Skeptic's Corner

Notable Quotes

2013-04-04T12:30:00.000-04:00

"If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change...

...But it does not mean global warming is a delusion."

David Whitehouse

The evidence is clear

2013-04-03T23:04:00.000-04:00

The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.

James Hansen

Admittedly I have not been keeping up with the global warming news nearly as closely as I used to, I pretty much have just been keeping up with the headlines and "big" stories.

One of those recent "big" stories has been about various 'alarmist" and alarmist institutions back pedaling from their normal doomsday claims and admitting that there has been a "slow down" in warming, see quote above by the "godfather" of the global warming fraternity as an example.

Then there was the rather detailed article in the Economist a publication that previously had taken the alarmist view of global warming where they admitted, well, the obvious.

"Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,"

It is sure nice that the fear mongers have quit denying the truth, but I have a rather simple question which I have not seen asked since this new "revelation" has taken hold of the climate community. It is simply this:

"If temperatures have remained flat over the past decade or more, what about all the stories over the past decade about the negative effects of global warming on well....everything?

I mean wasn't it just this past fall when climate change/ global warming caused Superstorm Sandy?

Consider this story from the Washington Post. This would be considered an attempt by the author to have an even handed look at the science regarding global warming and Superstorm Sandy. But given the "big" story outlined above, it really is just fiction

Here are a couple of the fair and balanced points the writer makes:

1) Sandy should not be “blamed” on climate change. Climate change does not cause storms and did not cause Superstorm Sandy. Storms form when certain weather ingredients come together. The historic record shows violent storms, some even more severe than Sandy, have struck the Northeast repeatedly..

2) While climate change did not cause Sandy, it may have been a performance enhancer like a steroid, injecting it with somewhat more energy and power.

3) Sea level rise from manmade climate change increased the water level along the Northeast coast 6 to 8 inches and, as a result, somewhat worsened the coastal flooding from Sandy.

I might be going out on a limb here, but if temperatures have been flat for the past 10-15 years, not only can Superstorm Sandy not be blamed on climate change, there was no climate change to be blamed!

It could not have "enhanced" Sandy and whatever sea level rise they claim, can not be the result of man made climate change/global warming simply because, there has not been any and the scientist and their allies are admitting it.

So the whole premise of the story, written less than six months ago, is false. As is almost every story attributing some occurrence or event to global warming. If there has been no global warming, then all the multitude of dire events blamed on it are either total fabrications of the result of some other cause, like nature. Consider this from the once prestigious National Geographic titled

Effects of Global Warming
Signs Are Everywhere

Well when you attribute everything to something that is not actually happening, then I guess you can find signs everywhere, can't you? They go on an alarmist tangent about all that is happening to our world while temperatures have been "flat" for over a decade.

The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole, and everywhere in between. Globally, the mercury is already up more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), and even more in sensitive polar regions. And the effects of rising temperatures aren’t waiting for some far-flung future. They’re happening right now. Signs are appearing all over, and some of them are surprising. The heat is not only melting glaciers and sea ice, it’s also shifting precipitation patterns and setting animals on the move.

They tell us that some of these things are happening now, among the examples I found interesting was this

Spruce bark beetles have boomed in Alaska thanks to 20 years of warm summers. The insects have chewed up 4 million acres of spruce trees.

Spruce bark beetles may have boomed in Alaska, but it has nothing to do with global warming, Alaska has been cooling over the past 15 years. But you wouldn't expect the National Geographic to have their facts correct now would you? not when the narrative is so much more dramatic.

How many stories have you read in the past decade about something being caused by global warming? Hundreds? Thousands? You know all those increased diseases, those endangered species, those droughts, the excessive flooding, the heavier snowfall, more tornadoes , hurricanes. All those thousands upon thousands of article written about what global warming was causing, not in the future but now, those articles are to put it mildly.... bogus.

As bogus as the theory itself.

Because you see the corner has now been painted into. If the scientific community has to finally admit that temperatures, despite their best efforts to fudge them, have remained flat, then everything they have attributed to "climate change" can not be true.

Oh there was a superstorm Sandy and perhaps the Arctic sea ice has melted more than it used to and perhaps in some areas of the globe there has been more droughts, or flooding or whatever. But the scientist are now telling us that it was not the result of global warming. How could it be?

They are now telling us the globe did not warm.

Yet they still teach it to the children, don't they?

The evidence is clear. Rising global temperatures have been accompanied by changes in weather and climate. Many places have seen changes in rainfall, resulting in more floods, droughts, or intense rain, as well as more frequent and severe heat waves. The planet's oceans and glaciers have also experienced some big changes - oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, ice caps are melting, and sea levels are rising. As these and other changes become more pronounced in the coming decades, they will likely present challenges to our society and our environment.

The evidence is clear?

Yes the evidence is clear, the world has been the victims of the greatest hoax, no that isn't right, a hoax is not malicious enough a term for what we have suffered through at the hands of corrupt scientist, politicians and their multitude of allies. With few exceptions we, the people of the world, have been robbed, lied to and brain washed by men and women who put their monetary gain and prestige over the most precious asset in the world, the truth.

Because you see if the temperatures have been flat this past decade plus, it is not like they have not known it, is it? They hyped the theory of what they projected to happen and made wild outlandish claims about events and occurrences which they knew could not be attributed to something that was not happening, global warming.

They fed off our tax dollars, they set themselves up as the protectors of the world, they destroyed those that dissented, and they initiated policies that were not only unnecessary but actually counter productive. They wasted valuable resources, they burned food for fuel and they indoctrinated our children with lies, the list of what these frauds have done could go on for pages.

The evidence is clear, they perpetrated crimes against humanity and they have just confessed.

Climate Change Runs Up Against Green Fatigue

2013-03-04T08:09:00.002-05:00

FROM-Science 2.0

By Hank Campbell

Environmental activists make money telling us all how terrible things are; climate scientists appreciate the help promoting their data, we do have a bit of a train wreck coming at us emissions-wise, but climate scientists also know there is a risk of backlash if there are too many hyperbolic claims, and that 'green fatigue' will set in if every change in temperature and every storm is attributed to global warming. That's why even the IPCC, no wallflower when it comes to using media talking points, wishes media would not attribute local weather to climate change.

And then there is the money aspect to just taking a 'sequester' approach to emissions. While activists seem to believe a sequester approach to taxes and spending - egalitarian, across-the-board cuts without regard to merit - is bad, they have an idealized vision of what it will do in the economy regarding emissions. We should just do it, they insist. When activists said America just 'needs' to get down to early 1990s levels of emissions, they painted a perfect scenario where everyone would somehow be employed in either green energy production or white-collar environmental awareness jobs. Yet America is back at early 1990s levels of emissions right now - and the economy we have is what that looks like. Stagnant business climate, high chronic unemployment and food stamp recipients are numerous enough to pick a president, but the stock market is up so the government claims that higher stocks and higher taxes will eventually help poor people who bridge a wider chasm from the rich than ever.

The ironic downside for activists who have gotten the lower emissions they wanted is that in the hierarchy of needs, broad environmental issues are not all that important. When people can't pay the rent or meet lots of other basic necessities, the last thing they want to hear is how they are killing the planet but developing countries like China, India and Mexico are exempt. And so concern about environmental issues, including climate change, is now at a 20-year low, even in America, despite the full-court press by the media in late 2012 to say that the Sandy storm was caused by climate change. What else happened 20 years ago, the last time people didn't care about the environment? A president got thrown out due to the "It's the economy, stupid" movement. Not having money makes people think about their world, not the world.

So studies may predict the impact of climate change but people losing their homes are not worried about 50 years from now; the activists who want a full-stop on CO2, more regulations, more penalties, more taxes and then more subsidies for their pet 'green' projects are living in their own fantasy world, where if they mandate and subsidize something like wind power, capitalism will take over and make it viable. The 13th century is not the answer to 21st century energy issues but they are against both fossil fuels and every viable alternative.

Result: People begin to stop caring.

Read entire article

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

2013-02-25T13:31:00.001-05:00

Letters to the Editor and other People Speak

From: The Australian

LETTERS
Global warming error

THE global warming industry made a tactical error in putting all its eggs in the one basket, in the cause and effect hypothesis.

Carbon tax, emissions trading schemes, solar and wind generation are all predicated on the certainty that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activity is the cause, and rising global temperature is the effect and the belief that, by manipulating the cause, we can modify the effect.

The pause in rising temperatures shows a disconnection between human activity and increasing global temperatures. The human activity has not ceased but the effect has. We are now back on solid scientific ground, where the sceptics and deniers have been all along, namely that climate changes - always has and always will - and what we are experiencing is within historical fluctuations.

Frank Pulsford, Aspley, Qld

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

2013-02-22T07:30:00.002-05:00

Letters to the Editor and other People Speak

FROM-OC Register

Letters: That chill in the air isn't global warming

DANA POINT, Larry Hamlin, retired Southern California Edison vice president of power production, former state energy construction czar under Gov. Gray Davis (2001):

In the article, “Less snow, more blizzards may be in store” [News, Feb. 10], Seth Borenstein, again, uses erroneous information and results from unvalidated climate models to mischaracterize recent weather events occurring in the U.S.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration empirical temperature data shows that U.S. winters have cooled in the past 15 years in all nine U.S. climate regions. Thus, Borenstein’s most basic and fundamental premise, that global warming makes winters warmer, is wrong, based on reviewing actual temperature data.

North America snow extent empirical data from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab for the fall, winter and spring seasons from 1967 through 2012 show virtually no change in total snowfall during this period. Thus, again, one of the article’s most fundamental claims, that global warming results in less snow, is wrong, based on reviewing actual snowfall data records.

Borenstein also claims that global warming results in more winter storms but NOAA winter storm data clearly shows increased storms during cooler periods, which is the opposite of Borenstein’s claims.

The number of winter storms in the past decade is consistent with the number of storms that occurred in the cooler-winter decade of the 1960s versus the fewer number of storms that occurred in the warmer-winter decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

This article, unfortunately, is another example of climate alarmists making unfounded claims that are easily refuted using empirical data. Further, the article relies on results from unvalidated climate models whose “projections” are based on unproven assumptions of man-made links to climate change.

As Blizzard Nemo Strikes, Global Warming Won’t Be Far Behind

2013-02-09T08:07:00.001-05:00

FROM-Town Hall

John Ransom

Blizzard Nemo is bearing down on the Northeast- hence the term nor’easter to describe it- so prepare for the folks at Fashion Week, now being held in New York City, to be out in force battling the storm.

“The organizers of New York's Fashion Week,” reports the CSMonitor, “a closely watched series of fashion shows held under a big tent – said they will have extra crews to help with snow removal and will turn up the heat and add an extra layer to the venue.”

We can only hope that they wear furs.

Because we’ll need blizzards of hilarity to withstand the up-and-coming storm, which will be the worst storm ever since, well, the last “WORST-STORM-EVER!”

However, we won’t have to brace against the snow per se; there have been plenty of monster winter storms in the Northeast that have been shrugged off, shoveled out from and tobogganed on.

Even in the midst of an outbreak of global warming, snow still, after all, eventually melts. Even in New England.

“Yes,” said Mark Twain, a resident of Connecticut, “one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty ofit.”

So, the biggest storm we’ll face won’t be Nemo, in other words; it will be the blizzard of pseudo-scientific, trash journalistic, moralizing, hypocrisizing and hyperventilating rain of ink that will tie the storm to the effects of global warming.

Al Gore can’t fart sideways today without the gas being caused by global warming.

By definition, global warming can now be defined by anything that disturbs the comfort and security of anyone who lives on the Eastern seaboard.

Read entire article

Another case study in climate change alarmism

2013-02-06T22:45:00.000-05:00

People who have payed attention to the alarmist narrative of global warming are seldom surprised when yesterday's apocalyptic predictions are suddenly transformed into today's far less dire scientific study, usually found on the back page.

This pattern of shouted alarm morphing into ho hum is becoming so common it is a wonder that the the climate community doesn't just close up shop in shame and embarrassment. But the hubris necessary to actually perpetrate such a false narrative is such that they simply change the theory to fit current climatic conditions.

A recent example of a alarmist narrative suddenly wiped away with little notice has to do with the Amazon. Reuters brings us the good news that

"Amazon forest more resilient to climate change than feared - study"

The Amazon rainforest is less vulnerable to die off because of global warming than widely believed because the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide also acts as an airborne fertilizer, a study showed on Wednesday.

The boost to growth from CO2, the main gas from burning fossil fuels blamed for causing climate change, was likely to exceed damaging effects of rising temperatures this century such as drought, it said.

The fact that CO2 is a "plant fertilizer" seems to be a new realization to the wizards of smart who have been keeping the world on edge these past couple of decades as they cash their tax payer funded checks. After years of demonetization of CO2. Reuters felt compelled to reluctantly and briefly explain that yes carbon dioxide actually does play a very significant and beneficial role in nature, as anyone over thirty years old remembers from grade school science knows, though who knows what is taught today.

Plants soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it as an ingredient to grow leaves, branches and roots.

This grade school biology has finally made its way into the calculations of climate scientist and they have now issued a reprieve for the world's largest rain forest. Not only that but we are being informed, again reluctantly, that CO2 far from being a negative to the Amazon is actually a net positive.

It estimated that the damaging effects of warming would cause the release of 53 billion tons of carbon stored in lands throughout the tropics, much of it in the Amazon, for every single degree Celsius (1.8F) of temperature rise.

The benefits of CO2 fertilization exceeded those losses in most scenarios, which ranged up to a 319 billion ton net gain of stored carbon over the 21st century. About 500 to 1,000 billion ton of carbon are stored in land in the tropics.

As if increased heat would not also be beneficial to plant growth....in a jungle environment. Oh well we will take what we can get from the scientific community, they have such a hard time admitting what to most people is common sense.

"I am no longer so worried about a catastrophic die-back due to CO2-induced climate change," Professor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter in England told Reuters of the study he led in the journal Nature. "In that sense it's good news."

Gee thanks Prof, we were really worried about it, especially after you and your peers put out stories like this just four short years ago.

From the UK Guardian in 2009

"Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say"

Global warming will wreck attempts to save the Amazon rainforest, according to a devastating new study which predicts that one-third of its trees will be killed by even modest temperature rises.

I guess these scientist did not take grade school science and did not know about the whole "plant fertilizer" properties of the demon gas carbon dioxide. They were all to worried about CO2 induced warming killing off the Amazon and made sure that as the Reuters article pointed out that the "die off because of global warming ...[is] widely believed."

And why is the Amazon rain forest die off so widely believed? From the 2009 Guardian article

Chris Jones, who led the research, told the conference: "A temperature rise of anything over 1C commits you to some future loss of Amazon forest. Even the commonly quoted 2C target already commits us to 20-40% loss. On any kind of pragmatic timescale, I think we should see loss of the Amazon forest as irreversible."

You got that? One of the hottest most humid environments on Earth was going to be "irreversibly lost" due to global warming. Even 1C rise in temperature was predicted to reek havoc on our South American jungles.

It is a good thing that good old Professor Cox came along and set them straight. Oh wait what is this ?

Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said the effects would be felt around the world. "Ecologically it would be a catastrophe and it would be taking a huge chance with our own climate. The tropics are drivers of the world's weather systems and killing the Amazon is likely to change them forever. We don't know exactly what would happen but we could expect more extreme weather." Massive Amazon loss would also amplify global warming "significantly" he said.

"Destroying the Amazon would also turn what is a significant carbon sink into a significant source."

So the reason people believe that global warming is going to destroy the Amazon and create a global "ecological catastrophe" is because that is precisely what Peter Cox was telling the world four years ago.

Of course the good professor and his like minded peers would simply say that recent scientific studies have superseded their previous conclusions. Of course the whole tenor of these people is like kids who set off fire crackers in a crowded theater then after the panic has created mayhem point out that they are innocent because it was not a real machine gun after all.

But science or truth was not the purpose in the first place was it? If you think about it, the scientific knowledge to reach the conclusion they reached in 2009 as opposed to what they know today is not that much different. As a matter of fact the only thing that changed is what they put into their models.

The scientists said the study was a step forward because it used models comparing forest growth with variations in the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

So all that they did different in this study was factor in forest growth as a result of increased CO2, which leads one to believe that they did not previously factor this into their models.

In other words the previous catastrophic model scenarios were based on the warmer temperatures that CO2 is believed to cause without determining what affect that same CO2 would have on plant growth which every scientist knows CO2 generates, (we would hope)

This in a nutshell is exactly how modern science operates when it comes to "climate change". Look for and factor in only the negative impacts while ignoring or hiding the positive and limiting factors in order to promote worse case scenarios thus creating alarm. Then as with this new Amazon study, when the truth can no longer be hidden, quietly and without shame, tell the truth.

But the damage is done, the agenda has been pushed "Forward", the narrative has been established and the lie has circled the globe for four years before the truth has even put on its shoes.

Thank you Professor Peter Cox for being case study in climate change alarmism.

Notable Quotes

2013-02-02T18:35:00.000-05:00

"My humble plan was to become a hero of the environmental movement. I was going to go up to the Canadian Arctic, I was going to write this mournful elegy for the polar bears, at which point I'd be hailed as the next coming of John Muir and borne aloft on the shoulders of my environmental compatriots ...

"So when I got up there, I started realizing polar bears were not in as bad a shape as the conventional wisdom had led me to believe, which was actually very heartening, but didn't fit well with the book I'd been planning to write.

"... There are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago. ... In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded. This is not to say that global warming is not real or is not a problem for the polar bears. But polar bear populations are large, and the truth is that we can't look at it as a monolithic population that is all going one way or another."

Zac Unger

The Age of Lies-Alaska is Melting

2013-02-02T09:26:00.000-05:00

FROM-Jer's Notes

I once wrote that I ceased to be liberal when I realized that in order to maintain that ideology I had to continuously deny what I knew to be the truth. What we are witnessing now is not just the denial of truths, it is the redefinition of truth.

Evil is being recognized as good and good is being condemned as evil.

And it is everywhere and it is seeping into everything.

From The Age Of Lies

Alaska is Melting

At the beginning of the year it was publicized and widely reported that the Alaska Climate Research Center using data from NOAA weather stations throughout Alaska had determined that temperatures in Alaska had dropped significantly over the past decade.

A new report from the research center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks reveals that the 49th state of the union has cooled by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 2000.

The drop is described as a 'large value for a decade,' in the academic paper 'The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.'

This was not some idle speculation but as I said a widely reported throughout the scientific community and in the popular press worldwide.

As the story from the UK Daily Mail points out, a drop in temperatures of 2.4 degrees over a decade is significant and a decade worth of data is more than just a simple anomaly. The report's own title calls the past decade a "cooling trend". The current climate science community will often use yearly or even seasonal anomalies to alarm the public and here we have an entire decade long trend of cooling.

Furthermore we are not talking about some random decade but rather the last decade when global temperatures especially in the northern latitudes were prophesied to rise. But rather than rising it has been been proven using the "warmist' communities own records that temperatures in Alaska actually dropped significantly over the past decade. These findings have not been disputed.

What may have happened in previous decades although possibly significant as well does not change the fact that the current climate in Alaska is experiencing a cooling trend. This is fact based on actual data and research, plain and simple. All of this was brought to the worlds attention in the first week of January 2013.

So why is it that the National Wildlife Federation at the end of January can issue a report which states the following ?(emphasis in original)

Alaska has warmed about twice as much as the continental United States and warming is severely altering the Arctic landscape including melting permafrost. In the face of this unprecedented warming, many uniquely polar habitats—like the sea ice that polar bears, seals, and walrus require to hunt—are shrinking fast.

In what time frame is this purported warming supposed to have occurred? Obviously they can not be referring to the most recent available data since again as has been widely reported, Alaska temperatures are decreasing. The NWF must simply be ignoring recent long term changes in Alaska's climate in order to make such a statement.

The report from the Alaska Climate Research Center tells us that previous studies found that:

In general, the temperature has increased in Alaska since instrumental records are available. Stafford et al. [2] analyzed 25 Alaskan stations for the time period from 1949-1998 and found a mean annual temperature increase for all stations in the range of 1.0°-2.2°C,

So previous studies, using basically the same stations that this new study used, concluded that Alaskan temperatures had increased, at most, 2.2 degrees, at the end of the twentieth century since 1949. Why is the increase of temperatures over a 50 year period of 2.2 degrees somehow" unprecedented" while the decrease in temperatures of 2.4 degrees over 10 years seems not to be even acknowledged?

I would also point out that if both studies are correct, then the past ten years of cooling have wiped out the previous 50 years of warming.

I would suggest that the decade long "cooling trend" in Alaska is an inconvenient truth that does not fit into the "warmist" narrative. Therefore the National Wildlife Federation just ignore the most recent scientific data in order to promote their progressive agenda.

The Age of Lies.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

2013-01-30T19:38:00.001-05:00

Letters to the Editor and other People Speak

FROM-Corvallis Gazette-Times

Letter: Could global warming be attributed mostly to sun spots?

We are told that the Earth is slowly warming, and that carbon dioxide emissions are largely responsible. Maybe so, but there is a possible alternative that at least ought to be looked at; that is whether sun spots can make a contribution.

Sun spots are cool areas scattered over the sun’s surface that result from strong magnetic interactions that reduce the sun’s emission locally. They vary in size and individuals usually persist only for a few days. But at least one on record lasted about three months and had a size of about 25 times that of Earth.

The obvious implication, of course, is that their appearance and growth would cool the Earth.

However, a hundred years of counting showed that their number oscillates in a wave-like manner with a frequency of about 10 to 12 years, and has been increasingly substantiated over that time.

The temperature of the Earth — or parts of it — has been measured (estimated?) for many decades but only accurately over perhaps the last decade with the advent of aerial data from the troposphere around the whole globe.

Consider then that if, fortuitously, measuring started when the sun spot count was near a maximum and continued for perhaps five or six years. During that period the concentration would be steadily decreasing and the Earth would be warming. The effect would be small, but we are only looking for a degree or so.

The test of these speculations, of course, would be to see if during the last half decade the temperature would begin to fall again as the sun spot count was increasing again to complete the cycle.

L. Michael Foster

Corvallis

Notable Quotes

2013-01-28T21:34:00.001-05:00

"Once again we see that the predictions of those who expect the worst are most likely wrong. The lack of sea-level rise over the last half century, the missing spread of drought, the stubborn refusal of major storm frequency to rise, and, most noticeably, the lack of increasing temperatures have conspired to force the climate alarmists back to their models."

Doug L. Hoffman

A "Goliath" Inconvenient Truth

2013-01-26T11:36:00.000-05:00

Just this past August (2012), the chicken littles were out in full force warning us of imminent doom as the result of the melting Greenland ice sheets.

Today, Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York, reported that melting over the Greenland ice sheet shattered the seasonal record in the modern era, a full four weeks before the close of the melting season. The melting season in Greenland usually lasts from June – when the first puddles of meltwater appear – to early September, when temperatures cool. This year, cumulative melting by 8 August had already exceeded the record of 2010 (chart above, year 2012 in red). "With more yet to come in August, this year's overall melting will fall way above the old records.

Wanting to be sure we understood how big a deal this is, they even broke into the biblical references

That's a goliath year

A Goliath year, wow that is big. How "Goliath" was it?

-- the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979," said Professor Tedesco.

Since 1979! Since 1979? I mean we are talking about dramatic changes not recorded since the end of the Disco epoch!

BUT, a new study puts the absurdity of this alarmist claim in perspective. As the Houston Chronicle...chronicles (emphasis mine)

The study used ice cores to study conditions during a period of natural global warming that occurred between 115,000 and 130,000 years ago, when temperatures were about 14.5 Fahrenheit degrees higher than they are today. This was known as the Eemian period.

So what happened to the Greenland ice sheet when temperatures were 14.5 degrees warmer than today? During a period of natural global warming?

During this inter-glacial time about 75 percent of Greenland’s ice sheet remained intact.

Nowhere in any literature that I have ever read are any of the alarmist scientist predicting that temperatures as the result of man made CO2, going to come close to a 14.5 degree Fahrenheit increase.

In fact since the end of the Disco epoch (1979) the illustrious IPCC says that global temperatures have increased .72 degrees Fahrenheit or less than 5% of the increase experienced in the Eemian period. The absolute worst case scenarios projected by the IPCC for temperature increases as the result of a doubling of CO2 is 11.4 degrees Fahrenheit a full three degrees lower than previously experienced according to this study.

In the abstract to the new study we are told: (emphasis mine)

The response of the Greenland ice sheet to the warmer-than-present climate of the Eemian has thus remained unclear. Here we present the new North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (‘NEEM’) ice core and show only a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian.

Or as the Chronicle writer observed in the opening to his article:

New research suggests that Greenland’s vast ice sheet isn’t as fragile as some climate scientists feared.

The work, published in Nature this week (see abstract), indicates the majority of ice on Greenland could remain intact for hundreds of years even if the planet warms considerably.

Why is this important? It is important because the fear of the Greenland ice sheet melting is among the sited as one of the largest contributors to sea level rise that the alarmist use to scare the populace and drive public policy.

Greenland An Inconvenient Truth — MOVIECLIPS.com

This narrative is embedded into our culture and has been taught in our schools for a generation, and continues to be.

What will happen in the future?

If people keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the average sea level around the world by the end of this century (the year 2099) could be anywhere from 7 to 23 inches higher than it was in 1990. Sea level could rise even more if the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt faster.

But the big ice sheets in Greenland will not melt faster, nor will the one in Antarctica, which is for another day.

The truth is that scientist have now shown that even if temperatures were to increase beyond the alarmist wildest claims, my home here near the Florida coast will be bulldozed under by future developers long before it is covered over by the rising Atlantic as depicted in Al Gore's fairy tale movie.

Yet people still believe in the fairy tale and that is a "Goliath" of an Inconvenient Truth.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

2013-01-23T07:51:00.001-05:00

Letters to the Editor and other People Speak

FROM-Echo Express

Letter - No consensus over global warming

To the editor:

A recent letter referred to man-made climate change and how to deal with it. Not all scientists or climate experts believe in what used to be called global warming (until 1998 ended and the temps leveled off, even lowered a bit). If it was warming, the temperature should have risen every year so 2012 would have been the highest year on record, but the previous one should not have been 14 years earlier.

About 30,000 scientists and climatologists signed a petition questioning the science and conclusions behind the global warming theory, so the “consensus” is not as complete as advocated. Included in this group are some of the top people in their field. If a person does research on “Climategate,” they will discover some of the questions and problems in this whole area.

I contacted five electricity suppliers about a carbon tax to find out what this would do to our rates. The responses were an increase of 15 to 32 percent. Are we ready to pay this price for something that has not been completely debated in the open by experts on both sides of the issue?

If manufacturers have their electric costs go up, hospitals, banks, schools, plus the additional costs of fuel for heat, travel, shipping of goods, what will this do to the cost of living? Since a business passes its cost increases on to the consumers, we will all end up paying a much higher price for everything. It won’t hurt the people with wealth a great deal, but if a way to increase the taxes on the poor is out there, this is it.

Let’s have a formal, open debate with both sides represented before we take major steps that could set our nation and world back severely.

Pryce Score

Kensington, MN

"Very rarely" ain't never

2013-01-20T11:19:00.000-05:00

I should be used to it, but I still am flabbergasted when reporting on the scientific community creates an alarming narrative out of something that they, in some study, show has happened before and thus is not only not unprecedented but in all likelihood is a natural recurring event.

It would seem to me, though what do I know, that if you show that something that is occurring in nature today has occurred in the past your first supposition should be that what caused it in the past is causing it again. If, after all, you can not explain the previous occurrence what basis do you have in attributing the current event to some new cause?

Yet the scientific community consistently is so lacking in intellectual curiosity and so focused on maintaining their death grip hold on their cash cow of "climate change" that they will immediately attribute or leave the impression that current natural recurring events are the result of man made climate change. They often do this without attempting to explain or understand the previous occurrences which could not possibly be attributable to man's influence.

A recent example of this comes from a new study undertaken to look for

... new clues about the recent rapid ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and help scientists make better predictions about future sea-level rise.

First off let me just ask, how can you have a better basis for for predicting the future when you have no explanation for the past? At the bottom of the article we are told that this rather expensive research was needed in order to

... improve the accuracy of computer models that are essential to predict future ice loss in the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its likely contribution to global sea-level rise.

This is all well and good but the fact of the matter is that in order to determine future ice loss don't you need to understand why you are losing ice in the first place? (emphasis mine)

Reporting this month in the journal Geology a team of researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the University of Tromsø presents a timeline for ice loss and glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica. The team concludes that the rapid changes observed by satellites over the last 20 years at Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers may well be exceptional and are unlikely to have happened more than three or four times in the last 10,000 years.

At the risk of sounding naive, how could something that has ."happened more than three or four times in the last 10,000 years." be refereed to in the same sentence as " exceptional"? I would think that, in a geological time frame, something that has occurred three or four times in 10,000 years is not all that exceptional and obviously is not unprecedented.

After a somewhat confusing description by the lead author of the study of what the team is investigating and why:

"As snow and ice builds up on the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet, the ice flows from the centre of the continent through glaciers towards the sea where it often forms floating ice shelves and eventually breaks off as icebergs. The floating ice shelves hold back the ice on land. A critical issue for us is to understand how the 'grounding line' – the position where the ice sitting on land (glaciers) begins to float (ice shelves) – has retreated landward over time. Satellite data are available only for the last 20 years and show that since 1992 the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers have experienced significant thinning (melting), flow acceleration and rapid landward retreat of their grounding lines, with that of Pine Island Glacier having retreated up to 25 km. It's possible that the grounding lines may retreat even further inland over coming decades....

We are again informed that this is not a unique event:

" ...Our study has revealed that episodes of fast glacier retreat similar to that observed over recent decades can only have occurred very rarely during the previous 10,000 years."

The first question it seems to me that a scientist interested in truly investigating this or a journalist reporting on this would ask is "what caused the previous instances of rapid retreat?" But the question is not addressed in the article and so far as I have been able to discover, nowhere do the scientist attempt to explain previous occurrences.

