Mitali Saran: Eyjafjallajökull, which in the local language means “A hundred thousand canceled flights later you still won’t be able to pronounce this.”

It was the Icelandic economy’s last wish that its ashes be scattered over the EU.
–Fred McCutcheon.

The eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull which has produced major disruptions in European air traffic demonstrates effectively the point that the limits of observational potential of the human lifetime and the very limited store of accumulated human knowledge leave plenty of room for the natural world to surprise us.

In the weekend section of the Wall Street Journal, James P. Sterba notes that the age of jet air travel has been too short for the necessity for aviation technology to have yet adapted to coping with the effects of with major eruptions. We are going to have to adapt. Sterba demonstrates that vulcanism has had a much greater impact on human history than is generally recognized.

In 1982, Mount Galunggung (VEI 4) in West Java, Indonesia, almost shot down a British Airways 747 cruising at 37,000 feet from Kuala Lumpur to Perth through its ash cloud. The plane’s four engines died, it glided out of the ash down to 13,000 feet, where Engine No. 4 was restarted, then the others, and an emergency landing at Jakarta saved 248 passengers and a crew of 15.

That was a spectacular wake-up call, but that same year a volcano 10 times more powerful, El Chichón (VEI 5) on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, would usher in the return of stratospheric calamity. It punched so much sulfurous gas into the stratosphere that airlines world-wide were flying through acid mists.

Except for the windows pilots look ahead through, airplane windows are made out of plastic. Sulfuric acid eats plastic. You can see little reflective stars in them. It’s called “star crazing.” After El Chichón, airlines found that windows were crazing up in months instead of years—especially on routes that flew over the poles through the stratosphere where the acid cloud hung on and on, seemingly defying gravity. Every flight from New York to Tokyo, for example, went through it. Repolishing the windows cost tens of millions. …

In the summer following Tambora’s 1815 eruption, crop failures dotted the northern hemisphere—rice failed in parts of China, wheat and corn in Europe, potatoes in Ireland (where it rained nonstop for eight weeks and triggered a typhus epidemic that killed 65,000 and spread to England and Europe). At Lake Geneva in Switzerland, vacationers from England sat out gloomy June storms reading ghost stories and composing their own. Lord Byron wrote a narrative poem, “Darkness,” in which there was no sun, “no day.” His personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, wrote “The Vampyre,” and Mary Shelley began “Frankenstein.” Famine spread across Switzerland. Food riots and insurrections swept France, which had already been caught up in the chaos following Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo. …

In New England, 1816 was called “the year without a summer” because there were crop-killing frosts every month, including the normally frost-free months of summer, across the region. It snowed in Virginia in June and again on the Fourth of July. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, the retired president, had such a poor corn harvest that he had to borrow $1,000 to make up for lost income. In New Haven, Conn., the last frost of spring was on June 11, and the first frost of autumn on Aug. 22—shortening the normal growing season by 55 days. Corn, the staple crop of New England, couldn’t mature under such conditions. Crop failures were widespread. In Connecticut, three-quarters of the state’s corn crop was too unripe, soft or moldy to make corn meal.

While New Englanders faced food shortages and higher prices, they did not experience famine. But the hardship was a tipping point that helped propel Yankee farmers off the land. In their elegant 1983 book, “Volcano Weather: The Story of the Year Without a Summer,” Woods Hole oceanographer Henry Stommel and his wife, Elizabeth, wrote: “The summer of 1816 marked the point at which many New England farmers who had weighed the advantages of going west made up their minds to do so.”

The great migration westward had already begun, but Tambora gave it a boost. The year without a summer, for example, helped convince the New York State legislature to support a proposed canal from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, which would help farmers along it market their produce. Funds were authorized in April 1817, and construction began on the Fourth of July. The Erie Canal, built without federal money, opened in 1825. The federal government at the time was preoccupied with finding a way west that started closer to the capital; that is, building an interstate road threading through the mountains from Cumberland, Md., to Wheeling, then in the state of Virginia on the Ohio River. This so-called National Road, built on a foundation of stones, opened in 1818.

Access to the Ohio Valley and beyond through the Erie Canal and the National Road set the stage for the transformation of the Midwest from forests to farms that would last through the 19th century and well into the 20th.

The real effects of volcanic eruptions certainly put the supposititious hazards of AGW into perspective, don’t they?

I bet it would work on democrats, too.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

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The federal government has nearly doubled the no-fly list since the Xmas bomb attempt.

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“There goes my life’s work.” George Monbiot (the original moonbat) laments the impact of Climategate. The experts, he observes, are “Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more.”

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The recent New Yorker profile of Paul Krugman features some particularly fine examples of superbia.

