Gore Should Give Back Oscar

[Guest]

Gore Should Give Back Oscar, Two Academy Members Say

Friday, December 4, 2009 1:05 PM

By: James Hirsen

Two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have called on the group to take back the Oscar awarded to former Vice President Al Gore for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd made the request based on the e-mails that a hacker/whistle blower released revealing that so-called scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England systematically falsifying data to support the theory that the earth is heating up and that humans caused it.

"An Inconvenient Truth," a film based on a climate-change speech that Gore developed, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2007. (Coincidentally, the next day, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research uncovered that Gore’s Nashville home guzzled 20 times more electricity than the average American household. )

That same year, the Academy elevated Gore's PowerPoint lecture, helping him to snag a Nobel Peace Prize as well.

The academy members' request that Gore return his statue is happening as preparations are under way for next week's United Nations climate change meeting in Copenhagen, where 16,500 people from 192 countries will fly in using private jets, consume 200,000 meals, and produce an estimated 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006.

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/Gore_...omo_code=92B7-1

[phkrause]

I suppose Richard that they could all meet via telecom instead of having to meet face to face. If they really thought that this would damage the ozone.

pk

[Guest]

I say we just beat him severely about the head and shoulders with it, and then let him keep it.

[Woody]

I still think Gore is a good actor. He certainly has had years of practice.

[Jeannieb43]

Gore Should Give Back Oscar, Two Academy Members Say

Friday, December 4, 2009 1:05 PM

By: James Hirsen

Two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have called on the group to take back the Oscar awarded to former Vice President Al Gore for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd made the request based on the e-mails that a hacker/whistle blower released revealing that so-called scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England systematically falsifying data to support the theory that the earth is heating up and that humans caused it.

Anybody who denies the earth's climate is warming hasn't seen the numerous glaciers which are shrinking across the face of the earth. It's undeniable.

[Guest]

They are not shrinking at the alarming rate the globa warming crowd has you believing, if at all. So yes it is deniable. You are depending on what a certain group of people are telling you, and putting faith in that.

Here's a (partial) list of the specific glaciers that are growing:

NORWAY

Ålfotbreen Glacier

Briksdalsbreen Glacier

Nigardsbreen Glacier

Hardangerjøkulen Glacier

Hansebreen Glacier

Jostefonn Glacier

Engabreen glacier

(The Engabreen glacier is the second largest glacier in Norway. It is a part (a glacial tongue) of the Svartisen glacier,

which has steadily increased in mass since the 1960s when heavier winter precipitation set in.)

Norway's glaciers growing at record pace. The face of the Briksdal glacier, an off-shoot of the largest glacier in Norway and mainland Europe, is growing by an average 7.2 inches (18 cm) per day. (From the Norwegian daily Bergens Tidende.)

CANADA

Helm Glacier

Place Glacier

Glaciers growing on Canada’s tallest mountain

17 Nov 08 – The ice-covered peak of Yukon's soaring Mount Logan

may be due for an official re-measurement after readings that suggest this country's superlative summit has experienced a growth spurt.

France

Mt. Blanc

ECUADOR

Antizana 15 Alpha Glacier

Italy

Winter snows did not all melt on Italy’s Presena Glacier this summer

10 Nov 09 - 'Their massive base depth last season meant it didn’t all melt over the summer so they have nearly a metre and a half of snow on the glacier

ski area already." (The second story of this kind in two years.)

SWITZERLAND

Silvretta Glacier

KIRGHIZTAN

Abramov

RUSSIA

Maali Glacier (This glacier is surging. See below)

GREENLAND See Greenland Icecap Growing Thicker

Greenland glacier advancing 7.2 miles per year! The BBC recently ran

a documentary, The Big Chill, saying that we could be on the verge of an ice age. Britain could be heading towards an Alaskan-type climate within a decade, say scientists, because the Gulf Stream is being gradually cut off. The Gulf Stream keeps temperatures unusually high for such a northerly latitude.

One of Greenland’s largest glaciers has already doubled its rate of advance, moving forward at the rate of 12 kilometers (7.2 miles) per year. To see a transcript of the documentary, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/bigchilltrans.shtml

Greenland Ice Sheet Growing Thicker

4 Nov 05 - After gathering data for more than ten years, a team of

Norwegian-led scientists has found that the Greenland Ice Sheet is

actually growing thicker at its interior.