In fact the authors admit that they really do not have a clue:

. However, it is unknown if the contemporary dynamic changes are simply part of long-term WAIS retreat since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ca. 23,000–19,000 cal. yr B.P.), or solely recent phenomena.

Putting aside that these scientist are investigating a phenomena which they have labeled exceptional based on "only... 20 years of satellite data" they can not even determine if these changes are unique or natural but wish to use their findings to "improve the accuracy of computer models that are essential to predict future ice loss... and its likely contribution to global sea-level rise."

Well how exactly do you do that? How do you use a phenomena that you can not explain to predict future ice loss?

When the skeptic community makes the charge that climate models are based on nothing more than suppositions not grounded in scientific reality they are accused of somehow being unscientific deniers. Yet here we have just such an example of how the scientific community creates suppositions to program their climate models and thus feed the climate change academic complexes coffers for future tax payer funded research.

"Very rarely"ain't never and to use current geological and climatic events which, by their own admission, are neither unprecedented or often times even all that unique as a basis to fund research is nothing less than fraud. The fact that they can not even explain the previous events but simply label current similar events as being caused by man made influences is not only unscientific, it is immoral.

Though immorality in the scientific community is neither unprecedented or unique.

Whatever happens, it’s all ‘climate change’

2013-01-19T21:45:00.001-05:00

FROM-Kansas City Star

BY E. THOMAS MCCLANAHAN

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says last year was the hottest on record in the contiguous United States. As The New York Times put it in a recent headline, it was “not even close.”

A couple of days later, The Times published a roundup of global weather gone wild, reinforcing the shift that took place some time back, in which “global warming” became the more vague and menacing “climate change” — a semantic adjustment that neatly accounted for the annoying lack of statistically significant global warming in recent years.

Along with heat in the United States, The Times story described snow in Jerusalem, endless rain in Britain, heat waves in Brazil and Australia and an arctic air mass settling in from Central Europe to South Asia — a cold wave severe enough to cause several hundred deaths. In Siberia, it was so frigid that natural gas liquefied in its pipes.

Omar Baddour of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva told The Times that these events were a sign that, as the paper put it, “climate change is not just about rising temperatures but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.”

In other words, if the temperature isn’t rising globally then “climate change” is pretty much anything bad that happens. I wish I could remember the blogger who crystallized the fallacy at work here, but he nailed it perfectly: If everything that happens becomes evidence for what you want to believe, how can you call it “science”?

The Earth may well start warming again and human activity may be the cause, but there are signs that many people have lost patience with the greens’ insistent predictions of doom.

At the “Watts Up With That” blog, meteorologist Anthony Watts found that search trends on Google for “global warming” and “climate change” have radically dropped off in recent years, while searches for “extreme weather” barely registered.

One reason may be that many people picked up on the dodginess of the shift from “global warming” to “climate change.” The Climategate scandal of 2009 — in which scientists wrote back and forth on how to thwart freedom-of-information filings or manipulate data — was a major blow to the theory’s credibility.

Then there’s the lack of significant warming since 1998, still the hottest year on record globally. What’s more, that trend will continue if you believe scientists at the British Met Office, an agency sometimes described as Britain’s NOAA.

The Met created a minor flap recently when, over the Christmas holiday, it posted a new set of predictions coughed up by its computer models. Unlike the previous year’s forecasts, these saw no significant warming for the next five years.

Moreover, the greens have failed to propose any workable policy levers for dealing with “climate change.”

The Kyoto process was stillborn given the refusal of big developing countries like China and India to participate. And the Obama administration’s cap-and-trade bill rightly died in the Senate. Politicians, especially in a chronically weak economy, aren’t likely to approve measures that could reduce growth and jobs even more, especially given the failure of climatologists to explain why global warming seems to have ceased.

The greens’ biggest problem is their tendency to package proposed remedies with a big dose of redemptive castor oil. We must do penance for our sins of waste, we’re told. But if they’d drop the moral exhibitionism, constructive options might appear.

You want a carbon tax? Fine. Make it revenue neutral and use the proceeds to lower the payroll tax — a direct levy on job creation — and cut taxes on saving and capital formation. That could well change the nation’s energy-use patterns, but I suspect many greens would see a downside: It might also accelerate growth and jobs.

Global warming takes a vacation

2013-01-19T15:59:00.000-05:00

FROM-Washington Times EDITORIAL:

Promoters of climate hysteria admit planetary temperatures are stable

Those who dare assert the Earth’s temperature isn’t on a perilous rise are derided as “deniers.” For liberals, the climate debate has ended, and it is an unquestionable article of faith that mankind’s carbon-dioxide emanations have set the stage for rising oceans, devastating hurricanes and disasters on a scale never before seen. To say otherwise is unthinkable, and that has created a dilemma. It’s not actually getting warmer.

In a paper published Tuesday, no less an authority than NASA scientist James E. Hansen wrote, “The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing.” Mr. Hansen is the intellectual godfather of the global-warming movement who advised Al Gore on his Oscar-winning climate-scare flick, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Mr. Hansen has just acknowledged more than the lack of warming. His words confirm nature, not mankind, played the decisive role in directing global temperatures over the past 10 years.

The anecdotal evidence has certainly not been friendly to climate hysteria. Southern England is covered in snow. Los Angeles has been shivering under what is — for Angelenos — a cold snap. The National Weather Service even issued a snow warning for the Washington area on Thursday. Frigid temperatures in January aren’t unusual, but the global-warming fanatics have been trying to pass off today’s climate as worse than the droughts and heat waves seen in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s when carbon-dioxide emissions were far lower.

There has been no appreciable warming since 1998, as can be seen in the official forecast from the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service, which the agency released on Christmas Eve. Presumably, the British government’s climate scientists didn’t want anyone to notice they had lowered their forecast from previous years, with temperatures in 2020 predicted to be no warmer than they were in the late 1990s. Websites such as Climate Depot and Watts Up With That had long ago reported the same phenomenon, only to be ridiculed by the climate-change establishment. It turns out these climate realists were right all along.

To be sure, the left isn’t about to give up on global warming. Politicians need the scare to have leverage to raise taxes through “cap and trade” schemes and to regulate what types of light bulbs the public will be allowed to buy. It would be economic suicide for climate soothsayers to entirely drop their frightening prognostications because that is their source for billions of dollars in taxpayer funding. That’s why Mr. Hansen’s paper insists the “stand-still of global temperatures” is a short-term phenomenon within a long-term warming trend. The carbon-dioxide molecules that are the byproduct of economic progress are still setting the stage for the end of days. The apocalypse is just on holiday for a decade or two.

The Washington Times

Blast from the Past

2013-01-18T08:33:00.001-05:00

With the recent revelations that soot is a major contributor to global warming, I thought I would re-post this blast from the past (March 2011). I am reasonably sure that the science community has now explained away 100% of global warming based on factors other than CO2. I don't know what happens when 130% of global warming can be explained by ingredients other than CO2 since the Mayan Calendar has expired....perhaps we start to cool.

"I Should have been dead five years ago"

I was reading this post over at No Trick Zone about a new study that indicates that half of recent Arctic warming is directly attributable to soot. In reading I came upon a paragraph which strangly reminded me of something a biology teacher told our class way back in Junior High (now called Middle School for some reason). The paragraph which took me down memory lane was this:

And another important factor in warming from 1980 – 1998 (there has been no warming since 1998) are the oceanic oscillations, which were in their warm phase from 1980 – 1998. That doesn’t leave much room left for CO2. Call it the incredible shrinking CO2 warming effect.

