November 29, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

In a Nov. 24, 2009 posting (Global warming with the lid off) I expressed hopes that, other than the Wall Street Journal, the rest of the main-stream media will follow suit and provide some coverage of the Climategate Scandal.  That now appears to be underway, a full 12 days after the Climategate Scandal first broke.

The New York Times and the Times of London both published articles on the nature, history and circumstances of Climategate; and so have a few other major newspapers. (See climatedepot.com; wattsupwiththat.com; climaterealists.com, and icecap.us)

For those who are new to the issue, Alex Jones interviewed Lord Christopher Monckton in an hour-long program on the UN’s plan to establish a totalitarian, communist world government by using the climate scam to scare and manipulate the world’s national governments into compliance.  The comments by Lord Christopher Monckton were made with reference to Climategate.

You need to watch the interview!

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November 27, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anHuOAXIl0M

Pierce Corbyn and Aleksey Kokorin became involved in a heated argument in that debate, over the incidence of malaria in Russia.

Aleksey Kokorin (a Russian warmist activist) implied that Pierce Corbyn (an astrophysicist renowned for making accurate, long-range weather predictions) cannot be correct with respect to stating that malaria was endemic in Russia’s North during the Little Ice Age, because Pierce Corbyn is not a medical doctor.  However, one does not have to be a medical doctor to be able to refer to the facts of medical science.  Aleksey Kokorin is in denial of those facts, Pierce Corbyn is correct, and knowledge once more trumps climate hysteria . It is not necessary to have extraordinarily high temperatures for malaria to thrive in temperate zones.

CDC — Perspectives
From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age

Paul Reiter
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol6no1/pdf/reiter.pdf (792 kB)

Dr. Reiter’s article states:

Until the second half of the 20th century, malaria was endemic and widespread in many temperate regions, with major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle…. [p. 1]

During the Medieval Warm Period, mention of malarialike illness was common in the European literature from Christian Russia to caliphate Spain: “As one who has the shivering of the quartan so near,/ that he has his nails already pale/ and trembles all, still keeping the shade,/ such I became when those words were uttered.” (The Inferno, Dante [1265-1321])….[p. 3]

*Malaria Species*
P. vivax and P. falciparum both have a tertian periodicity, so it is unclear which species was responsible for tertiary ague in England. P. vivax can persist for many years as a dormant hypnozoite in the liver, giving rise to occasional clinical relapses (caused by production of the blood stages of the parasite), whereas there is no evidence of hypnozoites in P. falciparum.
Twentieth-century studies in Russia and Holland showed that some strains of P. vivax from the northern hemisphere—given the subspecific name P. vivax hibernans—did not produce clinical symptoms until 8-9 months after the infective bite….[p. 5]

Laboratory studies have shown that tropical strains of P. falciparum do not multiply in European mosquitoes. However, European strains did cause major epidemics in Russia and Poland in the 1920s, with high death rates as far north as Archangel, Russia….[p. 6]

Rural populations declined as manual labor was replaced by machinery, further reducing the availability of humans as hosts for both mosquitoes and parasites. New building materials and improved methods of construction made houses more mosquito-proof, especially in winter, thus reducing the risk for contact with mosquitoes. Greater access to medical care and a rapid drop in the cost of quinine reduced the survival rate of the malaria parasite in its human host.
A similar decline occurred in the more prosperous countries of Europe—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, and northern Italy. However, malaria maintained a much firmer grip on Eastern Europe—Finland, Poland and Russia, and the countries bordering the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. It was not until the advent of DDT, after World War II, that a concerted attempt could be made to eradicate the disease from the entire continent (30). At the same time, the Communicable Disease Center (forerunner of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was set up in Atlanta to eliminate malaria from the United States, where it was still endemic in 36 states (27), including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey….[p. 9]

It has been estimated that more than 500 construction workers (not counting their wives and children) died of malaria during the construction of the Rideau Canal in Canada, in the early 1800s, long before the end of the Little Ice Age.

