Australian Bushfires due to AGW - not

In an article from the Peninsula on line dated 10/2/09 By Peter Smith in Sydney, that starts:

"Australia is a land of droughts, tropical floods and raging bushfires. But the scale of the fires that devastated rural communities in the state of Victoria at the weekend was on a scale never seen before."

Well, not quite never Pete. He later says:

"The bushfires have triggered a debate over the effects of global warning on the planet’s driest continent. Scientists say Australia, with its harsh environment, is set to be one of the nations most affected by climate change. "

He then gives a quote from that Wacko, Senator Bob Brown:

"“Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25 percent, 50 percent more,”

25 percent, 50 percent - Bob. Well that gives you , on your reckoning 100% margin of error!

Meanwhile, in the same day's "The Australian" the following quotes..


Geoffrey Blainey, in Melbourne's Herald Sun yesterday, on bushfires that occurred long before global warming:

"IN our recorded history, there has been no bushfire as spectacular as February 1851, on the very eve of the first gold rushes. They called it Black Thursday. Half of Victoria seemed to be on fire. A wild northerly was blowing, and it drove such a column of black smoke right across Bass Strait that one town near Devonport was so darkened in mid-afternoon that people actually thought the end of the world had come.

The period after World War I was especially dry in Victoria. Five devastating years for bushfires were 1919, 1926, 1932, 1939 and 1944. Those of 1926 have been largely forgotten, but in the town of Gilderoy only two of 14 forest workers survived. More than 50 Victorians were killed in bushfires during that February. I remember Black Friday: January 13, 1939. The two million hectares burned probably exceeded the extent of bush and forest destroyed this weekend. Some 1300 homes were lost, and 69 sawmills. More than 70 Victorians died that day."

Germaine Greer, in The Times of London, sets the record straight on the role of global warming in bushfires:

"FIRE is an essential element in the life cycle of Australian forests. Season by season sclerophyll or hard-leaved woodlands build up huge amounts of detritus, which must burn if there is to be new growth.

For 40 or maybe 60 millennia, Aboriginal peoples managed fire proactively, setting alight woodland, scrubland and grassland, so that they could pass freely, so that game was driven towards them, so that fresh green herbage was available. Aboriginal languages have dozens of words for fire. As the Endeavour sailed up the eastern coast, Captain Cook noted that the skies were darkened with smoke by day and lit up by fire at night.

Bushland that is not burned regularly turns into a powder keg, as the fuel load inexorably increases. The cause of these disasters is not global warming; still less is it arson. It is the failure to recognise that fire is an intrinsic feature of eucalypt bushland. It cannot be prevented but it can and should be managed. Unless there is a fundamental change of policy across all levels of government in Australia, there will be more and worse fires and more deaths."



So, fires of this intensity have occured regularly over history.
As GG points out, our eucalypts discard dead branches and woody weeds grow under the trees. The Australian Aborigines regularly did control burns which reduced bush fire fuel and generated new growth. Rural fires Services did the same until Labor governments started to pander to the Greens (watermelons actually, green on the outside and pink on the inside!)
The funny thing is, you never see Bob Brown or any other Greens around disasters like this, trying to help preserve native forests and native wildlife.

Apologise, Bob and stop using this terrible event as a time to spread your evil propaganda.

BBC abandons 'impartiality' on warming

From the UK Telegraph - article by Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 6:19PM GMT 31 Jan 2009

After part sponsoring a global warming stunt with a mock up polar bear on an ice-berg in the Thames, and doctoring film of President Obama's Inaugural speech,their Newsnight's science editor, Susan Watts, was even more bizarre. It was no more than a paean of gratitude that we now at last have a president prepared to listen to the "science" on climate change, after the dark age of religious obscurantism personified by President Bush.
At last, after years when they could not speak openly on this subject, chirped Ms Watts, "scientists calculate that President Obama has just four years to save the world". She failed to explain (although she was later forced to clarify this on her blog) that the only scientist to say anything so silly was Dr James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose utterances on climate change have lately become so wild and extreme that they have made him a laughing stock. (He was last week publicly disowned by his old boss Dr John Theon, who said that Hansen's unscientific claims had been an embarrassment to Nasa ever since he joined Al Gore in whipping up panic over global warming back in 1988.)"

http://talbyv.blogspot.com/2009/01/doom-4-years-left-last-chance-jim.html

In Australia, our equivalent ABC uses the same rules, recently excising Bill Kininmonth (William Kininmonth has a career in meteorological science and policy spanning more than 40 years. For more than a decade (1986-1998) he headed Australia's National Climate Centre with responsibilities for monitoring Australia's changing climate and advising the Australian government on the extent and severity of climate extremes) from a podcast and transcript of a broadcast.

Hudson Air Crash Caused by Global Warming - NOT

Time Magazine ( I used to get Time every week and respected the articles found in it!) blamed the bird-strike that brought down an Airbus passenger aircraft in the Hudson River, New York, on "global warming".

