Thread: NBC to Examine Climate Change Sunday Night

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NBC to Examine Climate Change Sunday Night Written by GBpro Staff

Friday, 04 April 2014 11:19

GREEN BAY - “Ann Curry Reports: Our Year of Extremes: Did Climate Change Just Hit Home?” this Sunday night at 6:00 p.m. central time. In a special one-hour documentary, NBC's Ann Curry travels from the Arctic, to drought-stricken regions in the American West, to the edge of rising seas in Florida and into extreme weather events all over the globe. The debate is over, and all evidence suggests that climate change is here to stay, bringing with it the harsh extremes of hot and cold, drought, storms, hurricanes, and sea level rise that we will have to deal with for the rest of this century and beyond. Gone is the nice sounding “Global Warming” and with it the images of palm trees in Green Bay and year around summer. It appears that, while the politicians debated and looked the other way, we missed the opportunity to stop it or even slow it down. So everyone should be watching Sunday to see if NBC pulls any punches or ducks the issue once again. A real examination of the issue in prime time on the networks that the average citizen watch has been needed for years. Let’s hope that this is it, and that people actually tune in.

Last Updated on Friday, 04 April 2014 11:59 NBC to Examine Climate Change Sunday Night

Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.

Christopher Booker

6:25PM GMT 28 Mar 2009
150 Comments

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

•For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview "Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud"; or email him – morner@pog.nu – to buy a copy of his booklet 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'

Fined, frozen and now jailed

The Marine Fisheries Agency was certainly onto a winner when it enlisted the aid of the Assets Recovery Agency in its ruthless war against our fishermen. In December 2007 Charles McBride and his son Charles, from Kilkeel in Northern Ireland, were fined £385,000 for under-declaring catches of whitefish and prawns in the Irish Sea, threatening the loss of their homes and boat. But the Assets Recovery Agency, using powers designed to recover money from drug dealers, also froze all their assets. To pay the fines, the McBrides tried to borrow against their assets. Now, for this effort to pay the fines, Liverpool Crown Court has sentenced the two men to two and three months in gaol for “contempt of court”.
Blown away

The Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, timed his jibe impeccably last week when he said that opposing wind farms is as “socially unacceptable” as “not wearing a seatbelt”. Britain’s largest windfarm companies are pulling out of wind as fast as they can. Despite 100 per cent subsidies, the credit crunch and technical problems spell an end to Gordon Brown’s £100 billion dream of meeting our EU target to derive 35 per cent of our electricity from “renewables” by 2020.

Meanwhile the Government gives the go-ahead for three new 1,000 megawatt gas-fired power stations in Wales. Each of them will generate more than the combined average output (700 megawatts) of all the 2,400 wind turbines so far built. The days of the “great wind fantasy” will soon be over.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...ever-told.html

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“Ann Curry Reports: Our Year of Extremes: Did Climate Change Just Hit Home?”
this Sunday night at 6:00 p.m. central time.

West Coast 7:00 p.m. East coast ???.

JOE RAEDLE / GETTY IMAGES FILE 9 hours

Our Year of Extremes: Did Climate Change Just Hit Home?

BY ELIZABETH CHUCK

The dazzling icescape at the top of our planet is mutating into a place that is barely recognizable to those who have studied it for years.

The Arctic is home to some of the world's most dramatic climate change, scientists say, with warming oceans and air melting ice at a rate experts never imagined possible. The warming there has drastic implications for the rest of the earth, scientists say.

"The Arctic is a very useful bellwether of change, and it's ringing," Jason Box, an American glaciologist, told NBC News' Ann Curry. Curry traveled to far corners of the globe for "Ann Curry Reports: Our Year of Extremes - Did Climate Change Just Hit Home?" which airs Sunday at 7 p.m. ET.
How Wildfires Are Leading to Gray Snow in the Arctic
The special, which takes a look at the Arctic, drought-stricken regions in the American West, rising seas on Florida’s coastline, and extreme weather events all over the world, comes days after a panel of some of the world's top scientists delivered the sobering news that climate change is already being felt in every continent and across the oceans.

"It is a call for action," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which issued the groundbreaking climate report Monday, told the Associated Press.

Those who have witnessed the Arctic's transformation loudly echo that call.

Aqqaluk Lynge, a leader of the Inuit — the indigenous people of the Arctic regions — told Curry that not long ago, the water behind him was once solid ice and served as a road for Inuit hunters' dogsleds during hunting season. But in the past 20 years, the sea ice has become unpredictable.

"Two years ago here, a young couple died falling through the ice," Lynge said.

"We don't have time to argue. It's here. It's happening and we need to do something."

Now when the Inuit hunt for traditional food for their families, such as walruses and seals, they sometimes have to use their dogs to haul motorboats into the water instead of sledding across ice.

Box, who has been studying Arctic ice for 20 years, accompanied Curry to Iceberg Alley in Greenland. He says the glacier has been discharging ice into the sea for thousands of years, but in the last 10 years, the rate has has doubled.

"Greenland each year recently is losing about 300 billion tons [of ice]," Box said.

The rapid pace of change isn't just in the Arctic: Scientists have observed record ice melt all over the globe, from Alaska to Peru, from the Himalayas to the Swiss Alps.

Though scientists generally do not link specific weather events to climate change, they also say as the earth warms, we will have to get used to living with more extreme weather.

In California, an unrelenting drought has gripped the state — threatening communities and the states farming industry. And since California supplies about half the nation's fruit and vegetables, that could mean food prices will rise.

But drought poses additional threats.

In other places in North America, where communities have developed in wildfire danger zones, millions of people are potentially at risk from longer wildfire seasons.

Amazingly, some scientists say the effect of those longer fire seasons can be witnessed as far as the Arctic. During her journey there, Curry noticed large dark swaths covering parts of the normally white ice.

"Most likely it's dust, but also in that is some wildfire soot," Box said, explaining that some of the soot had traveled from North American wildfires and coated the ice with carbon particles. The problems can multiply from there.xtremes, investigating effects

"Light-absorbing impurities trap more sunlight, and that can hasten the melting process," Box said. "It's a good example of human activity and climate change combining in complex ways that further promote melting."

Box is still conducting research, investigating the effect of what he calls "dark snow" on the rate of ice melt.

That the ice is melting is not in doubt. But the impact of ice melt is the subject of an ongoing debate.

Jennifer Francis, a research professor with the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has a bold and controversial theory that Arctic ice melt is changing the polar jet stream in the northern hemisphere.

"As the Arctic is warming faster, it's causing these waves in the jet stream to get larger," she said. As the waves get larger, the jet stream moves more slowly, she says, and that has the effect of holding weather - good or bad - in place.

If we want to stop the impact of climate change, there's no time to waste, experts say. In 2013, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions went up for the first time in years, although they're down 10 percent since 2005.

"We don't have time to argue. It's here. It's happening and we need to do something, and there's an urgency about it," said Keren Bolter, a research scientist at Florida Atlantic University's Center for Environmental Studies.

Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, believes human activity impacts global warming, but does not link recent extreme weather to climate change. And he too believes that urgent action is needed. He argues the introduction of something like a multibillion-dollar government initiative, possibly a carbon tax, may be necessary to fund energy innovation.

"Changing your light bulb is not going to make a big difference. We need to go after the big sources of energy," he said.

According to scientists, a huge volume of greenhouse gases is trapped under permafrost — frozen soil that spans large areas of the Northern hemisphere, at a thickness of up to one mile in places — and that permafrost is showing signs of thawing. If the trapped greenhouse gases escape, Box says there could be severe consequences — something he calls the "doomsday scenario."

"That's climate catastrophe. Runaway climate heating," he said.

"That would ravage agricultural systems. We cant feed people, mass starvation, famine, breakdown of civilization."

In the meantime, in the Arctic, some Inuit families are abandoning the melting ice that no longer provides for them. But they have an urgent message for the rest of the world.

"Protect it, take good care of it," said Inuit leader Lynge.

Ann Curry Reports: Our Year of Extremes - Did Climate Change Just Hit Home? airs Sunday at 7 p.m. ET.

First published April 6th 2014, 8:14 am
ELIZABETH CHUCK

Elizabeth Chuck is an NBCNews.com staff writer and homepage producer.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...it-home-n70976

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