GWPF | 30 Jan 2015
The Greening Of The Vatican
The Obama administration is seeking to hitch its climate change message onto that of the ever-popular Pope Francis, whose upcoming environmental encyclical has drawn more speculation than any papal document in recent memory. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency met Friday with senior Vatican officials who helped draft the document, which is expected to be released in June or July. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told reporters that her aim was to show how aligned President Obama and Francis are on climate change. She added: “It’s certainly not my place to dictate to the pope what he should be doing in an encyclical.” —Associated Press, 30 January 2015
Is Pope Francis greening? As well as moving to the Left? I’m beginning to worry. When Francis talks about the poor, he alludes to the “preferential option for the poor”. The phrase came out of Latin American Liberation Theology, with its neo-Marxist utopian view of socialism. One can certainly detect green affinities in his preaching. Today green ideology leans toward the Left — supposedly it is industrial capitalism that is the major agent in bringing about the global catastrophe that is predicted by the green prophecy. When it comes to global warming, the mantra accompanying the prophetic rhetoric keeps repeating, “The science is all in”. I rather doubt it. I am not a climatologist; but neither is Pope Francis. One may recall that the Church was wrong before in endorsing the pre-Copernican cosmology. — Peter Berger, The American Interest, 14 January 2015
1) Obama Administration To Advise Vatican On Climate Change Ahead Of Encyclical – Associated Press, 30 January 2015
2) Global Warming Won’t Mean More Storms, New Study Finds – University of Toronto, 29 January 2015
3) New Study: IPCC Climate Models Fail To Explain Climate Variability – Duke University, 26 January 2015
4) Warmists Take the Hardest Hits – Quadrant Online, 30 January 2015
5) Peter Berger: Environmentalists, Global Warming, and Pope Francis – The American Interest, 14 January 2015
A study led by atmospheric physicists at the University of Toronto finds that global warming will not lead to an overall increasingly stormy atmosphere, a topic debated by scientists for decades. Instead, strong storms will become stronger while weak storms become weaker, and the cumulative result of the number of storms will remain unchanged. —University of Toronto, 29 January 2015
A new Duke University-led study finds that most climate models likely underestimate the degree of decade-to-decade variability occurring in mean surface temperatures as Earth’s atmosphere warms. The models also provide inconsistent explanations of why this variability occurs in the first place. “The inconsistencies we found among the models are a reality check showing we may not know as much as we thought we did,” said lead author Patrick T. Brown. —Duke University, 26 January 2015
Why can’t the global-warming catastrophe industry convince the public that the scare underwriting its meal ticket is real? Even the CSIRO’s annual survey last year showed that 53% of Australians reject the official story. In Britain, more of the same, with a new survey showing those who describe themselves “very concerned” about climate change falling to 18%, down from 44% in 2005. My theory is that the global warming industry has made itself so ridiculous over the past 30 years, so hyperventilatingly ludicrous, by predicting ever-more-dire catastrophes by the year 20XX. But then year 20XX comes and goes and life continues as normal. –Tony Thomas, Quadrant Online, 30 January 2015
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year [2005] widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.” –Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, The Guardian, 22 February 2004
1) Obama Administration To Advise Vatican On Climate Change Ahead Of Encyclical
Associated Press, 30 January 2015
VATICAN CITY — The Obama administration is seeking to hitch its climate change message onto that of the ever-popular Pope Francis, whose upcoming environmental encyclical has drawn more speculation than any papal document in recent memory.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency met Friday with senior Vatican officials who helped draft the document, which is expected to be released in June or July.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told reporters that her aim was to show how aligned President Obama and Francis are on climate change, emphasize actions the U.S. is taking already, and that climate change isn’t just an environmental issue, but a public health threat and chance for economic opportunity.
She added: “It’s certainly not my place to dictate to the pope what he should be doing in an encyclical.”
