The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Global Warming: More Alarmist than Alarming
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
UPDATED Newsweek contributing Editor SLAMS previous week's Global Warming Cover Story as "Highly Contrived"
Robert J. Samuelson, a contributing editor of Newsweek, slapped down his own Magazine for what he termed a "highly contrived story" about the global warming "denial machine.” Samuelson, writing in the August 20, 2007 issue of Newsweek, explains that the Magazine used "discredited" allegations in last week's issue involving a supposed cash bounty to pay skeptics to dispute global warming science and he chided the Magazine for portraying global warming as a "morality tale." (LINK) Samuelson’s article titled “Greenhouse Simplicities," also characterized the "deniers" cover story as "fundamentally misleading.""Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. Last week's Newsweek cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder," Samuelson wrote.
Who would have thought that Newsweek would debunk its own embarrassing cover story a week later in the very next issue? This kind of reversal does not happen very often in journalism. [Note: It previously took Newsweek 31 years to admit its 1970's prediction of dire global cooling was completely wrong. See October 24, 2006 article: Senator Inhofe Credited For Prompting Newsweek Admission of Error on 70's Predictions of Coming Ice Age – (LINK)]
In this week's issue, Samuelson's writes: "As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale—as Newsweek did—in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society."
Samuelson also noted, “Newsweek’s ‘denial machine’ [cover story] is a peripheral and highly contrived story."
Meanwhile, I never can get too many opportunities to highlight the brilliant UK Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. If you have not seen it, here is yet another opportunity. And here is a question to Al Gore lovers: if you have seen An Inconvenient Truth--which I managed to sit through--abut you have thus far refused to see the other side of the argument, then I have a question: who is the real "denier" here?
UPDATE: Jeff Jacoby has some choice words of his own about the Newsweek hit piece.
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Global Warming Hysteria, The Left
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Oops...
Day by Day by Chris Muir (click to enlarge)
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Al Gore, Global Warming Hysteria
A Temperature Adjustment
Read the rest.Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.
Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.
And yet we survived.
So why is 1998 no longer America's record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA's handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an "oversight" that would be corrected in the next "data refresh." The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.
Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he's not even American: He's Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won't do, even when they're federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings – albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don't shine.
One is tempted to explain the error with old the computer expert's cry: That's not a bug, it's a feature. To maintain public hysteria, it's necessary for the warm-mongers to be able to demonstrate that something is happening now.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Churchill removed from school curricula in favor of Global Warming mythology
Fury erupted last night after Sir Winston Churchill was axed from school history lessons.I'm truly speechless about this one. The English Speaking Peoples are committing cultural suicide.Britain’s cigar-chomping World War Two PM — famed for his two-finger victory salute — was removed from a list of figures secondary school children must learn about.
Instead they will be taught about “relevant” issues such as global warming and drug dangers. Churchill’s grandson, Tory MP Nicholas Soames, branded the move “total madness.”
The decision to axe Churchill is part of a major shake-up aimed at dragging the national curriculum into the 21st century, it was claimed last night.
But the plan — hatched by advisers — angered schools secretary Ed Balls, who vowed to probe all the changes to the curriculum.
The proposals will see traditional timetables torn up, with pupils focusing on modern “relevant” topics such as drug and booze abuse, climate change and GM foods.
Churchill — voted the greatest ever Briton — goes off the required lessons list, along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King.
Labels: Academia, Global Warming Hysteria, History, Ignorance of History, Indoctrination not Education, UK, Winston Churchill
Monday, July 09, 2007
Unmasking the Religious Left at MSNBC
The immortal image of Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School - one of the great unsung schlock classics- popped in my head when reading Howard Kurtz's column this morning on NBC's sponsorship of the Live Earth semi-extravaganza:Wasn't NBC, whose news division covers the debate over climate change, providing a huge platform for advocates on one side of a contentious issue? And isn't the network helping a prominent Democrat -- who granted "Today" an interview last week in which he was asked again about his presidential ambitions -- raise money?
