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July 10, 2007

We Contribute A Little To Warming, But Celebs Even More

By Jack Kelly

Climate change is to blame for poor turnout at "Live Earth" concerts last weekend, said organizers of the events.
The nine concerts on all seven continents were an effort by Al Gore, the former vice president turned apostle of doom, to raise "awareness" of global warming. They were modeled on the "Live Aid" and "Live 8" concerts to relieve starvation in Africa, but fell short of expectations.

Sparse crowds in Johannesburg were due to unusually cold weather, said John Langford, the organizer there. It snowed in southern Africa last week for the first time in 25 years.

The weather was "perfect" for the concert in Rio de Janeiro, which drew the largest crowds (400,000 by the AP's estimate, less than 100,000 according to Reuters). Organizers had expected upwards of a million.

Good weather was why so few watched the Live Earth concert in London, said the BBC. At it's peak (when Madonna sang), 4.5 million people tuned in to watch the BBC's broadcast. The Live 8 concert two years before had attracted an audience of 9.6 million.

About 45,000 attended the Live Earth concert in Australia. But not for long, said the Sydney Morning Herald: "Scores were seen leaving within the first two hours of the nine hour festival, fed up with the lack of basic services."

"There's no overlooking the turnout was poor," said the Earth Times of the concert in Hamburg, Germany.

Organizers said the New York concert (held in Giants' stadium in New Jersey) was sold out, but an AP photo of Mr. Gore speaking at the event shows a lot of empty seats. Only a "few hundred" attended the concert in Washington D.C., said Agence France Presse.

It wasn't the weather that was responsible for what she described as a "foul-mouthed flop," wrote reporter Tahira Yaqoob in Britain's Daily Mail: "Critics said that the public had simply snubbed what they saw as a hypocritical event."

Britons are unwilling to take their climate science from aging rock stars who talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. Madonna and her entourage, for instance, generated some 440 tons of carbon dioxide in a four month tour last year.

"The average a British person produces is 10 tons a year," John Buckley, managing director of Carbonfootprint.com, told the Daily Mail.

Only one American in three thinks events like the Live Earth concerts actually help the cause they are intended to serve, and just 24 percent think celebrities really believe in the causes they promote, according to a Rasmussen poll taken just before the concerts. Rocker Mark Bellamy of the band Muse described Live Earth as "private jets for climate change."

Just one American in four thinks Al Gore is an expert on global warming, Mr. Rasmussen found. With good reason. Real scientists are backing away from Mr. Gore's histrionic claims the planet is warmer than ever, and man is the cause of it.

Scientists who drilled through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record found that lush forests once blanketed what is now an ice-covered wasteland. But even though temperatures then were, on average, 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now, Greenland's glaciers did not entirely melt away, according to a study published in Science magazine July 5.

In the same issue, Richard Kerr writes that the accuracy of the models used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (on which alarmists like Mr. Gore rely) is below the minimum acceptable for standard scientific publications.

This may be why when last month Prof. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania offered to bet Mr. Gore $10,000 that global temperatures would increase only negligibly, Mr. Gore refused to put his money where his mouth is.

Our current warming is the product of a 1,500 year cycle in the sun's irradiance, said Canadian climatologist Timothy Patterson in a paper published in March. His research team documented changes in temperature over the last 5,000 years by examining the sediment beneath the ocean off Canada's west coast. Solar research indicates the cycle is ending, and a global cooling will begin around 2020, Dr. Patterson said.

In an interview in June, Dr. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin, considered to be the father of scientific climatology, said of Mr. Gore's documentary: "Don't make me throw up. It's not science. It is not true."

Man's activities do contribute to warming, Dr. Bryson said, but the effect is insignificant: "It's like there is an elephant charging, and you worry about the fact there is a fly sitting on its head."

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