The Telegraph reports that the official temperature records compiled by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia establish the fact that the global average temperature did not, in fact, increase from 1998-2005.

So now, will Al Gore kindly shut up and go away?

Popular Mechanics debunks the MSM-constructed myth of government inaction:

MYTH: “The aftermath of Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history.”–Aaron Broussard, president, Jefferson Parish, La., Meet the Press, NBC, Sept. 4, 2005

REALITY: Bumbling by top disaster-management officials fueled a perception of general inaction, one that was compounded by impassioned news anchors. In fact, the response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest–and fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm’s landfall.

Dozens of National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew rescue operations that first day–some just 2 hours after Katrina hit the coast. Hoistless Army helicopters improvised rescues, carefully hovering on rooftops to pick up survivors. On the ground, “guardsmen had to chop their way through, moving trees and recreating roadways,” says Jack Harrison of the National Guard. By the end of the week, 50,000 National Guard troops in the Gulf Coast region had saved 17,000 people; 4000 Coast Guard personnel saved more than 33,000.

These units had help from local, state and national responders, including five helicopters from the Navy ship Bataan and choppers from the Air Force and police. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries dispatched 250 agents in boats. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), state police and sheriffs’ departments launched rescue flotillas. By Wednesday morning, volunteers and national teams joined the effort, including eight units from California’s Swift Water Rescue. By Sept. 8, the waterborne operation had rescued 20,000.

While the press focused on FEMA’s shortcomings, this broad array of local, state and national responders pulled off an extraordinary success–especially given the huge area devastated by the storm. Computer simulations of a Katrina-strength hurricane had estimated a worst-case-scenario death toll of more than 60,000 people in Louisiana. The actual number was 1077 in that state.

Penn State Professor Michael Mann’s famous hockey-stick graph allegedly demonstrating dramatic Northern Hemisphere temperature increases in recent times is one of the best known evidentiary exhibits cited when the case for the reality of Global Warming is being made. Mann’s tree-ring-based temperature chart first appeared in a 1999 paper and was rapidly adopted as the prevailing orthodoxy in climate science, despite its revolutionary revaluation of the significance of known climatic events over the past millenium.

The hockey stick has drawn serious criticism in scientific circles, and as the Wall Street Journal reports, Republican Congressional inquiries have finally produced an upcoming review by the National Academy of Sciences.

An 11-member academy panel will now study the accuracy and importance of such research, in particular the work of Dr. Mann, whose hockey-stick graph was included in a report issued by the United Nations in 2001. An academy spokesman said the report would be completed in about four months.

Dr. Mann’s critics, including two amateur Canadian climate researchers, say his work contains serious inaccuracies. Dr. Mann has denied that, but the debate has prompted several climate researchers to take a fresh look at temperature reconstructions.

Ideological instrusions into academic research leading to flawed methodologies and fudged results, first celebrated and acclaimed, but ultimately provoking major scrutiny and being debunked, have occurred before. Dr. Mann’s hockey-stick is likely soon to be joining Dr. Bellisles’ study of American probate records in the Academic world’s rogues gallery of exploded fabrications.

Holman Jenkins, Jr. in a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday pointed out the differences between models and reality, facts and theory, and the sorts of things its possible to do something about and those which it is not.

As used by the media, “global warming” refers to the theory not only that the earth is warming, but doing so because of human industrial activity.

How can a reasonably diligent citizen assess this claim? Measuring average global temperature is not an easy matter. It’s a big planet, with lots of ways and places to take its temperature. Scientists, naturally, have to rely on record keepers in decades past, using different instruments, to produce what has become the conventionally accepted estimate of a one-degree rise over the past century.

But even if a change is measured, how do we know it’s manmade? Giant, mile-thick sheaths of ice have come and gone from North America in recent millennia. In our unstable and evolving planet, temperature is often either rising or falling. Who knows whether a trend is the product of human activity or natural?

