XDA

The stunning revelation of the scientific perfidy by Warmie true believer (WTB) at and around Hadley CRU, located at the University of East Anglia, seemed for a while to stun the WTB into a semi silence, after they realized just repeating their old positions wasn't much of a response to the leaked e-mails, etc. At RealClimate, the primary Warmie web site, there was for over a week, just this entry:

Open thread for various climate science-related discussions. Suggestions for potential future posts are welcome.

But recently, they put up this entry, which compares the WTB predictions (based on their wholly inadequate but constantly upgraded computer programs) with the "reality" as they see it. They say they did pretty good, but I couldn't help but notice that they only compared the predictions to HadCRUT3 and GISSTEMP, which are the WTB records which the East Anglia documents show are at best biased towards warming and at worst completely unreliable. As I have pointed out a dozen times, these two are generally much higher than the harder to mess with satellite records from RSS and UAH. So how did the predictions do compared to reliable global temperature records? I'll get to that.

But first let's look at how James Hansen's predictions in 1988 did even compared to the suspect and elevated ground based temperature records on which NASA (our space agency) and then the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rely.

Not so good. Even the tamest of Hansen's prediction is way above reality. What are the odds of that? Here (just below) is how it looks to the WTB using only the suspect records, better, but still high.

Of course the WTB don't rely on Hansen. For the latest IPCC updated prediction (and I mean by 'updated' that the Warmie modelers take into account the ground based temperature record since their last predictions and then change the computer models to be more congruent with the so called reality so that it seems they are more reliable predictions than they in fact are) the fourth revision, which came out just two years ago, in 2007, the two years of real data (that is, including the satellite records) also is lower than predicted. Even rewriting history, they can't hit the mark, although it is difficult, it seems, for them to realize this.

So comparing the constantly revised computer predictions (which is not by any stretch of the imagination data in support of a theory) to a more reliable record of global temperature reveals how hopelessly shitty the computer models are; and the fact that WTBs compare their revised predictions to records they almost certainly bend upwards and then say, 'Ooh, lookin' good' reveals a sort of willful blindness to the very serious shortcomings of their alarmist theories.

It's like when Michael Palin pushes the cage of the dead Norwegian Blue and says, "See. He moved." Except not quite as funny.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Willful Blindness to an Unscientific Cooking the Record to Fit the Theory

"They Just Took My Money"

That's what my 8-year old son said about the sales tax on the ride home from Borders a few minutes ago. He had a $10 gift certificate from Christmas, bought a Clone Wars book for $7.99, looked at the receipt, and wondered why he still didn't have a full $2.01 on it.

This is how conservatives are made.

John J. Miller

Labels: John J. Miller quote

Also, as the year draws to a close, the Centers for Disease Control releases an urgent bulletin warning of a new, fast-spreading epidemic consisting of severe, and in some cases life-threatening, arm infections caused by "people constantly sneezing into their elbow pits.''

Dave Barry

Labels: Dave Barry quote

Because, amid the vapid, indeed feckless speech President Obama gave today about the Christmas underwear bomber attack, there was this reassurance to her:

As President I will do everything in my power to support the men and women in intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security to make sure they've got the tools and resources they need to keep America safe. But it's also my job to ensure that our intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security systems and the people in them are working effectively and held accountable. I intend to fulfill that responsibility and insist on accountability at every level.

So her job is safe.

Labels: President Obama; Transparent Untruths; Holding Secretaries Accountable

Unlike most gun nuts, I am not into explosives and only have the most basic knowledge about some of them. I did not know what PETN was, even though it is the terrorist explosive of choice lately--both Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and the more recent underpants bomber, used it and it failed to ignite--Thank the Lord. It is also the main ingredient in Symtec, another explosive of choice with terrorists, usually from the Middle East. PETN stands for Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, and it has been around for about 120 years. It is usually used as a detonator itself and is the explosive found in detonation cord. It is very powerful.

Here is one funny thing Wikipedia had to say about it:

It is difficult to detonate, as dropping it or setting it on fire will typically not cause an explosion.

