What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? Inquiring minds want to know.

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David Harsanyi of the Denver Post has a suggestion.

You’ll often hear the left lecture about the importance of dissent in a free society.

Why not give it a whirl?

Start by challenging global warming hysteria next time you’re at a LoDo [Lower Downtown Denver] cocktail party and see what happens..

..next time you’re with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell ’em you’re not sold on this global warming stuff.

Back away slowly. You’ll probably be called a fascist.

Don’t worry, you’re not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.

News is slow this week, so some clever journalist is breaking some old information as news, and the same story is bouncing all over the MSM echo chamber. In reality, the Paleoene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was detected by James Kennett and Lowell Stott as early as 1990.

AP‘s story:

Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It’s smack in the middle of the Arctic.

First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.

The scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases that came about naturally.

Mesonyx probably drove too many SUVs.

Al Gore’s agitprop documentary opens in theatres next week, and all our liberals friends will soon be running around in circles, crying: “The sky is falling!” Editorials will proclaim that Gore has definitively proven environmental disaster stemming from anthropogenic climate change is well underway, and dangerously accelerating. My college classmates will be buzzing like a hive of bees on the class email list.

Time to read the National Center for Policy Analysis’ debunking study No 285: Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts. Swimming polar bears and color-changing coral reefs are rapidly headed your way.

Scientific debate continues regarding the extent to which human activities contribute to global warming and what the potential impact on the environment might be. Importantly, much of the scientific evidence contradicts assertions that substantial global warming is likely to occur soon and that the predicted warming will harm the Earth’s biosphere.

The Earth’s climate began a warming trend after the “Little Ice Age” ended in the mid-1800s, long before global industrial development led to substantial increases in greenhouse gases beginning in the middle of the 20th century. About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming.

To assess future climate trends, climatologists rely upon General Circulation Models (GCMs) that attempt to describe Earth’s climate. The many climate models in use vary widely with respect to the variables they include and in the assumptions they make about how those variables interact. Yet some official reports, including the U.S. National Assessment published in 2000, report only the most extreme predictions, ignoring others that project only moderate warming in the 21st century.

The Australian Herald Sun reports that DNA testing of postage stamp saliva, from taunting letters addressed to Scotland Yard, suggests the person responsibe for the 1888 series of murders of prostitutes in London’s East End may have been a woman.

Ripperology:

Metropolitan Police —Casebook — Wikipedia— the letters— Whitechapel Society

A new rock slab is growing at more than one meter a day on the Mt. St. Helens volcano in the state of Washington. You can actually see it grow in this very brief time-lapse photopgraphy video. Hit replay, and watch closely a few times.

I used to do this with Sodium and Potassium in high school too, but I never had… Cesium! Fun, fun, fun.

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Manga Author James D. Hudnall examines the problem, and concludes what’s going wrong is located not in the Earth’s atmosphere, but between the ears of a sizeable segment of the contemporary human community.

America became the pre-eminent super power after WWII with the invention of the atomic bomb. We used the bomb on two cities in Japan. Having killed so many people, so easily, had a double edged impact. It made people confident in American supremacy. It also made people afraid that it could happen to them. Then scare stories about the effects or radiation came out. Suddenly, the public came to worry that science had gone to far and we had opened a pandora’s box.

Popular culture began to churn out stories about mankind creating monsters by fooling around with science and the power of the atom. In addition to this, the holocaust forced the culture to look honesty at discrimination, which resulted in social upheavals in the form of various civil rights movements. The Vietnam war, the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Watergate made a generation question the government. People started looking for reasons to doubt everything because the reality they had previously accepted was thrown into turmoil.

Previous to all these events, most Americans had a positive view of their society. The Europeans looked at us favorably. But things began to change.

Around this time, the environmental movement began to form. Among the many causes they championed was the reduction in air pollution. The concern was what it was doing to people’s lungs. How it was effecting the environment. At some point the theory of the greenhouse effect was born, and it was considered mostly a good thing. Because CO2, a greenhouse gas, is beneficial to plant life. But then the environmental movement became a big money making machine. The EPA was formed by President Nixon and began to grow exponentially in size. To justify this, it found more and more excuses to engage in every aspect of society. Government grants to study environmental issues soon became a great way for scientists to make a living. A whole industry blossomed around it. To justify their grants, some scientists looked for things to scare politicians, so they could keep that grant money flowing.

The Green movement is ironically named.

And to keep the green rolling in, they had to concoct crises to frighten the public with. In the 1960s it was pesticides. In the 1970s it was Nuclear Power plants. In the 1980s it was the Ozone Hole. In 1990s it was global warming.

————————

ibid.

The Environmentalists, and Albert Gore, are always warning us about it, but it’s actually harder to do than they think. Sam Hughes contemplates how to get the job done.

I think there are several very obvious ways.

MIT Climate Scientist Richard Lindzen, in the Wall Street Journal, discusses one of the ways you can tell: by the ongoing pattern of intimidation of dissenters and stifling of debate associated with Global Warming in the scientific community.

If it wasn’t bunk, they wouldn’t have to punish dissent and censor debate, would they? If they weren’t liars and opportunists, they wouldn’t act with the ruthlessness and dishonesty which have become characteristic features of Global Warming orthodoxy enforcement.

A “for instance” seems obligatory, so I’ll just point to Scientific American‘s threatening to sue Björn Lomborg for daring to quote the special hatchet job they published on his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in a web-published reply to their attack.

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?

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have to try this at home. It’s my duty to the cause of Science.

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