Christopher Booker can always be relied upon to puncture pithily the lies and conflations of those who would pull the wool over our eyes in their pursuit of power, influence and money. Here he is riding his (and our) old Global Warming hobbyhorse ...
The Times Atlas Of The World, regularly updated since the Victorian age, proudly presents itself as ‘the most authoritative atlas in the world’. But its latest hefty edition, published at the eye-watering price of £150, has become the focus of a bizarre climate change row.
The new atlas shows the ice in Greenland — the northern hemisphere’s largest ice cap — to be melting so fast that since 1999, nearly a sixth of it has vanished. An area the size of Britain and Ireland combined, once covered in ice and snow, has now become ‘green and ice free’.
The publishers said the map revealed a whole new island off Greenland’s east coast, formerly viewed as part of the mainland — but which the vanishing ice has now shown to be quite separate. Local inhabitants have even celebrated the event by giving it an Inuit name meaning ‘Warming Island’.
But no sooner was this shocking evidence of global warming reported than voices throughout the scientific community began to question the atlas’s claims. For a start, there is nothing new about ‘Warming Island’ — it was clearly shown on maps with this name more than 50 years ago, long before the global warming scare began. And nor is there any evidence that Greenland had in recent years lost 15 per cent of its ice.
The U.S. climate-change sceptic science blog Watts Up With That pointed out that one reason why satellite images might have shown such a huge ice-loss was that a lot of Greenland’s coastal ice sheet has been blackened by soot and volcanic ash, so that it no longer shows up white on photographs from space.
Richard Betts, head of Climate Impact at the UK Met Office — who actually wrote the part of the Times Atlas text which covers climate change — then insisted on another blog that he had not been responsible for ‘any of that Greenland rubbish’.
Britain’s leading polar ice experts at the Scott Polar Research Institute said recent satellite images of Greenland made clear that there are numerous glaciers and permanent ice cover where the Times Atlas shows ice-free conditions and the emergence of land. ‘There is to our knowledge no support for this claim in the published scientific literature,’ they said.
So one of the world’s most respected reference books, it seems, has been caught out perpetrating what amounts to yet more propaganda for the belief in global warming.
One of the most disturbing features of this is that copies of the new atlas may soon be found in school libraries, where it will be cited by teachers as yet more evidence that climate change is now dramatically changing the world we live in.
With active encouragement from the Government, whole generations of school-children have now had the apocalyptic threat of climate change pushed down their throats — not just in science classes, but in almost any subject you can think of (questions on the need to fight global warming have even cropped up in English GCSE papers).
In geography, the present curriculum no longer concentrates on countries, continents, rivers, mountains or cities. Instead, it insists that pupils should learn about global warming and climate change and the likely effects of rising sea levels.
The propaganda is all-encompassing. The Climate Change Schools Project, an outfit that exists in partnership with the Environment Agency and other government-funded bodies, promises on its website ‘to put global warming at the heart of the national curriculum . . . we want schools to become the “hub” of excellence in climate change teaching, learning and positive action in their local communities.’
When David Miliband was Labour’s education minister, he ordered that copies of Al Gore’s propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth should be sent to every school in the country. A High Court judge decided that the ‘apocalyptic vision’ of global warming presented in the film was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change. Mr Justice Barton ruled that the film contained nine errors so serious that the schools must be issued with corrections.
The Government’s response was to compile a 77-page document so long that scarcely a single school in the country used it and no pupil was any the wiser. And now the new Times Atlas can be added to the approved propaganda list, to ensure that once again school students are being fed with the right-on, politically correct message — even though in this case it has been so damningly challenged by real scientific experts.
In a wider perspective, this embarrassing blunder by a commercial publishing house might not seem anything like so significant as all those grievous errors identified last year in the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body that once prided itself as being the most prestigious source of authority on global warming in the world.
Few predictions of the IPCC’s 2007 report drew more attention, for instance, than its claims that, thanks to global warming, most of the Himalayan glaciers would have disappeared within 30 years; 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest would similarly have vanished; while Africa could expect mass-famine as its crop yields were halved.
All these claims were eventually revealed as not to have been based on science at all. Like many others in that IPCC report, they were no more than reckless scare stories, dreamed up by environmental activists and pressure groups.
But the fact that responsible scientists who are by no means climate sceptics should have been so anxious to point out the errors in the Times Atlas is perhaps an indication that some of the lessons of those blunders by the IPCC have struck home.
