From May 21 to 23, 2012, The Heartland Institute will host its Seventh International Conference on Climate Change, a three-day event in Chicago piggybacking on the NATO Summit occurring on May 19-20.

This year’s theme is “Real Science, Real Choices.” “Real science” refers to the distinctions that must be made between science has it has been practiced since the Enlightenment and “post-normal science” that isn’t science at all. Real science has falsifiable hypotheses and is data-driven, while “post-normal science” does not. “Real choices” refers to the choices being made as a consequences of unjustified alarmism over man-made global warming. We are shutting down or refusing to develop safe and affordable reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, and we are “burning food” by using ethanol to power SUVs. These are real choices with real consequences for human well-being as well as the environment.

More: http://climateconference.heartland.org/

Ocean acidification is like the Castle Ghost – everyone is scared of it but no one has seen it.

Dozens of learned articles and millions of media words tell us that ocean acidity has increased alarmingly since man started using carbon fuels. The worry is that the carbon dioxide being generated by man’s industry is dissolving in the ocean thus creating acidic water. And the computer models forecast that, by some future date, sea shells and corals will be dissolved or killed by the acidic ocean and/or the associated global warming.

However a close look at the chemistry of the oceans and the evidence provided by past records and present observations reveals that the open ocean is alkaline and never acidic, except locally near active submarine volcanic vents. It is deceptive to suggest that sea life is threatened by “the rising acidity of the oceans”. The oceans are still quite alkaline. Nothing unusual or abnormal has yet been detected. Other conclusions are:

• The pH of the oceans varies naturally from place to place and time to time, depending on temperatures and the activities of plant and animal life. It is impossible to determine a meaningful figure for “average” ocean acidity (pH). It is also impossible to say with any certainty that average ocean pH has changed because of man’s use of carbon fuels. Such “measurements” are an exercise in guided guess-work. (”What would you like the answer to be?”)
• It is a myth that acidic waters necessarily kill aquatic life. Rain water is slightly acidic and many fresh water lagoons, swamps and reed beds are also acidic. Nevertheless, aquatic life flourishes in these wetlands.
• The oceans have a huge capacity resist being destabilised by changes in temperature or composition of the atmosphere. Whenever there is a change, the reactions of other chemicals or life in the sea act to moderate and even reverse those changes. Oceans cover about 71% of the Earth’s surface and the hydrosphere contains over 300 times the mass of gases in the atmosphere. The oceans thus have a huge capacity to buffer any variations in heat content or gas content emanating from the thin veil of atmospheric gases. The effect of man’s supposed 3% contribution to the tiny 0.039% of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s thin atmosphere would not register a long-term effect in the massive oceans.
• Cold ocean currents from the deep ocean periodically up-well to the surface. These currents are rich in dissolved carbon dioxide and other chemicals and decayed organic matter. Where this cold nutrient-rich water surfaces, there is a staggering profusion of aquatic life.
• Oceans have an unlimited ability to remove carbon dioxide from their waters and store it in thick beds of shells and corals, limestone, chalk, dolomite, magnesite, siderite, marls, methane hydrate and oil shales. Fresh water swamps and lakes on land have also laid down massive deposits of coal and lignite formed from carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere. Many of these deposits were laid down when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was far higher than it is today.
• Carbon dioxide present in the oceans is essential to plant life and current very low levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean are limiting plant growth. All animal life depends on these plants. Man’s mining and industrial activities are harmlessly recycling some of this valuable carbon dioxide from natural limestones and hydrocarbons buried in the dead lithosphere, back to the living biosphere.
• Corals are hardy and adaptable and have survived for 500 million years. During that time they have had to cope with warm eras, ice ages, extinction events, eras of massive volcanic activity, dramatic rising and lowering in sea levels and eons of time when levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were far higher than today.
• A very recent extensive study of the Great Barrier Reef concluded that the changes forecast under the “business as usual greenhouse gas emissions” were unlikely to cause great harm to the reef.
• Any change in global temperature or the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will cause life on land and in the ocean to adjust and adapt. However, on balance, a warmer world with more plant food in the atmosphere and a more vigorous water cycle is very beneficial for the biosphere. The killer climates are associated with ice ages when the atmosphere is cold and dry, the sea levels are much lower and much of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in vast lifeless sheets of ice.
• There is no justification to use the baseless fear of “acidification of the oceans” as an excuse for a massive dislocation of our transport, food and energy industries. We should instead be focussing on real pollution problems (such as man’s rubbish floating in the oceans) and/or on preparing to cope with real and likely natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, fires, cyclones and droughts).

