Political Football

My whole world seems to stop on Super Bowl afternoon – so I’m catching up on a few organizational things including some blogging.  I’m watching the pre-game and may interject some comments.

Fun to watch the playoffs when I don’t care who wins.  What a finish to the season if WhO DaT NaTioN gets a super bowl championship; if the Colts win they are a blue collar team with Dallas Clark and Hawkeye History. 

I watched the Sarah Palin speech last night and am still looking for the next generation’s leaders.  President Obama can’t lead his way out of the proverbial paper sack – 13 months into his term he’s still campaigning.  I don’t see leadership in Gov. Palin either.  I like her, but people are pushing her into a leadership role for which she is not ready.

The 912 and Tea Party movements are engaging more citizens in politics, that is a good thing, and Gov. Palin’s speech was from the heart.  But those who are looking for the next Ronald Reagan in Palin, forget his “time in the wilderness” where he honed his philosophical tone by writing a-lot speaking around the nation and on TV.  Watch this TV broadcast from 1964 – 16 years before he was President.  YOU TUBE BROADCAST HERE   There is no Ronald Reagan type in either party today and I am afraid for the future.

To me it’s as simple as this.  Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  I’m not looking up the orgins of that quote – it just makes sense doesn’t it?

2008 campaign article

Study shows FDR spending policies lengthened, did not shorten the Depression.

I wish I started to buy gold when it was $400, not doing it now.  I hope the continued unravelling of the Global Warming Myth is turned into a new effort to protect the environment and an understanding that we need to learn how to help future generations survive this climate change we are seeing.  Science based on urgent collection of grant monies and financial profit - is an evil effort and must be stopped. 

Walter Payton :::tears::: gone too soon, we still love you.  Queen Latifa Rocked American the Beautiful…  No one will out do Whitney Houston’s Star Spangled Banner… what was a long time ago, I didn’t think much of this lady today…

Where I do appreciate every candidate and citizen that is newly engaged, this two party system has to come back and find a way to work together.  I hope Republicans do regain control of the 2011 congress and pass a fair and responsible reorganization of our healthcare system.  A reorganization that pays for itself by cutting waste, is portable and covers pre-existing conditions.  I am supporting Dr. Miller-Meeks for Congress in that effort.

In this article, SoS Clinton apologizes for the harm the USA has done to the planet.

“We acknowledge now with President Obama that we have made mistakes in the United States, and we along with other developed countries have contributed most significantly to the problem that we face with climate change,”

The phrase change from “global warming” (which can’t be proven) to “climate change” (which the world has experienced since its inception) is significant. ***

Why this administration feels it needs to apologize for America at every turn makes me angry.

Climate Change in particular has become the single most costly urban legend in the 20th Century and has laid the path to he destruction of the US Economy while people wring their hands.

According to the United States Weather Bureau:
– This June is tied for the 8th coolest on record. The average temperature was 67.5. (That’s) 3.7 degrees below normal…which also occurred in 1897.
– This was the coolest June since 1958…when the average temperature as 67.2 degrees.

The threat to the global economy today is created by hysteria on one level or another. Where is the Statesmanship? In other breaking news, the “lion of the Senate” Teddy Kennedy, visited Mary Jo Kopechne’s grave for the first time recently…

I just had a conversation with some of my Republican friends noting that the world changed so much with MLK and RFK’s assasinations. The conversation consensus was that RFK was the smartest of the Kennedys’ and the one most likely to become and important leader in the world. I was 14 and at the Iowa Republican Convention, the day he was shot.

Where is the next Statesman?

*** insert standard “we should all be good stewards of earth resources, etc, etc…

Hedge Funds, Sub Prime Mortgage bundling, now Carbon Offsets.

We’ve been heading for the disaster we’re living in now – ever since we started the WAR on POVERTY 45 years ago – (which we’ve never made a dent in, by the way)…. http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_sndgs01.html

All I really need to understand is George Soros was an early supporter of Hedge Funds to understand – this can’t be good.

A fund, usually used by wealthy individuals and institutions, which is allowed to use aggressive strategies that are unavailable to mutual funds, including selling short, leverage, program trading, swaps, arbitrage, and derivatives. Hedge funds are exempt from many of the rules and regulations governing other mutual funds, which allows them to accomplish aggressive investing goals. They are restricted by law to no more than 100 investors per fund, and as a result most hedge funds set extremely high minimum investment amounts, ranging anywhere from $250,000 to over $1 million. As with traditional mutual funds, investors in hedge funds pay a management fee; however, hedge funds also collect a percentage of the profits (usually 20%).

More information here where I grabbed the paragraph.

Hedge Funds then the bundling of bad mortgages into subprime mortgages and selling them, IMO are the prime elements of this crisis. It’s not an economic down turn, it’s payback for all the stupid things that people have done to “make a buck” or “keep up with the Jones’”. Everything from salaries to houses were too inflated, as well as people’s drive for “things”. I have a sister that always parses things simply by “wants” v “needs”. More people should be like her.

Now, every day I think about my fairly substantial 401k and if it will be there tomorrow. I don’t worry about its value – I wonder if it will be there – if someone will take it – or maybe it’s not really there… Is that nuts?

The world today seems to be “about the scam” – about taking advantage of the crisis. You have been instructed that you don’t need to pay your credit card bill or house payments, but still buy your new ipod or blackberry… get a stay at home job and make 6 figures a year. Even the congress has to rush to pass 1,000 + pages bills costing Trillions of dollars, and almost all of the legislators admit to not reading the bill. what’s the rush! What are they hiding? What’s the scam?

I’ve told my friends, prepare to live without your cell phone or internet access or even your car and try to remember (or learn) how exist – it is getting just that odd out in the real world.

Carbon offsets are becoming an increasingly popular way for individuals and businesses to participate in solutions to global warming. The basic idea of a carbon offset is to figure out your personal contribution level to the global warming problem from such activities as driving, flying, or home energy use. This contribution is called a “carbon footprint.” The term refers to carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. You can balance out your carbon footprint by buying carbon offsets. Your purchase funds reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through projects such as wind farms, which produce clean energy that displaces energy from fossil fuels. By funding these reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, you balance out, or offset, your own impact by an equivalent amount. Carbon offsets help you take personal responsibility for the environmental consequences of your activities.

Anything that is difficult to audit is ready for corruption. Bernie Maddoff? Enron? Have we learned nothing?

One of my favorite TV shows is “Living with Ed” the Greenman Ed Begley, the actor, and his wife star in a reality show. Ed is Green, very Green and his wife appreciates it but frequently thinks he goes too far. But I like him and think more people should live like him. No one needs a 50,000 sq ft mansion to live, I don’t care how rich you are. But you can’t make laws to tell people they can’t build 50,000 sq ft mansions! Anyway – Ed is always hopping on his computer to buy carbon credits. Last show I watched, it was because his wife was flying to Utah for a film festival and Ed was driving his hybrid. Guilt payments. I learn a lot from the show and it’s fun to watch. Ed doesn’t “force” his lifestyle on others but teaches. But do carbon credits work?

Then you have my candidate, Dr. Miller-Meeks. She was an alternate delegate to the AMA convention a few weeks ago when the President spoke in Chicago. She wrote about it several times in her blog – here is the link. She talks about the AMA going Green – sending out PDFs of the events, etc… hundreds of pages, but then everyone brings their laptops! Carbon Offset anyone???

Fossil fuel and cement emissions increased by 3.3 percent per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.3 percent per year in the 1990s. Similarly, atmospheric C02 concentrations increased by 1.93 parts per million per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.58 ppm in the 1990s. And yet, despite accelerating emission rates and concentrations, there’s been no net warming in the 21st century, and more accurately, a decline.

Mark Steyn’s 7/4 article

Last week the President gave a DVD movie set to his first foreign visitor. Sounds pretty odd and not very Presidential. If the set was one that could not run on European equipment – I know they are different – that would be embarrassing. The “excuse” given for that and various other issues is that the new President is overwhelmed. But apparently not overwhelmed enough to have parties at the WH on Wednesdays.

I got my taxes done this AM and asked my CPA to reconstruct them if Iowa lost the federal deductability on State tax reporting that currently exists.

I owed $90 more in state tax than I had paid in 2008. Under the proposed system I would owe over $800 more than I had paid in 2008. Wow. That’s more than a chunk of change – something I need to budget to pay. My sense is that bill will not pass, hopefully it won’t get through funnel week.

One of my favorite reads in the AM is Powerline Blog and this AM they were talking about the political games the Democrats were playing posting Rush Limbaugh as the “titular head” of the Republican party – knowing he was not well liked outside of conservative circles. The basic tennant was that Rush wants this President to fail, and how unAmerican that is. But… they also said:

Rush wants Obama to fail to socialize the economy and run up trillions of dollars in debt. Democrats in 2006–surely a plurality, if not a majority–wanted the United States to fail in a war in which our armed forces were then engaged. Yet, through the eight years of the Bush administration, neither the President nor his spokesmen ever accused these Democrats of being unpatriotic. I hope that someday their restraint will be appreciated.