The more responsible members of the ‘warmist’ scientific community seem now rather more on their guard than they were against the peddling of baseless scare stories to promote the case for global warming. When so much now hangs on whether or not there is genuinely reliable evidence for man-made climate change, it is more vital than ever that the claims made to support that change are grounded in proper science.
The Climate Change Act passed by the Labour government in 2008 threatens to become the most expensive piece of legislation in history as we try to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 per cent, building all-but-useless windmills and trying to find carbon-free energy sources at an unimaginable cost of £18bn every year for the next 50 years. Our politicians still believe this is the best way to fight the warming threat. But too much evidence has come to light in recent years to suggest that much of their belief in global warming may be little more than a vastly over-blown scare.
If there is cheer to be derived from this story of the Times Atlas error, it might be that the people quickest to knock it on the head were scientists who still believe in proper scientific evidence before trying to scare the world witless. We’re going to need much more of that if the world — and our schoolchildren — are going to be returned to sanity on the matter of climate change.
Meanwhile it has been widely reported that the loony fringe of the scientific world are coming up with more and more preposterous ideas to combat the non-existent menace of man-made global warming. We quote ...
“It sounds barmy, audacious or sci-fi: a tethered balloon the size of Wembley stadium suspended 20km above Earth, linked to the ground by a giant garden hose pumping hundreds of tonnes of minute chemical particles a day into the thin stratospheric air to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.
But a team of British academics will next month formally announce the first step towards creating an artificial volcano by going ahead with the world’s first major “geo-engineering” field-test in the next few months. The ultimate aim is to mimic the cooling effect that volcanoes have when they inject particles into the stratosphere that bounce some of the Sun’s energy back into space, so preventing it from warming the Earth and mitigating the effects of man-made climate change.
Before the full-sized system can be deployed, the research team will test a scaled-down version of the balloon-and-hose design. Backed by a £1.6m government grant and the Royal Society, the team will send a balloon to a height of 1km over an undisclosed location. It will pump nothing more than water into the air, but it will allow climate scientists and engineers to gauge the engineering feasibility of the plan. Ultimately, they aim to test the impact of sulphates and other aerosol particles if they are sprayed directly into the stratosphere. If the technical problems posed by controlling a massive balloon at more than twice the cruising height of a commercial airliner are resolved, then the team from Cambridge, Oxford, Reading and Bristol universities expect to move to full-scale solar radiation tests.
The principal investigator, Matthew Watson, a former UK government scientific adviser on emergencies and now a Bristol University lecturer, says the experiment is inspired by volcanoes and the way they can affect the climate after eruptions. “We will test pure water only, in sufficient quantity to test the engineering. Much more research is required,” he said, in answer to the question of what effect a planetary-scale deployment of the technology could have.”
(That's a sensible thing for him to say. Let's hope that more research will reveal just how much energy will be required to pump water or any other material a kilometre into the air, let alone to “more than twice the cruising height of a commercial airliner”. If the GOS can spot this obvious flaw in the scheme, why can't he?)
”Other leaders of the government-funded Stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering (Spice) project have investigated using missiles, planes, tall chimneys and other ways to send thousands of tonnes of particles into the air but have concluded that a simple balloon and hosepipe system is the cheapest. The research is paid for by the government-funded Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Oxford engineering lecturer Hugh Hunt said earlier this year “The whole weight of this thing is going to be a few hundred tonnes. That’s the weight of several double-decker buses. So imagine how big a helium balloon do you need to hold several double-decker buses – a big balloon. We’re looking at a balloon which is possibly 100-200m in diameter. It’s about the same size as Wembley stadium. This hose would be just like a garden hose, 20km long and we pump stuff up the pipe. The nice thing about it is that we can really have a knob, if you like, which we can control to adjust the rate at which we inject these particles.”
(Yes, mate. And we all know who the knob is.)
”While the October experiment is expected to have no impact on the atmosphere, it could also be used to try out “low-level cloud whitening”, a geo-engineering proposal backed financially by Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates.
In this case, fine sea salt crystals would be pumped up and sprayed into the air to increase the number of droplets and the reflectivity in clouds. Together, many droplets are expected to diffuse sunlight and make a cloud whiter. However, environment groups in Britain and the US said the government’s experiment was a dangerous precedent for a full-scale deployment that could affect rainfall and food supplies. Even if the approach successfully cools the planet by bouncing some of the Sun’s energy back into space, it would do nothing for the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere, which leads to increased ocean acidity.
