The Daily Tech asks, “Will the UN’s scenario for AIDS repeat for global warming reports?”

A new report from the United Nations acknowledges the agency has routinely overstated both the size and growth rate of the AIDS epidemic. …

Critics have long maintained the U.N. overstated cases to gain political and financial support. “There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda” said author and AIDS expert Helen Epstein.

Daily Tech goes on to report,

Climatologist and IPCC expert reviewer Vincent Gray has called the IPCC process “fundamentally corrupt” and its predictions a fraud. Dr. Madhav Khandekar, another IPCC expert reviewer, has called the review process scientifically unsound, and notes the latest report fails to acknowledge a growing number of scientists now question the theory of greenhouse gas-based climate change.

Is there a linkage between the UN’s handling of AIDS and global warming? According to journalist Claudia Rosett, the UN routinely overstates crises to generate funding, then uses it to fund a massive system of kickbacks, payoffs, and lavish expense accounts. According to Rosett, IPCC climate pronouncements are just part of this long-standing pattern.

The idea of the bureaucracy of the United Nations being made up of selfless, altruistic servants of humanity, who toil tirelessly for the benefit of all humankind, simply can’t be held by objective people. In fact, corruption of the highest order pervades almost everything the UN touches.

That aside, there are compelling (IMO, convincing) reasons to assert that global warming alarmism is really nothing more than the latest cash cow to milk. Consider the view of Dr William Gray, “a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth. …

“We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was,” Dr Gray said. …

“It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong,” he said. “But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.”

As I wrote last February, environmentalism is not merely a religion, it is an apocalyptic religion. And just like the sleaziest televangelist’s pleas, this religion requires massive cash inflows to survive.

Another thing - if global warming is the dire crisis the UN says it is, then why is the UN doing this?

Endnote: for more on the UN’s corruption, read , “Seeing the UN Plain: Corruption as a Way of Life,” by a US State Dept. official and this essay by Richard Sanchez at Belmont Club.

For some reason, I watched the NBC Nightly News tonight. Lester Holt was the weekend anchorman. About the second story was a breathlessly urgent story about how time has simply run out to stop global warming. If the world does not act now - right this very minute! - to reverse the greenhouse effect, then it will be too late. The linked report is not a transcript of the broadcast report, which, as of now, is still viewable online at msnbc.com under the title, “strong warming warning.” It’s javascript, so there’s no link to it.

Specifically, the broadcast segment says that “catastrophic” consequences will begin within 13 years unless by 2012 the world reduces CO2 emissions to five percent below 1990’s level. The text story says,

As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia’s large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, according to the report.

Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, says the report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore this year.

The panel portrays the Earth hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace and warns of inevitable human suffering. …

“Hurtling” toward warming at a “quickening pace” with “inevitable human suffering”! And as further proof, of global warming, South America is having one of the coldest springtimes on record. There’s suffering, all right - from the cold.

The report also quotes U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as saying he “witnessed the devastation of climate change in disappearing glaciers of Antarctica… .” You know, these “disappearing” glaciers:

The white area is the land mass of Antarctica. The purple area is the sea ice, the color indicating that its concentration is at or near 100 percent. This image is from the University of Illinois’ cryosphere center, which shows that Antarctic sea ice has been steadily growing since 1978.

Click for full-size image

It’s true, as the cryosphere center also shows, that Arctic-area sea ice has been falling in volume, but Antarctic ice has been growing. So in what way is global warming, well, global? And how does a theory of atmospherically-induced global warming account for record-low springtime temperatures right now in South America and the growth of sea ice in the south polar regions?

Speaking of Arctic ice, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s news release this week,

A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming. [italics added] …

“Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming,” said [James]Morison [of the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory].

Back in Antarctica,

The Brazilian Base Comandante Ferraz in Antarctica is rationing water. Never in the last twenty years the weather was so cold and snowy this time of the year in the Brazilian post in the South Pole. The nearby lakes that provide water to the base are frozen since September. The heliport that allows the arrival of food and bottled water by air is under three meters of snow. Water for human consumption is limited to the fifty Brazilian researchers in the region and the situations turns more dangerous each day.