So Rush supports America but not the President. How different is that from Liberals saying they support the troops but not the mission? which is worse? Rush want’s this President’s policies to fail. So do I; I hope voters WAKE UP SOON!!!

Then they talked about Charles Freeman who has been nominated by the President to head the National Intelligence Council when it’s obvious he has a bias against Israel. Can’t say I’m shocked.   [update 5pm today - Charles Freeman is another Obama candidate casualty.  He just asked to have his name removed from consideration.  It appears not only does he sit on a Chinese Company Board but he also has taken considerable coin from the Saudis.  Don't they vet these guys at all?  At lease we can assume he's paid his taxes.  -pf]

On a brighter note – there is more public dialog on the idiocy of Algore’s Global Warming mantra. This will be one of the worst scams of all time – costing trillions of dollars but more important, more than a decade of lost time. Where would we be if we were able to rationally discuss climate change and how to prepare for it? Climate Change will happen – Algore’s hyperbole is harmful and has spawned an industry that has not solved the problem.

Read an article written on a liberal blog HERE refuting Algore’s part in the Global Warming movement.

Maybe there is hope.

When Barack Obama and Gordon Brown see ‘opportunity’, we really do have a crisis

The Left is threatening our freedom by using the downturn to bolster the power of the state, says Janet Daley.

Link

The story so far: some capitalists behaved very badly. While this was going on, the socialists didn’t ask questions because they were too busy spending the receipts that flowed from that behaviour. Now, the socialists – who were happy to look the other way during the good times or even to delude themselves into thinking that they were responsible for them – want to use the ignominy of the capitalists to seize the kind of power they thought they had lost forever.

You may quibble at my use of the word “socialist” to describe people who generally present themselves as friends of the free market, and who have repudiated full-scale nationalisation (even of the banks at a moment when that option might have appeared irresistible). So, as someone who spent her formative years on the Left, let me make clear that I am using the word to designate those who accept the primary tenet of Marxist ideology: that the economy can and should be controlled by the state.

In the hard version of this creed, it is acceptable for government to become totalitarian in order to accomplish such control. The softer version – which prevailed in much of Western Europe and Britain – was committed to achieving this through democratic means. By the end of the 1980s, the hard version had collapsed and the soft version was discredited.

Then, suddenly – a miracle! Free-market economics, which seemed to have won the historical argument hands down, is imploding. Now the very people who had embraced it as, at the very least, a milch cow for public-spending adventurism, can see an “opportunity”. Yes, that is the word that both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama have taken to using to describe the current economic apocalypse.

In Gordon Brown’s fantasy, this is an “opportunity” to exercise control over the whole world. Not just stricter regulation by national governments of their own economic institutions, but a wondrous new level of international regulation by supranational functionaries – to be appointed by whom? A World Government agency accountable to no electorate and with no democratic mandate from the populations over whom it will wield such power? Trotskyists used to say that Stalinist Russia had failed to achieve Utopia because it had embraced “socialism in one country” rather than going for “world revolution”. Now, we are being told that Labour’s market-led social justice programme failed because it opted for “regulation in one country” instead of understanding the need for “world regulation”.

Maybe being an ex-Marxist is a bit like being a lapsed Catholic: you never quite get rid of the old thought patterns.

In the more overheated renditions of the Brown theme, there is talk of a “global vision for fairness”, in which the very poverty that is being visited upon all the developed economies will somehow make it possible to redistribute wealth to the developing world.

Is he quite mad? Does he actually believe that the economic failure of rich countries will do anything but impoverish poor countries even further? Or that the moral righteousness of the intention to cure world poverty will, in itself, constitute some kind of cure for the banking collapse?

Meanwhile, Mr Obama – who gives the impression of being considerably out of his depth in the economic maelstrom – talks of an “opportunity” to “reorganise our priorities”. He gave a major speech last week in which he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America’s failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming (”we made the wrong choices”), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country’s economic problems.

Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? Or is he suggesting that a practical solution lies in spending money on health care and the development of alternative energy sources?

If it is the latter, then he is making a pitch for old-fashioned Roosevelt-style government-expenditure programmes which take money out of the productive part of the economy and bring state intervention into play in new dimensions of national life. It did not work for Roosevelt and it will not work now.

But maybe sentimental mythology matters more than historical reality: what Obama and Brown are both trying to do is to put themselves on the benevolent, morally attractive side of the argument by saying: we – your government – will act, intervene, take positive steps to help you. We will not stand by and let the hurricane winds of the economy blow you down. (Mr Brown has actually used the word “hurricane” to describe the crisis, as if it were a natural disaster which no one could have prevented.)

What neither the Prime Minister nor the President can admit is what is becoming more obvious every day (and which has been admitted by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key): there is precious little that any politician can do to resolve the present economic problems. The values of assets and property are simply going to have to fall from the grossly inflated points they reached under the debt bubble to what are generally accepted to be realistic levels. Then people will start to do business again – as eventually they must – and confidence will gradually return.

So are these politicians pretending that they have answers out of wilful deceit – out of the need to keep playing the game for partisan advantage? Or are they simply attempting to maintain some degree of public optimism about the future? (After all, an “opportunity” sounds better than a “debacle”.)

Well, I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.

We are being led to believe that public debate should be all about economic mechanics when it should really be about political principle: just how many freedoms do we want to lose while governments pretend that they are the solution?

LINK

I have ALWAYS used single ply, no aloe, etc. – I don’t drive a Hummer, I drive a Toyota that gives me 35MPH on average so I am a greenie!

But let’s not be messin’ with my toilet paper.

HERE you FIRST

LINK and this howler…

EPA says farm dust requires regulation

Link to article 

Deja Vu All Over Again: Blogger Again Finds Error in NASA Climate Data

.

GISS’s October Data. The large reddish-brown area in Russia is actually September readings. Amateur team finds NASA error similar to one they discovered a year ago.

NASA’S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world’s primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe. GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm– a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month’s data.

Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA’s data didn’t agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.

McKintyre, the same man who found errors last year in GISS’s US temperature record, quickly noted that most of the temperature increase was coming from Russia. A chart of world temperatures showed that in October, most of Russia, the largest nation on Earth, was not only registering hot, but literally off the scale. Yet anecdotal reports were suggesting that October was actually slightly colder than normal. Could there be another error in GISS’s data?

An alert reader on McKintyre’s blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier– the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.

A few locations in Ireland were also found to be using September data.

Steve McKintyre informed GISS of the error by email. According to McKintyre, there was no response, but within “about an hour”, GISS pulled down the erroneous data, citing a “mishap” and pointing the finger of blame upstream to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA).

NOAA’s Deputy Director of Communications, Scott Smullens, tells DailyTech that NOAA is responsible only for temperature readings in the US, not those in other nations.

The error not only affected October data, but due to the complex algorithm GISS uses to convert actual temperature readings into their output results, altered the previously published values for several other months as well. The values for August 2008, for instance, changed by 0.11C and the global anomaly as far back as 2005 increased by a hundredth of a degree.

GISS is run by Dr. James Hansen, a strident global warming advocate who has accused oil companies of “crimes against humanity”.  Hansen recently made headlines when he travelled to London to testify on behalf of a group of environmentalists who had damaged a coal plant in protest against global warming. Hansen also serves as science advisor to Al Gore.

Dr. Hansen could not be reached for comment.

Damn rich people anyway…. now since this is in the papers, it has to be true, right? (just checking)

Frankly I think we should put Ed Begley, Jr in charge of Eco – improvements. I love his “living with ed” show and think he’s my kinda environment wacko. If more of us were like him, idiots like algore would melt into the atmosphere. -pf

——–

Link

Branson’s bogus eco-drive
03 August 2008 By Stephen Price
The Virgin boss’s much trumpeted pledge of €1.9bn to tackle global warming is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

In September 2006, Virgin boss Richard Branson pledged €1.9 billion towards tackling global warming. For the next ten years, he announced, the profits from his aviation and rail businesses would go towards combating the biggest, most complex problem that mankind has ever faced. The promise earned Branson headlines around the world. Media outlets carried photos of him, Bill Clinton and Al Gore at a Clinton Global Initiative press conference in New York. Adults, Branson solemnly told the assembled media, had a duty to pass a ‘‘pristine’’ planet on to the next generation. Politicians and campaigners were effusive in their praise for his imagination and generosity.