The particular teacher, his name escapes me, was actually a PE teacher who additionally taught biology as an elective course, which makes his lecture even more ironic and not at all political correct. Of course this was back in the late sixties and PC was just beginning to rear it's ugly head. Anyway what this PE/Biology educator explained to us disinterested hooligans was this, (I paraphrase. it was a long time ago):

"Modern science tells us that for every cigarette you smoke you shorten your life by the amount of time it takes to smoke it. They say that for every adult drink you consume you additionally shorten your life span by a few minutes depending on the quantity you drink. Certain foods you eat, most of which I enjoy, will additionally shorten your life span. I have done the calculations and have determined that I should have been dead five years ago"

Of course the statement was met with a great deal of laughter and cheer being as most of us were at the very beginning of our experimentation phase of life for these and many other ~~mind~~ ~~altering~~ life threatening substances.

Which brings me back to global warming. I thought wouldn't it be interesting if someone would go through the scientific literature for the past decade or so and see exactly how much global warming could be explained by factors other than CO2. Could it be possible that there exist enough scientific literature, peer reviewed of course. to show that in fact global warming has been or is in the process of being wiped away by the scientific literature the juggernaut of modern climate science is generating.

As strange as this may seem being that all those thermometers allegedly point in the other direction, the ~~religion~~ science of global warming in order to explain away so many contradictions and to create as much fear as possible may in fact have talked their way out of their own theory.

I have neither the expertise or the discipline to search all this out but I did take a little time to investigate the possibility that science, slowly but surely is scientifically destroying at least the alarmist version of global warming.

As an example I will simply point to my last post about the advancing forest taking over the tundra. Somewhat tongue in cheek I wondered:

Which brings up an interesting thought, will these advancing green monsters be able to keep up with mankind's insatiable appetite for demon fossil fuels? In fact have the wizards of modeling projections factored in these new marauding forest into any of their scenarios of doom and gloom?

As it turns out at least some studies have been done on increased vegetation caused by CO2 and global warming negating global warming. The folks over at World Climate Report
point the way in an article appropriately titled "CO2-induced Vegetation Growth Slows Global Warming" What makes this even more delicious is that it is done by NASA and NOAA Scientist partially using the same models they use to fry us.

A new study has identified a negative feedback between carbon dioxide-enhanced vegetative growth and global warming—the denser that vegetation becomes, the greater the cooling influence it has on any global temperature rise. The enhanced vegetation doesn’t offset all of the projected warming, but a sizeable chunk of it—13% globally, 20% over land areas, and more than 50% over the eastern United States. And this negative feedback is not included in current climate models.

A research team of scientists from NOAA, NASA, and the University of Maryland, led by Lahouari Bounoua set out to study how changing vegetation characteristics induced both directly by enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (recall that CO2 is a plant fertilizer) as well as by climate changes that are favorable for plant growth (increased temperature and/or precipitation) may feedback on the projected climate changes. The authors note that there has been some previous work on this topic, but that their current work (just published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters) uses a different modeling approach and includes plant responses not included in earlier studies.

So there you go 13% of projected Global Warming gone in one fell swoop, cha ching. And we don't even know if they included the marauding forest of the great North country in their study.

But 13% is just chicken feed compared to what the experts admittedly can't explain (emphasis mine):

"Missing" heat may affect future climate change

April 15, 2010
BOULDER—Current observational tools cannot account for roughly half of the heat that is believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, according to a “Perspectives” article in this week’s issue of Science. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) warn in the new study that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this “missing” heat, which may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system.

“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the lead author. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”

The authors suggest that last year’s rapid onset of El Niño, the periodic event in which upper ocean waters across much of the tropical Pacific Ocean become significantly warmer, may be one way in which the solar energy has reappeared.

So the heat that is supposed to be there, well it just ain't. But don't worry or do worry it'll be back you just wait and see. By the way the El Nino is gone, just like it always does. As far as this hide and seek heat other reputable scientist say that explanation is well ...just bunk
(emphasis in the original)

Trenberth’s [and co-author, NCAR scientist John Fasullo], however, are grasping for an explanation other than the actual real world implication of the absence of this heat.

First, if the heat was being sequestered deeper in the ocean (lower than about 700m), than we would have seen it transit through the upper ocean where the data coverage has been good since at least 2005. The other reservoirs where heat could be stored are closely monitored as well (e.g. continental ice) as well as being relatively small in comparison with the ocean.

Second, the melting of glaciers and continental ice can be only a very small component of the heat change (e.g. see Table 1 in Levitus et al 2001 “Anthropogenic warming of Earth’s climate system”. Science).

Thus, a large amount heat (measured as Joules) does not appear to be stored anywhere; it just is not there.

So here we have another 50%, not of future heat, but heat that should already be here, 50% plus 13% equals 63% ...cha ching.

I know, I know what you're thinking. If the scientist admit that the heat their models predicted are actually 50% less than called for, then the heating necessary to grow all those new plants in the other study won't happen.

Unless of course the heat which is hiding in the deep sea like some ancient sea monster surfaces from the depths as Kevin of NCAR warns and smites Mother Earth. Then Mother Earth shall retaliate with more vegetation and marauding forest to combat the fire breathing Leviathan from the depths of the Sea.

Interesting isn't it, how such a major admission from Kevin of NCAR, he of IPCC and climategate fame should simply be ignored in the relentless narrative of global warming. If alarmist scientist admit that 50% of the projected heating just isn't there, though it may be hanging out in the Marianna Trench, why does the rest of the scientific community continue to spit out model driven research papers as if those model projections were actually happening?

Even the study on increased vegetation due to global warming is based on the modeled projections of global warming which Kevin of NCAR admits is ...well LOST. Perhaps there is an island somewhere with mystical powers keeping our marooned Joules captive.

This of course means our marauding forest are at the very least, on hold. It also means that nearly every study being done based upon those models that are off by "roughly half" are not only assumptions based upon an assumption, which they have always been. They are in fact assumptions based upon a provably and admittedly wrong assumption.

Ah climate science what have you wrought. But you do make for good comedy.

I am reasonably certain that by now my former PE/Biology teacher has passed on, hopefully many years past when the scientist of that time projected he should. It is now only a matter of time and the real world intrusion on climate science's fable before we laugh at their inability to see that life and reality are not projections of mathematical formulas entered into computers by obsessed ideologues. Rather a wonderfully complicated evolving universe unfettered by the silly constraints imposed on it by egotistical scientist. If not for them this theory would have been dead, years ago.

'Professing to be wise, they became fools'

Notable Quotes

2013-01-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

"One of the great injustices to the entire global warming hysteria is that many worthy endeavors have hitched onto the frame work of climate change and are now irrevocably tied to the myth. Not only does this increase the power of those promoting this agenda, it tars these worthy causes with the same brush. When the stack of cards begins to truly collapse, which it inevitably will, separating the wheat from the chaff will be a very painful experience and many good causes will likely suffer as a result."

Jer

Shapeshifting Forward...or not

2013-01-16T23:32:00.000-05:00

Via-Jer's Notes

One of the great villains in movie history was the cop from the future in Terminator. What made him such a horrifying character was the inability of anybody, even Arnold Schwarzenegger, to do him in. If you blasted him full of enough assault rifle shells to give Dianne Feinstein the vapors, he would just reform himself from the pieces. This combined with the ability to shape himself into any person or thing he chose, usually the cop, made him almost invincible.

If the progressive movement didn't predate the Terminator franchise I would almost believe that Progressives used the cop as an organizational blueprint on how to operate. If your policies fail or are shown to be totally unworkable just restructure the pieces into a new form with the same goals under a new name and continue to destroy all that stands in your way.

Rush Limbaugh often says that the progressive movement is just another name for liberalism. At the risk of contradicting El Rushbo, he is wrong. Today's progressives are yesterdays liberals but yesterday's liberals were what the early progressives shape shifted themselves into after their policies were totally rejected post World War One. The Reagan revolution helped discredit the label "liberal" so they just shapeshifted back to the progressive label two generations removed from their original formation. Long enough removed from their former negative cogitation to be but a distant memory in societal consciousness You could say that today's progressives are your father's liberals which were your grandfather's progressives, we are just back to where we started in the label game but their goals remain the same.

