Friday, December 18, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Spin's The 40 Best Albums of 2009 - U2 #32
U2 NO LINE ON THE HORIZON
U2's 12th studio album is their oddest roots move yet -- back to the edgy, old-school new-wave band they never really were. Yet No Line is entirely convincing, with sounds, tones, and textures that wouldn't have sounded out of place in 1983, when the band was at its peak of martial bellicosity. Circa 2009, U2 are more interested in exploring grooves, from the ecstatic foghorn grandeur of "Magnificent" to the metronomic chime of "Unknown Caller." DAVID MENCONI
Spin's 30 Biggest Concerts of 2009 - U2 #8
SOLDIER FIELD, CHICAGO
SEPTEMBER 13
It takes 120 semis to haul the stage for U2's 360 World Tour from town to town, and at the opening date of the U.S. leg at Chicago's Soldier Field, the over-the-top production paid off. The Irish band went out all for their 23-song set, playing their hits beneath an "enormous claw-like structure pierced with a towering, glowing spire hulking over a rotating stage and 360-degree screen," wrote SPIN's Kyle Ryan. "It's precisely the kind of thing that leaves concertgoers staring slack-jawed and primed for the sensory overload the world's biggest band is required to provide."
Time's The Top 10 Everything of 2009 - Top 10 Songs
3. "No Line on the Horizon" by U2
The simplest song on U2's latest album also happens to be the best. "I know a girl," Bono screams on this muscular opener, thrusting us into the familiar cosmos of a U2 hit. There's the martial beat, the fickle female object of desire, the soaring inarticulateness in the bridge — "Ohhhhhh/ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh" — followed by the Edge's chugga-chugga-chugging away on his guitar, chasing Bono up the scale, note for note. The whole thing buzzes from beginning to end, proof that old tricks can generate new thrills.
The Voices: Artists of the Decade - Artists who defined the 2000s.
Bruce Springsteen: Artifacts from the legend's career.
Radiohead: Thom Yorke and Co.'s evolution.
Kanye West: Check out the MC's most ambitious show.
Beyoncé: Live shots from Sasha Fierce's tour opener.
Arcade Fire: A timeline of the troupe's live shots.
M.I.A.: The global party starter's wildest looks.
Jack White: The many guises of rock's multitasker.
U2: Three decades of the world's biggest band.
Radiohead: Thom Yorke and Co.'s evolution.
Kanye West: Check out the MC's most ambitious show.
Beyoncé: Live shots from Sasha Fierce's tour opener.
Arcade Fire: A timeline of the troupe's live shots.
M.I.A.: The global party starter's wildest looks.
Jack White: The many guises of rock's multitasker.
U2: Three decades of the world's biggest band.
Full recap of U2 appearances on Billboard's year-end of decade-end charts
Billboard magazine has published dozens of lists recapping its chart tracking for both 2009 and the entire decade. The most jaw-dropping chart is the Top Touring Artists of the Decade, where U2 ranks number two overall with nearly a billion dollars in gross revenue from touring -- $844,157,925 to be exact. The Rolling Stones are first, beating U2 by a paltry $25 million. Billboard's numbers show U2 selling 9,869,953 tickets during the decade, second to the seemingly always-on-tour Dave Matthews Band (11,230,696). As for the 2009 calendar year, the U2 360 tour is ranked number one with more than $311 million gross and more than three million tickets sold.
Here's a look at U2's other appearances on Billboard's end-of-year and end-of-decade charts.
U2
- #1 Touring Artist of 2009
- #2 Touring Artist of the decade
- #19 in 2009 "The Billboard 200 Artists" (whatever that means; they were not in "Hot 100 Artists" nor in "Top Artists")
- #9 in 2009 Digital Album Artist of 2009
- #87 in Artists of the Decade (but not in "Hot 100 Artists" of the decade)
- #44 on "The Billboard 200 Artists" of the decade
- #25 Top Rock Song Artist of the decade
All That You Can't Leave Behind
#68 on "The Billboard 200 Albums" of the decade
How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb
#124 on "The Billboard 200 Albums" of the decade
No Line On The Horizon
- #18 The Billboard 200 Albums of 2009
- #5 Top Rock Albums of 2009
- #12 Top Digital Albums of 2009
- #25 Top Digital Albums of the decade
- #4 Top Alternative Albums of 2009
- #5 Top European Albums of 2009
- #18 Top Canadian Albums of 2009
The Best of 1980-1990
#41 Top Catalog Albums of the decade
"Beautiful Day"
#90 Top Rock Songs of the decade
"Magnificent"
#96 European Hot 100 Singles of 2009
"Get On Your Boots"
#99 European Hot 100 Singles of 2009
If you're curious, Billboard says its charts are "calculated using custom formulas collecting sales, streaming and radio play."
Rolling Stone's #1 Album of the Year: U2, No Line On The Horizon
Aiming for rock glory, Bono, Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. explore dark places ("Moment of Surrender"), find modern twists on their classic anthems ("Magnificent") and uncover blindinglight soul ("Breathe"). The result was an album with a sense of drama that no one could match all year, more proof that a band that isn't busy being born is busy dying.
Multi-site churches mean pastors reach thousands
NEW YORK — Susan Hong stops Pastor Tim Keller as he dashes up the steps of a Baptist church on a hectic corner of Broadway and West 79th Street.
She heard him preach at 10:30 a.m. on the Upper East Side. Now she has brought friends to hear him at the West Side 5 p.m. service. He briefly greets her, then slips into the service just before his sermon.
In 45 minutes, before the final hymn, Keller's gone — off to deliver the same sermon, "The Gospel Changes Everything," on the East Side.
Then, again, Keller, founder and senior pastor of Manhattan's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, will dash back to West 79th Street for his fourth service of the day at three leased locations.
It's not the traditional American mom-and-pop church, where the same pastor counsels parishioners, visits when they're ill or marries or buries them.
Keller's service-hopping — he usually preaches to three-fourths of the 5,500 people who attend Redeemer services — reflects a new model for worship spreading rapidly across the U.S. church landscape: multisite churches.
This form of high-efficiency evangelism allows thousands of worshipers to hear the same message from a lead pastor or a member of his team, in person or by video at three, five, even a dozen or more locations. Meanwhile, others take over the one-to-one side of ministry — counseling, ceremonies and small-group guidance.
Among U.S. Protestant megachurches, 37% reported having two or more locations under the same leadership in 2008, according to a study by the Leadership Network and Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Hartford, Conn.
It's a growth strategy that works for churches of any size because it doesn't require new buildings or fighting for zoning or parking space, says Scott Thumma, professor of sociology of religion at Hartford Seminary, where the institute is based.
"They just rent a couple of extra theaters and high schools and put together a church in a box. Most pastors wouldn't give this as the primary reason, but clearly it's a distinct advantage," says Thumma, co-author of a 2008 study examining eight years of growth and change in megachurches.
Of the USA's 100 largest churches, 67% now have two or more sites and 60% of the 100 fastest-growing churches also have multiple sites, according to the annual listings of the USA's largest churches in Outreach magazine's October issue.
Still, the multisite model can prompt culture shock.
"I do miss having a pastor at the door shaking hands in the 'check-out line,' " says Lauren Green, drawn to join Redeemer by Keller's preaching. "But I realize that model of a personal relationship with a particular pastor is probably gone."
Green grew up in an American Methodist Episcopal church in Minneapolis, where her mother still worships and the pastor she has known all her life led her brother's funeral last month.
That congregational model is suffering, however.
Young adults change churches often as they move from job to job, marry and relocate. Older churches are costly for older members to maintain. And new pastors like the flexibility and evangelical energy of multisites.
Making it personal
Green recognizes, "We're just not looking for that kind of relationship with a pastor anymore. Today, it's all about a personal relationship with God, not the culture of a church. And a megachurch or a multisite church can still offer this. If you are there to hear a message and it's a powerful one, it shouldn't matter how it's delivered."
"Even if people are just watching the senior pastor on a screen, they are still gathering, as the Bible commands, they are still serving the poor, engaging in worship and study, and encouraging one another," says Ed Stetzer of LifeWay Research in Nashville, which studies church trends.
Protestant churches are not the only houses of worship to have multiple sites.
A few downtown Jewish synagogues developed secondary sites as members moved to the suburbs in the 1970s.
In the past five years many major Catholic dioceses, faced with low budgets and a shortage of priests, consolidated parishes and sent priests to serve "clusters" of parishes that still retain a distinct identity.
But it is chiefly young evangelical Protestants who have embraced the multichurch idea.
Craig Groeschel wanted to branch out in 1996 when he was a 28-year-old Methodist pastor, but denominational leaders deemed him too young to plant a new church. He went anyway, "to engage with people like myself."
Now his LifeChurch.tv is the second-largest church in the USA. From Edmund, Okla., his sermons are beamed to 26,776 people gathering every weekend for worship and fellowship at 13 meeting sites or "campuses" from Phoenix to Albany, N.Y.