The link for that is to this Word document found on Icecap.us.

It would be well to remember that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, IPCC, is primarily a political body rather than a scientific one. And for any political entity anywhere, it is well to remember Den Beste’s Law: “The job of bureacracies is to regulate, and left to themselves they will regulate everything they can.” Get ready for another round of regulation coming our way.

Test your knowledge and common sense in this simple 10-question test.

Caution: This section contains sound science, not media hype … .

I got nine of 10 correct.

A few days ago the news was released that a High Court in the United Kingdom ruled that Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, may not be shown to school students there unless preceded by court-mandated disclaimers:

… The Court found that the film was misleading in nine respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Nine inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The inaccuracies are:

* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

A highly read-worthy article in Scientific American offers, “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense” (printer version here). Part of the answer to the creationist claim, “Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created,” is this:

[E]volution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not-and does not-find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

But a recent announcement by anthropologist Meave Leakey (the most famous and respected family name in the business) busts a hole in the evolutionary descent of modern humans as presently accepted. Until now, scientists thought that the ancient species Homo habilis (”man with ability”), was the evolutionary ancestor of Homo erectus (”Erect man,” and no juvenile snickering, either). Dr. Leakey’s research postively disproves that idea.

Two fossils found in Kenya have shaken the human family tree, possibly rearranging major branches thought to be in a straight ancestral line to Homo sapiens.

Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens — a 1.44-million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55-million-year-old Homo erectus found in 2000 — said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.

If this interpretation is correct, the early evolution of the genus Homo is left even more shrouded in mystery than before. It means that both habilis and erectus must have originated from a common ancestor between two million and three million years ago, a time when fossil hunters had drawn a virtual blank. …

The challenge to the idea of a more linear succession of the three Homo species is being reported today in the journal Nature. The lead author is Fred Spoor, an evolutionary anatomist at University College London. …

Dr. Spoor, speaking by satellite phone from a field site near Lake Turkana, said the evidence clearly contradicted previous ideas of human evolution “as one strong, single line from early to us.” The new findings, he added, support the revised interpretations of “a lot of bushiness and experimentation in the fossil record.”

I amk not claiming that this discovery invalidates the theory of evolution, far from it. It just caught my eye how immediately SciAm’s defense of the existing theory of human evolution was knocked about. Who says? Not me. Here is what Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, had to say about the Spoor-Leakey report (same link):

The new findings, Dr. Lieberman said, highlight the need for obtaining more fossils that are more than two million years old. In addition, he said, they show “just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.”

So it seems that the human family tree is much less clear than SciAm makes it out to be. While the new finding does not affect the present understanding that H. erectus was the ancestor of modern humans, it does knock a huge hole in SciAm’s claim that there is a, “succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern.” In fact, the fossil researchers said they were surprised at how much less like modern humans the H. erectus fossil was than they expected it to be (read the article for why). So there seems now to be a big gap in our understanding of our descendancy, for which researchers will doubtless start to intensify their quest for additional finds.

Anyway, the rest of the SciAm piece is worth your time.

The protorosaur puzzle, solved!

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is in hot water. ABC News reports,

In an interview broadcast [yesterday] morning on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program, Griffin was asked by NPR’s Steve Inskeep whether he is concerned about global warming.

“I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists,” Griffin told Inskeep. “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”

“To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change,” Griffin said. “I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Needless to say, this point of view drew the ire of advocates of anthropogenic global warming, including members of NASA’s science staff. Yet really, what is the fuss about? It is about the fact that Griffin took a politically incorrect view, and did so in public. Notice that he didn’t dispute whether the earth is warming, only that the warming trend is not necessarily a bad thing.

I covered this point in February in, “What if global warming is a good thing?“

I’ve always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won’t stay the same. Even if everyone were to agree that the globe really is warming, can we please see some scientifically-sound documentation that it is worse than the alternative?

Environmentalism is the hippest Po-Mo religion; as I noted in, “Global cooling ain’t so great, either,” it is an apocalyptic one to boot.