This shapshifting can frustrate anyone trying to expose this destructive ideology and it is why Mark Levin did everyone a great service when he coined the phrase statist to describe all those who believe in a top down governing structure run by control junkies and elitist. But the label issue is the least of the problem, the real problem is not that they can change identities, it is that the progressive movement can easily transform through manipulation any issue or circumstance to promote their agenda.

And they are relentless. Their ruthlessness is possible because they have no collective conscious. When the ends always justify the means as a guiding principle, then there are no limits, no moral roadblocks. There is also no remorse for failed policies since the only thing important to the progressive mind is the ultimate goal of controlling society in order conform it to their mythical ideal of perfection.

To the progressive mind life is not a journey it is a destination. A destination where they get to determine how societies pieces fit together and how they meaning we should behave. The progressive is not about smelling roses along the road of life, he is about planting nice orderly rows where every bush is required to bloom on specific days and with predetermined color schemes.

Those who do not prescribe to this statist view of political and societal welfare are always left wondering why and how the progressive keep getting away with it. It is like in high school when you wondered why did the "bad boys" always attract the chicks and vice versa. The daring always attract the most attention, even if in the long run it is destructive behavior and the bold and the brazen can always cower the masses. Bullies are bullies because it works...until it doesn't.

Take the global warming debate, "THERE IS NO DEBATE !" as an example. As time has passed and the evidence mounts, or rather it doesn't, it has become ever more apparent that the premise of the theory is seriously flawed. But you see the premise of the theory is not the goal. The theory is just another means to an end and as with all things in the the progressive agenda the means in this case the theory is just a tool to be used. A scientific theory which normal people would consider to be the foundation of a scientific proposition is, for the progressives, secondary at best. In this case the goal is financial redistribution and economic control on a global scale, the "climate change" mantra is just a means to that end so fighting the battle about the specifics though necessary, has little affect on how the progressives will wage their campaign against the facts, facts having no real bearing on their overall goal.

While we laughed at the transformation of global warming into "climate change", the progressives just kept on building a political, academic and cultural foundation to support their statist goals. They will continually shift the argument and the premise in order to advance or progress their agenda. This is how you end up with headlines like this:

"Biting cold brings spectre of Global Warming closer, farmers worried but wheat crop safe"

We all know that virtually everything under the sun, with the exception of the sun, is now blamed on global warming which is now called climate change, or climate disruption or severe climate events or whatever they will shift it to next. We laugh at the absurdity while they indoctrinate the children into this new "reality" and embed their false premises into our culture not to mention the text books for future generations. They progress their deceitful agenda while we shake our heads at the insanity of it all and wonder how they get away with it.

They get away with it because they are doing while we are watching. After all one of those universal truths that is so easily ignored but has been proven true countless times over the ages is that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And nothing begat evil. Few are they in positions of power that actively call out the progressive agenda for the lie that it is and fewer still are those that once enacted will continue the fight rather than acquiesce to the new status quo.

For those of us who seriously followed how Obamacare came to be, at almost every juncture it was obvious that it would be stopped. There was no way it could go forward. The institutional safe guards were in place to stop it, but they just shoved right through those. The belief that "public opinion" was a check on political power in a republic did not even phase the progressives drive, they simply lied about what they were doing and carried on until they achieved their goal. Now Obamacare is the "law of the land" to quote the opposition parties most visible leader who has the legal power to shut it off but chooses to play by the political rules and traditions which were decimated in order for it to be conceived in the first place.

Just as we observers were sure that the "climategate" scandal would finally expose the charlatans and frauds of the scientific community and end global warming hoax, so too we expected that Obamacare was a step too far and finally this nightmare of power hungry elitist would be stopped, but they were not. The warmist still control the scientific narrative and the progressive politicians still control the reigns of power in DC. The skeptics are still mocked as as a matter of societal norm as are those who believe in the Constitution. The rule of law and scientific principles are for suckers.

There is a very simple reason for this, when the end justifies the means is an ingrained principle of your ideology, you can say anything with a clear conscious. A clear conscious is progressing your agenda forward and has nothing to do with the morality of truth. Our President has made this an art form but he is just a product of the progressive ideology and tactics, not the creator of them. The creator of this shapeshifting methodology was identified long ago as the "father of lies" and the naves who practice it are those who are willing to redefine values in order to achieve their unsustainable goals or the fools and tools who follow them down a dark path to ultimate destruction.

Truth, to the progressive mind, is an obstacle to be overcome and certainly not a guide post on the road of life. Truth can be used or discarded, shaped or molded as best fits the circumstances. A drought or a blizzard, it makes no difference whatever promotes the agenda. People are both trusting and busy so they will follow the loud voice of authority who claims there is a crisis and that they have the solution.

And that in nutshell is the progressive game and to them it is a game, create the illusion of a crisis in order to provide a solution. A solution which creates ever larger crisis which they again claim to have the answer to. A solution which always sacrifices individual liberties for progressive power and control.

How do you stop this shapshifting ideological nightmare bent on destroying personal liberty for the sake of elitist control? Well first off you recognize that most of the people involved in the progressive movement have a very limited knowledge of what they are a part of, simply because they are just shifting with the flow of the culture around them.

A consensus is forming on the "right" that the only real solution is to take back the culture, something that the "right" has seemingly little influence in. I say seemingly because the progressives hold on the culture is the proverbial mile wide and an inch deep. It appears as if the progressive left has a death grip on popular culture and thus the future. But I do not believe that this is necessarily so.

People, as a general rule, grow tired of the superficial and if their is anything that describes the progressive agenda it is superficial. Put plainly it can not sustain itself, it will continually fail. It takes a great deal of effort for an individual less alone a movement to continually gloss over failings. To this point in their history the progressives have been able to shapeshift after periods of failure by gloaming onto the successes that followed their previous demise to resurrect themselves. But we are reaching the precipice of a hundred years of this roller coaster ride. The bills are coming due and shifting of blame, though temporarily effective, does not solve the problem.

Just as you can shift the meaning of global warming to gin up crisis for a time, eventually you have to show results for your efforts. Nothing the warmist community can do is going to change the climate back to some mythical norm that never existed and nothing the progressive politicians can do is going to change the math of economic reality. Eventually the magician has to pull a rabbit out of the hat and the progressive illusionist are running out of rabbits to entertain the audience.

It is not that the progressives will not continue to reek havoc on the world, it is just that we are reaching the point where they must either take the next inevitable step, despotism, or their hold on society will begin to crumble. The candy man can only so long as the candy man can.

Glenn Beck has the right idea, begin to recreate the America we want it to be so that when the fall occurs, as it must, the strongest ones standing will be where the disillusioned will go for answers. Those who scoff at the simple truths today will thirst for them in the barren landscape of economic and societal decline which is all but inevitable now.

The way you defeat the shapeshifters, is to remain solid as a rock, hold onto the truth and the simple things that have always sustained peoples over the centuries. Faith, family, community, that is the only true progressive idea that has ever worked or ever will.

After all somebody is going to have to pick up the pieces.

Al Gore’s Payday

2013-01-15T10:30:00.000-05:00

FROM-NRO

Whatever his intentions, the former veep has benefited America’s enemies.

By Robert Zubrin

Recently, it was reported that former vice president Al Gore had managed to sell his financially troubled Current TV network to the Al Jazeera company, owned by the Qatar government, for $500 million, netting himself about $100 million in the process.

There is something unsettling about this transaction. I own a small aerospace company that does some business with the U.S. government. If I were to take a NASA middle manager out to dinner and pick up the tab, the inspector general would be all over both of us in a heartbeat. Yet here is Al Gore, a former congressman, senator, and vice president of the United States, receiving $100 million from a foreign government — and not just any foreign government, but one involved in extremely damaging economic warfare against the United States and the promotion of terrorism worldwide — and yet the attorney general takes no action. What gives?

To be sure, Al Gore is not the first high-level U.S.-government official, or even the first in his family, to obtain a payoff from a foreign government opposed to the United States. For example, his father, then-congressman Al Gore Sr., received a herd of prize cattle from Armand Hammer, which he was able to sell repeatedly at grossly inflated prices to lobbyists who never bothered to pick them up. When Gore retired from the Senate, he took up a $500,000-per-year (in 1970s money) position as CEO of the American coal subsidiary of Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum. Edward Jay Epstein extensively documented in his book Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, based on KGB files that became public after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Hammer was in fact — as had been widely suspected before the release of said documents — a top-level paymaster of the Soviet foreign-intelligence services from 1922 onward. According to Epstein, Gore Sr. received his payoff in return for his help in preventing prosecution of Hammer by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as for his key role in encouraging King Idris of Libya to transfer control of his country’s oilfields to Occidental — a move that no doubt facilitated the subsequent transfer of control of Libya itself to the Soviet camp.

So there is no doubt that Al Gore Sr. deserved his payoff from Armand Hammer. But what has Al Gore Jr. ever done for Qatar? Isn’t he, after all, the foremost champion of the worldwide environmentalist movement, which is bitterly opposed to oil production, the very lifeblood of the Qatari regime? Yes, he is, but there is a little catch, because while opposed in principle to oil production everywhere, the environmentalist movement has been effective in reality only in impeding it in the United States.

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Solar math

2013-01-14T23:16:00.000-05:00

In my quest to keep up with the alleged solar market I came across this article from the Salem News. As the article touts in the headline the "Solar farm could power nearly 500 homes" . How near to 500 we don't know but this seems like a rather big deal for a relatively small community. Of course the solar farm isn't really going to provide energy for 500 specific individual homes but rather it will be fed into the grid to be bought by the town;

“We do have a good-sized market that’s on this branch of the New England power grid,” he said. “Any city or town is eligible, but, of course, we hope it’s Beverly because they’re right here.”

So it will produce the electricity equivalent to nearly 500 homes. oOf course there are financial benefits to being solar:

He said selling to municipalities is the most cost-effective because solar producers receive a “significant” discount on transmission costs if they are selling to cities and towns.

I am not sure of the laws and regulations in Massachusetts but based on the statement it seems that this "significant discount" is something provided as some sort of government subsidy to solar producers as opposed to your run of the mill electric producers. This is not what caught my attention however, what attracted me to the story was the math of this project.

As the story points out, this is a private business, not a government run utility or enterprise and so one would assume that the purpose of the project is to make a profit for the people behind the project and this was what triggered my entrepreneurial instincts. How, I wondered, are they going to make money off of this? The first thing I noticed was that the "solar farm" was going to take up eight acres of what one would assume is not exactly dessert wasteland being located in a New England town just north of Boston near the Atlantic coast . There are generally a lot of things you can do or develop on eight acres of land so the fact that they are building a solar farm on this particular plot seems to indicate that they are expecting a good return on their investment. How much of an investment?

Bialek estimated the cost of the project at $6 million.

Six million dollars is still a good chunk of change, but we are talking about what amounts to a power plant here, so how much is that really. Well if you just take what we know, power for 500 homes for six million dollars is $12,000. per home.

That seemed like a lot of money to me, but what do I know. So I wondered how long it would take them to be paid back on their six million dollar investment. Just across the river in Peabody, it seems the average electric rates for a household are pretty low, actually very low sixty bucks a month low. Since I could not find exactly how much electric rates were in the adjoining community of Beverly I looked to see what the state average was. As of May 2012 the average household in Massachusetts paid $112 a month for electricity. This seemed reasonable, so let's go with it.

At $112 a month five hundred homes would pay $672,000 a year towards repaying that six million investment. So it would take just shy of nine years to pay for the initial investment. That doesn't seem to be what the owner calls "a good plan" to me. After all it is not like this solar farm once built is just going to operate without any maintenance, upkeep or repairs, not to mention administrative costs. There is also the issue of interest on loans and a slew of other overhead considerations. So that nine years would certainly be much longer. But it can't be too long, after all the life expectancy on solar panels is somewhere between 20 and 40
years.

No matter how you look at it, the math for a profitable enterprise just does not work out...well not until you get to the bottom of the article.

Bialek said he would apply for federal tax credits and state energy credits that are available for solar projects.

Now we see how an enterprise that makes no sense from a business standpoint works out just fine using solar math

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION STACKS DECK ON GLOBAL WARMING

2013-01-14T15:58:00.001-05:00

FROM-Breitbart

William Bigelow

At Globalchange.gov, a Federal Advisory Committee called The National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee (NCADAC) is boasting of their climate report. In the upper right corner of the webpage, the motto is written: “Thirteen Agencies, One Vision: Empower the Nation with Global Change Science.”

You know what that means; the Obama Administration is about to force down Americans’ throats its belief in global warming and the attendant changes that must be made because of their manufactured crisis. For goodness sake, they’re even blaming Superstorm Sandy on global warming, for as we all know, there have never been hurricanes in all of recorded history that even came close to Sandy’s fury.

So pardon us if we’re a little suspicious of the members who contributed to this “report.” Let’s just take a look at the NCASDAC’s chair, two vice-chairs, and ten executive secretariat members.

Chair: Jerry Melillo. “But project leader Jerry Melillo of MBL said this study demonstrates for the first time that global warming would also be likely to increase the carbon storing potential of trees, by speeding up nitrogen cycling in the forest.”
Vice-Chair:Terese Richmond: wrote Leveraging SEPA to Promote Green-Friendly Development.

Vice-Chair: Gary Yohe: joined an Open Letter from Scientists in the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Errors Contained in the Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007, in which this was said:

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So Fake It’s Real: Global Warming is Reality TV for the Media Elite

2013-01-14T07:53:00.000-05:00

FROM-Town Hall

John Ransom

Here’s my challenge to all the global warming apologists:

Explain to me why the “settled science” of global warming has to manipulate headlines to make information appear scarier and more threatening than the actual data shows.

If global warming is so settled, why do you and your friends take the opportunity to exaggerate, obfuscate and slant every piece of news that comes out to make it seem relevant to today?

You can see an example of this in the headlines below:

“Climate Change Main Contributor to Corn Volatility, Study Says” writes Bloomberg-BusinessWeek.

“Climate Change Has Outsize Effect On Corn Price Volatility,” trumpets Climate Central.

“Warming set to make corn prices pop,” says Agence France Presse.

“Climate Change to Affect Corn Prices, Study Says,” echoes the New York Times.

Nature Climate Change, a journal for the care a feeding of the climate change industry that masquerades as a peer-reviewed science rag, has published a new study that warns that “US corn price volatility to increase sharply in response to global warming projected to occur over the next three decades.”

Projected to occur over the next three decades.

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Notable Quotes

2013-01-12T11:00:00.000-05:00

"The inescapable if unfashionable conclusion is that the human use of fossil fuels has been causing the greening of the planet in three separate ways: first, by displacing firewood as a fuel; second, by warming the climate; and third, by raising carbon dioxide levels, which raise plant growth rates".

Matt Ridley

Or a total eclipse of the sun...

2013-01-12T08:15:00.005-05:00

It Looks Like Europe Is Going Off The Solar Energy Demand

Cliff