Friday, February 29, 2008

Science, It's All About Math




Some reading while you watch ...

Global Warming: The More You Know, The Less You Care

Another classic from the Tierney Lab:

If only the masses could understand the science of global warming, they’d be alarmed, right? Wrong, according to the surprising results of a survey of Americans published in the journal Risk Analysis by researchers at Texas A&M University.

After asking a national sample of more than 1,000 Americans how much they knew about global warming and how they felt about it, the researchers report that respondents who are better-informed about global warming “both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.”

That surely explains why Laurie David is so hysterical. I've written before of the gap in perception on this issue between scientists and meteorologists (think Max Mayfield, formerly head of the National Hurricane Center and world renowned global warming skeptic). People who actually know something about weather and climate, but whose research and grant money don't depend on a deep and abiding faith in global warming, tend not to be too alarmist about changing weather. But this is an interesting new spin, and it turns out those who are best informed are the least concerned--and these are the folks who (unlike me) have confidence in the science:

Another unexpected result: “Respondents who showed a great deal of confidence that scientists understand global warming and climate change showed significantly less concern for the risks of global warming than did those who have lower trust in scientists.”

Tierney offers some speculation that this is because respondents who are confident in the science are also confident in the ability of science to respond to global warming. I'm dubious. There are a lot of great ideas floating around for how to cool the planet, but nobody's going to win an Oscar for showing how technology can save the world and your SUV.

A Moral Obligation

Spoken by a big huge liberal no less ... Angelina Jolie. Sheesh, what is she smoking, at least she can admit when things are going better, unlike three quarters of our Democrat party leaders.
What we cannot afford, in my view, is to squander the progress that has been made. In fact, we should step up our financial and material assistance. UNHCR has appealed for $261 million this year to provide for refugees and internally displaced persons. That is not a small amount of money -- but it is less than the U.S. spends each day to fight the war in Iraq. I would like to call on each of the presidential candidates and congressional leaders to announce a comprehensive refugee plan with a specific timeline and budget as part of their Iraq strategy.

As for the question of whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq. They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is possible.

It seems to me that now is the moment to address the humanitarian side of this situation. Without the right support, we could miss an opportunity to do some of the good we always stated we intended to do.
Obama would call this too hopeful. Iraqis would say why abandon us now?

Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Candy Man Can

The cult of emptiness and slick jive talk rolls on.
“Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned.

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have been critical of the long-standing North American Free Trade Agreement over the course of the Democratic primaries, saying that the deal has cost U.S. workers’ jobs.

Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama’s campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.

The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

But Tuesday night in Ohio, where NAFTA is blamed for massive job losses, Obama said he would tell Canada and Mexico “that we will opt out unless we renegotiate the core labour and environmental standards.”

Late Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign said the staff member’s warning to Wilson sounded implausible, but did not deny that contact had been made.

“Senator Obama does not make promises he doesn’t intend to keep,” the spokesperson said.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Democrats New Energy Plan

Democrats don't yet get the message, global warming has been cancelled, replaced by global freezing. Meanwhile, the money people aware of the coming ice age, are running for the hills ... Ethanol Bust
Indeed, plans for as many as 50 new ethanol plants have been shelved in recent months, as Wall Street pulls back from the sector, says Paul Ho, a Credit Suisse investment banker specializing in alternative energy. Financing for new ethanol plants, Ho says, "has been shut down."
Doesn't stop the global warming hoaxers, they run on 100% pure faith.


House Democrats passed legislation again yesterday to levy $18 billion in new taxes on oil companies, an industry that is already overtaxed by government. The bill passed 236-182 largely along party lines.
AP - Hoyer acknowledged "this legislation alone will not bring down gas prices." But he said the measure will provide a needed boost to alternative energy industries — solar, wind, biofuels, and geothermal — and help promote energy conservation. "That may bring down gas prices three years from now, 10 years from now," he said.
Isn't this just grand, in the meantime you get to pay more for food, pay more for fuel and pay more for taxes. But it may -- However like most things Democrat, ever notice how none of what they ever say is true? It's a habit with them, the only truth is the new taxes. Democrats made simple -- Raise taxes, fund socialism and gun control. It's all they really know.
The bill would roll back two lucrative tax breaks for the five largest U.S. oil companies. One helps manufacturers compete against foreign companies; the other gives American companies a tax credit related to oil and gas extraction outside the country. Democrats estimated that those current breaks would save the oil companies $17.65 billion in taxes over the next 10 years.

The House-passed bill would use that money to promote renewable energy industries — such to promote renewable energy industries — such as wind, solar and cellulosic ethanol plants — by extending tax credits that recently expired or are scheduled to end at year's end...

The oil industry has lobbied intensely against the House tax legislation, calling it a "discriminatory bill" that targets companies that already pay considerable taxes. "New taxes ... will even further reduce our energy security by discouraging new domestic oil and natural gas production and refinery capacity expansions," the American Petroleum Institute said in a statement.
This latest move by the Pelosi-Reid Congress is not surprising. They just do the same stupid things, over and over again. Those of you too young to remember President Jimmy Carter, you look to be getting a second chance. I knew Jimmy Carter, you do not want to repeat the misery he caused.

Democrats have always been against lower fuel prices, a vibrant capitalist economy, oil drilling and exploration. Gaia is their patron saint. Hey you can call liberals stupid, but they are persistent in their stupidity.

No oil, but we get socialized windmills, pabulum and lots of nice nothings from the empty headed ObamaOsama mama. And what do you do when the windmills crap out, you do know the wind doesn't blow on demand don't you? Well the windmills ran out of wind yesterday in Texas, giving darkness.
A drop in wind generation late on Tuesday, coupled with colder weather, triggered an electric emergency that caused the Texas grid operator to cut service to some large customers, the grid agency said on Wednesday.

Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as colder temperatures moved into the state.

The grid operator went directly to the second stage of an emergency plan at 6:41 PM CST (0041 GMT), ERCOT said in a statement.

System operators curtailed power to interruptible customers to shave 1,100 megawatts of demand within 10 minutes, ERCOT said. Interruptible customers are generally large industrial customers who are paid to reduce power use when emergencies occur.
No word on the economic loss for the wind shortage. Maybe we should send out subsidy checks for the damages. Just add it to the bill.

Who says Democrats aren't nuts? Prove it ...

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

RIP, William F. Buckley

William F. Buckley has passed away at the age of 82, at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. He’ll be greatly missed.

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008) [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died this morning in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.

He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

As you might expect, we’ll have much more to say here and in NR in the coming days and weeks and months. For now: Thank you, Bill. God bless you, now with your dear Pat. Our deepest condolences to Christopher and the rest of the Buckley family. And our fervent prayer that we continue to do WFB’s life’s work justice.

Here’s the last piece he wrote for National Review Online, showing that he remained as eloquent as ever, to the end: Fowlerspeak-Goodspeak.

Proved False -- Theory of Man Made Global Warming

Science works like this. You propose a theory of how something works. You make a hypothesis based on your theory. The hypothesis is tested, either by experiment or by some measurements. Measurements confirm theory. Theory is good until further notice. Measurements don't confirm theory. Theory is "No F'ning Good". The boys and girls of the UN noticed CO2 increasing. Proposed the theory of man made Global Warming due to man's CO2 generation and increasing atmosphere CO2. Measurements deny global warming, while CO2 continues to increase. Man caused global warming theory based on increase of CO2 is "No F'ning Good".

End of story ...

Need new theory, Plan A is a dismal failure. So the boys and girls of the UN had to look for something else. The boys and girls at the UN go to plan B. Climate change is due to increased CO2. New theory to be trotted out real soon now.

