What? Me blog?

SEPP.org provides a timeline of the unraveling of the IPCC and it's fraudulent report:

· In mid-August, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. The CRU action renders independent review and verification of the temperature trends
published by the CRU impossible – a clear violation of principles of science and
the Freedom of Information Act .

· In October, at the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Dr. Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree ring data from Russia
showing a cooling after 1961 were truncated and artfully disguised in IPCC
publications. The artful deceit, so exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment
Report 4 (AR4) contains deceptions rendering the entire document scientifically
questionable.

· In November, emails from the CRU were leaked to the public. These emails reveal
efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions of
human caused global warming. Thus, the IPCC scientific review process has a
systematic bias of an unknowable magnitude in favor of human induced warming.

· In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) reported
that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office
(Met Office) had probably tampered with Russian climate data and that the
Russian meteorological station data do not support human caused global warming.
The Met Office collaborates with the CRU in reporting global temperatures. The
reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and probably have a
strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.

· In January, Joe D’Aleo and E. Michael Smith reported that the National Climatic Data Center (NOAA-NCDC) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS) dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years. The dropped stations, many of which continue to make appropriate reports, are generally in colder climates. The actions by NOAA -NCDC and NASA-GISS make their
reported temperature trends unreliable and likely to have a strong warming bias
of an unknown magnitude. [NOAA-NCDC and NASA-GISS are the two other
organizations that report global surface temperatures.]

· Thus, all global surface temperatures and temperature trends announced by the three major reporting international organizations probably have a warming bias of an unknown magnitude rendering their announced temperatures and temperature trends scientifically unreliable.

· On January 23, 2010, the Sunday Times (London) reported that the AR4 wrongly linked natural disasters to global warming. AR4 claimed that global warming is causing increases in property losses. Yet the Sunday Times reported the actual published report upon which this claim was based actually stated: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses

· In January, Dr. Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the AR4’s chapter on Asia, stated that the report deliberately exaggerated the possible melt of the Himalayan glaciers. “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” This admission demonstrates that the AR4 is a political document and not a scientific one.

· This past week, additional reports reveal that IPCC’s claims that warming will cause extensive adverse effects in the Amazon rainforests and on coral reefs came not from peer reviewed science but from publications by environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. Thus, the IPCC pretense that it represents peer reviewed science is false.

On December 7, 2009, the EPA administrator made the determination that Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The EPA determination is based almost entirely on the reports of the IPCC. During the public hearing period, which closed on June 23, 2009, a number of scientists, including members of SEPP, testified that the IPCC reports are not the best science available; thus such a determination is scientifically flawed. At that time it was not clear the extent to which IPCC science had been compromised. The recent revelations demonstrate that the science upon which the EPA relies is hopelessly flawed.

I blew off the AGW hysteria as a hoax a long time ago. If you still believe - why?

Labels: global warming, nonsense

Obviously, I haven't been doing much in the way of blogging. Not that anyone has likely missed my screeds...
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I have spent a lot of time catching up on my reading, mostly American Revolution and Civil War. I've spent WAY too much time watching TV lately. Mostly I watch movies, sports and news - I never watch series television. Netflix on the Roku device (which is still performing marvelously) is addictive. There are some decent movies that flew under the radar, and a lot of foreign films I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise, that eat up a couple of hours a day. Plus it seems a waste to let that new 52" plasma go unwatched. My remining free time is usually spent w/grandchildren or motorcycling, or yard work, or doing ANYTHING besides in front of my computer typing out this drivel.
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The good people of Massachusetts declined to resurrect Kennedy's bloated corpse and return him to the Senate. Good for them. They did, however, elect a big government liberal - albeit with an "R" after his name. Oh, well. I guess you can't have anything.
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GO COLTS! Man do they look good on that new 52" plasma...
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I've managed one ride on the motorcycle since late November. Where's global warming when you really need it?
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Fat. Dumb. Happy.

Not much to blog about.

Labels: Colts, errata, global warming, ma$$hole, me, motorcycling

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The end is near!

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s enter for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed might...create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Newsweek article

Labels: global warming

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate."

Check it out: http://www.petitionproject.org/index.html

Labels: global warming

and Global Warming apparently ain't happening after all...

Scientist says Earth could soon face new Ice Age - no doubt due to Anthropogenic Global Warming.*

...the Earth passed the peak of global warming in 1998-2005,” said Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of a space research lab at the Pulkovo observatory in St. Petersburg...

“By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041,” he said. Mankind will face serious economic, social, and demographic consequences of the coming Ice Age because it will directly affect more than 80% of the earth’s population, the scientist concluded.

I'll like as not be pushing up daisies by 2041, or I'd be laughing my ass off at you purveyors of AGW* nonsense.

