"Warmists Think We're Stupid"

Ross Kiminsky delivers the devastating point:

We have nearly eliminated smallpox and polio, two of the greatest scourges of eras past. In other words, we adapt to our environment -- in those cases when we can't adapt our environment to us.

For that reason, it defies common sense to believe that man-made global warming, even if it were real, would have the devastating impact that its anti-capitalist, wealth-redistributionist proponents claim.

Now we have the results of a much broader study, commissioned by the Reason Foundation, which points in exactly this same direction of adaptability. The study, entitled "The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900-2010" is summarized thus:

Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by 98% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events.

Other highlights from the study's findings:

• "Droughts were the most deadly extreme weather category between 1900 and 2010, responsible for over 60 percent of extreme weather deaths during that time. The worldwide death rate from droughts peaked in the 1920s when there were 235 deaths a year per million people. Since then, the death rate has fallen by 99.9 percent. The study finds that global food production advancements, such as new crops, improved fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides, along with society's better ability to move food and medical supplies, were responsible for reducing the number of deaths in times of severe drought."

• "Floods were to blame for 30 percent of the deaths during the timeframe studied, making them the second most deadly extreme weather category. The death rate for floods topped out in the 1930s at 204 deaths a year per million people. Deaths from floods have fallen by over 98 percent since then and there was an average of approximately one flood death per year per million people from 2000 to 2010."

• All of this while the advent of storm-finding and storm-reporting technologies have massively increased the number of reported extreme weather events. (This is not to say that the actual number of such events has increased, just the reporting thereof.) Of course, the same technology which allows storms to be reported allows them to be prepared for.

If people adapt, as we manifestly do, to almost anything thrown at us, it is difficult to take seriously the doomsday scenarios proffered by the UN's IPCC and their grant-chasing "scientists," supported by radical environmental leftists whose motivation is more to impoverish the west than to "save the planet."

That is why their "solutions" all involve two things: Curbing energy usage and production (which is to say, curbing humans' standard of living), and redistributing wealth from richer people and richer nations to poorer people and poorer nations. But if they really cared about the impact on people, rather than satisfying their own self-loathing as members of the human race, or even worse as Americans (gasp!), they would focus on aiding and speeding adaptation rather than trying to do the atmospheric equivalent of stopping continental drift.

For example, Denmark's Bjorn Lomborg, a professor of environmental economics, is a believer that global warming is man-made yet still argues that massive wealth-destroying policies are the wrong way to go. Instead, we should focus on much cheaper and more effective projects such as increasing clean water supplies in the third world.

People are becoming skeptical of man-made global warming not just because the warmists' mathematical models can't explain the lack of warming since 1998 and not just because Climategate proved how utterly corrupt "climate science" has become. But it's also because the solutions proposed, i.e. to stop using energy, are based on an obvious, even if never-ever-ever-ever-stated by the left, premise that people who live on 21st century Earth are too stupid to adapt to a changing environment -- even though we have as a species, even without the benefit of modern technology, done just that for millennia.

Reason's new study is just confirmation of what we all know in our gut: that "climate change," even if it were partially caused by man, is not the threat the left claims and not to be responded to by cutting our own economic throats, whether by cap-and-trade policies or by incinerating billions of dollars on the altar of "green energy" as our savior. Indeed, actually incinerating the money may have generated more energy for our nation than Solyndra and the like have, proving perhaps that while humans are not inherently stupid, bureaucrats and politicians may be a special case.

The Computer Models are wrong---AGAIN

But does that stop the man-made global warming hoaxers? Of course not!

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

50 million climate refugees?

By now, we were supposed to have had them....But does that stop the fraudmeisters? Of course not!

Was 2010 a "warm" year?

Only 9,098 0f the last 10,500 years were globally warmer than 2010.

But the fraudulent statists of the Left don't give up easily:

1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century. A decade ago, the closest challenger appeared to be 1998, a super-el nino year, but it trailed 1934 by 0.54°C (0.97°F). Since then, NASA GISS has “adjusted” the U.S. data for 1934 downward and 1998 upward (see December 25, 2010 post by Ira Glickstein) in an attempt to make 1998 warmer than 1934 and seemingly erased the original rather large lead of 1934 over 1998. The last phases of the strong 2009-2010 el nino in early 2010 made this year another possible contender for the warmest year of the century. However, December 2010 has been one of the coldest Decembers in a century in many parts of the world, so 2010 probably won’t be warmer than 1998. But does it really matter? Regardless of which year wins the temperature adjustment battle, how significant will that be? To answer that question, we need to look at a much longer time frame‒centuries and millennia.

California Propositions

Prop 19: Legalizing Pot -- Symbolic YES.

I say symbolic because even if this initiative passes, it will not happen. It will immediately get tied up in litigation, both state and federal, that will go on for years. So as a result, both the nightmare scenarios outlined by opponents and the alleged increased revenues and decreased Mexican drug cartel activity outlined by proponents simply are not going to happen, at least not anytime soon.

I actually have respect for those who vote NO. My nephew told me that he thinks society has enough problems with alcohol, and do we really want to have a larger pot problem? From someone who has had a drinking problem, and who watched his pothead father graduate to methamphetamine, this is not a frivolous point.

The proposed law also provides that "no person shall be discriminated against or denied any right or privilege" for pot use, inviting a lawsuit every time an employer tries to require a drug test, for example.

There is also the obvious question: Do we really want a legally dumbed down society to the point where "the munchies" are the topic of discussion? I rather regret most of the times I spent getting stoned, they being in adolescent angst and all that.

Nevertheless, I am of the mind to vote YES, simply because with "medicinal" marijuana, we already have a fairly large exception by which thousands of people in this state are toking away, and probably passing it on to the non-afflicted. Our current anti-marijuana enforcement efforts are tantamount to telling Katie to bar the door after all the horses have already left the stables. To have such an unenforceable law is to invite contempt for the law in general.

As for the concerns that marijuana leads its users on to harder drugs, here there is an undeniable element of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who seek out marijuana tend to get it from those involved with the manufacture or sale of other illegal substances, such as methamphetamine. If it were legally grown and sold, as tobacco is, that would not be the case.

Finally, I am increasingly of the mind that we should "Legalize It, Then Demonize It", much as has been done with tobacco. And smoking tobacco has declined among the American population, relative to previous generations. Youth are still more likely to smoke than older adults, but that was true with prior generations as well. There is a very simple reason for this. Cigarettes and alcohol, for teenagers who wish to seem more grown up, are easy and false outward symbols of maturity, whereas genuine adult recognition and earned achievement are much harder to come by. (Nope, "Joe Camel" had nothing to do with youth smoking, "The Marlboro Man", however, probably did.)

I am reminded of the Wickersham Commission of 1929-1931, which, while acknowledging that Prohibition was very problematic and ineffective, would not urge its repeal.

Franklin P. Adams, a columnist for the now defunct New York World newspaper (from which the term "World Series" comes, as the newspaper was the original sponsor of the American Baseball Championship Game) wrote a ditty that mocked the government's report:

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It don't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it.

And this kind of ditty is as appropriate now as it was in 1931.

Prop 20: Congressional Redistricting. (Symbolic?) YES.

Prop 20 extends the redistricting reform applied to State Senate and Assembly districts by previously passed Prop 11 to Congressional districts. Congressional districts are currently drawn by politicians in the Legislature. This measure would take control of Congressional redistricting away from the Legislature, giving it instead to a citizens commission.

Prop. 20 would end political gerrymandering. It’s widely agreed by good government advocates that politicians draw districts for political advantage, creating safe seats for incumbent politicians and protecting the majority party’s position of dominance.

This finishes the work we began in 2008 to get redistricting decisions away from self-interested state legislators and into the hands of a bi-partisan commission, to reduce the gerrymandering rampant in California politics. The original initiative was just for California state districts - this simply adds the Congressional ones.

I suspect this might face legal challenges, so it *might* be symbolic.

I really would like to see districts that respected municipal and county boundaries, trying to keep first counties, then cities, then neighborhood districts, together as much as possible, and were not bizarrely drawn. Obviously, a mega county like LA will have many representatives in it, but let us try to have districts that don't carve up established municipalities, established neighborhoods, or ZIP Codes.

Have you ever used Wikipedia to see what your Congressional District looks like on a map? You might be surprised, infuriated, or amused. My own district looks like this, and it is actually one of the less bizarre ones.

Most other California districts, like this, and this, and this, and this, have no respect for city or county boundaries whatsoever. But the real champ of gerrymandering is this one. To "represent" certain liberal coastal enclaves, it is 200 miles long and in some places only 200 yards wide!

And what do those districts have in Common, except for mine? DEMOCRATS. Suppose the districts were drawn more with realistic city and county boundaries in mind. Might California be a little more balanced? I think so.

Meanwhile, it is time to boycott "The League Of Women Voters", who claim this:

"Tucked into the proposed law are problems that would make it harder to protect California's diverse neighborhoods."

In other words, The League Of Women Voters favors the kinds of ethnic Bantustan districts that allow corrupt creeps like Maxine "Kill Whitey and Free OJ" Waters to continue to get re-elected time and time again. Shame on you, League of Women Voters. Non-partisan, my fanny. Not anymore anyway.

Prop 21: Robbing Drivers To Pay Parks - NO.

Right now, state park users pay a nominal fee that helps pay for upkeep, assuring that those who use our state parks help pay for them. This measure ends shifts the cost to the rest of us by imposing an $18 per car tax increase whether we use the parks or not. Stealing money from highway travelers used to be called "highway robbery." Now it's called "Proposition 21."

Moreover, there is no guarantee that there will not be "bait and switch". Funds raised ostensibly for parks still may not be used to fix the parks, but may instead be raided by wasteful spending politicians to squander on other unrelated pet projects.

Frankly, in a time of budgetary woes, it may be time to reconsider and sell off those parks which have very low use, which have to be plowed or grazed by Cattle periodically to prevent wildfires, and lack facilities for campers. Coe State Park, in the Diablo Ranges east of San Jose, comes to mind. Originally one ranch gifted to the State, it has annexed most neighboring ranches and grown many times its original size, but it still lacks the most basic of park facilities and is inaccessible to most Californians.

Prop 22: State Hands Off Local Government Tax Money - YES.

Prop 22 is designed to protect local funds from being borrowed by the state government. In recent years, as the state has faced massive budget shortfalls, Sacramento politicians have partially made up for these shortfalls by borrowing funds from local government treasuries. Funds borrowed included money that local governments would otherwise have been available for services including transportation and public safety.

Sacramento politicians have raided their treasuries resulting in layoffs of police officers and fire fighters and hindering plans for transit projects that were supposed to be paid for with gas tax revenue. Instead, the Sacramento political class robbed local governments, forcing others to pay for their reckless spending and misplaced priorities. Prop 22 protects local funds from further raids by the state government ensuring funds are used for those local projects they were intended for, and not to bail out state level politicians.

This takes a giant leap toward restoring local government independence and protecting our transportation taxes by prohibiting state raids on local and transportation funds. Local governments are hardly paragons of virtue, but local tax revenues should remain local.

Many people whose opinions I respect oppose this initiative, on the grounds that it will make it harder for state authorities to defund local "redevelopment agencies" who abuse their eminent domain powers. But I think that is a problem of property rights, not of local control.

Prop 23: End The Man-Made Global Warming Hoax - YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In 2006, Sacramento's rocket-scientists enacted AB 32, imposing draconian restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions (yes, that's the stuff you exhale).

They promised to save the planet from alleged "man made global warming" and open a cornucopia of new "green" jobs. Since then, California's unemployment rate has shot far beyond the national unemployment rate and the earth has continued to warm and cool as it has for billions of years.

Prop 23 merely holds the "Environmentalists" to their promise: it suspends AB 32 until unemployment stabilizes at or below its pre-AB 32 level. For this the leftist propagandists call it "anti-science".

Gee, it sure is "science" when the global warming "scientists" have been caught red-handed adjusting / fabricating data to fit the "computer models". If the data doesn't fit the models, make it fit! And when they get caught doing this for decades, they merely assert that "the science is settled!" that much louder.

It has become fashionable to re-label "global warming" as "Climate Change" to account for lower than normal temperatures and Little Ice Ages in recent decades. And that in a sense is true--over time the climate is always slowly changing. But those of us who remember the 1970's claims that industrial man, by stirring up sun-blocking particulate matter and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere, was going to cause a "New Ice Age", are skeptical.

Solar orbital cycles, sunspots, volcanic eruptions, natural ocean current shifts, and massive natural non-industrial sources of Carbon Dioxide, water vapor, and methane, all of which dwarf man's output, could not be reached for comment.

I am evenly split over whether these "scientists" and the politicians who trumpet them are sinister liars, or whether they are sincere "true believers" just looking for a "religion for the Godless." But either way, they do have motives: more research grant money at best, crypto-totalitarians looking to take away our mobility and therefore freedom at worst, and those looking for another excuse to tax us somewhere in between.

The disgusting propaganda opposing this initiative makes me ill. For starters, we have the vilification of two "Texas" oil companies, Valero and Tesoro. Gee, Valero and Tesoro between them operate four major refineries in the State of California, oilfields in the Bakersfield area, and have hundreds of service station franchises here. Outsiders? Really? Because they have their HQ's in Texas? To escape the punitive and business bashing California State Taxes, who wouldn't? Meanwhile, the aforementioned and exposed climate change hoaxers seem to come from around the world.

On a related note, it is time to boycott "The American Lung Association", who claim this initiative "causes pollution", even though this initiative doesn't lower a single standard for emissions of *real* pollutants (such as nitric oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons, the stuff that actually makes up "smog"). Carbon Dioxide is NOT a pollutant. Plants like it.

Shame on you, American Lung Association. From here on, any Christmas Seals, Easter Seals, or other American Lung Association fundraising letters featuring the poor asthmatic kids go right in the trash. Not one red cent to a corrupted organization. Not. One. Red. Cent.

Prop 24: The So-Called "Tax Fairness Act" - NO!!!!!!!!

Prop 24 repeals recently enacted changes in the tax code that were designed to somewhat ease the tax burden on California businesses.

Prop 24 raises taxes on California in three ways. First, Prop 24 ends a practice called “elective single sales factor” that allows businesses to choose between basing their tax burden on sales or property and payroll, giving them the ability to use whichever formula results in a lower obligation.

Second, Prop 24 ends a tax credit designed for research and development that allows companies to shift tax credits between profitable and unprofitable operations. Because research units do not usually earn profits directly, the ability to shift credits between units assists research and development units.

Finally, this proposition ends the practices of “net operating loss carryback,” a tax procedure that allows businesses to use previous tax years operating losses to reduce their liability in a current profitable year.

Various Democrats in the state are calling these "corporate tax giveaways". Giveaways? As if those revenues are theirs to give? Really, the Soviet Politboro-like arrogance of these people is something to behold. And that is why I call those various Democrats, "Commiecrats" or "Demunists".

Ultimately the reality is that for the most part the businesses don't end up paying the business taxes - we do. And when that can't happen, the businesses flee the state and are accused of "exporting jobs".

Business taxes can only be paid in three ways:
1. by us as consumers (through higher prices),
2. by us as employees (through lower wages) and
3. by us as investors (through lower earnings on our 401k's).

Proposition 24 is a jobs tax that will make unemployment worse when the ranks of the jobless are already at record highs. California’s business taxes are currently one of the highest in the nation and California has been ranked by numerous studies as one of the worst places to do business. Imposing billions in new taxes on employers would make the state an even more inhospitable environment for jobs and economic growth, increasing the exodus of jobs out of California and discouraging new investment.

Prop 25: Simple majority for new budgets - NO
Prop 25 allows a budget to be passed with a simple majority rather than the currently required 2/3 vote. The proposition also eliminates the power of referendum on the budget and budget related bills, making budgets take effect immediately upon passage with no opportunity for voters to stop implementation.

If the Legislature fails to pass a budget on time, Prop. 25 requires that legislators forfeit their salaries and living expense allowance. That is a nice gimmick to sell the proposition, but the fact is that all too many state politicians have independent fortunes beyond their salaries anyway. Governator Ah-nold served without pay for years.

Now in fairness, this initiative does not directly make it easier for the Powers That Be to raise taxes--that would still require a 2/3 vote (unless that tax is relabeled a "fee"; see Proposition 26 below). However, this initiative does make it easier for the Powers That Be to spend money--and raising taxes follows that, surely as night follows day.

Prop 25 also does not place any restrictions on what can be included in a budget related bill, so politicians could also more easily pass other legislation currently requiring a super majority simply by inserting it into budget related bills. Super majorities are currently required for the passage of taxes, placing bond proposals on the ballot, and for imposing new environmental regulations on the Delta.

So in other words, while this Proposition does not directly challenge the 2/3 rule for new taxes, it is a stalking horse for ultimately overturning that rule. Their ultimate goal is removing the ‘super majority’ vote on the budget and raising your taxes.

Prop 26: Subjecting New Fees to 2/3 vote - YES

Prop 26 requires that new state fees be passed with a 2/3 vote of the Legislature and establishes the right of citizens to approve, either by two-thirds or majority, local taxes. California currently requires new taxes to be approved with a 2/3 vote of the Legislature, but only requires a simple majority vote to pass levies defined as “fees.” This has encouraged politicians to define new taxes as “fees” to ease passage. Prop 26, with limited exceptions, imposes the same requirements now applied to taxes to fees.

Under the Sinclair Paint vs. California Board of Equalization Court decision (1997), virtually any tax may be increased by majority vote as long as it is called a "fee," gutting the 2/3 vote requirement in the state constitution to raise taxes.

Surprise, surprise, surprise, over the last decade there have been many more fees. Billions in hidden taxes may be imposed on Californians simply by redefining them as "fees".

The proliferation of fees have added to California’s high tax anti-business climate. Closing this legal loophole by making the passage of fees no easier than the passage of taxes would protect jobs and California taxpayers. Prop. 26 rescinds the Sinclair Paint decision, restores the Constitution, and calls a tax a tax--as it should be.

Prop 27: Abolishing Citizens Redistricting Panel - NO!!!!

Prop 27 rolls back the previously passed Prop 11. which took the power to draw Legislative districts away from the Legislature and gave the responsibility to a newly formed Citizens Redistricting Commission, consisting of four Democrats, four Republicans, and three independents. It hasn't even been fully implemented yet, and already the gerrymandering forces want to undo it! Prop 27 would once again allow legislators to draw their own districts, and includes a “poison pill” provision that would kill Prop 20 if Prop 27 passes with more votes.

Barbara Boxer, Carly Fiorina, and "Outsourcing Jobs"

I was disappointed with Carly's performance in the first senatorial debate against the Bolshevik Barbara Boxer. Then again, I was disappointed with Carly's winning the primary.
And of course, Barbara Boxer brought up the canard about Carly Fiorina "exporting jobs" when she was running Hewlett-Packard.
And the wench Boxer really doesn’t get that her taxation and her mandates and her lawsuits drove businesses out of this land, does she? Wow.

Businesses leave our shores for cheap labor, the commiecrats say? Which begs the question of who drove up the cost of labor?

Who did that? THEY did.

Leftists, when you have made business into something to be excessively taxed for your welfare state, do not expect the businessmen and women to remain here. Do not expect them to stay in America and lose their money for the purpose of becoming the fodder of National Health Care. Do not expect them to produce, when production of goods and services is punished with ever higher statist demands. Do not ask, “Who is exporting the jobs?” You are.
You may notice the corporations *are not* going to Venezuela, where bandito commie leftover Hugo Chavez will steal from them, or to Afghanistan, where they might get blown up, or to Outer Mongolia, where there isn't any infrastructure to support industry.
Industry goes where the dealing is good. Either improve the situation for them here, or be prepared to watch them leave.
A huge part of why they leave, and of the cost of labor, is taxation. Deal with it. Tax a corporation? When it can't pass on the costs in higher prices, it moves. Even the Eurosocialists, who have high individual taxes up the wazoo, have low corporate ones.
If you want to have some protectionism to keep businesses here, then argue for that and accept the higher costs of products at home, and possible retaliation abroad.

Or go unionize workers over there.
But quit pretending that adding to the costs of doing business *here*, such as:
--business bashing "windfall profits" taxes (sorry, profit is GOOD)
--"Affirmative Action" (sorry, soft racism *is* bad)
--or the Global Warming carbon tax fraud (sorry, Carbon Dioxide is GOOD for plants)
--or higher taxation in general
doesn't encourage them to leave. Because it does. Period.

It is amusing to see Leftists chide patriots for "living in the 1950's" (culturally), when they definitely live in the 1950's economically--and which forces do people have more control over? Hint: not economic ones. The very businesses the Left thinks are omnipotent--all the while hating them--are at the mercy of economic forces too.

Why Solar And Wind Power Are Jokes

At least for serious and susbstantial energy. And don't get me started on ethanol either.


As Scotty said in Star Trek: "You cannot change the laws of physics!"

George Will: Climate Science Tantrums

This is so good it bears repeating:

Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

"They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder — and I hope they put it on their faces every day."

Do not judge him as harshly as he speaks of others. Nothing prepared him for the unnerving horror of encountering disagreement. Global warming alarmists, long cosseted by echoing media, manifest an interesting incongruity — hysteria and name-calling accompanying serene assertions about the "settled science" of climate change. Were it settled, we would be spared the hyperbole that amounts to Ring Lardner's "Shut up, he explained."

The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children's story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months, which began Nov. 19 with the publication of e-mails indicating attempts by scientists to massage data and suppress dissent in order to strengthen "evidence" of global warming.

But there already supposedly was a broad, deep and unassailable consensus. Strange.

Next came the failure of The World's Last — We Really, Really Mean It — Chance, a.k.a. the Copenhagen climate change summit. It was a nullity, and since then things have been getting worse for those trying to stampede the world into a spasm of prophylactic statism.

In 2007, before the economic downturn began enforcing seriousness and discouraging grandstanding, seven western U.S. states (and four Canadian provinces) decided to fix the planet on their own. California's Arnold Schwarzenegger intoned, "We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment." The 11 jurisdictions formed what is now called the Western Climate Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Or not. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently suspended her state's participation in what has not yet begun, and some Utah legislators are reportedly considering a similar action. Brewer worries, sensibly, that it would impose costs on businesses and consumers. She also ordered reconsideration of Arizona's strict vehicle emission rules, modeled on incorrigible California's, lest they raise the cost of new cars.

Last week, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar, three early members of the 31-member U.S. Climate Action Partnership, said: Oh, never mind. They withdrew from USCAP. It is a coalition of corporations and global warming alarm groups that was formed in 2007 when carbon rationing legislation seemed inevitable and collaboration with the rationers seemed prudent. A spokesman for Conoco said: "We need to spend time addressing the issues that impact our shareholders and consumers." What a concept.

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain's Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years. Small wonder that support for radical remedial action, sacrificing wealth and freedom to combat warming, is melting faster than the Himalayan glaciers that an IPCC report asserted, without serious scientific support, could disappear by 2035.

Jones also says that if during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (circa 800-1300) global temperatures may have been warmer than today's, that would change the debate. Indeed it would. It would complicate the task of indicting contemporary civilization for today's supposedly unprecedented temperatures.

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change — yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government — warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern's portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

The "Man Made Global Warming" scam unravels....

....further and further still.

political fraud and scientific swindle can be measured by collapsing "science." The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain was regarded as the leader in climate research and the fount of raw data on which the science was based until leaked e-mails between researchers revealed evidence of doctoring of data and manipulation of evidence. The director of the research unit, professor Phil Jones, was regarded as an archbishop in the Church of Global Warming. He was pressured to resign in the wake of the scandal. Now he has conceded to an interviewer from the BBC that based on the evidence in his findings, the globe might have been warmer in medieval times. If so, the notion that fluctuations in earthly temperatures are man-made is rendered just that, a man-made notion. 

The learned professor told his interviewer that for the past 15 years there has been no "statistically significant" warming. He conceded that he has lost track of many of the relevant papers — that his office was overwhelmed by the clutter of paper. Some of the crucial data to back up scare stories might be lying under other stuff, but he's not sure. An environmental analyst for the BBC said the professor told him that his "strengths" include "integrity" and "doggedness" but not record-keeping and "office tidying." He's just not dogged about keeping things straight. 

This was good enough in the early years of the scam, but not any longer. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and once a ranking member of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the temperature records have been compromised and cannot be relied on. The findings of weather stations that collected temperature data were distorted by location. Several were located near air-conditioning units and on waste-treatment plants; one was next to a waste incinerator. Still another was built at Rome's international airport and catches the hot exhaust of taxiing jetliners.

The global-warming hysteria, on which the Obama administration wants to base enormous new tax burdens, is a fraud. Leftist Man wants more statist control over us and invents this fraud with which to do it. But I think it goes even deeper than that. Leftist Man is driven by his ego and finds it impossible to think even the weather is not all about him.

The other main organ of the climate "consensus" is the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It won the Nobel Peace Prize for its 2007 report, which turns out to have been so riddled with errors it could have been researched on Wikipedia. It said Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, warned that global warming could reduce crop yields in Africa by 50 percent by 2020, and linked warming to the increased economic cost of natural disasters — all nonsense.