And in the meantime, stop telling the world to cut down on CO2 emission just to please this fellow Rajendra Pachauri, or whatever the name of the current UN IPCC climate charlatan is.

Man causes global warming, man causes global cooling. Now if we only knew how, we could make it just right.


This is the monthly Hadley land and ocean and UAH MSU LT temperatures over the last decade plotted with atmospheric CO2 overlayed. Note the temperatures have not warmed. Note the correlation with CO2 has vanished the last decade for both data sets.

Read more here.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Global Warming Cooling

I hope Al Gore has cashed all his carbon credits, because this is bad news for the AGW hoaxers. All gone in search of warming ...

Question, since man caused the warming, how did man cause the cooling? And why can't we do it whenever we want?
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Ethanol

Ethanol, use it, use a lot of it. Starve people all over the world and feel good about yourself.

Surprise, Inflation looking worisome
January price increases were led by food and energy. Food prices rose 1.7%, matching the large increase of October 2004; the last time food prices rose faster was October 2003.

Energy prices rose 1.5%, led by an 8.5% gain in home heating oil and a 2.9% rise in gasoline prices. Producer prices have now risen an unadjusted 7.4% over the past year, the largest 12-month gain since 1981.
The Democrat's plan is working fine, Just like Jimmuh Carter's did -- With a twist. Jimmuh just F'ed up the energy market and the food trailed behind. Now they have F'ed up the energy market and added F'ing up the food market a bonus.

Burn food, see what that nutty idea does for you.

Democrats made easy, raise taxes, fund socialism and gun control. It's all they know. Yes, and that includes the repackaged old-new hope vacuous Obama -- As liberal a leftists as they get. In fact if you listen carefully, you will hear the faint ring of communism in Obama's rhetoric -- Workers paradise.

Monday, February 25, 2008

The Hopelessness Of Communism

Could easily be translated to the hopelessness of Obama or Clinton, but that would be mean, right?
I've just returned from a 10-day trip to Cuba and I must say that the misery and decay I encountered in Havana (Habana Vieja) exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. From above the city looks like after an air raid ... and from the ground, it doesn't look that much better:
More here, with photos of the real Cuba from the metropolis of Havana, free education and free healcare.

Americaca's future, you decide, but if you listen to a speech by Obama, or Hillary, you can hear the songs of socialism, helplessness, hopelessness and despair in the background. You won't hear the rhetoric of "can do America".

Safety





More here.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Real Change IS Coming

The solar weather report today is not good, it's been this way for over a year. The sun is eerily quite. There is no solar weather, to speak of. If solar cycle 24 does not start soon, the Earth could quickly sink into another Ice Age - and actually we are about due for one. Over time, interglacial periods, like the one we are in now, last on average about 10,000 years -- We are at 11,000 and counting. Yes, that means the normal state of the planet Earth is mostly a snowball.

Unfortunately, carbon dioxide reductions will have exactly the same impact on the coming and perhaps imminent Ice Age as human-generated carbon dioxide had on the interglacial warming -- Namely, zero, nada, none. Well, except the higher CO2 levels may help with crop growing on the remaining usable land, good if you like to eat.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age.

What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended.

How much longer do we have before the ice begins to spread across the Earth’s surface? Less than a hundred years or several hundred? We simply don’t know.

Even if all the temperature increase over the last century is attributable to human activities, the rise has been relatively modest one of a little over one degree Fahrenheit — an increase well within natural variations over the last few thousand years.

While an enduring temperature rise of the same size over the next century would cause humanity to make some changes, it would undoubtedly be within our ability to adapt.

Entering a new ice age, however, would be catastrophic for the continuation of modern civilization.
Mankind seems destined for reasons of enslaving people to world socialism, to head in the exact opposite direction. Who says lemmings are stupid, humans are smart. An new ice age, or even significant cooling, will have devastating effect on world food supplies. History is your freind, read history not Al Gore propaganda. The propaganda is only enriching him, not doing a damn thing for the Earth, it's people or it's ability to resist ustoppable climate change.
NASA has predicted that the solar cycle peaking in 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries and should cause a very significant cooling of Earth’s climate. Will this be the trigger that initiates a new Ice Age?

We ought to carefully consider this possibility before we wipe out our current prosperity by spending trillions of dollars to combat a perceived global warming threat that may well prove to be only a will-o-the-wisp.
Is socialism so important to the left that it will take mankind down with it? Probably, these ideology driven control freaks see mankind as the enemy of nature, and HE needs to be stopped.

With proper planning, resource allocation to finding new ways to grow crops in less favorable growing areas, mankind could weather the change. With ignorance, anything can happen.

BTW, for those worried about the oceans rising, they rose 400 feet since the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago, they will likely recede by a similar amount when the next full fledged ice age hits.

They Will Wave From Their Limousines

Well, well well, the green hypocrites are being outed. You knew that all the "green talking" was for the people, not for the ruling elites didn't you?
Ministers are using a secret limousine service to ferry them around the country, a Mail on Sunday investigation has discovered.

Senior Labour figures are quietly using £60,000 gas-guzzlers to whisk them around in comfort – despite claims that politicians have switched to smaller, cheaper models that are less damaging to the environment.

Among the prominent politicians using the secret luxury car service is the Speaker Michael Martin and his wife Mary, who travel regularly in top-ofthe- range Mercedes and Jaguars.
All while you are forced into death-trap small cars. It's the same in the US, only difference is they claim the secret service makes them do it, and in states like CA, the just hope you don't notice what the elites drive.

The Left And Fidel Castro

Not satisfied with just fawning over Cuba's ridiculous national health care that no one with a brain would ever partake of, CNN goes the extra mile. The left never knew a dictator they didn't like. With Castro dying, looks like Hugo Chavez is vying for the coveted spot of the left's favorite, but competition remains tight with Assad and Ahmadinejad still in the running.

Mugniyah behind establishment of Mahdi Army

Imad Mugniyah, the senior Hezbollah military commander who was killed in Syria earlier this month, helped form the Mahdi Army, the military wing of the radical Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr, according to an Iraqi intelligence official. He was described as a “co-founder” of the Mahdi Army, Naharnet reported, based on a translation from the Iraqi daily Al Zaman.

Mugniyah helped form the Mahdi Army after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003. He recruited from the Shia communities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and then sent the recruits to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley for training. “The 300 fighters were trained on the use of assault rifles, booby-trapping and kidnapping operations,” the unnamed intelligence official told Al Zaman.
Bill Roggio has the rest here.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

There Is A God -- Chris Muir


It was a whole lot more fun handing down the edicts than it is living by them.

Friday, February 22, 2008

CO2 And Temperature


This is the monthly Hadley land and ocean and UAH MSU LT temperatures over the last decade plotted with atmospheric CO2 overlayed. Note the temperatures have not warmed. Note the correlation with CO2 has vanished the last decade for both data sets.

Read more here.

China's Carbon Dragon

Try this statistic on for size: If China's economy continues to grow at its current pace, and the Asian giant doesn't cut its rate of energy use, by 2030 it could be emitting as much carbon into the atmosphere as the entire world does today.

And here's another: As you read this, China is bringing on line coal-fired power plants – major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions – at the mind-boggling rate of two per week.

Yet China's No. 1 mandate isn't environmental protection, it's economic growth. And that's defensible. A rising standard of living helps ensure that the world's most-populous country remains stable, a goal that benefits both the Chinese people and the rest of the world.

