Top 100 Ways Global Warming Will [Allegedly] Change Your Life!

Here.

BBC poll results

Here.

Excerpt:

In the United States, Britain and Germany, only around 29% of those interviewed thought their media did a good job in reporting news accurately.

Negative Feedbacks In Climate: Natural Cycles Dominate

Here.

Kyoto treaty to be superseded by Copenhagen consensus?

Here.

"Mumbai campaign on global warming has lukewarm response"

Here.

Socialists march against climate change in London

From a Socialist Party web site:

Members and supporters of International Socialist Resistance, Socialist Students and the Socialist Party formed a very loud and political bloc on a relatively quiet demonstration, attracting many youth to join our chants and our campaigns.

Our chants called for the nationalisation of big business and public services and for fundamental change in how society is run to address the risk posed to the planet. Throughout the demonstration people could be seen reading the ISR and Socialist Students "Our planet not their profit" leaflet.

Update: A related post is here.

Excerpt:

The point that this whole issue has been seized by people with a political and economic agenda that is directly served by it...and that these people are among the loudest supporters should make you somewhat cautious of simply embracing the idea that they just want to stop climate change.

Sobering thought about the Baseball Hall of Fame

Excerpt from this article:

We could have a "Baseball Hall of Fame" without the all-time hit leader (Pete Rose), the all-time home run leader (Barry Bonds), the first man to hit 70 homers in a season (Mark McGwire), the guy Babe Ruth patterned his swing after (Shoeless Joe Jackson) and, now, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball history (Roger Clemens).

About that alleged Bali "breakthrough" deal

From the AP here:

The new deal does not commit countries to specific actions against global warming. It simply sets an agenda and schedule for negotiators to find ways to reduce pollution and help poor countries adapt to environmental changes by speeding up the transfer of technology and financial assistance.

Despite an aggressive EU-led campaign to include specific emissions reduction targets for industrial nations — by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 — the final road map has none.

Interesting paragraph from Bloomberg

Here:

The U.S. won't compensate for the emissions of its delegates because ``we feel the best use of taxpayer dollars is for technology advancement, not purchasing carbon offsets,'' said Kristen Hellmer, a spokeswoman for the delegation.

Should the entire world go socialist based on temperature data collected in places like this?

From this article:

Signs of a new solar cycle

Here.

Sanity from John Redwood MP

Here.

Excerpt:

The reporting by the BBC has hit a new low of idiocy. To them there are good guys – who want targets – and bad guys – who do not want targets. They seem to rely on EU spin, out to portray themselves as the new powerful good cops, taking on the bad guys, the US.

More from Redwood is here.

Another casual admission of the Ivory-bill's status

Excerpt from this article:

...his drawings of the passenger pigeon and ivory-billed woodpecker remain valuable records of species now extinct.

Climate debate on Monday, Dec 17: Andrew Dessler vs Tim Ball

Here.

"The UN Climate Change Numbers Hoax"

Here.

A list of some global warming skeptics

Here.

"Bali: The Dog That Didn’t Bark"

See the post from Philip Stott here.

Excerpts:

Just as I predicted, Bali went on through the night and well into an extra day; there were the inevitable tears, and a final tantrum from China; and then the blandest of deals...Well, if I were one of the ‘global warming’ faithful, I should be crying “Woe unto us!” this merry morning.

As it is, I don’t think Bali will disrupt the world economy too much, and so I can live with it quite happily.

"Solving Global Warming Through Squalor"

Here.

"Good Politics? Maybe. Good Policy? Definitely Not!"

Here.

Excerpt:

The idea that a bunch of politicians should negotiate in a backroom deal how many gallons of ethanol American should consume in 2022 is absurd on its face.

"Bloggers are making professional journalists nervous"

Here.

The money quote is from former NBC correspondent David Hazinsk:

The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

"Sun and Warmth Save Lives"

Here.

Czech president Klaus criticises Bali conference on climate

Here.

U.S. FIGHTS REARGUARD ACTION AT BALI

Here.

Excerpt:

If China and India are exempt, then in effect we are simply exporting our emissions (and our jobs and wealth!) to the east, with little or no reduction in overall CO2. These alarmists cannot have it both ways - either we must drastically reduce CO2 across the whole world or we are simply engaging in some sort of world social engineering project. To me it looks much more like the latter.

Did that "cavalcade of stars" actually show up in Bali?

Snippet from a December 10 Greenpeace blog post:

Rumours abound that in the next week, in addition to the 15000 delegates already here, we will be graced by the presence of a cavalcade of stars, including, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, George Clooney, Al Gore, Arnie the Terminator and Leonardo DiCaprio.

We know that Gore showed up, but at this point, I don't see any evidence that the other five did.

Time wrote this about Arnold:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had planned to attend, but budget negotiations kept him at home.

Stott on the Bali negotiations

Excerpt from this post:

One particular trope to note in all the reporting is how the US is always made out to be the sole ‘villain of the piece’ [it just has to be Bush’s fault], when, in reality, it is a range of countries, such as Japan and Canada, presenting an entirely sensible objection to the EU’s proposed return to 1950’s central planning (and with China, paradoxically, and other G-77 countries excluded).

France vs USA : the heat is on

From a Greenpeace blog here:

A bilateral US-France meeting ended in a close-to-clash situation and led Borloo to rewrite the speech he was giving 2 hours later to the Conference of the Parties. And his message to the Bush administration was crystal clear: unless the US come with binding reduction targets to the Major Economies Meeting planned to be held in Paris in February 2008, they don’t have to come at all and the meeting will be cancelled. And he was even more precise: anything less than the 25-40% reduction range wouldn’t do it.

Global warming teaching to replace classes

Here.

2007 Gore vs 1997 Gore

Here.

Excerpt:

Mr. Gore, you should be ashamed of yourself for grandstanding this way on an international stage pointing your finger at your own country when the administration you served in had exactly the same political stance as the current one.

Nice typo

Excerpt from this article:

Delegates at the UN climate change conference in Bali are targeting a guideline of 25-40 percent cuts in greenhouse emissions [by 2020] from 1990 levels, but climate change activist Al Gore says the American delegation is blocking progress.

