informed. Read what scientists with genuine expertise in climate science have to say. Go to the NASA and NOAA websites to get real data.
The question about the ice is this:
Is ice coverage a trailing, current, or leading indicator of climate change?
Seeing as how glaciers and, to some degree, sea ice are cumulative items - they exist from year to year and are built up over time - I'd have to say that ice coverage is a trailing indicator of temperature. As such, I think that relying on ice coverage %s to indicate current temperature trends is a poor idea.
While most of us agree that the climate changes over time (Alaska was, at one time in the past, a tropical paradise for example) I think a growing number of people are seeing "global warming" for what it really is - a scam perpetrated on the people of the world designed to enrich a small group of folks pushing carbon credits and technologies that are not advanced enough yet to be profitable on their own.
The result will be billions of dollars (that could be used for better, more productive programs) wasted on programs designed solely to defraud the public and enrich certain patent holders that can't see any other way to make a profit.
44% is not a majority, but a plurality. Also, the error rate of 3% sort of knocks the 3% difference in those who/who don't think global warming is the cause to a ... tie, just about.
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