No kidding.

Labels: PETN; Global War Against Islamic Extremism

There seemed to be a few thousand pro-animal commercials on TV this past weekend, including a local sanctuary, Sarah McLaughlin's earnest plea for all dogdom and a World Wildlife Fund spot for Polar Bears with former ER star, Noah, uh, whatever his last name is. Hey, Noah, I say, quit lying to me! The protected polar bears are not in danger. Their numbers are up, way up, better than lower 48 bald eagles, over the past half century and the numbers are recently stable and growing where hunting has not been reinstated.

No one knows what the niche carrying capacity is for the Arctic vis a vis polar bears. We do know that when there is overpopulation of predators to prey, the number of predators goes down because there is not enough food to sustain them all. Of the 19 areas where there are plenty of polar bears, how many have reached what I'll call saturation? I am aware of not a single scientific inquiry into the subject.

Every interglacial for the past 600,000 years has produced average polar temperatures much higher than today's for thousands of years. The Northern ocean has indeed in the past been ice free by September, yet we still have at least 25,000 polar bears today. Loss of sea ice does not appear to be the huge threat of extinction Noah kept saying it was.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Polar Bears in Danger of Climate Change

Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, the least of the less than impressive cabinet to President Obama, said during an interview about the rich, Nigerian wannabe terrorist, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been outed as such by his father a month ago and who failed to blow up a plane because of his faulty equipment and heroic efforts by passengers (particularly by Jasper Schuringa) that in this case the "system worked."

What?

The State Department did not revoke the terrorist's visa. The vaunted home security system did not move the terrorist from the terrorist watch list (nearly half a billion names long) to the no fly list (with just 4,000 names) and the trained government officials at two airports did not detect the explosives. The only reason the plane did not drop burning from the sky is that the detonator failed and a few of the passengers acted quickly and well.

Heck of a system ya' got there, Nappie.

Michelle Malkin has a reminder of how truly, truly terrible at her job Ms. Napolitano has been.

Labels: Janet Napolitano; Government Failure at Homeland Security

The sun rises at its most southern point on the horizon (on December 21), here, over the 2400 year old Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, Greece.

Labels: Sun Rise

The artist is unknown by me, but if he or she identifies his or herself, I'll give the appropriate credit. I do recognize the original Nazi poster used, but I can't remember what it said in German.

Labels: Political Poster of the Month

“Global warming” hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is “science.” The recently revealed destruction of raw data at the bottom of the global warming hysteria, as well as revelations of attempts to prevent critics of this hysteria from being published in leading journals, suggests that the disinterested search for truth — the hallmark of real science — has taken a back seat to a political crusade.

Thomas Sowell

Labels: Thomas Sowell quote

Some people are critical of Congress, but I say that we have the best Congress money can buy.

Will Rogers

Labels: Will Rogers quote

First it was a humiliating first round expulsion of Chicago as the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Now it is a climate deal Friday, spun as significant, but which even the lefty correspondents call a failure. Perhaps the President would have better luck in a different city.

UPDATE: Here is the New York Post's take. It is not as hopeful as mine.

Labels: 0-2, President Obama at Copenhagen

I've been trying to find out what happened in Copenhagen on Friday and it's beginning to look, although I hate to jump to a conclusion before all the facts are in, like the participants agreed to disagree and kicked the can down the road. But here is our President giving a decidedly uninspiring speech which I will mini-fisk.

We come here in Copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people. All of you would not be here unless you -- like me -- were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, it is science. Unchecked, climate change will pose unacceptable risks to our security, our economies, and our planet. This much we know.

We know no such thing. Climate change is real, but almost entirely natural--it happens all the time. It can be a danger. If, for example, we were heading back into another ice age, as we will one day, it might be cause for alarm, but to say with confidence that the recently feared change, warming, will be a grave danger is like looking at the entrails of sheep and lamenting our fate revealed therein.

