July 29, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

In the face of irrefutably declining sea surface temperatures, a new study (by Boris Worm et al, Dalhousie University, apparently published in Nature — I have not yet been able to locate the study)  causes cries of alarm that “microscopic marine algae known as phytoplankton have declined globally by roughly 40 percent since 1950 because of rising sea surface temperatures and changing ocean conditions.” (as per an article, “Dying algae a ‘global concern’”, The Edmonton Journal, July 29, 2010, A3)

• Crucial marine algae declining globally, says Canadian Study
  The Vancouver Sun

• Study: Phytoplankton Population Down 40 Percent In 60 Years
  All Headline News

• ‘Marine phytoplankton steadily declining over 20th century
  New Kerala

• Concern over declining marine algae
  Virgin Media

• New study reveals decline of marine phytoplankton over the past century
  Science Centric

•  Are our oceans dying? Phytoplankton has declined 40% in 60 years as figures reveal Earth has been getting hotter since the Eighties
  Daily Mail

• Phytoplankton in decline: bye bye food chain?
  New Scientist

• Warmer seas put marine food chain at risk
  ABC Online

• Food chain’s fuel runs low
  Scotsman

• Vital ocean phytoplankton a casualty of global warming?
  The Christian Science Monitor

• Base of Ocean Food Chain Is in Decline, Study Finds
  LiveScience.com

• Marine Phytoplankton Declining: Striking Global Changes at the Base of the Marine Food Web Linked to Rising Ocean Temperatures
  Science Daily

I became aware of this latest scare story when checking The Edmonton Journal this morning.  It carried a similar story, taking up about half of page A3:

Dying algae a ‘global concern’

Carmen Chai
Postmedia News

As of the time of writing this, that article was not yet available on The Edmonton Journal’s website.

The media feeding frenzy with respect to this latest instance of climate change alarmism brings to mind what Conrad Black had to say about the integrity of journalists.  In “The Establishment Man” (Peter C. Newman, 1982, MacLelland & Stewart Limited, ISBN 0-7710-6785-2) his views are described as follows:

    While Black does admire a few individual journalists, he despises their profession.  “My experience of the working press,” he says, “is that they are a very degenerate group.  There is a terrible incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse.  The mental stability of large elements of the press is more open to question than that of many other comparable groups in society.  A number of them are ignorant, lazy, opiniated, intellectually dishonest, and inadequately supervised.”

    “The individual journalist, if he has any panache or talent, becomes something of a celebrity.  Much of his social life is built up on the press-circuit: bars, hangers-on, media groupies, the stifling and depraved gossip of the degenerate little media community, and the fawning of unfulfilled women, boys, and hucksters…. Journalism tends to attract the sort of person who settles whimsically on it as a calling or comes to it after disappointments elsewhere, because of the relative ease of entry into the field.  These people, discouraged and purposeless are easily influenced by their angrier colleagues.  It is by inadvertence, inexperience, the investigative nature of the press, the antithetical role of the employee, and the negligence of the employer, and not by any organized subversion, that the press veered away from being a mirror to society, and became a perverse sort of irregular and often disloyal opposition.”

     Black blames this sad state of the journalist’s craft on the decline of resident media proprietors, who might have been excentric and curmudgeonly in character but at least ran their own shops.  “With the rise of the chains,” he says, “the publisher has become a local coordinator and functionary, answerable to his absentee employer on economic matters, with a mandate to ensure that the content is sufficiently anodyne to avoid disputes with advertisers, sufficiently formless to avoid strikes in the newsrooms.  The proprietors take relatively little interest in the journalistic aspects of the business….” [page 196]

It is curious that later, when Conrad Black acquired the Canadian Southam newspaper chain, he too became an “absentee employer,” one of those whom he castigated prior to 1982 for being at least in a major part responsible for everything that is wrong with today’s quality of journalism.

To come back to the “irrefutably declining sea-surface temperatures”, you may wish to follow these links:

• Sea-Surface Temperature Anomalies
  

• Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Continue their Plunge
  June 18th, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

• Even doubling or tripling the amount of CO2′ will have ‘little impact’ on temps
  Posted on September 4, 2008 by Anthony Watts
  From New Zealand Climate Science
  Professor Geoffrey G Duffy
  DEng, PhD, BSc, ASTC Dip., FRS NZ, FIChemE, CEng
  “It is also interesting to note that NASA’s Aqua satellite system has shown that the earth has been cooling since 1998.   This corresponds with measurements from the Argos sub-ocean probes that the ocean is cooling.”

