XDA

Here is noted climate scientist Paul Krugman on the Global Warming Hoax/Hysteria. Here is another nail in its coffin. You make the call which is more convincing.

Samples from each.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

That's Krugman. Notice no links, no names, no articles--no nothing in support.

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

That's Mr. Soloman. He's talking about a peer reviewed article in Nature which article certainly seems to be vindicating the once laughed at cosmic ray/cloud nexus theory regarding natural cycles of earth's temperature first propounded in 1996 by two Danes.


One more time: The sun controls the weather and climate here on planet Earth. The so-called greenhouse gas effect is mostly the effect of water vapor in the form of humidity and some types of clouds; and CO2, at .038% of the dry atmosphere has little effect, as its curve is asymptotic and we're already, at 395 ppmv, on the flat part of the curve. By burning the carbon sequestered deep in the earth as coal, oil and natural gas, we have quickly added to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere so that we are having an effect, but it is a small effect hardly even measurable. Extra CO2 in the atmosphere will be almost completely beneficial. There is no evidence of any positive feedback system involving CO2 and water vapor.

Anyone who tells you differently hasn't been keeping up on current events. Krugman is a sad joke off his field of expertise in international labor relations.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Paul Krugman; CERN; Cosmic Rays

This is a roadside sign west of here in Grand Junction. Actually, Franklin Pierce was the worst president ever but Obama is the worst of the 21st Century. I think Woodrow Wilson was the worst of the 20th, although Carter was no day at the beach.

Labels: Worst Presidents

Here is what the boy reporter/pundit Ezra Klein says about the coming EPA regulations which will shut down a fifth of the currently operating coal fired plants here in America over the next 6 years. That means about 1/3 of the coal power now supplied will be lost. Because coal fired plants are 45% of our electricity production, reducing 45% by a third is a pretty big hit on the nation's power production. Klein thinks it's a good thing, and that we'll be able to quickly and easily make up their loss with cleaner gas fired plants. And it will only cost us all an additional $2.8 Billion/yr. Almost nothing.

When there were blackouts in California because of the lack of power plants a decade ago, the political powers that be blamed the evil speculators including Enron of conspiring to cause the rolling brownouts and blackouts. In the next few years, if we start to have blackouts in certain states where the EPA regulations shut down power plants, who will the left blame?


Here is the lefty ideal of power production.
















I meant the top half of Korea.

Labels: Government Control of Power Production, No Energy Economy

The current interglacial period we're in will end and we will descend into another ice age or glacial period. It's not a question of if but of when. From the lengths of the past three recent interglacials (all of which had much warmer temperatures than now, which necessarily would have resulted in the repeated extinction of polar bears), it would appear that the new ice age will be coming sooner rather than later.

I think we ought to name the new ice age the Gore glacial period after the all knowing Nobel Laureate.

Labels: Global Warming: The Gore Glacial Period

When Barack Obama won the election in 2008, he was quite right that the old system needed fixing. America’s debt, its poorly educated youth, its imbalances in trade, its counterproductive tax system, its out-of-control annual spending, its culture of entitlement and subsidies, all in perfect-storm fashion were starting to coalesce and weaken America from within and the perception of America abroad. The statesmanlike thing to do — in the manner of a once-naïve Harry Truman, who woke up to the threat of Soviet-inspired global Communism, or of a Bill Clinton, who finally addressed some of the contradictions of the welfare state and deficit spending — would have been to overhaul the tax system, recalibrate Social Security and Medicare, cut spending, lecture the citizenry on personal responsibility, and address the therapeutic curriculum in our failing schools. With a 70 percent approval rating and supermajorities in both houses of Congress, Obama could have done almost anything throughout 2009.

Instead, he chose the path of Jimmy Carter and the pre-1995 Bill Clinton — even more redistributive state programs, more stifling regulations, more petulant talk about “them,” more class warfare, more debt, and more failed big government.