The Bali conference enters its final day today and the guideline targets are in a daft final document that the EU supports and the United States and Canada do not.

I think it would be utterly daft for the U.S. to legally commit to any emission cuts, based on a notion that we should do something "just in case" carbon dioxide suddenly starts driving global temperature (with no evidence that it's ever done so in the past).

If the U.S. had to start meeting those targets, what would you advise doing first? Note that if you banned all airline travel, you might achieve a 3% reduction from current levels (and to get this reduction, you'd also have to ban people from replacing their lost airline trips with other forms of transportation).

Note also that some or all of that 3% savings might be offset by population growth between now and 2020.

I don't think many "environmentalists" have done the math here. Unplugging cell phone chargers, using less toilet paper, and banning Hanukkah candles wouldn't really move the needle very far towards a 40% reduction.

Inventing The Whirlwind?

An article by Patrick J. Michaels on tropical cyclone hype is here.

Bickering to save the earth

More public mockery of the alleged global warming crisis is here.

The people vs the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Check out the typical alarmist editorial here, then check out the responses in the comment section.

At Bali, Germany pushes emissions cuts; at home it pushes coal plants

Here.

Excerpt:

...more than half the new power stations planned for Germany will be fueled by coal, according to Essen-based RWE, the nation's second-biggest utility.

Hat tip: Greenie Watch

"The sun gets dissed again"

Here.

Why America Doesn't Ratify Treaties

Here.

Excerpt:

That is why when a leading climate skeptic said at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference this year (I paraphrase), "If President Bush had had an ounce of sense, he would have ratified Kyoto and then done what Europe did and ignored it," he was completely wrong. There is no way that Kyoto, once ratified, could be ignored. Environmental activists could have judges take control of the US economy within months of ratification in order to enforce its provisions.

A very short petition

Here:

Petition from Americans to world leaders at Bali Summit:

Please ignore President Bush. He doesn't represent us.

Note that the site will evidently accept "signatures" from any country. As of this moment, about 15,000 of the world's 6.6 billion people have signed it.

"German air travel booms despite global warming worries"

Here.

"Greenpeace Radicals Indoctrinate Schoolkids With "Climate Change" Propaganda"

Here.

New Australian Prime Minister Wrong to Fast Track Kyoto Ratification?

Here.

Can't we just replace coal power with wind power?

Check out the article here.

What consensus? Experts protest the Bali madness

Check out the whole thing here.

Excerpts:

In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ­government ­representatives. The great ­majority of IPCC contributors and ­reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.
...
Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems.

But didn't someone suggest that terrorism isn't a big threat?

Note the snippet here about extremely heavy security at the UN climate change conference in Bali:

Bali's police spokesman A.S. Reniban said that 8,000 military personnel and 8,000 police officers were stationed near the conference centre, in addition to the UN police force patrolling the summit grounds.

I wonder if they considered just posting signs saying "Terrorism banned on these premises".

"The Religious Left’s Meltdown on Global Warming"

Here.

"Arctic Sea Ice Re-Freezing at Record Pace"

Check out this Daily Green article, entitled "Arctic Sea Ice Re-Freezing at Record Pace":

Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.

(Note the contrast with this CBS article, which on the same day curiously claims "NASA Images Show Arctic Ice Melting At Fast Rate".)

If you're a climate alarmist and you're hoping that no one's reading that Daily Green article, think again. At this moment it's got nearly 1000 Diggs (see the link here and take a gander at the 380+ comments).

I would also note that after ICECAP posted some similar information earlier this week, they received such a tremendous traffic spike that they had to move their site to a bigger server.

Odd quote from Yvo de Boer

Excerpt from this story:

"I'm very concerned about the pace of things," said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat. "We are in an all-or-nothing situation in that if we don't manage to get the work done on the future (terms for negotiations) then the whole house of cards basically falls to pieces."

He said that any collapse, involving a postponement of a launch of talks to a next meeting in late 2008 in Poland, could undermine momentum this year stoked by worries about warming.

I think the situation in Bali is indeed a political house of cards, which is in turn built upon a scientific house of cards, which is built upon a base of crappy temperature data taken near busy intersections, grills, hot building walls, hot asphalt, etc.

Without any evident "local" warming problem, families sample life "off the grid"

Here.

Experts question focus of global warming meeting

Here.

"The IPCC has reached the end of its usefulness"

I actually agree with this paragraph from a typical alarmist article :

In fact, I think that with the release of the recent synthesis report, the IPCC has reached the end of its usefulness. Anyone who isn't persuaded by that document and the general desperation of international climate scientists is unlikely to be moved by yet another such assessment and more begging. In particular, skeptical Americans are unlikely to be convinced by another international report that focuses on international climate impacts.

There's No Transparency in the Carbon-Offset Market

Here.

Excerpt:

Adam Piore today profiles Tom Arnold of TerraPass, a for-profit company selling carbon offsets to guilty gas-guzzling liberals. TerraPass is very secretive about its "revenue, profits, or even how much it has invested so far in carbon-offset projects", which means that no one using TerraPass has any clue how much of their money goes to carbon offsets and how much goes to amortize the cost of Tom Arnold's SUV.

Focus at Climate Talks Shifts

Here.

Warming or not ?

Here.

Mike Collins, Ivory-billed Woodpecker "Tracker"

Here.

Tim Allwood expresses some IBWO-related thoughts here.

Flying into controversy

Here.

Excerpt:

The UN secretary-general today called on world leaders for immediate action on climate change - before flying thousands of miles to the US for a music concert and then leaving in the interval to jet to Europe.

Ban Ki-moon has been slammed for planning a round-the-world trip that will generate thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions just days after he leaves the UN meeting in Bali.

Slate article on "climate justice"

Here.

California: The land of unkept climate commitments

Excerpt from this article:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon says that California "leads the world" on climate change. He's right, but not the way he thinks. In fact, the Golden State leads the world in unfulfilled promises to fight global warming.