Never let facts come in the way of a good scare story.  Instead, raise alarm on pure speculation, such as, “The study suggests…,” or “This may well be one of the largest biological changes observed in recent times,” and project from there to asserting “simply because it affects most of the biosphere,” said study co-author Boris Worm,” and there you have it, a new scare story that will without a doubt drive a long-lasting wave of unfounded and largely unsubstantiated media hype and hysteria that will take a long time to simmer down into the mundane and boring reality that the whole concern was vastly overblown.  However, when that, finally and perhaps years from now, comes to pass, it will not make the front pages, if anyone in the mainstream media even should bother to report on it.

In the meantime, the funding for the researchers that fuel such media hype and hysteria keeps rolling in, wherefore they will keep stoking the fires of climate change alarmism.

–Walter

Posted in Propaganda debunked, Climate Change | Print | 1 Comment »

July 28, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

American Thinker

July 28, 2010

Cap-and-Trade’s Market Failure

By Joseph Bast

Cap and trade died even before Congress shelved legislation…for now. News of the death of cap and trade last month didn’t appear in the obituary section of daily newspapers. Instead, it appeared on page C1 of the July 12 edition of The Wall Street Journal in an article titled “Changes Choke Cap-and-Trade Market.”….

The death of SO2 cap-and-trade in July 2010 should be duly noted by every thoughtful observer. It should signal the defeat of any proposals for CO2 emissions trading. If a CO2 cap-and-trade program were ever enacted in the U.S., its collapse would be spectacular indeed compared to the one that will have foreshadowed it.  (Full Story)

Posted in Energy Issues, Propaganda debunked, Climate Change, Acid Rain, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »

July 24, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

It is obvious that 165,000 is a much larger number of geese than is 1,600 ducks.

It is not so obvious why the deliberate killing of 400 geese (and at least 164,600 more geese to go) is not as prominent a story as is the accidental deaths of 1,600 ducks and other waterfowl in Fort McMurray.

The deaths of the 1,600 ducks at Ft McMurray made the front pages for weeks, while the planned cull of 165,000 geese in New York City only rated a short article on the bottom of page A4 of the July 24, 2010 edition of the Edmonton Journal.

Up to 165,000 Canada geese will be sitting ducks for NYC cull

July 24, 2010

The recent gassing of a large flock of Canada geese in New York City may be part of a larger plan to kill more than 165, 000 of the large migratory birds. A nine-page “work plan” outlines the Big Apple’s goal for a drastic cull of the population… (Read more)

Posted in Wildlife | Print | No Comments »

July 22, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

From Tallbloke’s Talkshop:

Nailing the solar activity – global temperature divergence lie

Posted: July 21, 2010 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

We are frequently told that the Sun can’t be responsible for late C20th warming because temperature has increased while solar activity has dropped from it’s peak in the 1950′s.

What a load of rubbish.

Solar cycle amplitudes are only part of the story. The cycles in the late C20th were short, ~10 years, and high compared to the long term average of ~40 SSN. The minima between them were short too. So although they did reduce in absolute amplitude after the ’50s, they made up for it by kicking out more energy more of the time. Last year to get a handle on this, I integrated the total sunspot areas as a running cumulative total departing from the long term average…. (Source location)

(Higher resolution graph)

That is quite convincing, isn’t it?

Posted in Climate Change | Print | No Comments »

July 21, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Thanks to Wattsupwiththat.com:

Cold snap freezes South America – beaches whitened, some areas experience snow for the first time in living memory

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Anthony Watts

The full text of the article, including good-resolution photos is also available at this link (PDF file)

Excerpts:

HISTORICAL COLD SNAP FREEZES SOUTH AMERICA
By Alexandre Aguiar / MetSul Weather Center

A brutal and historical cold snap has so far caused 80 deaths in South America, according to international news agencies. Temperatures have been much below normal for over a week in vast areas of the continent. In Chile, the Aysen region was affected early last week by the worst snowstorm in 30 year. The snow accumulation reached 5 feet in Balmaceda and the Army was called to rescue people trapped by the snow….