Victor Davis Hanson

Labels: Victor Davis Hanson quote

Here is climate science's view of average planet temperature and CO2 content over the past 600 million years, that is, once life on the planet was well established. It was usually a lot hotter than it is in the beginning of the Quaternary (we're in the coldest period for the last 260 million years) and, then as now, there appears to be absolutely no correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature.

But I could be reading it wrong.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Recent Geological History

Noemie Emery at the Washington Examiner has a stunning view of how feminists have painted themselves into a corner by their use of the word "choice" in place of "abortion."

Women around the world have chosen lately to abort more and more female fetuses, so that about 160 million more female babies are "missing" from the world population, which seems to prefer male children and, increasingly, to be willing to do something concrete about that preference. This is awful, a holocaust for women which dwarfs the Nazi efforts in the last years of WWII. You can't be a feminist and OK with aborting females because they are females, but...

Because the feminists have relied on the marketing ploy of the word "choice" they have no moral standing to complain about the world's choice to kill many more women fetuses and they are silenced.

This karma can be very black-hearted.

I say aborting a baby merely because it is a female is a hate crime.

Beat that, feminists.

(But what do I know, I think aborting a fetus merely because a baby would be inconvenient is morally indefensible?)

Labels: Karma: Feminists Silent about Gynocide

On this day in 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival (Three Days of Peace and Music) opened in Bethel, NY. I was 16, in Virginia, and I had a car; and although I didn't go (hadn't even heard it was happening beforehand) I could have gone which makes me part of the Woodstock Nation in a way people who couldn't have attended can only dream of. BFD, actually.

Jeff Beck was scheduled to appear but his band fell apart days before when his pianist Nicky Hopkins left and Beck didn't get to Woodstock (although Hopkins did playing keyboards for Jefferson Airplane). I would have been really disappointed.

One of the great things about music during the extraordinarily creative period (1966-1971) were the art nouveau influenced posters and cards of upcoming shows. They're a distant memory now replaced with much less attractive T-shirts, I guess.

Labels: Woodstock Music Festival

If you can't make heads nor tails of this 8/12/11 satellite photo of the Northern Ocean with surrounding lands, there is a more interactive mosaic image here where you can get oriented and see details.

Unlike 2007, no one could sail blue water west from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific this year.

Labels: Global Warming; Arctic Sea Ice

Old Pulteney, an also-ran Highland Scotch from the most northern distillery which no one has every heard of (and which I find has a peaty nose and a finish of peat with just the slightest under-taste of excrement), has decided to get some publicity by paying some Brit masochists to attempt to row to the pole, the magnetic north pole, that is, or kinda, which is actually a few hundred miles west north west off a northwest corner of Ellesmere island in Nunavut Territory, Canada. You can follow the fellows' progress, such as it is, here. They started at Resolute on Cornwallis Island (there's a name near and dear to us revolting colonials), one of the Queen Elizabeth Islands way, way up north, and now they're stuck on the north coast of Devon Island about 300 klicks north of where they started (as the crow flies--if it wasn't too cold for crows) but still hundreds of miles from the pole, and nearly as far from their stated goal, the location of the magnetic pole 15 years ago, when it was much nearer to Ellesmere. They needed to get to Ellef Ringnes Island in the Sverdrup Islands to avoid being considered loser jokes but they are a long way from there. Now their way is completely blocked by thick sea ice as far as the eye can see. Who could have anticipated that? Really, isn't the Northern Ocean becoming ice free in Summer? No? Oh well, there's what, 4 more weeks of melting before the big freeze begins? Who am I to say they can't make it.

I was just kidding about the excrement under-taste. It's just more peat. Peat with an under-taste of peat. Just the Scotch I fancy.

UPDATE: Can't say that this news endears me to the lads and their sponsor.

UPDATE 2: Here's what the satellite shows today. Looks a little icy north of the intrepid rowers.