The question of how China can both cut emissions and grow its economy at the same time "poses one of the greatest challenges of this century," declares a recent analysis in the journal Science.

All the Prius-driving, thermostat-lowering, and light-bulb changing going on in the rest of the world won't count for much unless China can radically reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions. This week, China made clear at a discussion of climate change at the United Nations that it considers itself a "victim" of global warming rather than one of the "culprits" causing it – i.e., the world's rich nations.

While China promises to play a positive role in battling the problem, Ambassador Yu Qingtai said, it should not be expected to be bound by the same caps on emissions as a "developed country."
The foolishness of destroying Western economies is lost on me, if the goal is to reduce worldwide emissions. It is also interesting that the one technology that could reduce emissions, nuclear power plants, is shunned like the plague by the alarmist.

I wonder who is going to buy all that Chinese junk once the Western economies are brought to their knees?

Just a couple of hmmms to ponder.

Read the rest here.

Global Warming Videos

Here are some videos on the subject of Global Warming ... Debunking it that is.

Measuring the Phoenix Urban Heat Island

The project could also be called "Disproving the IPCC is so easy, a child could do it."

You begin to realize the IPCC and the data they keep is so unreliably and full of holes it's not possible to use it for anything except party games.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

NOAA: Global Warming Not Causing More Destructive Hurricanes

As reported by Anthony Watts moments ago:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - February 21, 2008

*** NEWS FROM NOAA ***
NATIONAL OCEANIC & ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION U. S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE WASHINGTON, DC
Contact: Dennis Feltgen, NOAA 305-229-4404

Increased Hurricane Losses Due to More People,
Wealth Along Coastlines, Not Stronger Storms, New Study Says

A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes.

“We found that although some decades were quieter and less damaging in the U.S. and others had more land-falling hurricanes and more damage, the economic costs of land-falling hurricanes have steadily increased over time,” said Chris Landsea, one of the researchers as well as the science and operations officer at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. “There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.”

The paper in question was written by Roger A. Pielke Jr., Joel Gratz, Christopher W. Landsea, Douglas Collins, Mark A. Saunders, and Rade Musulin.

Think journalists are busily studying this report so that they can share the great news with the citizenry on this evening's broadcasts and in tomorrow's papers?

The Cult Of Personality

We've seen this before ...



... and it doesn't end well.


Read the lyrics, below, from Lyrics Mania--it's Barack Hussein Obama in a nutshell.

I know your anger, I know your dreams

I've been everything you want to be

I'm the Cult of Personality

Like Mussolini and Kennedy

I'm the Cult of Personality

Cult of Personality

Cult of Personality

Neon lights, A Nobel Price
The mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You don't have to follow me
Only you can set me free
I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face on your T.V.
I'm the Cult of Personality
I exploit, you still you love me

I tell you one and one makes three
I'm the Cult of Personality
Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi
I'm the Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality

Neon lights a Nobel Prize
A leader speaks, that leader dies
You don't have to follow me
Only you can set you free

You gave me fortune
You gave me fame
You gave me power in your God's name
I'm every person you need to be
I'm the Cult of Personality


See Debie Schlussel for more here.

Microsoft Declares Truce In Open Source War

The glasnost era has arrived at Microsoft. The software giant - which over the years has earned a reputation for not playing nice - put out a press release Thursday morning proclaiming its readiness to collaborate with the rest of the world. Microsoft said it is making changes in its technology and business that aim “to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.” The company is so eager to pound home the point that the words “open” and “openness” appear 16 times in the release.
More here.

We'll see, trust but verify.

EU regulators cool on Microsoft open-source move
The European Commission has expressed doubt regarding Microsoft's announcement Thursday claiming a move toward greater interoperability.

In a statement, the Commission said that while it would welcome greater interoperability, Microsoft had made similar announcements before.

"The Commission would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability," the statement says. "Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today's announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability."

The agency added that the Microsoft announcement would not affect its antitrust investigations against the software giant.

"In the course of its ongoing interoperability investigation, the Commission will verify whether Microsoft is complying with EU antitrust rules, whether the principles announced today would end any infringement were they implemented in practice, and whether or not the principles announced today are in fact implemented in practice," said the Commission. "Today's announcement by Microsoft does not address the tying allegations."

Oil From Coal

The Chinese are no wimps when it comes to making the right decisions ...
A Chinese energy company is poised to open a chemical plant to make liquid fuels for cars and aircraft from coal, a move that has alarmed environmental campaigners who say it will increase carbon emissions and worsen global warming.

The plant, in Inner Mongolia, will use technology developed by Germany during the second world war to convert coal directly into synthetic diesel, dubbed "Nazi fuel". China says the process will help break its booming economy's reliance on foreign oil, and that it will build more such plants.

The US and India are also investing heavily in the technology, which is being heavily promoted by coal companies across the world as a cost-effective solution to soaring oil prices and concerns about energy security.

The Chinese facility, operated by Shenhua Corporation, will be the first of its type in the world. Shenhua would not say when it expects the plant to open, but industry experts said it would be within weeks. Last month, company officials said construction work was 99.5% complete.

...

Analysts say the fuel could be economic if oil prices stay consistently above US$25-40 a barrel. Oil currently costs double that, and briefly touched $100 a barrel last month.

A study last year by the Chinese Academy of Sciences said: "Production of liquid fuels from coal is practically the most feasible route to cope with the dilemma in oil supply."
Think about the part of the article outlined in red above, how does $40 equivalent seem to you when the costs of a barrel of oil on today's market is $100+. If the US politicians were really interested in energy independence instead of giving lip service to the words, the US would be doing what the Chinese are doing. Instead, Pres Clinton made a fake monument of the largest US deposit of low sulphur coal, you might ask why did he do that? Well it was to benefit his Indonesian buddy, look it up if you want to know more.

Seriously, we are driving up food prices to produce ethanol which causes as much as twice the CO2 as gasoline, does that sound like a winner? Why are we not using coal synfuel to power cars and nuclear to power our electrical generation? Both would reduce CO2 production. Going to have to leave that part up to the reader to decide. Why are the enviro-whack-nuts alarmed, but unwilling to advance the cause of nuclear power?

Read about coal liquefaction and gasification, two of the ways coal changes characteristic. Yes, it can be done cleanly, especially if nuclear power is used for the energy to drive the conversion processes. Coal conversion has been useful for many countries, in WWII the Germans and the Japanese ran their war machines on coal.

Professor Says Solar Panels a 'Loser'

Installing solar panels on homes is an economic "loser" with the costs far outweighing the financial benefit, a respected University of California-Berkeley business professor said Wednesday.

The technology, using photovoltaic panels to generate electricity, is not economically competitive with fossil fuels and costs more than other renewable fuels, said Severin Borenstein, who also directs the UC Energy Institute.

"We are throwing away money by installing the current solar PV technology," he said.

...

"I have nothing against solar PV and I hope it gets better," he said. "It's just very expensive and not terribly efficient."

Borenstein said he didn't take into account the feel-good benefit or societal value of installing a solar system on your roof. "Certainly people make these decisions for a variety of reasons," he said.

But installing better insulation would be a better bet economically, he said, although your neighbors won't know you did it.
Having installed solar panels myself, the return just isn't there. Good for emergency power, like what you may need to charge batteries after a hurricane or flood, but not worth much when trying to replace power plant supplied electrical power. The economies of scale of the power companies is just too great. Nuclear is the best answer, if your goal is really reducing CO2, if not, then skip solar.