In Uruguay, there were widespread reports of sleet and even snow mixed with rain in towns in the Southern and Eastern part of the country, even in the capital Montevideo. At leas two deaths have been blamed in Uruguay on the low temperatures. Hospitals were packed with patients with respiratory illness.
In Paraguay, at least nine people died due to the cold weather in only 3 days. Cattle were very affected and one thousand animals died of hypothermia. In Bolivia, dozes of people died in consequence of the very low temperatures. In some areas of the nation the cold period was described as the worst in 15 years. It even snowed in the Chaco of Bolivia, one of warmest areas of South America, where the local population never saw snow before. Classes were suspended in Bolivia for three days to prevent more cold related deaths (El Nacional newspaper from Bolivia)….

Southern Brazil was also very affected by the cold air eruption from the Southern Pole. Last week the temperature dropped to -7,8C in the city of Urupema, Santa Catarina. In Rio Grande do Sul, in the hills of the state, temperature felt to -4,9C in the city of Cambara. In the state of Paraná, the low was -6C. Only the nights were freezing, but the afternoons were very cold. In some days, temperature failed to reach 5C in many towns, the first time in a decade. Flurries observed in towns of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná and sleet was also reported in Western Santa Catarina….

On July 14th, in the afternoon hours, temperatures in the hills of Rio Grande do Sul state in Southern Brazil were lower than in Marambio, the main polar base of Argentina in Antarctica. In Central Brazil, in the tropics, the long streak of cold days was considered extremely rare. It was so cold that thousand of animals died in this region of Brazil known for its cattle, just South of the Amazon basin….

Maybe the most notable fact took place in North South America. The cold reached Amazon and temperatures felt to as low as 7ºC in towns in the Amazon Forest in the states of Acre and Rondonia. Temperature even felt in Roraima, where the state capital Boa Vista record 20C (normal lows are 25C) and the wind were blowing from the South. Boa Vista is located at 2º North of latitude, so the influence of the Antarctic cold blast crossed the Equator line and reached towns in the Northern Hemisphere. It would be the same of a cold snap from the Arctic crossing the entire North America continent, the Caribbean and reaching North Brazil in cities at 2º South of latitude as Santarem, a bizarre situation….

Well, given that all of that happened July 15, why did we not hear or see much of that on the news?  Perhaps we are not supposed to know about it.  Effective propaganda entails censorship of news that don’t fit the program.   A cold snap of historical proportions in South America, one that causes an antarctic blast of cold air to cross the equator into the northern hemisphere does not fit the program of man-made global warming alarmism.

We have to be careful about what we see and read in the news, but it appears that it is at least as important to be aware of what we do not see or read in the news.

As far as the mainstream media goes, consider the extent to which they regard the hundreds of deaths due to cold in South America as news worth covering.

Something is seriously wrong with that picture.

Posted in Censorship, Weather, Climate Change | Print | No Comments »

July 19, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Today I found the following unbelievable tidbit of information on the Internet

Illiteracy

Bruderheim is notable for producing the largest percentage of functional illiterates (*) from a single town in Canada{{Fact|date=September 2009}}. One notable resident, Matthew Kachur, is famous for having completed an undergraduate and a law degree despite his complete inability to speak or write in the English language{{Fact|date=September 2009}}.

______________
* Functional illiteracy …is a term used to describe reading and writing skills that are inadequate to cope with the demands of everyday life. This is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or write simple sentences in any language. -Characteristics: An illiterate…
(Source: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Bruderheim,_Alberta)

There is a serious logical error in that assertion.  Matthew Kachur must certainly have been literate by Absolute Astronomy’s own definition of illiteracy.  After all, it is hardly appropriate to consider anyone not capable of writing and speaking the English language to be illiterate if he has no trouble coping “with the demands of everyday life.”  Someone capable of acquiring a law degree in any language can hardly be considered to be functionally illiterate, especially if that language is not the one he writes and speaks.

There is absolutely no reference to any source of information (let alone a credible and reputable one) on which Absolute Astronomy bases its assertion.  Even though the definition of illiteracy quoted by Absolute Astronomy was obviously copied from a page in Wikipedia (from a now cached version of that page), it is irrefutable evidence proving that Wikipedia is far from a credible source of reliable information. If anything, the quote used by Absolute Astronomy could easily be taken as evidence that they are gullible enough to be easily fooled and to advertise that fact.