UPDATE 3: One commenter over at Watts Up With That said that when these guys start to drag the boat over the sea ice some of the team has to stay in the boat and pretend to row. I laughed out loud.

Labels: Global Warming; Row for the Pole (magnetic)

Labels: Scientist: Sense of Humor

The giant wind turbines that chop up birds and kill bats and look bad and make a very annoying noise and provide very small amounts of intermittent power usually at the wrong time at a very large price, and which don't last much more than 20 years without burning up, breaking down or falling down, are proving to be worse than useless in the real world. Sane people in Denmark, Germany and Spain have come to the conclusion that it has all been a waste to build these things. Perhaps we will eventually come to that conclusion in the United States. I was of that opinion long ago. Here's what's got me hot under the collar lately, a very vexing column by Robert Bryce over at NRO.

Texas has the most wind generators of any state with a rated power of over 10,000 megawatts. It gets hot in Texas in the summer (40 days recently of temperatures over 100) and a lot of people use a lot of air conditioning. On August 2, the demand for electrical power down there almost hit 68,000 megawatts. What do you think the contribution into the peak demand grid of the giant wind generators was? I won't make you wait long. 1500 megawatts. That's all. A trifle less than 15% of the rated power. And you know why? Because the wind doesn't blow very hard when it's hot, as any competent meteorologist could tell you. (I guess you do need a weatherman to know how hard the wind blows).

The price tag for the 10K megs of wind power was an astonishing $17 Billion with another $8 Bil for transmission lines. So what could the $25 Billion have bought in the way of reliable, economically viable, power generators? Let's back up a second. We know that the midwest has a lot of wind and Texas at the south end is no exception. Know what else Texas has a lot of? Natural gas. With advanced technologies like horizontal drilling and fracking, they are awash in the cleanest fossil fuel. $25 Billion would have bought 25,000 megawatts of natural gas produced, when you need it, every time you turn on the switch reliable, and cheap, power. That's about 40% of Texas's current peak electricity needs.

There's another side to this story. The EPA is appearing to be doing everything it can to punish Texas for its singular success in creating jobs lately. It is seeking to shut down some old coal fired plants which were all that prevented rolling blackouts these past weeks. (I won't even mention that the feds are seeking to shut down oil and gas drilling there based on a questionable call about habitat fragmentation of a common lizard--that would signal paranoia). If the money for additional energy hadn't been squandered on the unreliable, giant bird choppers, they could have closed those plants easily and cleared the sky ever more completely of harmful emissions of sulfur compounds. They went with eyesore bat killers instead.

The really harmful thing is that 30 other states (including DC, of course) have "clean alternative" energy production mandates in place. Time for the Republicans to stop wasting this money on the No Energy Economy and promote real energy independence with kerogen, oil and gas below our feet here in the United States.

Money quote from Mr. Bryce:

The main motive for installing all those turbines is that they are supposed to help reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, which, in turn, is supposed to help prevent global temperature increases. But it’s already hot — really hot — in Texas and other parts of the southern United States. And that leads to an obvious question: If the global-warming catastrophists are right, and it’s going to get even hotter, then why the heck are we putting up wind turbines that barely work when it’s hot?

Labels: Green Energy; Wind Energy; Pixie Dust Energy

On this day in 1972, the last American combat troops (Third Battalion of the 21st Division) depart from their duty station guarding the Da Nang air base and come back to the Big PX (to lapse into 1972 Viet Nam parlance for a second). Vietnamization of the war effort against the NVA (the Vet Cong had become combat ineffective and an absolute non-factor after their failed Tet offensive years before) was complete regarding ground troops, and victory was within the grasp of the U.S. and South Viet Nam alliance.

Then, in a response to Watergate, Democrats took over huge numbers of seats in the House and Senate and proceeded to stab our former allies (and Cambodia) in the back, as Democrats are wont to do. Not counting the navy personnel off the coast in the 7th Fleet, and the airmen of the 8th Air Force, the departure of the last ground troops left less than 50,000 American military types--advisors, airmen and the like--but that was enough, more or less, with American naval and air support, for the ARVN to have defeated a determined invasion by the NVA in the Easter 1972 invasion, killing up to 100,000 NVA soldiers.

Labels: Viet Nam War History; The Beginning of the End

I have never believed for a moment that Barack Obama has the best interests of the United States at heart.

Thomas Sowell

Labels: Thomas Sowell quote

I hate it when my memory fails me but it has. There was a movie or TV scene where a person was slightly hurt and the medical aid provider (probably a doctor) comes over and starts to treat the minor wound and the patient goes nuts whining and crying and praying and the doctor, whatever, says either That's just the antiseptic or I haven't started cutting yet or something along those lines. If one of the dozens of readers here knows the movie or show, drop a comment please. It's bugging me that I can't recall more.

OK, to the reason for the posting. We've been treated in the past 7 months to a series of symbolic, meaningless, tiny "cuts" in our out of control and on the edge of impossible to really comprehend how big it is federal spending. I challenge quoted the word cut because there has not actually been yet a cut to the spending merely a reduction in the future growth, that's right, GROWTH of our our already out of control and on the edge of impossible to really comprehend how big it is federal spending.

And how have the Democrats reacted? Like we're chopping off poor people's feet. Like we're the cruelest cutters since Jack the Ripper or Hannibal Lector. Like the hysterical, cowardly patient in the half remembered scene. Behold: NYT; ABC; Daily Kos; Nancy Pelosi; Paul Krugman; Brad Johnson; AP; MSNBC; CommonDreams; John Dingell; Catholic News Agency; Fifth Column; Jon Stewart and on and on and on.

I've got just one thing to say to the hysterical Left (and the Republican squishes): We haven't started cutting yet.

There is a solution but the mere idea of it might send some particularly empathetic lefties to a 72 hour mental health hold.

Labels: Federal Spending; Budget "Cuts"; Faulty Memory

Although I knew that only about 3 to 4% of the CO2 placed into the atmosphere each year was of human origin, mainly from fossil fuel burning, but some from land use change, I didn't doubt that the nearly two century rise in CO2 was caused almost exclusively by man. Warmie website Real Climate said it was 100% ours. QED. The pre-industrial "ideal" of 280 ppm of atmospheric CO2 was said to exist in 1840 and before; and now it's 396 ppm a mere 171 years later (a 41% increase). All ours because we burned safely sequestered oil, gas and coal (all dead plant derived fuels) and all that carbon went up into the atmosphere where it added to the CO2 up there and recycling between plants, the soil and the ocean in equilibrium. All our fault.

Well, hold on there, kitty cat.

We can calculate how much we put into the atmosphere each year. See below. It's a lot more difficult to calculate what is coming from the land and the sea. The actual amount in gigatons of CO2 we humans put into the atmosphere varies between 6 and 35. That's a lot of variation. However, there is the same sort of variation in the amount of CO2 thought to come from the land and the sea--it varies between 150 gigs and 770 gigs. Precise, and of one mind, these climate scientists are not. However, the ones who have the human contribution high, in the 20s and 30s, also have high estimates of the land and sea contributions. Dividing the human contributions by the entire yearly contributions of man, sea and land generally gives a percentage of human contribution between 2.57% and 4.10%. Lets go consensus and call it 3.33%.

It turns out there are two isotopes of carbon in CO2 which catch our fancy, C12 and C13. C12, which plants like, is 99% of the CO2 in the atmosphere while only 1% is C13. The ratios of these two isotopes fluctuate a little and can give us a signal to determine origin in the ratios and what's going on in the atmosphere vis a vis CO2 from changes in the ratios over time. The signal of plant derived CO2 is very similar to the signal fossil fuel CO2, as you might expect as fossil fuel comes almost entirely from plants.

So the Aussie scientists, Murray Salby, has been looking at the C12/C13 ratio signals for the past few years and comes to this conclusion, according to Jo Nova, that: "... man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels."

He gets that by looking of the ratios of the isotopes and their changes. He thinks that most of the warming recently has caused more CO2 rather than the other way around. Of the 192 ppm climb over the last two centuries, he believes humans have caused only a fifth. The rest is outgassing of more CO2 from warmer oceans. The oceans got warmer because we have been climbing out of a minor ice age in the past two centuries not because the CO2 level has been climbing. The Warmies have put the cart before the horse and mistaken the cause and effect here. The peer reviewed paper is due in a few weeks.

I have to say this all makes some sense on second thought. First, there is the delay evident between warming (first) and CO2 level climb in the Vostok ice cores. The delay is on average 800 years in those ice core records but a two or three hundred year period is within the parameters. If the reaction of CO2 to warming has been clearly going on for 600,000 years, why would we believe it's stopped now? There is no reason to believe it's stopped now.

Also we have a mirror measurement of the Hawaiian Mona Loa CO2 record at our base at the South Pole. We also have the undeniable fact that there are more people and industry (and coal burning power plants) in the northern hemisphere than in parts of South America and Africa and the thin layer of Asia below the equator, oh, and Australia. If the north is putting out five to 20 times as much CO2 as the south, then there should be a delay between measurement of atmospheric CO2 in Hawaii and the South Pole measurements of CO2. It should take months at least for the north's huge excess of the gas to get mixed in and migrate all the way south to the pole. But there is no such delay. Thus, it is logical to believe the bulk of the CO2 being measured at both sites has a global source other than from humans distributed very unevenly about the world. How about from the oceans? They are distributed fairly evenly global.

So practically nothing the Warmies say is true. Other than 69% of the population, who would have thought that?

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Another Blow

Here are the Northern and Southern skies next to each other. The Southern stars, dwarf galaxies and nebulae seem much more interesting. Maybe it's just me.

Labels: Northern versus Southern stars

What happens to an ideologue when the president in whom he invested enormous hope is increasingly seen as a failure? For one answer, see the lead “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker, where Hendrik Hertzberg writes this:

Invoking the Fourteenth Amendment has always been a long shot, a last refuge. But Obama’s seeming refusal to hold it in reserve … is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating negotiating strategy–indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most disappointing aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has allowed deficits and debt to supercede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household that must ‘live within its means.’ (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now–a lack of demand, not a shortage of capital–higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich.

Translation: Barack Obama, the most liberal president in generations, hasn’t been liberal enough. His problem hasn’t been profligacy but frugality. During the last two-and-a-half years, as $3.7 trillion has been added to our national debt, it turns out Obama has spent too little. Despite his efforts to slander and misrepresent the proposals of his opponents, Obama turns out to be too civil, too accommodating, too darn decent. And the man Democrats considered their Great Communicator just three years ago is suffering from a “communications problem,” unable to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics.

This is sheer nonsense, of course. But Hertzberg’s comments are instructive. Rather than take into account the economic (and empirical) failure of Obama’s Keynesian approach, those who take a dogmatic, faith-based approach to American politics engage in intellectual contortions in order to try to innoculate their ideology from damage. People like Hertzberg begin from what is, for them, an unassailable proposition: liberalism is right because it is right and so it can never be wrong. And what happens when, by any objective standard, liberal policies fail? The problem is, they weren’t sufficiently liberal.

There are certain advantages to this approach. Those whose minds are obdurate and canonical –regardless of the philosophy they hold — don’t need to grapple with inconvenient facts. They have a reflexive response to every set of facts that challenges their worldview: ignore the facts. This doesn’t help one ascertain the truth. But it does avoid the hard work of facing up to the false assumptions on which their intellectual structure rests. Call it the comforting life of an ideological fanatic.

Peter Wehner (I usually have a link here to the original but I quoted the entire piece)

Labels: Peter Wehner quote: comforting life of idealogical fanatic