During the construction of the Rideau Canal, a temperate form of malaria, P. Vivax, was present. This was the form indigenous to southern Ontario at the time. It has two cycles, the normal short (weeks) malaria cycle and a much longer cycle where it would spend nine months or longer incubating in the liver of a human. This longer cycle allowed it to survive the harsh Canadian winter by staying inside a human until the mosquitoes were out and biting again. P. Vivax has a very low mortality rate (essentially 0%) since it infects far fewer red blood cells than other forms of malaria. One explanation for the 2 to 4% mortality rate on the Rideau is that those who died were either suffering from other illnesses of the day, or had health issues such as dysentery, and that getting infected with P.Vivax was the last straw. An alternate, but perhaps less likely explanation, is that P. falciparum, a more virulent tropical malaria, was also present. P. falciparum, introduced into the U.S. with the African slave trade, doesn’t have the ability to over-winter in Canada, so, if it was present, it must have been re-introduced each year.

Groupings of people, such as in the canal construction camps, certainly helped the spread of the disease, allowing mosquitoes to easily transmit the disease from one worker to another. Many of the construction areas were near clear standing water swamps, ideal egg-laying areas for the mosquito. No one escaped from malaria, everyone from the highest-ranking officer to the wives and children of immigrant labourers all suffered from it. It was most prevalent in the southern Rideau, within the range of the anopheles mosquito. There are no definitive records regarding how many deaths due to malaria occurred during the building of the Rideau Canal. Surviving records indicate an on-site mortality (death) rate of about 2% and a morbidity (sickness) rate of about 60%. Many left the work sites during the “sickly month” (August) so the actual mortality rate is likely higher, perhaps up to 4%. One educated guess (Passfield) is that upwards of 500 men (excluding women and children) died as a result of malaria contracted while working on the Rideau Canal. (Full Story)

Update 2010 05 28:

Climate Change-Malaria Link Debunked

By Doug L. Hoffman on Wed, 05/26/2010 - 15:21

Many climate change alarmists have predicted a wide range of calamitous side-effects to be caused by global warming. One such link that frequently surfaces is that global warming will cause the spread of malaria, leading to a world wide pandemic. A new study, just published in the journal Nature, has shown that malaria is actually declining worldwide. Furthermore, proposed future climate induced effects are insignificant compared with the observed natural trend and easily overcome by current disease control mechanisms. In short, claiming that malaria will spread around the globe due to climate change is an outright lie….(Full Story)

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November 26, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

Without a doubt, global warming is man-made — that is, not the actual temperature trends but the data showing an alleged warming trend have been manipulated to show the desired trend.

The example indicated here illustrates willful and systematic temperature data manipulation by NIWA (the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research).  Although the example originates in New Zealand, many of the climate “skeptics” websites that came into existence were created because of concerns that the temperature data manipulations appear to be all-pervasive, involving global temperature data.

Uh, oh – raw data in New Zealand tells a different story than the “official” one.
25 11 2009

Reposted from TBR.cc Investigate magazine’s breaking news forum:

New Zealand’s NIWA accused of CRU-style temperature faking

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre…. (Full Story)

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November 24, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

The U.K.’s Hadley Climate Centre is one of the leading proponents of the hype and hysteria of global-warming alarmism that is the driving force for world-wide government-spending — to the tune of trillions of dollars — to avert the allegedly imminent global-warming climate catastrophe that supposedly will fry, cook and burn Earth and bring all life on Earth as we know it to a calamitous demise.

Allegedly*, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2009, someone hacked into the Hadley Climate Centre’s website and made a large compendium of information (more than a thousand e-mails and three-thousand documents) available to the public at large.  The e-mails and related information caused the discussion of climate change hysteria in the blogosphere to be raised to an ever-increasing crescendo whose end is not yet in sight.

The mainstream media, long committed to the religion of detrimental climate change hysteria, has — with very few exceptions — been extremely slow and largely silent on the calamity of the climate-change e-mail scandal that proves without a doubt that not the climate trends but the climate-change hysteria is a a man-made problem.

Without going much into the context of the e-mail scandal, the Wall Street Journal posted its take on the contents and consequences of some of the e-mails involved in the scandal, thereby outlining the strategies involved in bringing across the climate-catastrophe propaganda effort.