Groeschel sees the multi-site route as a way to offer a classic evangelical message — "the Bible is true and salvation is only by grace" — at bargain volume rates. His website boasts that LifeChurch.tv reached 1 million people in July, at a cost of 7 cents each. "For us, multisite is only a tool, nothing more," he says.
Community Christian Church in suburban Chicago, with nine sites and two more planned, makes an effort to create distinctive cultures at individual sites with their own "campus pastors" and rotating teachers.
Jeff Wagner, 45, who worships at the Plainfield campus, says it is still a personalized experience. "It's your campus pastor who knows your name and makes you feel welcomed and cared for, like you matter."
There are still foreign mission fundraising drives and local events that pull all 5,000 people at Community Christian together, such as December gift marts, with thousands of donated presents and volunteers in nearby Aurora.
Warren Bird, research director for Leadership Network, a research and consulting group focused on church growth, wonders if the multisite church is simply "the next new thing" and excitement will fade in a few years.
Thumma says, "sociologically, the multisite model goes against every instinct about religious commitment to a church. But so far as we know, a larger network can do more for a community, and re-create intimate worship experiences in accessible places where people live, and create more opportunities for volunteerism and service."
'A high-tech upgrade'
In June, Mark Driscoll, pastor of the 10-site non-denominational Mars Hill Church in Seattle, said he would add 100 more video-linked sites plus 1,000 new "church plants," spinoffs with their own senior pastors and administrative staffs.
At a conference in 2008, Driscoll rooted the multisite model in history, citing Francis Asbury, the 18th-century founding bishop of Methodism in America. Asbury covered a quarter-million miles on foot and horseback launching churches: "Now, instead of a horse, we have a video screen. We've given it a high-tech upgrade."
Keller isn't ready to ride that high-tech horse. He relies on the subway or a staff-driven SUV to orbit among four of the five Redeemer services every week.
Mixed with members are visitors who want to hear Keller after reading his 2008 best seller, The Reason For God, or his new book, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power and the Only Hope that Matters, about the spiritual wreckage of the current recession.
"The core of the multisite concept is that a church must 'reverse the flow.' Instead of drawing people to the church, take the church into their world," he says.
He launched Redeemer in 1989. After rapid growth, the congregation moved to an East Side college auditorium site by 1993, then added two West Side locations to serve a more diverse community.
Now, Keller frets as he pushes Redeemer toward a $20 million plan for six more sites in the next 10 years.
For Green, more sites will mean fewer Sundays she'll see Keller in person on the pulpit. She says, "I know intellectually that this is needed, and I understand it and I go to church every Sunday even when he's not there. But I don't think it will be the same."
Keller acknowledges, "It all sounds shaky to people. It makes them nervous. But this is not such a bad thing. If you don't know how something will turn out, you pray like crazy."
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The President Is No B+. In fact, he's got the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year.
Barack Obama has won a place in history with the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year: 49% approve and 46% disapprove of his job performance in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll.
There are many factors that explain it, including weakness abroad, an unprecedented spending binge at home, and making a perfectly awful health-care plan his signature domestic initiative. But something else is happening.
Mr. Obama has not governed as the centrist, deficit-fighting, bipartisan consensus builder he promised to be. And his promise to embody a new kind of politics—free of finger-pointing, pettiness and spin—was a mirage. He has cheapened his office with needless attacks on his predecessor.
Consider Mr. Obama's comment in his interview this past Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" that the Bush administration made a mistake in speaking in "a triumphant sense about war."
This was a slap at every president who rallied the nation in dark moments, including Franklin D. Roosevelt ("With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph"); Woodrow Wilson ("Right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts"); and John F. Kennedy ("Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed . . . will be met by whatever action is needed").
This kind of attack gives Mr. Obama's words a slippery quality. For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it "flawed" and blamed "the last administration" for launching it "hastily."
Really? Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner designed it. If it was "flawed," why did Mr. Obama later nominate Mr. Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman and make Mr. Geithner his Treasury secretary?
Mr. Obama also claimed at Brookings that he prevented "a second Great Depression" by confronting the financial crisis "largely without the help" of Republicans. Yet his own Treasury secretary suggests otherwise. In a Dec. 9 letter, Mr. Geithner admitted that since taking office, the Obama administration had "committed about $7 billion to banks, much of which went to small institutions." That compares to $240 billion the Bush administration lent banks. Does Mr. Obama really believe his additional $7 billion forestalled "the potential collapse of our financial system"?
Mr. Obama continued distorting the record in his "60 Minutes" interview Sunday when he blamed bankers for the financial crisis. They "caused the problem," he insisted before complaining, "I haven't seen a lot of shame on their part" and pledging to put "a regulatory system in place that prevents them from putting us in this kind of pickle again."