NEW ZEALAND

All 48 glaciers in the Southern Alps have grown during the past year.

The growth is at the head of the glaciers, high in the mountains, where they gained more ice than they lost. Noticeable growth should be seen at the foot of the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers within two to three years.(27 May 2003) Fox, Franz Josef glaciers defy trend - New Zealand's two best-known glaciers are still on the march - 31 Jan 07

SOUTH AMERICA - Argentina's Perito Moreno Glacier (the largest glacier in Patagonia) is advancing at the rate of 7 feet per day. The 250 km² ice formation, 30 km long, is one of 48 glaciers fed by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. This ice field, located in the Andes system shared with Chile, is the world's third largest reserve of fresh water.

Antarctic ice grows to record levels

13 Sep 07 - While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed

in recent years and ice near it diminished during the Southern

Hemisphere summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder

and ice elsewhere has been more extensive and longer lasting,

Oops - West Antarctic Ice Sheet

not losing ice as fast as we thought

20 Oct 09 — New measurements by

GPS Network suggest the rate of ice

loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet

has been overestimated.

Antarctica's Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf is growing

7 Dec 05 – Scientists Joughin and Bamber re-evaluated the mass balances of the ice in Antarctica. "It is clear from the results of this study that the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf is not rapidly, or even slowly, wasting away. Quite to the contrary, it is growing."

Global Warming? New Data Shows Ice Is Back

19 Feb 08 - A Feb. 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual, challenging the global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny that the world is undergoing global warming.

[Dr. Shane]

The argument against man-made global warming has been that it was being caused by solar activity and not the greenhouse effect. Now the issue is if global warming is over as apparently the solar activity has decreased. Time will tell. If scientists were all wrong about man-made global warming, it certainly will cast doubt on a lot of what scientists claim.

[bonnie]

Environment

The Fiction Of Climate Science

Gary Sutton, 12.04.09, 10:00 AM EST

Why the climatologists get it wrong.

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."

Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."

OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.

I remember sometime back in 1975-76 reading about the "coming" Ice Age in the weekly magazine HIGHLIGHTS...wish I would have saved it.

Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.

Sorry, I noticed.

It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.

Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes.

His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone.

The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue.

That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing.

While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Their growth rings show what's happened no matter which philosophy is in power. Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.

Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.

Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans.

Today, as I peck out these words, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops."

To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. But the longer term changes are no more compelling, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age?

I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status.

Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. That's another inconvenient fact.

Gary Sutton is co-founder of Teledesic and has been CEO of several other companies, including Knight Protective Industries and @Backup.

[Guest]

Environment

The Fiction Of Climate Science

Gary Sutton, 12.04.09, 10:00 AM EST

Why the climatologists get it wrong.

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."

Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."

OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.

I remember sometime back in 1975-76 reading about the "coming" Ice Age in the weekly magazine HIGHLIGHTS...wish I would have saved it.

Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.

Sorry, I noticed.

It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.

Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes.

His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone.

The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue.

That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing.

While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Their growth rings show what's happened no matter which philosophy is in power. Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.

Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.

Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans.

Today, as I peck out these words, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops."

To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. But the longer term changes are no more compelling, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age?

I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status.

Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. That's another inconvenient fact.

Amen!

[bonnie]

Dead Ringer

By Ross Kaminsky on 12.4.09 @ 6:07AM

"Climategate" is first time that the magnitude of bad behavior by climate alarmist scientists was so large and so easily understood by non-scientists that even the liberal mass media can't completely ignore it (though they're doing their best.)

But the release of e-mail and data from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain showing global warming alarmist "scientists" manipulating and deleting data is far from the first time these same people have been found to be acting in distinctly non-scientific ways.

It is common practice for academic scientists to share their data and their methods of calculation, allowing others to check their work in a quest for the truth. However, leading global warming alarmist, NASA's James Hansen, and Hansen's employees (who are paid with taxpayer money) and non-American climate alarmists routinely refuse to share their data with those who do not share their near-religious belief in man-made global warming. The issue became big enough that the GAO issued a (rather tame) report on the subject.

Earlier this year, Phil Jones, the head of CRU who just stepped down pending the Climategate investigation, claimed to have lost some of the world's oldest climate sensor data after first saying to the requesting scientist "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Indeed, there is a consistent tendency among climate alarmist scientists to refuse to make their data or calculations public.