Wall Street Journal
NOVEMBER 24, 2009, 7:18 A.M. ET

Global Warming With the Lid Off

The emails that reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science.

….we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.

Let’s hope that the rest of the mainstream media will follow suit.  In the words of Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley (former science adviser of Margret Thatcher), in a letter to Representatives Ed Markey and Joe Barton, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce:

Rightly, one of the Administration’s own supporters on your Committee has stated that the principal purpose of “cap-and-trade” is not to “Save The Planet” – which it would not do even if it worked – but to raise revenue. If you wish to raise excessive revenue, be honest about it. Say that you intend to tax and tax and tax again. But desist from claiming that you are raising the revenue with the aim of preventing “climate crisis”. Already, every opinion poll demonstrates that, notwithstanding the most lavishly-funded propaganda campaign by the classe politique since Goebbels tried to make Nazism look good, the people are not buying the “global warming” scare any more. (Full Story)

____________
* According to a news story published by CBS and others,

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)  (Source Link)

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November 22, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

In late 2009, the credibility of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took a serious hit when email exchanges between some of its senior authors and editors revealed deliberate efforts to falsify data and silence dissenting scientists. The IPCC’s reputation was already waning in the wake of scandals concerning Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature diagram and the role of government officials and environmental activists in its so-called “peer review” process. The IPCC Email Scandal of November 2009 meant the IPCC could no longer claim to represent the “scientific consensus” on global warming.

Source and links to media coverage on the IPCC e-mail scandal

More media coverage on the IPCC e-mail scandal

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November 20, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

Thanks to Luboš Motl, physicist, Pilsen, Czech Republic:

The Hadley climate center has been hacked [*] or reviewed by a whistleblower who could no longer stand the dirt, and the files have been freely posted. If you want to download an interesting 62-megabyte file, which unpacks to 156 megabytes or so, here are some links.

Just in time for the upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen, exposing the UN climate fraud permits insights into what is behind the pandemic of the UN-promoted climate alarmism: a sleezy mix of tax-fraud, data manipulation, scientific fraud, ad-hominem attacks on reputable climate scientists who dare to oppose the climate-propaganda agenda, and much more.

Tell your kids when you put them to bed at night that they should not worry about Earth going up in flames, that what little global warming there is is quite natural and even good for the environment, that the Earth is actually cooling right now and has done so for a good number of years, and that there is no evidence that shows that there is any man-made global warming.  Tell them that the same people who promoted the global-warming fears all along are the ones that amongst themselves discuss how to best put the big lie across.

However, read Luboš Motl’s take on the embarrassing exposure of the leading climate scientists who drive the climate-propaganda war.

Update 2009 11 21: Here is a link to a searchable web page containing the e-mail files of concern: Alleged CRU Emails - Searchable

The title of the web page contains the word “alleged”, but there is little doubt in my mind that all of the e-mail messages are quoted accurately.  I read quite a few of the messages.  Many are messages I had read over the past few years.  Given that those messages were quoted accurately, it is extremely unlikely that anyone would have been able to fake the context and contents of the e-mail messages that ensued in reactions by the CRU-related participants who participated in the collusion to tweak and manipulate the climate data manufactured such as to produce the very questionable claims necessary to promote the UN’s IPCC climate scam.

____________
* According to a news story published by CBS and others,

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)  (Source Link)

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November 14, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

Thanks to http://www.climatedepot.com/

• New Paper: ‘Little Ice Age Preparedness Plan’: Retired U.S. Navy Physicist warns of coming brutal cold

The discussion paper is a 1MB PDF file (42 pages).  It provides tips not only for the next Little Ice Age but also tips for living through any winter with extremely low temperatures.

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November 11, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

By Traci Watson, USA TODAY

One of the world’s oldest energy sources is making a comeback.

Across the USA, power plants are turning to wood to make electricity. The move is spurred by state mandates to encourage renewable power and by bills moving through Congress that require more renewable electricity nationwide.