Oh, but the President has pronounced it science, not fiction. But we know from years of study--Anthony Watts' survey of American sites for taking the atmosphere's temperature found that the overwhelming majority of which were producing a temperature record biased to warming and the huge drop off in the number of world sites (from 6000 to 1800 or so after the fall of Communism)-- that the ground based record, kept by the Warmie true believers, was suspiciously high. Now we know, from the whistle blower released East Anglia documents, that the Warmie true believers have indeed corrupted the data with computer programs which fudge it warmer, and then destroyed or lost the original data. We know that Russian scientists accuse the Hadley CRU located at East Anglia of cherry picking the warmest of the remaining Siberian stations to produce a warming that doesn't exist there. In short, the Warmie "science" of climate change (anthropogenic global warming from CO2) is more fiction than science. Our President ignores the unraveling of the hoax, as does the leftstream press.

The two satellite services are probably reliable, but only go back 30 years. That's one problem substituted for another's solution. They show a very minor warming in the 80s and 90s and a slight cooling thereafter. But back to the President.

So I want this plenary session to understand, America is going to continue on this course of action to mitigate our emissions and to move towards a clean energy economy, no matter what happens here in Copenhagen. We think it is good for us, as well as good for the world.

The clean energy economy (windmills and photovoltaics) is pixie dust solution, the power these worthless intermittent sources provide is tiny, but expensive, and the real power providers don't even consider them in their base power calculations. No wind generator has saved even a single lump of coal from powering the industrial nations, and will not in the foreseeable future.

But our President has very ambitious goals in mind.

And I'm confident that America will fulfill the commitments that we have made: cutting our emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020, and by more than 80 percent by 2050 in line with final legislation.

This last is fantasy. We will need 50% more electricity by 2050 so, if we maintain a viable economy (a mere possibility under Democratic leadership) our CO2 emissions will go up, not down to 1913 levels. Of course we all know Obama is merely making promises he has no intention (or ability here) to keep. It's like he is in permanent campaign mode where all his promises contain short 'best used by' labels.

How can I say this? Behold:

The time for talk is over.

Yet, as is his wont, that is all he did, without apparent consciousness of the inherent irony.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Nails in the AGW Coffin, President Obama at Copenhagen

Labels: Amanda Knox; Italian Murder Verdict; Matt Towery

We are talking about people who live in sharia states where they still stone women for adultery, apostates for daring to abandon Islam, and homosexuals for breathing. We are talking about people who riot and murder over cartoons--people who who use mosques to hide weapons and Korans to transmit terrorist messages and them murder non-Muslims for purportedly defaming their religion. It makes no difference to these people that we detain Muslim terrorists in military brigs under the laws of war rather than detaining them in civilian prisons after trial in our criminal justice system.

Andrew McCarthy, destroying the idea that the housing of illegal combatants in Guantanamo Bay has any deleterious effect on the war being waged against us by Muslim extremists

Labels: Global War Against Muslim Extremists, Misdirected Concern over Guantanamo Prison

Here, in his own words, is Al Gore's Vogon Poetry about the effects of climate change. He is rapidly becoming an object of pitiable derision, deservedly so.

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune's bones dissolve

Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly

Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning's celebration

Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups

Passion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rung

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

UPDATE: According to the 30 years of satellite data as shown on the website at the University of Illinois (at Urbana/Champagne) called The Cryosphere Today, the lowest area the floating continent of Arctic sea ice has covered at the end of Summer is just under 3 million square kilometers and just this year it was 3.45 million, bigger than the country of India. There's going to have to be a truckload of more warming "soon" to fulfill poet Gore's dire predictions. I'm yawning as I wait for this fool's hour upon the stage to be over.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Al Gore Poetry; Vogons

In high school we took a practical art/art history class senior year. It was a hoot. My best friend Frank Kelly and I couldn't draw a straight line, but we loved the art history part and did our best to memorize the famous paintings, etc. and the years they were produced. There was, one day, a remarkable series of slides shown by the teacher.