Consider the Los Angeles solar initiative. In 2000, L.A. announced it would become the "Solar Capital of the World," with solar panels on 100,000 rooftops by 2010. To reach this ambitious target, the L.A. Department of Water and Power offered generous subsidies for solar energy systems. Three years and $80 million later – to outfit 600 rooftops at a cost of $13,000 each – the city cancelled the project as cost-ineffective, 99,400 buildings short of its goal.

Energy non-economics

Here.

Excerpts:

The energy bill also mandates that electric utilities produce 15 percent of their power from "renewable sources," which makes no economic sense in many parts of the country. If nuclear energy can be produced for a third of the cost of a renewable, why should all consumers be saddled with higher prices to do things less efficiently? Again, the free-market price system tells producers what fuels they should use far more effectively than lordly senators and representatives ever can.
...
One truly foolish and arrogant provision of the bill would mandate a phaseout of the standard incandescent electric light bulb. But the private sector has already invented high-brightness LEDs and other new lighting technologies that use a small fraction of electricity and last far longer than the traditional bulb. As the price of these new technologies drop, individual consumers will quickly switch over — as they are already doing — without the nannies in Congress telling them to do so. (LEDs have become standard for stop lights and are used on the White House Christmas tree this year).

Before the Start of Winter--A Relentless Southward March of Snow and Ice

See the pictures here.

Excerpt:

Most of us remember the confident predictions by climate "scientists" that 2007 would be the warmest year ever recorded! But already, we are back to the 1990s. Before this cold northern December is over, we may have to go back further in the records.

In his haste to visit Oslo and Bali, Al Gore forgot to warn North Americans that in the end, nature will have its say. Computer models are one thing. Reality is quite something else.

An entire A.P. article with no mention of global warming!

Here.

The A.P. gets it wrong on Kyoto again

Here.

A bit more detail on the Alberta tar sands

Excerpt from this post:

The Alberta Government calculates that about 28 billion cubic metres (174 billion barrels) of crude bitumen are economically-recoverable from the three Alberta oil sand areas (see map above) at current prices using current technology. Such estimates position Canada’s proven-oil reserves as second in the world after those of Saudi Arabia.

More on the Bali farce

Here.

Green on the outside, red on the inside

Excerpt from this blog post:

A common theme was that the “solutions” to climate change that are being posed by many governments, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels are false and are not rooted in justice. Another point was that as this current ecomonic system got us here in the first place, a climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.

The post is by Emma Brindal, "Climate Justice Campaign Coordinator" for Friends of the Earth Australia.

Completely disconnected from reality

Check out this remarkable stuff from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon:

“The world’s scientists have spoken with one voice: the situation is grim and urgent action is needed,” Mr Ban said at a gathering of 190 countries on the Indonesian island of Bali. “The situation is so desperately serious that any delay could push us past the tipping point, beyond which the ecological, financial and human costs would increase dramatically. We are at a crossroads: one path leads to a comprehensive climate change agreement, the other one to oblivion.”

Remember, his alarmism is based on computer models that have shown no predictive ability, with input temperature data taken near grills, hot auto radiators and asphalt, air conditioning exhaust fans, etc etc.

Interesting discussions on solar cycle 24

Here and in the comment thread here.

Bali negotiations on carbon dioxide emissions are getting massive publicity, but their net effect on world climate is almost certainly negligible compared to the effect of the sun's upcoming activity.

Opposing views on the Ivory-bill

From yesterday's Minneapolis Star Tribune:

1. Jim Williams writes:

It seems that every time someone sees an ivory-billed woodpecker they write a book about it. The latest is Dr. Geoff Hill's "Ivorybill Hunter" (Oxford University Press, $24.95).

Since I truly believe that this bird -- long thought to be extinct -- still exists, Hill's book was a page-turner, even though I knew the ending: no definitive photo.

Nonetheless, Hill writes a lively account of months of grinding fieldwork along the Choctawhatchee River in Florida's panhandle in 2005 and 2006. (The search continued as the book was being published this year.)

Ivorybills were seen; recordings of knocks and calls were captured. And the all-too-common snippet of blurry video was taken. All of this -- plus some dishing on ornithology and ornithologists -- makes for a good read.

The last chapter outlines how you, too, can join the search. Bring your GPS. Leave your skepticism at home.

From Curt Brown in the same paper on the same date:

Who knows, I mused, perhaps it's the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker lost on the comeback trial.

"Food vs. Fuel"

Check out this Washington Post piece.

Excerpts:

To be sure, some farmers in these countries benefit from higher prices. But many poor countries -- including most in sub-Saharan Africa -- are net grain importers, says the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank. In some of these countries, the poorest of the poor spend 70 percent or more of their budgets on food. About a third of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That proportion has barely changed since the early 1990s. High food prices make gains harder.
...
It's the extra demand for grains to make biofuels, spurred heavily in the United States by government tax subsidies and fuel mandates, that has pushed prices dramatically higher. The Economist rightly calls these U.S. government subsidies "reckless." Since 2000, the share of the U.S. corn crop devoted to ethanol production has increased from about 6 percent to about 25 percent -- and is still headed up.
...
This is not a case of unintended consequences. A new generation of "cellulosic" fuels (made from grasses, crop residue or wood chips) might deliver benefits, but the adverse effects of corn-based ethanol were widely anticipated. Government subsidies reflect the careless and cynical manipulation of worthy public goals for selfish ends. That the new farm bill may expand the ethanol mandates confirms an old lesson: Having embraced a giveaway, politicians cannot stop it, no matter how dubious.

Are we any smarter than ancient people?

This is not the first time that humans have irrationally blamed themselves for climate change.

Please check out the entire article here.

How to deal with Poseur Policymakers

Here.

Excerpt:

The alarmists and their ilk cannot make a persuasive case, which is why they bully, lie, shout down and pull stunts like the “appeal to authority” and claim “the science is settled…let’s move on”. Citizens have every right and ability to be heard, and have the truth heard, before having this posturing shoves down their throats, after a trip through their wallets.

Couric to Candidates: Is Global Warming REALLY All That Bad?