In September we learned why with a revelation that those of us who follow this debate closely thought was an earthquake in the "global warming" debate. It turns out to have been a tremor leading up to Climategate, but remains a devastating blow to the "science" underlying claims of rapidly increasing temperatures:

One of the most influential data sets in climate science has been that of CRU climatologist Keith Briffa who, in 2000, published an article using tree ring data from northern Russia to show a dramatic "hockey-stick" increase in temperatures in the late 20th century.

Briffa and many others have published subsequent articles based on the same data. Even Wikipedia's historical temperature graphs are substantially based on Briffa's numbers. After several of Briffa's articles, Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre requested the underlying data only to be rebuffed each time by Briffa or the journals themselves. However, in 2008 Briffa published an article for a publication of the British Royal Society, an organization that requires data underlying an article to be made available. With his hand forced, Briffa released an uninteresting portion of his data, then waited nearly a year -- until this September -- to release the rest.

What McIntyre found was astonishing: Briffa's "hockey stick" was created by using data from only 10 trees in 1990 and 5 trees in 1995-1996. Given that tree ring growth can be affected by non-climate factors, such as if a nearby tree is cut down giving the subject tree more hours of sunlight each day, such a small sample size can lead to very large errors. Indeed, McIntyre found one tree that so skewed the data that he called it "the most influential tree in the world." Professor Ross McKitrick (who worked with McIntyre to disprove Michael Mann's original "hockey stick" graph -- the erroneous basis for much of the UN's global warming alarmism) notes, "Once again a dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least reliable portion of a dataset."

Making Briffa's choice of data all the more suspicious is that there was data on 34 nearby trees available from a scientist with whom he had co-authored articles in the past. One implication, supported by Briffa's near-decade long refusal to share his data, is that he cherry-picked the dataset that supported the conclusion he wanted to find.

When McIntyre used the data from the other 34 trees, the "hockey stock" vanished, leaving the 20th century as just the latest trendless and unremarkable section of a generally trendless and unremarkable 2500-year history of tree ring growth in the region.

Scientists like Briffa, Hansen, Jones and Mann have self-serving motives for promoting fear of "global warming" and for hiding their so-called data. After all, it's much easier to get a grant and big speaking fees by saying we have a problem than by saying we don't.

But there is far too much at stake, particularly given the grave economic threat of cap-and-trade legislation, to allow scientists to sully their professions, to mislead the public, and to desperately keep others from checking their work when it comes to "climate change." As Professor McKitrick says about Keith Briffa's tree ring data -- data which has repeatedly been used to back up other people's "independent" claims of global warming -- "Whatever is going on here, it is not science."

Following Climategate, one might expand McKitrick's comment to include the entirety of the global warming alarmist establishment. Rather than Jones's "hide the decline," Briffa's actions served to "inflate the increase." Not science, indeed.

[Jeannieb43]

Pictures, please [of these so-called enlarging glaciers].

I wish I could remember the names of the glaciers my husband and I visited in Europe and Norway 10 years ago. They were shrinking, and the management there posted photographs to show the former extent of the glaciers through the previous 50-100 years. We rode out on the glaciers inside big snow cats with huge lugs for wheels. But had to be taken much further out via regular buses first, because the glaciers had shrunk so far.

Also, the glaciers on the border of Alaska.... I have a terrible memory. But I think Mendenhall Glacier is the name of one of them. We can Google it and show its former size compared with today's.

Also Antarctica. It has lost so much snow and ice that the ice-breaking ships can now access the land in most places almost without cutting through any ice at all.

[Dr. Shane]

Pictures are only going to show that global warming has taken place. They are not going to tell us why. Over the past few years it looks like the trend has stopped. Solar activity has also slowed down. Time will tell. We are expected to have another cold winter this year.

[there buster]

Quote:

Pictures, please [of these so-called enlarging glaciers].

Here's a list of expanding glaciers

[Woody]

This is not good news either there buster. The fact that we are headed for an ice age makes me shiver.

[phkrause]

I don't buy that one either Redwood. Both extreme's are to far fetched.

pk

[Woody]

Well ... you're right pk. We just can't always believe what the politicians and environmentalists say and promote.