To see a full report on “The Acid Ocean Bogey Man” by Viv Forbes with illustrations and explanations see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/acid-ocean-bogeyman.pdf [PDF, 1.2 MB]

By Ken Ring

According to climate experts and politicians, if we persist in burning fossil fuels, this insensitivity by man could cause an environmental catastrophe, only avertable we are told by paying extra taxes. But is life on earth really that finely balanced?

Life as we know it has existed for at least half a billion years, starting as primeval slime and evolving to present day, during which time every environmental calamity did happen. Yet oddly, life is still here.

Read More: http://nz.news.yahoo.com/opinion/post/-/blog/news_makers/post/95/comment/1/

CO2Australia boasts of planting three million carbon credit trees. This is “just the beginning” of a new bubble industry, the CO2.con.

This bubble is set to inflate rapidly. To offset just one day of Qantas operations, CO2 promoters must plant more than 200,000 trees in permanent forests covering 130 hectares. How much land is required to offset all Australian power stations, industry and transport?

Yes these trees will consume carbon dioxide. However CO2 levels today are well below what is ideal for plant growth. While they are growing strongly, these trees will suck the gas of life from the atmosphere, competing strongly with nearby crops and plant life for the traces of carbon dioxide remaining.

Then as the trees mature, growth stops. The aging forest just sits there, some trees growing, some dying and net carbon sequestration ceases. It becomes a sterile shrine to the green religion whose main impact on the biosphere is providing a haven for feral animals and noxious weeds.

Green spruikers claim that they only use land not suitable for anything else. Wrong! Every bit of Australia not covered by road, cities, parks or deserts can support crops, timber-getting or grazing animals. Carbon-credit forests gnaw away at this national land asset every year.

Moreover, CO2.con investors, like all speculators, want quick returns. Their quick return demands rapidly growing trees in arable country - deserts and salt pans are uneconomical. Thus the wheat/sheep belt is shrinking.

No one can demonstrate any climate or environmental benefit from the CO2.con.

Forcing consumers and taxpayers to fund this large scale permanent land sterilisation is clearly unsustainable. All Australians fund this destruction via increased prices for electricity, cement, steel, air tickets and rail fares, and reduced land for food production. The carbon tax will increase their burden.

Like all bubble industries, the CO2.con industry must end in tears, and the sooner it ends the better.

Read on for more, including:

1. Vested Interests in the Climate Debate
2. Solving Three Problems
3. The Rice Video: Carbon Dioxide in perspective
4. Flogging a Dead Horse
5. Two Green Prophets Recant

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/co2-dot-con.pdf [PDF, 171 KB]

When Europeans settled Australia, much of the country was covered by grasslands and open forests. In 1770, that great botanist Sir Joseph Banks reported “very few tree species, but every place was covered with vast quantities of grass”. Many other explorers and settlers made similar observations.

The land had been kept in this state for centuries by aboriginal land managers using their main tool, fire. However, since 1788, the use of fire was progressively suppressed by settlers, foresters, city dwellers, bureaucrats and environmentalists.

Trees invade and then suffocate grasslands unless tree seedlings are kept in check by fire or by mechanical or chemical means.

The destruction of Australia’s ancestral grasslands has received a massive boost in recent years by green extremists aiming to remove human activities from rural Australia using national parks, reservations, crown land, heritage areas, Wild Rivers, vegetation orders, logging bans and now Kyoto bans on regrowth clearing.

Prevention of hazard reduction burning (the key tool used by generations of aborigines to maintain Australia’s landscape), lockout of grazing animals and the spread of carbon credit forests is completing the destruction of our savannah lands.

Once the grasslands become infested by woody scrubs, these quickly give protection to noxious weeds such as lantana, groundsel and boxthorn, and vermin such as foxes and wild dogs, cats, and pigs.

The amazing grasses of the world and their seeds feed most of the animal kingdom. The deliberate sacrifice of native grasslands to woody weeds is another suicidal green policy.

For those who would like read some fascinating comments by early explorers and settlers see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/fire-and-landscape.pdf [PDF, 1.8 MB]

Coal, not candles, should be the symbol of Earth Hour.

It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power and burn wood, cardboard, unwashed coal and cow dung for home heat.

It was coal that saved the forests being felled to fuel the first steam engines and produce charcoal for the first iron smelters.

