Climategate Update 12: The AGW Walls Start To Crumble, The Smoking Code & The Tiger Woods Index

While an unscrupulous American MSM maintains a blanket of silence on the greatest scientific scandal at least of our age, the science community itself is convulsing. Yesterday we were treated to Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann tossing his fellow AGW scientist, Phil "Hide the Decline" Jones under the bus on the BBC. Today, we learn that the IPCC's Chairman Mao, Rajendra Pachauri, who has completely stonewalled on Climategate up to this point, that he has now relented and called for a UN investigation. For him to do this on almost the eve of the Copenhagen Summitt means that heat must really be on. This from the BBC:

The head of the UN's climate science body says claims that UK scientists manipulated data on global warming should be investigated.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the matter could not be swept "under the carpet".

The allegations emerged after e-mails written and received by UK climate researchers appeared on the internet.

The police are investigating whether the scientists' computers were hacked.

Dr Pachauri told BBC Radio 4's The Report programme that the claims were serious and he wants them investigated. . . .

That is pretty momentous, and even if they try to whitewash it at this point, it is still going to be a giant elephant sitting in the middle of Copenhagen. That is something even the BBC acknowledged in a subsequent article.

While the IPCC may have had a reality check, at least one other person is stonewalling with the help of our media. Al "green-backs" Gore, perhaps the most successful con man of all time, sits for an interview with the Politico, while the two interviewers, John Harris and Mike Allen, do not bring up a single issue surrounding Climategate. You can tell from the comments the readers of this white wash dribble were not impressed.

Over at Watts Up With That, a guest poster, Robert Greiner, a scientist and self-described AGW agnostic, pulls apart the code downloaded from the CRU and shows, line by line, how its been used to distort data. He concludes:

As you can see, (potentially) valid temperature station readings were taken and skewed to fabricate the results the “scientists” at the CRU wanted to believe, not what actually occurred.

Where do we go from here?

It’s not as cut-and-try as one might think. First and foremost, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything about global warming as science. It just shows that all of the data that was the chief result of most of the environmental legislation created over the last decade was a farce.

This means that all of those billions of dollars we spent as a global community to combat global warming may have been for nothing.

If news station anchors and politicians were trained as engineers, they would be able to find real proof and not just speculate about the meaning of emails that only made it appear as if something illegal happened.

Conclusion

I tried to write this post in a manner that transcends politics. I really haven’t taken much of an interest in the whole global warming debate and don’t really have a strong opinion on the matter. However, being part of the Science Community (I have a degree in Physics) and having done scientific research myself makes me very worried when arrogant jerks who call themselves “scientists” work outside of ethics and ignore the truth to fit their pre-conceived notions of the world. That is not science, that is religion with math equations.

Do read the entire post.

It bears remembering that the impact of climate change legislation will have little impact on global temperatures, it will vastly enrich many a rent seeker, and it will negatively impact on all of the rest of us, with, as Evangelicals point out in a recent press release, the poor being hit by far the hardest. That matters not to the far left and the rent seekers with vested interests in AGW. Just look at the ethanol/biofuel insanity. The World Bank estimates that the establishment of ethanol and bio-fuel mandates, with its negative impacts on agriculture, has driven 100 million people below the poverty line.

Lastly, John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, thinks that the American MSM, so heavilly invested in promoting the AGW meme, is now in a corner, waiting for the scandal to blow over or for some act that will allow them to report that they were "misled." Writing at PJM, he hopes for the latter but sees the former as still possible. I disagree in the long run at least. FOIA requests are about to be honored. Programs will be requested and will eventually have to be released. "Climate science" will see the light of day. Part of the reason is the internet. And until our overlords invoke the Chinese option and start controlling internet searches, the biggest search words of the day now concern Climategate. Do see EU Referendum for the Tiger Woods Index, developed by Dr. North to answer the questions "Is the public more interested in Tiger Woods than Climategate? And does the media coverage reflect the public interest?"


Prior Posts:

Climategate and Surrealism
More Climategate Fallout
Climategate Update 3
Climategate Update 4: CRU Records Worthless
Climategate Update 5: IPCC's Chairman Mao
Climategate Update 6: Climategate In Video
UNEP, Green Religion & Global Governance
Climate Update 7: IPCC's Chairman Mao Plays The Obama Card, Peer Review Analyzed, Scientific Method Explained For Paul Krugman
Climategate Update 8: The NYT Reports
Climategate Update 9: CRU Head Phil Jones Steps Down During Investigation, An MIT Prof Explains The Holes In AGW Theory, And Climate Fraud Is Everywhere
Climategate Update 10: Climategate Reverberates From The UK To Down Under
Climategate Update 11: Finally An AGW Consensus, "Hockey Stick" Mann Attacks Jones, Gore Goes To Ground

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The Goracle Needs A New Analogy

Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise questioned the science of [global warming]. Frustrated, Mr. Gore retorted, “There are people who still believe that the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona.”

Al Gore, comparing global warming skeptics to moon landing skeptics, Al Gore Heads To The Hill To Push Climate Change Bill," Knoxville News Sentinel, 25 April 2009

Dr Aldrin said he was sceptical of climate change theories.

"I think the climate has been changing for billions of years," he said.

"If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favour of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today.

"I'm not necessarily of the school that we are causing it all, I think the world is causing it."

Interview of Dr. Buzz Aldrin, second person to set foot on the Moon, "Buzz Aldrin calls for manned flight to Mars to overcome global problems," The Telegraph, 3 July 2009

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Environmentalists & Dems Opposed To Alternative Energy

If you listen to Obama's ad running during the Olympics, the only reason we do not live in alternative energy utopia today is because we have held back building it. Merely elect the One and he will "fast track" alternative energy to solve our needs and create millions of new jobs. It is the modern equivalent of promising to feed the masses with a few fish and loaves.

And the Goracle is pushing the same snake oil in television ads. His latest organization, WeCanSolveIt.org, is running its an ad pushing for a compete change to a carbon free U.S. in ten years. According to his site, with $4 gas prices, we can not longer afford to wait to get rid of gas and oil.

Alternative energy is far from ready for prime time. None of it is close to being cost effective nor is any of it proven to scale. Wind power and solar power combine to provide less than 1% of our energy today and both suffer significant drawbacks in their current form. That does not mean we do not want to toss a great deal of R&D money at it. But it does mean that anyone today who promises to replace oil, coal and gas with solar, power and bio-fuels is either insane or has an ulterior motive. And don't tell me that subsidizing the alternative energy is the key. That is simply hiding the true cost of energy by paying for the bulk of it through taxes. Further a massive change in infrastructure is going to take years - much of it because of opposition from Democrats and environmentalists.

But in at least one comparison, oil and gas exploitation stand on precisely the same footing as alternative energy. That is that both are exposed to the same insane environmental laws that hand the keys to the court house to every radical environmental group in and out of the U.S. And, as the WSJ points out today, when one goes from the utopian rhetoric to the real world practicalities, Democrats and the environmental lobby are as opposed to exploiting alternatives as they are to exploiting oil and gas:

This from the editors at the WSJ:

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.

Read the entire article. If we are going to stand any chance of addressing our energy needs before our economy gets truly hurt over the next one to two decades, the first thing that has to happen is a massive overhaul of the legal and regulatory framework that I blogged about here. The overhaul does not mean that we need to stop common sense protection of the environment, but it does mean that we need to take the ultimate decisions out of the hands of a judiciary and streamline the process for dispute resolution.

Update: EU Referendum notes a similar situation on their side of the pond:

Of course, we are experiencing exactly the same dynamic over here, as the greenies get their knickers in a twist over the conflict between saving the little tweetie birds and indulging in their wet dreams of a carbon-free future.

But then, since the real greenie agenda is to force us back into the Stone Age – as long as we don't light any fires with our flints – this sort of confusion is grist to the mill. There is nothing quite so carbon-free as no power at all – the inevitable consequence of this greenie schizophrenia.

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Her Majesty's Navy & Anthropogenic Global Warming

The Telegraph is reporting on a study done of thousands of log books from Royal Navy ships in the 17th and 18th century. Their finding - the weather patterns we are seeing today were replicated then, thus strongly suggesting that that our global warming - or cooling as is occurring for the past decade - is not anthropogenic and tied to carbon dioxide emissions.
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This from the Telegraph:

Scientists have uncovered a treasure trove of meteorological information contained in the detailed logs kept by those on board the vessels that established Britain's great seafaring traditition including those on Nelsons' Victory and Cook's Endeavour.

Every Royal Naval ship kept a detailed record of climate including air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and major meteorological disturbances.

A group of academics and Met Office scientists has unearthed the records dating from the 1600s and examined more than 6,000 logs, which have provided one of the world's best sources for long-term weather data.

Their studies have raised questions about modern climate change theories. A paper by Dennis Wheeler, a geographer based at Sunderland University, recounts an increasing number of summer storms over Britain in the late 17th century.

Many scientists believe that storms are caused by global warming, but these were came during the so-called Little Ice Age that affected Europe from about 1600 to 1850.

The records also suggest that Europe saw a spell of rapid warming, similar to that experienced today, during the 1730s that must have been caused naturally.

"British archives contain more than 100,000 Royal Navy logbooks from around 1670 to 1850 alone," Mr Wheeler said. "They are a stunning resource. Global warming is a reality, but our data shows climate science is complex. It is wrong to take particular events and link them to carbon dioxide emissions.

"These records will give us a much clearer picture of what is really happening."

Read the entire article. As to Mr. Wheeler's assertion, I am quite sure that the results of this study will be studiously ignored by all of those who have financial and political stakes in the canard of anthropogenic global warming - which includes everyone from Nancy Pelosi and Obama to Gore and the IPCC.

And No Oil For Pacifists has the latest round-up of news contradicting assertions that sea levels are rising and showing the inaccuracy of climate change modeling.

H/T Brits At Their Best

Art: On Board HMS Bellerophon, Sir William Quiller Orchardson, 1880

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A Global Cooling Update

This from a post by EU Referendum:

We have had no warming for eleven years, the current global temperature is the lowest it has been since 1999 and snow is lingering on the North American continent for longer than in living memory. We have serious papers suggesting a very real possibility of global cooling and sunspots have all but disappeared.

Read the entire post.

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Harbingers of the Apocalypse

Look if you dare upon the new four horsewomen of the apocalypse who have been loosed upon the land. They are no mere mortals. Gluttony wears a black bikini and has the power to make us overeat at every turn. Sloth wears the green bikini, and causes us to remain motionless on couches while the mere thought of exercise is pondered only fleetingly and with abhorence. In the red bikini is Heavy Foods, whose wonderous cakes, delectible chocolates and candies overloaded with calories call ever bewitchingly to our ears. And last comes "Does My Ass Look Fat In This." She is the great deceiver who makes us lie to others and ourselves. Her siren song allows us to keep thinking that we can wait til the morrow to begin our diets and her discordant notes cause us to believe the claims of snake oil salesman who offer, for a heavy price, the latest placebo that they tell us will allow us to lose weight even as we settle in to eat the entire breakfast bar at Shoneys. Together they form the four horsewomen of the apolcalypse and their coming together is a harbinger of the end of days due to . . . . global warming? Er, yes, at least according to scientists in Britain who now count obesity as one of the primary causes of global warming.

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This from the Telegraph:

As if they didn’t already have enough problems on their hands fat people are now being blamed for global warming.

Mr Edwards and his colleague Ian Roberts argue that because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than rely on cars, a slimmer population would lower demand for fuel and food.

Because 20 percent of greenhouse gas stems from agriculture any reduction in food consumption would help cut emissions.

Edwards and Roberts found that obese people need 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 calories to maintain daily activities, 18 percent more than someone with a healthy body mass index.

At least 400 million adults worldwide are obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.

In their model, the researchers estimate 40 percent of the global population is obese, with a body mass index of 30 or over.

The normal range is usually considered to be 18 to 25, with more than 25 considered overweight and above 30 obese.

"Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food," Edwards and Roberts wrote in the latest edition of The Lancet. . . .

Read the entire article. I wonder how the Goracle is going to take this as he looks as if he has been filling out a lot lately. And let's not even get to Michael Moore and Rob Reiner. If this theory has any validity, than those two alone are likely responsible for the melting of the polar ice sheet.

At any rate, this turn of events marks a major departure from Britain's historically appreciative view of increasing waistlines. One imagines that the works of the great Ben Johnson's will soon fall out of favor. In anticipation of that tragedy, let's look at least one last time at Johnson's famous ode to obesity, composed near four centuries ago:

Hymn to the belly

Oom! room! make room for the bouncing Belly,
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly;
Prime master of arts and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit,

The plough and the flail, the mill and the hopper,
The hutch and the boulter, the furnace and copper,
The oven, the bavin, the mawkin, the peel,
The hearth and the range, the dog and the wheel.

He, he first invented the hogshead and tun,
The gimlet and vice too, and taught 'em to run;
And since, with the funnel and hippocras bag,
He's made of himself that now he cries swag;

Which shows, though the pleasure be but of four inches,
Yet he is a weasel, the gullet that pinches
Of any delight, and not spares from his back
Whatever to make of the belly a sack.

Hail, hail, plump paunch! O the founder of taste,
For fresh meats or powdered, or pickle or paste!
Devourer of broiled, baked, roasted or sod!
And emptier of cups, be they even or odd!

All which have now made thee so wide i' the waist,
As scarce with no pudding thou art to be laced;
But eating and drinking until thou dost nod,
Thou break'st all thy girdles . . .
. . . . . and break'st forth a god.

From: Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,
Ben Johnson, 1618.

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The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

The 2008 Non-Governmental International Conference on Climate Change has been meeting in New York since March 2. This meeting was convened by those scientists who are not part of the Goracle's "consensus" about global warming.




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A summary of the opinions and arguments being aired at the NG-IPCC can be found in the publication Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climage. The document begins with a rebuttal of the work of the highly politicized UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) penned by Frederick Seitz, President Emeritus, Rockefeller University, past President of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, and Chairman of the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warming. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence.

The document sumarizes its findings in Section 1:

The IPCC continues to undervalue the overwhelming evidence that, on decadal and century-long time scales, the Sun and associated atmospheric cloud effects are responsible for much of past climate change. It is therefore highly likely that the Sun is also a major cause of twentieth century warming, with anthropogenic GH gases making only a minor contribution. In addition, the IPCC ignores, or addresses imperfectly, other science issues that call for discussion and explanation.

The present report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) focuses on two major issues – the very weak evidence that the causes of the current warming are anthropogenic (Section 2) and the far more robust evidence that the causes of the current warming are natural (Section 3) – and then addresses a series of less crucial topics:

- Computer models are unreliable guides to future climate conditions (Section 4);

- Sea-level rise is not significantly affected by rise in GH gases (Section 5);

- The data on ocean heat content have been misused to suggest anthropogenic warming. The role of GH gases in the reported rise in ocean temperature is largely unknown (Section 6);

- Understanding of the atmospheric carbon dioxide budget is incomplete (Section 7);

- Higher concentrations of GH gases are more likely to be beneficial to plant and animal life and to human health than lower concentrations (Section 8); and

- Conclusion: Our imperfect understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change means the science is far from settled. This, in turn, means proposed efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing GH gas emissions are premature and misguided. Any attempt to influence global temperatures by reducing such emissions would be both futile and expensive (Section 9).

Do see the entire report. And keep your hands firmly on your wallets until you decide whether we really need to engage in economy busting measures - such as biofuels and carbon credits - on the basis of the assertions of the Goracle.

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Where is the Warming?

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced a rather cheesy video, but one that makes a very valid point about which I have blogged previously - that the temperature plateau and, indeed, the dramatic recent drop in temperature, require a reexamination of the global warming theories before we institute economy busting measures to contain what may be mere fantasy.



Much more on this video from Debbie at Right Truth. Are we on the cusp of a period of prolonged global cooling due to the decrease in solar activity? That certainly seems to be borne out by the recent evidence.

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More Shivers

What does a person have to do to get some global warming around here?












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We may be on the cusp of a period of global cooling driven by a Maunder Minimum - a sudden and sustained drop off in solar activity. I've posted that the world has just experienced the largest 12 month, January to January, drop in temperature since they began keeping records in 1880. And in that same vein, there is this today from the National Post:

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.

. . . 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.

. . . [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.

Read the entire article.

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Maunder Minimum & The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

A Maunder Minimum refers to a significant decrease in solar activity leading to a prolonged period of global cooling. It appears that we might be on the cusp of such an event.


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This today from the USA Daily:

. . . On February 7, Investors Business Daily had an editorial titled “The Sun Also Sets” in which it cited the views of Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council. In essence, Tapping wants people to know that solar activity such as sunspots, i.e., magnetic storms, “has been disturbingly quiet.”

It’s useful to know that global temperatures and events closely reflect solar cycles.

The lack of activity “could signal the beginning of what is known as the Maunder Minimum.” While solar cycles tend to last about 11 years, the lack of normal or increased activity can trigger the Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every few centuries, can last as long as a century, and causes a colder earth.

The most recent such event was the mini-Ice Age that climatologists date from around 1300 to 1850. In the midst of this there was a distinct solar hibernation from around 1650 to 1715.

“Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and 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.”

If these events continue and become a cycle of cooling, it represents a major threat to the Earth’s population because it means that food crops will fail and, with them, the means to feed livestock, and the rest of us.

If you have been paying attention to global weather reports, you know that China has had the heaviest snowfall in at least three decades. David Deming, a geophysicist, in a December 19, 2007 article in The Washington Times, noted that, “South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918.” This occurred across the entire Southern Hemisphere. “Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever.”

It must be said that one big blizzard does not an Ice Age make, but a whole series of events that suggest a cooling cycle may well be the warning that is being ignored in the midst of the vast global warming hoax.

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute. He recently published a commentary asserting that a global cold spell could replace global warming. Note that the Earth has been warming—about one degree Fahrenheit—since the last mini-Ice Age ended around 1850. “The real reasons for climate change are uneven solar radiation”, said Dr. Sorokhtin, while citing others that include the Earth’s axis gyration and instability of oceanic currents.

“Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface.” Yes, the Sun itself goes through periods of change. Dr. Sorokhtin believes that “Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.”

There is a reason scientists refer to our current era as an “interglacial period”, i.e., a time between Ice Ages.

Up to now, the mainstream media has ignored the cold reality of the Earth’s known cooling cycles. They have been in complete thrall to the howling of Al Gore with his endless lies about an imminent warming. Given the accolade of a Nobel Prize and even a Hollywood Oscar, why should people unschooled in science believe otherwise?

The United Nations International Panel on Climate Change whose reports have been based, not on hard science such as observations of solar activity, but on flawed, often deliberately false computer models, has been the driving factor behind the global warming hoax. What better way to assert political and economic control over the Earth than to create a global crisis? To their credit, many participants in the IPCC have protested these reports.

Large numbers of scientists have sold their soul to the global warming lies in order to receive millions in research grants, but increasingly other scientists have been coming forth to tell the truth. On March 2-4, several hundred will convene in New York for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change to offer papers and serve on panels disputing and debunking the global warming hoax.

. . . At the very moment the Earth is on the cusp of what is likely to be a very long cooling and possibly a full scale repeat of the last Ice Age, all the engines of government, nationally and internationally, are trying to inhibit the discovery, extraction, and use of energy reserves that will be needed to cope with climate changes that will impact millions and, ultimately, billions of people.

All the wind turbines and solar panels in the world will not keep you warm in your home or apartment when a short or long term cooling of the Earth occurs. Ironically, as the Greens rant about so-called endangered polar bears in the Arctic, the bears are far more likely to survive than humans.

What controls the Earth’s climate? The Sun!

Read the entire article. Assuming that this is accurate, would it be possible to prepare as a species for the looming cooling if we were to recognize its imminence and begin planning now?

(H/T EU Referendum)

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Thick Ice, Thriving Polar Bears, & Global Warming Legislation

This picture of polar bears puportedly stranded on a drifitng ice flow has become an icon of the global warming community. We now know it was taken wholly out of context. We also know that sea ice is at or above normal levels in both hemispheres. Polar bears are thriving. Yet there is legislation in Congress to declare polar bears a protected species. That legislation has little to do with protecting polar bears and everything to do with advancing the global warming agenda through our courts.





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The iconic photo above, purported to show two forlorn polar bears stranded on a drifting ice flow, was made famous by the Goracle. Al Gore used that photo as a centerpiece on his lecture circuit, stating of the two bears: "Their habitat is melting . . . beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet."

There are several important falsehoods in the Goracle’s doomsday pronouncement. Arctic sea ice now covers as much territory as it did in 1970, there is actually more sea ice in the Antarctic, polar bears are thriving, and the use of this picture to show polar bears in danger was, as Carole Williams terms it in a recent article, a classic example of "How the Environmental Extremists Manipulate the Masses." Ms. Williams has the whole background story to the photo, which was stolen from a marine biologist and subsequently forwarded to the Goracle and his acolytes who proceeded to twist it completely out of context. (H/T EU Referendum)

As a threshold matter, polar bears are some of the world’s greatest swimmers, being able to swim tremendous distances. Polar bears have been tracked swimming over 60 miles at a time. You of course would not know that from the Goracle, but what you also wouldn’t know, until you read Ms. Williams article, is that the photo of the polar bears was taken near shore, easily within swimming distance for the bears. They were in no danger whatsoever. Or as Christopher Booker put it today, the bears "weren’t drowning," they were just "waving" for the cameras. And you would also not know from the Goracle that the polar bear population is at "historic highs" and growing.

The second bit of what we now know to be incorrect in the Goracle’s statement is that the sea ice has replenished. To be fair to Gore, what knowledge we had indicated otherwise whilst he was on the lecture circuit, bringing home the green. But, as Christopher Booker explains:

Last autumn the BBC and others could scarcely contain their excitement in reporting that the Arctic ice was melting so fast there would soon be none left.

Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the website Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois.

This body is committed to warmist orthodoxy and contributes to the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km.

A second graph, "Global Ice Area", shows a similar pattern repeated every year since satellite records began in 1979; while a third, "Southern Hemisphere Ice", shows that sea ice has actually expanded in recent years, well above its 30-year mean.

Read the article here. That one will be difficult to explain away but I have faith in the Goracle and the IPCC once they get time to focus on it. They are busy at present trying to work out how global warming is causing snow from Iraq and Jerusalem to a massive snowfall in China.

But back now to the polar bears. In a bit of utter insanity, the Fish and Game Service is currently being pushed to declare polar bears an endangered species. Hearings are occurring as we speak.

What makes this truly insane is that the polar bears are thriving. According to the Inhofe blog, studies undertaken in 1970 estimated the the polar bear population to be about 5,000 –10,000. A 2002 study put the polar bear population at "historic highs, between 20,000 and 25,000. They occupy their entire natural range. And they are a hearty species. The fossil record shows that polar bears have survived several past global warmings that occurred before recorded history, one of which saw the Arctic wholly denuded of ice.

So how on God’s green earth can anyone suggest that polar bears should be listed on as an "endangered species?" And what could possibly be their motivation?

To justify listing polar bears as endangered, global warming enthusiasts are using dubious computer models that, they claim, predict that thirty years or so down the road, the now thriving polar bears will become endangered They have no physical evidence to support their assertions. It is a measure of how screwed we are as a people that our government is seriously considering this legislation.

The motivation for listing the polar bears as endangered has everything to do with the politics of global warming, not the plight of the thriving polar bears. Once listed as endangered, then global warming enthusiasts can challenge in court a whole host of economic and other activities across the width and breadth of America on the basis of their supposed effect on the polar bear and its Arctic home. Or as Senator Inhofe has stated:

Listing the bear as a threatened species is not about protecting the bear but about using the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to achieve global warming policy that special interest groups can not otherwise achieve through the legislative process.

Read the post here. You can find the Minority Report on this issue here. There is a reason we have democracy and several hundred men and women to debate and hold hearings. Somehow, though, I suspect this attept to run around the left side of the legislature and get it into the courts has the Goracle’s full support.

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Adam Smith & The EU's Global Warming Arrogance

The socialists at the EU really are an arrogant bunch. Knowing as they do what is best for Europe without need of consulting their electorate, they of course know what is best for the rest of the world also, including the U.S. For example, the EU partially fund the ABA to conduct its propaganda offensive against the death penalty in the U.S. Does that seem like a gross imposition into our internal affairs?

And indeed, just within the past year we have witnessed the unelected EU President send a letter to the popularly elected Texas governor instructing the governor that the it is a settled issue that the death penalty is not a deterrent and should be eradicated. It must be nice to go through life without having to examine any facts that challenge one’s deeply held belief. Such is the modern left.

The European socialists in Brussels see no problem with their attempt to make an end run around the electorate in Texas – the same people who could easily vote for a candidate who wishes to abolish the death penalty should they desire. But "democracy" has no worth as a concept in Brussels; its only use is as an Orwellian label. The EU is making sure that their own electorate have no say in the creation of the EU socialist super-state that, with the "Reform Treaty" of Lisbon, has just come into being. Indeed, to complain about the lack of democratic vote is to "show contempt for dignity of Parliament." This gives you some flavor of the incredible hubris of the EU.

But all of that pales in comparison to the damage the EU socialists, in their arrogance, are poised to inflict both internally and on the world.

The EU, which has taken global warming out of the realm of science and debate and made it a shibboleth of their constitutional law, is gearing "up to produce its much-heralded strategy on "climate change" – expected on 23 January." According to EU Referendum:

The core of this strategy will be the 20 percent reduction in emissions by 2020 and the 10 percent biofuel quota, the combination of which – with the other measures the commission is considering – will have a profound effect on our economy, our own personal lifestyles and global politics in general.

This is a program that will take billions out of the EU economy while making no contribution to efficiency, only adding to the cost of the production of goods and services. So as the EU shackles the economies of its member provinces with changes to combat global warming, how will the EU remain competitive in the global market?

It was completely predictable to anyone who watches the EU that their first thought would be to transfer their economic costs and use taxation as a type of global social policy to enforce EU beliefs on the global heretics. Thus it is no surprise at all that this today should appear in The Times:

A row has erupted in Brussels over proposals to introduce a carbon tax on goods entering the European Union from countries that fail to take measures to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

The tax would hit powerful emerging market exporters, such as China, which do not comply with the Kyoto treaty on climate change. The proposal is opposed by Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner, who fears that it would fall foul of World Trade Organisation rules.

Sources at Mr Mandelson’s office said the proposal was "dead", while a spokesman for Stavros Dimas, the Environment Commissioner, said several drafts of the proposal were being discussed and debated. "It’s at the beginning of the process," he said.

The Trade Commissioner’s spokesman argued that the proposed tax was "too complicated" and would create problems with the United States, which has not signed the Kyoto treaty. . .

Do read the entire article. One does not need a PhD in economics to see that such taxes would have a depressive effect on the world economy and would, if imposed, likely set off a trade war. But such is the arrogance and the insanity to be found amongst our friendly, unelected socialist allies. It’s the Goracle versus Adam Smith. Smith will win in the end, but the Goracle and his EU acolytes can do incredible damage in the short run.

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Global Warming Under Threat

By and large, Russian scientists have never bought into the global warming hysteria now being spouted as dogma by the holy trinity of the Goracle, the UN's IPCC, and the EU. I can recall reading of a bet between Russian scientists and global warming acolytes about twelve years ago that the warming trend would come to an end with the end of the current solar cycle. It now seems that we will have an answer to that question in the next few years - though it will be long after that before the Holy Trinity profess agnosticism. This today from Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia, fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and a staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute, speaking for RIA Novosti. He coherently challenges all of the dogma surrounding the global warming hysteria:

Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! . . .

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.
It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations—in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill?

Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.

The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean’s surface warms up, it produces the “champagne effect.” Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.

Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution—a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.

Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.

Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.

Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.

Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.

The principal among those diverse links is Earth’s reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.

What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.

Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.

The entire article can be found here. This should be fascinating to watch. With so many people, organizations and governments (global warming is part of EU constitutional law) fully invested in global warming, it is doubtful that they will be willing to give up their cherished views - and their gravy train - until advancing glaciers inundate Brussels. Wouldn't it be the height of irony that our best bet for survival may be to create as much green house gases as possible? My suggestion, don't sell your stock in coal mining companies just yet.

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Forecast For 2008: More Global Warming . . . Alarmism

This from John Tierney in the NYT today, questioning the dogma preached from on high by global warming's holy trinity of the EU, the IPCC, and of course, the Goracle:

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, "2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend."

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

. . . Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an "availability cascade" . . .

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and "The China Syndrome," minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

"Many people concerned about climate change," Dr. Sunstein says, "want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade."

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s "Inconvenient Truth"?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to "stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific," and focused on other kinds of disasters, like "massive droughts" and "massive flooding."

"In the last few months," Mr. Gore said, "it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter." But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

Read the entire article. Could it be that the Goracle is not only not a deity, but in fact may be acting in a manner a bit less than honest with us. Some think so.

. . . Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, ``Ma Verite Sur la Planete'' (``My Truth About the Planet''), doesn't mince words.

He calls Gore a ``crook'' presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore's French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.

Allegre doesn't deny that the climate has changed or that extreme weather has become more common. He instead emphasizes the local character of these phenomena.

While the icecap of the North Pole is shrinking, the one covering Antarctica -- or 92 percent of the Earth's ice -- is not, he says. Nor have Scandinavian glaciers receded, he says. To play down these differences by basing forecasts on a global average makes no sense to Allegre.

Read the article here. I wouldn't throw away your cold weather gear just yet, irrespective of the Goracle's forecasts.

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Cal Thomas Asks When Will We Debate the Religion of Global Warming

More global warming heresy, this time from Cal Thomas who notes the lack of any substantive response from them the global warming camp - whom he classifies as "secular fundamentalists" - to the Senate Minority Report dissenting from global warming dogma. What ad hominem response there has been is particularly ironic given the difference in funding for scientists who support global warming as well as the sources of their funding. Then again, as Thomas notes, hypocrisy is not a big concern for the members of the Church of Global Warming.

You don't have to be religious to qualify as a fundamentalist. You can be Al Gore, the messiah figure for the global warming cult, whose followers truly believe their gospel of imminent extermination in a Noah-like flood, if we don't immediately change our carbon polluting ways.

One of the traits of a cult is its refusal to consider any evidence that might disprove the faith. And so it is doubtful the global warming cultists will be moved by 400 scientists, many of whom, according to the Washington Times, "are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis." In a report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, these scientists cast doubt on a "scientific consensus" that global warming caused by humans endangers the planet.

Like most cultists, the true believers struck back, not by debating science, but by charging that a small number of the scientists mentioned in the report have taken money from the petroleum industry. A spokeswoman for Al Gore said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobile Corp. Exxon Mobile spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying, "the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories."

The pro-global warming cultists enjoy a huge money advantage. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, noted in an EPW report how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears and so-called solutions: "In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $50 billion (US) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one," he wrote on June 18, 2007. The $19 million spent on research that debunks the global warming faith pales in comparison.

. . . Oklahoma Senator James M. Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report debunks Mr. Gore's claim that the "debate is over." In fact, the debate hasn't even begun because the global warming cultists won't debate. Despite numerous challenges, Al Gore has refused to debate the issue with any credible scientist who is a skeptic. Shouldn't the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize be willing to debate such an important issue? What does he have to fear? If his theory cannot stand up to scientific inquiry and skepticism, it needs to be exposed as a false religion and himself as a false prophet before he and his followers force us to change the way we live and alter the prosperous society that generations of Americans have built.

Gore and his disciples will still be living in their big houses, driving gas-guzzling cars and flying in private jets that leave carbon footprints as large as Bigfoot's, while most of us will be forced to drive tiny automobiles and live in huts resembling the Third World. But hypocrisy is just one of many traits displayed by secular fundamentalists like Gore.

Before adopting any faith, the agendas of the people attempting to impose it, along with the beliefs held by them and their disciples, should be considered. Gore and company are big government liberals who think government is the answer to all of our problems, including problems they create. In fact, as Ronald Reagan often said, in too many cases government is the problem. . .

Read the article here.

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Senate Minority Report On Global Warming

On December 20, 2007 the minority members of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released a report, "U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007; Senate Report Debunks "Consensus." Or as I like to think of it, Senator Inhofe's version of "Satanic Verses." As the report states in the introduction:

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007.

Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking." Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears "bite the dust." In addition, many scientists who are also progressive environmentalists believe climate fear promotion has "co-opted" the green movement.

This blockbuster Senate report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. This new "consensus busters" report is poised to redefine the debate.

Many of the scientists featured in this report consistently stated that numerous colleagues shared their views, but they will not speak out publicly for fear of retribution. Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, explains how many of his fellow scientists have been intimidated. . .

Do read the entire report.

On a personal note, I fully support actions that combine economic sense and environmentalism. The environmental movement has been grossly ill-served by those, such as the Goracle, who have hijacked the movement and turned it into a doomsday religion and those, such as the EU, who are using it as a vehicle for furthering socialism.

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His Emminence, the Goracle

Michael Crichton very astutely observed several years ago that the green movement had become a new religion for the left with a belief system based on faith, a paradise, a fall from grace, a defined heresey, and a doomsday scenario. And if one questions the accuracy of that assessment, perhaps reading this Time magazine article on the Global Warming movement's High Priest, the Goracle, will be enlightening. It is authored by Bono.

As 2007 closes and 2008 begins, . . . Americans are looking for leadership that can turn spiritual yearnings into practical realities.

Al Gore is the kind of leader these times require. Not as President — God and the Electoral College have given him a different job. As it happens, Al is at work repositioning his country from the inside out as a leader in clean energy; and along the way restoring faith in the U.S. as a moral powerhouse that can lead a great, global spiritual revival as the temperature rises.

That's right, a spiritual revival. Because this apostle of all things digital is the first to admit that technology alone will not reverse the damage done. . . .

For Al, 2008 is a rendezvous with destiny and an appointment with the enemy. The foe he sees is our own indifference to the future and a lack of faith in our ability to do anything about it. He stresses that through crisis we can find opportunity. His language is pretty Biblical, but, then, doesn't the Bible say something about floods? He is like an Old Testament prophet amped up with PowerPoint and an army of the world's scientists at his disposal. The right response to the global-warming crisis, he explains, will be a mosaic of solutions that will kick off a whole new economic boom, one that is low-carbon and high-productivity, with truly sustainable development, and an atlas for planet management — using not New Age technology but old age wisdom generating sustainable solutions.

Is he Noah or are we King Canute? Are we prepared to make difficult choices on behalf of children not yet born? . . .

. . . [Bishop] Desmond Tutu often uses the word ubuntu, meaning "I am because we are." It's my favorite epithet, an ode to interdependence. When I told Al that, he responded with Gandhi: Satyagraha, meaning "hold tight to the truth."

Personally, I'm trying to live up to both words, but it's hard. Like a lot of folks, I've got a lot on my plate without trying to make sure the dishwasher liquid is in a biodegradable container. (It is, but were it not for the eco-warrior with whom I share a bed, I would have fallen behind.) As Al leaves our house, I fall over myself to explain that my fancy car runs on ethanol, then laugh nervously, like when you meet a parish priest in the supermarket and it turns into confession. . .

Read the article here. A big part of the global warming movement are secularists for whom belief in the environment and global warming has filled the spiritual void left in the absence of a true religion. And further, I think there are more than a few who may or may not be true believers in global warming, but who do adhere to socialism and see global warming as a vehicle to justify centralizing power and redistributing wealth. It is a potent marriage with the potential to do great harm - as at least one truly spiritual man has recognized.

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A Methane Gas Emission in Church . . .

If global warming is the new religion of world socialism - and even the Pope seems to think so - than the IPCC's Bali Conference, now ended, was its High Mass. And from the way some of the particpants have reacted, one might think that . . . well, a noxious fume had been let loose amongst the otherwise pristine sea air circulating in the Global Warming Cathedral. Much to the chagrin of the true believers present in Bali, the US apparently could not be cajoled into putting a stake in capitalism by agreeing to a massive redistribution of its national wealth via a carbon tithe. That in fact was a major motivation of many of the faithful who were present for the services, as reported by one attendee:

A common theme [at the Bali Conference] was that the "solutions" to climate change that are being posed by many governments, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels are false and are not rooted in justice. Another point was that as this current economic system got us here in the first place, a climate change response must . . . [provide for] a redistribution of wealth and resources.

See here. And the U.S. didn't even agree to come on board for an economy busting massive decrease in its carbon footprint, though it did agree to talk more about it.

All of this was apparently too much for the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, the man negotiating on behalf of the UN at Bali. Fashionably dressed in eco-friendly church attire - a floral shirt - Mr. de Boer had to be led away when he broke down in tears over the failure to reach an agreement for a hard target reduction in carbon emissions. The "Crying Dutchman's" emotional outburst was emblematic of the angst that many of the parishioners seemed to be feeling when they characterized the end result of Bali as "fatally flawed." It should go without saying that such characterization is all a matter of one's perspective.

But not all in Bali were held back by ecognosticism. Britain's Labour government certainly was not.

The socialists in Britain's Labour government are true believers. Indeed, Labour is trying to indoctrinate Britain's young in this new religion, making the Goracle's "An Inconvenient Truth" part of the national school curriculum for children aged 11 to 13. And Prime Minister Gordon Fawkes Brown considers himself a standard bearer of the faith, vowing to "lead Europe on climate change." Shortly before the Bali service convened, he committed Britain to a massive 60% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050. Its not hard to forecast what that will do to Britain's economy if it ever comes to fruition.

Of course, the reality is that Britain's economy no longer belongs to Brown, he having unilaterally signed over the sovereignty of Britain to the EU the other day. But, that aside, is hardly the end of PM Gordon Fawkes Brown's madness. Christopher Booker comments in the Telegraph upon Gordon's latest folly in Bali, or, as Booker characterizes it, "the maddest single decision ever made by British ministers." Booker is referring to Gordon's decision, announced through his Secretary Timothy Hutton "amid the clouds of self-righteous humbug billowing out from Bali," to build "7,000 giant offshore wind turbines round Britain's coast by 2020, to meet our EU target on renewable energy." Booker examines this "megalomaniac project" that defies reality:

For a start, no one mentioned costs. Mr Hutton spoke of his turbines, equivalent to one every half mile of coastline, as having a capacity of 33 gigawatts (GW), a hefty chunk of the 75GW of power we need at peak demand. But with the cost of giant offshore turbines, as tall as 850 feet, estimated at £1.6 billion per GW of capacity, this represents a bill of more than £50 billion - equivalent to the colossal sum earmarked last week by central banks to shore up the world banking system.

But of course the point about offshore turbines is that, because wind blows intermittently, they only generate on average at a third or less of capacity. So Mr Hutton's 33GW figure comes down to 11GW. To generate this much power from "carbon-free" nuclear energy would require six or seven nuclear power stations and cost, at something under £20 billion, less than half as much as the turbines.

This, however, is only the start of the madness. Because those turbines would generate on average only a third of the time, back-up would be needed to provide power for the remaining two thirds - say, another 12 nuclear power stations costing an additional £30 billion, putting the real cost of Mr Hutton's fantasy at nearer £80 billion - more than doubling our electricity bills.

. . . The turbines' siting would mean that much of the national grid would have to be restructured, costing further billions. And because wind power is so unpredictable and needs other sources available at a moment's notice, it is generally accepted that any contribution above 10 per cent made by wind to a grid dangerously destabilises it.

Two years ago, much of western Europe blacked out after a rush of German windpower into the continental grid forced other power stations to close down. The head of Austria's grid warned that the system was becoming so unbalanced by the "excessive" building of wind turbines that Europe would soon be "confronted with massive connector problems". Yet Mr Hutton's turbines would require a system capable of withstanding power swings of up to 33GW, when the only outside backup on which our island grid can depend is a 2GW connector to France (which derives 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power). . .

Amen. If only Ted Kennedy had a summer home overlooking the North Sea, Booker and his small number of like minded heretical Brits might able to generate some staunch opposition to such a project.

The bottom line of all this is that socialists are largely ascendent throughout the world today, they are using global warming as a tool to advance their political philosophy, and we may well get dragged into this if we are not careful. While we desperately need to get off oil, and we do need to husband the environment, those things have precious little in common with goals and methods of the religion of global warming. Newt Gingrich's A Contract With The Earth is well worth a read in this regard.

Addendum: Reading the Treaty of Lisbon the other day was quite educational. The Treaty of Lisbon is the one just signed that marks the EU's debut as a true state and establishes a Constitution for the EU. The fine folks at the EU have taken the dubious scientific proposition of global warming, turned it into dogma, and made it a matter of Constitutional law.

By Article 4 of the new Lisbon Treaty/Constitution, the EU takes primacy to pass laws on the "environment." The Treaty/Constitution amends Article 179 to explicitly recognize the problem of "climate change" as an "environmental" problem and provides the EU with a constitutional mandate to take appropriate measures to "deal with" it. It is a constitutional excuse for centralizing power and redistributing wealth on a scale unheard of. And as Constitutional law, that means that judicially, "climate change" is a settled issue. No amount of scientific argument will even be heard as a means to challenge any law the EU chooses to pass in which they claim global warming as a justification. The ramifications of that are just jaw dropping. If global warming is a socialist's wet dream, than the people that staff the EU are going to bed warm and comfy each night in globally warmed pup tents.

Update: Is it possible for true believers to corner the market on hypocrisy? (H/T Instapundit)

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