More good - or bad - news here:

Instead of global warming, and based on actual observations that are fully verifiable by all, our life-giving Sun is telling us that we should prepare for a period of increasingly cold winters, already signaled by the early arrival of substantial snow in most European mountain ranges, Arctic ice reforming at an unprecedented rate and three recent ice and snow storms across wide areas of the US, killing over 50 people and causing major havoc for hundreds of thousands (all by mid-December) - you can ignore me, but you can’t ignore Nature itself. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming - the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend billions of Dollars needlessly.

Do tell...

Full disclosure - these (my?) experts don't necesarily agree with other (your?) experts. Experts seem to be like assholes...well, you get my drift. At least these guys are calling for more research instead of trying to shut the opposition up by declaring the question settled.

*As AGW is more and more being shown for the hoax it is, the PTB are pushing "Climate Change" in place of "Global Warming." Nuh-unh. They aren't getting off that easily. Climate change happens; AGW has a cause.

Labels: global warming

The head of one religion weighs in on a tenet of the religion of Gaia:

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The...Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

Labels: global warming, religion, silliness

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Grasping the magnitude of Ice Age glaciation is possible today only on Earth's two extant polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. During the final Ice Age push, ice sheets up to nearly two miles thick covered much of America. Believe it! We Hoosiers who are living in a period of relative warmth have built houses where once existed only huge sheets of ice.

Because the amount of water in Earth's hydrosphere is constant - it is a closed system - the storage of water in the great ice sheets caused sea levels to fall. A lot. During the late Wisconsinan glacial episode, so much of the Earth's water supply was locked up in enormous ice masses that the sea level fell some 280 to 350 feet below today's level, exposing vast areas of land formerly under water. Continental shelves are shallow submarine plains that border continents and typically end in steep slopes to an oceanic abyss. Where a wide continental shelf slopes gradually, a small drop in sea level can cause a great increase in shoreline areas. Conversely, a small increase in sea level can inundate large swaths of land.

The result of the late Wisconsinan glaciation here in North America was a continuous land bridge that stretched between Siberia and Alaska. Legends tell of Lyonesse in the British Isles. If the semi-legendary western realm of Arthur is imaginary, the land itself is not, as Saxon records tell of the drowning of Lyonesse in 1099 due to, erm, rising sea levels.

Sea level now rises an average of one foot per century because global warming is melting the great polar ice masses of the Arctic and Antarctic. Before you picture future global conditions as the set for a crappy Kevin Costner movie, keep in mind that because the hydrosphere is a closed sytem, there is an upper limit to how high sea level can rise. A greenhouse effect and loss of stratospheric ozone may possibly have increased the rate of global warming recently, but attributing this to human activity is pure speculation because evidence suggests much higher concentrations of so-called greenhouse gasses many times in the past.

The temperature of the earth has been much warmer in times past. Bear in mind, there were once boreal forests. In eons past, before the coming of the ice, land where Hoosiers currently build houses was the bed of a shallow sea.

The current scare-mongering is nothing more or less than a scheme to separate you from your money and your freedom. Always remember that the same folks who are bemoaning anthropogenic global warming today were sounding the death knell for civilization in the chilly grip of the coming Ice Age, which, as I recall, was supposedly caused by human activity also.

Many of these are the same elitist control freaks who seem to think the solution to most of the world's problems are less people and have been doing their damnedest to remove as many as possible of the world's undesirables through eugenics, abortion and various scemes involving ovens and gas chambers and whatnot.

Relax. There isn't a durn thing you can do about global warming. Even if we in the US were to utterly destroy our standard of living on the way to zero emissions, the developing world - including the two most populous nations on the planet - far outspew our comparatively paltry output anyway.

Learn more at http://www.sepp.org/

All those poor polar bears will just have to take up residence on shore. Or evolve into cetaceans.

Labels: global warming

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Now 5-3, my Hoosiers still aren't bowl eligible. The Penn State game was a heckuva game to watch, but losing by 5 when Kellen Lewis fumbled away our last chance was hard to take. C'est la vie. I've been a Hoosier fan a long time. One gets used to it.

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I was unable to take advantage of probably the last really good riding weekend of the year. I took my daughter to the game Saturday and my bike really isn't much good for two riders over a distance of 300 miles. In fact, you couldn't pay me to ride on the back of the bike for 20 miles, much less 300.

I went to church Sunday with the missus and spent the rest of the day entertaining grandkids, so the bike spent the entire weekend in the garage.

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It's raining and the temperature is falling. We're getting into seasonable late October weather. The riding gets much chillier from here on out. Tomorrow (Tuesday) looks like a washout, but the rest of the week should be decent riding weather.

The Iceman cometh. You'd think all this global warming would be good for something.

