Reference: Sea rise is virtually unstoppable, Bangkok Post, October 1, 2009

Ahead of the Bali meeting in 2007, climate scientists had flooded the media with press releases that were increasingly alarmist in their pitch to save the planet from carbon dioxide, so much so that they got carried away and announced that it was too late to save the planet for we had passed the tipping point. Apparently, the damage done by the carbon dioxide already in the air had put into motion irreversible non-linear changes that would lead us to climate doom whether or not we cut emissions. Soon thereafter, having realized their folly, they quickly reversed themselves just in time for Bali by saying that there was still time to save the planet after all (Still time to avert the worst, Bangkok Post, September 27, 2007). Clearly they have not learned from that experience for here we are in 2009 coming up on the Copenhagen meeting, and as they raise the pitch and volume of their prophesy of climate doom, they have invoked the tipping point yet again (Sea rise is virtually unstoppable, Bangkok Post, October 1, 2009) saying that the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica is a runaway process feeding on itself and there is nothing we can do to prevent a 2-meter sea level rise that will make "many island nations disappear". In the next few days there will surely be another clarification along the lines of "there is still time" if only we commit to even deeper cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. The politics of fear require that no matter how scary your prophesy, you must be able to hold yourself out as the savior.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: China's growth could exceed planet's resources, Bangkok Post, September 30, 2009

In the good old days the European races consumed all the resources of the planet and lived well and the rest of the world cooperated by staying poor and supplying resources and energy to fuel European wealth. This arrangement is now changing. About 3 billion Asians in China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are undergoing rapid economic growth with steeply rising income and consumption - particularly the consumption of minerals and fossil fuels - to the point that it now seems that they aspire to live like Europeans. That is a scary prospect for the rich nations (China's growth could exceed planet's resources, Bangkok Post, September 30, 2009) because it implies competition for scarce resources with a population many times their own, living at the same standard of living and therefore consuming immense amounts of energy and resources. From their perspective, this scenario is intolerable and cannot be allowed to happen. Initial pleas to the Asians that they must not all drive cars, buy refrigerators, and live in heated and air-conditioned homes, that they must go back to their quaint ways and ride bicycles, have not had any success in stemming the Asian economic onslaught. That is why I believe the Europeans need something like a global warming Armageddon. Armed with that scenario, they can now tell the teeming Asian multitudes that they can't all live like the Europeans do because that would overload the planet somehow and that overload would destroy them. That, I believe, is the genesis of the fossil fuels to Armageddon connection by way of carbon dioxide and global warming.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Cleaning up our act, Bangkok Post, September 28, 2009

Programs like the CDM, cleverly worded Orwell style with the D standing for development, allow the North to get the South to run carbon offset programs and sell the offsets to the North (Cleaning up our act, Bangkok Post, September 28, 2009). In the end it is the South that carries out the emission reduction but it is the North that claims them as "offsets" in order to meet their emission reduction targets. They have the money and they mean to continue their high energy consumption and high standard of living to which they have become accustomed. The rich get richer by continuing to consume immense amounts of energy per capita. The poor get poorer by selling them their energy resources as they have been doing all along, and now, by also selling them their carbon offsets. The carbon trading scheme and perhaps the whole global warming thing could very well turn out to be an elaborate mechanism to ensure continued flow of energy to the North in the face of limited non-renewable resources and increasing energy demand from a rapidly developing South.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: It is already too late for the coral

As long as we have studied coral reefs we have observed mass coral die offs in bleaching events that are often followed by regeneration and recovery. These days, however, scientists see all coral bleaching as anomalous and therefore symptomatic of global warming, as if they had never seen coral bleachings before. In 2006, they issued an alarm that "it was already too late for the coral" saying that mass coral bleaching was devastating the Great Barrier Reef and human activity involving carbon emissions was to blame. The bleaching event had occurred early in 2006. By the end of the year the supposedly devastated coral had made a complete recovery all by themselves. Thereupon, climate scientists who had once doted on the GBR as proof of carbon dioxide's devastation simply went silent on the issue.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Edge back from the abyss, Bangkok Post, September 22, 2009

Starting sometime this month the global warmists have injected the word "abyss" into their lexicon and as usual with warmist terminology, the word connotes fear and urgency with repetition and confusion substituting for meaning. Last week Ban Ki-Moon told us that we were approaching the abyss and if Copenhagen failed we would soon find ourselves at the abyss. This week we are told by Jose Manuel Barroso that we are already at the abyss and success at Copenhagen will help us to back away from the abyss (Edge back from the abyss, Bangkok Post, September 22, 2009). Besides the terminology, Mr Barroso also appears to be confused about the data and forecasts presented by the very people whose science supposedly legitimizes his message. He writes that "climate change is happening faster than we believed only two years ago" whereas in 2009 the IPCC and others have actually backed away from their more extreme forecasts of 2007 in all aspects of climate change including temperature, ice melt, and sea level rise. In their desperation ahead of Copenhagen, the warmists have become more confused and less credible than ever.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Why the Copenhagen talks offer us one last chance, Bangkok Post, September 21, 2009

Ban Ki-Moon says that he went to the Arctic Ocean and was horrified to see the remains of a glacier that just a few years ago was a majestic mass of ice and that had just collapsed - not slowly melted - just collapsed. He thereby became convinced that the only resolution for the "climate crisis" is a successful emission reduction agreement at the Copenhagen meeting in December (Why the Copenhagen talks offer us one last chance, Bangkok Post, September 21, 2009). This message is incredibly garbled. There are no glaciers in the Arctic Ocean. The glaciers in Greenland that climate scientists had once said were flowing faster into the ocean because of climate change have since slowed down to a normal rate of flow and are no longer retreating. Glaciers don't "collapse".

The Secretary General goes on to say that he traveled by ship to the Polar ice rim and that in just a few years that ship will be able to travel all the way to the North Pole because the polar ice will have been completely melted by our carbon dioxide emissions. Current exaggerated projections by the UN's own climate scientists is that the Arctic will become ice free in summer around 2060 if we do not reduce CO2 emissions. That's 50 years from now, not "just a few years". In any case, it now appears that the minimum summer ice extent in the Arctic is not diminishing but in fact it is making a recovery and so the ice free Arctic forecast may be revised yet again.

He also states that thawing permafrost is even now releasing methane into the atmosphere. He is concerned because methane is a more potent heat trapping gas than carbon dioxide. This statement is completely false. The scenario of thawing permafrost in Siberia releasing methane is a forecast made by climate scientists and not one that has been observed. According the the IPCC, if we don't reduce our carbon emissions, Siberian permafrost may thaw and that thaw may release methane into the atmosphere in quantities sufficient to accelerate global warming. No climate scientist has claimed that these changes are now occurring. Incidentally, these forecasts have been rejected by Russian scientists.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Brussels not amused by Berlusconi's antics, Bangkok Post, September 19, 2009

Citing the high cost of the EU carbon emission reduction plan ill timed to coincide with a long and painful global recession, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi announced that Italy will not comply and moreover that he intends to use Italy's veto power to block the measure. The frustration with Italy in Brussels is best understood in these terms. Their attempt to tarnish and sideline Berlusconi using sensational tabloid press sex stories (Brussels not amused by Berlusconi's antics, Bangkok Post, September 19, 2009) is simply a desperate warning the prime minister to not use Italy's veto power. The EU are not amused because Berlusconi has forced them into a reality check with respect to their ambitious but misguided war against carbon dioxide.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Action needed fast to save Maldives from drowning, Bangkok Post, September 19, 2009

Climate change scientists have warned the Philippines and the Maldives that if they fail to cut their carbon dioxide emissions they face devastation from intense typhoons, drought, and food shortage in the case of the Philippines and inundation by rising sea levels in the case of the Maldives (Action needed fast to save Maldives from drowning, Bangkok Post, September 19, 2009). This kind of scenario of death by climate change where each country suffers directly from its own carbon dioxide emissions is contrary to what climate scientists have told us in the past - that the whole world is affected by the sum total of global CO2 emissions. Neither the Maldives nor the Philippines produces sufficient emissions to have a measurable impact on global atmospheric CO2 concentration. If they are about to be destroyed by typhoons and rising seas, there is absolutely nothing that these countries can do about it for even if they stop using fossil fuels altogether the effect on global atmospheric CO2 will be immeasurably small.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Arctic sea ice pack at record low, Bangkok Post, September 19, 2009