Read the rest here.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Fall in U.S., Rise in Europe

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States fell by 1.8 percent in 2006, compared to a 0.3 percent increase in emissions in the European Union (EU), according to newly released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The new data confirm the continuing success of market-oriented, voluntary greenhouse gas emissions programs in the U.S. versus European cap-and-trade mandates.

The stark difference occurred even though the two economies grew at a near-identical pace in 2006, roughly 3 percent for the year.

Technology and free markets wins again over command and control bureaucracy. Free market economies will always outperform command and control.

Source here.

Cold Reality


UK’s Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature anomaly (HadCRUT)
See Watts Up With That for the whole story.

Fortunately for mankind, neither the sun, the earth nor the universe obeys the wishes of politicians. So, what does today's cold reality check tell us?

(a) first, it is a timely reminder that climate is driven by hundreds of factors, not just by one politically-selected variable; and,

(b) secondly, the lack of media reporting demonstrates powerfully, yet again, how the ‘global warming’ grand narrative and myth works hard to exclude any facts, or science, which does not bolster the hegemony of the myth.
Read the whole article here.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Hover And Stare




Honeywell's MAV -- The MAV system, consisting of two air vehicles and a ground station, provides enhanced mission effectiveness and force protection.

Miami is going to do a six months test. Can they be staring at you soon?

Sleeping Like A Baby

Ever wonder why Al Gore doesn't want to talk about the Sun? Ever wonder what really drives climate on Earth? A little solar system science might help -- The Earth is suspended in a sort of "goldilocks orbit" where the Sun makes the planet not too hot, not too cold. But that orbit and the constant warm is not constant. The Earth orbit varies, the output of the Sun varies, the solar wind varies, the heating and cooling effects on planet Earth varies. Nearly all real scientists know this. The vagaries of the Earth's obit were first explained by Serbian civil engineer and mathematician Milutin Milanković. We are just beginning to understand the rest of the story.



SOHO sunspot scan, 2-18-2008. Scientists have been waiting for over a year for solar cycle 24 to begin. A blink in August 2006 and a blink in January 2008 raised hopes, but all remains quiet.

Every climate scientist in the world has known for at least several years now, that late 20th century warming was driven almost entirely by the very high levels of solar activity between 1940 and 2000, quietly called the modern maxima. They also know the corollary, that when solar activity drops into a down phase, the earth will get cold, possibly even precipitating the next ice age.

When the Sun goes quite, the Earth grows cold. It's what is happening right now, the Sun is very quite. The snows come, the snow pack causes another effect, the white surface of the snow increases the Earth's albedo and reflects back into space some the heat that would otherwise heat the planet. The snow pack combines with clouds which do much the same thing.

How might this work, with a twist -- The leading theory says that it is the Galactic Cosmic Radiation(GCR) rather than the solar wind that directly affects global temperature. High energy GCR ionizes the atmosphere, inducing the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight back into space. This increases the Earth's albedo, or put another way, reflectivity as seen from space. Under this theory, the warming effect of the solar wind is indirect. The solar wind actually sweeps away most of the GCR, the result is the solar wind in-effect blows the clouds away, warming the Earth. The GCR phenomena is a recent discovery, for more information, see Henrik Svensmark’s 2007 book The Chilling Stars.

The bad news is when the solar wind dies down because sunspot activity decreases, the GCR has a more direct effect on the Earth, forming clouds and causing precipitation. The phenomena is additive, snow pack and cloud formation, it tends to reflect back into space the warming light of the Sun, and the Earth cools down. At its simplest, the relationship between the solar magnetic field strength and the Earth’s climate is this: lower magnetic field strength means few sunspots, fewer sunspots means less solar wind, less solar wind means more galactic cosmic rays, more galactic cosmic rays means more low level cloud formation, more low level clouds means more sunlight reflected back into space, which in turn means less heating of the Earth’s surface and
atmosphere.

Here is a paper that supports to coming low sunspots, it will be published in March 2008 that the The Heartland Institute, is sponsoring "2008 International Conference on Climate Change", March 2 - March 4, 2008 in New York City. Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf

And now you know the rest of the story -- Much simplified of course.

Look How Easy It Really Is

Most normal people throughout the USA know that if you actually enforce laws, people will for the most part obey. The dilapidated state of our illegal immigration problem is testimony to the fact that if you allow them to come, they will. Such is the case with McCain's own state Arizona, it's gotten so bad they decided to enforce the laws that were already on the books, and now look what happens -- It works. Someone needs to notify the 'maverick', I doubt he is home much as he runs around the country on the "lying talk express" saying otherwise.

More here.

Immigration Reform: The problem of illegal immigration seems to take care of itself if laws are obeyed and enforced. For the latest evidence, we turn to Sen. John McCain's home state.

Arizona is seeing signs of a flight by Mexican immigrants out of the state and back across the border. Local reformers credit the state's recent crackdown on illegal immigration. Indeed, sanctions against employers are playing a key role.

The new state law — which goes into effect March 1 — punishes employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants by suspending their business license for 10 days on the first violation and revoking it for a second offense.

At the same time, the county sheriff in Phoenix has been helping enforce federal immigration laws by rounding up people living there illegally.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has given arrest authority to many deputies. So in the course of a traffic stop, illegal aliens without driver's licenses for the first time now stand a real chance of being deported.

In response to the crackdown, illegals are flooding the Mexican consulate in Phoenix to obtain papers to move back across the border and enroll their children in school.

The consulate is reporting an "unusual" 400% increase in parents applying for Mexican birth certificates for their anchor babies and other documents they need to return to Mexico.

They're also requesting a paper known as a "menaje de casa," which allows illegals living in the U.S. to cross into Mexico without paying a tax on their furniture and other household goods.

How charming that they follow their own immigration rules, but not ours. And how telling that the Mexican government makes it hard for its citizens to return, while making it easier for them to break into our country by handing out thousands of maps to border tunnels and water tanks in the Arizona desert.

Some immigrants' rights groups are claiming U.S. citizens, not just illegals, are crossing into Mexico, because the Arizona economy is flagging, and construction and retail jobs are drying up. That makes little sense. Americans don't flee to Mexico to find work.

Fact is, some 30,000 illegal immigrants plan to leave Arizona sometime before March 1, when the state's tough new immigration laws kick in, according to a survey conducted earlier this month by Chicanos Por La Causa. And CPLC can hardly be accused of anti-immigrant bias — it's a nonprofit immigrant-support group.

State lawmakers who pushed through the crackdown are already heralding its success. The desired effect was having illegals see that the red carpet would no longer be rolled out for them.

Arizona has borne the brunt of the Mexican invasion, and its citizens are fed up. According to a study last year, 12% of Arizona workers are in the U.S. illegally — the highest share in the country.

Illegal immigrants and their families are not only a burden on public services, but many of them join gangs and commit violent crimes while living here.

Amnesty advocates argue it's not feasible to deport millions of illegals. They say it's impossible to round up 12 million people and kick them out of the country.

But the out-migration in Arizona proves you don't have to. Just making a strong show of law enforcement at the work site and on the street corners is enough to discourage illegals from staying.

Arizona is a model for other states being overrun by illegals. If they just send a clear message to immigrants living here illegally that they're serious about enforcing the law, they'll pack up and leave. And they'll tell their friends and relatives waiting to break in on the other side of the border that it just ain't worth it.

It costs a lot of money to hire coyotes and smugglers to get here. They'll see in due order that they'll be wasting their money and will stay home — or get in line with law-abiding immigrants who actually want to come to America and be American citizens.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

VirtualBox, Now Sun Microsystems' New Honey




Sun Expands to the Desktop with Innotek Virtualization Acquisition
By David Marshall
February 13, 2008

Sun Microsystems announced that it will acquire German desktop virtualization vendor Innotek GmbH, the maker of VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization product that has been growing in popularity. The announcement comes on the heels of Sun's $1 billion acquisition announcement of open source database developer MySQL. Terms of the Innotek deal haven't been disclosed.