Here.

"Robert Redford Bashes Al Gore as Greedy Opportunist"

Here.

"It's not the heat, it's the stupidity"

Here.

Excerpt:

Evans again: "We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction... This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between."

Bryan Leland of the International Climate Science Coalition: "I am an energy engineer and I know something about electricity trading and I know enough about carbon trading and the inaccuracies of carbon trading to know that carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else... We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to ‘solve' a [climate] problem that probably does not exist."

"The Pope condemns the climate-change scaremongers"

Here.

Excerpt:

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate-change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.

The 80-year-old Pope said the world needed to care for the environment but not to the point where the welfare of animals and plants was given a greater priority than that of mankind.

Do the Rich Owe the Poor Climate Change Reparations?

Here.

Excerpt:

Without going into the details, the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework (GDR) proposal foresees levying the equivalent of a climate "consumption luxury tax" on every person who earns over a "development threshold" of $9,000 per year. The idea is that rich people got rich in part by dumping carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels into the atmosphere, leaving less space for poor people to dump their emissions. In one scenario, Americans would pay the equivalent of a $780 per person luxury tax annually, which amounts to sending $212 billion per year in climate reparations to poor countries to aid their development and help them adapt to climate change. In this scenario, the total climate reparations that the rich must transfer annually is over $600 billion. This contrasts with a new report commissioned by the U.N. Development Program that only demands $86 billion per year to avoid "adaptation apartheid."
...
A woman from Papua New Guinea in the audience warned that such climate aid was likely to disappear into the corrupt pockets of poor country politicians rather than lift poor people out of poverty. But the touching faith of climate campaigners in the efficacy of international and national bureaucracies is immune to such realities.

A typical day at the UN climate conference

Here.

Southern Hemisphere Ice Cover Remains Well ABOVE Normal

Here.

Excerpts:

Southern Hemisphere’s ice cover now is at the same level as last June, i.e., a level seen during the last winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Besides, there are two more millions square kilometers of ice now compared to December 2006. And the large positive anomaly has persisted since September.
...
Icecap note: In the Northern Hemisphere, the ice and snow cover have recovered to within 1% (one snowstorm) of normal with the official start of winter still more than 12 days away

Bali - hand in hand or arm wrestling?

Some remarks on the Bali logo are here.

Note this tidbit from the comment section:

Another example of the government’s half-knowledge was the “installing” of solar panels at many of Bali’s traffic intersection 2 days prior to the start. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that there were no wires. Just for show. Well, at the intersections near the conference, some higher-ups have realized their mistake and during the night the panels were removed. Hopefully learning from their mistakes.

Even Reuters can see the irony in Bali

Here.

Obama "Objection" Looks Like Defence of Status Quo

Here.

Excerpt:

The statement released by presidential hopeful Barack Obama yesterday looks worryingly like a defence of the untenable and destructive Bush Administration position on global warming.

Polar Bear Facts

Here.

Excerpts:

Inuit also argue the bear population is on the rise along Western Hudson Bay, in sharp contrast to the Canadian Wildlife Service, which projects a 22% decline in bear numbers.
...
So I'm going to propose a different reason for the supposed decline in polar populations and it is an old one, indeed, it is the same one that led to a 5,000 bear World population earlier in the 20th Century, hunting. Nunavut allows at least 500 bear kills a year. Other Canadian places, like Nunavik, have no restrictions on the number of bears killed (by Inuit). There are no restrictions on Inuit kills of polar bears in Greenland. Who knows what goes on in Siberia.

Mayfield: No One Pressured Me on Climate Change

Here.

Free carbon offsets!

Here.

I hope they're thinking of us in Bali

Here.

Excerpt:

Ice Storm Turns Midwest Into 'War Zone'

DES MOINES, Iowa (Dec. 11) -- Schools closed for thousands of youngsters, Iowa's biggest airport shut down and thick layers of ice brought down more power lines Tuesday as a major ice storm glazed the nation's midsection.

At least 22 deaths had been blamed on the storm system since the waves of sleet and freezing rain started during the weekend. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses had no electricity.

Officials in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma had declared states of emergency. President Bush declared an emergency in Oklahoma on Tuesday, ordering federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts.

Global Warming issues in the news

Here.

Gore Co-Nobelist On Global Warming: “All the science of the IPCC is unsound.”

Here.

"Picture" of a complete solar cycle

Here.

"Three cheers for John Kerry"

Here.

Colorado shooting update

Here.

Excerpt:

The "security guard" who stopped the shooter was actually a volunteer parishioner who used her own gun, not a rent-a-cop. Much more from David Hardy, who notes that press coverage tends to obscure this point. Meanwhile, it's more evidence that people don't stop killers, people with guns do.

What would Cameron Diaz do?

Another excerpt from a Greenpeace blog here:

Some of the very surreal aspects of the Bali Climate Change conference are the setting, the cast of players and how this contrasts with the gravity of the issues that we are here to deal with.

Bali is a beautiful place. And the conference is being held in one of the grandest hotels on the island, the WestIn, in the resort area of Nusa Dua. Rumours abound that in the next week, in addition to the 15000 delegates already here, we will be graced by the presence of a cavalcade of stars, including, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, George Clooney, Al Gore, Arnie the Terminator and Leonardo DiCaprio.

All that wealth, all that beauty……

2008 International Conference on Climate Change

Here.

Excerpt:

On March 2-4, 2008, a very different kind of conference will take place at the Marriott Times Square Hotel in downtown New York. Hundreds of the world's leading scientists, economists, and policy analysts will come together to explore key issues overlooked by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming...
...
The global warming debate that the public and policymakers usually see is one-sided, dominated by government scientists and government organizations that are agenda-driven to find data that suggests a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research, but often to achieve political agendas entirely unrelated to the science of climate change. There is another side, but in recent years it has been denied a platform from which to speak.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is the first major conference bringing together the world's leading scholars who question the alleged "consensus" that the modern warming is largely man-made or would be catastrophic. It promises to be an exciting event, and the point of departure for future conferences, publications, and educational campaigns to finally present both sides of this important topic.