2) Global Warming Won’t Mean More Storms, New Study Finds
University of Toronto, 29 January 2015
A study led by atmospheric physicists at the University of Toronto finds that global warming will not lead to an overall increasingly stormy atmosphere, a topic debated by scientists for decades.
Instead, strong storms will become stronger while weak storms become weaker, and the cumulative result of the number of storms will remain unchanged.
“We know that with global warming we’ll get more evaporation of the oceans,” said Frederic Laliberte, a research associate at U of T’s physics department and lead author of a study published this week in Science. “But circulation in the atmosphere is like a heat engine that requires fuel to do work, just like any combustion engine or a convection engine.”
The atmosphere’s work as a heat engine occurs when an air mass near the surface takes up water through evaporation as it is warmed by the Sun and moves closer to the Equator. The warmer the air mass is, the more water it takes up. As it reaches the Equator, it begins to ascend through the atmosphere, eventually cooling as it radiates heat out into space. Cool air can hold less moisture than warm air, so as the air cools, condensation occurs, which releases heat. When enough heat is released, air begins to rise even further, pulling more air behind it producing a thunderstorm. The ultimate “output” of this atmospheric engine is the amount of heat and moisture that is redistributed between the Equator and the North and South Poles.
3) New Study: IPCC Climate Models Fail To Explain Climate Variability
Duke University, 26 January 2015
DURHAM, N.C. – A new Duke University-led study finds that most climate models likely underestimate the degree of decade-to-decade variability occurring in mean surface temperatures as Earth’s atmosphere warms. The models also provide inconsistent explanations of why this variability occurs in the first place.
These discrepancies may undermine the models’ reliability for projecting the short-term pace as well as the extent of future warming, the study’s authors warn. As such, we shouldn’t over-interpret recent temperature trends.
“The inconsistencies we found among the models are a reality check showing we may not know as much as we thought we did,” said lead author Patrick T. Brown, a Ph.D. student in climatology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
“This doesn’t mean greenhouse gases aren’t causing Earth’s atmosphere to warm up in the long run,” Brown emphasized. “It just means the road to a warmer world may be bumpier and less predictable, with more decade-to-decade temperature wiggles than expected. If you’re worried about climate change in 2100, don’t over-interpret short-term trends. Don’t assume that the reduced rate of global warming over the last 10 years foreshadows what the climate will be like in 50 or 100 years.”
Brown and his colleagues published their findings this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research.
To conduct their study, they analyzed 34 climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fifth and most recent assessment report, finalized last November.
The analysis found good consistency among the 34 models explaining the causes of year-to-year temperature wiggles, Brown noted. The inconsistencies existed only in terms of the model’s ability to explain decade-to-decade variability, such as why global mean surface temperatures warmed quickly during the 1980s and 1990s, but have remained relatively stable since then. […]
“Regions of Significant Influence on Unforced Global Mean Surface Air Temperature Variability in Climate Models,” by Patrick T. Brown, Wenhong Li and Shang-Ping Xie; published Jan. 9, 2015, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: DOI: 10.1002/2014JD022576.
4) Warmists Take the Hardest Hits
Quadrant Online, 30 January 2015
Tony Thomas
Anyone can be a prophet of doom: Pick a spot on the globe, any spot, and state with oracular authority that it will suffer most from runaway climate change. Tim Flannery fancied Perth, for example, which has yet to become his predicted ghost town, but he has plenty of company in the dunce’s corner
Why can’t the global-warming catastrophe industry convince the public that the scare underwriting its meal ticket is real? Even the CSIRO’s annual survey last year showed that 53% of Australians reject the official story. And even on the CSIRO’s figures, Aussies rank climate fourteenth out of sixteen concerns overall, and we rate it only seventh out of eight even among environmental concerns. In Britain, more of the same, with a new survey showing those who describe themselves “very concerned” about climate change falling to 18%, down from 44% in 2005.