Posted in Town of Bruderheim | Print | No Comments »

July 17, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

The Communities in Bloom Provincial Judges will be visiting our community on Thursday, August 5th, 2010.  In their honour, we will be holding a potluck luncheon for the judges from 12:15 pm to 1:30 pm at the Bruderheim Senior’s Centre.

All community groups are invited and encouraged to send at least one representative to the luncheon. This is an opportunity to share with the judges the wonderful work that your club or organization does in our community.

This year we choose to do a “potluck meal” to highlight the community spirit and hospitality that makes Bruderheim unique! All participants are asked to bring a favourite dish to share such as an appetizer, entrée or dessert for 6 to 8 people….

Please contact me at 780-796-3731 or at brownj@strathcona.ab.ca to confirm your attendance and your participation in the potluck luncheon as soon as possible.

Thank-you!

Sincerely,

Jodi Brown
Community Services Director

___________
Note: You are not able to look-up this information or additional details at the website of the Town of Bruderheim.  That website has been off-line for more than two years and remains off-line.

Posted in Bruderheim Seniors | Print | No Comments »

July 12, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Mankind certainly lost a lot in value ever since we became enlightened.  Not so long ago man was celebrated as the crown of creation.  Now it’s a question of whether it is better to burn bodies or to dump them into the sewer.  Consider….

MailOnline

Belgium’s plan to wash its dead down the drain: Bodies would be dissolved in caustic solution… and flushed into the sewer

By Allan Hall
July 8th, 2010

It could hardly be said to be the most dignified of send-offs.

Undertakers in Belgium plan to eschew traditional burials and cremations and start dissolving corpses instead.

The move is intended to tackle a lack of burial space and environmental concerns as 573lbs of carbon dioxide are released by each cremated corpse….(Full Story)

Mind you, if the amount of CO2 saved is truly at the heart of it, would it not be better yet to prevent people from being born or at least to kill them off as soon as possible after having been born?  Sure it is.

The average human exhales about 2.2lb or 1kg of CO2 a day.  That means that a human exhales in about 260 days as much CO2 as will be produced by his cremation.  It follows, therefore, that Gaea would be much better off if we were not to let any human live for long and then to flush him down the sewer.

Is anything wrong with that reasoning?

Posted in Alarmist Insanity | Print | No Comments »

July 8, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

The Town of Bruderheim has a telephone answering service.  The answering service, accessible 24/7, is staffed by two involuntary volunteers and provides redirection to intended clients for the Town Office, cheerfully and always ready to serve.

The Bruderheim Town Office is aware of that going on, and has been aware for quite some time, but so far have offered no solution to what is truly an imposition on the involuntary volunteers saddled with the task of providing service to prospective Town Office clients who ask for all sort of things, such as whether we can provide “contact details for Bruce Trucking” or whether we “still operate the bulk-water-terminal.”

The more bizarre such information requests appear to be, the more likely it is that a given party making it is simply looking for the Bruderheim Town Office.

How can it possibly be that our telephone number became the tool whereby Town Office clients find their way to constructive and accurate information offered by office staff paid to provide it, whereas we, my wife and I, get paid sweet tweet, for being always cheerful and eager to provide friendly service to all sort of calls that number anywhere between one and up to five or more a day?  Our telephone number is not even remotely similar to the telephone number used by the Bruderheim Town Office (whose number is 780.796.3731).

For many years, the website of the Town of Bruderheim seriously ailed. It contained, for example, links that ostensibly were to lead to information on current town council members but led instead to a welcoming message by a now former mayor, even long after that mayor had become history for more than a year.  On the other hand, the promised information about the composition of the Bruderheim Town Council remained successfully hidden from all comers.

Still, anyone sufficiently astute in using Internet searches for specific websites and willing to spend the time required to find information on the Town Council’s composition could find it, but relatively few people are that astute.

The Town Office has been aware for years that the glaring deficiencies of its website existed.  Their solution was to hire someone to redesign their website, while the redesigning did nothing to address those deficiencies.

Even after the much-advertised redesigning of their website, the website still showed, for example, a member of the Town Council who years ago had left the Council because he had intended to move away, Marcel Mann.  That was until about half a year ago.

About half a year ago or earlier, the Town Office deigned to announce the launching of another revamping of their website.  They got everyone’s attention by removing all of their web pages and replacing them with a web page that states:

Town of Bruderheim

This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon.

