Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

. . . .the so-called consensus of hundreds of scientists on the IPCC report is much worse than that. An analysis released in September 2007 on the IPCC scientific review process by Australian climate data analyst John McLean, revealed that the UN IPCC peer-review process is "an illusion." Only a few of the “hundreds” are actually involved in the UN’s peer-review process. Says McLean, “The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very much supported by the majority of reviewers. The reality is that there is surprisingly little explicit support for this key notion. Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4 explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis, and one other endorsed only a specific section.”

Putting this into perspective, at most 52 scientists wrote the IPPC’s report, of which only 4 or 5 endorsed its highly politicized findings. Yet, the IPCC repeatedly gives the impression that hundreds, if not thousands of scientists endorse their conclusions. This is completely false. While many other scientists do endorse it, it is certainly not a consensus. Compared to this, every one of the 23 NIPCC’s scientists and economists who authored the report released at the conference endorsed it. Likewise, most, if not all, the 100 scientists at the conference endorsed the NIPCC’s conclusions.

No one should be surprised that the mainstream press got it completely wrong " again. After all, if they wrote that the polar bear, which is being considered for listing as an endangered species, is experiencing record high populations and is in fact not in danger from global warming, the reporters would suffer the scorn of their environmentalist friends and the possible wrath of their editors. If they wrote that maybe, just maybe all these scientists at the March Climate Change meeting in New York were right, it would shatter the use of global warming as a justification for global governance, as former French President, Jacque Chirac proclaimed to the world in 2000 during the Framework Convention on Climate Change’s COP 6 meeting. “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance…to organise our collective sovereignty over this planet.”
http://www.newswithviews.com/Coffman/mike11.htm

Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, is to use its space planes to gather scientific data on climate change from the highest reaches of the atmosphere under a new collaboration with an American government laboratory.

Instruments and sensors will be added to the company's high altitude plane, White Knight Two, and the smaller rocket-propelled SpaceShipTwo, as part of a climate change research project planned by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Colorado.

The researchers will use Virgin Galactic test flights, and subsequent commercial launches, to collect air samples from high up in the atmosphere, which will be analysed for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and other constituents.

Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, is to use its space planes to gather scientific data on climate change

Tourism to help understand climate change ???
I presume it's called stratospheric (very high) greenwashing.

Oh, this story about Branson and his eco-friends may interest you Walter

the global warming frenzy to be much ado about virtually nothing, as compared to real problems.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
(months: jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sept oct nove dec average)
2003 0.527 0.438 0.422 0.414 0.435 0.439 0.453 0.523 0.518 0.565 0.428 0.519 0.473
...
2004 0.505 0.571 0.510 0.495 0.324 0.347 0.371 0.419 0.446 0.477 0.526 0.376 0.447
...
2005 0.463 0.376 0.493 0.536 0.480 0.512 0.532 0.503 0.507 0.513 0.494 0.371 0.482
...
2006 0.296 0.443 0.385 0.357 0.338 0.443 0.434 0.488 0.417 0.481 0.441 0.536 0.422
...
2007 0.632 0.520 0.441 0.472 0.374 0.375 0.406 0.370 0.412 0.368 0.268 0.213 0.404
...
2008 0.050 0.189 0.446 0.267 0.278 0.312 0.412 0.387 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.293*
...

The plan is to lure the manatee to shore with lettuce, envelop it in a net, and lift the 600- to 800-pound beast out of the water with a crane. They hope to load it into a cargo plane, where veterinarians will shower the manatee with water until it arrives in Orlando.

whales retained even more toxins than polar bears, which had been believed to be the region's most toxic animals.

The finding raises the question: How did one of the planet's most untrammeled corners become a repository for these toxins?

"Most of these chemicals are not produced or widely used in the Arctic," WWF's Walker said. "But air and ocean currents are going [predominately] northward.....

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report

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Indur M Goklany, Ph.D, who has represented the United States at the International Panel on Climate Change and in the negotiations leading to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also scrutinized the UN's IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM) released in 2007. "Once one gets past the opaque verbiage of the SPM, it is clear that most of the negative impacts listed in the SPM are overstated, while the positive impacts are understated," Goklany noted in an April 9, 2007 critique. (LINK) Goklany managed the US Environmental Protection Agency's fledgling emissions-trading program in the 1980s. "These [IPCC] studies estimate impacts for 2085 using technologies from the 1990s or earlier. This is like estimating today's food production and levels of hunger using technologies from the 1910s! You are bound to underestimate food production and overestimate hunger. In developing countries prevalence of chronic hunger declined from 37% to 17% between 1970 and 2001, despite an 83% increase in population, in substantial part because of new technologies," Goklany added. "Similarly, human health impacts are often estimated assuming that adaptive capacities are fixed as of the start date of the analysis. Under such a methodology the mortality and morbidity rates from water related diseases in the U.S., for example, would be the same in 2000 as in 1900. But in fact, these rates have declined by 99% or more during the 20th century for disease such as typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, malaria, etc.," Goklany noted.

The association between climate change and the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events is now well established.

General circulation models of climate change predict that heatwaves will become more frequent and intense, especially in the higher latitudes, affecting large metropolitan areas that are not well adapted to them.

The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into buying a new homeland - as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees, the country's first democratically elected president has told the Guardian. ...

He said Sri Lanka and India were targets because they had similar cultures, cuisines and climates. Australia was also being considered because of the amount of unoccupied land available.

"We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades," he said.

Environmentalists say the issue raises the question of what rights citizens have if their homeland no longer exists. "It's an unprecedented wake-up call," said Tom Picken, head of international climate change at Friends of the Earth. "The Maldives is left to fend for itself. It is a victim of climate change caused by rich countries."

Nasheed said he intended to create a "sovereign wealth fund" from the dollars generated by "importing tourists", in the way that Arab states have done by "exporting oil". "Kuwait might invest in companies; we will invest in land."
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