Saturday, December 18, 2010

Snowed in: Part 2 "Global Warming"

Once again there's several inches of snow outside and I'm sitting INSIDE working on my line-edits. Anybody watching the news might have noticed a sudden dearth of so called 'experts' waffling on about global warming, or 'climate-change' as it's now known. They tend to go extremely quiet when things go against the predictions they've been harping on about for the last 25 years, and they remain even quieter when the various climate-change myths they've been shouting from the melting mountain-tops get exposed.

For those of you who've been taken in by the great circus that is climate-change, here's a few carefully researched pointers for you that I've accumulated over the past four or five years that show what a mess the IPCC has made of scientific endeavour and public faith in our best and brightest.

1) The mean temperature of our globe has been cooling since 2000, not warming.

2) Carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere has continued, however, to rise, destroying the entire edifice of climate warming as being caused by atmospheric CO2.

3) Antarctica is getting colder, and despite losing sea-ice at it's edges is gaining ice in its centre, causing a net-gain in ice.

4) There have never been more polar-bears in the Arctic than there are now, and they're not dying out. Only two isolated populations are declining, the rest are on the rise.

5) Sea levels in the Maldives are dropping not rising, and have been for some years.

6) The Medieval Warm Period exceeded current global mean temperatures long before industry or fossil fuels. It was followed by a global chill that lasted almost 200 years.

7) Increases in atmospheric CO2 do not CAUSE increases in temperature, they FOLLOW increases in temperature. Fluctuations in solar radiance far better fit global mean temperature changes than CO2 levels.

8) Every single major claim made in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth have been proven false by climate scientists. Chief of these is the so-called 'Hockey-Stick' graph, showing dramatic changes in global temperatures since the industrial age. Take this graph, extend it back 2,000 years instead of 200, and our current temperature is exceeded many times in natural fluctuations. Extend it back further, and it becomes an invisible blip of no significance. Nor is the speed of temperature change either unusual or unique. The graph as advertised is a deliberate falsehood promoted by the International Panel on Climate Change.

9) "If the Arctic melts, sea levels will rise!!" No, they won't. Take a glass of water, put an ice cube in it, and mark the level of the water. Wait for the ice to melt, and see what happens to the water level. It will fall. Water expands when it freezes, and the Arctic is a giant ice cube floating in the ocean, with most of its mass below the surface. Sea levels will fall if it melts: only if the Antarctic starts melting will we be in trouble, and it's not ( see above ).

10) In the past, there have been severe freezes and thaws throughout climate history, many of which were far more extreme than that being experienced now. The greatest danger on Earth is not global temperature through human activity, but global poisoning through human activity. Amphibians are called 'sentinel species' for a reason, they're sensitive to change. Pictures of three legged frogs, the deformity put down to climate change, are absolute rubbish. Temperature change won't easily cause such genetic mutations: but throw some heavy metals into the water table and it all makes more sense, and we do that all the time. Everyone's barking up the wrong tree, and that's what happens when science becomes politicised for profit, which is what's happened with climate-change.

11) Wind turbines are sold on their maximum theoretical output, not their actual output, increasing profits. Denmark, which has the world's greatest investment in wind turbines, has banned all further building of them having finally realised that they're useless. They either produce too much or not enough power, forcing the country to either sell power cheap or buy power in expensively from elsewhere depending on their turbine output.

12) Never believe anything you read without first checking it. If you think the above is incorrect, search for scientific studies and papers that are INDEPENDENTLY written and peer-reviewed (ie, not the product of either the IPCC or anti-global-warming interests ). Then you'll get confirmation.

I predict that within 15 years, people will wonder how the hell the IPCC got away with the deliberate mis-use of science for profit via carbon trading.

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Snowed in!

Like most of the country I awoke this morning to find myself surrounded by about a foot of the white stuff. Once upon a time this would have meant no work and much rejoicing, but as I now work from home.....

I completed the general edit of Covenant a couple of weeks ago, and since them my editor at Simon & Schuster, Maxine Hitchcock, has been hard at work on the 'line-edit'. This second round of editorials is a fine tuning of the manuscript, the final polishing where Maxine makes suggestions on the macro scale. Would character 'X' really say something like that? Would they actually do something like that? Does this line need to be in the narrative or can it be cut out? Is there a spot too much exposition here, too little there? And so on. This final run-through irons out any remaining questions that might 'jolt' a reader as they travel through the story, ensuring that everything within the narrative runs smoothly.

I imagine that it will take me at least a couple of weeks to run through this edit, returning the manuscript to Maxine before Christmas. In the New Year, the MS will then be sent to the copy-editor, who has purposefully not yet read the novel. It will be their job to identify technical errors, should there be any, things like time distortions, character's appearances changing and so on.

Meanwhile, in the background book two is taking shape, with opening chapters already in place. Despite the snow outside, I'm enjoying the work too much to go out and play!!