Advice is like snow - green energy no-spin zone

Investors Business Daily had an editorial about climate change on Saturday:

Climate Science: Noted scientists at a Chicago climate conference declare that global warming is not only dead, but that the planet faces a big chill for decades to come. What about those frozen wind turbines?

It's not exactly Copenhagen or Kyoto, but the 700 scientists attending the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, had some chilling news of their own in the most liberal sense.

"Global warming is over — at least for a few decades," Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the gathering. "However, the bad news is that global cooling is even more harmful to humans than global warming, and a cause for greater concern."

We don't need computer models to tell us, baby, it's getting cold outside. Of course, the doomsayers will claim that global warming causes global warming. Right.

"Rather than global warming at a rate of about 1 (degree) Fahrenheit per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030," Easterbrook said.

The editorial mentions problems with wind turbines in Minnesota that stopped working this winter due to cold.  Nice.  What’s the cost per kW for a wind turbine that doesn’t run?

In looking at the editorial, and checking the presentations, the Heartland Institute’s 4th annual conference on climate change is what would be expected from the ‘free market’ slant and from looking at the guest list.  However, not only disproving global warming but predicting global cooling through 2030 is new.  There is a difference between denying warming and predicting cooling.  Some memorable excerpts from a story about the conference on Human Events.

MIT’s Richard Lindzen argued that we should be suspicious of climate alarmism for five primary reasons: The alarmists claims of incontrovertibility, their arguing from authority instead of scientific reasoning or even elementary logic, their use of the term “global warming” without either definition or quantification, their identification of complex phenomena that have multiple causes as being based on a single cause, and their conflation of natural climate variability with man-made global warming.

And in the most fundamentally significant words spoken about those who disagree with the cult of Al Gore, Lindzen suggested that the word “skeptic” should not be used:

“Skepticism” implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global-warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary. The failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from Climategate and other instances of overt cheating.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37128

One of the other fascinating scientific topics was how global temperatures are measured. Joe D’Aleo of Icecap noted that 75% of the world’s weather stations dropped out around 1990, with missing data increasing ten-fold after 1990. There are either no adjustments or totally inadequate adjustments for “urban heat island effect”, a point made by several speakers who suggested that most of the warming the IPCC has measured is simply the warming created in big cities. The point was driven home by a picture of the Rome airport weather station: It’s in a fenced area right behind the jet wash of airplanes taking off.

IPCC data is changed frequently with no explanation: 20% of NASA’s data changed 16 times in 2.5 years from 2004 to 2007. Data modifications for Darwin, Australia changed a cooling trend of .7 degrees into a warming trend of 1.2 degrees, and other such shenanigans. It’s the ultimate example of “garbage in, garbage out.”

Slideshows and other information are/is here.

http://www.heartland.org/events/2010Chicago/program.html

It will be interesting to see the feedback from Lord Monkton’s keynote.

Advice is like snow -- the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge