posted May 26, 2014 12:22 PM            

In April, for the first time, the mean monthly CO2 concentration in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million (ppm) throughout the northern hemisphere, which pollutes more than the south, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said.

"This should serve as yet another wakeup call about the constantly rising levels of greenhouse gases which are driving climate change," WMO chief Michel Jarraud said in a statement.

"If we are to preserve our planet for future generations, we need urgent action to curb new emissions of these heat-trapping gases. Time is running out," he warned.

Spring values in the northern hemisphere had previously spiked over the 400 ppm level, but this was the first time the monthly mean concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere exceeded the threshold.

The global annual average is set to exceed the 400 ppm level in 2015 or 2016, the agency added.

The threshold is of symbolic and scientific significance, and reinforces evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is responsible for the non-stop increase in heat-trapping gases, the WMO underlined.

CO2 stays locked in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and its lifespan in the oceans is longer still.

It is by far the most important greenhouse gas emitted by human activities and was responsible for 85 percent of the increase in radiative forcing, the warming effect on the climate, from 2002-2012.

According to the WMO, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 393.1 parts per million in 2012, or 141 percent of the pre-industrial level of 278 parts per million.

posted May 27, 2014 11:36 AM            

For instance, water vapor makes up about 97% of all atmospheric green house gasses and water vapor is 25 times more efficient in trapping heat than CO2.

Methane makes up about...roughly 1% of atmospheric green house gasses and it's also about 25 times more efficient in trapping heat than CO2.

But, the man made global warming religionists can't do anything about water evapororating from oceans and lakes...and they can't do anything about cow..and human flatulence or methane escaping from the permafrost in the summer months. Sooo, it had to be the least of the green house gasses they would attempt to get control over to regulate the economies of the world.

posted May 28, 2014 08:24 AM            

Retired officers poised to profit after Pentagon’s alarmist climate change report

Urgent Obama call can funnel funds to projects
Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times
Monday, May 26, 2014

Retired military officers deeply involved in the climate change movement — and some in companies positioned to profit from it — spearheaded an alarmist global warming report this month that calls on the Defense Department to ramp up spending on what it calls a man-made problem.

The report, which the Obama administration immediately hailed as a call to action, was issued not by a private advocacy group but by a Pentagon-financed think tank that trumpets “absolute objectivity.” The research was funded by a climate change group that is also one of the think tank’s main customers.

The May 13 report came from the military advisory board within CNA Corp., a nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia, that includes the Center for Naval Analyses, a Navy-financed group that also gets contracts from other Pentagon units. CNA also operates the Institute for Public Research.

CNA’s webpage states that it is not an advocacy group. It says it maintains “absolute objectivity. In our investigations, analyses and findings we test hypotheses, carefully guard against personal biases and preconceptions, challenge our own findings and are uninfluenced by what a client would like to hear.”

The Center for Naval Analyses’ motto is “high quality, impartial information.”

One of the CNA panel’s vice chairmen, retired Navy Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, is president of a private think tank, the American Security Project, whose prime issue is warning about climate change.

The other vice chairman, retired Army Brig. Gen. Gerald E. Galloway Jr., is a prominent adviser to the Center for Climate and Security, a climate change group.

In all, four CNA board members sit on the panel of advisers to the Center for Climate and Security, whose statements on climate change are similar to those found in the CNA report.

Other board members work in the climate change world of consulting and technology.

The CNA advisory panel is headed by retired four-star Army Gen. Paul Kern, who sits on the board of directors of a company that sells climate-detection products to the Pentagon and other government agencies. At least two other board members are employed in businesses that sell climate change expertise and products.

The greatest influence on CNA reports seems to come from the Center for Climate and Security, whose position is that the debate on climate change, or man-made global warming, is over.

“This is a world which recognizes that climate change risks are unprecedented in human history and does not wait for absolute certainty before acting to mitigate and adapt to those risks,” the center says.

The CNA report, titled “National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change,” says: “Some in the political realm continue to debate the cause of a warming planet and demand more data.” It then quotes a board member as saying, “Speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”

The Center for Climate and Security has taken donations from the Tides Foundation, which gets money from Democratic Party financier and liberal billionaire George Soros.

The CNA credits the Center for Climate and Security for helping release the report, and the center issued a press release lauding the report the day it was released.

The CNA report was celebrated by other global warming foreboders, particularly The New York Times, which gave it home page prominence on its website. The Times quoted Secretary of State John F. Kerry as saying the report would ignite a larger administration effort to combat climate change.

Business concerns

The military board’s 16-member roster is filled with former commanders and strategists, such as retired Gen. James T. Conway, a former Marine Corps commandant, and retired Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, who rose to the No. 2 position at NATO.

The CNA report prominently displays the opinions of three retired officers who sit on the advisory board at the Center for Climate and Security: Gen. Galloway; Adm. Frank L. “Skip” Bowman, the Navy’s former director of nuclear propulsion and who now runs a consulting business; and retired Rear Adm. David W. Titley, a former Oceanographer of the Navy.

A fourth board member tied to the center is Gen. Ronald E. Keys, a former chief of Air Force Combat Command.

Climate change has become big business. The U.S. government alone increased spending by more than $100 billion from 2003 to 2010, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Nations around the world are buying sensors, imaging technologies and airborne monitors.

That means huge contracts for consulting, studies and technologies to analyze the Earth and its environment.

Gen. Kern, the CNA advisory board chairman, is on the board of directors of Exelis Inc. (formerly ITT), a broad-based defense contractor that is also in the climate change business. It sells climate-detection systems to the Pentagon as well as to private industries.

This month, SpaceNews.com reported that Exelis Geospatial Systems won two climate-related contracts worth a potential $200 million — one for a NASA monitoring system, the other for Japan’s Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite.

Gen. Wald, another advisory board member, heads the largest single business entity within Deloitte, the giant international accounting and consulting firm. Gen. Wald runs its defense unit, and one of his portfolios is energy consulting. Deloitte itself has set up a consulting business that it says helps clients with “climate change and carbon management.”

Gen. Kern and Gen. Wald did not return phone requests for comment.

Gen. Keys, who joined the Center for Climate and Security in March, owns RK Solutions, a consulting firm that advises the Pentagon on climate change, according to the center’s biography for him.

One of the CNA report’s main recommendations: “In addition to DOD’s conducting comprehensive assessments of the impacts of climate change on mission and operational resilience, the Department should develop, fund and implement plans to adapt, including developing metrics for measuring climate impacts and resilience. The Department should place a greater emphasis on the projected impacts of climate change on both DOD facilities and associated community infrastructures.”

‘Self-fulfilling prophecy’

CNA Corp. itself is in the climate change business, a check of its client lists shows.

One of its major foundation customers is the Energy Foundation, the same group that financed the CNA military advisory board climate study. It is a global warming activist and is pushing a tax on carbon emissions.

CNA also lists as clients the liberal Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The fund states: “Human activity is causing global warming, rapid loss of biodiversity and accelerating degradation of Earth’s life-support systems. With the recognition that the impact of unchecked climate change threatens all other conservation efforts, the program focuses its grant-making on advancing solutions to climate change.”

CNA spokeswoman Constance Custer defended the way the study was conducted in response to questions from The Washington Times about board members’ climate change activism and business ties.

“Just as news organizations are confident in the abilities of their journalists to maintain objectivity and guard against personal bias, the MAB is confident in the objectivity and lack of bias of its members, whose careers have been based on honest, objective assessments of situations affecting military planning to ensure national security,” Ms. Custer said.

The CNA report is 100 percent climate change advocacy, stating as fact that global warming has caused flooding and wildfires. It uses phrases such as “more intense storms” and “more frequent and severe storms.”

“Globally, we have seen recent prolonged drought act as a displacement of populations, each contributing to instability and eventual conflict,” the CNA said.

Yet a number of scientists — and the United Nations — have looked at the history of storms and concluded that they cannot be blamed on climate change.

Roger Pielke, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado who has studied decades of U.S. storm data, told a Senate committee last year: “It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate time scales either in the United States or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Jeff Kueter, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a nonprofit that assesses scientific issues that affect public policy, said the report does not adhere to CNA’s creed of “absolute objectivity.”

“The report is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Mr. Kueter, who believes climate change impact on national security is tenuous. “The authors begin with the belief that the impacts of climate change are negative, and from that only bad consequences can flow. The report is not an objective treatment of the validity of the scientific claims or the veracity of the connections between environmental issues and security concerns.”

Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global warming advocate, said in its latest report that there is “low confidence” in any long-term increase in cyclone and hurricane activity. It also said there is “low confidence” in increased tornadoes and hailstorms.

David Kreutzer, an energy economics and climate change researcher at the Heritage Foundation, said the CNA report is based on some projections that have proved way off base.

“The report paints a picture of a future pocked with climate disasters, which is likely to be true because we have always had climate disasters,” Mr. Kreutzer said. “Even with no increase in floods, droughts, hurricanes or tornadoes — no increase is what the IPCC says we have observed so far — the future will have plenty. The military should be ready for them but should not blame them on climate change.”

He said the CNA relied on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models that “have proven embarrassingly inaccurate. In fact, instead of providing narrower and more certain projections, the projections have been getting further and further from the actual observed temperatures.”

posted May 28, 2014 11:35 PM            

For instance, Governor Moonbeam...aka Jerry Brown is hysterical that LAX is going to have to be moved in the next 200 years because rising sea levels will flood Los Angeles International Airport.

Hehehe, LAX is 120 feet above sea level. The most outlandish/absurd forecast by man made global warming religionists is that sea levels will rise 4 feet...FOUR FEET in that time frame.

When it comes to Man Made Global Warming; where's the beef?

Global Warming Alarmists Are Getting Desperate

For climate-change alarmists, the heat is on… their foreheads. Their desperation is starting to bead up and roll into their collars like flop sweat. California Gov. Jerry Brown’s absurd contention that LAX Airport is going to be turned into a bathtub because of climate change is the latest example of how know-nothings in the media, entertainment and politics are reaching for ever more questionable arguments as they continue to fail to stoke fears in an American public that, contrary to their hateful claims, largely believes in global warming but isn’t particularly worried about it. (Even among Democrats, more Americans rate drug use than climate change a serious political issue).

Brown said that due to changes in glacier mass (breathlessly hyped as “collapse” by the media), in 200 years “the Los Angeles airport’s going to be underwater.”

No, it isn’t. A projected four-foot rise in sea levels won’t much affect the airport, which sits 120 feet above sea level. A spokesman for Brown quietly admitted “the governor misspoke.” Cancel that budget item for the “billions of dollars” Brown imagined would be necessary to move the airport. (Or, maybe, move it anyway, for the same reason the state hopes to spend $68 billion on high-speed rail: It may be useless, but construction jobs will surely be created.)

Brown’s effort is typical of the political-informational complex’s new tactics. In the face of the inconvenient truths that hurricane activity has been on the decline and there was a frustratingly dismal season of storms for alarmists last year, that record cold temperatures last winter can hardly be blamed on global warming , that the slowing rate of increase in global temperatures is on the verge of falling beneath even the lowest projections of virtually all climate-change models, the alarmists are trying to keep global warming hysteria hot by throwing pocketbook issues into the furnace. That’s why we’re seeing a major uptick in global bathos, via headlines like “Climate Change May Be Killing Our Fancy Coffee.” Oh well, Maxwell House struck everybody as good enough for 80 years. The progressives at ThinkProgress warn of a possible guacapocalypse at Chipotle due to climate change. Is “Your Breakfast Under Assault from Climate Change“? Of course it is, you denier. Frosted Flakes prices could go up 20 percent….by 2030. Stockpile now! Or maybe give up Frosted Flakes and invest that money in future beachfront property in Orlando, because 2030 is also the year the alarmists tell us Miami is going underwater. (Really? From a sea-level rise of 3 mm per year? That adds up to 1.9 inches by 2030.) Oh, and if you think mankind can somehow muddle through climate change, you’re a Nazi.

Even alarmist publications like The New York Times are forced sheepishly to correct other alarmists (The Times’ environmental blogger wrote, “Some headlines are completely overwrought — as with this NBC offering: ‘West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning.’ This kind of coverage could be interpreted to mean there’s an imminent crisis”). No wonder a Yale study discovered that the most scientifically-literate Americans are less frightened of climate change than their low-information neighbors.

Political and media figures in the alarmist camp hope to bully the stubborn realists into silence. John Kerry is the latest to rely on a spurious claim that, as he put it in his Boston College commencement speech this week, “ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.” An equally obtuse figure who relies on the audience to mistake him for a well-informed person, HBO comic John Oliver, whose Cambridge degree and British accent equal erudition to low-information viewers, last week paraded 97 extras and actors onstage for a global warming “debate” with three actors pretending to be global-warming skeptics, for the purpose of showing the jabbering 97 shouting down the cringing three. He said this was a better illustration than the usual one-on-one media debate because in “a survey of thousands of scientific papers, uh, that took a position on climate change, 97 percent endorsed the position that humans are causing global warming.”

Uh. That uh, as Oliver may or may not be aware, indicates 97 percent of 33 percent — the latter being the proportion of scientific papers that declared humans were causing climate change. Two-thirds offered no opinion on the matter. In other words, Oliver’s the-crowd-is-with-me statement (and Kerry’s even more ill-informed mangling of it) equated to 32 percent of the crowd he was talking about.