Innotek has been growing in popularity with end users and developers because of its open source nature. The product was first made available in January of last year, and it already has more than 4 million downloads to its name. VirtualBox runs on top of Windows and Linux today, and the company already has a Mac OS X version in Beta. And only two days ago, the company announced its first Beta version for Open Solaris, the open source version of Sun's Unix operating system.

According to Sun, acquiring Innotek will help strengthen Sun's leadership in the virtualization market by extending the company's xVM platform with a desktop virtualization solution. Steve Wilson, who heads Sun's xVM team, posted on his blog that he believes that the VirtualBox technology will help broaden interest among developers in Sun's xVM product line.

Wilson explains on his blog that the two products, VirtualBox and Sun's xVM, may sound familiar at first, however they are targeted at radically different markets. Wilson writes:

"Sun xVM Server is a bare-metal hypervisor. This means it installs directly on the hardware, not on top of an existing operating system. It's a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. It includes high-end, data center features like live VM migration and dynamic self-healing. This is datacenter grade virtualization. Along with Sun xVM Ops Center, xVM Server will become the engine that drives a dynamic data center.

VirtualBox is what is technically referred to as a type-2 hypervisor. It's an application that installs on top of an existing operating system. VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris hosts, which means you can use it with your laptop no matter what OS you choose for your 'native' environment. This makes VirtualBox a software developer's dream. You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multi-tier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box! VirtualBox doesn't have xVM Server's data center features, like live migration, but it's incredibly light-weight."

Wilson compares xVM Server to something like VMware's ESX Server platform and VirtualBox as more of a comparable platform to VMware's Workstation or Fusion product or Parallels Desktop for Mac. And because of that, VirtualBox seems to fit in nicely with Sun's plans for a virtualization suite offering.

Right now, VirtualBox is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and can be downloaded on virtualbox.org. Sun plans on continuing to make VirtualBox freely available to users, and it hopes that its open source nature can continue to win over support from the developer community.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Watching The Media 'Toilet Swirl'

The real problem is that buying public are not buying the left shifted ideological slant the majors newspapers are pushing. It is not the wordsmithing of the journalists, it is the leftist editorializing of the news that is creeping into almost every aspect of the news reporting that is repulsing the buying public. Starting with the nonsensical man-caused global warming, the relentless pushing of the Democrats socialism agenda and ending with the idiocy of muslim fascists terrorism denial -- And all the stops in between.

But notice, it isn't the editors or the publishers who pay the price for that bad policy.
After years of resisting the newsroom cuts that have hit most of the industry, The New York Times will bow to growing financial strain and eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, the executive editor said Thursday.

The cuts will be achieved by “by not filling jobs that go vacant, by offering buyouts, and if necessary by layoffs,” said the executive editor, Bill Keller. The more people who accept buyouts, he said, “the smaller the prospect of layoffs, but we should brace ourselves for the likelihood that there will be some layoffs.”

The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900. There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in The Times’ newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely because of the growth of its Internet operations.
Not going to slow the swirl, rest is here.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Cracks Forming In The Cold

Following is an essay about global warming written by agricultural journalist Jerry Carlson. Mr. Carlson is and has been following the study of climate for over 50 years and offers the insight of a journalist and agricultural scientist on what he calls "the scientific debate of the century." He is referring of course to the myth of man-caused global warming, and the efforts to control it via various methods of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's an important read and well worth the time to and digest what he says.

The original essay can be found at the AIM site here.



Will Media Expose Global Warming Con Job?


Special Report | By Jerry Carlson | February 1, 2008


In March 2007 the UK’s Channel 4 broadcast a biting documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. It debunked most of the major
arguments of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning video, An Inconvenient Truth.

The Chinese word for crisis is a combination of the two ideograms Wei, which means "danger" and Ji, which means "opportunity."

The Chinese word for crisis

In the past several months, a new "crisis" has heated up the controversy over man-made global warming.

A few major-media writers and TV personalities are actually reporting statements by credible scientists who are challenging the assumption that carbon dioxide is the primary force causing global warming.

There's a real possibility that big-name journalists will break ranks and pursue their next Pulitzer Prize by exposing the lack of scientific consensus on CO2 as a planet-heating pollutant.

That would create a crisis of confidence among the activists, researchers and global-governance apparatchiks who want a global carbon tax to build their political and financial power base.

As an agricultural journalist, I find this a fascinating new development in the climate controversy. I've studied weather and climate for more than 50 years. In the early 1970s, I wrote a short book, Tomorrow's Wild Weather, which warned what could happen if there was a long-term continuation of the cooling trends in the mid-latitudes since the 1930s.

As climatologist Reid Bryson advised me at the time, a cooler climate in temperate zones would have been serious for world agriculture: Westerly winds would intensify, making U.S. weather more extreme. Africa's Sahel desert would expand much farther southward, spreading famine across northern Africa. The data looked ominous: Average temperature in the 48 U.S. states had fallen by more than six-tenths of a degree Celsius since 1930.

This cooling attracted widespread press coverage and even some political pressure-to reduce "aerosols" or fine particles of pollutants which must be making our atmosphere more opaque. But the "New Ice Age" scare faded as more refined data emerged and the longer-term, slow recovery from the Little Ice Age resumed.

I've continued to follow the climate controversy, especially since the 1997 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since that conference, billions of dollars in government funding have generated floods of research data, a myriad of computer models, political posturing and the Kyoto Protocol.

The New Data

Most of that data is freely available to scientists and others on the Internet. Using it, hundreds of highly qualified climatologists and other scientists outside the fraternal network of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have challenged climate prediction models and other assumptions of the IPCC's reports. While there's consensus that climates change over time, climatologists are sharply divided over the interactions of the many potential causes. As research emerges, CO2 as a primary warming force becomes harder to defend with hard data.

These challenges are starting to fracture the UN's pretext for global governance over carbon emissions-including imposition of carbon taxes and "carbon credit" trading supervised by UN agencies. Giving the UN a legal right to impose a carbon tax- "cap and trade" in UNspeak-would provide an income stream to UN agencies which would greatly increase political power of UN bureaucracies. And their track record with large amounts of money, such as the Iraqi Oil for Food program, is not encouraging.

However, if the scientific case for CO2 as a primary climate pollutant crumbles, so could a global carbon tax.

Individual climatologists have disputed conclusions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change even before the first IPCC Assessment Report in 1990. The IPCC has issued a series of reports, each focusing on CO2 as the primary "greenhouse gas" causing the continuing warming recovery since the Little Ice Age.

One of the first organized scientific counterattacks sounded on April 6, 2006. Sixty accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines signed a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, urging that billions of Canadian tax dollars appropriated to implement the Kyoto Protocol on climate change "will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science."

They wrote that if today's extensive climate knowledge and measuring capabilities had existed in the mid-1990s, the Kyoto treaty "would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary."

That scientific challenge received little prime-time media attention. The Canadian government's administration and legislature mostly ignored it.


Film Exposes Gore's Deceptions

Then, in March 2007, the UK's Channel 4 broadcast a biting documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. It debunked most of the major arguments of Al Gore's Oscar-winning video, An Inconvenient Truth. For example, the Antarctic ice core data dramatized in Gore's show actually reveal that increases in CO2 have generally followed increases in temperature. The lag is typically on the order of 800 years.