It was a big Bierstadt painting, but the slide series started with a detail of the painting, a pool of water with a turtle in it. The next slide pulled back a little and showed more of the painting, and on and on for about 20 slides until the whole painting, of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, was revealed. Frank, who is now a big wig in the National Gallery--specializing in American 19th C . landscapes--was seriously impressed and indeed his ultimate career path started that day, I believe.
I think the remarkable thing of the slide show was the constantly changing, expanding, frame of reference of the work.

So here is a similar ever expanding series of graphs from a glacier in Greenland which covers the past 50,000 and shows the temperature record therefrom.

The first graph, above, back just to 1400, about a 150 years after the end of the Medieval Warm Period, shows a hockey stick style graph, with a steep rise beginning about 1825. Ooh, scary.

But back up a little (to 900 AD) and the "blade" of that hockey stick is revealed as a tiny blip compared to the serious warming of the Medieval Warm Period. Back up, again to 3000 BC and even the Medieval Warm Period is dwarfed by other higher and more sudden warmings.

The little 1825-on "blade" of the first graph is revealed to be a very small version of many sudden rapid rises in temperature again and again and again.

Back up again to 9,000 BC and the start of the interglacial is a huge steep climb in temperature which reduces the 1825-on "blade" of the first graph to utter insignificance. Back to 50,000 during the depths of the latest ice age, and the interglacial is revealed to be the oasis one would expect. The final graph is the Vostok Antarctic ice core which takes the temperature record back to 400,000 BC and shows a series of ice ages with brief, warm interglacials in between. This is the same graph Al Gore used in An Inconvenient Truth to show a congruence of CO2 and warmth (of course Al neglected to show that the warmth preceded the rise in CO2 by an average of 800 years). To a disinterested viewer, the final graph shows that the little bit of warming since 1825 is absolutely within the norm of ancient warmings, indeed it is dwarfed by most of them, and there is nothing, NOTHING, special or even slightly alarming about the recent climate change. Since the rapid big warmings over the past 400,000 years were clearly before any industrialization or the burning of fossil fuels, there appears to be nothing in history which would cause us to believe that recent warming is anything new, and certainly nothing alarming.

With the correct frames of reference, our modest recent warming is reduced to mere background noise in the constant flux of mean temperature. It is reduced to nothing at all.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Proper Frame of Reference

Had candidate Obama empathized with bad/worse choices in every war, rather than simplistically demonizing his predecessor, the public might be more sympathetic to his present plight.

Victor Davis Hanson

Labels: Victor Davis Hanson quote

There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause.

Mark Steyn, with a spot on parody of President Obama in Oslo, or anywhere else overseas for that matter.

Labels: Mark Steyn quote

Here is a transcript of President Obama's Oslo Speech yesterday. Diomedes, Hugh Hewitt, Paul Mirengoff and even Sarah Palin liked it. I was less than thrilled although I certainly was thinking earlier that he would do far worse. I'm more with former UN Ambassador Bolton and Victor Davis Hanson.

I will give the speech two cheers, First, Obama realizes (or so he says) that there are limits to diplomacy and non-violent struggle and that the Ghandi/King approach wouldn't have worked in Nazi Germany. One of Dinesh D'Souza's teachers put it much more eloquently (and starkly): If Ghandi had tried what he did in India in Germany in the 1930s, he'd be a lampshade today. Oh, and would it be gauche or pedantic of me to point out that the Ghandi/King method of non-violent struggle (Civil Disobedience) was invented by Henry Thoreau? Probably. Forget I wrote that last then.

Second, Obama seem to say he embraces the Catholic catechism regarding the concept of just war, which he described as: War as a last resort or in self defense; proportional response; and, with protection of civilians. Actually here is the Church on the subject:

In this regard Just War doctrine gives certain conditions for the legitimate exercise of force, all of which must be met:

"1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

2. all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3. there must be serious prospects of success;

4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition" [CCC 2309].

So, close enough.

But here is part of what I hated about the speech. Obama said that Afghanistan was a just war and kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in Gulf War I was a just war but, impliedly, deposing Saddam Hussein in 2003 was not a just war. Hold on there, kitty cat. If Gulf War I was a just war, and it was, then Gulf War II was necessarily a just war too. Gulf War I ended, like the Korean War, not with victory and a treaty, but with a cease fire agreement which required certain things of both sides. We kept our side of the deal. Saddam kept almost none of his legally binding promises. If the end of just Gulf War I was a sham because of Saddam Hussein's actions, wouldn't the resumption of the war after decades of efforts, all in vain, to get him to live up to his side of the deal be the very definition of just war. The original justness of the cause was not dissipated by a cease fire agreement which was breached again and again by Saddam Hussein. I don't think President Obama can see this truth. I really don't.

Obama said that we have to be held to a higher standard of conduct in war, which is why he praised himself for prohibiting torture by Americans (an unnecessary act) and for closing Guantanamo (still premature for praise there--get back to us when it is actually closed and the results are a more just confinement of illegal combatants). Obama also said that he has "reaffirmed" Americas commitment to the Geneva Conventions. We have almost never strayed from the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. It is our enemy in the current war which completely ignores the international rules. Our current enemies don't even wear uniforms. They are, like pirates, saboteurs or spies, not entitled to any protection of the Geneva Conventions and can be summarily executed when captured.

That Obama has placed unnecessary and dangerous rules of engagement on our troops in Afghanistan and has afforded to a selected-by-whim few of our illegal enemies the same constitutional rights as American citizens. He is treating our illegal enemies better than we treated our savage, but at least they were in uniform, enemies in WWII. He is rewarding their flaunting flouting (thanks for the correction, D) of the international law of warfare. That's not praiseworthy. It's certainly not self-praiseworthy. It is moral preening at the expense of the lives of our soldiers, et al., and to the detriment of our national security.

I really hate it when our commander in chief endanger our soldiers, et al., and all of us, so the Euro-elites will like him more. It just seems more like treason to me. I certainly can't call it good leadership.

There was much more to hate, but it's late.

Labels: President Obama; Oslo Speech; Strategic Naivety

What, actually, is the difference between the Big Bang Theory in Cosmology and the part of the Vulgate at Genesis 1:3, "fiat lux. Et facta est lux"?

Just asking.

Labels: Theology

Here is what AGW apologist/reporter George Monbiot wrote recently about the existence of a Climate Denial Industry.

I discussed this below and promised to return to it. Monbiot provided four examples of the Industry which "has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming":

1. The Information Counsel for the Enviornment (ICE) waged a $510,000 PR campaign, targeted primarily at U.S. Representatives, which urged skepticism and asked questions like "how much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?" Not exactly a juggernaut of disinformation in my book.
2. The Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) put at least $100,000 into the hands of Cato Institute author Patrick Michaels' group, New Hope Environmental Services, Inc., and Professor Michaels doesn't trumpet that payment sufficiently for Mr. Monbiot.
3. The Heartland Institute, which has received $676,000 from ExxonMobile (over an unknown period of time) for all of the Heartland Institute's activities as a pro-business political think tank, put out a list of 500 scientists whom it claimed had performed research which cast doubt on an alarmist view of AGW. Mr. Monbiot says that at least 45 of these guys and girls are true believer Warmies and several have asked for their names to be removed from the list and they haven't. I have to point out that the Heartland institute said the research contradicted AGW scare tactics, not that the authoring scientists were skeptics. At this point I was still waiting for evidence that these individuals and think tanks had "no interest in establishing the truth about global warming." All I was hearing was that these people and organizations had a different opinion from Mr. Monbiot. Not quite the same.
4. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which received $2,000,000 from Exxon (I guess before the merger with Mobile) again over an unknown period of time, had members or perhaps unrelated individuals who asked that IPCC head Bob Watson be sacked from his post and be replaced with Harlan Watson.The White House did sack Bob and appointed Harlan, who, according to Mr. Monbiot, "went on to wreak havoc at international climate meetings."

OK. That's the extent of the examples. Wow, what a well financed, secretive, no doubt illegal, conspiracy of purveyors of falsehood! (Sarcasm alert). The low estimate for the government money flowing to the Warmie true believers is in excess of $30 Billion just here in America. Al Gore's Warmie propaganda gets played in thousands of theaters and awarded Oscars despite at least a dozen falsehoods while the counterbalancing "Not Evil Just Wrong" has to resort to a viral campaign for showing the film in a few living rooms here and there.

Mr. Monbiot says his four examples strike a blow to the Denial Industry much worse than the release of the East Anglia/Hadley CRU documents. Well, perhaps in his eyes...

The last on this series will be the other sides' version of what Monbiot says is so horrible of them. (I'll remind Brit Monbiot that, here in America, our right to form groups and petition our government for redress of grievances are God-given rights recognized by our First Amendment and his rather pitiful examples are not evidence of an illegal conspiracy to misinform, not by a long shot).

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; The Warmie Empire Strikes Back With a Rubber Band Gun

It was a relatively quiet month. There was hardly any combat involving Americans in Iraq and there was hardly anything but an armed struggle going on in Afghanistan. Still, although each death is a private tragedy for the slain and to his or her family and friends, the totals were very light, for nearly 200,000 American warriors fighting the good fight in foreign lands.

Here are the details. According to releases from the Department of Defense, for the month of November, 10 American warriors were killed in Iraq and 18 were killed in Afghanistan for a total of 28, less than one per day. Here is further breakdown: In Iraq, four died from non combat causes, four were killed in accidents and one was killed by small arms. As I wrote, not a lot of fighting going on there. In Afghanistan, seven were killed by IEDs, five were killed in combat operations, two were killed by a suicide bomber and one each was killed by mortar fire, small arms, an accident and a non combat cause. I guess the Taliban is indeed waiting for the dreaded Spring Offensive, but, back on a serious side, only two of the 18 killed in Afghanistan last month were not killed in some form of combat.

There were no soldiers, et al. with feminine names and only two officers killed, both dead in a single helicopter crash in Iraq. They were CWO Mathew Heffelfinger, 29, of Kimberly, ID and CWO Earl Scott III, 24, of Jacksonville, FL.

Our thoughts and prayers go out for all our men and women at arms fighting the war the Islamic extremists have brought against us. We pray also for their swift and safe rotation home and complete success with their mission.

Labels: Iraq; Afghanistan; American War Dead

Labels: Enceladus

George Monbiot, a Warmie apologist/journalist of the first order, seemed recently to have his religious faith in anthropogenic global warming rocked by the huge scientific scandal in this very field, as evidenced by the e-mails and other documents released from Hadley CRU before Thanksgiving. He still sees clearly the damage those documents have done and what the climate "scientists" need to do to begin to regain their credibility (and take the challenge quotes off their job description). Yet he seems not to have lost his religion and indeed now sees and rails against things that do not exist.

Don't believe me? Read this. Money quote:

The second observation is the tendency of those who don't give a fig about science to maximize their [the leaked documents'] importance. The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.

Clear thinking Monbiot has just stated that what the climate scientists were doing, as revealed by the leaked documents, was anathema to science, but it is the deniers who don't give a fig about science. I see. I get the picture. But if we really loved science and hated, as Monbiot claims to hate, what the bad climate "scientists" did, would our opinions be any different?

Then there is the bombshell that a denial industry exists. Monbiot later gives some examples, which I will discuss in detail over the rest of the week. An industry! And it is a corrupt industry which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming. Wow! An evil, corrupt industry which is interested in lying about the climate for money. The swifter of my readers will be thinking projection as the psychological malady from which Mr. Monbiot suffers.

Let's look at his strawmen arguments. He writes that even if you discounted all the things the leaked documents call into question, "the evidence for man-made global warming would be unequivocal." And what is his evidence of man-made global warming? "You can see it in the measured temperature record which goes back to 1850" (which is being reassessed because of the non science at the CRU revealed in the released documents) and in the real world evidence of warming (shrinking glaciers, thinning sea ice, wild animal and plant reaction (what?) and rapidly changing crop zones).