The answer is nobody. All we have is hypothesis. Let’s be honest: A diligent and engaged citizen judges these matters based on the perceived credibility of public figures who affiliate themselves with one view or another. Less engaged citizens, whose views are reflected in polls showing a growing public concern about global warming, are simply registering the prevalence of media mentions of global warming.

In both cases, it may be rational to assume there wouldn’t be so much noise about global warming unless responsible individuals had validated the scientific claims. This is a rational assumption, but not necessarily a reliable one. Politicians adopt views that are popular in order to be popular. Scientists subscribe to theories that later are proved to be wrong. There are “belief” processes at work even in the community of climate researchers.

So how else might an intelligent layperson judge the matter?

Well, he could begin by evaluating the claim that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 0.028% to 0.036% without necessarily taking the measurements himself. This finding is so straightforward, it’s reasonable to assume it would have been widely debunked if unreliable.

Next, the claim that this should lead to higher temperatures because of the heat-absorbing qualities of the CO2 molecule. A reasonable person might be tempted to take this finding on faith too, for a different reason: because even ardent believers in global warming accept that this fact alone wouldn’t justify belief in manmade global warming.

That’s because all things are not equal: The climate is a vast, complex and poorly understood system. Scientists must resort to elaborate computer models to address a multiplicity of variables and feedbacks before they can plausibly suggest (choice of verb is deliberate here) that the net effect of increased carbon dioxide is the observed increase in temperature.

By now, a diligent layperson is equipped to doubt any confident assertion that manmade warming is taking place. Models are not the climate, and may not accurately reflect the workings of the climate, especially when claiming to detect changes that are small and hard to differentiate from natural changes.

Note this doesn’t make our conscientious citizen a global warming “denier.” It makes him a person who recognizes that the case isn’t proved and probably can’t be proved with current knowledge.

He’s also entitled to turn his attention now to the nonscientific factors affecting public professions of certainty about manmade global warming.

Nobody doubts, for instance, that when Bill Clinton asserts global warming is the greatest threat to mankind, he’s consulting not the science but a purported “consensus” of scientists. A layman asks himself: What can “consensus” mean if it asserts a judgment nobody is equipped to confidently make?

Likewise, a study that made news worldwide last month purported to show the death of frogs from warming. It did not show the death of frogs from manmade warming — the study contributed zero evidence one way or another on a human role in climate change. You would have thought otherwise from the media reports. Ditto Al Gore, who offers a traveling slide show (now a movie) in which he catalogs possible dire consequences of global warming in non sequitur fashion to persuade audiences that climate change is caused by human activity and would yield to human action.

Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist who spent several years observing and interviewing staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, shows in a new paper that even climate modelers themselves, who appreciate better than anyone the limits of their work, nonetheless slip into unwarranted certainty in public. She quotes one: “It is easy to get caught up in it; you start to believe that what happens in your model must be what happens in the real world. And often that is not true.”

All this explains why, inevitably and unfortunately, today’s debate over global warming revolves almost exclusively around the status and motives of spokesmen for opposing viewpoints, rather than the science and its limits. Yet this is a story of progress.

Tony Blair, whose government has been a steady sounder of climate warnings, now says he recognizes the improbability of nations sacrificing their economic growth based on uncertain climate science.

He and many others also recognize that the problems associated with climate change (whether manmade or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms and droughts. Money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don’t understand.

Let’s see, how does it go?

“Bush lied, people died.” “We made a mistake.” “We now know there were no Iraqi WMDs.” The left has assidulously erected an imaginary alternative reality for itself, in which (just like anthropogenic Global Warming) the unlikely thesis that “Saddam had no WMD” has been elevated to the level of an accepted fact. These days, it’s even easy to find Republicans who happen to read the MSM or watch television too much, and who have consequently succumbed to accepting this on the basis of the endless repetition of the same Big Lie.

It’s been obvious enough all along, I would argue. Saddam moved his entire air force to the territory of his former adversary Iran, rather than lose it to US attacks during the first Gulf War. The precedent for cross-border withdrawal to safe asylum of precious Iraqi weapons is all too clear.