These aren't random errors. As former head of the IPCC, the British scientist Robert Watson notes, "The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact."

Of course they did.....

Too many of the creators and guardians of the "consensus" desperately wanted to believe in it. As self-proclaimed defenders of science, they should have brushed up on their Enlightenment. "Doubt is not a pleasant mental state," said Voltaire, "but certainty is a ridiculous one." The latest revelations don't disprove the warming of the 20th century or mean that carbon emissions played no role. But by highlighting the uncertainty of the paleoclimatic data and the models on which alarmism has been built, they constitute a shattering blow to the case for radical, immediate action.

But does that give the hoaxers pause? Of course not. They double down.

Global Warming? Child Obesity? The Big Lie Agenda

They're caught lying about "Global Warming"--again:

During the 1960s and into the 1980s, the number of stations used for calculating global surface temperatures was about 6,000. By 1990, the number of stations dropped rapidly to about 1,500. Most of the stations lost were in the colder regions of the Earth. Not adjusting for their lost made temperatures appear to be higher than was in fact the case. According to Science & Environmental Policy Project, Russia reported that (the British) Climate Research Unit was ignoring data from colder regions of Russia, even though these stations were still reporting data. That means data loss was not simply the result of station closings but deliberate decisions by Climate Research Unit to ignore them in order to hype their global warming claims.

(...)

Mounting evidence of scientific fraud might make little difference in terms of the response to manmade global warming hysteria. Why? Vested economic and political interests have emerged where trillions of dollars and social control are at stake. Therefore, many people who recognize the scientific fraud underlying global warming claims are likely to defend it anyway. Automobile companies have invested billions in research and investment in producing "green cars." General Electric and Phillips have spent millions lobbying Congress to outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL). Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention massive subsidies.

(...)

I bet that even if the permafrost returned as far south as New Jersey, as it once did, the warmers and their congressional stooges would still call for measures to fight global warming.

And They are hyping a Childhood Obesity Scare, which *they* caused:

Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple — as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don't care about slimming your kids' waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.

Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students' physical fitness. The East Wing is now in full campaign mode — leaning on the nation's mayors, traveling with the surgeon general and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children.
(...)
For decades, school administrators have criticized this Great Society relic for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses. In the late 1970s, New York principal Lewis Lyman skewered it as a federal "boondoggle" in a seminal essay for the education journal Phi Delta Kappan. But Democrats demagogued the GOP's responsible attempts at financial reform during the Clinton years as "starving the children." While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school-lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed by the White House's most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the first lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What's in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: "A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC (the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program) is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers (emphasis added)."

There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. "More robust expansion" of the federal school-lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats' health care takeover bill).

The SEIU's front group, "Campaign for Quality Services," is clamoring for "the right to sick days and training" for school food-services workers. Never ones to let a crisis go unexploited, SEIU sent its members to lobby in front of Chicago public schools last year and scare parents into supporting their labor agenda. They accused the school system of "putting our kids at risk" during flu season by resisting the SEIU's sick day coverage demands. "Without sick days, I can't take a day off, so I have to bring germs to school," an SEIU janitor lamented.

Along the same lines, they are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind P.R. efforts casting them as superheroes "serving justice, and serving lunch." Opposing the union means opposing children's health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J., lamenting: "I love my work, but it's getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we're working with. It breaks my heart to see a child who's hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed."

Actually, that's the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a "stronger nutrition safety net." Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.

Cede the children, feed the state.

The Carbon Dioxide Fallacy

And the Man-Made Global Warming, I mean Climate Change, hoax continues to unravel:

We are told, based on computer models, that human beings burning fossil fuels -- and exhaling -- is increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. This, in turn, is trapping heat, which is responsible for the modest temperature increase between 1976 and 1998. The conclusion is that we must alter our entire lifestyles to avoid a planetary catastrophe.

For computer models to be accurate, inputs must include all of the factors that can impact climate. Knowing this, as well as believing it likely that the majority of factors that do impact climate are yet unknown, how can we trust the models?

Especially when we find out the inputs were "fudged" if not outright fabricated.

And yet, we who doubt the agenda driven alarmism, are said to be "anti-science." Ha! The real "anti-scientists", also sinister liars, are those pushing the man-made global warming hoax. The hoax is put forth by those out for more research grant money at best, crypto totalitarians looking to take away our mobility and therefore freedom at worst, and those looking for another excuse to tax us in between.

Gee, it sure is "science" when the "scientists" have been caught red-handed adjusting / fabricating data to fit the "computer models". If the data doesn't fit the models, make it fit! Science!

Wow, what happened to empirical proof and causal links?

Solar orbital cycles, sunspots, natural non-industrial increases in carbon dioxide output, and volcanic eruptions could not be reached for comment.

It is also important to understand what the measure of "global warming" in degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Celsius/Centigrade *really* means. Remember, zero degrees Fahrenheit and zero degrees Celsius/Centigrade are man-made conventions. To state a percent temperature change relative to either is meaningless.

Temperature is simply a measure of heat. At absolute zero (-460 degrees F or -273 degrees C) there is no energy. So, any thermodynamically relevant measure would consider a percentage energy change relative to absolute zero (that is, in degrees Kelvin) rather than an arbitrary Fahrenheit or Celsius/Centigrade measure.

Why is this distinction important? Because variations in the sun's radiation on the earth are defined against a true zero (usually as watts/sq. meter). When stated as a percentage relative to absolute zero, changes in the earth's average temperature can easily be explained through the typical variations in the sun's radiant energy. That no "climate expert" mentions this only further solidifies my dislike for the lot of them.

What "Climategate" reveals

It is revealing to see the Global Warming, I mean Climate Change, hoax imploding at the University of East Anglia. "Climategate" as some wags call it, refers to a series of emails "hacked"—as in leaked— from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom.

What they reveal is indisputable: the "science" of global warming has, at the very least, been compromised by the political ideology that drives it. Data has been manipulated or hidden from public view. Skeptical scientists have been marginalized along with academic journals that have printed their doubts, and the peer review process has been tainted by those who should know better.

The lessons of this scandal are instructive:

1. The manufacturing of "Overwhelming Consensus":

....the e-mails suggest that CRU scientists have been suppressing and misstating data and working to prevent the publication of conflicting views in peer-reviewed science periodicals. Some of the more pungent e-mails:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

"Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4?"