It is reported that the summer melt of Arctic sea ice in 2009 has reduced it to its third lowest extent on record continuing an overall decline symptomatic of climate change (Arctic sea ice pack at record low, Bangkok Post, September 19, 2009). It should be noted that the "record" used goes back only to 1979 when satellite data started becoming available. Our record of history prior to that shows more extensive summer melts including an open Northwest Passage. It should also be noted that the third greatest summer melt since 1979 follows in the heels of second place 2008 and first place 2007. This progression does not show a continuing overall decline but the exact opposite particularly when one considers all the carbon dioxide emissions since summer of 2007 and the global warmists' 2007 forecast that the summer melt would continue to increase in 2008 and 2009. Therefore the data presented are not consistent with climate change nor symptomatic of it.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

A succinct list of the flaws in the case for man-made climate change (extracted from Andrew Freedman's Washington Post blog

Flaw number 1: Hurricane Katrina was not a particularly severe storm. It made the news because it happened to make landfall in a vulnerable location. Yet the global warmists selected Hurrican Katrina to make their case that carbon dioxide emissions was increasing the severity of storms.

Flaw number 2: If you visit the Florida State Hurricane data center (http://coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/global_running_ace.jpg) you will find that hurricane intensity and frequency are not increasing as claimed by the global warmists. In fact, since the 1990s, hurricane activity has been decreasing even while we were using fossil fuels and emitting more CO2 than ever before.

Flaw number 3: The 2007 summer melt of Arctic sea ice was grossly misinterpreted and misrepresented as a cataclysmic event even though the satellite data of Arctic sea ice extent used go back only about 30 years and even though we have plenty of credible anecdotal data that the Northwest Passage had been open in recorded history.

Flaw number 4: First we were told that Antarctica was warming due to CO2 emissionf from fossil fuels. When challenged with hard data from weather stations that showed the continent was actually cooling they argued that this kind of cooling was consistent with their man made global warming hypothesis.

Flaw number 5: First they predicted that CO2 emissions will increase the frequency and severity of El Nino events. When asked why we have not had a severe El Nino since 1998 they said that El Nino was a very complicated climactic event with many inter-related variables and therefore they are unpredictable.

Flaw number 6:


Flaw number 3:

Reference: Arctic thaw threatens much of world, Bangkok Post, September 16, 2009

The unusually extensive summer melt of Arctic ice in 2007 had triggered forecasts of global warming doom that said that the ice would not fully recover with ensuing summer melts cutting deeper and deeper into the ice extent until the Arctic became ice free by 2030, 2050, or 2060 according to various forecasts. In the following two years, the Arctic ice summer melts and winter recoveries have been contrary to these assumptions. The Arctic ice extent did in fact fully recover from the 2007 melt, and the 2008 summer melt was less than that in 2007 not more, again with full recovery the following winter. This counter forecast trend continued in 2009 with a summer melt that is even less than the one in 2008. Clearly the the trend in the summer melt cycle of the Arctic is moving exactly in the opposite direction but the same forecast of diminishing Arctic ice is being sold to us over and over again (Arctic thaw threatens much of world, Bangkok Post, September 16, 2009). Interested parties may view the data for themselves by visiting the National Snow and Ice Data Center at nsidc.org.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: The Population Bomb, Silent Spring, ozone holes, and climate change