Partly to blame is that dratted 18-year halt to global warming, even as man-made CO2 continues to pour into the skies. But my theory is that the global warming industry has made itself so ridiculous over the past 30 years, so hyperventilatingly ludicrous, by predicting ever-more-dire catastrophes by the year 20XX. But then year 20XX comes and goes and life continues as normal.
Take the The Guardian ‘s corker of a scoop in 2004, when it obtained a secret and suppressed Pentagon report on ‘climate wars’ intended for an unimpressed President George W Bush. As The Guardian breathlessly reported,
“…major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020 [editor: because the Gulf Stream will have stopped flowing]. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life…’
An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year [2005] widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.”
The report went on to predict “catastrophic” energy shortages by 2020 (current oil price: about US$45 per barrel). The authors in 2004 thought it was possibly too late even then to prevent such disasters. “It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years [2009],’ they said.
Some sane bloggers, e.g. Anthony Watts of WUWT, have always enjoyed compiling amusing lists of dud warming-catastrophe predictions. But a new blog entrant is specialising in the genre and, by sorting and classifying, turns the scare-a-minute soothsaying into spectacular entertainment.
One sub-genre on the site specialises in which particular countries or places have variously been spruiked as most likely to suffer most when Gaia cranks up the thermostat and takes her revenge. Australia, of course, will be hardest hit by climate change. If you live in Perth, well, Perth will be hardest hit by climate change, perhaps becoming a ghost metropolis, as climate comedian Tim Flannery puts it.
But Australia is not alone. Pick a country, any country, say Malta or Bulgaria, and you’ll be sure someone has claimed the ‘settled science’ is in no doubt that, yes, Malta or Bulgaria will be hardest hit by climate change. Alternatively, if your country is thought to have a chance of surviving climate change, it will become a lifeboat state flooded by teeming millions of climate mple, srefugees. For example, see here and here.
So keep a straight face as you read below, courtesy of climatechangepredictions.org
5) Peter Berger: Environmentalists, Global Warming and Pope Francis
The American Interest, 14 January 2015
Is Pope Francis greening? As well as moving to the Left? I’m beginning to worry.
In its issue of January 3-9, 2015, The Economist published a story describing a political dispute over Yellowstone National Park. (The Economist, in my opinion the best general newsmagazine anywhere, is blessedly free of the anti-American animus that is common in European journalism. It reports objectively and in depth about developments in the United States. But it also shows occasional wonder at the more bizarre aspects of the American scene.) The three issues involved in this dispute concern the release of wolves since the 1990s into Yellowstone in order to reduce the huge number of elk (who apparently are choice ingredients of wolf cuisine), the roaming rights of bison, and the access of snowmobiles. This sharply pits ranchers (who are anti-wolf and anti-bison because wolves and bison threaten their cattle), and environmentalists (who cherish “unspoilt nature”, including all free-roaming wild animals, but detest snowmobiles).
Justin Farrell, a Yale sociologist and author of the book The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict, saw the class angle of the dispute, between people who have gun racks on their trucks and those who have bicycle racks. He also saw the religious angle, as indicated by the subtitle of his book. Many ranchers are conservative Christians, who believe in God-given property rights and some of whom refer to the Biblical mandate to man to exercise dominion over the animal world. And a significant sector of the environmental movement cultivates a nature mysticism that received strong impulses from Asian spirituality and from a (mostly imagined) Native-American worldview. The Economist story features a cartoon, showing a confrontation in a winter landscape between an angry-looking man wearing a cowboy hat and a boy hugging a bison, with a wolf lurking in the background.
This dispute is of course yet another episode in the ongoing culture war between conservatives and progressives that has been a prominent feature of American life for several decades. It would be a mistake to see this as a war between two armies, each wearing distinctive uniforms and having clear ideas on what the conflict is all about. Culture is a much more complex phenomenon and the ideas of most people are much more muddled. If one can speak of cultural conflict in America, progressives and conservatives can be recognized as having distinctive differences—these are cues that indicate which side an individual basically belongs to, for example on the environment. Look at someone’s coffee table for such cues. A conservative is more likely to have hunting magazines, a progressive journals advocating animal rights. Conservatives are more likely to vote Republican, progressives Democratic. But there are quite a few “cross-dressers”: progressives who are in favor of American military power, and conservatives who are devoted to at least some animals.
