Gore Still Lying His Way South

Gore's opening statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today:

We are here today to talk about how we as Americans and how the United States of America as part of the global community should address the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis.

The weather in Washington on arrival...20 dead and many frozen.

Gore's fellow alarmist James Hansen of NASA has been punk'd by his former supervisor at NASA, Dr John S. Theon: “As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research,” Theon wrote of his career.

Theon has publicly declared he is in the rapidly growing ranks of the Skeptics.

Now remember...
Arctic sea ice growth finished the year in 2008 at the same level as 1979.
The oceans have been cooling since 2003.
Sea ice is growing at the fastest pace on record.
A rare 50 year arctic blast is cooling the west coast.
Greenland's glaciers are stabilizing.
There are growing fears of a coming freeze worse than the ice age.
Alaskan Sea Glaciers are advancing for the first time in 250 years.
And, for the second straight year the Earth is, in fact, cooling... not warming.

Rodney Hide on the ETS in the House Today

"As an Environmental Scientist I am probably the only person in this House qualified to discuss this matter"

"This bill is about creating a market in hot air"

"This bill is about a computer model - none of it has been proved and this bill will have no effect on the climate"

Have a look at Rodney's speech when Hansard is out. He gets few into Al Bore on the way through.

Deputy Speaker Hobbs is struggling to get the House to address the bill itself as it is in its committee stage - seems there are at least another 700 amendments since Liar Parker introduced the bill last week.

Someone from NZ First has just got up to say no one knows enough about the bill with 750 new amendments.

Aussie Reactions to Rudd's ETS Green Paper

I have posted some initial thoughts over at Having a Blast

Australian ETS Green Paper Out

See more detail at Having A blast

• Agriculture not included
• Petrol Tax/excise to be reduced to compensate for carbon charges
• Free permits to emitters who are energy intensive exporters
• Direct assistance to low paid, beneficiaries and moderate income families to compensate

Looks to have been more carefully thought through than the misanthropic proposals from Clark and Parker in New Zealand

NZ Scientists Debunk Critical Climate Change Assumptions.

A recent article in the NZ Herald carried the astonishing story that recent research in Westland "puts the cat among the paleoclimatology pigeons"

In simple terms the story is research in Westland (of New Zealand) debunked a critical climate change assumption. The assumption that climate change occurs across the hemispheres simultaneously was speared by research from the University of Canterbury. This is a critical assumption for the warmists' anthropogenic climate change agenda.

I did think it deserved a post. I see now that Watts Up With That has picked the story up. They note:

University of Canterbury research indicating a glacial ridge in the South Island was formed by a landslide could pour cold water on evidence that climate change happened simultaneously around the world. Scientists had believed the Waiho Loop moraine was created during a brief cold snap about 13,000 years ago that also affected Europe and North America...

But no one had ever studied the Waiho Loop sediments. “...these new findings suggest the loop (see photo at Top) - which sits near the South Island’s Alpine fault line - was the result of a landslide, not climate change...”

“When graduate student Dan Tovar had a look, he discovered to our surprise that it was mainly made up of a rock type known as greywacke, which is different from the rocks that make up all the other moraines in front of the Franz Josef Glacier.”

Professor Shulmeister said greywacke occurred about 13km up the valley from the Loop. All the other moraines were predominantly composed of schist which outcropped near Franz Josef township.“The greywacke was also rather more angular than the rocks in the other moraines, suggesting it had not been transported in water or at the base of a glacier.”

It is this is the assumption that appears to be wrong. The team concluded:

...As a result of the study, Professor Shulmeister’s team believes a large landslide dumped a huge volume of rock on top of the glacier, causing it to advance and, when the advance stopped, the moraine was created.

This research is to be published in Nature Geoscience and the Abstract is here.

Perhaps the most critical comment in the abstract is this:

Our study shows that glacial moraines are not necessarily climatic in origin, which must be taken into account when evaluating the mass balance responses of glacial systems.

The criticality is that many/most of the warmists use glacier change (as demonstrated through analysis of the moraine) as proof of global warming.