Of course these things are only evidence of global warming are not evidence of what caused it. Of course it has warmed and cooled since we entered, about 12,000 years ago, perhaps the 25th interglacial (which means it warmed and cooled a lot 24 times before, over the past few million years). But we know, from hundreds of peer reviewed articles in paleoclimatology over the past 35 years or so, that even recently, there have been warm periods, the latest of which, the Medieval Warm Period, lasted between around 850 to 1250 AD. The IPCC in 1990 published a graph which showed the overwhelming scientific consensus then that the Medieval Warm Period was WARMER than it is now.

If over the past few milennia it has been warmer than it is now, and those were at times when there was no industrialization nor any wholesale burning of fossil fuels, then why should be believe that this most recent warming is the result of industrialization and the wholesale burning of fossil fuels? Where's the evidence that this most recent warming is special, different...man-made? That's the central question for us deniers.

George Monbiot has an answer: No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Oh well, case closed then. No, I kid, there's more--Monbiot says that solar cycles can't explain it as they are out of sync with the recent warming (I don't believe that--the sunspot numbers appear to be reaching a minimum of some sort just now and minimum sunspot numbers in the past have been associated with global cooling periods and indeed, over the past decade, despite a rise of 5.4% in global CO2 atmospheric concentration, it has, in fact, cooled).


Monbiot says that the performance of greenhouse gasses has been measured in the laboratories but we deniers assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere. (I am aware of no serious denier making that claim, rather we hold them to their laboratory measurements (see graph) which say that for the doubling of atmospheric CO2, from the agreed upon pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm to 560 ppm (which we have not achieved and will not for at least another 140 years) the temperature will rise between .4 and 1.6 degrees C by 2150 or so). Yet the Warmies claim a catastrophic temperature rise of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees C by the end of this century. And their proof is? Well, they have no proof, as that term doesn't apply to projections about the future. Why should we trust their projections then? Monbiot's ability to provide support, apparently, ran dry.

More later.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax: Monbiot Keeps the Faith

Our robot photographers just get better and better.

Labels: Crescent Earth

In my state, Colorado, you can use reasonable physical force, less than deadly physical force, against any person who you rationally believe is using or about to use "unlawful physical force" against you (see Section 18-1-704, C.R.S.). "Unlawful physical force" is not defined in the statutes, but there are three degrees of assault, the least of which is defined as knowingly or recklessly causing bodily injury to another. "Bodily injury" is defined as physical pain, illness or any impairment of physical or mental condition. Thus, it is an assault to pipe poison gas into a person's home, for example, and I would argue, it is also unlawful physical force to pump a poison gas into someone's home, for example, and you could use reasonable physical force to stop that person from pumping in the gas.

So now that the EPA, in its wisdom, has declared that the naturally occurring, necessary for life on this planet, present in every breath we exhale, CO2, "threaten[s] the public health and welfare of the American people," can I slug any person who breathes in my direction? Certainly he or she is introducing into the air I am about to breath a gas which threatens my health, and any impairment of my physical condition is bodily injury, namely, a bodily injury against which I am justified to use reasonable physical force to prevent.

CO2, at .038% of the atmosphere, is of course not a pollutant, just the opposite, so I would not object to anyone producing CO2 at any level near me, but the true Warmie believers, can they slug me for breathing?

Just asking?

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; EPA Declares CO2 Dangerous Pollutant

Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Which of these is not like the others? If there is true liberty, where each person can rise or fall on his or her talent, effort and luck, how on Earth can there be equality? It's not possible. I'm not saying this is why the French Revolution turned within a decade into the Terror and then the Empire, but to embrace a logical fallacy between your guiding principals can't be a good thing.

Our motto, our self evident truth regarding some of our God given inalienable rights was: Life, liberty and property the pursuit of happiness (by owning property). There is no contradiction in this Jefferson/Locke truth and so our Revolution became our extraordinary nation and a shining example of good, at least much more good than bad, for the past 200 plus years.

I'm aware of the equality in the Declaration of Independence, in which all men are created, but that's equality of law, of opportunity. The French ideal is of the equality of outcome, which brings me back to the opening paragraph.