Skeptical Scientists Urge World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference

Here.

Excerpt:

BALI, Indonesia - An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to "have the courage to do nothing" in response to UN demands.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.

"Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing," Monckton told participants.

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)" Monckton added.

"False Prophets"

From Philip Stott here:

Between 1997 and 2004 (the most recent year for which we have complete statistics), carbon dioxide emissions rose as follows:

Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%;
Emissions from countries that ratified the protocol increased 21.1%;
Emissions from non-ratifiers of the protocol increased 10.0%;
Emissions from the U.S. (a non-ratifier) increased 6.6%;
Emissions from the U.S. increased less than 75% of ratifying countries.

With respect to the last point, the following are the percentage rises in emissions for a list of selected countries which have ratified the protocol (or which were exempted from targets):

Maldives, 252%;
China, 55%;
Luxembourg, 43%;
Iran, 39%;
Norway, 24%;
Russia, 16%;
Italy, 16%;
Finland, 15%;
Mexico, 11%;
Japan, 11%;
Canada, 8.8%.

What can one say? Should Mr. Bush have ratified the protocol and then followed everybody else’s example, I wonder?

Here we have, yet again, unequivocal evidence that ‘global warming’ is the ultimate faith without works. All that matters is your public confession of sin and belief, which must include the vilification of the U.S. The hypocrisy of the EU, and of many other countries, is breathtaking. The developing world must hold out at Bali against such dangerous deceits.

Kerry says US Senate wouldn't pass climate deal without developing countries

Here.

"When all you have is a hammer"

Here.

Excerpt:

Since the hammer-only people only have one tool, CO2-based climate forcing, they over-estimate the influence that this has on the climate. This in turn causes them to see looming disaster. As the people who are yelling the loudest, they get the most attention - more than they deserve.

Another report from Bali

Here.

Excerpt:

...But after a full week of attending plenary sessions and contact groups I can see why the process can be frustrating. I sat in a session about Carbon Capture and Storage last Thursday that exemplified the kind of frustration I think they were referring to. After 45 minutes of discussing how the discussion should take place, the facilitator noted that time was up and dismissed the meeting. Seriously? I was reasonably appalled at the productivity with which such an important part of the global conference was conducted.

Prehistoric Fossil Shows Polar Bears Lived During Last Global Warming Period

Here.

Excerpt:

What's so fascinating about the discovery is that it places the polar bear remnant living in the Eeemian - the last interglacial - which was much warmer than our current Holocene epoch and might portend goods news for today's polar bear population numbering 20-25,000 animals.

Pacific Ethanol halts a plant

Here.

"Another warming story doesn't hold up"

Here.

Excerpt:

The Times has just reported that duck hunting in Missouri is going through changes due to a warming climate in Missouri...
...
Here is the data as supplied by the United States Historical Climatology Network. What sticks out rather dramatically is that the most recent 50 years were considerably cooler than the previous 50 years. Missouri didn’t warm up over the last half century -- if anything it cooled.
...
...In fact all of the ten hottest years in Missouri, since 1900, were prior to 1955.

Routinely the New York Times makes claims about temperatures in specific localities rising in recent years in stories about global warming. Not one of such stories that I’ve read bothered to check the historical data.

Don't New York Times writers have access to Google?

Cold weather dampens Richard's enthusiasm for march against warming Armageddon

Regarding last Saturday's global warming protest in London's "biting cold", a Greenpeace blogger writes:

I am bathed in the warm glow of the righteous, for not only did I march with them, but I marched in the rain. Once you've made the decision, a little bit of meteorological adversity boosts everyone's sense of camaraderie. Apart, that is, from my fair-weather 'friend' Richard, who buggered off to the pub about ten minutes in, and is therefore the worst sort of part-timer and highly deserving of public contempt and derision. I try to do my bit.

So, apart from Richard the faithless, we were all there to send a message to Bali, where our glorious leaders are trying to save us all from climate Armageddon without imperilling the ability of large companies to make more money.

How not to measure temperature (Alaska)

Here.

Excerpt:

It’s not just the waste heat from power transformers nearby that can cause a bias, there’s also an air exhaust vent, and inside the building, which is known as the Orca Diesel Generation Plant is a very large diesel generator capable of providing 7 megawatts of electric power for the town of Cordova.

"False Sense of Certainty"

Here.

Excerpt:

If all your forecasts are coming out in the bottom 1% of the forecast range, then it is safe to assume that one is not forecasting very well. Which reminds me of Michael Mann, who said with famous confidence that there was a 95-99% probability that 1998 was the hottest year in the last 1000, which is an absurd claim. (Mann now denies having said this, but he is actually on film saying it, about 25 seconds into the linked clip).

For you Ivory-bill buffs, a climatologist claiming 90% certainty on something is comparable to an ornithologist claiming 90% certainty that a glimpsed bird was an Ivory-bill.

"Kyoto: More Harm Than Good. Where next?"

An interesting perspective from an apparent global warming alarmist is here:

One week at the Bali Climate Conference has cured me of any illusion that UNFCCC will solve the climate crisis, or that the annual gatherings of governments, industry and some NGOs will even remotely move us in the right direction.

This is not about saving the planet. It's quite simply a trade show, and all the different proposals are about making carbon trading more efficient or getting this or that industry or government to profit a bit more whilst we move ever faster towards mass extinction. I wonder if, in years to come, we'll look back on UNFCCC meetings as climate change profiteering conferences.

"Gore Lied; Global Warming Died"

Here.

Today's Bali roundup

1. "Reality Arrives in Bali" here.

2. "How Green Was My Bali" here.

"Who's Fueling Whom?"

Check out the Smithsonian article here.

"Climate missing from U.S. election-Gore"

Check out the article from Reuters here.

Excerpt:

"It takes time to talk to people in enough places to create a critical mass of opinion and urgency that will cause us to cross the tipping point beyond which a majority will demand that we solve this crisis," he said.

I think that global warming hysteria has already peaked in the U.S., and I doubt that Gore will ever get a majority of the people demanding that we solve this alleged crisis.

