Anglican Samizdat

As the dog and I stepped out into the -15°C air this morning, my thoughts drifted inexorably to global warming.

The bad news is that not only has there not been any warming for the last 15 years, there isn’t going to be any for the next five either.

This is not news that is welcomed by global warming Cassandras: Christopher Monckton, the third viscount of Benchley, the bearer of the bad tidings that global warming is a sham, was ejected from the United Nations climate change conference for his efforts.

Some speculate that the U.N.’s determination to make Canada even colder is really a surreptitious war against capitalism. Since every self-respecting, anti-capitalist, liberal-left apparatchik from the impotent Fred Hiltz to the messianic Barack Obama is beside himself with excitement at the prospect of crippling Western industry with carbon penalties – no-one seems to care much about CO2 from China or India -  it seems pretty clear that they are right.

Still, at least it has warmed up to -12°C for the dog’s evening walk.

From here:

“Charles Manson Still Believes in Global Warming. Do You?”
That’s the essence of a thoughtful and nuanced new billboard campaign put together by the Heartland Institute, the nation’s top climate change-doubting think tank. The billboards feature portraits of figures like Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, Charles Manson, and Fidel Castro, alongside giant lettering that reads “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?”

If I had designed the ad, it would have been much more subtle. Something like this:

Yet more doubts are being cast on the reality of global warming by David Happer, professor of physics at Princeton:

During a fundraiser in Atlanta earlier this month, President Obama is reported to have said: “It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking. On the other hand, I really have enjoyed nice weather.”

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.

I admit that I am disappointed by all this. My wife is a keen gardener and she keeps a number of compost piles in our yard. I had high hopes that they would very soon be exploding in spectacular showers of potato peelings and rotting parsnips. But no: most disconcerting.

Global warming could explode ‘compost bombs’ all over the planet.

When the compost pile in your backyard revs up, it starts producing heat, as the microbes in it do their work breaking down organic matter. On a small scale, that’s great for your garden. On a grand scale, though, this same process can create a “compost bomb” — a burst of carbon into the atmosphere. And as the planet warms up, this is going to happen more often.

From here:

Cardinal Keith O’Brien of St. Andrews and Edinburgh has joined other Christian leaders, including Anglican Archbishops Rowan Williams and Desmond Tutu, in calling for repentance over indifference to climate change.

Here I am, repenting over my indifference to global warming:

Since it no longer believes in Hell in the next life, the Episcopal Church can’t very well preach fire and brimstone sermons, so on Sunday, it did the next best thing: it had “a national preach-in” (whatever that is) on global warming in this life.

I can’t help noticing that the participants in the photo have warm coats on.

From here:

On Sunday, Berkeley’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church took part in a national preach-in on global warming which linked hundreds of congregations across the country together as they reflected on their responsibility towards the planet and social action.

The Reverend Arthur Boone linked the responsibility for Christians to act on the issue of global warming to Christ’s admonition to love one another. Citing Paul’s letter to the Corinthians “Love does not insist on its own way…,” the Reverend argued that the United States, with 3% of the world’s population, cannot in good conscience continue to consumer 25% of the world’s energy resources. “If we are to love our fellow humans, we cannot insist on our own way of consuming ever more energy,” he said.

Next time you are pulled over by the RCMP for a rolling stop at a stop sign, you have a new excuse: you are helping to prevent global warming.

From here:

Is the rapid spread of stop signs in Scarborough contributing to global warming?

City of Toronto staff were given two months to find out, but couldn’t.

The investigation started in November, when Mike Del Grande, councillor for Scarborough-Agincourt, appeared concerned about the number of new stop signs being approved for the area.

With the release of 5000 new Climategate 2 emails, it has become even more apparent that data has been falsified, the issue politicised and the science as unsettled as my Aunty Ethel’s homemade blancmange.

From here:

Global-warming skeptics spend much of their time knocking down the fatuous warmist claim that the science is settled. According to the warmists, this singular piece of settled science is attested to by hundreds or thousands of highly credentialed scientists. In truth, virtually the entire warmist edifice is built around a small, tightly knit coterie of persons (one hesitates to refer to folks with so little respect for the scientific method as scientists) willing to falsify data and manipulate findings; or, to put it bluntly, to lie in order to push a political agenda not supported by empirical evidence. This is what made the original release of the Climategate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia so valuable. They clearly identified the politicized core of climate watchers who were driving the entire warmist agenda. Following in their footsteps are all the other scientists who built their own research on top of the fraudulent data produced by the warmist core.

Canada is standing up for sanity by refusing to participate in the Kyoto protocol and, excluding flights for the participants, around 15,000 tonnes of CO2 is being dumped into the air in Durban City at the conference to discuss how to dump less CO2 into the air.

Meanwhile, Rowan Williams is promoting his solution to the problem: grow your own potatoes. I am all for home grown vegetables since they taste very good and, I have to admit, it’s a pretty harmless solution from a person no-one listens to, to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Heads I win, tails, you lose.

• Snow
• Lack of snow
• Drought
• Rain
• Heat
• Cold
• Hurricanes
• Lack of hurricanes
• Sea level rising
• Sea level falling

From here

The global warming alarmists have been telling porkies again, this time, Professor Richard Muller who portentously announced the demise of global warming scepticism in the Wall Street Journal recently.

Following this revelation, Prof Judith Curry from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology accused Muller of hiding the fact that there has been no warming for the last 13 years.

Ironically, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, of which Muller is founder and chairman, has “A transparent approach based on data analysis”, emblazoned on its web page.

Read more here:

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

[…..]

a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

[…..]

As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

The nineteenth century horse manure problem:

Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*

The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]).

In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.

The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.

Even though today a more colloquial rendering  is common, the original horse manure problem is still with us in the guise of global warming. Since it locates the dwelling place of sin in the inanimate rather than where it belongs in the human heart, it appeals especially to Anglican bishops. Melbourne’s Archbishop Freier recently intoned:

If the [climate] scientists are even partly right, “our children’s children will have to endure a harmful legacy,” Dr Philip Freier, Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne warned last night, in his opening address to the 50th Synod of the Diocese of Melbourne.

The Harold Campings of climate catastrophe had recent cause for celebration (they secretly welcome the doom implicit in global warming) here where Richard Muller pronounced that “Global warming is real”. However, he did rather let the side down in the last two sentences of his article – an unfortunate admission since it was supposedly the point of the study – a blunder noticed here and here:

How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

It seems anthropogenic global warming may well be nothing but a pile of horse manure after all.