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can't."

"I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU temperature station data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"

2. The corruption of the "peer-reviewed" process:

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the "science" behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

But don't worry, it's all "peer-reviewed."

Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review". When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor," and Mann advised that "we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers."

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the "consensus" reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley ("one of the world's foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to "get him ousted." When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." 

The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:

"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.

"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"

And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!

"Re, your point at the end – you've taken the words out of my mouth."

And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.

Which brings us to:
3. The agenda behind all this:

....you can't make informed decisions when those decisions have already been made for you by an educational establishment which has been in the liberal tank for decades. With respect to this particular subject, how many school age children have been forced to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and given the impression that a blowhard politician with no scientific credentials whatsoever, a man whose own lifestyle contradicts everything he ostensibly believes in, is the last word on the subject? How many kids have been told global warming is "settled science" without offering them a scintilla of contrasting information? How many have been brainwashed into believing that "living green" is tantamount to the religious mandate to "go and sin no more?"

Every effort mankind has ever undertaken to obliterate individual freedom and increase the power of the state has always included the inculcation of children too young to think independently. This one is no different. If America is going to right itself, the war for our children's hearts and minds must be won.

But in order to win it, more people have to realize it exists. More importantly, they have to do something about it. This is a difficult undertaking for parents who are the front-liners in this fight. At the end of a busy day, very few people want to know—exactly—what their children are learning in school. Unfortunately, such apathy is the mother's milk of progressives for whom raising a generation of school children who disdain American exceptionalism is a prime directive. People with no particular pride in their country are a much more malleable bunch than those with a real understanding of self-reliance, Constitutionalism, and historical perspective.
A "burning planet"—only thirty-three years removed from a "freezing" one—reveals the true nature of "progressivism". It is about the accumulation of power by any means necessary. And, as evidenced by the purloined emails, even the ostensible epitome of rational thinking, aka the scientific method, is as exploitable as anything else. But such people could never get as far as they've gotten without getting the children on board. 

Ironically, they have told us so. How many times has a liberal touted this or that government agenda with the idea that they're doing it "for the children." When more Americans begin to understand that the more accurate phrase it "to the children," it will be the beginning of the end for these power-hungry thugs.

4. The double standard of the liberal lamestream media:

The reaction to these revelations? Perhaps as revealing, if not more so, than the revelations themselves. Much like the ACORN scandal, the mainstream media—once again with the exception of Fox News—has either avoided the story completely, or sought to focus on the manner in which the emails were procured. This last bit is pivotal, because it is the basis by which the intrepid folks at the New York Times and other media sources have determined that they will withhold the damning evidence from the public: stolen material is unfit for print or broadcast.

Apparently this is a spanking new standard for the Times, whose appetite for disseminating purloined or secret stuff goes back at least as far as the top secret, "not intended for publication" Pentagon Papers in 1971, all the way through to revealing top-secret info about how the Bush administration conducted various aspects of the war on terror.

While "errors" of omission and large dollops of hypocrisy are nothing new in the annals of MSM behavior, what is new is that they can no longer get away with them. This story has legs for two reasons: 1. it is a genuine scandal and 2. the blogosphere, unlike far too much of the MSM, will not let it go unreported simply because it doesn't jibe with the liberal agenda.

Thus on the plus side, those of you who have heard of this story realize that the old media can no longer be trusted. As a result, your understanding of what is actually happening in the world goes far deeper than the average American. That is the minus side: too many of our fellow citizens still believe watching TV news makes them informed Americans. Too be kind, they don't know what they don't know. Too be less than kind, it's long past time they learned.

Copenhagen, despite Barack Obama's presence, seems sure to be a bust — there will be no agreement on mandatory limits on carbon emissions. Even if there were, it would probably turn out to be no more effective than the limits others agreed to in Kyoto in 1997. In any case, China and India are not going to choke off their dazzling economic growth to please Western global warming alarmists.

But that's just it---the elites pushing this *don't mind* if the Red Chinese won't choke off their economic growth. They just want to choke off *ours*.

Either out of some multicultural brainwash guilt, or a peevish resentment that the Soviets didn't beat us, so they hope the Red Chinese do so, or they genuinely believe the world is better off with another superpower to keep what they see as "Amerikkka" in line. They are old fellow travelers.

Some, like Tom Friedman at the New York Times, do nothing but praise Red China's new spin on statism. In his coverage of China, Tom Friedman reminds me of people like Charles Lindbergh who were impressed with and gushed about what they saw coming out of the Third Reich prior to 1939.

Global Warming Ate My Homework!

100 events attributed to man made global warming. Never mind the contradictions, non-sequiturs or other absurdities:

Late for a party? Miss a meeting? Forget to pay your rent? Blame climate change; everyone else is doing it. From an increase in severe acne to all societal collapses since the beginning of time, just about everything gone wrong in the world today can be attributed to climate change. Here’s a list of 100 storylines blaming climate change as the problem.
1. The deaths of Aspen trees in the West
2. Incredible shrinking sheep
3. Caribbean coral deaths
4. Eskimos forced to leave their village
5. Disappearing lake in Chile
6. Early heat wave in Vietnam
7. Malaria and water-borne diseases in Africa
8. Invasion of jellyfish in the Mediterranean
9. Break in the Arctic Ice Shelf
10. Monsoons in India
11. Birds laying their eggs early
12. 160,000 deaths a year
13. 315,000 deaths a year
14. 300,000 deaths a year
15. Decline in snowpack in the West
16. Deaths of walruses in Alaska
17. Hunger in Nepal
18. The appearance of oxygen-starved dead zones in the oceans
19. Surge in fatal shark attacks
20. Increasing number of typhoid cases in the Philippines
21. Boy Scout tornado deaths
22. Rise in asthma and hayfever
23. Duller fall foliage in 2007
24. Floods in Jakarta
25. Radical ecological shift in the North Sea
26. Snowfall in Baghdad
27. Western tree deaths
28. Diminishing desert resources
29. Pine beetles
30. Swedish beetles
31. Severe acne
32. Global conflict
33. Crash of Air France 447
34. Black Hawk Down incident
35. Amphibians breeding earlier
36. Flesh-eating disease
37. Global cooling
38. Bird strikes on US Airways 1549
39. Beer tastes different
40. Cougar attacks in Alberta
41. Suicide of farmers in Australia
42. Squirrels reproduce earlier
43. Monkeys moving to Great Rift Valley in Kenya
44. Confusion of migrating birds
45. Bigger tuna fish
46. Water shortages in Las Vegas
47. Worldwide hunger
48. Longer days
49. Earth spinning faster
50. Gender balance of crocodiles
51. Skin cancer deaths in UK
52. Increase in kidney stones in India
53. Penguin chicks frozen by global warming
54. Deaths of Minnesota moose
55. Increased threat of HIV/AIDS in developing countries
56. Increase of wasps in Alaska
57. Killer stingrays off British coasts
58. All societal collapses since the beginning of time
59. Bigger spiders
60. Increase in size of giant squid
61. Increase of orchids in UK
62. Collapse of gingerbread houses in Sweden
63. Cow infertility
64. Conflict in Darfur
65. Bluetongue outbreak in UK cows
66. Worldwide wars
67. Insomnia of children worried about global warming
68. Anxiety problems for people worried about climate change
69. Migration of cockroaches
70. Taller mountains due to melting glaciers
71. Drowning of four polar bears
72. UFO sightings in the UK
73. Hurricane Katrina
74. Greener mountains in Sweden
75. Decreased maple in maple trees
76. Cold wave in India
77. Worse traffic in LA because immigrants moving north
78. Increase in heart attacks and strokes
79. Rise in insurance premiums
80. Invasion of European species of earthworm in UK
81. Cold spells in Australia
82. Increase in crime
83. Boiling oceans
84. Grizzly deaths
85. Dengue fever
86. Lack of monsoons
87. Caterpillars devouring 45 towns in Liberia
88. Acid rain recovery
89. Global wheat shortage; food price hikes
90. Extinction of 13 species in Bangladesh
91. Changes in swan migration patterns in Siberia
92. The early arrival of Turkey’s endangered caretta carettas
93. Radical North Sea shift
94. Heroin addiction
95. Plant species climbing up mountains
96. Deadly fires in Australia
97. Droughts in Australia
98. The demise of California’s agriculture by the end of the century
99. Tsunami in South East Asia
100. Fashion victim: the death of the winter wardrobe

And the list goes on. The truth is climate change is causing some of these events, but the earth’s average temperature has been increasing and decreasing since the beginning of time. Maybe the increase in UFO sightings can’t be pinpointed to climate change but certainly animals will adapt to new habitats as the climate changes. But climate change and adaptation to it is nothing new. There’s an underlying assumption that human activity is causing the climate to change in many of these stories, but the scientific consensus on what causes climate change is anything but a consensus. Temperatures have risen and fallen many times before and the earth was cooling as recently as the period from the 1940s to the 1970s giving rise to fears of a coming ice age:

“At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

The other implication of this list is that a reduction in Co2 with cap and trade policies like Waxman-Markey and Boxer-Kerry will cure problems as disparate as hurricanes, wars, crime, hunger and…cow infertility. The problem is that no one can actually claim that a reduction of Co2 will prevent these occurrences; one can only speculate that they will be worse in a world that has more rather than less Co2. Given cap and trade’s massive economic consequences and negligible effects on the earth’s temperature, this is a bold and potentially very costly speculation.

I Pledge to Promote Global Warming Propaganda

This is truly sad. But this is what they are pushing in the schools.

Meanwhile, corruption within the "climate-change" industry is rampant. “Climategate” — the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom — revealed that many of the world’s top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar-bear populations turned out not to be supported--indeed, they were contradicted--by scientific facts.

It is also apparent that “green” industries are nothing but corporate welfare and crony socialism. Commonsense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retro-fitted houses, and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common results are few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who land hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.

Even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of the theory of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet has not heated up at all, and indeed has cooled, during the last ten years, “global warming” gave way to “climate change”. So now we are told that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures. Square that circle!

Then, when “climate change” was still not enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term follows: “climate chaos.” Suddenly some “green experts” claim that even more terrifying disasters — from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes — could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels.

Current hard times also explain the demise of global-warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near-nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs — not whether it’s a more expensive green hybrid model.

Meanwhile, fossil-fuel exploration and recovery — especially horizontal drilling and fracking — have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution — at a time when a struggling US economy is paying nearly half-a-trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands, and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.

We simply don’t know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it has are disingenuous, statist control freaks, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.

Independence Lost: The Obamunist "Cap-And-Trade" Hoax

The Obama-backed, House-passed bill is economically suicidal and scientifically grossly irresponsible. Its only justification is as a Democrat, left-liberal power grab.


Barack Obama called for House passage of the cap and trade tax bill last Friday by calling it a jobs bill. The bill is designed to raise the price of energy in the U.S. so much that it will reduce the use of fossil fuels by 17% by 2020 and by 83% by 2050. Sentencing the U.S. economy to high cost energy is insanity when it comes to creating jobs. The Charles River Associates, a Harvard based economics consulting firm, estimates a net loss of jobs from the bill of about 2.5 million each year.

This is surely a gross underestimate of the net job losses from a bill designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels to the level in 1907! All those soccer moms better get used to riding their horses to the grocery store and back. And their husbands better get used to working the farms again, by hand, as high cost energy will chase remaining American manufacturing out of the country to India and China, which do not suffer from Al Gore's delusions about supposed global warming.

Yet Barack Obama calls it a jobs bill. This reflects a by now well-established pattern of deceptive, misdirection rhetoric, raising broadly appealing ideals in promotion of policies that would do just the opposite. We already see this with Obama trying to sell us a new health care entitlement, larger than any of our already grossly overgrown entitlements we can't finance, with the argument that it will actually reduce costs, even while CBO estimates that it will increase Federal spending by $1.6 trillion (and I bet anything that amount is woefully underestimated).

Earlier this year, Obama released his budget with great fanfare about how it would supposedly reduce the federal deficit in half in five years. Hidden in the fine print was the awful truth that his budget, now passed by the overwhelmingly Democrat Congress, explodes this year's deficit to a record busting $1.8 trillion, four times bigger than Bush's largest deficit, and seven times bigger than Reagan's largest, which caused so much caterwauling among liberals in its day. The deficit in the last budget passed by a Republican controlled Congress was $162 billion, less than 10% as much.