Selling this stuff to politicians, Hollywood and children tends to be easier than selling it to your average population of adult registered voters.

Note that Democratic voters in Iowa don't seem to care a whole lot about global warming.

Very much like the Ivory-bill hysteria, the peak belief period for each individual tends to occur before he/she seriously examines the evidence. In both hysterias, a reasonable person will almost certainly grown increasingly skeptical after digging into the subject. New global warming skeptics are being minted every day, while the ranks of the believers are thinning.

"Key targets gone from key text!"

From a December 10 Greenpeace Bali blog post here:

New text on the negotiations, that all those who have ratified the Kyoto Protocol are involved in. And it is bad news. The key targets - peaking global emissions in the next 10-15 years; reducing emissions in industrialzied countries by 25-40% by 2020; getting global emissions well below 50% by 2050 - they are all gone! There is a reference to a previous decision that includes these targets. But this is still unacceptable. We need clear words and clear signal from Bali. Nothing less. Period.

This person may be referring to actual text like this:

Responding to the unequivocal scientific evidence that preventing the worst impacts of climate change will require Parties included in the Annex I to the Convention as a group to reduce emissions in a range of 25-40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and that global emissions of greenhouse gases need to peak in the next 10 to 15 years and be reduced to very low levels, well below half of levels in 2000 by 2050

Two observations:

1. I'd like to see that allegedly "unequivocal" scientific evidence.

2. If the above text really is missing, it may be because those goals are not reachable. See this BBC article.

More from Philip Stott

Here.

I completely agree with this key paragraph:

So, let’s shout it from the very top of the ‘Tower of Bali’: “There is no way that human beings can manage climate in a predictable manner, and it is deeply dangerous to try to re-organise world economics and politics in the misguided belief that we can!”

"The Maoist Solution to Global Warming"

Here.

Excerpt:

So you thought that the socialists, the anti-growth / anti-technology folks, and the anti-globalization rioters all have gone silent over the last few years? WRONG! They have all joined the global warming movement -- in fact, in many cases, they are driving the movement. They have found that the global warming packaging can help them resell their failed ideas. That is why no one in the global warming catastrophist movement wants to talk about the science. Because its not about the science. It is about the ends that they desire, and they have discovered that the global warming panic is the best possible vehicle for reaching those ends.

"NY Times repeats the Kilimanjaro lie"

Here.

Excerpt:

If you watched An Inconvenient Truth (my condolences if you have), or if you have read any one of countless media reports on AGW, you might have gotten the impression that the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is melting.

It's not melting.

It is in fact shrinking, but that's due to sublimation, the process by which something changes from its solid state directly into its gaseous state in below-freezing temperatures without first melting. The temperature atop Kilimanjaro is nowhere near what is needed for melting. Low humidity in the region -- not warming -- is driving the sublimation. And guess what? It's been happening for more than a century.

"A convenient £50m for green Gore"

Here.

Excerpt:

WHO would have thought that saving the planet could be such a lucrative business? Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned environmental campaigner, has made more than £50m in just seven years from his books, speeches and shrewd investments in technology and green ventures.

Gore, 59, a failed presidential candidate, has already reinvented himself from the nearly man of American politics into the first global green celebrity. This week he will pick up the Nobel peace prize in Oslo before flying to Bali to take centre stage at the United Nations climate change conference.

Today Gore commands between £50,000 and £85,000 a speech, holds stock options in Google worth £15m and has made as much as £4m from advances on his book deals. He is also advising a US venture capital company on how to invest a $600m green technology fund.

He has come a long way since losing the 2000 presidential election to George W Bush when, according to official documents, Gore was worth just £1m. His biggest assets were his two homes in Nashville, Tennessee, and Arlington, Virginia, valued at £375,000, and £500,000 invested in oil company shares.

A related article is here.

"Mandating the Impossible (Not to Mention the Stupid)"

Here.

Excerpt (see the post for links):

The Congress is demanding 36 billion gallons of ethanol. Presumably, this is all from domestic sources because Congress has refused to drop the enormous tariffs on ethanol imports. But the entire corn harvest in 2004 of 11.8 billion bushels would make only 30 billion gallons of ethanol. So Congress wants us to put ALL of our food supply into our cars? Maybe we can tear down the Amazon rain forest to grow more.

"plane stupid"

Once again, the question: is this parody, or are these people actually serious?

"Tilting at windmills"

Here.

Excerpt:

Asked whether having a wind installation every half-mile around the coast was acceptable, Mr Hutton replied: "It is going to change our coastline, yes for sure. There's no way of making the shift to low carbon technology without making a change and that change being visible to people."

The worst of it though is that this madcap idea simply cannot work. With an average load factor of around 35 percent, alternative generation capacity will have to be built for the two-thirds of the time when the wind farms are producing no electricity at all – at ruinous cost.

But an even bigger problem is that, when highly variable wind power approaches ten percent of total production, it risks destabilising the grid, precipitating total collapse of the system.

Hat tip: Climate Science

Ice Storm Coats Nation's Middle; 6 Dead

Here.

It's a fact: When ordinary citizens are facing real weather like this, it's pretty darn tough to convince a majority of them that alarmist warming models are credible.

Excerpt:

ST. LOUIS (AP) - An ice storm slickened roads and sidewalks, grounded hundreds of flights, and cut power to tens of thousands Sunday in a swath from the Southern Plains to the Great Lakes as even colder weather threatened.

The wintry weather was expected to continue through midweek, and ice storm warnings stretched from Texas to Pennsylvania.

"Tomorrow may be even more of a dilemma than today because we're going to get even a little bit more colder," said John Pike, a meteorologist in the Weather Service's office in Norman, Okla.

Six traffic deaths were blamed on icy roads in Oklahoma. Roads along much of the state were considered slick and hazardous by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation, with two sections of Interstate 40 being closed temporarily.

More than 130,000 customers lost power in Missouri, Oklahoma, Illinois and Kansas, utilities reported.

Some communities in Missouri reported ice as thick as three-quarters of an inch, the National Weather Service said.