“What is being floated” said Pat Mooney, chair of ETC Group in Canada, an NGO that supports socially responsible development of technology “is not only a hose but the whole idea of geo-engineering the planet. This is a huge waste of time and money and shows the UK government’s disregard for UN processes. It is the first step in readying the hardware to inject particles into the stratosphere. It has no other purpose and it should not be allowed to go ahead.”
Mike Childs, head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth UK, said: “We are going to have to look at new technologies which could suck CO2 out of the air. But we don’t need to do is invest in harebrained schemes to reflect sunlight into space when we have no idea at all what impact this may have on weather systems around the globe.”
Here at GOS we find it perfectly ludicrous that people who believe that mankind's tinkering has damaged the atmosphere, should think the correct solution is to tinker even more.
On the Prison Planet website, Paul Joseph Watson makes an even more extraordinary (but sadly rather believable) claim ...
Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming,” a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism.
The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the “carbon credits” on to transnational corporations. The company is backed by the World Bank and HSBC. Its Board of Directors includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur, as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers.
The company claims residents of Kicucula left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner, and yet the people tell a story of terror and bloodshed. Villagers told of how armed “security forces” stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others.
“We were in church,” recalled Jean-Marie Tushabe, 26, a father of two. “I heard bullets being shot into the air.”
“Cars were coming with police,” Mr. Tushabe said, sitting among the ruins of his old home. “They headed straight to the houses. They took our plates, cups, mattresses, bed, pillows. Then we saw them getting a matchbox out of their pockets.”
The New York Times reported that “in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.”
An Oxfam report documents how the British outfit has worked with the Ugandan government to forcibly expel over 20,000 people from their homes using terror and violence as part of a lucrative scramble for arable land that can be used to satisfy the multi-billion dollar carbon trading ponzi scheme, which is worth $1.8 million a year to the company.
“I no longer own any land. It’s impossible to feed my children – they have suffered so much. Some days all they eat is porridge from maize flour. When people can’t eat well their bodies become weak – there have been lots of cases of malaria and diarrhoea. Some days we don’t eat anything at all,” said former farmer Francis Longoli, whose land was stolen by New Forests.
The manufactured threat of man-made global warming is being used as a tool of neo-colonialism in the third world, not only through the seizure of land and infrastructure, thereby preventing poor nations from using their resources to develop, but by literally starving poverty-stricken people to death.
Climate change alarmism and implementation of global warming policies is a crime of the highest nature, because it is already having a genocidal impact in countries like Haiti, where the doubling of food prices is resulting in a substantial increase in starvation, poverty and death, with the population being forced to live on mud pies.
As a National Geographic Report confirmed, “With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies,” by “eating mud,” partly as a consequence of “increasing global demand for biofuels.”
In April 2008, World Bank President Robert Zoellick admitted that biofuels were a “significant contributor” to soaring food prices that have led to poor people dying from starvation as a result of biofuels dominating land that would normally be used to harvest food.
Even man-made global warming advocate George Monbiot admits that promotion of biofuels “is causing starvation in the poor world,” particularly in Swaziland, where the decision to allocate several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production despite the country being in the grip of a famine was labeled “a crime against humanity” by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur.
But it’s not just biofuels, a product of global warming alarmism, that are unleashing a genocide against black people in poorer countries, it’s the whole anti-development mantra embraced by climate change activists that is being enforced by supranational organizations like the World Bank and the IMF in the name of reducing carbon dioxide, the evil life-giving gas that plants breathe and humans exhale.
Indeed, poorer countries rejected the 2009 Copenhagen climate agreement precisely because it discriminated against third world nations.
In addition, the Obama administration, firmly supported by Al Gore, last year ordered the World Bank to keep “developing” countries underdeveloped by blocking them from building coal-fired power plants, ensuring that poorer countries remain in poverty as a result of energy demands not being met. By preventing poor nations from becoming self-sufficient in blocking them from producing their own energy, the Obama administration is ensuring that millions more will die from starvation and lack of access to hospitals and medical treatment.
While ignorant environmentalist leftists preach all day about the effects of global warming having the most impact on poorer countries, it is in fact the poorer countries and their people who are suffering most from global warming alarmism, and predators like the banker-backed New Forests Company.
The seizure of arable land in the name of “global warming” is set to become big business, which is why the United Nations recently announced it is preparing to roll out an army of green helmeted “climate peacekeepers” to intervene in poorer countries to protect “shrinking resources”.
Hard to believe, isn't it? Yet somehow we can't help thinking that it's all too likely. The Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis, Pol Pot ... there's no one so dangerous as a crusader who knows he is right and scents the personal profit to be gained from persecuting those who disagree.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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