Dan Harrison, an NBC senior vice president, does not back away from the message. He calls the Gore effort "an initiative we believe in," including parent company General Electric. "I really don't think climate change is a political issue," Harrison says.
So now NBC senior vice presidents are "scientists" too. Hello, Rodney Dangerfield. Okay, that's not fair. Maybe Mr. Harrison is Dr. Harrison and has a secret PhD in climatology - or perhaps physics. And in that spirit I checked. Alas, Dan Harrison doesn't have his own Wikipedia entry yet and I didn't see anything else indicating any scientific training. But perhaps I missed something... can you help, dear reader? Or perhaps NBC would provide some indication of Harrison's scientific qualifications. For all we know, they could even be more than Al Gore's.
Labels: Global Warming Hysteria, Media Bias
Sunday, July 08, 2007
The REAL Cost of 'Live Earth'
The Live Earth event is, in the words of one commentator: "a massive, hypocritical fraud".For while the organisers' commitment to save the planet is genuine, the very process of putting on such a vast event, with more than 150 performers jetting around the world to appear in concerts from Tokyo to Hamburg, is surely an exercise in hypocrisy on a grand scale.
Matt Bellamy, front man of the rock band Muse, has dubbed it 'private jets for climate change'.
A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army.
The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623.63 miles between them to get to the various concerts - nearly nine times the circumference of the world. The true environmental cost, as they transport their technicians, dancers and support staff, is likely to be far higher.
The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists' and spectators' travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com, who specialises in such calculations.
Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces ten tonnes in a year.
The concert will also generate some 1,025 tonnes of waste at the concert stadiums - much of which will go directly into landfill sites.
Moreover, the pop stars headlining the concerts are the absolute antithesis of the message they promote - with Madonna leading the pack of the worst individual rock star polluters in the world.
Sepermodel Kate Moss, another profligate polluter through her use of private jets, is producing a T-shirt for the event. Yet, Gore is touting the concerts as 'carbon neutral'. So how can that be?
A: It can't. As Glenn Reynolds put it, in his own succinct way:
Don't hold your breath on that one.51 plane flights in six months for an environmental author and lecturer--embarrassing? Yeah, that's one way of putting it. Another would be "I guess my entire career has really just been one long act of satire." It is possible that none of these flights were even slightly superfluous?
I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis.
Labels: Al Gore, Global Warming Hysteria
Saturday, July 07, 2007
A Reality Check for "Live Earth" Acolytes
In the meantime, as Scientists continue to make more and more discoveries--this one in Greenland for example--the sheer gall of Mr. Gore and the utterly fictional nature of An Inconvenient Truth becomes more and more obvious:
If you have the courage to learn the truth, it is out there. If you choose instead to go along just to get along--and you refuse to see any facts that would refute your world view--then your ignorance is your business; but then please stop pretending to be knowledgeable about this subject, and stop your ridiculous whining to "save the earth." If you want to be taken seriously, learn all the facts. Fortunately I am here to show you the way: Here is a site where you can watch this 10-minute clip of pertinent facts from Channel 4's (UK) "The Great Global Warming Swindle". (Once you have watched that, you can watch the entire documentary here). Joe Bob says: "check it out."Ice-covered Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests in a climate much like that of Sweden and eastern Canada today.
An international team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from the bottom of an ice core that indicates the presence of pine, yew and alder trees as well as insects.
The researchers, led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, say this is the first proof that there was forest in southern Greenland.
Included were genetic traces of butterflies, moths, flies and beetles, they report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
Historians have long known that Vikings established colonies on coastal Greenland over a thousand years ago, but that it disappeared as the Little Ice Age waxed. The creep of the glaciers killed the agricultural efforts of the colonists, and they eventually abandoned Greenland. Researchers had assumed that the colony took advantage of an exceptionally warm temporary weather pattern that freed the land from its normal icy status, but this discovery could show that the glacial period of Greenland is the exception rather than the norm.
