London Liberals Failing Down

The big news from Britain is that the Labor Party is being beaten like a drum by just about anyone in the opposition. Speculation is that even "Red Ken" Livingstone, the Mayor of London, would not escape the bloodbath. The results will be known late Friday

The Labour Party slumped to its worst local election defeat on record on Friday, dealing a blow to Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his first test at the polls since taking over from Tony Blair.

Buffeted by global economic turmoil and bedevilled by party in-fighting, Brown now faces an uphill climb against the resurgent Conservatives in the next parliamentary elections due in 2010 at the latest.

"If the economic crisis continues through 2010, Brown's dead in the water," MORI pollster Robert Worcester told Reuters.

The Telegraph reported that Brown was hoping for the London mayor to hold out before a tidal wave of electoral rejection. This is mostly a rejection of Brown rather than a win for the Conservative party in England. And what are the people rejecting, very likely this has a lot to do with it. 70 percent think new taxes to fend off AGW is a non-starter. The English people get it right, green taxes are just cynical ploy to boost revenue, say majority of Britons. The hoax is wearing thin. The economy still rules when it comes to the people.

The only thing more CO2 does is raise taxes.

UPDATE: Yippee, Red Ken is done ...

UPDATE II: British PM suffers poll 'bloodbath' -- It won't take long for our Democrat Jimmy Carter current day clones to flame out, starting with their massive tax increase to feed the global warming hoax. That's why I say you really don't want to vote McCain, then they will have someone to blame. I see myself as a new maverick, we're all mavericks now, and will likely cross the aisle and vote Democrat, just for the sheer fun of it. Not going to waste a dime on the RINOs.

Krauthammer Revists Huessein's Race Speech

Making the assumption that the average voter can't remember what happened yesterday, the Obama campaign forges on. Krauthammer has a hot column for you here.

"I can no more disown him [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother." -- Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18

Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading in classrooms across the country." College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews.

Apparently there's been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration used to say, inoperative. Poor Geraldine Ferraro, thrice lashed by Obama in Philadelphia as the white equivalent of Wright's raving racism, is off the hook.

These equivalences having been revealed as the cheap rhetorical tricks they always were, Obama has now decided that the man he simply could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is, mirabile dictu, surgically excised.

Who you going to believe? Let's face it, the Rev Wright was how Obama thought he would bank his street cred with the black community while he made his political fortune.

Looks like blacks are threatening to only vote for blacks as well. But remember, race doesn't matter, right? Identity politics at it's best. The Democrats will explode under the weight of operation chaos. Good result.

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

What is it? Short answer -- Just one variable in the Earth's climate change equation.

For the past century at least, global temperatures have tended to mirror the 20-to 30-year warmings and coolings of the north-central Pacific Ocean. We don’t know just why, but the pattern of the last century is clear: the earth warmed from about 1915 to1940, while the PDO was also warming (1925 to 46). The earth cooled from 1940 to 1975, while the PDO was cooling (1946 to 1977). The strong global warming from 1976 to 1998 was accompanied by a strong and almost-constant warming of the north-central Pacific. Ancient tree rings in Baja California and Mexico show there have been 11 such PDO shifts since 1650, averaging 23 years on length.

Source:



The "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" (PDO) is a long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability. While the two climate oscillations have similar spatial climate fingerprints, they have very different behavior in time. Fisheries scientist Steven Hare coined the term "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" (PDO) in 1996 while researching connections between Alaska salmon production cycles and Pacific climate (his dissertation topic with advisor Robert Francis). Two main characteristics distinguish PDO from El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO): first, 20th century PDO "events" persisted for 20-to-30 years, while typical ENSO events persisted for 6 to 18 months; second, the climatic fingerprints of the PDO are most visible in the North Pacific/North American sector, while secondary signatures exist in the tropics - the opposite is true for ENSO. Several independent studies find evidence for just two full PDO cycles in the past century: "cool" PDO regimes prevailed from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976, while "warm" PDO regimes dominated from 1925-1946 and from 1977 through (at least) the mid-1990's. Shoshiro Minobe has shown that 20th century PDO fluctuations were most energetic in two general periodicities, one from 15-to-25 years, and the other from 50-to-70 years.

There is a tracked Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) Index defined as the leading principal component of North Pacific monthly sea surface temperature variability (poleward of 20N for the 1900-93 period). Digital values of the PDO index are available from Nate Mantua's anonymous ftp directory.