“We were the only textbook that incorporated the financial crisis, as we were chronically late. We were supposed to have the manuscript delivered in August or September, and by October we were still working, and we just said, ‘We can’t send it out like this, too much is going on.’ We were really in nail-biting territory, because you have to get it to the printers by a certain date or you miss the academic year.”

“We were right in the middle of that when the Nobel Prize committee called, and Robin’s reaction was ‘We don’t have time for this! …

“Paul is really averse to being drawn into a social network, to being groomed,” Wells says. “He doesn’t go to Washington because he doesn’t want to fall into that. As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

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Richard Murphy explains to his readers why he fights.

Tory parliamentary candidates have undergone training by a rightwing group whose leadership has described the NHS as “the biggest waste of money in the UK”, claimed global warming is “a scam” and suggested that the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified.

This is the reality of the libertarian right – openly hostile to humanity at large, embracing abuses of human rights, putting profits before else, contemptuous of the needs of the majority, denying facts when it suits them, seeking to destroy society as we know it, and wishing to make life for most considerably worse than it is now to advance their own enrichment.

That’s why I take them on here – and the bogus economics some of them use to support their arguments.

Gaunt and nervous, with trembling hands, former head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) Phil Jones faced some uncomfortable questions from a parliamentary science committee yesterday. The Guardian seemed to think he got off more easily than he might have done, because the members felt sorry for him.

Jones did his best to persuade the Commons science and technology committee that all was well in the house of climate science. If they didn’t quite believe him, they didn’t have the heart to press the point. The man has had three months of hell, after all.

Jones’s general defence was that anything people didn’t like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all “standard practice” among climate scientists. “Maybe it should be, but it’s not.”

And he seemed to be right. The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. “They’ve never asked,” he said.

He gave a little ground, and it was the only time the smile left the face of the vice-chancellor, Edward Acton: “I’ve written some awful emails,” Jones admitted. Nobody asked if, as claimed by British climate sceptic Doug Keenan, he had for two decades suppressed evidence of the unreliability of key temperature data from China.

But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.

Nor did the MPs probe how conflicts of interest have become routine in Jones’s world of analysing and reconstructing past temperatures. How, as the emails reveal, Jones found himself intemperately reviewing papers that sought to criticise his own work. And then, should the papers somehow get into print, judging what place they should have in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he and his fellow emails held senior positions.

But the committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, “manipulation of the publication and peer review system”, and “intolerance to challenge … which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process.” Ouch.

Neville Nicholls

“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” — Groucho Marx.

The Express:

Climate scientists yesterday stunned Britons suffering the coldest winter for 30 years by claiming last month was the ­hottest January the world has ever seen.

The remarkable claim, based on global satellite data, follows Arctic temperatures that brought snow, ice and travel chaos to millions in the UK.

At the height of the big freeze, the entire country was blanketed in snow. But Australian weather expert Professor Neville Nicholls, of Monash University in Melbourne, said yesterday: “January, according to satellite data, was the hottest January we’ve ever seen.

“Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen. November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen.” Veteran ­climatologist Professor Nicholls was speaking at an online climate change briefing, added: “It’s not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven’t warmed in the past 50 years.”

How many times will Bruno Ganz’s Hitler in Oliver Hirschbiegal’s “Der Untergang” (2004) be re-subtitled for satiric purposes? Who knows? However often they use it, it always seems to work pretty well.

This time the Fuehrer is getting the bad news about Climategate

3: 50 Hitler On Climate Change

From Viral Footage via RightWing News.

Victor Davis Hanson finds that the wisdom of the commentariat has changed. Via the News Junkie.

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Labour deliberately set out to alter the culture, character, ethnic composition, and consciousness of Britain. If they didn’t like it the way it was, couldn’t they just have moved?

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Phil Jones admits no significant Global Warming since 1995. His reference to the unknowability of the world-wide extent of Medieval Warming Period implicitly concedes that the science cannot possibly be regarded as settled.

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Bad habit. University of Alabama faculty shooter also fatally shot 18 year old brother in 1986. Better not make her angry.

Congressman Delahunt was the DA that did not press charges.

Doug Ross mocks Time Magazine’s recent efforts to associate Snowmaggedon with AGW.

“There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.” And there’s also evidence that eating five bags of pork rinds a day could cause you to lose weight, but I can’t quite prove that yet. …

No mention of ClimateGate. No mention of missing weather stations. No mention of corrupted or intentionally destroyed data. No mention of the glaciers that were supposed to melt next week.

Just the Democrat-Statist talking points, recited to an audience that’s disappearing faster than a gallon of ice cream in front of Michael Moore’s pie hole.