That has some implications for the climate-change debate. Advocates of anthropogenic climate change use Greenland as key evidence in their argument. They claim that the loss of Greenland's glacial mass -- which is still in dispute -- shows the effect that mankind has had on the Earth's climate. If Greenland's glaciers have only recently formed, then that argument makes little sense. Some estimates of the age of the DNA from the central portion of southern Greenland have them as recent as 116,000 years ago.
Dennis Miller has a nice rant about Global Warming on Fox's 1/2 Hour News Hour. And of course there is always this classic evisceration of "Consensus Science."
We should save the Earth all right: from these alarmists and from all the marxists and socialists and grant-hungry climatologists in the background egging them on.
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Al Gore, Global Warming Hysteria
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Some Inconvenient Truths for Al Gore
Correcting the reams of misinformation and compensating for the hot air that Big Al releases into the atmosphere does not seem to be in Al Gore's nature, but don't be surprised to see him back in the Presidential race soon; if only one of his opponents would confront him with the facts about Gore's false Global Warming claims. Don't hold your breath.Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.
For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."
Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."
Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.
Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.
Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."
Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.
Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Al Gore, Global Warming Hysteria
Monday, June 25, 2007
Don't Bet On It
The Scarlet Letter is now Green
Tell it, brother.But what would be the fun in in minding your own business? The fun is in minding others. What all the earthly paradises promised by social re-engineering projects have in common is not that they are free from unpleasantness and want; Stalin offered a vision of barracks life, cafeteria food and compulsory day-care; modern environmentalists conjure one of five-minute showers, subsistance living and rationed toilet paper. They are bleak, unpleasant places. The attraction of these earthly utopias is not pleasance but freedom from doubt. Entry into a place where all the answers are supplied and there are no more dilemmas. What is required of that Brave New World above all is the final banishment of Hamlet's soliloquy. The attraction of Communism, a world ruled by the Greens or lashed under the chains of Sharia Law is they leave no room for doubt. They offer a place where every aspect of life will be regulated, our carbon footprints measured at intervals, our piety audited periodically and we shall be rid at last of our greatest burden -- freedom and uncertainty.
For that reason people like the "environmentalists" that Tim Blair describes derive satisifaction from forcing people into line. It is the Global Warming line in this instance, but any line would have done. Any port which will shelter them against the storm of doubt. The very same people who were yesterday's Communists are today's environmentalists and tomorrow's Muslim converts. It's really all the same religion to them. Marx was wrong when he said the whole point of history was not to understand but to change it; for the true believer the whole point of history is simply to find a way to end it.
The saddest aspect of these endeavor is that it blinds its adherents to the fecundity of creation; to the newness of each sunset; the uniqueness in its child's smile; to the potential for discovery; to the possibility that the winds of the world change not by our feeble edicts, but because Spirit bloweth. Free and ever-new.
Labels: Global Warming Hysteria, The Left
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Next Crisis: Global Cooling?
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Handle Everyone's Health Care? No Problem. Cool the Planet? Your Government can handle it. Enforce our borders? Can't be done.
Everyone's "dealing with" global warming now. The G8 just devoted their summit to it. Time magazine has a big story this week headlined "The New Action Heroes." It's about Michael Bloomberg in New York and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, photographed together looking either like a couple of mob enforcers or a gay couple who've just been told the church was double-booked for a Jerry Falwell memorial. But, either way, this heroic pair are not like these do-nothings in Congress, mired in partisan bickering. They're men of action and they're getting things done.
What are they doing ? Why, Bloomberg was "opening a climate summit" and "talking about saving the planet." All of it, including the bits west of the Holland Tunnel. And Schwarzenegger was "talking about eliminating disease." All of them. "I look forward to curing all these terrible illnesses," he announced.
At one level, Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger have a point. Why wait for national or international action when a mayor or governor can just get on with it? But the assumptions underpinning Time's paean to the new action heroes all operate in one direction — in increased government regulation and restraint on individual judgment.