It was coal that powered the light bulbs and saved the whales being slaughtered for whale oil lamps.

It was coal that produced the steel that replaced shingles on the roof, timber props in the mines, wooden fence posts on the farms and the bark on the old bark hut.

In Australia today, coal provides at least 75% of our lighting, cooking, heating, refrigeration, rail transport and steel. Without it, we would be back in the dark days of candles, wood stoves, chip heaters, open fires, smoky cities, hills bare of trees and streets knee deep in horse manure.

Coal is fossil sunshine as clean as the green plants it came from, and often less damaging to the environment than its green energy alternatives.

Earth Hour candles are green tokenism for rich status-seekers and nostalgic dreamers.

We should spend Earth Hour saluting the real people who produce the coal on which most people on earth depend.

The Real Agenda of Earth Hour

“We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for Capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to the wilderness millions and tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.” – Dave Foreman, “Earth First”

For those who would like to read more:

Clearing the smog of Beijing with “Coal by Wire”: http://carbon-sense.com/2008/08/04/clearing-the-smog/

Return to the caves: http://carbon-sense.com/2010/05/06/earth-day-blackout-night/

Hail to Electricity: http://carbon-sense.com/2010/04/01/hail-to-electricity/

The Road to more Blackout nights: http://carbon-sense.com/2010/03/26/earth-hour-2010/

Earth Hour – a Dissent: http://carbon-sense.com/2011/03/25/mckitrick-earth-hour/

There is more in the PDF version of this post: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/earth-hour.pdf [PDF, 82 KB]

The Australian government’s plan to sell their un-saleable carbon tax has hit a snag – their pollsters have discovered that the word ”carbon” provokes anger in the electorate. This is no surprise. Most decent people hate liars and the carbon tax campaign has been mired in lies from the start.

There are five big carbon lies.

Read on for more, including:

• Farming Carbon Credits
• The New Brisbane Line?
• The Big Unravelling Starts, in Germany
• Global Warming is not the Threat - Ice is the Killer
• Renewable Electricity for Australia – the Cost
• Practical Weather Prediction
• How we are Winning the Climate Wars
• Carbon Sense will keep up the fight

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/carbon-lies.pdf [PDF, 230 KB]

By Dr. Robert Brown,
Physics Dept. Duke University

One of many, many problems with modern climate research is that the researchers seem to take their thermal reconstructions far too seriously and assign completely absurd measures of accuracy and precision, with a very few exceptions. In my opinion it is categorically impossible to “correct” for things like the UHI (Urban Heat Island) effect — it presupposes a knowledge of the uncorrected temperature that one simply cannot have or reliably infer from the data. The problem becomes greater and greater the further back in time one proceeds, with big jumps (in uncertainty) 250, 200, 100 and 40 odd years ago. The proxy-derived record from more than 250 years ago is uncertain in the extreme, with the thermal record of well over 70% of the Earth’s surface completely inaccessible and with an enormously sparse sampling of highly noisy and confounded proxies elsewhere. To claim accuracy greater than 2-3 K is almost certainly sheer piffle, given that we probably don’t know current “true” global average temperatures within 1 K, and 5K is more likely.

See the full post on: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/04/global-annualized-temperature-full-of-snip-up-to-their-eyebrows/

At presentation to a seminar at the British House of Commons recently, Professor Lindzen clarified what the debate over climate change is really about.

“It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is.
“It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is.
“It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should.
“The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.

For the whole presentation see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/lindzen-reconsidering-the-climate-change-act.pdf [PDF, 1.7 MB]

For another summary see: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/22/is-catastrophic-global-warming-like-the-millenium-bug-a-mistake/

Prof Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT.

The Carbon Sense Coalition was formed in 2007 by a bunch of alarmed and annoyed senior citizens (mainly crusty old blokes and a few smart young things). Many had long experience in science, engineering, economics, industry and government.

We were alarmed at the stupidity of anyone classing carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and annoyed at the misuse of government funds to promote the foolish notion that man controls the climate, and all that is needed to improve it is a carbon tax.

The founders are more senior now and a bit more relaxed because we have been joined by many concerned youngsters, and the alarmist tide has definitely turned. Once we were ignored by most of the media – now some friends report our message and the others are sufficiently concerned by our message that they try to dig up dirt on us and our motivations.

Why was this battle against climate alarmism all over the world largely led by the oldies? Here are a few reasons:

Read on: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/future-carbon-sense.pdf [PDF, 114 KB]