The essential idea in environmental extremism is that human activity is bad and that the planet needs to be saved from human beings, as if we were aliens from Mars and not of the earth. All of their crusades have been built on hysteria rather than objective scientific inquiry and none of them has withstood the test of time being eventually proven false. Their common denominator, that human beings are fundamentally bad for the planet, endures even though Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb", has been completely discredited as rubbish. So we find that Ehrlichism has been resurrected yet again, this time by the global warmists. Bright minds at the London School of Economics have come up with the idea that, since it is caused by people, we can fight climate change by getting rid of people. They have proposed that we should save the planet from people simply by not giving birth to more of them. Being economists they have boiled it down to pounds and shillings with the equation that a condom costs less than the cost of climate change mitigation to offset the carbon footprint of the human whose birth was prevented by the condom. It is surprising that we take these people seriously enough to have labeled the essential ingredient of life in the carbon cycle as a pollutant and to stand ready to commit economic suicide in order to wage war against carbon dioxide.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: The effect of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels on glaciers in Greenland

In 2005 two glaciers in Greenland were found to be moving faster than they were in 2001. Scientists concluded from these data that the difference observed was a a long term trend of glacial melt in Greenland and that carbon dioxide was the cause of this trend. The assumed trend was then extrapolated forward and we were told that carbon dioxide would cause the land based ice mass of Greenland to be discharged to the sea and raise the sea level by six meters. They said that the only way out of the devastation was to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

However, in 2009, just before a meeting in Copenhagen where these deep cuts in emissions are to be negotiated, it was found that the glaciers had returned to their normal rate of discharge. In other words, the changes observed in 2005 did not represent a trend but a temporary natural phenomenon that had been grossly misinterpreted.

Undeterred by data, scientists are now saying that we should make those reductions in carbon dioxide emissions anyway because the miscue by scientists in this case serves to show how little they know about these things, how wrong they could be, and therefore how much greater the danger carbon dioxide could pose for humanity. In other words, the less they know the more urgent their message. If there had been a way of holding climate scientists accountable, they might not have been so brash .

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Rich must commit more, Bangkok Post, September 12. 2009

There will be no deal struck in Copenhagen as the pre-meeting bickering makes clear (Rich must commit more, Bangkok Post, September 12. 2009). Citizens of rich nations face an unsavory cost/benefit analysis in which the benefits are global but the costs are local. At the same time the poor nations find that their per capita emission is already well below the most ambitious target of the rich nations. The bottom line is that CO2 emission is a proxy for energy consumption and energy consumption is a proxy for the standard of living and no rich nation is willing to reduce their standard of living. More bad news for Copenhagen lies in the data. The warmists are surely praying for a monster hurricane or some other equally dramatic weather data prior to Copenhagen and they may yet get that wish but so far the data have not cooperated with them. There have been a flurry of press releases by the warmists all of them reruns from 2005 and 2007 and yet all dutifully published by a pliant media but datawise it's been all quiet on the global warming front except for bad news. The US NOAA announced that the continental USA has been cooler than normal in August, 2009 even as the warmists are trying to promote August as an unusually hot month.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: THAI fails to transfer four long-range jets, Bangkok Post, September 11, 2009

The A-340 is dead having lost its entire market share to twin engine designs because it is expensive to operate. There are now only 18 orders left in the books at Airbus for the A-340 and even these few orders are disappearing fast as cancellations come in. There is no residual demand for this aircraft in the airline or air cargo market and THAI's failure to find a single operator to bid for it is testament to this well known reality. It is surprising to read that the staff at THAI were "dumbfounded" when they received no bids except from an aircraft dismantler who is offering junkyard prices (THAI fails to transfer four long-range jets, Bangkok Post, September 11, 2009). One would think that those who work for an airline would have been clued in to current market conditions.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: A plan to issue ration cards for energy to fight climate change

The Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK has put forward a plan to fight climate change by rationing energy. The program would include gasoline, natural gas, heating oil, electricity, diesel, and even airline tickets and holidays. According to the plan each person or perhaps each household will be issued ration cards for a prescribed amount of energy each month and when the that amount has been consumed, excess consumption will be possible only by purchasing very expensive permits or perhaps by making purchases in the black market. Whether intentional or not, the climate change agenda is playing into the hands of the right wing conspiracy theorists who had warned us that climate change was a ruse for big brother to take control of our lives.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Himalayan nations' first climate talks, and Nepal villagers on climate change frontline, Bangkok Post, September 9, 2009