Does a prediction really count as "new information"?

Here.

Al Gore's Nobel acceptance speech

Here.

Note again that he holds up droughts, fires, some melting glaciers, etc as a "body of evidence" supposedly proving that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are destroying our environment.

For you Ivory-bill buffs, this is very much like using toots, taps, bark peeling and glimpses as evidence of a population of Ivory-bills along the Choctawhatchee.

What the Ivory-bill believers lack is any clear photographic documentation of a living Ivory-bill.

What climate alarmists lack is any clear observed correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature.

CNN compares Al Gore to Jerry Lewis

Here.

People don't stop killers. People with guns do.

Excerpt from an article linked here:

Virginia Tech doesn't have that kind of trust in its students (or its faculty, for that matter). Neither does the University of Tennessee. Both think that by making their campuses "gun-free," they'll make people safer, when in fact they're only disarming the people who follow rules, law-abiding people who are no danger at all.

This merely ensures that the murderers have a free hand. If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be harder.

In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 fromhis truck and ran to the scene. In February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.

Police can't be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it's usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they're armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

Pure Ivory-bill insanity

Here.

Spot the thermometer in this [infrared] photo

Here.

Excerpt:

As you can see, the NOAA MMTS official thermometer is at the edge of a swimming pool, with the stucco wall of the observers residence just 29 feet away. You can see the heat from the residence in the stucco, and the pool, which is also warmer than the ambient air. The air temperature when this photo was taken was 54°F or 12°C. The pool appears to be about 14°C. of course the pool will be significantly warmer than the ambient air at night this time of year.

Strict personal flight “allowance” proposed in Britain

Here.

"Greenpeace must go nuclear"

Here.

UK's official CO2 figures an illusion - study

Here.

Excerpt:

Britain is responsible for hundreds of millions more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions than official figures admit, according to a new report that undermines UK claims to lead the world on action against global warming.

The analysis says pollution from aviation, shipping, overseas trade and tourism, which are not measured in the official figures, means that UK carbon consumption has risen significantly over the past decade, and that the government's claims to have tackled global warming are an "illusion".
...
Under Kyoto, Britain must reduce its greenhouse gas output to 12.5% below 1990 levels by 2012. According to official figures filed with the UN, Britain's emissions are currently down 15% compared with 1990.

But the new report says UK carbon output has actually risen by 19% over that period, once the missing emissions are included in the figures.

The report says: "This is a dramatic reversal of fortune. It merits an immediate, more detailed and more robust assessment. It suggests that the decline in greenhouse gas emissions from the UK economy may have been to a considerable degree an illusion."

An extremely absurd paragraph from the Washington Post

Check this out:

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. panel of scientists on climate change, said people are going to have to change their lifestyles to become part of the solution, but "that doesn't mean we have to go back to life in a cave." He said his own children "shamed" him into changing his habits, and he urged young people to realize the influence they have over adults.

Ok, Mr. Chairman: you're telling us with all that allegedly great evidence of impending human-caused catastrophe, you wouldn't even change your own personal habits until your kids shamed you into it?!

What exactly did your kids say that was so much more persuasive than what your UN scientists (allegedly) say?

Yet another peer-reviewed paper disputes climate alarmism

Excerpt from this link:

About 5 kilometers above the surface in the tropical zones, models predict between 2 times and 4 times higher warming trend than what is observed. Above the altitude of 8 kilometers, the theoretical and empirical trends have opposite signs.

Excerpt from this link:

Our research demonstrates that the ongoing rise of atmospheric CO2 has only a minor influence on climate change. We must conclude, therefore, that attempts to control CO2 emissions are ineffective and pointless. – but very costly.

Who are these "thousands of climate change experts"?

Excerpt from this article:

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Thousands of climate change experts from throughout the world are gathering in Bali to start the politically tortuous process of turning new scientific evidence about the perils of climate change into policy to act on the problem.

If you do some reading on the gathering in Bali, you should pretty quickly figure out that the 10,000+ people working on policy are mostly bureaucrats, political activists, etc, rather than people who could reasonably be called "climate change experts".

I would bet a large sum of money that very few of the attendees could formulate an intelligent answer to this fundamental question:

Can you articulate specifically why you believe that altering one ten-thousandth of our atmosphere is likely to result in catastrophic warming of the planet?

In your answer, I'll be looking for things like references to actual evidence, data, logic, etc.

Another snippet from the above article:

The problem with climate change is it's very long term," he [Agus Purnomo] said. "You can mobilize for something sudden, like a tsunami. With climate change, the adaptation is gradual," he said.

Ok, so we can easily adapt to a surprise 20-foot tsunami, but we can't reasonably cope with a one-foot sea level rise spread over an entire century?

Hydrogen Car Is Here, but Where’s the Hydrogen Economy?

Here.

Excerpt:

The bottom line? Transforming the energy source that makes a car run is relatively easy compared with rebuilding a multitrillion-dollar transportation and energy grid that took more than a century to create (no matter what we think of it now).

In "biting cold", disappointing attendance at London global warming protest

Excerpt from this article:

Carrying banners with slogans like "cut carbon not forests" and "actions speak louder than words" protesters in London marched in torrential rain and biting cold past parliament and through Trafalgar Square to rally in front of the U.S. embassy.

Update 1: Check this out--Reuters has now removed "and biting cold" from the above sentence:

Carrying banners with slogans like "cut carbon not forests" and "actions speak louder than words" protesters in London marched in torrential rain past parliament and through Trafalgar Square to rally in front of the U.S. embassy.

Note also the paragraph about disappointing attendance:

British police said 2,000 people took part in the march. Organisers said they estimated the number at 7,000.

Note that organizers had hoped for a vastly greater turnout:

Organisers say they hope up to 40,000 people could attend the rally.

"Last year we attracted 35,000 people and we hope this will be bigger," said Phil Thornhill of the Campaign Against Climate Change, which is organising the event.

Update 2:Thanks to Icecap for the link!

Update 3:Now note this from the BBC, with no mention of the British police figure of 2,000 protesters:

Organisers said 10,000 turned out for the London march and rally outside the US embassy.