The Swindle documentary roused furor and scorn among carbon-as-cause believers, who attacked Channel 4 as offering a "great propaganda gift" to "climate-change deniers." But the credibility and rationale of scientific sources on the documentary endured the attacks. No factual challenges were forthcoming against the scientists' arguments.

The controversy over this TV show, the first journalistic challenge against CO2 as primary world thermostat, may have encouraged others in the scientific community to point out that despite roughly $50 billion for climate-change research over several decades, the case against carbon dioxide faces more uncertainty as the evidence grows, not less.

One such challenge comes from Dr. Bob Carter, Research Professor at James Cook University and paleoclimate analyst with more than 30 years' experience, including 95 research papers.

In an Accuracy in Media guest column in April 2007, Carter emphasized: "The evidence for dangerous global warming forced by human carbon dioxide emissions is extremely weak. That the satellite temperature record shows no substantial warming since 1978, and that even the ground-based thermometer statistic records no warming since 1998, indicates that a key line of circumstantial evidence for human-caused change-the parallel rise in the late 20th century of both atmospheric carbon dioxide and surface temperatures-is now negated."

This challenge and others from eminent scientists roused the carbon theorists to their ramparts. On the website www.realclimate.org, Gavin Scmidt and Stefan Rahmstorf presented a 1980-2006 chart of global temperature showing that the trend of deviation from "normal" in that 26-year period remains up. But they made no attempt to explain why shorter-term deviations vary more widely than the longer-term anomaly, which puts the globe at about 0.4 degrees Celsius above its long-term "normal" using the GISTEMP Land-Ocean Index computed by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Throughout 2007, hundreds of highly qualified climate scientists individually challenged the presumption that global regulators can, and must, manage the world's thermostat by curbing 50% - and possible eventually 100%-of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.


Continuing Debate

The most lively media arena for the CO2 emissions controversy the past two years has been, by far, among Internet websites and blogs. The Science and Public Policy Institute (http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org) offers a wide-ranging forum on the science of climate change.

Websites like the SPPI bypass major-media gatekeepers and the UN organizers, who carefully monitor any non-governmental organization wishing to attend an IPCC climate conference. Example: At the November 2000 Conference of the Parties (COP6) climate parley in the Hague, Netherlands, the only non-governmental organization to oppose the Kyoto Protocol was Sovereignty International (www.sovereignty.net).

The websites provide newspaper, radio and TV reporters a rich diversity of data and analysis on the issue. Usually, any posted article contains an opportunity for immediate rebuttal. These websites may embolden scientists to speak out more frequently in a forum unconstrained by peer review.

The volume of new climate data is accelerating, which means that media-amplified claims like the linkage between climate warming and hurricanes can be challenged more quickly. For instance, the SPPI site points out 35 factual errors in Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

On Dec. 20 2007, the biggest-yet assembly of scientists challenging the Kyoto pretext of CO2-as-villain was posted by Marc Morano on the minority page of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. This extensive digging by Sen. James Inhofe's staff summarized comments from over 400 prominent scientists who disputed some aspect of man-made global warming in 2007. These scientists' observations fill some 120 pages when printed out from the website. But they hardly made a ripple on prime-time TV news.

This Senate site says, in part: "Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore."

Sen. Inhofe's staff observes, "Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking."


A Contrary View

But on the first day of 2008, a very significant contrarian voice emerged in an astonishing place: The New York Times.

Science writer John Tierney's editorial slashed deep:

"Today's interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels."

As a long-time journalist myself, I saw a larger significance in Tierney's op-ed piece, which point out that when it comes to covering climate change, only politically-correct news avoids the spike.

Here's that significance which my journalistic instinct perceives: Tierney's courageous analysis implies that the command center of CO2 orthodoxy, the New York Times itself, will allow any journalist to reveal the rips in the CO2 emperor's clothes.


The Questions

The Pulitzer Prize of 2010 just might go to the contrarian newsperson who challenges climate scientists and carbon-tax advocates with questions like these:

1. Why don't advocates of restricting and burying CO2 ever mention opportunities of longer growing seasons and higher CO2 availability for crops?

Agronomic research shows that doubling atmospheric CO2 levels to about 700 parts per million raises corn and soybean yields 20% to 40%. We see more opportunity in using CO2 for higher crop yields than in burying it under the sea floor. Greenhouses commonly enrich their atmospheres with carbon dioxide.

Historically, advances in civilizations have accompanied warmer, wetter epochs in climate cycles. Dr. Raymond H. Wheeler and hundreds of research assistants documented this with a lifetime of analysis beginning in the 1930s. If the climate follows Wheeler's cyclical pattern, we may well be entering a warmer, wetter epoch which will benefit agriculture.

Two decades ago I had many visits with physicist Iben Browning, a climate researcher and author of many works including Climate and the Affairs of Men, written with Nels Winkless III and published in 1975. Browning documented that past climate change has impacted humanity in massive ways, such as the barbarian invasion of China and the Phoenician presence in Stonehenge Britain.

He reminded readers in his 1975 book that the climate since 1925 had been unusually mild and beneficial; that a cooling could occur anytime.

And Browning told me that as he refined his computer models of climate change, "We get our best correlation with measured climate data when we ignore the presence of man and his use of carbon-emitting fuels."

2. Why is the IPCC's projected future global warming almost linear or accelerating, when it's well-known that the greenhouse-gas impact of CO2 fades sharply with each incremental increase of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Some background: The trendline level of CO2 in the air measured at Mona Loa, Hawaii, was 385 parts per million (ppm) in January 2008. When observations began at Mona Loa in 1958, the level was 315 parts per million.

Since 1990, annual increases of CO2 have ranged from 0.5 to 2.6 ppm. At a trendline rise of about 1.8 ppm per year, it will take 35 years to increase atmospheric CO2 to 450 ppm. CO2-control advocates claim this high a level has never occurred in 650,000 years, and would force devastating global warming.

CO2 PPM

However, the dominant "greenhouse effect" comes from water vapor in the atmosphere. CO2 causes only 3% of infrared heat blocking, and the physics of CO2 are such that the greenhouse effect of each added increment of CO2 shrinks on a logarithmic scale.

An analogy: If one layer of insulation in your ceiling traps half of the roof's energy loss, adding an identical second layer traps only half the loss escaping the first layer. Each added increment of CO2 in the atmosphere has a logarithmically diminishing greenhouse effect.

Although physicists proved this years ago, you won't see it in the dramatic graphs of Al Gore's slide show, An Inconvenient Truth. It projects a nearly parabolic soaring of global temperature from a linear rise in CO2.

Advocates of man-caused global warming defend their case by saying that although CO2 itself has only a 3% role, it amplifies warming by various feedback mechanisms.

"This is a hypothesis, not a proven fact," counters Dr. John Christy, Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Other scientists argue that current climate models underestimate the cooling influence of cloud cover.

3. Over long epochs revealed in ice cores, why have CO2 uptrends often followed new cyclical temperature uptrends, rather than leading them?

Temperature and CO2 cycles deciphered from Antarctic ice cores reveal that new temperature uptrends in CO2 levels have typically followed new temperature uptrends by 600 to 1,200 years. If that has been the case historically, it's hard to claim that CO2 caused those temperature uptrends to begin.

One of the most dramatic screens in Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, shows a chart where temperature and CO2 levels wriggle through thousands of years in apparent synch with each other.

Flashed on a wide screen for moments, the long series of cycles appear tightly coupled. Audiences gasp. Gore declares that to deny this linkage is the "silliest thing I've ever heard."

But the statistical correlations of these measurements derived from ice cores are highest when temperature data is mathematically lagged about 800 years after CO2 data. This indicates that temperatures rise first, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere follows.

If you look closely at a section of Gore's chart, you can see in the red and white lines that the new temperature uptrends (white line on the bottom) begin many years before a new uptrend in carbon dioxide (red line).

CO2 PPM and temperature

This relationship makes sense. Warming oceans release CO2. It takes decades for the world's oceans to warm after a long cooling cycle. University of Colorado research indicates that as Earth started to warm after the most recent Ice Age, the oceans have released some 600 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere as CO2.

Also, why do ancient climate records extracted from ice cores show global cooling cycles in the wake of CO2 increases? Some scientists argue that the world's vegetation increased, locking CO2 into "carbon sinks." That simply helps make my agriculturist case that a world richer in CO2 could be a greener world.

Even in recent years, climate variations have occurred over decades, despite a steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Radiosonde data revealed wide annual temperature swings in the troposphere, including drops of 0.8 degree below average after 1930. In the mid-1970s, I was writing newsletters for farmers when this "global cooling" fanned media stories of coming climate disaster. Our farm news and advisory organization, Professional Farmers of America, held "World Food Crisis" conferences to study how global agriculture might cope with a potential worldwide cooling.

Today, global-warming activists shrug off the fact that during the 1930-80 cooling in North America, CO2 was probably rising at 1 to 2 parts per million annually - close to the annual rate it is rising today.

In fact, the long glacial cycles suggest we're coming due for a cooling. Tim Patterson, director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, says: "It is global cooling, not warming, which is the major climate threat to the world." The dip in lower-latitude temperatures in the past few years might be an early clue to such a cooling. I anticipate that if it does occur, Kyoto Protocol enthusiasts will claim credit for rescuing the planet.

4. Are we farming in a relatively CO2-deprived epoch? The plant kingdom metabolizes carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. The animal kingdom metabolizes oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. Nice design.

Some climatologists claim that the current 385 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is "unprecedented" in 650,000 years of proxy data from Antarctic ice cores. But other scientists say those estimates from isotopes underestimate the amplitude of CO2 variation. Still other research, such as fossil analysis, indicate that the atmosphere has exceeded 2,000 ppm of CO2 repeatedly over the past 300 million years, fueling abundant plant growth resulting in today's strata of carbon stored as coal.

Crops grown in air with enriched CO2 content make more efficient use of water and nutrients. Growing up on a farm, I've seen how young crops surge with fresh vigor after cultivation stirs the soil under a crop canopy. Mixing oxygen into the soil triggers a burst of underground biological activity. That causes a faster release of CO2, which is quickly metabolized by the fast-growing crop.

5. How can CO2 "coupling" explain global temperature drops in 1965-77, and a sharp rise after that? I assembled the accompanying global temperature chart covering 1946-2007 using data from Britain's Met Office Hadley Center, with special help from an astute researcher, Holly Titchner.

The chart includes monthly smoothed data from ground stations back to 1945. It includes weather balloon data, which became reliable enough to include starting in 1958. Beginning in late 1978, it shows data from satellites. This is one of the most comprehensive estimates of long-term global temperature I could find.

Globe is half a degree warmer

A straight linear trend of global surface and tropospheric temperature would show a rise of about 0.6 degree Celsius during 1945-2007. However, Britain's Hadley Center researcher Peter Thorne and six colleagues cautioned in a 2005 Journal of Geophysical Research paper "This linear trend agreement is misleading. Almost all of the tropospheric warming is the result of a step-like change in the mid to late 1970s which has been ascribed to a ‘regime shift,' particularly in the tropics."

I asked the Hadley Center to describe "regime shift."

Manager David Parker replied: "The regime change around 1976 was probably connected with changes of atmospheric and oceanic circulation and heat transports in the Pacific. These changes are somewhat similar to those experienced with El Nino and La Nina but are less focused on the equator and occur on time-scales of several decades. There was a warming regime-change in the 1920s and a cooling regime-change in the 1940s. There may have been a cooling regime-change in the late 1990s, partly obscured by global warming."

This quote from Parker, a participant in the IPCC, emphasizes the complexity facing researchers who write computer models of global climate change. I translate it as: "There's an awful lot we don't know about climate change."

Let's look at some of the promises and pitfalls of climate models, which are the primary basis for carbon taxes and the CO2 theory of climatic forcing.

6. What justifies such extreme confidence in long-term computer models of projected climate?

One poster-child controversy is the "Hockey Stick" computer model of past and future climate, developed primarily by Michael Mann, Associate Professor in Pennsylvania State University's Department of Meteorology.

His team used a statistical technique called "principal component analysis" (PCA) to simplify the large array of variables.

Mann's model result was published by the IPCC as proof of unprecedented, man-made global warming. The model flattens the temperature changes of the well-documented Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age. The model generates a dramatic uptrend in recent years, then a parabolic rise in global temperatures over the next few decades.

The Little Ice Age

Several statistical experts have declared Mann's study invalid, and went on to point out the "peer review" involved was primarily among Mann's mutually supportive colleagues.

Mann and fellow researchers still use the same statistical approach, and the hockey-stick formation remains in IPCC-published charts as evidence for man-caused world warming.

A friend of mine who teaches graduate-level statistics uses Mann's climate model as an example of how not to apply principle component analysis. As used in the climate model, "it will generate a hockey-stick projection 99% of the time when applied to purely random data over time," says my friend.

This misuse of statistics was verified by Canadian researchers Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who offer a rich array of other evidence at this web address:

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html

Also, see Steven McIntyre's website at:

http://www.climateaudit.org/

Incidentally, my college-professor friend asked to remain anonymous, saying: "If I became branded on this campus as opposing man-made global warming, I'm afraid it would be used against me-to deny tenure."

Another long-time skeptic of the UN's global climate models is Dr. Reid Bryson, who at age 87 still works daily on his own, unpaid, at the Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin.

His sixth book is just off the press. It's written to help researchers build models of regional climate history. Colleagues often cite him as the "father of scientific climatology." Our acquaintance with his work goes back 30 years, when his book Climates of Hunger alerted us to the Northern Hemisphere cooling episodes leading into the 1970s. At the time, Bryson's book expressed a hope that this cooling might reverse, which would rescue agriculture from disasters like those during the Little Ice Age.

Fortunately, Northern Hemisphere temperatures did rise again, during and after the 1970s. But Bryson reasons that the upturn was caused by natural cycles such as varying transparency of the earth's atmosphere, not by CO2 from hydrocarbon fuels.

He sticks with a conclusion of his 1977 book: "We can't expect to control the forces that affect climate."

Bryson points out that most computer simulations of climate are designed like short-term weather models. He says: "Impossible. You cannot do that."

The reason: Interactions of our planetary circulation and solar system are unknown, complex, unpredictable - and interwoven with feedback. Wrong assumptions propagate with each computer-simulated cycle of global circulation. After a few iterations, "you're down to zero accuracy," says Bryson. "Who even believes a 10-day forecast?"

But the weather-model approach to general-circulation climate models persists because many of today's climatologists were trained as meteorologists. These models have generally predicted more warming than has actually occurred, says Bryson.

For more than 60 years, Bryson and a wide array of colleagues searched for causes of climate change. They found signals in Earth's orbital changes and the slight wobble on its rotational axis. They studied a natural influence largely ignored by other climatologists: variations in transparency of Earth's atmosphere, caused primarily by sulfur dioxide and other aerosols emitted by volcanic activity. The transparency data correlate with Earth's temperature variations in the past 100 years.