One of the bigger fault lines between the left and right wing is that the left is all about equality of outcome where the right is all about equality of opportunity. Since the government rarely creates anything, the statist left is reduced to producing an equality of misery, under which no human population can live for too long. Equality of opportunity produces a lot most of it good, but including an ever growing divide between the producers and the slackers, between rich and poor; but that is an inescapable product of true freedom. Only the statist worries about the width of this divide, and apparently only the right of center cares about maintenance of the equality of opportunity, allowing the have nots to become the haves, through effort.

Which of these two concerns is more like the ideals contained in the Declaration and which is more like the French self contradiction?

Labels: Revolution; Equality of opprtunity and of outcome

Climatologists, well… I guess they cannot argue the facts because, well, they made theirs up. And so they call people names.

Don Surber. talking about Warmie climatologist, Andrew Watson, decrying name-calling as "character assassination" by the skeptics and 40 seconds later calling Denier Mark Morano an asshole on live BBC TV.

Labels: Don Surber quote

Here is what disgraced Warmie climate scientist, Phil Jones, said to reporters before Thanksgiving, after many of his e-mails were leaked by a whistle blower:

We've not deleted any emails or data here at CRU.

And here is what he wrote in an e-mail complaining about a FOI request from Steve McIntyre about a year ago:

About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little - if anything at all.

To quote David Knopfler: Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong.

Or as we lawyer types dream of asking: So when were you lying to us, Mr. Jones--last year or last month?

Also, for the not too feint of heart, here is a dense but rewarding take on the thing from Steven Hayward at the Weekly Standard.

Except for the fact that some science is involved, the alphabet broadcast news systems are ignoring a pretty good story here. I guess they are itching to lose even more viewers.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Death Knell?

Labels: President Obama; Self-Identification Polling

I don't know computer code from Cretan Linear B. The last time I wrote a program, I saved it on paper tape with huge and little holes in it, and my program took about all the free bytes available on my high school's main frame. So this guy could be leading us by the nose, but Hadley CRU and GISS have always produced global temperature measurements above the satellite measurers so the difference was either heat island artifact or crafty manipulation. It's really looking like the latter now, and the whistle blower released documents are indeed proving a timely help to us who look on Warmie alarmists as we look on Aztec priests pulling out hearts. There's a reason that the alphabet broadcast news networks have ignored the document drop we're apparently calling Climategate

Oh, and here is a good refutation of the "Nothing here to see, folks, move along" apologists regarding the e-mails, etc. I really liked it. Wonder who, really, Sean is.

Despite the yawning and ignoring by the left stream media, this really is a big thing.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Death Knell?

OK, so he only took over a quarter to consider what his handpicked general in Afghanistan told him he needed, and he only gave him 3/4 of what Gen. McChrystal said was the minimum for reasonable success, and he emphasized, as nearly all Democrats seem to do, that we would quit in 18 months, and he looked like a wimp and was all smoke and mirrors and no raw meat, but in the end, President Obama ordered another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan which is sort of the right thing to do. Well done, Mr. President. I just wonder why he has to lie while he's doing it. Check it out:

Throughout this period, our troop levels in Afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in Iraq....Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.

This is bull. There were indeed lower troop levels in Afghanistan than in Iraq, but no one was asking for more troops and not getting them (for months and months), until this year, until Obama asked his hand picked general (and a good choice I think) to review the troop levels and make recommendations.

Rumsfeld has called him out on this fabrication, and good for him to do it. The Gibbs' spin is less than compelling, as usual.

Labels: President Obama; Global War Against Islamic Extremism; Afghan Front

I had a total right hip replacement on Monday. All I can remember is getting to the surgery on a gurney but not past that. And then waking up in the recovery room. I have been walking with crutches a lot and doing the exercises in the hospital, where the nurses and staff were great. One by one the tubes all were removed. I'd declare it a total success, but I have three months of recovery to go. That's March 1, 2010. Boy, that seems a long way away.

Anyway, that's my excuse for the light posting. Good as any.

Labels: Personal History: Joint Replacement.