Photo of "WWF CO2 Dance Attack" in Bali

The photo above is from this page.

Is global warming just the latest Salem witch hunt?

Here.

Excerpt:

"The advent of a new ice age, scientists say, appears to be guaranteed. The devastation will be astonishing." — Gregg Easterbrook in Newsweek, Nov. 23, 1992

Global warming skeptics look on in wonder and amazement at the daily barrage of environmental doom and gloom featured in these pages and elsewhere. How is it possible that so many people — journalists, scientists and politicians alike — could be so gullible? History and sociology may prove instructive.

In 1691, a phenomenon sociologists call a "collective delusion" swept the enclave of Salem Village, Mass. As a consequence of social paranoia, hundreds of people were accused of practicing witchcraft, and perhaps two dozen lost their lives. Of course, we enlightened moderns would never succumb to superstition and mass hysteria.

Or would we? According to sociologists Robert Bartholomew and Erich Goode, collective delusions have taken place with surprising frequency, and the phenomenon's long and shameful history includes several episodes from the recent past. A relic of the Dark Ages it is not. In fact, global warming could be described as a collective delusion, a modern equivalent to the Salem witch hunt.

Gore warns CO2 cuts needed for "the survival of our civilization"

Here.

Baby tax needed to save planet, says "expert"

Read the whole thing here.

Excerpt:

A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus "baby levy" at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

When properly motivated, people will attend your event

On the same day that an underwhelming number of people turned out for worldwide global warming protests, we see this:

Hardy Minnesotans by the thousands braved the cold to audition for NBC's "Deal or No Deal." The goal was to get noticed, somehow.
...
Saturday's cold weather didn't keep thousands of Minnesotans away from a chance to win $1 million.

More than 8,000 people began lining up before dawn at Denny Hecker's Inver Grove Heights Toyota dealership to audition for NBC's "Deal or No Deal" game show.

"Chasing rumours and meetings, meetings, meetings. Is that really all we do?"

This post from a Greenpeace blog provides a window into some of what is really happening in Bali:

It’s not easy to explain plainly what I and other civil society reps have actually been doing for all the long hours we have spent here at the Convention centre all week. The world of global climate talks is a world of rumour chasing, coffee drinking, constant huddles and meetings – with country delegations, with other NGOs, with the rest of the Greenpeace crowd. Press releases need to be discussed, drafted and then often enough redrafted as the negotiations have already moved on. People who are not at the talks but in national Greenpeace offices need to be kept informed of what’s going on – and motivated to do something, if it happens to be their government that is acting up. There is a fair amount of sitting in big windowless rooms listening to boring speeches, as well. The challenge is to wake up again when something really outrageous happens – and to then react.

Also note this excerpt from their ECO newsletter:

The ever popular NGO Party will be held tonight from 8pm to 3am at the Beach Bar, Inna Putri Bali Hotel (next to the Grand Hyatt Hotel).

Unclear on the concept

Yet another very odd global "warming" protest is detailed here:

Then just like that, Pastor Morris turned his back and made determined strides across the snowy beach and into the placid, 37-degree lake water.

Grunting could be heard as the priest marched about 20 feet out, then squatted down in the water to his neck. He paused for a few seconds, then rose, and hastened back to shore, flashing the audience a tortured grin.

All was over in less than a minute. Back on land, parishioners and a woman in a polar bear costume covered his dripping body with blankets.

"I'm all numb," Father Morris said, still grinning but in obvious discomfort. "Numb's the word."

Eleven-year-old Cheryl Salinger looked on, never having seen anyone dip into water so cold.

Not just a junket in paradise?

Excerpt from this article:

If you can take the tropical air, it's nice in Bali now. The temperature ranges from 78 and 86 degrees, and while humidity is around 80 percent, it is, well, Bali - one of the world's most glorious islands.

All of us enduring a sometimes-rainy December in Northern California can be allowed envy for Santa Clara Mayor Patricia Mahan and Councilman Pat Kolstad, who are attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference at the Bali International Conference Center, courtesy of electricity ratepayers.

The city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, is paying $5,700 for Mahan's trip, which includes $2,243 for air fare. Kolstad's bill is being footed by the Northern California Power Agency, a consortium of publicly owned power companies that he serves as chairman.

Only "about 80" people show up for a global warming protest in frigid Edmonton

Excerpt from this article:

About 80 "mourners" attended a mock funeral for Mother Earth in Edmonton, singing songs and giving eulogies next to a long black coffin adorned with pictures of landscapes and arctic scenes, followed by a minute of silence.

With over 900,000 people in the Edmonton metropolitan area, less than 1 in 10,000 showed up for this protest (less than .01%).

In the face of truly gargantuan hype by the media and political groups, it seems that only a tiny percentage of the public is buying into the panic.

Al Gore is criticised for lining his own pockets after £3,300-per-minute green speech

Excerpt from this Daily Mail article:

Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 a minute to deliver a poorly received speech.

The former American Vice-President was also accused of being "precious" at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming.

Many of the audience at last month's Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000.

"Small" attendance at Winnipeg global warming protest

Excerpts from this article (which carefully avoids giving us the actual number of Winnipeg's 600,000+ residents who attended this protest):

The messages came from a gaggle of peaceful protesters gathered outside the Manitoba Legislature yesterday afternoon for an international day of action supporting the Kyoto Protocol.
...
Though the local protest was small in scale, its participants shared the view that every little bit helps.

"If this does anything, us standing here freezing our butts off, it's a good thing," said 25-year-old Andrea Stewart...

Amusingly, at the bottom of this story, we see a link to this one, entitled "Cold enough to kill":

Extreme weather is difficult enough for those who are well-prepared, but for the city's most vulnerable it can be deadly.

"It's cold enough to kill you," said Blake, who is currently staying at Siloam Mission in Winnipeg's core area.
...
Yesterday morning the deep freeze continued as the wind chill dropped to -40 C in Winnipeg. Environment Canada had issued a wind chill warning for Winnipeg and other parts of Manitoba.