Labels: global warming, Hoosiers, motorcycling

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30 years ago, it was a no brainer. The humidity and temperature would race to see which could get to 100 fastest. As kids we'd stand around under shade trees (if one larger than a sapling could be found in the nearly treeless wastes of suburbia) and suck down sodas and munch popsicles and talk about how hot it was while we did what kids do anyway.

Global warming?

Nope.

August.

Now, the media blathers on about the heat wave (My God! 6 more days of 90+ degrees will be a new record!*) and the freaking Gorons wax eloquent over the impending doom of mankind due to global warming. Half a dozen old farts (Count me in!) croak due to heat related stress on already stressed hearts (Pass me another cheeseburger, Martha!) and the panic is on!

Guess what?

It's August. Gets like this every year.

Shaddup already.




*Ummm, not! There have been times on Earth when 30 days of 90 degree highs would have been a cool spell. Look it up.

Labels: global warming

Academia is hierarchical - every bit as much as the Catholic church - and peer review is one of the methods used to maintain the hierarchy. There is no due process or check-and-balance and the review is done out of the public eye. What makes you think that peer review is impartial? Even the name “peer review” is a misnomer, since it is really the academic elite who run the show.

"Peer review suffers from the referee’s paradox. This paradox goes as follows: Who is best qualified to judge (or referee) an article? The best qualified are those who are in the article’s sub-field. But those people also ought not to be allowed to do it because it represents a conflict of interest for them. But to let others judge the article is to have it be judged by those who aren’t fully qualified. Thus, no one can be trusted to judge an article, either because it’s a conflict of interest for them or because they aren’t fully qualified." - JFP, responding to Jonah Goldberg in a comment at Townhall.com

Labels: global warming

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Think you have a good handle on Global Warming?

Maybe? Maybe not.

Click here to find out how much you really know...

Labels: global warming

Labels: global warming

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Hendrik Tennekes from Unlicensed Engineers (pt 2):

Thomas Kuhn...is the giant who put the study of scientific evolution on the map. He found that science progresses in a saw-tooth way...A new “paradigm” – an old word that obtained its current significance through Kuhn’s book – topples an earlier one all of a sudden, and then the slow rise toward bloated organizational structures begins... The best-known example, of course, is how Einstein toppled all of Newtonian mechanics in a single year’s time. When will the next Einstein arrive? Isn’t it an omen that the world physics community needs such expensive, massive research factories these days? I still giggle when I recall Kuhn’s description of the work all these thousands of scientists do. They are “mopping up” the last crumbs of an antiquated paradigm.

Contained in part one is a cool discussion of wooden shoe sailboat models. The comments to part one make for some highly engaging reading.

The two essays are attacks on global climate modeling. From part one:

I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society. In all regular engineering professions, there exists a licensing authority. If such an authority existed in climate research, I contend, the vast majority of climate modelers would vainly attempt certification. Also, they would be unable to obtain insurance against professional liability.

From another essay, A Personal Call for Modesty, Integrity and Balance by Dr. Tennekes:

In 1976, Steve (Stephen H.) Schneider published a book entitled The Genesis Strategy. It made quite an impact on me at the time, primarily because Schneider did not promote technological fixes, but a global strategy of what is now called Adaptation, an idea reluctantly and belatedly embraced by IPCC. Those were the days of Nuclear Winter, weather modification, Project Stormfury, stratospheric ozone destruction, and the sick idea of seeding all Arctic ice with soot to prevent the next ice age. In the preface to his book, Schneider quotes Harvey Brooks, then Harvard dean of engineering:

“Scientists can no longer afford to be naïve about the political effects of publicly stated scientific opinions. If the effect of their scientific views is politically potent, they have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions, and to try to be honest with themselves, their colleagues and their audience about the degree to which their assumptions have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence”.

Indeed.

I've spent a good bit of time at Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog since the site first came to my attention - thank-you Al Masetti! - and I've been impressed with the level of discourse. Tennekes is an uncommonly good writer, regardless of his position on global warming.

Hendrik Tennekes is a retired Director of Research with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, former Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Penn State and is an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes.


The Flying Dutchman

Labels: global warming

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From sepp.org -

The Week That Was

Vaclav Klaus has criticized the UN panel on global warming, claiming that it was a political authority without any scientific basis. In an interview (Feb. 8. 2007) with "Hospodrsk noviny", a Czech economics daily, Klaus answered a few questions (translation courtesy of Lubos Motl, Harvard)

Q: IPCC has released its report and you say that global warming is a false myth. How did you get this idea, Mr President?
A: It's not my idea. Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the UN panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people must wait for the full report till May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the Summary for Policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses.

This is clearly an incredible failure of many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.

Q: How do you explain that there is no other comparably senior statesman in Europe who would advocate this viewpoint? No one else has such strong opinions...
A: My opinions about this issue simply are strong. Other top-level politicians do not express their global-warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.