7. What is the real, long-term cost in lost production and human well-being worldwide from distorting energy markets and creating global mandates against hydrocarbon fuels?

In the summer of 2007, I cited an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chart showing that their lowest-cost projection of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at 450 parts per million would be $350 trillion in 1990 dollars. That chart came from the IPPC's Climate Change 2001 : Synthesis Report, Figure 7-3. When I asked the IPPC for a current verification, their message to me on Jan. 18, 2008 pointed out that the data had been "corrected."

Cost of reducing CO2 concentrations

The original chart, which had apparently been on the IPPC website since 2001, was mistakenly high by a factor of 100. The lowest-cost assumption for achieving stability at 450 ppm was now corrected, six years later, to just over $3.5 trillion in 1990 U.S. dollars. The highest estimate now is about $17 trillion, or almost 500% higher than the lowest estimate. Here's the current IPCC chart, also available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/climate-changes-2001/correctionfig73.pdf

Corrected graph of cost of reducing CO2 concentrations

Yet there are presumptions that the U.S. can cut its use of CO2-emitting fuels by 80% for only a slight reduction in gross national product over the next several decades. It's doubtful that China and India will do likewise.

One certainty about this "crisis:" It's the scientific debate of the century. It's far from being scientifically resolved, even though world policymakers will persist in making far-reaching energy-rationing rules based on unproven theories.


Threat to Freedom

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, says that using global warming hysteria to justify global governance and energy-taxing schemes is today's biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity. It has, he says, "become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem."

If policymakers plow ahead with capturing carbon, I'd like to see them place much more emphasis on how agriculture and all of humanity can benefit by converting CO2 into food and building humus. This is a beneficial and stable carbon reserve in the soil. It's a waste to simply bury carbon.

Carbon is the cornerstone of biological life, and the "carbon is pollution" presumption leads toward bizarre proposals like pumping CO2 deep underground. In fact, a recent scientific proclamation claims that reducing CO2 emissions to zero would not stabilize climate change. The scientist says it will be necessary to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it.

If the regulators do enforce carbon sequestration, they might review how ancient tribes in South America's tropics applied one of the most simple and beneficial ways to convert carbon stored in tropical forests into greater food production.

Using earthen firepits to create charcoal from jungle trees and undergrowth, they mixed raw charcoal into their tropical soils. This "biochar" provided microscopic niches for microbes and fungi, touching off a bloom of soil biological life which supported food crops for centuries. This "Terra Preta" or "dark soil" has been rediscovered by ecologists in the past couple of decades. Terra Preta soils remain productive despite the heat and moisture of the tropics, which otherwise oxidize organic matter and leach away crop nutrients from tropical clay and sand.

The low-tech building of biochar almost vanished after 1491, when European diseases arrived in South America and killed most of the indigenous population.

Helping people adapt to inevitable, natural climate change, in ecologically sound ways, would be much more productive and beneficial to humanity than building a global-governance bureaucracy financed by taxing hydrocarbon energy and run by top-down regulations.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

What He Says

The scientists who interest me in this field are those who can draw on the experience of a lot of people who have come before them. And uniformly in these areas I find scepticism. People who write mathematical models of complex systems for a living tend to find the climate models very unconvincing. Geologists find the arguments very unconvincing. Engineers find the arguments unconvincing. And astrophysicists find the arguments unconvincing....

The climate models seem to be largely driven by over-fitting to a small sample set and positive feedback. The small sample set - at most 30 years of accurate data - might be enough to try and predict one or two years, but 50 year predictions? Ignoring the biggest effect on global warming - water vapour - is surely going to cause problems.

Positive feedback in engineering invariably results in unstable systems - so we have to ask why do most if not all of the climate models rely on it to get doomsday predictions? For the Earth to have survived as long as it has with a stable climate, through major events like ice-ages or volcanic eruptions, there is little doubt that a degree of negative climate feedback is essential.
He is John Atkinson

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Hillary's Sword vs Obama's Gun




The best I have ever heard at saying nothing, giving hope to the ignorant. How could they not be ignorant and think these words mean anything.

Change for the sake of hope. Hope for the sake of change. 360 degrees.

Hillary's Inevitable Campaign




What? You think this is harsh? OK then, how will she win after she loses? Democrats, lie cheat and steal, it's all they know.

Nothings Perfect: Why Do You Think The Earth's Orbit Is Round?

The Earth's orbital behaviors are responsible for more than just presenting us with a leap year every four years. According to Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, parameters such as planetary gravitational attractions, the Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun and the degree of tilt of our planet's axis with respect to its path around the sun, have implications for climate change and the advent of ice ages.

People often think of orbits as circular, but they're not that smooth and simple. They are often a less-than-perfect eccentric circle.

"All planets travel in an ellipse around the sun, but the shape of that ellipse oscillates," he explains. "When the Earth's orbit is more elliptical, the planet spends more time farther away from the sun, and the Earth gets less sunlight over the course of the year. These periods of more-elliptical orbits are separated by about 100,000 years. Ice ages occur about every 100,000 years, and they line up exactly with this change in the Earth's elliptical shape."

The purpose of the leap year is to keep our artificial calendars aligned with what the Earth actually does in its orbit around the sun and to ensure that roughly at noon on the winter solstice (Dec. 21) each year, the same point on the Earth is tilted toward the sun.

As in much of nature, the process is both neat and messy.

Wandering solstice

While we are accustomed to thinking that the Earth takes 365 days to go around the sun, it actually takes about 365.25 days. Thus, every four years the quarter days add up to one whole day. If the quarter days were unaccounted for, the solstice would wander away from its Dec. 21 date over time.

"Earth's 24 hour day is a transient thing," Wysession says. "It actually takes 23 hours, 56 minutes and four seconds to make one revolution around its axis — that is, to go all the way around so that the stars will appear in the same point in the sky day after day.

"However, during that time, the Earth also has moved one more day along its orbit around the sun, so it actually has to spin a little bit more for the sun to arrive back in the same place in the sky. This amount of time is three minutes and 56 seconds, which makes the 24 hours."

However, Wysession notes that our time units — 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours — would mean nothing had humans evolved 100 million years earlier or later because the Earth spun much faster then, and today, like aging baby boomers, it is slowing down.

Extreme seasons in the future

Despite what many people believe, seasons on Earth are not determined by the nearness of the northern and summer hemispheres to the sun.

"Seasons occur because in January, for instance, the North Pole points away from the sun, so the southern hemisphere gets more direct sunlight," Wysession says. "Six months later, that will be reversed. In terms of climate change, this has an impact because land heats up much more quickly than water, five times more quickly. The northern hemisphere has most of the land on Earth; the southern has most of the water. On January 3 or 4 (it varies) the Earth is at its closest point to the sun (the perihelion), but because water heats up so slowly, it doesn't make as much difference in temperature in the southern hemisphere as it otherwise might.

"In the northern hemisphere summer, despite the Earth being farther away from the sun, land heats up much more quickly than the southern hemisphere's water, and heats up about the same amount consistently. The two hemispheres end up buffering the climate swing, producing less severe winters than we would have otherwise."

Stick around, though, if you like extremes. Wysession says that in the future, the Earth will be farther away from the sun in winter and closer to it in the summer, causing more severe temperature swings in these two seasons. This will happen about 12,000 years from now.

"Orbital parameters of Earth, the sun and moon and the planets have great effects on ice ages and other climatic changes," he says. "Those major events are driven by very small changes in the planetary orbital functions."

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

The fancy name for all this is Milankovitch cycles