Time Magazine thinks its readers are really, really dumb. Perhaps the few that remain are truly stupid. But I kinda doubt it. They’d be working for Time if they were that dumb.

Mona Charen, too, admires the double-standard at work in establishment media weather event reporting.

True to their mission as the organs of the liberal establishment, Time magazine and the New York Times ran stories in the midst of the great snowmageddon warning us against drawing any politically incorrect conclusions. “Skeptics of global warming,” cautioned the Times, “are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt. Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.” Time agrees: “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.”

Note how the Times contrasts “skeptics of global warming” with “climate scientists.” Bill Nye the Science Guy, appearing on MSNBC, used the same tactic, accusing skeptics about manmade global warming of “denying science.”

Those who now protest that any particular weather pattern should not be confused with global climate have short memories. Only yesterday, they were attributing every forest fire, drought, hurricane, and toad disease to global warming.

Read the whole thing.

Bryan Walsh, in Time Magazine, delivers a classic example of the MSM defense of junk science.

There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.

Ah, yes. Some evidence! An alternative of “some authorities contend…” that if we have warm weather, it must be because of Anthropogenic Global Warming. And if we have cold weather, it must be because of AGW. If we have mild weather, voila, AGW. If we have extreme weather, it’s AGW, too.

The fatal role of human naughtiness in producing things, driving, heating their homes, and converting physical substances into energy is evidenced, according to liberals generally, simply by “climate change,” which all inclusive concept is really an artful comedown from Global Warming.

Climate change is delightfully non-specific and basically 100% reliable. Change being, in fact, precisely what climate always does.

The earth’s climate operates in cycles. Cycles are patterns of change. World climate, in fact, is undeniably at any given moment in time changing, either growing warmer or growing colder.

Clever warmists have the situation perfectly under control. It no longer matters if the models they propose to use as a basis to tax, regulate, and control the world’s economy can actually ever predict anything. They simply need to point to a record snowfall here or an exceptional storm there, a hot day in New York or cool weather in Miami. Change of any kind proves there is a problem. And, let’s face it, the weather is always changing.

Their models and theories enjoy absolute immunity from testing or verification. Whatever happens proves they are right. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Yesterday, backyard fence nearly buried in the morning. It snowed until evening.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., Spetember 24, 2008 in the LA Times:

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington’s C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.

Via David Freddoso.

Phil Jones

Phil Jones, the former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) who resigned in the wake of the leaked Climategate emails, along with a Chinese-American colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, is the target of a major investigation by the Guardian.

Jones et.al. published a paper in Nature in 1990, addressing concerns that temperature data might be being inflated by the location of sensors in urban locations which dismissed those concerns, assuring readers that he and his colleagues had examined the data and analysed the impact of urban settings, concluding that “The results show that the urbanization influence in two of the most widely used hemispheric data sets is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale.”

The 1990 Nature paper became a key reference source incorporated in the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –- including a chapter in the 2007 report of which Phil Jones was a co-author.

Climate skeptics, not surprisingly, found the paper’s conclusion counter-intuitive. Brick, asphalt, and cement absorb and retain heat, and centers of human population and economic activity generate considerable heat as byproducts of the warming and cooling of interior spaces and as the result of transportation and industrial production.

Jones responded to requests for information on the locations of 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study negatively, claiming that supplying that information to critics would be “unduly burdensome.”

Finally, in 2007, Jones responded to continuing pressure by releasing the data he had available, which proved to be startlingly incomplete. 49 of 84 Chinese weather stations had no location histories or other details, including all but 2 of 42 stations listed as “rural.” 18 other stations had been moved, possibly compromising the validity of thie data, including one which had been moved 5 times over a distance of 41 kilometers.

Douglas Keenan, a retired British banker and independent climate analyst, published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environment openly lodging an accusation that fraud had occurred. Keenan’s paper is much discussed in the Climategate emails.

The Guardian has allocated major coverage. 1, 2

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Fort Morgan, Colorado US Historical Climate Network Station. It is easy to see how urbanization can impact recorded temperature data.

Christopher Booker, in the Telegraph, adds another glaring example to what is becoming an ever-growing list of exposed scientific falsehoods and wholly-fabricated claims of dire climactic effects.

This time it is the same Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that asserted that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 on the basis on a phone conversation has been found to be basing its claims concerning the Amazon rainforest on environmentalist agitprop.

The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report… citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

Little of this has come as a surprise to those who have studied the workings of the IPCC over the years. As I show in my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, there is no greater misconception about the IPCC than that it was intended to be an impartial body, weighing scientific evidence for and against global warming. It was set up in 1988 by a small group of scientists all firmly committed to the theory of “human-induced climate change”, and its chief purpose ever since has been to promote that belief.

Read the whole thing.