Coincidence?

The PDO Index switched negative at about the same time the sun's geomagnetic averaged planetary index(AP) dropped off in October 2005 and has stayed more or less negative since then. Is it just a coincidence that the PDO Index went negative about the same time as the sun's geomagnetic averaged planetary index dropped. Curious.


The folks that track the PDO Index are located here.

Is the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) the next to shift? And what about the ... ?? Settled science my ass.

Chickenfeedhawks

Global warm-mongering.

By Mark Steyn

Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”

Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the “war”: one degree.

If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.

So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I’d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route Seven there’s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput.

So where exactly do Time magazine’s generals want to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It’s all these third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it’s a flag of eco-colonialism.

And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, the Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on April 12. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to “global warming” — or, at any rate, the “war on global warming” that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty, and affordable? Well, one out of three ain’t bad.

Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.

So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:

At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies... This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol…

Etc. It’s not the environmental movement’s chickenfeedhawks who’ll have to reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no doubt about where to place the blame — on the bullying activists and their media cheerleaders and weathervane politicians who insist that the “science” is “settled” and that those who query whether there’s any crisis are (in the designation of the strikingly non-emaciated Al Gore) “denialists.” All three presidential candidates have drunk the environmental kool-ethanol and are committed to Big Government solutions. But, as the Independent’s whiplash-inducing U-turn confirms, the eco-scolds are under no such obligation to consistency. Finger-in-the-wind politicians shouldn’t be surprised to find that gentle breeze is from the media wind turbine and it’s just sliced your finger off.

Whether or not there’s very slight global cooling or very slight global warming, there’s no need for a “war” on either, no rationale for loosing a plague of eco-locusts on the food supply. So why be surprised that totalitarian solutions to mythical problems wind up causing real devastation? As for Time’s tree, by all means put it up: It helps block out the view of starving peasants on the far horizon.

Isn't It Curious

UK Astronomer Dr. David Whitehouse, who authored the 2004 book The Sun: A Biography, said on May 1, 2008:

"Isn't it curious that over the next decade man-made global warming will be cancelled out by natural cycles. It's nice that Mother Nature (not the journal) is helping us this way but it does beg the question as to whether the man-made effect was all that significant if it can be nullified this way."

Curious indeed.

When the PDO changed in 1977 from cold to warm, the "ice age is coming" scare melted with it -- Only to be reborn as "we are all toast" as the warm cycle continued. And now the PDO has shifted back to "the next ice age is coming". I wonder if anyone understands how bad they have been had.

Now that the sun has joined in by going quite, the next years are going to be really interesting. Warm is good, cold is not so good. Learn to live with it, the natural variability of our planet.

The only thing CO2 drives is increasing taxes and fear mongering.

Wearing Real Thin

Anybody else finding this Liberal tripe grating on them?

Junk Science: The Great Global Warming Race

Can global warming’s vested interests close the deal on greenhouse gas regulation before the public wises up to their scam? -- Steve Milloy

Good question --- The only thing more CO2 causes is higher taxes.

Engineer Joke

Being an Engineer, I like good engineer jokes

An engineer, a scientist, and a global warming modeler were all interviewing for a job. The interviewer calls in the engineer first. The interviewer tells the engineer, "I have one question, what is 2+2"? The engineer replies, "I can tell you with exact certitude the answer is 4.00000". The interviewer makes some notes, lets the engineer go and then calls in the scientist. "I have one question", says the interviewer. "What is 2+2?". The scientist thinks for a moment then replies, "I can tell you that the answer lies somewhere between 3.998 and 4.002.". The interviewer lets the scientist go and then calls in the global warming computer modeler. The interviewer tells the modeler, "I have one question, what is 2+2?". The modeler thinks for a moment, looks to the left of him, then looks to his right. Then he lowers his head, leans in and whispers to the interviewer, "What answer do you want it to be?"

New National Park Rules Proposed

Maybe going down to the sticks in the Everglades National Park may not be as dangerous as it is today, if the new rules make it into the books.

The proposed rule was filed today and will be published in the Federal Register tomorrow, and can be found online at: http://federalregister.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2008-09606_PI.pdf. It provides sixty days for public comment.

These new regulations will provide uniformity across our nation’s federal lands and put an end to the patchwork of regulations that governed different lands managed by different federal agencies. In the past, only Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service lands allowed the carrying of firearms, while lands managed by DOI did not.