And I’m not the only one aware of all this, as we reported here in December, Israeli Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force, told the New York Sun over dinner in New York that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. “He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria. No one went to Syria to find [them].”

And today the same New York Sun, reports that Iraqi former top military advisor to Saddam Hussein and second-in-command of the Iraqi Air Force, General Georges Sada reveals his own knowledge of the transfer of chemical WMD in his new book, Saddam’s Secrets.

two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, Mr. Sada said. Then Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including “yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel.” The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.

The flights – 56 in total, Mr. Sada said – attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.

“Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming,” Mr. Sada said. “They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians.”

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I thought I was early on this one, but I find that Rick Moran has already responded at length, and is collecting comments by the Blogospheric Right.

Every year, significant numbers of whales individually or en masse strand themselves on the world’s shorelines. Some 10 species of whales mass strand regularly and another 10 species do so occasionally. Most strandings are of toothed whale species.

In other times, the curious periodic behavioral choice of members of certain species of cetaceans, particularly bottlenose whales, stranding themselves on Northern European shores would have been regarded as evidence of the bounty of God, and taken as cause for celebration of the arrival of valuable supplies of meat and oil. Today, urbanized and deracinated humanity typically has forgotten all this, and has no use for whale meat.

But, even today, stranding whales continue to provide for the needs of at least select portions of humanity: for the Press, which covers each such incident as an unprecedented and astonishing 90 day wonder and a heart-rending tragedy; for do-gooders, environmentalists, and animal activists who come running to attempt to de-strand whales determined to strand themselves; and for sophisters, calculators, and economists who get to theorize about what exactly causes whale stranding.

Some humans-are-responsible whale stranding theories include:

naval sonar

increased pair-trawling

Other theories include:

sloping beaches and bubbles

inner ear infections

herd instinct

injury or disease

And what does modern Homo urbanensis do to help stranded whales?

call Big Brother!

throw water on them, and refloat them

shoot ’em

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Despite human and governmental efforts to return it to the sea, and limitless media concern, the bottlenose whale passed away (as it probably had been intending all along).

The BBC informs us of the latest enviromental threat:

Scientists in Germany have discovered that ordinary plants produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which helps trap the sun’s energy in the atmosphere.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature, have been described as “startling”, and may force a rethink of the role played by forests in holding back the pace of global warming.

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Ronald Reagan actually joked about trees as a source of pollution twenty-five years ago, and the clueless left took his quip as a mark of ignorance. They still use that quotation in attacks today.

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together ought to be able to tell that the sophister, calculator, and economist community is talking rot when you get this kind of story:

Writing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, the scientists say that more than 60 closely related frog and toad species have vanished from the tropical forests of Latin America during the last few decades, partly because of warming temperatures. The team says this is the first time such a connection has been made.

The research team found a “near lock-step (link) between the timing of losses and changes in climate,” said lead scientist Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica. “It’s a very striking pattern, and it’s hard to find another explanation for it.”

In the first place, we know they’re lying through their teeth, because the vanishing batrachian meme has been a standard Global Warming talking point for a couple of years.

Secondly, do you really believe that scientists are God, sitting on a cloud at MIT, Harvard, and CalTech, keeping an effective eye on every living species in every remote and inhospitable wilderness on earth? Who exactly has been counting, for decades, no less, 60 species of swamp and jungle dwelling frogs and toads? The reality is, no doubt, that some grad student went out twice and counted the frogs and toads to be found in a convenient Latin American one quarter acre somewhere, and then they sat down and started figuring.

Statistical analyses can be designed to prove any thesis you want, since you are always in a position to pick your own assumptions. Unfortunately, reality tends to operate on unknown bases and principles. Simpleton environmentalists believe in a pre-human, pre-lapsarian perfect order of an ideal balance of Nature, but Nature is not like that at all. Nature is always a feast or famine situation. Species are so numerous they darken the sky one day, and then they crash and become rarities. Back in grandfather’s day, a Canada goose was an uncommon trophy, and black ducks and canvasbacks were the staple Eastern wildfowling fare. Today, Canada geese are a non-migratory nuisance species, who’ve developed a penchant for office parks and golf courses, and you get more shots at wood ducks than you do at black ducks or cans.