Q: But you're not a climate scientist. Do you have sufficient knowledge and enough information?
A: Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable, and this fact scares me. The second part of the sentence should be: we also have lots of reports, studies, and books of climatologists whose conclusions are diametrically opposite.

Indeed, I never measured the thickness of ice in Antarctica. I really don't know how to do it and don't plan to learn. However, as a scientifically oriented person, I know how to read science reports about these questions, for example about ice in Antarctica. I don't have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. And inside the papers I have read, the conclusions we see in the media simply don't appear. But let me promise you something: this topic troubles me -- which is why I started to write an article about it last Christmas. The article expanded and became a book. In a couple of months, it will be published. One chapter out of seven will organize my opinions about climate change.

Environmentalism and green ideology are something very different from climate science. Various findings of scientists are abused by this ideology.

Q: How do you explain that conservative media are skeptical while the left-wing media view global warming as a done deal?
A: It is not quite exactly divided into left-wingers and right-wingers. Nevertheless, it's obvious that environmentalism is a new incarnation of modern leftism.

Q: If you look at all these things, even if you were right ...
A: ...I am right...

Q: Isn't there enough empirical evidence and facts we can see with our eyes that imply that Man is demolishing the planet and himself?
A: It's such nonsense that I have probably not heard a bigger nonsense yet.

Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?
A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing. Look: you represent the economic media, so I expect a certain economical erudition from you. My book will answer these questions. For example, we know that there exists a huge correlation between the care we give to the environment on one hand and the wealth and technological prowess on the other. It's clear that the poorer society is, the more brutally it behaves with respect to Nature, and vice versa.

It's also true that there exist social systems that are damaging Nature - by eliminating private ownership and similar things - much more than the freer societies. These tendencies become important in the long run. They unambiguously imply that today, on February 8th, 2007, Nature is protected incomparably more than on February 8th ten years ago -- or fifty years ago or one hundred years ago.

That's why I ask: how can you pronounce the sentence you said? Perhaps if you're unconscious? Or did you mean it as a provocation only? And maybe I am just too naive and I allowed you to provoke me to give you all these answers. It is more likely that you actually believe what you say.

Labels: global warming

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Cathy Young of the Boston Globe from Reason.com writes:

Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy studies at UCLA and a self-identified liberal, noted this recently on his blog...."To those who dislike a social system based on high and growing consumption and the economic activity that supports high and growing consumption and maintains high and growing demand, to those who think that the market needs more regulation by the state, to those who think that international institutions ought to be strengthened . . . global warming is a Gaia-send" -- since it justifies drastic worldwide public action to curb production and consumption. While Kleiman sympathizes with environmentalists, he notes that "their eagerness to believe the worst" -- for instance, in Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" -- "is just as evident as the right wing's denialism."

... those on the left who embrace environmentalism as their substitute religion don't want to hear about scientific and technological solutions to climate change -- from nuclear power to geoengineering, the artificial manipulation of the global environment -- that do not include stepping up regulation and curbing consumption.

Her conclusion?

Most journalists and pundits have limited knowledge of science...(and) an ideological crusade can be as strong an inducement to bend the truth as the profit motive.

There is a ways to go in the science; we have even further to go in deciding the best way to attack the problem - if indeed it can be solved by humans. I know the solutions I've seen so far have been less than satisfactory and the idea that I think shows the most promise is the one that is most ignored - for reasons of politics.

(That would the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Google it, or hit me with an e-mail address in the comments and I'll send you a .pdf file of the ABARE report. Hey, Dubya can't get everything wrong.)

Surely we can quit villifying the skeptics and instead address their concerns rationally. Many of their concerns are based on the political agenda of true believers as much as - or more than - the science itself. Contrary evidence as to causation is simply being shouted down and labeling the opposition seems to be a substitute for rational argument. We surely don't need to brand skeptics or those who hold competing theories as heretics and shun them...

Dr. Heidi Cullen, Climate Expert at the Weather Channel seems to think otherwise.

If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.

We've made huge policy blunders in the past based on scientific "consensus" that turned out to be just flat wrong. How many are dead of malaria who didn't have to die?

Labels: global warming

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Current Science & Technology Center: Global Warming on Mars?

A study of the ice caps on Mars may show that the red planet is experiencing a warming trend.

Wait a minute...

But how do we square the fact that almost every planet in our solar system is simultaneously undergoing temperature change and volatile weather patterns. Does this not suggest that global warming is a natural cycle as a result of the evolving nature of the sun? - Gortbusters

How indeed?

And while you're thinking, ponder this:

How warm did it have to be for Greenland to support agriculture?

Hint: a lot warmer than it is today!

Labels: global warming