But as a freshman senator, Mr. Obama supported a threatened 2005 filibuster of a bill regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He doesn't show "a lot of shame" that he and other Fannie and Freddie defenders blocked "a regulatory system" that might have kept America from getting in such a bad pickle in the first place.
The president's rhetorical tricks don't end there. Mr. Obama also claimed his $787 billion stimulus package "helped us [stem] the panic and get the economy growing again." But 1.5 million more people are unemployed than he said there would be if nothing were done.
And as of yesterday, only $244 billion of the stimulus had been spent. Why was $787 billion needed when less than a third of that figure supposedly got the job done?
Mr. Obama also alleged on "60 Minutes" that health-care reform "will actually bring down the deficit" (which people clearly know it will not). He said his reform reduces "costs and premiums for American families and businesses" (though they will be higher than they would otherwise be). And he claimed 30 million more people will get coverage through "an exchange that allows individuals and small businesses" to purchase insurance (though 15 million of them are covered by being dumped into Medicaid and don't get private insurance).
Mr. Obama may actually believe it when he says, "I think that's a pretty darned good outcome" and congratulates himself that he could succeed where "seven presidents have tried . . . [and] seven presidents have failed."
But voters seem to have a different definition of success. And they are tiring of the president's blame shifting and distortions.
Mr. Obama may believe, as he told Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview, that he deserves a "solid B+" for his first year in office, but the American people beg to differ. A presidency that started with so much promise is receiving unprecedentedly low grades from the country that elected him. He's earned them.
Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Scare tacticians
by David Warren
And then there was acid rain, and then there was the ozone hole and ... I hardly had space in my column for Saturday to recount the whole history of "environmentalist" frauds and impostures. It would be interesting to see some attempt to estimate the total direct cost to the world's taxpayers of all the scare-mongering since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first started appearing in the New Yorker magazine in June 1962.
Each scare, in turn, is packaged and marketed with more skill than the previous; each enjoys its run in the world's headlines, and the frenetic political attention we are watching in Copenhagen in its most advanced form. Each in turn is gradually forgotten as more facts come to light, as the apocalyptic predictions fail, as the story line bores through repetition. And then a new scare needs to be invented.
"Anthropogenic global warming" will go the way of its predecessors, having achieved what was meant for it, in its season: the extortion of huge amounts of money by the parasites clustered around all the existing environmentalist spigots; the sinking of new bungholes into the public accounts; the creation of new big-brotherly bureaucracies to feed new vested interests; and, untold riches and prestige for the "settled scientists" who work the system for patronage.
But then it will be replaced with a new environmental scare narrative.
The parties are already working on "acidification of the oceans"; there were loose ends from Rio '92 on "biological diversity"; and there will always be fresh water supply issues to play with. The threat from asteroids was briefly considered, then dismissed: too hard to blame that on the free market. But the activists will come up with something, for their livelihoods depend upon it. And as the world's climate is constantly changing, and has been doing for the past 4.54 billion years, "climate change" itself will provide new opportunities.
For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the "global warming" scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those "hacked" documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting "the right results." This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts.
My reasoning here is that "environmentalism" at large has -- like all other "progressive" movements -- exploited public gullibility about motivations.
The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure, and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure, while themselves being on the take.
While I do not personally enjoy a mudfight, it is necessary to disarm these people, by taking away this public benefit of the doubt.
Even before examining, objectively, details of the claims environmentalists are making, the public needs to be put on its guard. A successful representative democracy requires an electorate armed against politicians of any stripe or kind (elected or otherwise) who make claims to personal sanctity: for this is an infallible mark of grave hypocrisy. Genuinely good people do not advertise their goodness; genuinely humble people do not advertise their humility; genuinely truthful people do not claim to be messengers of "settled science," when there is no such thing.
There are real cultural failures here -- running right through our postmodern societies -- that allow the scare tacticians to flourish. In a sense it is an environmental catastrophe, although the environment in question is a psychic, rather than a physical, landscape. People have become unattuned to the most basic warning signals our ancestors used, to protect themselves against human predators. We are anyway removed by modern technology from the possibility of looking them straight in the eye. (What comes through a television screen is in no way intimate; it is instead a form of "virtual reality.")
We, the people, must find ways to recover the pre-bureaucratic order of things. The great, and very real problems of society -- including those of pollution, and conservation of resources -- are not amenable to "activist" cures. The world simply does not work that way.