As a result of historical accidents, the two major political parties have different frequency distributions of conservatives and progressives, but this was not always the same as today’s distributions, and this may change again in the future. As the Economist article points out, religion is involved on both sides of the Yellowstone dispute. The ranchers, quite apart from their obvious economic interests, come out of a culture of rugged individualism believing in God-given property rights, and in that part of the country have many members who are Evangelical Christians who adhere to the Biblical view that man was given dominion over creation and the animal kingdom. Today’s environmentalists generally operate with a progressive and indeed anti-capitalist discourse.
It wasn’t always that way: Traditional organizations to preserve the pristine beauty of the West were founded and supported by successful businessmen who wanted to breathe fresh air (at least on vacations), away from what they thought of as the physical and demographic pollution of cities full of industrial fog and undesirable immigrants. On the environmentalist side there are also Christians who go on about the “preservation of the planet”, but also there is a sizable community adhering to the nature mysticism that I mentioned before.
In the late Roman Empire, Asia Minor was the place of origin from which every variety of exotic mysticism invaded Rome and other cosmopolitan centers (early Christianity must have been perceived by educated Romans as part of that invasion). Hence Asia Minor was known as the “vagina of the gods” (vagina deorum). I think that California merited that title in the middle of the twentieth century.
It is quite appropriate that I first encountered the new nature mysticism on a visit to northern California. It was at a faculty party at UC Davis. I had just returned from my first visit to Africa, where I was engaged in a sort of sociological tourism. On my return I was still under the impression of the exotic encounters I had on a trip that stretched from Senegal via Uganda to Tanzania. At the Davis party a passionate young woman kept on with a harangue against the loggers who, she asserted, were despoiling the awesome beauty of the Redwood forests. I asked whether she was bothered by the loggers cutting down so many trees. She hesitated, then said that this is not all that troubles her. Rather, the loggers were offending the very essence of treeness. It struck me that she thought of trees as living beings—part of an animistic worldview as different from my own sense of reality as anything I had encountered in Africa. Not long afterward I politely turned down an invitation from a colleague to join him for a session at a Native-American sweat lodge.
What does all this have to do with Pope Francis I? There has been a report that Francis is urging Catholics to be concerned about global warming. And it has been officially announced that he is working on an encyclical about the environment (which presumably will include the issue of global warming). Is Francis greening? As well as moving to the Left? I’m beginning to worry. Perhaps his choice of name was appropriate, suggesting a closeness to Francis of Assisi rather than to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Is Pope Francis finally coming out of the closet as a full-fledged Franciscan?
He keeps talking about a Church for the poor, he has shunned the luxurious fringe benefits of the papacy, and he has said nasty things about “unfettered capitalism” (which in fact exists nowhere in the world today except in China). When Francis talks about the poor, he alludes to the “preferential option for the poor”. This phrase can be interpreted in different ways: What is good for the poor? The short answer is economic growth in a market economy. But the phrase came out of Latin American Liberation Theology, with its neo-Marxist utopian view of socialism. I don’t think that the saint from Assisi had socialism in mind when he extolled poverty, but the Catholic Left has so interpreted his title of “il poverello”. And one can certainly detect green affinities in his preaching.
Today green ideology leans toward the Left — supposedly it is industrial capitalism that is the major agent in bringing about the global catastrophe that is predicted by the green prophecy. When it comes to global warming, the mantra accompanying the prophetic rhetoric keeps repeating, “The science is all in”. I rather doubt it. I am not a climatologist; but neither is Pope Francis. One may recall that the Church was wrong before in endorsing the pre-Copernican cosmology.