Last year, Obama campaigned on proposals to raise the top two income tax rates by over 10%, the capital gains tax rate by 33%, and the tax rate on dividends by 33%, while restoring a permanent death tax rate of 45%, and raising taxes on corporations that already pay virtually the highest tax rates in the industrialized world, all the while focusing on his promise to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. That tax cut turned out to be a puny $400 per worker tax credit that is phased out after next year, when his tax increases will become effective to sink the still sputtering economy.

During the campaign, Obama also pledged that he would never raise taxes in any form on Americans making less than $250,000 per year. But his cap and trade tax is estimated to cost American families almost $2,000 a year when it becomes effective, growing to almost $7,000 a year for a family of four by 2035. That will be paid through higher prices for electricity, oil, gasoline, natural gas, home heating oil, coal, food, and every product that is produced or transported using energy. Remember: when the first President Bush violated his oft-repeated campaign pledge not to raise taxes, voters booted him out in the next election.

Democrats have suggested that the legislation would cost American families only $175 a year, or as little as $80. But fossil fuel use is not going to be reduced by 17%, growing to 83%, through added costs of $80 to $175 per year.

The rationale for this bill is to counter global warming by sharply reducing greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. But even if the bill works exactly as envisioned, the most radical environmentalists admit that it will only slow temperature increases by 2050 by a ridiculous 9/100th of one degree Fahrenheit! Even after all the costs of reducing the use of fossil fuels by 83%, that is all that would result.

That is because all humans across the planet produce less than 5% of all carbon dioxide emissions. So slashing U.S. emissions won't have much effect in any event. Moreover, don't expect other nations to follow us in this foolhardy policy. Even the Europeans never really enforced their own cap and trade regulations, so their carbon dioxide emissions have actually increased more than ours over the last 10 years. Now nations from France to Poland, Japan, the Czech Republic, Australia, New Zealand and others are turning away from cap and trade policies, and souring on the whole notion of global warming. China, now the world's number one carbon dioxide producer, India, Russia, Africa, and South America have shown no interest in the suicidal economics of global warming fantasy. But the left-wing extremists now running America are too close-minded and religiously dogmatic to even consider an alternative course.

As the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) recently asked:

Does it really make sense to eliminate between 2.3 million and 2.7 million jobs each year, and force families, farmers, and drivers to pay higher power bills, higher heating and cooling bills, higher food and goods prices, and higher gasoline and diesel prices, all for the promise of slowing temperature increases by merely hundredths of a single degree Fahrenheit by 2050?

The Global Warming Hoax

Worst of all, the science behind global warming is now collapsing. The most reliable satellite weather data shows that global atmospheric temperatures have declined over the last 11 years, with the trend downward accelerating. Even global warming advocates are now conceding that this trend may continue for decades.

Moreover, the latest and best science shows that the temperature patterns of the 20th century correlate with natural causes, not global warming theory. Temperatures did not increase steadily throughout the last century, even though carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases did. Temperatures in the U.S., which has the most thorough and consistent temperature record and historically the most CO2 emissions, were stable until 1920, increased some in the 1920s, and then soared to produce the hottest decade of the century during the 1930s (before the later, more rapid increases in greenhouse gas emissions). The climate then cooled during most of the period from 1940 until about 1977. Temperatures climbed upward from 1977 until 1998, except for a sharp downturn from about 1988 until about 1995. Temperatures are down again over the past decade.

This record is more consistent with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a long-term pattern of ocean currents that turns from cold to warm back to cold every 20 to 30 years, and with variations in solar activity, particularly sunspots. Indeed, our current accelerating temperature decline correlates with an extended trend of slowing sunspot activity, which may portend another Little Ice Age, as happened from the early 1400s to the late 1800s.

Democrat political rhetoric labels carbon dioxide as pollution, arguing that the bill sharply reduces such pollution, and targets "polluters." But carbon dioxide is a natural substance essential to all life on the planet, not pollution. All plants must take in carbon dioxide to survive, and emit oxygen. Humans and all other animal life need that oxygen to survive, and breathe out carbon dioxide. Moreover, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were several times higher in the past than today, for hundreds of millions of years, with only beneficial effects in the flowering of plant and animal life recorded.

Despite what you have heard from the Democrat party controlled media, the polar ice caps are not melting. The melting of glaciers still going on due to the end of the last ice age, and, therefore, not due to global warming, has caused sea levels to rise by roughly 400 feet over the last 18,000 years! That rise has been decelerating over the past 5,000 years, settling into a stable rate of increase over the last century of about 1.8 mm per year, regardless of global temperature fluctuations. That would result in a sea level rise over the next 100 years of less than 9 inches.

Finally, the latest science shows that the theory of significant man-made global warming has now been definitively proved false. The UN's own climate models, the top source of global warming hysteria, project that if man's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call "the fingerprint." Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude, producing a "hotspot" near the top of the troposphere, about 6 miles above the earth's surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling.

All scientists, both the alarmist warm-mongers and the pacifist cooler heads, agree that this temperature pattern would result if man were causing global warming, reflecting the pattern of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that would prevail in the atmosphere. Warming due to solar variations or other natural causes would not leave such a fingerprint pattern. Higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now enable us to settle the man-made global warming debate definitively.

The observed result is just the opposite of the modeled global warming fingerprint pattern. The data from weather balloons show no increasing warming with altitude, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot. The satellite data confirms this result: no increasing temperature with altitude, no hotspot, no fingerprint.

These arguments are now increasingly accepted by scientists all over the world. Those who argue there is a scientific consensus to the contrary are posturing fakers. As Kimberley Strassel wrote in the Wall Street Journal last Monday:

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming….Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion."

Even a suppressed study from inside the EPA concludes, "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data." Investors Business Daily reports in a June 26 editorial regarding that study:

What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings….

We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.

"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in the Earth's global temperatures."

One of the best sources for the true science of global warming is the operation of Dr. Fred Singer at SEPP. Singer is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and the founder and first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service. Another top source is the Heartland Institute. There is no collection of scientists in the world smarter and better than those who speak at and attend their regular international conferences on climate change. Heartland has just published the definitive rebuttal to the theory of significant man-made global warming, the 880-page Climate Change Reconsidered.

Probably the most articulate and informed single advocate countering global warming hysteria is Marc Morano. The Competitive Enterprise Institute also does top drawer work on the fallacies of global warming.
Global warming has nothing to do with science. It is about cover for massive increases in government power and taxes at all levels, including UN dreams of becoming a world government with global taxing powers. This is the only reason it is so heartily embraced by liberal/left interests. These people don't know anything about science.