The real environmental problems are solved by inculcating supple cultural traits in the people themselves -- which the State cannot do. It can only be done from parents to children. Individual human beings must be raised to eschew waste, luxury, and personal display. They must be raised to prefer good to evil, truth to falsehood, beauty to ugliness. There are no quick fixes.
The solution to environmental problems is civilizational, and thus organic. The solutions environmentalists propose are the extreme opposite of this: they are "the end justifies the means."
And then there was acid rain, and then there was the ozone hole and ... I hardly had space in my column for Saturday to recount the whole history of "environmentalist" frauds and impostures. It would be interesting to see some attempt to estimate the total direct cost to the world's taxpayers of all the scare-mongering since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first started appearing in the New Yorker magazine in June 1962.
Each scare, in turn, is packaged and marketed with more skill than the previous; each enjoys its run in the world's headlines, and the frenetic political attention we are watching in Copenhagen in its most advanced form. Each in turn is gradually forgotten as more facts come to light, as the apocalyptic predictions fail, as the story line bores through repetition. And then a new scare needs to be invented.
"Anthropogenic global warming" will go the way of its predecessors, having achieved what was meant for it, in its season: the extortion of huge amounts of money by the parasites clustered around all the existing environmentalist spigots; the sinking of new bungholes into the public accounts; the creation of new big-brotherly bureaucracies to feed new vested interests; and, untold riches and prestige for the "settled scientists" who work the system for patronage.
But then it will be replaced with a new environmental scare narrative.
The parties are already working on "acidification of the oceans"; there were loose ends from Rio '92 on "biological diversity"; and there will always be fresh water supply issues to play with. The threat from asteroids was briefly considered, then dismissed: too hard to blame that on the free market. But the activists will come up with something, for their livelihoods depend upon it. And as the world's climate is constantly changing, and has been doing for the past 4.54 billion years, "climate change" itself will provide new opportunities.
For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the "global warming" scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those "hacked" documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting "the right results." This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts.
My reasoning here is that "environmentalism" at large has -- like all other "progressive" movements -- exploited public gullibility about motivations.
The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure, and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure, while themselves being on the take.
While I do not personally enjoy a mudfight, it is necessary to disarm these people, by taking away this public benefit of the doubt.
Even before examining, objectively, details of the claims environmentalists are making, the public needs to be put on its guard. A successful representative democracy requires an electorate armed against politicians of any stripe or kind (elected or otherwise) who make claims to personal sanctity: for this is an infallible mark of grave hypocrisy. Genuinely good people do not advertise their goodness; genuinely humble people do not advertise their humility; genuinely truthful people do not claim to be messengers of "settled science," when there is no such thing.
There are real cultural failures here -- running right through our postmodern societies -- that allow the scare tacticians to flourish. In a sense it is an environmental catastrophe, although the environment in question is a psychic, rather than a physical, landscape. People have become unattuned to the most basic warning signals our ancestors used, to protect themselves against human predators. We are anyway removed by modern technology from the possibility of looking them straight in the eye. (What comes through a television screen is in no way intimate; it is instead a form of "virtual reality.")
We, the people, must find ways to recover the pre-bureaucratic order of things. The great, and very real problems of society -- including those of pollution, and conservation of resources -- are not amenable to "activist" cures. The world simply does not work that way.
The real environmental problems are solved by inculcating supple cultural traits in the people themselves -- which the State cannot do. It can only be done from parents to children. Individual human beings must be raised to eschew waste, luxury, and personal display. They must be raised to prefer good to evil, truth to falsehood, beauty to ugliness. There are no quick fixes.
The solution to environmental problems is civilizational, and thus organic. The solutions environmentalists propose are the extreme opposite of this: they are "the end justifies the means."
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY
HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:
1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago
12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions
15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates
21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades
23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries
24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder
25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research
26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles
27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.
28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population
29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago
30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles
31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming
32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures
33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere
34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere
35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything
36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes
37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”
38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC
39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally
40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms
41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful
42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical
43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests
44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years
45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations
47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.
48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change
49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.
50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.
51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.
52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”
53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.
54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics. Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot
55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.
56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.
57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”
58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.
59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.
60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.
61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.
63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.
64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.
65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.
66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature.
67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.
68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.
69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.
70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”
71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.
72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all.
73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.
74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.
75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes.
76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.
77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.
78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.
79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).
80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.
81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.
82) Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.
83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.
85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.
86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.
87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.
88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.
89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.
90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.
92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.
94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.
95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.
96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.
97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.
98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”
99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”
Sunday, December 13, 2009
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