If frogs and toads are in decline somewhere, you can bet that something else is on the rise. Our amphibian friends have been around a long time, longer than we have, and you can count on them staging a comeback sooner or later.

Mark Steyn, writing in the Australian, remarks:

One day, the world will marvel at the environmental hysteria of our time, and the deeply damaging corruption of science in the cause of an alarmist cult. The best thing this week’s conference could do is inculcate a certain modesty, not least in Senator Ian Campbell, about an issue that is almost entirely speculative. We don’t know how or why climate changes. We do know it’s changed dramatically throughout the planet’s history, including the so-called “little Ice Age” beginning in 600, when I was still driving a Ford Oxcart, and that, by comparison, the industrial age has been a time of relative climate stability. But, of course, as with that “hockey stick”, it depends how you draw the graph.

Question: Why do most global warming advocates begin their scare statistics with “since 1970”?

As in, “since 1970” there’s been global surface warming of half a degree or so.

Because from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell.

John Cole‘s commie blogmate Tim F. alerts us to what he calls an excellent commentary on global warming by Stirling Newberry which proves to be (of all places) on Daily Kos. Newberry is basically gloating over the conversion to at least one aspect of the PC position on Global Warming and storm activity by a former skeptic, and he concludes prescriptively:

The response is carbon neutrality – to move away from burning hydrocarbons and coal for energy. Carbon is a rock, most of it should be in the ground.

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Of course, speaking accurately, carbon is really a chemical element, which does make up a large percentage of the composition of a tiny proportion of the chemicallly complex kinds of things we usually speak of as rocks, and which also makes up a large portion of the composition of many other things, including, most conspicuously, all living things on the planet. The left has a talent, often remarked upon, for seeing to it that a great many of a certain kind of carbon-based animate form do wind up in the ground, so I suppose one should view a call for measures limited to one sort of fossil fuel as relatively modest in its ambitions, speaking historically. I am afraid, however, that I do find the prescriptive belief that coal should be left lying in the ground just a trifle superstitious.

Leading Environmental Scientist

Jason Katz Cooper in American Thinker surveys a variety of scientific and popular publications, and finds alarums everywhere: excessively early swallow arrivals, too few cold-water plankton, too many warm-water plankton, diminishing sand eels and disgruntled sea birds. No wonder Al Gore declared that “global warming is more serious than terrorism.” The British journal Nature recently even warned that carbon dioxide is now predicted to be causing global freezing along with global warming. (Too bad Nature is a subscriber-only site, that one ought to have been good for a laugh.)

Cooper concludes:

As an American I am embarrassed that my country sent 100,000 troops overseas to defend freedom in Iraq while ignoring the dangers of greenhouse gasses as they kill cold-water plankton, injure reindeer noses, and spread frogs across the great Russian tundra. The temperature right now in Fairfax, Va (from where I write) is 41°F. If we had concentrated our focus instead of Iraq on the CO2 terror it would be 40°F.

Speaking in Washington, last Novermber 6th, on Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century, Michael Crichton observed that

one important assumption most people make is the assumption of linearity, in a world that is largely non-linear….

Crichton proceeded to explain the peril of exaggerated linear views, taking predictions of deaths resulting from the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl as an example:

according to the UN report in 2005, is that “the largest public health problem created by the accident (at Chernobyl)” is the “damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.”

In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information…

You may know that Australian aborigines fear a curse called “pointing the bone.” A shaman shakes a bone at a person, and sings a song, and soon after, the person dies. This is a specific example of a phenomenon generally referred to as “hex death”—a person is cursed by an authority figure, and then dies. According to medical studies, the person generally dies of dehydration, implying they just give up. But the progression is very erratic, and shock symptoms may play a part, suggesting adrenal effects of fright and hopelessness.

Yet this deadly curse is nothing but information.

This is a must read.

Hat tip to terrye at YARG, who linked Roger L. Simon.