However, a look at the not-very-small print revealed that this amazing gesture would not be a matter of taking the profits from Branson’s polluting industries and using them to protect vast tracts of the Amazon.In fact, the money would go to a new division of the Virgin conglomerate, called Virgin Fuel. Branson was simply gearing himself up to make more money. But as always, the PR spin was that he’d be doing the rest of us a favour in the process.Branson has built an empire on this perception. His first two business ventures – both failed – were growing Christmas trees and selling budgerigars, so he obviously understood from an early stage that nature is there to be exploited.

His reputation as a rebel underdog took off when he was arrested in 1971 for selling records in Virgin stores that had been declared export stock. Because he also sold ‘‘cut-outs’’ (remaindered LPs at discounted prices), the perception took root that he was being persecuted by the authorities for challenging a rip-off establishment. In fact, he was doing nothing of the sort – he paid the taxes and fines owing from the case.

Branson’s anti-establishment persona was cemented in 1977 when Virgin Records signed the Sex Pistols; the band had already been dropped by two labels, EMI and A&M. He was also on board the boat the band played on when they sailed down the Thames during Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee celebrations. In a blaze of publicity, it was pulled in by police and a few punters were arrested.

When British Airways engaged in a ‘‘dirty tricks’’ campaign against Virgin Atlantic in the early 1990s, this was grist to Branson’s mill. Whether it’s flights, records, mobile phones, cola, radio, television, hotels, trains or holidays, sticking the word ‘‘Virgin’’ in front of something supposedly makes it cheaper yet cooler, with the bearded, grinning boss fronting many of his own ad campaigns. Because if a hippy says it’s all right, then it must be. Mustn’t it?

Since Virgin Fuel was set up in 2006, the tide has very much turned against bio-fuels with the realisation that far too much agricultural land could be eaten up by fuel crops. Palm oil, one of the major biofuels, is contributing to global warming as virgin (no pun intended) rainforests in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia are decimated to make way for palm plantations.

Still, in February of this year Branson was on the tarmac toying with a coconut for the inevitable photocall when one of his 747s flew – empty- from London to Amsterdam on a 20 per cent bio-fuel mixture. Two years on from his ‘‘profits’’ gesture, slightly wiser green campaigners dismissed the flight as a stunt.

But onwards and upwards. While Branson has done little to save the planet and a hell of a lot to pollute it, he can arrange for you to look down upon it. This week he unveiled an aircraft for flying tourists into space. Virgin Galactic (yes, space can be branded too) has built a four-engine, twin-fuselage jet that will carrya spaceship with six passengers up to 50,000 feet to release it for sub-orbital flight.

The actual space ship is not yet complete, but apparently 2 50 punters have already paid $200,000 up front for the experience, among them Ireland’s own leading car salesman, Bill Cullen. The plane is called White Knight II, lest we forget what a favour Branson is doing for us.

Hippies are often credited with being the first to bring green issues to the fore, but the 1960s also legitimised the ascent of personal selfishness over social responsibility. Of course, Branson is no more of a hippy than I am, just a good businessman.

Spraying huge amounts of jet fuel into the atmosphere, purely to allow rich people to look down on an overheating planet, is about as stupid and hypocritical as it gets. Still, I’m sure that the earth from space is a beautiful sight – enjoy it while it lasts.

Link from Powerlineblog.com

Looming Disaster

Next week, the Senate will vote on the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade climate control bill. The proposed statute is a nightmare that would devastate our economy. The Wall Street Journal calls it “the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.”

The EPA estimates that by 2030 it will reduce GDP by 0.9% to 3.8%, and that is based on assumptions that appear hopelessly optimistic. Even the EPA’s assumptions contemplate an additional increase of 44% in the cost of electricity over what would occur without Lieberman-Warner.

The Chamber of Commerce has charted the various regulations, mandates and timelines that Liberman-Warner would dictate:

The idea that American voters can change the Earth’s climate is folly.

The danger that voters could choose to cripple our economy is, however, very real.

hat tip to http://powerlineblog.com

Again, let the global warming hysteria be replaced by a new and higher focus on conservation.  -pf

Predictions of environmental doom have been with us for a long time, as the Washington Policy Center reminds us:

•“…civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.

• By 1995, “…somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.

• Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor “…the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born,” Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

• The world will be “…eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age,” Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.

• “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” biologist Barry Commoner, University of Washington, writing in the journal Environment, April 1970.

• “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,” The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970.

• “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…” Life magazine, January 1970.

• “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• “…air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution, and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years.

• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

• “By the year 2000…the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine,” Peter Gunter, North Texas State University, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

In one of my most satisfying dreams, algore runs for president while at the same time the real danger that he has wrought is revealed. By focusing climate change issues for political advantage and not scientific study; algore deserves scorn and ridicule for all time. -pf 04/03

04/04 – here’s another link to an article that says there has been NO global warming since 1998.  I do not doubt we are always in a climate change trend on Earth; this trend needing planning and forethought to manage survival in the next hundreds of years.  Teach CONSERVATION don’t build political mansions from the hysteria you’re causing algore!  As our workflow guru Eli Glodratt says “Be Paranoid, Be Paraoid, don’t be hysterical.”

New article from 04/04 referenced above

Link to original article below

April 03, 2008

Al Gore’s Global Warming Therapy

By Marc Sheppard

On the surface, Sunday’s 60 Minutes puff piece did little more than cheer the pending rollout of Al Gore’s all-out 300 million dollar green media blitz. But on a deeper level, it also provided disturbing new insight into just what drives this man’s unwavering and unfounded obsession.

Having dispensed with her CBS-requisite softball questions and genuflection to Mr. and Mrs. ex-vice-president, interviewer Leslie Stahl soon steered the conversation to an obviously painful topic. Gore appeared rather surprised when asked whether he had gone through “the seven stages of anger and grief” after he “lost the presidency when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of George Bush.”

Failing to parry the dogged insistence that he must have felt anger, fury and rage, Al hesitantly dmitted that he “strongly disagreed with the [court's] decision,” and yeah, he “probably went through all that.”

And although both Gores appeared somewhat unsettled by the topic, Stahl’s voiceover pushed even deeper:

“His friends said they were worried about him and his state of mind, especially after he gained a lot of weight and grew a beard.”

If you’ll pardon the lay pop-psychology, it sounded as though Al may have had some coping issues to iron out. So then — just what brought the self-proclaimed once “next president of the United States” out of his dark funk?

According to wife Tipper, “Al’s survival after his defeat in 2000 depended on his immersing himself in the climate cause.” [emphasis added] Somehow, CBS didn’t find this peculiar statement worthy of further exploration. I do — as it may suggest that the “PR Agent for the Planet” became so in an effort to lift himself from the throes of depression.

More from Tipper:

“I mean, I think that if you look at anyone who kind of went through what, what he went through and see what he’s been able to do. I’m just really proud of the way that he has not given up. That he lifted himself and our family, you know, back up as well.”

Of course, he did so “by turning his old slides that were gathering dust in the basement into that mega-hit documentary.”

The same “mega-hit documentary” that became the quintessential bible of the Big Green Scare Machine’s Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cause, despite having the majority of its claims either disputed or outright disproved. And, on the subject of those who dare question the anthropogenic contribution to global warming, Al Gore told Stahl:

“I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view. They’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the earth is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off,”

About this, Gore may have mistaken one group as two. In reality, the nutty International Flat Earth Research Society did challenge pictures of the obviously spherical Earth taken from the moon. Toward that end, they concocted this wild story that the Apollo moon landing had been “faked in Hollywood studios” and that science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (who recently died and will be greatly missed) had written the script.

But referring to the thousands of scientists questioning AGW as a “tiny, tiny minority” while comparing them to a truly diminutive group of space-cadets who believe we live upon a disk-shaped planet is, itself, a bit nutty.

As is traveling the globe — 60 Minutes featured him in India — training others to “spread the word” by continuing to present his error-filled slideshow to others still. In fact, watching this arrogant cult-like geometric indoctrination method eerily brings to mind the “auditing” techniques the Church of Scientology employs in spreading its own brand of fantastic dogma.

In essence, then, we’re dealing with a psyche that blamed at least Republicans and perhaps the world for having suffered the humiliation of a perceived power theft. While friends and family fretted over his response to that blow, he retreated to his basement to prove his mettle by resuscitating a lightly sleeping obsession. And when he reemerged, he did so reinvented — as a self-appointed savior of the planet armed with little more than an unsubstantiated PowerPoint presentation and an accordingly unreasonable mission.

A 1604 novel by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes told of another man who descended into fantastic delusions of grandeur as a victim of his own frustrated obsessions. Enraptured by tales of chivalry, Alonso Quixano fancied himself a knight errant and, sporting an old suit of armor, dubbed himself “Don Quixote de la Mancha” before embarking on an imaginary mission to save the downtrodden.

But while Quixote’s delusions were mostly benign, Don Gore de la Tierra’s are not. The “word” his misguided mission spreads has facilitated policies of potential calamity far exceeding the actual problem their implementation is meant to remedy. From economy starving Kyoto-style cap-and-trade treaties to population starving ethanol mandates, unintended consequences invariably turn such quixotic green solutions into sheer disaster.

Time and time again.

In one famous Cervantes scene, the delusional warrior encounters a group of windmills and mistakes them for “hulking giants,” which he proceeds to do battle with. Of course, Gore sees industry and capitalism as his imaginary adversaries and windmills not as the problem but rather one of many needless solutions.

But his mission to engage the “hulking giant” which is the planet’s chaotic climate system leaves little doubt which character is the more delusional.

And, needless to say — the scope and communicable nature of such fantasy make him infinitely more dangerous.

again, I’m not saying that conservation and reduction of oil consumption is not important – actually I think it’s SO important that I’ve been irritated by the global warming crowd who has made a farce out of the subject.   read on…  -pf

Link to original article

Christopher Pearson | March 22, 2008

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

Last Monday – on ABC Radio National, of all places – there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth stillwarming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”

Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn’t support their case. “People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?”

Marohasy: “Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that’s what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we’re going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling.”

Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?”

Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

Duffy: “The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?”

Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”

Duffy: “From what you’re saying, it sounds like the implications of this could beconsiderable …”

Marohasy: “That’s right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer’s interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point.”

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.

The poorest Indians and Chinese will be left in peace to work their way towards prosperity, without being badgered about the size of their carbon footprint, a concept that for most of us will soon be one with Nineveh and Tyre, clean forgotten in six months.

The scores of town planners in Australia building empires out of regulating what can and can’t be built on low-lying shorelines will have to come to terms with the fact inundation no longer impends and find something more plausible to do. The same is true of the bureaucrats planning to accommodate “climate refugees”.

Penny Wong’s climate mega-portfolio will suddenly be as ephemeral as the ministries for the year 2000 that state governments used to entrust to junior ministers. Malcolm Turnbull will have to reinvent himself at vast speed as a climate change sceptic and the Prime Minister will have to kiss goodbye what he likes to call the great moral issue and policy challenge of our times.

It will all be vastly entertaining to watch.

THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece.

The Australian’s Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald’s version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that “we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics”.

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: “Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)”

The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age’s version of the essay. The attribution reads: “Copyright Ian McEwan 2008″ and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age.

Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn’t there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at “absorbing inconvenient fact”?

LINK

Article published Mar 14, 2008
COMMENTARY/Climate panel on the hot seat

March 14, 2008 By H. Sterling Burnett – More than 20 years ago, climate scientists began to raise alarms over the possibility global temperatures were rising due to human activities, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.To better understand this potential threat, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to provide a “comprehensive, objective, scientific, technical and socioeconomic assessment of human-caused climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”

IPCC reports have predicted average world temperatures will increase dramatically, leading to the spread of tropical diseases, severe drought, the rapid melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, and rising sea levels. However, several assessments of the IPCC’s work have shown the techniques and methods used to derive its climate predictions are fundamentally flawed.

In a 2001 report, the IPCC published an image commonly referred to as the “hockey stick.” This graph showed relatively stable temperatures from A.D. 1000 to 1900, with temperatures rising steeply from 1900 to 2000. The IPCC and public figures, such as former Vice President Al Gore, have used the hockey stick to support the conclusion that human energy use over the last 100 years has caused unprecedented rise global warming.

However, several studies cast doubt on the accuracy of the hockey stick, and in 2006 Congress requested an independent analysis of it. A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC’s peer review process. For example, the researchers who created the hockey stick used the wrong time scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded temperatures of the last century. Because the mean temperature was low, the recent temperature rise seemed unusual and dramatic. This error was not discovered in part because statisticians were never consulted.

Furthermore, the community of specialists in ancient climates from which the peer reviewers were drawn was small and many of them had ties to the original authors — 43 paleoclimatologists had previously coauthored papers with the lead researcher who constructed the hockey stick.

These problems led Mr. Wegman’s team to conclude that the idea that the planet is experiencing unprecedented global warming “cannot be supported.”

The IPCC published its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 predicting global warming will lead to widespread catastrophe if not mitigated, yet failed to provide the most basic requirement for effective climate policy: accurate temperature statistics. A number of weaknesses in the measurements include the fact temperatures aren’t recorded from large areas of the Earth’s surface and many weather stations once in undeveloped areas are now surrounded by buildings, parking lots and other heat-trapping structures resulting in an urban-heat-island effect.

Even using accurate temperature data, sound forecasting methods are required to predict climate change. Over time, forecasting researchers have compiled 140 principles that can be applied to a broad range of disciplines, including science, sociology, economics and politics.

In a recent NCPA study, Kesten Green and J. Scott Armstrong used these principles to audit the climate forecasts in the Fourth Assessment Report. Messrs. Green and Armstrong found the IPCC clearly violated 60 of the 127 principles relevant in assessing the IPCC predictions. Indeed, it could only be clearly established that the IPCC followed 17 of the more than 127 forecasting principles critical to making sound predictions.

A good example of a principle clearly violated is “Make sure forecasts are independent of politics.” Politics shapes the IPCC from beginning to end. Legislators, policymakers and/or diplomatic appointees select (or approve) the scientists — at least the lead scientists — who make up the IPCC. In addition, the summary and the final draft of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was written in collaboration with political appointees and subject to their approval.

Sadly, Mr. Green and Mr. Armstrong found no evidence the IPCC was even aware of the vast literature on scientific forecasting methods, much less applied the principles.

The IPCC and its defenders often argue that critics who are not climate scientists are unqualified to judge the validity of their work. However, climate predictions rely on methods, data and evidence from other fields of expertise, including statistical analysis and forecasting. Thus, the work of the IPCC is open to analysis and criticism from other disciplines.

The IPCC’s policy recommendations are based on flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles. Policymakers should take this into account before enacting laws to counter global warming — which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.

H. Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institute in Dallas.

Link

Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is ‘Telling Us What to Think’

TWC founder and global warming skeptic advocates suing Al Gore to expose ‘the fraud of global warming.’

The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.

Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.

“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”

The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.

[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

Earlier at the conference Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told an audience that the science will eventually prevail and the “scare” of global warming will go away. He also said the courts were a good avenue to show the science.

Stuart James and Paul Detrick also contributed to this report.

Link

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Lorne Gunter, National Post

Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it’s not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca

Link
Powerlineblog

February 14, 2008

Not serious about energy policy either

In a post below, John shows once again that congressional Democrats are not serious about national security. They would rather pander to their radical base and, it would appear, to their trial lawyer financiers than authorize measures through which the government can obtain the intelligence needed to fight terrorism.

As Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, the Democrats aren’t serious about energy policy either. Both gasoline prices and oil company profits are high. Thus, House Democrats propose to raise taxes on oil companies. But, according to Lieberman, oil companies already pay their fair share of taxes. In fact, their effective tax rate of 37 percent is slightly higher than that of large corporations in general.

More importantly, the proposed tax hike would tend to produce even higher gasoline prices. It would do so in part by discouraging investment in new domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, thereby tending to decrease supply as demand continues to grow. In addition, any new tax on gasoline, whether at the pump or at the producer level, will raise the cost of this product to consumers. Furthermore, says Lieberman, the Democrats’ proposal would undermine our energy security by providing a competitive advantage to OPEC and other non-U.S. suppliers whose imports are not subject to most of the bill’s provisions.

The Democrats should understand this. As Lieberman reminds us, they tried something very similar in 1980. during the Carter administration, when they imposed a “windfall profit tax” on oil companies. According to the Congressional Research Service, this tax “reduced domestic oil production from 3 to 6 percent, and increased oil imports from between 8 and 16 percent.”

To make matters worse, the Dems would use the new revenue generated from the tax increase to subsidize alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power. Lieberman notes that, even after decades of tax breaks, alternative energy provides only a small fraction of America’s energy needs. Solar energy, for example, provides only 3 percent of our electricity due to its high cost and unreliability. And the Department of Energy estimates that the overall percentage of electricity attributable to renewable sources is not likely to increase even by 2030. In short, the forms of energy the Democrats want to subsidize are the sources of the future, and likely always will be.

The federal government has a dismal record of picking winners and losers among energy sources. Yet the Democrats persist in seeking to raise taxes on what works and subsidizing what doesn’t. They simply aren’t serious.

There was a story on the History Channel tonight about the little ice age from the 14th to the mid 19th centuries. This was first shown in 2005. It shows scientists studying the demise of the Norsemen of Greenland (which was really green) and some theories on sun spot activity being the source.

A balance in all dialog is necessary – it has never been my intent to diminish the value of conservation of natural resources. It has always been my intent to show Al Gore to be a dangerous man for creating hysteria were there should be study. The story below is just another of the series of articles that I find interesting that support my point.  -pf

Link to Powerlineblog story

February 9, 2008

Global Cooling Alert

When Scott and I wrote “The Global Warming Hoax” in 1992, a group of Danish scientists had just published a paper that compared solar energy output (as measured by sunspot activity) to global temperatures, and found a striking correlation. No surprise there: just about all energy on earth comes from the Sun. Investors’ Business Daily recalls that research and notes that the Sun has been quiet lately:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

[Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council] reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere. ***

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”

I suspect that many global warming alarmists are well aware that time is running out for them. If nothing is done and global temperatures decline in coming years–as they inevitably will, the only question is when–the alarmists will have been refuted. On the other hand, if they succeed in pushing through industry-destroying caps on carbon emissions around the world, and especially here in the U.S., they will take credit for the cooling when it comes, claiming it as vindication of their theories.

In that context, the 2008 election shapes up as very important. I don’t worry too much about John McCain’s acknowledged lack of economic expertise, as his instincts on the economy are generally conservative. But McCain badly needs to educate himself on the debate currently raging over the climate. “Global warming” represents the Left’s most ambitious power grab since the fall of Communism, and if a Republican President doesn’t stand it its way, who will?

If McCain is looking for a sensible energy policy, he might start with these recommendations from the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

Our policy recommendation is to phase out natural gas (methane) for electric power generation (now about 20% in US and 40% in UK), replace it with coal/nuclear, and use gas as a clean transportation fuel (in the form of Compressed Natural Gas — CNG) for buses, trucks, and all fleet vehicles. In the US case it would cut oil imports by 30%. Further cuts would come from the use of plug-in and hybrid-electric cars.

There is lots of good work being done in climate science, a discipline that is still in its infancy. There are also plenty of creative proposals for how to address our energy needs. But if the Republican Party mindlessly signs on to the fake-science of anthropogenic global warming, those ideas will never see the light of day.

Someone please get the word to John McCain.

from InstaPundit webblog

GEORGE W. BUSH, CLIMATE-CHANGE HERO:

The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

* Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
* Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto.

They told me that if George W. Bush were elected, the United States would lag behind the rest of the world on greenhouse gases And they were right!

UPDATE: Actually, if you look at the most recent years the news gets better:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels decreased by 1.3 percent in 2006, from 5,955 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (MMTCO2) in 2005 to 5,877 MMTCO2 in 2006, according to preliminary estimates recently released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The economy, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), grew by 3.3 percent and energy demand fell by 0.9 percent indicating that energy intensity (energy use per unit of GDP) fell by 4.2 percent. Carbon dioxide intensity (CO2 emission per unit of GDP) fell by 4.5 percent.

The market seems to be doing what Kyoto hasn’t. (Somewhat related item here).

I can’t explain why the last three articles I’ve posted have been on global warming, except I want to rail on some republican candidates for President and am trying NOT to…  can’t wait until the caucus is over…  :::sigh:::

Link to powerlineblog.com article

Tom Friedman strikes again

We commented on the AP’s Kyoto revisionism in “The AP strikes again” this past September, noting an AP story stating:

Under the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, the United States joined a U.N. meeting in Kyoto and agreed to the protocol. But the United States rejected it under the administration of President George W. Bush, Clinton’s successor.

Readers with a long memory may recall that the United States never adopted the Kyoto Protocol because the Clinton administration never submitted it for ratification to the Senate. The Clinton administration never submitted it to the Senate for ratification because in July 1997 the Senate voted 95-0 to adopt a resolution stating that ”the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto.”

Today Tom Friedman writes another consciousness-raising column on events at the UN global warming conference last week in Bali. According to Friedman, global warming presents an emergency requiring “transformational” economic action. Friedman’s Bali buddies are dubious of America’s bona fides as a result of “the gratuitous way President Bush trashed the Kyoto treaty in 2001, without presenting any alternative for six years. Message to world: ‘Get lost. We only care about ourselves.’”But Friedman, like the AP, conveniently forgets the role of the United States Senate as the original author of that resounding message regarding Kyoto. And a cynical person might conclude that Tom Friedman’s carbon footprint sends an identical message, as does the hot air he contributes to the purported crisis of global warming.

Link to article

December 18, 2007

Does Gore Know What He’s Talking About?

By Ed Koch

I may be old fashioned, but I think it’s wrong to publicly attack and criticize your own country overseas. It is doubly wrong to do so in the presence of those who hate the United States.

Al Gore, a former Senator from Tennessee, a former Vice President of the United States and the 2000 Democratic candidate for president, apparently believes that since, as he said, he is “not an official of the United States,” he is free to attack his native country anywhere.

This month in Bali, Indonesia, the United Nations held a conference on global warming for the purpose of extending the Kyoto Protocols, which will formally end in 2012. The United States — concerned about Kyoto’s effect on economic growth — has refused to ratify the Protocols. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate rejected then Vice President Gore’s advice and voted 95-0 to reject the Kyoto Protocols.

Last week Al Gore appeared at the Bali conference and said, “I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that.”

Oh, really? And just how do we all know that? Is it true that the U.S. is “principally responsible for obstructing progress” in Bali? The New York Times, which applauds the former Vice President, reported on December 14 that “[t]he emerging economic powers, most notably China and India, also refuse to accept limits on their emissions, despite projections that they will soon become the dominant sources of the gases.” The same Times article stated while the U.S. opposes an agreement that would include numerical targets, so do “a few other countries, including Russia.”

On November 7, 2006, The Times reported, “China will surpass the United States in 2009, nearly a decade ahead of previous predictions, as the biggest emitter of the main gas linked to global warming, the International Energy Agency has concluded in a report to be released Tuesday.” The article continued, “China’s rise, fueled heavily by coal, is particularly troubling to climate scientists because as a developing country, China is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol’s requirements for reductions in emissions of global warming gases.

Unregulated emissions from China, India and other developing countries are likely to account for most of the global increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the next quarter-century. The agency’s prediction highlights the unexpected speed with which China is emerging as the biggest contributor to global warming. Still, China has resisted limits on its own emissions and those of other developing countries.”

The argument offered by China, India and other developing countries is clear and direct. Said Lu Xuedu, the deputy director general of the Chinese Office of Global Environmental Affairs, “You cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions.” China’s intent is to put the United States and Europe in a difficult economic position where standards of living will be reduced until developing countries rise to the standard of the U.S. At that point the developing countries will be required to reduce their emissions.

President Bush has been attacked by Al Gore and his supporters for resisting a treaty that could inflict economic harm on the American people. Does Al Gore seriously think that we should reduce the U.S. standard of living until developing countries — formerly called Third World countries until that term was discarded as demeaning
– catch up with us economically?

China is growing at a tremendous rate. So far this year, China’s gross domestic product has grown 11 percent, while U.S. growth is two percent. According to The Times, India has a middle class of 250 million, while the entire U.S. population is 300 million. What’s going on here? These facts alone make clear it is not necessary to effectively mandate a reduction in the U.S. standard of living in order for other nations to grow.

I wonder if Al Gore knows what he’s doing. Reducing and sacrificing the U.S. standard of living as a way to bring others up the ladder, rather than allowing the U.S. to maintain its living standard while encouraging and helping others to reach our level, is a foolish and dangerous plan. It is simply unacceptable. Al Gore and his friends live in a Democratic society and have the absolute right to say what they want. But those of us who do not want to see the U.S. punished because of its success have rights, too. I believe it is our duty to denounce Al Gore’s unwise attacks on America and hold him accountable for what he says.

Today, China has a hugely favorable balance of trade with the U.S. In 2006, for example, China’s net favorable balance was more than $232 billion. The New York Times on December 14, 2007 reported that “China’s trade deficit with the United States is expected to soar to nearly $300 billion this year, representing nearly half the overall American trade deficit.” Thanks to these enormous trade advantages, China has now accumulated more than $1.4 trillion dollars which they can use to buy up our industries cheaply, especially now when so many American business leaders are prophesizing an American recession. The Chinese have actually set aside $200 billion for the purpose of making such purchases worldwide, as a start.

Should Al Gore be out there creating the impression that the U.S. primarily is the cause of global problems? I say “no.” It is particularly galling when a recent Wall Street Journal article reported: “Under the vaunted Kyoto, from 2000 to 2004, Europe managed to increase its emissions by 2.3 percentage points over 1995 to 2000. Only two countries are on track to meet targets…[M]eanwhile in the U.S., under the president’s oh-so-unserious plan, U.S. emissions from 2000 to 2004 were eight percentage points lower than in the prior period.”

In other words, when it comes to the emissions problem, the U.S. is leading the way toward solving the problem without throwing millions of people out of work.

Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City.

Link to article here

December 11, 2007

Kyoto Schmyoto

Randall Hoven

One would think that countries that committed to the Kyoto treaty are doing a better job of curtailing carbon emissions. One would also think that the United States, the only country that does not even intend to ratify, keeps on emitting carbon dioxide at growth levels much higher than those who signed.

And one would be wrong.

The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

• Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
• Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
• Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
• Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto. Below are the growth rates of carbon dioxide emissions, from 1997 to 2004, for a few selected countries, all Kyoto signers. (Remember, the comparative number for the U.S. is 6.6%.)

• Maldives, 252%.
• Sudan, 142%.
• China, 55%.
• Luxembourg, 43%
• Iran, 39%.
• Iceland, 29%.
• Norway, 24%.
• Russia, 16%.
• Italy, 16%.
• Finland, 15%.
• Mexico, 11%.
• Japan, 11%.
• Canada, 8.8%.

World and U.S. opinion seems to revolve around who signed Kyoto rather than actual carbon dioxide emissions. Once again, stated intent trumps actual results. Can even the global warming believers possibly believe this treaty has anything to do with it?

Update: In response to a reader request, here is a link to the table showing increases in absolute numbers, not percentages.

Link
Christopher Booker’s Notebook
By Christopher Booker

Last Updated: 1:48am GMT 25/11/2007
We are set on a course of ‘planet saving’ madness

The scare over global warming, and our politicians’ response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level – not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his “first major speech on climate change”, airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 – which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign trying to commit Winston Churchill’s government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War.

Mr Brown’s only concrete proposal for reaching this absurd target seems to be his plan to ban plastic bags, whatever they have to do with global warming (while his government also plans a near-doubling of flights out of Heathrow).

But of course he is no longer his own master in such fantasy exercises. Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the “planet-saving” measures to which we are now committed by the European Union.

By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from “renewables”. At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill).

As Whitehall officials privately briefed ministers in August, there is no way Britain can begin to meet such a fanciful target (even if the Government manages to ram through another 30,000 largely useless wind turbines).

Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from “biofuels” by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food (at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already face a global food shortage).

Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs.

This compulsory switch to low-energy bulbs, apart from condemning us to live in uglier homes under eye-straining light, is in practice completely out of the question, because, according to our Government’s own figures, more than half Britain’s domestic light fittings cannot take them.

This year will be remembered for two things.

First, it was the year when the scientific data showed that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that – yet another vastly inflated scare.

Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over us, including Gordon “Plastic Bags” Brown, wholly out of their wits.

Billions of MoD spending is off target

The great row over under-funding of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, led in the Lords by five former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, has so far missed a hugely important part of the story, although it was hinted at by General Sir Mike Jackson when he was interviewed on the Today programme.

Alas, John Humphrys failed to pick up the significance of Jackson’s observation that “we may not have enough to do the things which we do now and the things which we may have to do in the future”.

The problem with our defence spending in recent years is not that the Ministry of Defence has been starved of cash. On the contrary, it has been earmarking colossal sums for projects designed to equip us to fight imaginary wars in the future, as part of the European Rapid Reaction Force to which Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon committed us around 2000: £20 billion on the Navy’s two giant carriers (with planes and infrastructure); £16 billion on FRES, a new family of vehicles for the Army; not to mention the £20 billion already committed to Eurofighters for the RAF.

It was the diversion of resources into planning for that imaginary future that took the eyes of the MoD and the then-Chief of the Defence Staff off the need to equip our forces adequately for the totally different type of insurgency war they have actually been having to fight.

The MoD is belatedly trying to make amends for this disastrous blunder, for instance equipping our troops with properly mine-protected Mastiffs, instead of the unprotected Snatch Land Rovers that have caused so many deaths. It may also help that enthusiasm for the EU’s fantasy armed forces of the future has been on the wane.

But no one at the time shared that enthusiasm more obviously (or was happier to send those hopelessly inadequate Land Rovers to Iraq) than the officer who was then Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson.

Schools minister neglects homework

Desmond Swayne, MP for New Forest West, tells me of a fearful problem affecting Hampshire schools, which have been told by the county education officer, Ian Beacham, that under new rules teachers must no longer drive pupils in mini-buses unless they have a full “passenger vehicle licence” – “a huge and expensive undertaking which entitles them to drive a coach or bus”.

Threatening many extra-curricular activities, such as away sporting fixtures, this is causing such grief that Mr Swayne has asked in Parliament whether it is right that teachers should be forbidden to drive children in this way.

Schools minister Jim Knight didn’t know the answer but said he would look into it. Harriet Harman, Leader of the House, suggested that Mr Swayne should move for a debate on the issue.

Had those ministers or Hampshire’s education officer learned to use Google, they might have found in seconds that this is all a fuss about nothing. The two relevant EU directives on driving licences, 91/439 and 2003/59, make clear that teachers are exempted from the licensing requirements, as does a leaflet available at the click of a mouse on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website.

But does it not say something about the way we now allow our laws to be made in Brussels that neither ministers nor a council official responsible for enforcing them appear to know what those laws say?

On October 19, 1999 I reported here a remarkable “personal message” sent out to Britain’s small businesses over the signature of Nick Montagu, then head of the Inland Revenue Board. He told them how “exciting and important” it was for him and his staff to be “at the forefront of implementing the new Labour Government’s policy agenda”.

How apt, in light of the mega-grief they are currently causing the Government, that eight years later our incompetent tax-gatherers appear to be playing such a significant part in New Labour’s impending downfall.

Carbon offsetting schemes not so green

By Jasper Copping, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 20/08/2007

As millions of Britons jet off to foreign climes for their holiday this month, the more environmentally minded travellers will have salved their consciences by paying for trees to be planted to compensate for the carbon emissions caused by their flight.

But a ground-breaking study has now called into question the effectiveness of using trees to “offset” emissions, suggesting that their ability to “lock-up” carbon dioxide has been greatly exaggerated.

Forests have long been seen as an effective way of absorbing the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which are thought to trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming.

Celebrities, including the Rolling Stones and Leonardo DiCaprio, the film actor, have signed up to schemes to plant trees to offset their own emissions.

However, the new research found that trees bathed in extra carbon dioxide grew more tissue, but did not necessarily store significant extra quantities of carbon. Instead, the tree’s capacity to absorb the gas depended on water and nutrient levels.

The news will come as a blow to the carbon-offsetting industry, which has expanded rapidly as individuals and companies try to atone for their carbon dioxide emissions by paying companies to plant trees for them.

In 2003, the Rolling Stones held a “carbon neutral” tour, planting one tree for every 60 tickets sold.

Dido, the singer, and even the celebrity drinking club, the -Groucho, are all reported to have paid out for trees to be planted.

In 2002, Coldplay, the band fronted by Chris Martin, the husband of actress Gwyneth Paltrow, announced it would offset the environmental impact caused by the release of its second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, by planting 10,000 mango trees in southern India. By last year many of the trees had died.

David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, also says he pays into offsetting schemes for all his flights, road and rail trips, and a growing number of blue chip companies and airlines, as well as Government departments, now sign up to such projects.

According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Britons spent £60 million on such schemes last year. This is forecast to grow to £250 million annually by 2009.

The latest findings come from an ongoing study – known as the Free Air Carbon Enrichment project – which has been running for 13 years at Duke University, North Carolina, in the US.

Researchers bathed plots of pine trees in extra carbon dioxide every day for 10 years and found that while the trees grew more tissue, only those that received the most water and nutrients stored enough carbon dioxide to offset the effects of global warming.

Ram Oren, the ecologist who led the project, said the research suggested that planting more trees would not be successful in slowing the pace of climate change. “More trees don’t necessarily mean less carbon dioxide,” he said. “Planting trees is not going to do a whole lot to decreasing carbon concentration.

“What we’re finding is that extra carbon very quickly goes back into the atmosphere if there are low nutrients and water available.

“And we are not going to be able to increase the capacity of forests to hold carbon, because we couldn’t fertilise such large areas or provide sufficient water. It would cause such pollution that the consequence would be much worse than carbon dioxide enrichment in the atmosphere.”

But Ru Hartwell, the director of Treeflights, an offsetting company planting trees in Wales and Peru, said: “There are problems with tree planting but it is only one way in which we are going to get on top of the problems of global warming. I have complete faith that tree planting is positive and we should not just chuck away our spades and do nothing.”

by Jay Ambrose  – Link to article here

August 12, 2007 — NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a “well-funded,” global-warming “denial machine,” is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance.

The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the “naysayers” to this holy writ: They are part of a “well-coordinated,” heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians.

The article not only fails to make so sweeping a case, but skips over a fact that the rawest newsroom rookie should have picked up – namely, that the Chicken Littles have outspent the cited think tanks and other groups in trying to inflict everyone with the willies, scientific exactitude be hanged.

As some of the skeptics have noted in response to Newsweek’s nastiness, the expenditures of the doubters are in fact dwarfed by the multimillions skillfully deployed by environmental groups. Sure, some corporations have sought to persuade lawmakers and the public that the alarmism is itself a danger, and why not? These businesses could be badly damaged by some suggested policies that, in terms of actually achieving anything, might be little more than voodoo dances.

Newsweek thinks they would be jim-dandy. On the basis of what analysis? Nothing precise is offered.

The more you read the Newsweek piece, the more you notice it excludes still other information and argumentation that doesn’t suit its thesis, material that is hugely important in understanding the issue but might get in the way of advocacy. It mentions Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie about warming, for instance, without noting how misleading it was on some questions, and nowhere does it even hint at how so many alarmists have leaped over scientific justification in their near-biblical prophecies of coming calamity.

An article aiming to provide well-rounded, helpful, praiseworthy news reporting might have discussed the Kyoto treaty with some semblance of comprehension. The treaty would accomplish next to nothing in and of itself, as even many of its proponents agree, while it could very well do serious harm to the economies and people of rich and poor nations alike, as a number of economists have argued. Newsweek might even have conceded that some Kyoto signatories in Europe have done far less to limit greenhouse-gas emissions than the dreaded Bush administration.

The most egregious transgression of the article is something else, however. It is the demonizing of “contrarian scientists” and questioning think-tank analysts who are surely as honorable as those who would carelessly abuse their good names.

The article goes out of its way to tell us that one nonapocalyptic scientist, Patrick Michaels, has earned $165,000 from interested industries, as if his scientific conclusions were dictated by this money that constitutes one small portion of his livelihood.

If the magazine thinks that is how the world works, why didn’t it similarly point out that NASA’s James Hansen, a supporter of John Kerry in the last presidential election and one of the most outspoken scientists about the threat of warming, received a $250,000 prize from the Heinz Foundation, administered by Kerry’s wife?

Everyday decency and an understanding of the need for unfettered discussion in a democracy should have informed the Newsweek reporters and their editors that while it’s OK to probe and push and ask tough questions, it is intellectually unsupportable and cruel as well as contrary to the public good to treat those on one side or the other of this kind of complicated, difficult, policy-oriented dispute as conscienceless bad guys, their hired hands or maybe dupes or dolts.

Even now, dissenters to the global-warming orthodoxy are providing us with all sorts of countervailing possibilities that could ultimately save us from irrecoverable policy decisions, and the last thing you want to do is scare them into shutting up. The only people who would do that are those so arrogant as to think they possess the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Newsweek reporters don’t. Despite their insistence that you are part of a “denial machine” unless you call an unsettled science settled, the science of global warming is unsettled.

8/14/07 update – at this link 

Blog: Science Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data
Michael Asher (Blog) – August 9, 2007 11:49 AM

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or “jump” in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA’s Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an “oversight” that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

Then again — maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media.

Gloom and Doom in A Sunny Day
By Emily Yoffe / Washington Post
Monday, June 25, 2007; A19

Link to article 

It was a mild January evening, and people had filled the restaurant’s outdoor patio. As our group walked past the tables, one of my friends said, “This terrifies me.” I don’t know if she was reassured later by the chilly April, but we are all supposed to be terrified of the weather now.

In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore tells us that unless drastic global changes are made, our cities will be inundated and those of us who haven’t drowned will face a world wracked by cataclysmic weather and swarming with pestilence. One of his devotees, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming out with his own environmental horror movie warning of human extinction if we continue living as we are. This would have a negative effect on the box office, but extinction might be preferable to the future Gore envisions.

I, however, refuse to see the apocalypse in every balmy day. And I think it’s wrong to let our children believe they’ll be swept away before they get a chance to fret about college admissions. An article in The Post this spring described children anxious, sleepless and tearful about the end; one 9-year-old said she worried about global warming “because I don’t want to die.”

Usually we want to protect our children from awful events, adjusting the message to suit their age. Certainly we tried to do that after Sept. 11. But an essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change. Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one.

And a recent New York Times profile of Gore tells that we are to be flooded with “An Inconvenient Truth.” It is going to be shown in schools; book versions for children and young adults and a children’s television show are planned. The global Live Earth concerts scheduled for July 7 are expected to raise millions, going to a three-year public relations effort, headed by Gore, to deluge us with bad news.

All this is not to say that it’s not getting warmer and that curbing our profligate environmental ways is not a commendable and necessary goal. But perhaps this movement is sowing the seeds of its own destruction — even as it believes the human species has sown its own. There must be a limit to how many calamitous films, books and television shows we, and our children, can absorb.

It doesn’t seem sustainable to expect people to remain terrified by such a disinterested, often benign — it was so nice eating out on the patio! — and even unpredictable enemy. (I understand we’re the enemy, but the executioner is the weather.) Recall that the experts told us last year would be a record-setting hurricane season, but the series of Katrinas never materialized.

Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: “NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer.” But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it’s supposed to be a sign I’m in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I’m oddly reassured. We’ve seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.

It’s also hard to believe assertions that the science on the future of our climate is settled when climate scientists can’t agree about the present — or the past (there is contention about the dates, causes and even the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed). Now, Gore and others say that Katrina was a product of global warming and that we can expect more and bigger storms. But there is actually brisk scientific debate over the role global warming plays — if any — in the creation of hurricanes.

A study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last month, looking at 5,000 years of Atlantic hurricanes, found “large and dramatic fluctuations in hurricane activity, with long stretches of frequent strikes punctuated by lulls that lasted many centuries” — with the stormier periods occurring during cooler ocean temperatures. But talking about Earth’s constant, and still inexplicable, climate changes and cycles is not useful if you’re trying to shock.

In his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” Gore denounces what he sees as today’s politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion — any such campaign — is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It’s about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

Emily Yoffe is a contributing writer to Slate.com. Her e-mail address is emilyyoffe@hotmail.com.

THIS JUST IN :::sigh::: when will the hysteria stop?

Truth be told, climate changes are just that – changes in climate.

Financial Post Saturday

by Lawrence Solomon
June 02, 2007

“Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.”

So said Al Gore … in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren’t sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn’t think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.

Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.

More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.

My series set out to profile the dissenters — those who deny that the science is settled on climate change — and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world’s premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop — the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists — the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects — and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction.

Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world’s top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. “The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world,” the IPCC Secretariat responded. “The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007.”

An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC’s comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.

A great many scientists, without doubt, are four-square in their support of the IPCC. A great many others are not. A petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine between 1999 and 2001 claimed some 17,800 scientists in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. A more recent indicator comes from the U.S.-based National Registry of Environmental Professionals, an accrediting organization whose 12,000 environmental practitioners have standing with U.S. government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. In a November, 2006, survey of its members, it found that only 59% think human activities are largely responsible for the warming that has occurred, and only 39% make their priority the curbing of carbon emissions. And 71% believe the increase in hurricanes is likely natural, not easily attributed to human activities.

Such diversity of views is also present in the wider scientific community, as seen in the World Federation of Scientists, an organization formed during the Cold War to encourage dialog among scientists to prevent nuclear catastrophe. The federation, which encompasses many of the world’s most eminent scientists and today represents more than 10,000 scientists, now focuses on 15 “planetary emergencies,” among them water, soil, food, medicine and biotechnology, and climatic changes. Within climatic changes, there are eight priorities, one being “Possible human influences on climate and on atmospheric composition and chemistry (e.g. increased greenhouse gases and tropospheric ozone).”

Man-made global warming deserves study, the World Federation of Scientists believes, but so do other serious climatic concerns. So do 14 other planetary emergencies. That seems about right.

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. Email: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.

An Aptly Titled Tome, by Christopher J. Alleva

Al Gore has most assuredly secured his place in the pantheon of modern media deities, right along side Paris Hilton and Sean Penn. His legacy as a senator and later vice president may be lackluster, but he has transcended those shortcomings by pulling off one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of all time. Public relations professionals will study his global warming campaign for decades on.

In between knocking down big paydays from investment bankers and six figure speaking fees, Gore has been the front man of this truly amazing campaign. Until he stumbled into this global warming gig, he was the Frank Burns of American Politics. The butt of all the jokes with the classic whiny demeanor. Bill Clinton was always Hawkeye Pierce to Gore’s Frank Burns. Who can forget his greatest line ever? After pulling back his concession to then Governor Bush, he chortled: “you don’t have to get snippy about it” But all that’s behind him.

As he was making his finale on Capital Hill back in March, wowing the media once again, Penguin Books announced plans for an encore performance.

Yet, another book tour featuring a new book written under his name aptly titled Assault on Reason. When I first heard about it I said to myself, now there’s a topic this man knows all about. Arguably, his expertise is so great he scarcely needs a ghostwriter. His last book, An Inconvenient Truth, is perhaps the biggest assault on reason since the Pope went after Galileo in the 17^th Century.

The mendacity of this work was stunning. Numerous errors, misstatements and outright lies have been detailed in many rebuttals, especially by Chris Horner and Marlo Lewis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mendacious as it may be, that has not stopped a gullible media from swallowing it hook line and sinker as the metaphor goes, and foisting it on the American public. Their implacable lack of skepticism has been truly remarkable.

Audacious must be Al Gore’s middle name. How else can you describe someone that would publish a book that calls for a complete reordering of the world and then follows it up with a book with the premise that if you don’t buy it you’re assaulting basic reason.

The self-important catalog description of the book reveals Gore’s inherent conceit.

“A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degradation of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason.”

My father used to say if you point your finger at someone there are four pointed back at you. Other than Bill and Hillary Clinton, I can hardly think of anyone that has shown a greater mastery of the politics of fear. Secrecy and cronyism are literally a way of life for him.

The timing of Gore’s book release is obviously designed to undercut those that disagree with his cabal. Its safe to predict that the media will all roll over again. What else would you expect, Al is a media god. Time Magazine is dutifully first out of the gate publishing a short excerpt teaser in their latest issue. To no avail, I did some research to discover who Al’s ghostwriter is. So far its still a secret (at least to me). Al is kind of like the Milli Vanilli of the literary and political world, lip synching his way all the way to the top. Unlike Rob and Fab, I don’t think Al will be served with any class action lawsuits for deceptive sales practices on “his” book. I may be wrong, but don’t think we’ll be unearthing anything like Reagan’s “In his Own Hand” collection of personal writings from Al after he retires. Uncashed royalty checks perhaps, thoughtful prose, probably not.

Since this essay is nominally about Al Gore’s new book, I guess I’ll comment on the actual excerpt if I have to. The prose is downright turgid and the writing style is akin to congressional testimony. In other words, bring the No Doze. Unintended irony oozes from every paragraph. The writer vainly attempts to be profound but comes off looking trite instead. The editors at Penguin must have been pulling out their hair out; consoled only in the knowledge that no one will actually read the book. The television interviews will be carefully scripted no ad libing. Just follow the teleprompter baby.

The media may think Al Gore is a god but I think history will judge him more harshly. The sheer audacity of his global warming campaign is stunning to behold. The blind faith of the media is far more disturbing. Hopefully, this will be his last book.

Sun’s pulses point to drenching rain

Matthew Warren, Environment writer

March 19, 2007

DROUGHT-BREAKING rains across eastern Australia have been predicted in new modelling by a scientist who believes massive pulses in the sun’s magnetic field are helping to drive the Earth’s climate systems.

If proven, the research will make the prediction of floods and droughts in Australia far more reliable and influence models projecting future climate change.

Robert Baker, from the University of New England, claims to have found a strong relationship between the rhythmic pulsing of the sun’s magnetic field and weather systems, particularly in the southern hemisphere.

The sun’s magnetic emissions are known to peak every 11 years, a phenomenon demonstrated by increased sunspot activity. The sun also switches poles every 11 years. It last flipped in 2001.

Associate Professor Baker said modelling of the sun’s magnetic activity showed high rainfall during times of high activity and drought when the sun was stable.

This suggested the fluctuations impacted on the upper atmosphere, which was in turn reflected in changes in the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), the measure of air pressure over the Pacific Ocean used as a reliable indicator of drought and flood.

Dr Baker said the most intense droughts in eastern Australia, including the Federation drought, tended to occur every 22 years, about a year after the southern pole of the sun flipped and became positively charged.

In a paper, which has been submitted to the journal Solar Terrestrial Physics for peer review, he claims changes in solar magnetic fields can explain about 50 per cent of the variation in the SOI. The impact of solar magnetism is more noticeable in the southern hemisphere and in regions such as eastern Australia because more variable climate is driven by proximity to large oceans.

He said this relationship between the sun and climate required further research because it might help to explain an important but little understood natural cycle influencing the Earth’s climate systems.

“The sun drives the whole system,” he said. “There is a natural impact that the sun has in terms of weather patterns maybe over a century.”

Dr Baker said the sun appeared to follow a longer-term magnetic cycle of about 80 years, meaning it might be possible to predict floods and droughts for the next 30 years based on historical records from the mid-1920s.

Dr Baker said the SOI was currently following a similar pattern to that recorded after 1924 when eastern Australia enjoyed heavy falls after a period of prolonged drought.

Dr Baker’s model puts a more scientific and transparent theory to the concepts first developed by long-range weather forecasters Lennox Walker and Inigo Jones.

It also suggests there may be a longer 500-year solar cycle, which may help explain climate variability over the past centuries, including periods of unexplained climate variability such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Dr Baker said he was concerned about the welfare of rural communities amid unfounded speculation the current drought might continue for decades.

this link may not be available for long http://theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21404847-30417,00.html?from=public_rss

There is too much assumption built into these Global Warming models to believe them blindly. Those who tell you it’s immoral NOT to believe in the hysteria of Global Warming are not serving science well. Morality is a judgement and doesn’t belong in this discussion. The impact of civilization on Global Warming has not been proven. Those who first believed the earth was round where labeled heretics. Let’s keep studying the facts and not make any absolute judgements. Don’t be bullied into believing what doesn’t make sense to you – ever.Don’t forget to read the “do as I say, not as I do” post titled “Simple: Al Gore is a hypocrite”. Algore is perverting science into political folly; beware, those who follow algore.

National Geographic article ”Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says”

The Congressional Working Paper, “Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth” provides a thorough and comprehensive examination of Gore’s claims.

The OnPoint “Some Convenient Distortions” provides a brief overview of the major flaws in Gore’s analysis.Watch the video of Marlo Lewis’s presentation on the report

“Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth,” which aired live on C-Span 2 on March 16.

(The video is in three parts.) Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Follow the video with the accompanying slide presentation

Read this to find the MSM turning on algore – related to Global Warming. Here is a teaser paragraph about a zinc mine algore has owned for 30 years – I’ll tell you how he got it later:

The Gore mines were no small operations. In 2002, the year before they shut down, they ranked 22nd among all metal-mining operations in the U.S., with total toxic releases of 4.1 million pounds. A new mine operator, Strategic Resource Acquisition, is planning to reopen the mines later this year. The Tennessean reports that just last week, Mr. Gore wrote SRA asking it to work with a national environmental group as it makes its plans. He noted that under the previous operator, the mines had, according to the environmental website Scorecard, “pollution releases from the mine in 2002 [that] placed it among the ‘dirtiest/worst facilities’ in the U.S.” Mr. Gore requested that SRA “engage with us in a process to ensure that the mine becomes a global example of environmental best practices.” The Tennessean dryly notes that Mr. Gore wrote the letter the week after the paper posed a series of questions to him about his involvement with the zinc mines.

But this is the good part – read how he “acquired” the mine 30 years ago.

Mr. Gore has personally earned $570,000 in zinc royalties from a mine his father bought in 1973 from Armand Hammer, the business executive famous for his close friendship with the Soviet Union and for pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions during Watergate. On the same day Al Gore Sr. bought the 88-acre parcel from Hammer for $160,000, he sold the land and subsurface mining rights to his then 25-year-old son for $140,000. The mineral rights were then leased back to Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum and the royalty payments put in the names of Al Gore Jr. and his wife, Tipper.

Folks, you can not make this stuff up. God Bless algore.

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Link to treehugger.com

HOUSE # 1:

A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the South.

HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer.

The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

HOUSE #1

(20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE #2

(model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as “the Texas White House,” it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

The new mantra on the Global Warming warcry is to change it to a more defensible phrase ”Global Climate Change”.  Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Please note all this moonbat behavior is AFTER President Clinton DECLINED to push the Kyoto Protocol through our national legislative bodies or sign it himself (see this resolution – Vote [95-0] to NOT sign Kyoto). However, I think it was Michael Crichton “Environmentalism as a Religion” who suggested the “eco-terrorists” began their message around the time the Soviet Union fell. His theory was that we needed a new boogyman and the “global warming” crowd filled the vacuum. It’s just reached the LOONEY stage as they call it all BUSH’s FAULT.  

In my humble opinion - before any more yelling, the Global Community should help the worst polluters in some of the newly industrialized countries who are pumping much more pollutants into the air than we are.  The 10 most polluted CITIES in the world are documented here (in alphabetical order):

Chernobyl (Ukraine) | Dzerzinsk (Russia) | Haina (Dominican Republic) | Kabwe (Zambia) | La Oroya (Peru) | Linfen (China) | Mailuu-Suu (Kyrgyzstan) | Norilsk (Russia) | Ranipet (India) | Rudnaya Pristan (Russia)  These cities are, what people who are really interested in solving problems would call the longest legs of a pareto chart noting Global Pollution. Global Warming is a phrase; it’s not actionable – pollution is.