Wood power’s rise is “meteoric,” says William Perritt, editor of Wood Biomass Market Report. One wood-burning plant started up in 2007, seven in 2008 and a dozen in 2009, he says….(Full Story)

____________
Ostensibly, wood waste will be burned in those wood-burning power plants, but, as the article points out, the demand will soon be for wood chips that are produced by clear-cutting.

That will save the planet?  The only thing that is certain is that it will cause clear-cutting and pollution, besides, burning wood is the burning of carbon and will produce carbon dioxide.

Although Schilda is a real town in Germany, it is also the name of a fictional town inhabited by fools known as “Schildbürger” [Schilda-citizens], see Wise Men of Gotham.

Examples of the actions of the citizens of Schilda:

Schildbuerger Streich

The Germans have a series of allegorical tales in which the citizens of Schilda (the SchildBuerger) embark on a range of schemes that seem, at first sight, logical but on closer inspection turn out to be totally misguided and pointless.

A famous story runs like this – the Schildbuerger have no salt and so must buy it from the nearest big city. This is expensive and the people of Schilda are not rich. They call a town meeting and decide that something must be done. ‘Surely’ says one man “ if we grew our own salt plants there would be an endless supply for us”. The others agreed that this was a great idea. They set about collecting money from all the people to buy two large sacks of salt from the merchants in the big city.
The salt duly arrived and one of the local farmers volunteered his best acreage as a salt field, greedily hoping that he would get a bigger share in return. The salt was ploughed into the soil and the Schilda congratulated themselves on their superb cleverness.
In autumn they returned to harvest their salt plants, but found only a field of nettles. The farmer could never get crops to grow in this field till the end of his days…. (Full Story)

The Invention of the Window

A German Volksbuch (”folks book”) story tells about the difficulties that the citizens of Schilda had, as they were trying to illuminate the interior of their council house.

They went to the extreme of going outside with all types of baskets and bags, in order to collect as much sunlight as they could, and carry it inside the house.

Since that did not work, they also tried removing the house roof. This worked perfectly, until the winter came.

One day, a Schilda man accidentally hit himself against the wall on the way out of the council house. This caused a ray of light to enter inside the house through a tiny wall fissure.

And this is how the Schildans came to think about windows. That simple part of a house, the story says, was never invented but found by mere accident…(Source)

One can’t help but wonder what future generations will write and tell about climate alarmism and the supposed cures for global warming.

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November 10, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

Applied Information Systems

The Climate Industrial Complex

[last update: 2009/11/09]

In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, President Eisenhower stated:

“there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties”

and:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

We now face the Climate Industrial Complex, where all powers involved want to impose their own version of a costly action as a solution to the misrepresentation of global warming….(Full Story)

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November 10, 2009 by Walter Schneider.

Science News

Fossils From Animals And Plants Are Not Necessary For Crude Oil And Natural Gas, Swedish Researchers Find

ScienceDaily (Sep. 12, 2009) — Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have managed to prove that fossils from animals and plants are not necessary for crude oil and natural gas to be generated. The findings are revolutionary since this means, on the one hand, that it will be much easier to find these sources of energy and, on the other hand, that they can be found all over the globe.

….According to Vladimir Kutcherov, the findings are a clear indication that the oil supply is not about to end, which researchers and experts in the field have long feared….

“There is no doubt that our research proves that crude oil and natural gas are generated without the involvement of fossils. All types of bedrock can serve as reservoirs of oil,” says Vladimir Kutcherov, who adds that this is true of land areas that have not yet been prospected for these energy sources….

(Full Story)

The claims made in the article perhaps do not match what you were taught in school.  Nevertheless, the hypothesis of abiogenic (non-fossil generated) petroleumhave been around for more than half a century.  Research relating to that was done primarily by Russian scientists, but the hypothesis has also been proposed by scientists in the West.

Read the Wikipedia article on abiogenic petroleum origin.  That article contains the statement,

“This article may be inaccurate in or unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (July 2009)

Do not let that put you off.  That statement is not being used persistently by Wikipedia throughout many of the articles it covers.  For instance, it is not used in the Wikipedia articles on Climate change or Global warming, two of many subject areas in which the science is by no means settled and points — on the balance of the evidence — to the opposite of the politically-correct assertions.

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