The current regulations on possession, carry or transportation of loaded or uncased firearms in national parks were proposed in 1982 and finalized in 1983. Similar restrictions apply in national wildlife refuges. The NRA has long held that amendments to those regulations were needed to reflect the changed legal situations with respect to state laws on carrying firearms.

As of the end of 1982, only six states routinely allowed citizens to carry handguns for self-defense. Currently, 48 states have a process for issuing licenses or permits to allow law-abiding citizens to legally carry firearms for self-defense. Two states do not require permits, 38 states have a “shall-issue” permit process, and eight have a discretionary process for issuing permits.

More here.

The Farce That Was

Recall that Al Gore has predicted global destruction in less than 8 years from now...

OK, let's pick up the narrative at where we left off. In time gone by, not much time actually, the UN IPCC said that positive feedback's were going to swamp the planet and Earth will become a hot house in a mere matter of (you got pick it) years. But then the cooling started, The silliness progresses, but the data lagged behind. In fact the data downright misbehaved and went negative on them. Well what to do is the question of the hour.

How could the computer models that predict the future be so wrong in so short of time. Well, first the sun decided it had had enough of those nasty sunspots and decide that zero was a nice round number for sunspots since about fall 2005. Sure there have been a few, but many would say that the small ones, the Tiny Tims", that there were would not have been counted under instrument conditions that existed during the Maunder Minimum, i.e. the last min-Ice Age.. Then comes the pronouncement from NASA that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation(PDO) has reversed from a warming period to now a cooling period -- It does this naturally on about a 30 year cycle.

The last bit of linguistic jujitsu and nonsensical analysis comes our way in the realist community via this, the scientists are now saying, the whacky-doodle alarmist ones at least, that natural variability will swamp out the man made global warming and result in global cooling. Well Duh, the natural variability? You mean the climate naturally changes? No it impossible, isn't it?

Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.

OK, I say so much for the AGW hypothesis and the future predictions -- If you can't predict the future until it actually happens then what good are the computer models in the first place.

Note I correctly call the predictions of catastrophic global warming computer models, because that is all the hoax is based on. Do you know what GIGO is? It is a term used by engineers, and probably others, to express computer models and their outputs, Garbage In, Garbage Out -- GIGO. Exactly what this hoax is based on. No empirical evidence whatsoever, just fabricated computer models and a whole lot of arm waving. Anybody can cook you up a computer model to prove anything you want. Here is the twisting and turning trying to save the AGW hypothgesis ...

Writing in Nature, the scientists said: "Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic [manmade] warming."

The study shows a more pronounced weakening effect than the Met Office's Hadley Centre, which last year predicted that global warming would slow until 2009 and pick up after that, with half the years after 2009 being warmer than the warmest year on record, 1998.

Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.

"Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades."

But he said the use of just sea surface temperatures might not accurately reflect the state of the MOC, which was several miles deep and dependent on factors besides temperatures, such as salt content, which were included in the Met Office Hadley Centre model.

If the model could accurately forecast other variables besides temperature, such as rainfall, it would be increasingly useful, but climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain, he added.

Bailout time, the models are not complete, of course everyone knew the most important parts were missing, the results cannot predict anything, hence the UN forbidding the use of predict in future discussions, the models now provide guidance only ... Huh? Time to be honest, if the models could they would? So precipitation and clouds are left out, they are too hard to model, and now precipitation is thrown over the transom, because it's not modelled. Does anyone know what happens during a rainstorm -- Yes you in the back "it gets cold" -- Yes you are right.

The whole house of cards is not going to remain standing much longer. There are enough scientists to take down the hoax, like with DDT before, it will fail the smell test shortly.

Read the rest here.

BTW: The time is quickly arriving where reputations will be irreparably damaged by supporting the hoax. Think about it, mke sure you are on the right side, the data is piling up that it's a hoax.

For some real laughs, the piece's author leaps into action, spinning and twisting while jumping, you got to read this article, global warming causes global cooling. They really are concerned that people might see through the hoax and then the backlash against the tax tax tax to say you can control the weather might really kick in. They really are trying to protect their hoax industry and alGore's carbon credit scam.

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As a footnote: The difference between a theory and a hypothesis is that a hypothesis is UNPROVEN, it's a tentative assumption made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences. The empirical data taken and testing that has been done to date, has all come back negative. Whereas a theory is a scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena. Don't allow people to confuse the two in order to win the upper hand in a debate with you. Words mean things.