Christopher Monckton on Right Side News put out a more realistic argument.


"The Time article said that "Wildlife mitigation" was the official term for avoiding bird strikes. A report published in June 1988 by the Federal Aviation Administration had found that since 1990 the number of bird strikes had quadrupled, from 1,759 in 1990 to a record 7,666 in 2007. According to Time, "Officials cite a number of possible causes for the increase", including "habitat destruction and climate change", which "have disrupted migratory patterns". Time adds, "Al Gore should be very proud of himself."
The truth: As the article also points out (though not in the headline), most commercial airlines are replacing three-engine and four-engine aircraft with twin-engine aircraft. The newer engines are quieter, so birds are less likely to detect and avoid them. Also, aircraft with fewer engines are less able to survive bird-strikes."

Lord Monckton lists the 7 worst fatalities due to bird strike. They occurred in Oct 60(Boston); Nov 62 (Maryland); Sept88 (Ethiopia); Apl90 (Off Panama); Sept95 (Alaska); Apl2000 (Congo); Jan07 (France).

"The geographical spread of the bird strikes shows that there is no basis whatever for the suggestion that "global warming" has aggravated the problem. Bird strikes have occurred in all parts of the globe, from the tropics to the Arctic, and they have involved birds of all kinds. Birds, like most species on earth, are necessarily tolerant of different climates. This tolerance of varying temperatures is essential to survival, since the temperature difference between a summer's day and a winter's night, in the same location, can be at least 100 times greater than the 0.74 °C (1.3 °F) difference between mean global surface temperature 100 years ago and today."

Another spurious article incorrectly attributing something unrelated to (anthropogenic) global warming?

"Al Gore, mentioned with approval in Time's article, complains in the entertaining fiction book that accompanies his inaccurate movie An Inconvenient Truth, that pied flycatchers can no longer hatch at the right time to feed their young on the customary species of caterpillar, which "hatch two weeks earlier after 20 years of ‘global warming'". He is careful not to point out that "global warming" has been happening not for 20 years but for 300. He is also careful not to point out that, even if the caterpillars were indeed becoming available a couple of weeks later in the year than previously, the birds would merely have to fly a few miles further north to find caterpillars that hatched at a more convenient moment.

Global Warming’s Last Gasp

From Newsmax.com's Phil Brennan:
In a hysterical report, "Obama left with little time to curb global warming," AP writer Seth Borenstein warned that global warming "is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid."

"How can this guy call himself a ‘science reporter?’” asked David Deming of the University of Oklahoma. "He is perhaps the worst propagandist in all the media, and that's stating something. In his latest screed, he screams: 'global warming is accelerating.'

“How then does he explain the fact that the mean global temperature [as measured by satellite] is the same as it was in 1980? How can global warming be 'accelerating' when the last two years have seen dramatic cooling? Is this guy totally removed from all reality? He completely ignores any evidence contrary to his personal beliefs, and twists everything to meet his preconceived notions."

And from one of their own

Richard S. Courtney, a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expert reviewer and a U.K.-based climate and atmospheric science consultant snorted, "Rubbish! Global warming is not 'accelerating.' Global warming has stopped. There has been no statistically significant rise in [mean global temperature or MGT] since 1995 and MGT has fallen since 1998 . . .

"Arctic ice advances and recedes over decades. 2007 saw a minimum in Arctic ice cover in the short period that it has been monitored using satellites. But 2008 saw the most rapid growth in Arctic ice cover in that same period and Arctic ice cover is now back to the average it has had in the period.

“Also, 95 percent of polar ice is in the Antarctic, and Antarctic ice is increasing. Nobody can know if the recent halt to global warming is temporary, permanent, or the start of a new warming or cooling phase. But it is certain that anybody who proclaims that 'Global warming is accelerating' is a liar, a fool, or both."

Professor denies Global Warming Theory

From  Joe D'Aleo's Ice-cap.US

'Physics Professor William Happer had some tough words for scientists who believe that carbon dioxide is causing global warming. "This is George Orwell. This is the 'Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.' It's that kind of propaganda. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4% carbon dioxide. To say that's a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult." '

 

Happer was the director of the Office of Energy Research under Pres. Bush Snr. He subsequently was fired by VP Al Gore.

As I've said before, if CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, we have to ban wine, beer, coke, soda and exhaling.

An Honest Climate Debate

Courtesy Tom Nelson and an Honest Climate Debate Blogs.

The producers of "Not Evil, Just wrong." 

Some Quotes:

"Propaganda is fuelling the new Global Warming hysteria."

"Gore flies his own jet (not commercial airlines) Well, don't preach to me!"

"Is it real science? -No, it's a seriously flawed theory."

"It's no coincidence that environmentalism really took off after the fall of Communism."