The argument for this is that the state has an interest in a healthy workforce: If you're poor and you get lung cancer, you'll be filling up hospital rooms at public expense. If that's true, then the state arguably has a greater interest in you continuing to smoke and dying young: the ever aging population of the western world will be the biggest single burden on state resources in the coming decades.
But in the broader picture it might be truer still to say that the individual, unlike the state, therefore has an interest in stopping and reversing the government annexation of health care — because that argument can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom — and, in the end, you may not get the government health care anyway.
Under Britain's National Health Service, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacement. Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Today, it's smokers and the obese. But, if a gay guy has condom-less sex with multiple partners, why should his "lifestyle choices" get a pass? Health-care costs can be used to justify anything.
And, if becoming a charge of the state is the issue, then Governor Schwarzenegger is a complete squish on California's real health crisis. His state's emergency rooms have been reduced to Quebec-level waiting times because of the strains of providing free health care to the legions of the undocumented Americans. One third of the patients in Los Angeles County hospitals are illegal immigrants, and they've overwhelmed the system: dozens of emergency rooms in the state have closed this decade after degenerating into an unfunded de facto Mexican health-care network. If you're a legal resident of the State of California, your health system is worse than it was a decade ago and will be worse still in a decade's time. Fortunately, by then your action-hero governor will have cured "all these terrible illnesses" and there will be no need for California's last seven hospitals.
Why not? There are immigration laws on the books right now, aren't there? Why not try enforcing them? Every day, you can switch on the news and see some illegal immigrant complaining about this bill to a TV reporter — on camera and giving his name. "Living in the shadows" translates as "I'm ready for my close-up now." The same people who say that government is a mighty power for good that can extinguish every cigarette butt and detoxify every cheeseburger and even change the very climate of the planet back to some Edenic state so that the water that falleth from the heaventh will land as ice and snow, and polar bears on distant continents will frolic as they did in days of yore, the very same people say: Building a border fence? Enforcing deportation orders? Can't be done, old boy. You're dreaming. Cloud-cuckoo stuff. Pie-in-the-sky.But refrigerated pie-in-the-sky with frozen whipped cream once we cool down the planet: that we can do.
Labels: Border Protection, Global Warming Hysteria, Illegal Immigration, Socialism, Socialized Medicine
Global Warming Caused by... Bad Thermometer Placement?
But seriously folks, a model is only as good as the data which goes into it... and when you can't even trust that, well...
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Global Warming Hysteria, The Left
Friday, June 15, 2007
WHY the Global Warming Models are wrong
Monday, June 04, 2007
Global Warming Alert: Neptune temprature fluctuations since 1980 mimic Earth's
Go figure: The planet furthest from the Sun is apparently warming at almost exactly the same rate as the Earth. Is the United States responsible for all of the warming on Neptune too?? (Gee, I hope not; it would be a lot harder and more expensive for American businesses and taxpayers to stop Neptune's "man made global warming" from here... I guess we had better set up a UN panel of America-hating socialist governments to investigate how the US is to blame for this planet-threatening catastrophe... )Wednesday, May 30, 2007
They may want to rethink that Global Ice Age theory again
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Alexander Cockburn blasts "The Greenhousers" Out of the Water
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Global Warming Hysteria, The Left
Friday, May 25, 2007
"The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time"
Meanwhile, more than 90,000 direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, carried out in America, Asia, and Europe between 1812 and 1961, with excellent chemical methods (accuracy better than 3%), were arbitrarily rejected [by supporters of anthropogenic climatic warming]. These measurements had been published in 175 technical papers.
For the past three decades, these well-known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists-and not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry, biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time.
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Global Warming Hysteria, The Left
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Irresistable Science vs. Immovable Object Hollywood
Labels: "Consensus" Science, Al Gore, Global Warming Hysteria, Hollywood, The Left