It is claimed that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are causing Himalayan glaciers to melt and threaten devastation (Himalayan nations' first climate talks, Bangkok Post, September 9, 2009). The available data do not support this conclusion. It is true that some glaciers are retreating but that is due to natural cycles of weather patterns and not global warming and the proximate cause of the retreat is aridity and not temperature. In fact, there is no evidence that the mean annual temperature in the Himalayas has risen in the last decade. More to the point, not all glaciers are retreating. Most are stable or advancing. Taken as a whole, total glacial mass is currently not decreasing. It should also be mentioned that the many sad anecdotes about Nepalese men who leave their families behind to seek work in India (Nepal villagers on climate change frontline, Bangkok Post, September 9, 2009) are irrelevant to the climate change issue for they represent a well known historical migration pattern that has to do with poverty and not carbon dioxide.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

A reader of the Southland Times writes:

The IPCC climate model assumes that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is 50 to 200 years while recently published research shows that CO2 has a residence time of 5 to 15 years. The lower residence time of CO2 greatly reduces its effect on climate to the point of being negligible.

Posted by

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Action needed to avoid the abyss, Bangkok Post, September 6, 2009

Ban Ki Moon has described the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on climate as "our foot is stuck on the accelerator and we are heading towards an abyss". If "abyss" is another word for what has previously been described as the "tipping point", the Secretary General might wish to consult his own agency charged with the global warming agenda for these people have declared repeatedly between 2005 and 2007 that "it is already too late" for we are now "past the tipping point" and that we are doomed because mitigation of man-made climate change is no longer possible. Yet, here in 2009, we are somehow only approaching the abyss but not there yet. As it has in the past, the rising volume of fear rhetoric signals that we are approaching not an abyss, but a meeting on climate change in which they intend to extort from us the kind of agreement they want by making sure that we are sufficiently scared

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Luxury beachfront property in Australia is sinking, IHT, September 4, 2009

The coast of SE Australia consists mostly of beaches and these beaches are not stable landforms but a dynamic ever changing interface between land and water subject to violent erosion as well as the formation of sandbars. Coastal erosion along these beaches is an ongoing and natural phenomenon that has been recorded for more than a hundred years and has been related by hydrologists to the effect of east coast low pressure systems and tropical cyclones in conjunction with high tide. Coastal erosion of this nature in Australia is not new. What's new is the penchant these days to link all destructive natural events to global warming as if these kinds of events did not always occur. Media journalists and editors should evaluate the content of these stories and press releases for themselves with critical thinking of their own instead of printing like sheep.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

The politics of global warming

The global warming arena has taken on all the colors of a global tort case with hapless poor nations in Asia, Africa, and the South Pacific playing the role of the injured party goaded on by slick ambulance chasing tort lawyers in the form of the global warmists. Both of these parties are motivated to overstate the pain and suffering allegedly thrust upon the poor nations because that simultaneously ensures continued funding for the warmists and maximizes the possible payoffs to the poor nations. Objectrive scientific inquiry and scientific honesty are forced to take a back seat when large amounts of money are at stake.

Cha-am Jamal
Thailand

Reference: Ban makes climate plea in Arctic Circle, Bangkok Post, September 3, 2009

After the 2007 summer melt, climate scientists had predicted that Arctic ice would not fully recover and that therefore there would be less and less Arctic ice every winter until the Arctic became ice free in 2030 and that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were to blame. Instead, the ice fully recovered in 2008 and these forecasts are now irrelevant given post 2007 data. Yet the 2007 forecast has taken on a life of its own now putting the top man in the United Nations in the embarrassing position of being the poster boy for a lame duck prophesy (Ban makes climate plea in Arctic Circle, Bangkok Post, September 3, 2009). Greenpeace, the organization that got the Arctic ice melt scare started, is now back-pedaling on the idea and under questioning on BBC's “Hardtalk”, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace withdrew from that position saying that they had erred.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand