In a sad proof of the pitiable intellectual state of today’s American academic community, the faculty of Cornell responded to a poll rating the world’s most important problems on a five-point scale, and Apocalyptic Manichaeism and Puritanism won.

• Climate change and its effects on ecosystems (4.39, 2.63)
• Corporations have too much influence in governing (4.24, 3.35)
• Lack of long-term perspective in political, environmental and social actions (4.23, 2.69)
• Humans are unsustainably exploiting the environment (4.13, 2.79)
• Maintaining the health of the planet (4.1, 2.67)
• Lack of global responsibility on the part of corporations, governments and individuals (4.03, 2.97)
• Global poverty and its effects (3.98, 2.48)
• Inequitable distribution of wealth among people (3.97, 2.32)
• Unsuitable growth in energy use (3.96, 2.95)
• Shortage of potable and clean water (3.94, 3.59)

Is there really a shortage of potable water in Ithaca? It seems remarkable to me that, from the viewpoint of Cornell’s savants, the world’s most important problems pretty much entirely divide into the fictitious (Global Warming, unsustainability, vanishing resources), the permanently intractable (human inequality, poverty), along with the unfortunate delay in mankind everywhere implementing Socialism.

Representative Edward Markey (D- 7th district Massachusetts) deserves a special place on Warmlist for telling some high schools students that Global Warming was responsible for the shooting down of a US Black Hawk helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993.

The incident led to a book by Mark Bowden titled Black Hawk Down, made into a 2001 film of the same title by director Ridley Scott.

On the Spot (CNSNews.com) – A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, also equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ...

“In Somalia back in 1993, climate change, according to 11 three- and four-star generals, resulted in a drought which led to famine,” said Markey.

“That famine translated to international aid we sent in to Somalia, which then led to the U.S. having to send in forces to separate all the groups that were fighting over the aid, which led to Black Hawk Down. There was this scene where we have all of our American troops under fire because they have been put into the middle of this terrible situation,” he added.

Markey was referring to the battle of Mogadishu in 1993, when 18 members of a U.S. military team were killed in a helicopter crash and a resulting firefight. The battle was made famous by a 2001 Academy Award-winning film, “Black Hawk Down.”

Call the men in the white coats with the butterfly nets, we’ve got plenty of the afflicted right here in America.

Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne Herald Sun:

Psychiatrists have (diagnosed) the first case of “climate change delusion.” ...

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.

“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.” ...

“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”

Harry Reid, despite originating from and representing Nevada in the Senate (a state whose history is based upon minerals and mining), has gone all moonbat, and won himself a place in YouTube’s list of “Most Watched” videos, bleating absurdities about coal and oil “making us sick” and “ruining the earth.”

0:35 video

Well, mining coal in deep mines and breathing in coal dust can make you sick. It killed my grandfather back in the 1930s. But claims that coal is making anybody other than deep miners sick is a claim based on what we call statistics. Statistics are produced by sophisters, calculators, and economists, and liberals always have statistics by the boxcar load ready and waiting to prove whatever they happen to want to prove. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Coal has been used in domestic heating and in industrial production since Elizabethan times. Burning coal undoubtedly produced cleaner air in places like London than the wood fires used previously.

They discovered anthracite coal in Pennsylvania early in the 19th century, and Benjamin Franklin’s stove adapted with grates was found perfect for its use. By mid-century, railroads and canal boats were carrying coal to all major American cities. They found oil, also in Pennsylvania, in the mid-19th century, and we’ve been using that ever since, too.

Generations of Americans and Europeans have lived and died using coal and oil, and the Earth remains, far from ruined.

I don’t feel particularly sick. How about you?

The truth is that no economically practical alternatives exist, and politicians cannot magic new forms of energy into existence. What they can do is jump on to the bandwagons of fashionable do-gooder causes and disseminate misinformation and sow unnecessary fear as a means of bamboozling the gullible public into surrendering more powers and more tax monies to them.

It’s this kind of politics that ought to make you sick.

Brett Stephens, in the Wall Street journal, explains once again that Global Warming isn’t science. It’s religion, and religion of the nasty, grovelling on the ground, flagellating pilgrims, sacrificing babies to idols variety at that.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it’s time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA’s Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of “99% confidence”). ...

Let’s stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific “consensus” warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to “patriarchal” science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” That’s Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What’s remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you’re inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature’s great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, “morbid-minded” religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

We’ve been hearing a great deal from our liberal friends about “settled science.” Reading this paper, I feel compelled to agree. The science is settled: an atmospheric greenhouse effect is incompatible with the established facts of theoretical physics and thermodynamic engineering.

ABSTRACT

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

PDF

The Earth is not a greenhouse. As the authors observe:

It is not the “trapped” infrared radiation, which explains the warming phenomenon in a real greenhouse, but it is the suppression of air cooling.

CONCLUSIONS:

A statistical analysis, no matter how sophisticated it is, heavily relies on underlying models and if the latter are plainly wrong then the analysis leads to nothing. One cannot detect and attribute something that does not exist for reason of principle like the CO2 greenhouse effect. There are so many unsolved and unsolvable problems in non-linearity and the climatologists believe to beat them all by working with crude approximations leading to unphysical results that have been corrected afterwards by mystic methods, flux control in the past, obscure ensemble averages over different climate institutes today, by excluding accidental global cooling results by hand, continuing the greenhouse inspired global climatologic tradition of physically meaningless averages and physically meaningless applications of mathematical statistics.

In conclusion, the derivation of statements on the CO2 induced anthropogenic global warming out of the computer simulations lies outside any science. ...

The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.

Hat tip to QandO via Bird Dog.

University of California at Berkeley’s efforts to construct a new athletic training center in the vicinity of its current stadium, basically atop the Hayward Fault, like any Bay Area development effort inevitably provoked protest from the local activist community.

The comedy, complete with tree-sitters and fences and police protecting them from annoyed Golden Bears football fans, has been running since December of 2006, and shows no signs of nearing an end.

The SF Chronicle finds that a long-awaited court ruling doesn’t mean a thing:

Wednesday’s ruling by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara Miller that Cal’s long-delayed athletic training center is sort of legal and sort of not largely advances the legal notion that there really is something called “semi-pregnant.”

Put another way, when both sides effusively declare victory, what you have is a ruling that doesn’t really say much at all. But what did you expect? This is Berkeley.

Miller said that the $140 million project doesn’t actually sit on a fault line, although one suspects that the 3 or 4 extra feet of leeway won’t really mean much when the building slides into the bay.

Read the whole thing.

Background Dec 22 07 article at Daily Kos

TaoLive (moonbat-perspective) 8:12 video

Al Gore’s new solar roof

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reports more embarrassing news about the personal life of the planet’s savior.

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

In February 2007, An Inconvenient Truth, a film based on a climate change speech developed by Gore, won an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The next day, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research uncovered that Gore’s Nashville home guzzled 20 times more electricity than the average American household.

After the Tennessee Center for Policy Research exposed Gore’s massive home energy use, the former Vice President scurried to make his home more energy-efficient. Despite adding solar panels, installing a geothermal system, replacing existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauling the home’s windows and ductwork, Gore now consumes more electricity than before the “green” overhaul.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Today’s news featured a demand from an international agency for large-scale sacrifice.

AP:

The world needs to invest $45 trillion in energy in coming decades, build some 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power in order to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to an energy study released Friday.

The report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency envisions a “energy revolution” that would greatly reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels while maintaining steady economic growth.

The painting by Raphael, titled The Sacrifice at Lystra, was done 1515-1516, and is part of the Royal Collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

It depicts an incident described in the Acts of the Apostles 14:8-18.

And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked:

The same heard Paul speak: who steadfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed,

Said with a loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked.

And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.

And they called Barnabas, Jupiter; and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker.

Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people.

Which when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of, they rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out,

And saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein:

Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways.

Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.

And with these sayings scarce restrained they the people, that they had not done sacrifice unto them.

Though in the modern case, that confusion always involves the first person. Contemporary scientists who cannot reliably predict the weather more than a week or so in advance, and who do not in fact understand the causes or normal patterns of the planet’s periodic cycles of warming and cooling, pretend to able to predict imminent catastrophe related to human activity. Political pundits and economists, who cannot reliably predict high or low prices or good times and bad, and who actually produce nothing but merely manipulate words and ideas, claim they can revolutionize available forms of energy.

Today’s sophisters, calculators, and economists pretend to knowledge they do not possess, based on data outside human reach, and by so pretending to possess superhuman powers, they are really pretending that they are gods. Member of the modern intellectual clerisy habitually think themselves the gods Jupiter and Mercurius. But the sacrifices they propose, of course, are considerably greater than a single ox.

Just like the Lystrians, their demand is for sacrifices to an idol, the idol of Leviathan the State. “Progressives” have really gone far backward, into a barbarous and pagan past, one preceding both the Enlightenment and Christian Europe, whose faith rested upon a newer kind of thinking which respects the freedom and dignity of the human individual, which values spontaneous order and the voluntary interactions of human beings, and which does not view man and Nature as separate, distinct, and intrinsically at war.

In Washington to promote the newly-published English-language translation of his book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus wants to debate Albert Gore on Global Warming.

Earth Times:

Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the “climate alarmism” perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.

“Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,” he said.

“In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat – this time, in the name of the planet,” he added.

Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he oppposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.

“It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda,” he said.

Mr. Klaus’ statement can be read in full at his web-site here.

Labour policies resulted in food rationing continuing in post-WWII Britain until 1954. Today’s Global Warming bugaboo may again offer renewed opportunities to both regulators and black marketeers, the Daily Mail reports.

Every adult should be forced to use a ‘carbon ration card’ when they pay for petrol, airline tickets or household energy, MPs say.

The influential Environmental Audit Committee says a personal carbon trading scheme is the best and fairest way of cutting Britain’s CO2 emissions without penalising the poor.

Under the scheme, everyone would be given an annual carbon allowance to use when buying oil, gas, electricity and flights.

Anyone who exceeds their entitlement would have to buy top-up credits from individuals who haven’t used up their allowance. The amount paid would be driven by market forces and the deal done through a specialist company.

MPs, led by Tory Tim Yeo, say the scheme could be more effective at cutting greenhouse gas emissions than green taxes.

But critics say the idea is costly, bureaucratic, intrusive and unworkable.

The Government says it supports the scheme in principle, but warns it is ‘ahead of its time’.

The idea of personal carbon trading is increasingly being promoted by environmentalists. In theory it could be used to cover all purchases – from petrol to food.

But the prophets, seers, and prognosticators say they know warming will resume in a decade or so, they can predict it!

National Post:

You may have heard earlier this month that global warming is now likely to take break for a decade or more. There will be no more warming until 2015, perhaps later.

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.’s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

Of course, Mr. Keenlyside—long a defender of the man-made global warming theory—was quick to add that after 2015 (or perhaps 2020), warming would resume with a vengeance.

Climate alarmists the world over were quick to add that they had known all along there would be periods when the Earth’s climate would cool even as the overall trend was toward dangerous climate change.

Sorry, but that is just so much backfill.

There may have been the odd global-warming scientist in the past decade who allowed that warming would pause periodically in its otherwise relentless upward march, but he or she was a rarity.

If anything, the opposite is true: Almost no climate scientist who backed the alarmism ever expected warming would take anything like a 10 or 15-year hiatus.

Last year, in its oft-quoted report on global warming, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted a 0.3-degree C rise in temperature in the coming decade—not a cooling or even just temperature stability.

In its previous report in 2001, the IPCC prominently displaced the so-called temperature “hockey stick” that purported to show temperature pretty much plateauing for the thousand years before 1900, then taking off in the 20th Century in a smooth upward line. No 10-year dips backwards were foreseen.

It is drummed into us, ad nauseum, that the IPCC represents 2,500 scientists who together embrace a “consensus” that man-made global warming is a “scientific fact;” and as recently as last year, they didn’t see this cooling coming. So the alarmists can’t weasel out of this by claiming they knew all along such anomalies would occur.

This is not something any alarmist predicted, and it showed up in none of the UN’s computer projections until Mr. Keenlyside et al. were finally able to enter detailed data into their climate model on past ocean current behaviour.

Less well-known is that global temperatures have already been falling for a decade. All of which means, that by 2015 or 2020, when warming is expected to resume, we will have had nearly 20 years of fairly steady cooling.

H/t to Frank Dobbs.

Says the New York Times: there are people starving in Sub-Saharan Africa, and throwing food away causes Global Warming, too.

Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American. ...

The numbers seem all the more staggering now, given the cost of groceries and the emerging food crisis abroad.

After President Bush said recently that India’s burgeoning middle class was helping to push up food prices by demanding better food, officials in India complained that not only do Americans eat too much — if they slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, said one, “many people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plate” — but they also throw out too much food.

And consider this: the rotting food that ends up in landfills produces methane, a major source of greenhouse gases.

Lots of luck, NY Times pinkos, Americans know that charitable garbage donation begins at home.

Daniel Tarantola, formerly of Harvard’s School of Public Health and the UN’s World Health Organization, now “Professor of Health and Human Rights” at the University of New South Wales (What do you suppose he did?), recently received international press attention for this terribly precise scientific analysis of the clear causal nexus between Global Warming and Increased HIV Infection.

He also deserves a nice new entry on Warmlist.

In a panel discussion between top HIV researchers, Professor Daniel Tarantola said that warming could strain already meager health and social resources in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries, worsening the incidence of HIV and other diseases.

“It was clear soon after the emergence of the HIV epidemic that discrimination, gender inequality and lack of access to essential services have made some populations more vulnerable than others. These problems have not gone away,” Professor Tarantola said. “Today, additional threats are lurking on the horizon as the global economic situation deteriorates, food scarcity worsens and climate change begins to affect those who were already dependent on survival economies.

“Climate change will trigger a chain of events which is likely to increase the stress on society and result in higher vulnerability to diseases including HIV,” he said.

Gateway Pundit notes that Polar bear numbers are up in 11 of 13 regions of Canada recently.

And successful conservation practices have dramatically restored bear numbers over the past half century.

While Arctic ice levels are at their highest point in 15 years.

But none of these considerations prevented the Bush Administration’s Department of the Interior from swallowing journalists’ fairy tales based upon somebody’s computer model and placing Polar Bears on the Threatened Species List. The purely imaginary decline, thought by some Interior Department experts to be a future possibility, is attributed to imaginary Anthropogenic Global Warming.

There’s your Republican government at work for you, identifying a non-existent problem contrary to the evidence of the facts on the basis of the other side’s ideology out of political cowardice.

Obama or Hillary can complete the process next year, and assure that all energy exploration in the Arctic will be firmly prohibited by law.

The Guardian contributes a further citation to the Warmlist, which already has sharks booming and sharks moving north.

Two deaths in the waters off California and Mexico last week and a spate of shark-inflicted injuries to surfers off Florida’s Atlantic coast have left beachgoers seeking an explanation for a sudden surge in the number of strikes.

In the first four months of this year, there were four fatal shark attacks worldwide, compared with one in the whole of 2007, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

‘The one thing that’s affecting shark attacks more than anything else is human activity,’ said Dr George Burgess of Florida University, a shark expert who maintains the database. ‘As the population continues to rise, so does the number of people in the water for recreation. And as long as we have an increase in human hours in the water, we will have an increase in shark bites…Another contributory factor to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea temperatures. ‘You’ll find that some species will begin to appear in places they didn’t in the past with some regularity,’ he said.

But there’s really no cause for alarm, as Australian scientist Phil Chapman explains, Global Warming is over, and colder weather is probably on the way.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930.

Sorry, Mr. Gore. Maybe the Antarctic ice pack won’t be melting after all.

NatureNews:

Antarctica’s deep ocean waters are getting colder after years of warming, say researchers who have just returned from a Southern Ocean voyage aboard the German research vessel Polarstern.

And what’s this? Global Warming is stopping… temporarily?

Telegraph:

Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.

Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. ...

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: “The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that.”

He stressed that the results were just the initial findings from a new computer model of how the oceans behave over decades and it would be wholly misleading to infer that global warming, in the sense of the enhanced greenhouse effect from increased carbon emissions, had gone away. ...

Writing in Nature, the scientists said: “Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic [manmade] warming.”

The study shows a more pronounced weakening effect than the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, which last year predicted that global warming would slow until 2009 and pick up after that, with half the years after 2009 being warmer than the warmest year on record, 1998.

Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.

“Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades.”

But he said the use of just sea surface temperatures might not accurately reflect the state of the MOC, which was several miles deep and dependent on factors besides temperatures, such as salt content, which were included in the Met Office Hadley Centre model.

If the model could accurately forecast other variables besides temperature, such as rainfall, it would be increasingly useful, but climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain, he added.

So, bear that in mind, the earth getting cooler does not mean that you are not causing Global Warming. And though scientists can’t predict anything accurately about the future climate, you are not entitled to reject climate modeling’s conclusions.

This was made by some liberal bed-wetters as satire, but I pretty much agree with 99% of it, so what the heck! I’m posting it entirely in earnest.

1:55 video

If cities full of liberals get flooded, that’s just too bad. And we won’t have to eat rocks, we’ll have all those tasty fish who’ve been mopping up the drowned liberals.

Anthropogenic Continental Drift.

the ineffable Michael Pollan

The New York Times rather outdid itself on Sunday in serving up its traditional ration of stupidity and cant, but Earth Day occurs this week and provided the occasion for the Times to devote the entire Sunday Magazine to an Enviro-PC-Fest of preening libs.

Michael Pollan, for instance, took a long, hard look into his own navel, and understood that changing the world, the choices, habits, lifestyles, and behavior of all of the world’s 6 and a half billion inhabitants, reversing the course of history, and rejecting capitalism, consumerism, and modern industrial civilization might be only a matter of setting a personal good example.

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. ...

f you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on.

And even if what you do personally doesn’t actually have any real impact on the world, you should, of course, do all this goofy green stuff anyway, since even if you can’t meaningfully change the world, you can change yourself into an environmentally-PC member of the more-enlightened-than-thou elite, a nobler, finer being, capable of experiencing the orgasmic sense of narcissistic self-righteousness that only comes from composting.

Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

Alleged Anthropogenically-produced Global Warming has been reported by the media to be responsible for:

(list compiled by Warmlist)

Air pressure changes, allergies increase, Alps melting, anxiety, aggressive polar bears, algal blooms, Asthma, avalanches, billions of deaths, blackbirds stop singing, blizzards, blue mussels return, boredom, budget increases, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks, butterflies move north, cannibalistic polar bears, cardiac arrest, Cholera, civil unrest, cloud increase, cloud stripping, methane emissions from plants, cold spells (Australia), computer models, conferences, coral bleaching, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink, cold spells, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, damages equivalent to $200 billion, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, dermatitis, desert advance, desert life threatened, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, diarrhoea, disappearance of coastal cities, disaster for wine industry (US), Dolomites collapse, drought, drowning people, drowning polar bears, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early spring, earlier pollen season, earthquakes, Earth light dimming, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning out of control, Earth wobbling, El Niño intensification, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis,, Everest shrinking, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (ladybirds, pandas, pikas, polar bears, gorillas, whales, frogs, toads, turtles, orang-utan, elephants, tigers, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, penguins, a million species, half of all animal and plant species), experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, famine, farmers go under, figurehead sacked, fish catches drop, fish catches rise, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, floods, Florida economic decline, food poisoning, footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frosts, fungi invasion, Garden of Eden wilts, glacial retreat, glacial growth, global cooling, glowing clouds, Gore omnipresence, Great Lakes drop, greening of the North, Gulf Stream failure, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, heat waves, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, human fertility reduced, human health improvement, hurricanes, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, inclement weather, Inuit displacement, insurance premium rises, invasion of midges, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, Kew Gardens taxed, krill decline, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawyers’ income increased (surprise surprise!), lightning related insurance claims, Lyme disease, Malaria, malnutrition, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), megacryometeors, Melanoma, methane burps, melting permafrost, migration, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, more bad air days, more research needed, mountains break up, mudslides, next ice age, Nile delta damaged, no effect in India, nuclear plants bloom, ocean acidification, outdoor hockey threatened, oyster diseases, ozone loss, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, pests increase, plankton blooms, plankton loss, plant viruses, polar tours scrapped, psychosocial disturbances, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rainfall reduction, refugees, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rift on Capitol Hill, rivers raised, rivers dry up, rockfalls, rocky peaks crack apart, Ross river disease, salinity reduction, Salmonella, sea level rise, sex change, ski resorts threatened, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall reduction, societal collapse, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, spiders invade Scotland, squid population explosion, spectacular orchids, tectonic plate movement, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tree beetle attacks, tree foliage increase (UK), tree growth slowed, trees less colourful, trees more colourful, tropics expansion, tsunamis, Venice flooded, volcanic eruptions, walrus pups orphaned, wars over water, water bills double, water supply unreliability, water scarcity (20% of increase), weeds, West Nile fever, whales move north, wheat yields crushed in Australia, white Christmas dream ends, wildfires, wine – harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine – more English, wine – no more French , wind shift, winters in Britain colder, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, Yellow fever.

New York Times editorialist Nicholas D. Kristof (Joe and Valerie Wilson’s breakfast partner) quotes a Berkeley professor who claims to have identified yet another.

As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars — and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.

In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall — either drought or flooding — witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

There is some spectacular irony implicit in this particular accusation. The enlightened portion of mankind knows that the persecution of alleged witches has always taken the form of the bringing of false accusations of responsibility for untoward events through mysterious and preternatural agency against the innocent by unethical and deluded people seeking to benefit personally by gaining prestige and/or power thereby.

Which is, of course, precisely what leftists do when they point to the modern industrial economy and the citizens of the developed countries and accuse them of altering the climate of the earth.

We don’t need to travel to Tanzania to observe witch-hunting in action. Plenty of that activity is conducted right here at universities like Berkeley and in the pages of the New York Times.

Jon Caruthers, at American Thinker, identifies the left’s Climate Management agenda as simply a more ambitious version of earlier human attempts at managing Nature on a smaller-scale, as in Yellowstone Park, for example, described at length in Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park.

The conceit that scientists and bureaucrats can use the power the state to manage nature has lead to disaster in the past, and will again if the global warmists keep getting their way.

When Yellowstone National Park was first created, park officials believed they had to “save” the native fauna as well as protect the visitors by killing off the native wolf population. This they did in grand form. Additionally, they noticed the yearly occurrences of wildfires which, according to the then “modern” and “progressive” thought of the day, should be stamped out at all cost.

The net result of these notions was that 110 years or so later half the park burned down. It turns out that without the wolves the ruminants ran wild and ate up the deciduous trees, leaving only the pine trees to go forth and multiply. Anyone who’s started a campfire knows what happens when you compound this with 110 years of pine needles and flotsam and jetsam—you end up with the perfect firestorm. This is nothing natural. This situation was created by us—by human intervention into a formerly pristine ecosystem that was supposedly “managed” by the federal government – and the result was that half the park burned down.

Once again, on the issue of “global warming” we’re faced with government control—in this case not of the national park system, but of the entire globe. The “progressives” and their “grand thoughts” of the age seek to “manage” the globe in the same “modern” way our ancestors “managed” Yellowstone. Like our ancestors of yore, today’s environmentalists believe the government can control the environment better than Mother Nature can. Are we to suppose that the people who give us the DMV and the IRS are going to “manage” the globe in the same efficient and benevolent manner? In the grand scheme of things are we supposed to believe that we humans are actually better than Mother Nature at “managing” the global environment? For some reason, the enviro-nazis of the age seem to believe that Mother Nature is some kind of octogenarian Alzheimer’s patient and they’re the designated colostomy bag.

Read the whole thing.

Flagellants in Ingman Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)

There is something residing deep in human nature which believes that mankind is not entitled to comfort or prosperity and that the jealous gods of Nature are even now preparing to punish our insolence in illuminating our cities and heating our homes. The same impulse which actuated the medieval penitents who flagellated themselves to turn aside the wrath of God remains active and alive in today’s secular age.

Displays of piety, of course, are not necessarily entirely penitential or propitiatory. When cult membership is associated with social rank, religious behavior can function as a status marker. Thus, in today’s Western community of fashion, penitence no longer pertains to sin, and society’s elect proudly displays possession of the visible signs of grace by publicly repenting for consumption.

Cthulhu must be so pleased.

AFP:

Twenty-six major cities around the world are expected to turn off the lights on major landmarks, plunging millions of people into darkness to raise awareness about global warming, organisers said.

‘Earth Hour’ founder Andy Ridley said 371 cities, towns or local governments from Australia to Canada and even Fiji had signed up for the 60-minute shutdown at 0900 GMT on March 29.

“There are definitely 26 (cities) that we think, if it all goes to plan, we are going to see a major event of lights going off,” he told AFP.

Cities officially signed on include Chicago and San Francisco, Dublin, Manila, Bangkok, Copenhagen and Toronto, all of which will switch off lights on major landmarks and encourage businesses and homeowners to follow suit.

Ridley said it was also likely that other major European cities such as Rome and London, and the South Korean capital Seoul, although not officially taking part, would turn off lights on some attractions or landmarks.

The initiative began in Sydney last year and has become a global event, sweeping across 35 countries this year.

From 8:00 pm local time in Sydney, the energy-saving campaign will see harbourside icons such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House bathed only in moonlight, restaurant diners eat by candlelight and city skyscrapers turn off their neon signs.

Organisers hope the initiative will encourage people to be more aware of their energy usage, knowing that producing electricity pollutes the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels which are contributing to global warming.

But they are also aware that it will be just a small step in solving the problem of rising temperatures around the globe.

Nuremburg Chronicle, 1493

Is it possible? Here’s the New York Times actually reporting without derision scientific questioning of the responsibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming for an observed instance of change in the natural world.

In the scientific equivalent of the board game Clue, teams of biologists have been sifting spotty evidence and pointing to various culprits in the widespread vanishing of harlequin frogs.

The amphibians, of the genus Atelopus — actually toads despite their common name — once hopped in great numbers along stream banks on misty slopes from the Andes to Costa Rica. After 20 years of die-offs, they are listed as critically endangered by conservation groups and are mainly seen in zoos.

It looked as if one research team was a winner in 2006 when global warming was identified as the “trigger” in the extinctions by the authors of a much-cited paper in Nature. The researchers said they had found a clear link between unusually warm years and the vanishing of mountainside frog populations.

The “bullet,” the researchers said, appeared to be a chytrid fungus that has attacked amphibian populations in many parts of the world but thrives best in particular climate conditions. ...

Other researchers have been questioning that connection. Last year, two short responses in Nature questioned facets of the 2006 paper. In the journal, Dr. Pounds and his team said the new analyses in fact backed their view that “global warming contributes to the present amphibian crisis,” but avoided language saying it was “a key factor,” as they wrote in 2006.

Now, in the March 25 issue of PLoS Biology, another team argues that the die-offs of harlequins and some other amphibians reflect the spread and repeated introductions of the chytrid fungus. They question the analysis linking the disappearances to climate change. ...

“There is so much we still do not know!” David B. Wake, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail note after reading the new paper. The origin of the fungus and the way it kills amphibians remain unknown, he said, and there are ample mysteries about why it breaks out in certain places and times and not others.

Ah! but here we go, wait for it, here comes the Times’ conclusion:

Ross A. Alford, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, said such scientific tussles, while important, could be a distraction, particularly when considering the uncertain risks attending global warming.

“Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects,” he said, “is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.”

The Australian reports that the data is in, and it does not fit the catastrophist models.

It appears that the tipping point we are approaching is actually the one in which accumulating facts make the Convenient Fantasy (justifying the greater regulation and higher taxes the left wants) impossible to sustain.

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.”

Read the whole thing.

Don Surber loses his temper over the irrationality of it all.

Kansas Gov. Sebelius kills 2 new coal plants.

Does she prefer some other fossil fuel?

Or nukes?

Or flooding half her state for hydro-power?

Because unless she is willing to put up with one of those alternatives, Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas just doomed her state by vetoing a bill that would have cleared the way for two state-of-the-art coal-fired plants to serve the state’s electric needs in the 21st century.

She has no plan.

She prefers darkness.

“Instead of building two new coal plants, which would produce 11 million new tons of carbon dioxide each year, I support pursuing other, more promising energy and economic development alternatives,” she said in a statement accompanying the veto.

What are those alternatives?

Rubbing lamps to conjure up genies?

Hamsters in wheels?

If she is talking about solar power, then she is either an idiot or a charlatan. America has pursued that pipe-dream for 30 years or more.

In 2006, solar supplied 1% of 1% of America’s electric use. Wind supplied about ½%. Combined they produced 26.3 billion kilowatt hours of power – in a nation that consumed 4,053 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

Will anyone challenge this woman’s ignorance on the subject?

The stupidity of people is truly amazing. My college class, for instance, is full of people who get all their opinions from the daily papers, and who are utterly econonically illiterate. They are perfectly prepared to believe that an injection of government funding will change reality, and all those idle technologists (unmotivated by the paltry rewards available right now via the sale of cheaper, cleaner forms of energy) will suddenly spring into action and, abracadabra! new magical ways will be found to make wind and solar power economically competitive. They’re nuts.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Every time some agency in the Bush Administration declines to place the US Government’s official imprimatur on a particular piece of environmentalist agitprop concocted by a moonbat working on the taxpayer’s dime, the aggrieved moonbat runs leaking to the New York Times, which duly cranks out another “Bush Suppresses Science” headline destined to echo around the left side of the blogosphere throughout eternity.

But you didn’t see any story in the Times or Post about the case of atmospheric physicist Ferenc Miskolczi, forced to resign from NASA when supervisors declined to allow his research to be released.

DailyTech:

Miklós Zágoni isn’t just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Langley Research Center.

After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. “I fell in love,” he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.

“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.

How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.

The Telegraph has an amusing story on the rise of eco-snobbery.

What was it, this frisson that passed between the young woman behind the counter at Pret A Manger and me? It wasn’t flirtation, exactly. It was more conspiratorial than that. A knowing look. A social judgment shared.

As she asked me if I wanted a plastic bag for my two items – a (wild) salmon sandwich and a banana – the man at the head of the queue next to mine was asked the same question by another assistant. He had a sandwich and an apple. The point is, I said no. He said yes. That was when the look was exchanged.

That, I am ashamed to admit, was the moment I felt superior, if only by one degree, if only for a second. The man had committed a faux pas. He had transgressed an unwritten ethical code. He had fallen foul of the new morality, which actually, if you think about it, is also the new snobbery.

It is apparent everywhere. In a restaurant the other night our companions asked us if we wanted sparkling water or whether we were happy with a jug of tap. The clue to the correct answer was in the word “happy”. We went with the tap. It wasn’t that we were being cheap – but we probably were being a little smug. My wife and I are paid-up members of the enlightened middle classes, you see. Our consciousnesses have been raised. We are E, the modern equivalent of U.

Just as Nancy Mitford divided society into the upper classes and the aspiring middle classes – that is, into U and Non-U – so society is being divided into the environmentally aware and environmentally unaware, or E and Non-E. It satisfies a need we seem to have to judge one another.

Read the whole thing.

Today’s spoiled haute bourgeoisie extend aspirational self-affirmation far beyond mere careerism and materialistic consumption into realms of spiritual narcissicism and ethical pretension undreamt of by previous generations.

The New York Times quotes authorities explaining that a short period of colder weather doesn’t mean anything. It really takes two decades of slightly warmer weather to establish firm understanding of the direction and processes at work in climate cycles of warming and cooling operating on a Geologic time-scale.

Many scientists also say that the cool spell in no way undermines the enormous body of evidence pointing to a warming world with disrupted weather patterns, less ice and rising seas should heat-trapping greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests continue to accumulate in the air.

“The current downturn is not very unusual,” said Carl Mears, a scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, a private research group in Santa Rosa, Calif., that has been using satellite data to track global temperature and whose findings have been held out as reliable by a variety of climate experts. He pointed to similar drops in 1988, 1991-92, and 1998, but with a long-term warming trend clear nonetheless.

“Temperatures are very likely to recover after the La Niña event is over,” he said. ...

Climate skeptics typically take a few small pieces of the puzzle to debunk global warming, and ignore the whole picture that the larger science community sees by looking at all the pieces,” said Ignatius G. Rigor, a climate scientist at the Polar Science Center of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Before Obama starts working on plans for those new federally-required carbon credits, he’d better read this DailyTech article.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile—the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C—a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

William Briggs reads Coby Beck’s guide to arguing in favor of Anthropogenic Global Warming, and encounters a new form of scientific argument.

A few weeks ago I speculated what would happen if human-caused significant global warming (AGW) turned out to be false. There might be a number of people who will refuse to give up on the idea, even though it is false, because their desire that AGW be true would be overwhelming.

I guessed that these people would slip into pseudoscience, and so would need to generate excuses why we have not yet seen the effects of AGW. One possibility was human-created dust (aerosols) blocking incoming solar radiation. Another was “bad data”: AGW is true, the earth really is warmer, but the data somehow are corrupted. And so on.

I failed to anticipate the most preposterous excuse of all. I came across it while browsing the excellent site Climate Debate Daily, which today linked to Coby Beck’s article “How to Talk to a Global Warming Sceptic“. Beck gives a list of arguments typically offered by “skeptics” and then attempts to refute them. Some of these refutations are good, and worth reading.

His attempt at rebutting the skeptical criticism “The Modelers Won’t Tell Us How Confident the Models Are” furnishes us with our pseudoscientific excuse. The skeptical objection is

There is no indication of how much confidence we should have in the models. How are we supposed to know if it is a serious prediction or just a wild guess?

and Beck’s retort is

There is indeed a lot of uncertainty in what the future will be, but this is not all because of an imperfect understanding of how the climate works. A large part of it is simply not knowing how the human race will react to this danger and/or how the world economy will develope. Since these factors control what emissions of CO2 will accumulate in the atmosphere, which in turn influences the temperature, there is really no way for a climate model to predict what the future will be.

This is as lovely a non sequitur as you’re ever likely to find. I can’t help but wonder if he blushed when he wrote it; I know I did when I read it. This excuse is absolutely bullet proof. I am in awe of it. There is no possible observation that can negate it. Whatever happens is a win for its believer. If the temperature goes up, the believer can say, “Our theories predicted this.” If the temperature goes down, the believer can say, “There was no way to know the future.”

What the believer in this statement is asking us to do, if it is not already apparent, is this: he wants you to believe that his prognostications are true because AGW is true, but he also wants you to believe that he should not be held accountable for his predictions should they fail because AGW is true. Thus, AGW is just true.

Polar bears are drowning, Al Gore warns us, complaining of Global Warming shrinking Arctic ice. But, look! ice levels west of Greenland are at 15 year highs this year.

“Doesn’t matter,” reply Anthropogenic Global Warming supporting scientists, “It’s just an insignificant variation in weather patterns, perfectly normal, and it doesn’t mean a thing.”

Sermitsiak:

The ice between Canada and southwestern Greenland has reached its highest level in 15 years.

Minus 30 degrees Celsius. That’s how cold it’s been in large parts of western Greenland where the population has been bundling up in hats and scarves. At the same time, Denmark’s Meteorological Institute states that the ice between Canada and southwest Greenland right now has reached its greatest extent in 15 years.

‘Satellite pictures show that the ice expansion has extended farther south this year. In fact, it’s a bit past the Nuuk area. We have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south. On the eastern coast it hasn’t been colder than normal, but there has been a good amount of snow.’

But how do these new reports fit in with continual reports that ice in the Arctic Ocean has been melting at a record rate due to increasing temperatures? And isn’t global warming at the top of the political agenda these years?

If it’s up to meteorologists from Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, there is not anything inherently contradictory that extreme cold is replaced by higher temperatures than average. Or that melting sea ice occasionally is replaced by expanding ice sheets.

‘Weather is a phenomenon which changes from year to year and right now the atmosphere has changed so we have cold weather. That will certainly mean that melting ice in the North Pole will be less this year, but next year the situation can look completely different,’ according to Henriksen.

To sum things up, global warming hasn’t been called off. In the meanwhile, western Greenlanders will have to accept that the cold weather continues for some time. At least until next Tuesday when milder weather could be on the way, according to Polarfronten online.

Hat tip to Lynn Davidson.

David Shearman, co-author of The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, thinks democracy and individual liberty can get in way of the quick implementation of the kinds of measures experts like himself have decided are necessary. Calling people like himself “communists” is so unfair!

Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. The subject is almost sacrosanct and those who indulge in criticism are labeled as Marxists, socialists, fundamentalists and worse. These labels are used because alternatives to democracy cannot be perceived! Support for Western democracy is messianic as proselytised by a President leading a flawed democracy.

There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. It is not that liberal democracy cannot react once it sees a threat, for example, the speedy response to a recent international financial emergency. If governments can recognise a financial emergency and in an instant move heaven and earth (and billions of dollars, pounds sterling and euros) to contain it, why are they unable to do the same in response to a global environmental emergency? Quite simply our system is seen to live and breathe by the present economic system; the problem is that living and breathing within the confines of the world ecological systems is contrary to the activity of progress and development as defined within liberal democracy. ...

We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.

If there was ever any doubt that inside the environmentalist movement’s green, there lurked a bright pink core, Shearman is there to prove it.

Even a few people on the left can see through the lunacy of Global Warming. Here’s Alexander Cockburn promoting his new book attacking the leading popular delusion of our time.

Here in the West, the so-called ‘war on global warming’ is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; BA hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch. This kind of behaviour is demented.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

It’s cold in Minnesota, and David Karki wishes Al Gore would just send some of that Global Warming his way, and leave his civil liberties alone.

Minus 17° F. That was the low temperature this mid-winter morning as I walked outside and coughed on the frigid arctic air that burned my windpipe as I attempted to inhale it, before starting my minivan’s engine so it could idle for 20 minutes and then be warm enough to drive.

Some think we Minnesotans are crazy to live in such conditions, but then every location has its risks – hurricanes in the southeast, summer heat in the desert southwest, and so on. Those of us endowed with a healthy sense of humility, logic and common sense understand that these extremes are perfectly normal; that they have been occurring off and on for many, many years; and that they are far beyond our puny ability to significantly affect.

Sadly, this grounded understanding has completely escaped one Al Gore and his radical environmentalist acolytes. Ol’ Al has jumped off the reality train and headed for parts unknown.

Never mind the crust of frost on my bedroom windows; Al says “the climate crisis is significantly worse.” You want to come up here without thermal underwear, a parka, gloves and a stocking cap and say that? ...

And never mind the federal government banning incandescent light bulbs come 2012; Al says it’s not enough, and that we must change laws, “not just light bulbs.” Uh, first of all Al, the new ban is changing the law, you idiot! And more importantly, you and your wacko tree-hugging allies have no right whatsoever to stomp on personal liberties just to stroke your massive ego for having solved an entirely non-existent crisis.

That is really the point here. The tyrannical means being used to implement this lunatic environmentalist policy is so beyond anything we Americans should find tolerable, much less acceptable, that even if the ends were desirable we should not stand for it. What we are really talking about, when you take away the pseudo-benevolent green crapola behind which these psychos hide, is totalitarian control of every last detail of your life.

Read the whole rant.

The San Jose Mercury News reports a fascinating legal battle is underway which could only take place on the left coast.

In a case with statewide significance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office is pursuing a Sunnyvale couple under a little-known California law because redwood trees in their backyard cast a shadow over their neighbor’s solar panels.

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Prius and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they’ve done nothing wrong.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Lame midi

The wife and I attended today the Old Dominion Hounds’ Joint Meet with the Casanova Hunt (to which numerous other Northern Virginia Hunts—including our own Blue Ridge Hunt—were invited).

The joint meet was a fund raiser undertaken to support efforts to oppose Dominion Power’s plan to build 16-story 500-kv electrical transmission towers through scenic and historic Frederick, Warren, Rappahannock, Culpeper, Fauquier, Prince William and Loudoun counties.

And for what? To bring more electrical power to the District of Columbia to illuminate federal offices whose functionaries are busily employed drafting new regulations and spending more tax dollars.

If the evil federal government wants more power, let ‘em build nuclear power plants in the District, or do without and borrow some cardigan sweaters from Jimmy Carter.

Not in my backyard, and not in my neighboring fox hunt’s backyard, say I.

We did not get our fair share of abuse, actually. But we did see some fine riding and some lovely scenery. The Blue Ridge really is blue down there in Fauquier County. And the natives are as charming and hospitable as in the rest of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Link to photos at my wife’s hunt diary.

The federal government already prevents Americans from using durable (made with lead) house paint, and assures that new toilets don’t flush properly. Now California wants to go a step further and take control of California residents’ heating and cooling systems and home appliances.

Californians love Big Brother!

WorldNetDaily:

Add thermostats to the list of private property the government would like to regulate as the state of California looks to require that residents install remotely monitored temperature controls in their homes next year.

The government is seeking to limit rolling blackouts and free up electric and natural gas resources by mandating that every new heating and cooling system include a “non-removable” FM receiver. The thermostat is also capable of controlling other appliances in the house, such as electric water heaters, refrigerators, pool pumps, computers and lights in response to signals from utility companies. If contractors and residents refuse to comply with the mandate, their building permits will be denied.

The proposal, set to be considered by the commission Jan. 30, requires each thermostat to be equipped with a radio communication device to send “price signals” and automatically adjust temperature up or down 4 degrees for cooling and heating, as California’s public and private utility organizations deem necessary.

Claudia Chandler, assistant executive director for the California Energy Commission, told WND the new systems would be highly beneficial to residents.

“From the Energy Commission’s perspective, all we’re doing is ensuring that this new technology is included in new homes instead of the older programmable technology,” she said.

The Programmable Communication Thermostat, or PCT, will allow power authorities to control home temperatures without granting consumers ability to override settings during “emergency events.” Nowhere in the proposal does it clarify what type of situation would qualify as an “emergency,” but Chandler offered her own explanation: “An emergency is when the utilities need to implement rolling blackouts and drop load in order to be able to meet their supplies because the integrity of the grid is being jeopardized.”

She claims residents will be able to manually override controls in all cases, but the 2008 Building Efficiency Standards (Page 64), known as Title 24, specifically states: “The PCT shall not allow customer changes to thermostat settings during emergency events.”

The Alternative Energy Retailer quotes a source offering some trenchant criticism of the entire Alternative Energy movement.

Government incentive programs for adopting alternative energy are totally corrupt,” warns Alex Epstein, business analyst with the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Irvine, Calif. “They consist of expropriating the wealth of Americans, including energy companies that actually produce ample, affordable power, and using it to finance sources of energy that do not produce ample, affordable power – even, in some cases, after decades of subsidies. It makes no more sense than giving Americans liberal incentives to use horses and buggies instead of cars.”

For Epstein, the federal and state governments should play no role in advocating the American usage of alternative energy. He adds that using concerns over global warning to promote alternative energy is inappropriate.

“The purpose of government is the protection of the individual rights of all to their lives, liberty and property,” he says. “For government action to be justified in response to claims of global warming – the cause of today’s alternative energy infatuation – it must be scientifically demonstrable, in a court of law, that individuals’ burning of carbon fuels will do demonstrable harm to specific individuals through some sort of catastrophic change in weather. The state of evidence regarding global warming today is not even close to that. Even the highly politicized, highly speculative United Nations projections of a gradual, 8-degree-average warming over the next 100 years would be easily dealt with by industrialized people, who have sturdy houses, air conditioners, and sunscreen to cope with heat or bad weather, and ample time to migrate if necessary.”

Under the Objectivist viewpoint, alternative energy companies should sink or swim without any assistance from public funding. “If someone has a great idea for a new method of producing of energy, great – let them prove it in the free market,” continues Epstein. “If someone wants to make himself feel good by pretending that he is averting an apocalypse by using unattractive light bulbs, throwing away his clothes dryer, driving an overpriced car, buying carbon offsets from Al Gore, or spending a fortune on solar panels in a free country, he has a right to do so. But he has no right to demand that the government compel others to sacrifice for his unproven claims of doom.”

BBC Science Correspondent David Whitehouse, in the New Statesman, observes that the key problem with the theory of Global Warming and climate projection models is that Global Warming has stopped, and the theory and the models can’t explain why.

‘The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001’

Global warming stopped? Surely not. What heresy is this? Haven’t we been told that the science of global warming is settled beyond doubt and that all that’s left to the so-called sceptics is the odd errant glacier that refuses to melt?

Aren’t we told that if we don’t act now rising temperatures will render most of the surface of the Earth uninhabitable within our lifetimes? But as we digest these apocalyptic comments, read the recent IPCC’s Synthesis report that says climate change could become irreversible. Witness the drama at Bali as news emerges that something is not quite right in the global warming camp.

With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 – there has been no warming over the 12 months.

But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly. ...

It was a pity that the delegates at Bali didn’t discuss this or that the recent IPCC Synthesis report did not look in more detail at this recent warming standstill. Had it not occurred, or if the flatlining of temperature had occurred just five years earlier we would have no talk of global warming and perhaps, as happened in the 1970’s, we would fear a new Ice Age! Scientists and politicians talk of future projected temperature increases. But if the world has stopped warming what use these projections then?

Some media commentators say that the science of global warming is now beyond doubt and those who advocate alternative approaches or indeed modifications to the carbon dioxide greenhouse warming effect had lost the scientific argument. Not so.

Certainly the working hypothesis of CO2 induced global warming is a good one that stands on good physical principles but let us not pretend our understanding extends too far or that the working hypothesis is a sufficient explanation for what is going on.

I have heard it said, by scientists, journalists and politicians, that the time for argument is over and that further scientific debate only causes delay in action. But the wish to know exactly what is going on is independent of politics and scientists must never bend their desire for knowledge to any political cause, however noble.

The science is fascinating, the ramifications profound, but we are fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a complicated system as the Earth’s atmosphere’s interaction with sunlight to decide. We know far less than many think we do or would like you to think we do. We must explain why global warming has stopped.

David Deming notes that Global Warming enthusiasts have no intention of letting the weather get in the way of a good theory.

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. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

Last January, $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a devastating five-day freeze. Thousands of agricultural employees were thrown out of work. At the supermarket, citrus prices soared. In the wake of the freeze, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked President Bush to issue a disaster declaration for affected counties. A few months earlier, Mr. Schwarzenegger had enthusiastically signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a law designed to cool the climate. California Sen. Barbara Boxer continues to push for similar legislation in the U.S. Senate.

In April, a killing freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina’s peach crop, and 90 percent of North Carolina’s apple harvest. At Charlotte, N.C., a record low temperature of 21 degrees Fahrenheit on April 8 was the coldest ever recorded for April, breaking a record set in 1923. On June 8, Denver recorded a new low of 31 degrees Fahrenheit. Denver’s temperature records extend back to 1872.

Recent weeks have seen the return of unusually cold conditions to the Northern Hemisphere. On Dec. 7, St. Cloud, Minn., set a new record low of minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. On the same date, record low temperatures were also recorded in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years.

Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri are just emerging from a destructive ice storm that left at least 36 people dead and a million without electric power. People worldwide are being reminded of what used to be common sense: Cold temperatures are inimical to human welfare and warm weather is beneficial. Left in the dark and cold, Oklahomans rushed out to buy electric generators powered by gasoline, not solar cells. No one seemed particularly concerned about the welfare of polar bears, penguins or walruses. Fossil fuels don’t seem so awful when you’re in the cold and dark.

If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you’re hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can’t make this stuff up.

Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.

A paper by Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

ABSTRACT

A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth’s weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge. The environmental effects of rapid expansion of the nuclear and hydrocarbon energy industries are discussed.

Summary Excerpt:

Predictions of catastrophic global warming are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy. The empirical evidence – actual measurements of Earth’s temperature and climate – shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, during four of the seven decades since 1940 when average CO2 levels steadily increased, U.S. average temperatures were actually decreasing. While CO2 levels have increased substantially and are expected to continue doing so and humans have been responsible for part of this increase, the effect on the environment has been benign.

There is, however, one very dangerous possibility.

Our industrial and technological civilization depends upon abundant, low-cost energy. This civilization has already brought unprecedented prosperity to the people of the more developed nations. Billions of people in the less developed nations are now lifting themselves from poverty by adopting this technology.

Hydrocarbons are essential sources of energy to sustain and extend prosperity. This is especially true of the developing nations, where available capital and technology are insufficient to meet rapidly increasing energy needs without extensive use of hydrocarbon fuels. If, through misunderstanding of the underlying science and through misguided public fear and hysteria, mankind significantly rations and restricts the use of hydrocarbons, the worldwide increase in prosperity will stop. The result would be vast human suffering and the loss of hundreds of millions of human lives. Moreover, the prosperity of those in the developed countries would be greatly reduced.

Townhall.com:

With the official hurricane season now over, we now have a better idea of what 85%+ forecast certainty meant: Wrong 100% of the time.

In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast a 85% probability there would be an “above normal” hurricane season.

This is the second year running the government hurricane forecast was wrong. This 0-2 record may tell us something about other similarly “certain” forecasts, such as those issued by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If forecasters can’t get hurricane projections right during hurricane season, why should we trust their forecasts for a hundred years from now?

NOAA had predicted 7-9 hurricanes and 3-5 major hurricanes, but there were just six hurricanes, only two of which were “major.” There are “normally” six hurricanes, two major, and 11 named storms.

Marc Morano reports on Senator James Inhofe’s blog from the UN conference in Bali.

How do you save the Earth from catastrophic climate change? Create a new International tax to be used to redistribute monies from countries like to US to the Third World.

A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, told Inhofe EPW Press Blog…

Schwank said at least “$10-$40 billion dollars per year” could be generated by the tax, and wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the “polluters pay principle.”

The U.S. and other wealthy nations need to “contribute significantly more to this global fund,” Schwank explained. He also added, “It is very essential to tax coal.”

The UN was presented with a new report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.” The report stated there was an “urgent need” for a global tax in order for “damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world.”

The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would “flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund” to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.

Schwank said a global carbon dioxide tax is an idea long overdue that is urgently needed to establish “a funding scheme which generates the resources required to address the dimension of challenge with regard to climate change costs.” ...

The environmental group Friends of the Earth, in attendance in Bali, also advocated the transfer of money from rich to poor nations on Wednesday.

“A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth. ...

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen warned about these types of carbon regulations earlier this year. “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life,” Lindzen said in March 2007.

How do experts and activists battle Global Warming? They jet off to Bali for a two-week UN conference focussed on how best to tax and regulate the rest of us.

But the good times were spoiled this year, it seems, by the intrusion of a number of prominent scientist skeptics, as Senator James Inhofe reports via the US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works:

An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to “have the courage to do nothing” in response to UN demands.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.

“Climate change is a non-problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing,” Monckton told participants.

“The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)” Monckton added. (LINK)

Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists.

“UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings,” Monckton explained.

“It is a circus here,” agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that refute the UN’s climate claims.

“This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences,” Evans said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort. (Note: An analysis by Bloomberg News on December 6 found: “Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.”

Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies. (LINK)

“We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don’t cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years,” Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog. Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper “Carbon Emissions Don’t Cause Global Warming.” (LINK)

Evans touted a new peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists appearing in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found “Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence.” (LINK)

“Most of the people here have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction,” Evans explained. ...

UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports since its inception going back to 1990, had a clear message to UN participants.

“There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any effect whatsoever on the climate,” Gray, who shares in the Nobel Prize awarded to the UN IPCC, explained. (LINK)

“All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. If you examine every single proposition of the IPCC thoroughly, you find that the science somewhere fails,” Gray, who wrote the book “The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of “Climate Change 2001,” said.

“It fails not only from the data, but it fails in the statistics, and the mathematics,” he added.

Evans, who believes the UN has heavily politicized science, warned there is going to be a “dangerous time for science” ahead.

“We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction” away from fears of a man-made climate crisis, Evans explained.

“The two are splitting. This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between,” he concluded.

New Zealander Bryan Leland of the International Climate Science Coalition warned participants that all the UN promoted discussions of “carbon trading” should be viewed with suspicion.

“I am an energy engineer and I know something about electricity trading and I know enough about carbon trading and the inaccuracies of carbon trading to know that carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else,” Leland said.

“We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to ‘solve’ a [climate] problem that probably does not exist,” Leland added.

And as the Daily Mail reports, the Vatican has begun to recognize that Environmentalism constitutes a religious competitor and Global Warming its dogma, and Pope Benedict himself is going on the offensive against them.

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

Holman Jenkins, in the Wall Street Journal, describes the way the popular culture of the mainstream media forms its consensus of intellectual conformity, and how some clever people respond.

Availability cascade” has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; “informational cascade” for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs; and “reputational cascade” for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he’s playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: “The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona.”

Here’s exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged “consensus” arrived at their positions by counting heads?

It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn’t. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they’ve chosen to believe.

Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

With politicians and lobbyists, of course, you are dealing with sophisticated people versed in the ways of public opinion whose very prosperity depends on positioning themselves via such cascades. Their reactions tend to be, for that reason, on a higher intellectual level.

Take John Dingell. He told an environmental publication last year that the “world . . . is great at having consensuses that are in great error.” Yet he turned around a few months later and introduced a sweeping carbon tax bill, which would confront Congress more frontally than Congress cares to be confronted with a rational approach to climate change if Congress really believes human activity is responsible.

Mr. Dingell is no fool. Is he merely trying to embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change at the expense of out-of-favor industries such as Mr. Dingell’s beloved Detroit?

Take Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist working with Kleiner Perkins, a firm Mr. Gore joined last month to promote alternative energy investments. Mr. Khosla told a recent Senate hearing: “One does not need to believe in climate change to support climate change legislation. . . . Many executives would prefer to deal with known legislation even if unwarranted.”

Mr. Khosla is no fool either. His argument is that the cascade itself is a reason that politicians can gain comfort by getting aboard his agenda.

Scotland on Sunday:

They were once outlawed for being used as seditious weapons of war. Now, bagpipes have been blasted as an environmental menace.

Over-intensive logging means that the African wood used to make Scotland’s national instrument faces being wiped out.

Conservation groups are letting out skirls of protest, urging musicians and instrument manufacturers to make sure their pipes come from eco-friendly sources.

As part of the campaign, Scots are being asked to fund the planting of “bagpipe trees” in a bid to atone for the environmental damage.

Traditionally the chanter on the bottom of Highland pipes, which is used to create the melody, was made from native woods such as bog oak.

But Scottish mariners who travelled to Africa in the 18th century returned with supplies of African Blackwood, which proved to be far more resilient and produced a sweeter sound.

Since then the species, known as Mpingo in Swahili, has been a staple component of most quality pipes.

Conservation group Fauna & Flora International (FFI) said urgent action is needed to prevent the species being lost.

“With its beauty, fine grain, durable structure and natural oils no other wood looks – or sounds – the same as African Blackwood,” said its campaign co-ordinator Georgina Magin.

“But it has been heavily exploited for woodwind instruments like bagpipes and stocks are now seriously depleted.

“If woodlands and the valuable timbers they contain are managed unsustainably, species such as African Blackwood will become extinct.

“Already in northern Tanzania, where unsustainable logging occurs, Blackwood and other species are threatened with commercial extinction.

“This is a pivotal time for Blackwood, and musicians can play a crucial role in ensuring this unique timber remains available long into the future.”

It is believed that as much as 70% of Blackwood trees in Tanzania have already been felled. ...

But pipe major and manufacturer David MacMurchie, who uses Blackwood, was less than impressed by the campaign.

“I for one am not going be made to feel guilty by a bunch of misguided environmental do-gooders,” he said. “I am sure that the communities in Africa use a hell of a lot more Blackwood than bagpipe manufacturers.

“It is unfair and misleading to try to blame it all on us.”

MacMurchie, a former member of the band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, said he was happy to make pipes from plastic, but said the overwhelming public demand was for traditional wooden instruments.

Other alternative woods, such as ebony, are vulnerable to splitting and, in some areas, are themselves under threat.

Most pipe manufacturers believe that no other wood has the same durability and resonance as the Blackwood. The African tree takes 80 years to reach just 40cm in height.

Greenpeace thinks it has found the way to defeat the clever Japanese, who manage to harvest hump-backed whales in defiance of an international ban on whaling… “for research.” After they’ve been “researched,” you see, Japan’s harvested whales are not simply discarded, but instead manage to find their way to Japanese dining tables.

This year Greenpeace (couch-Eco-warriors that they are) is following the humpback whales by satellite, and proposes to save them by asking its website’s bleating moonbat readers to select a name. Once they’ve named the puppy, the theory is that presumably it will be that much easier to guilt the Japanese about eating it.

And what a choice of names!
——————————————————
Again, from Karen L. Myers.

Al Gore has declined to debate Global Warming skeptics, so Junk Science brings the debate to him by presenting replies from a number of prominent scientific climate skeptics in this 8:52 video.

The same Junk Science is also offering a $125,000 prize to anyone who can prove, in a scientific manner, that humans are causing harmful global warming.

John Coleman, meteorologist and founder of the Weather Channel, denounces Global Warming in no uncertain terms. He’s right, too.

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minutes documentary segment.

I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party. However, Global Warming, ie Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.

I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped. The sky is not falling. And, natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway. I strongly believe that the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.