That is where things remain as of now.  What you see there is all that remains of the consequences of the last major redesign of the website of the Town of Bruderheim. Of course, the creation of absence of useful information is an unsatisfactory problem solution.  As you can see from the full text of that web page, the information provided there is useless for anyone trying to glean something as simple as instructions on how the Bruderheim Town Office can be contacted either by e-mail, snail-mail or telephone.

The reason why we have been forced into providing answering services for the Town Office is that prospective clients keep on searching for better information than that offered by the Bruderheim Town Office.  All who succeed in that effort are then rewarded by reaching the best possible alternative, the website of About Bruderheim, where they can obtain our telephone number, call us and get helpful advice, such as to call 780.796.3731 during standard government-bureaucracy operating hours from 9 a.m to 4 p.m.

When we paid our increased property taxes last June, we suggested to the Town Office staff that it would be a practical solution to add contact information to their cryptic message at their website, but other than that they verified that such information was absent from their website and that they told us that we would probably be very interested in “the roll-out of the newly redesigned Town Office website at their next Town Council meeting,” absolutely nothing was done to improve the quality of the service they provide to their clients.  They persist in hiding their identity and location, even though the required update of their website would not require more than a few seconds of work.

Sorry people, but that is not good enough, not for as long as Town Office staff feel that a “roll-out” is as or more important than a practical and useful update of the Town Office website and to put it online for all to see and use.  The general public and your constituents expect nothing less!

Posted in Town of Bruderheim, Taxes, Organizational News, Community & Industry | Print | 3 Comments »

July 7, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Many “skeptics” have for years already justifiably objected to various aspects of UN-driven climate-alarmism (e. g.: The `Hockey Stick’: A New Low in Climate Science, by John L. Daly; first posted in 2001).

The all-out climate-alarmism propaganda campaign is now dying a slow death. New, well-founded objections are being raised by reputable climate researchers and institutions.  One important fact emerges.  That is that rising atmospheric CO2 levels, of which a minuscule fraction (3%) is due to man-made causes, have little to do with rising global temperature trends.  Still, it is not likely that the mainstream media will soon tell us anything about the fundamental truth that needs to be faced by anyone involved in climate science: the science is not settled, and predictions about climate trends are “unrealistic” because too little is known about what makes Earth’s climate system tick.

Thanks to wattsupwiththat.com

Arctic shows no signs of warming

pat says:

July 7, 2010 at 9:23 am

Arctic chills down
“The Arctic shows no signs of warming, according to the latest data from the Danish Meteorological Institute’s Centre for Ocean and Ice. Last month, in fact, virtually every single day saw temperatures below the mean experienced over the last half-century. The Danish data – taken daily – casts doubt on climate models that had predicted a steady warming of the Arctic.”

Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/07/06/lawrence-solomon-arctic-chills-down/#ixzz0t6ohXmqI

CO2 field experiment likely to cause “do-over” for climate models

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Anthony Watts

I have two press releases here, one via EurekAlert, and one from Max Planck. Plus at the end a summary of points via WUWT regular Pierre Gosselin. First, a key point. You can see the CO2 respiration of the biosphere in the Mauna Loa CO2 record below:

CO2 Trend for Mauna Loa - note the dip in 2008 when global temperatures plummeted, and the step again from 2009 into 2010 when an El Niño occurred. (More)

[From] a summary of key points via Pierre Gosselin:

….4. The climate is quite temperamental: countless factors are involved and many feedback mechanisms enhance effects such as the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. This makes it difficult to make predictions, especially as many processes in the Earth system are still not completely understood.

….

6. Particularly alarmist scenarios for the feedback between global warming and ecosystem respiration thus prove to be unrealistic.”

….

8. “It is still not possible to predict whether this attenuates the positive feedback between carbon dioxide concentration and temperature,” says Markus Reichstein. “The study shows very clearly that we do not yet have a good understanding of the global material cycles and their importance for long-term developments.”

9. “We were surprised to find that the primary production in the tropics is not so strongly dependent on the amount of rain,” says Markus Reichstein. “Here, too, we therefore need to critically scrutinize the forecasts of some climate models which predict the Amazon will die as the world gets drier.”

(Full Story)

Posted in Propaganda debunked, Climate Change | Print | No Comments »