2010: The Return of the ‘Reagan Democrat’?

Washington Post & Accuracy in Media Slam Sean Penn Movie as “Full of Lies”

I wrote about the Plame non-scandal scandal at length in The Preface and in a large term paper on “attitude change propaganda”. I am gratified that the Washington Post editors did the right thing in their recent editorial, but the Washington Post was as guilty as anyone else in reporting the lies about this issue and repeated them regularly.

At first, the Post (along with the rest of the elite media) would just report the usual lies; that Plame was outed by the White House, that she was undercover and that she lost her career as a secret agent as a result of her exposure. All of this and more was debunked in the official investigations.

But as it became more clear that it was Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame who were liars, the Washington Post did something very interesting which made them the focus of my paper on propaganda. On page one and two the Post would report the usual lies about this story as if they were true, and often on the very same day they would write an editorial that was buried in the paper telling the truth about the matter. This happened repeatedly. Do the editors at the Washington Post actually edit and check the accuracy of their reporters and/or the wire stores they feature prominently, or do they just write a daily column and call it an editorial?

The largest misconception is that Valerie Plame was a secret agent at or near the time the events unfolded. The truth is that Plame was outed many years before by secret documents that were leaked which rendered her a desk jockey at the CIA’s  WMD  Division at Langley. If anyone doubts that may I remind you that when this unfolded Plame had young twins at home, so unless the CIA is in the habit of sending pregnant moms to be with twins overseas undercover you are just going to have to accept that she was put on desk duty.

Plame was listed in Joe Wilson’s Who’s Who entry. Plame made contributions to Democrats listing a known CIA front business as her place of employment. Her neighbors knew she worked for the CIA (as one intrepid reporter went knocking on doors). She was not 006 by any objective measure.

The Washington Post continued their peculiar behavior recently as Accuracy in Media points out:

While the paper said [in its editorial] it hoped that George W. Bush’s version of events would be vindicated by historians, the Post’s “Reliable Sources” gossip column had run a big article about  the public relations blitz for the movie and its various premiers in Washington, D.C. Plame “is more than happy with ‘Fair Game,’ the movie based on her memoir,” the article said. No kidding.

So the “troubling trend” was in evidence at the Post itself, albeit in a different section of the paper.

 

Indeed Washington Post, where was the reporters fact check in the story linked? The fact that the film was made from Plame’s memoir and that she is happy with it shows that Plame is not just a proven liar, which the evidence has demonstrated and even the Washington Post admits, but rather she is a continuous and flaming one [not the language we like to use here but unfortunately reality demands it - Editor].

To read both of the excellent pieces from Accuracy in Media you can access them HERE and HERE.

Washington Post:

Hollywood myth-making on Valerie Plame controversy

WE’RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film “Fair Game” – which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq – deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame’s exposure as a CIA agent. “It’s accurate,” Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember that period.”

We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post’s Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification. [Translation - she made it up - Editor]

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee [The bi-partisan committee was unanimous in its findings - Editor] found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter [In fact Wilson's report to the CIA bolstered the case that Saddam was trying to obtain more uranium according to that very same Senate Intelligence Committee Report - Editor] , and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

“Fair Game” also resells the couple’s story that Ms. Plame’s exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy – but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative. [Think about it, you lie to the newspapers while telling them that the President is a liar; and you expect that the Washington press core won't track down the fact that it was your wife, Valerie Plame, who sent a memo to her boss recommending that Wilson be sent to Niger? The Senate Intelligence Committee investigators confirmed that as well. Our question still remains, why was Wilson not required to sign a non-disclosure contract? Could it be that the infamous Wilson letter was the goal of the entire affair? - Editor]

Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; “Fair Game” is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored. Mr. Wilson claimed that he had proved that Mr. Bush deliberately twisted the truth about Iraq, and he was eagerly embraced by those who insist the former president lied the country into a war. Though it was long ago established that Mr. Wilson himself was not telling the truth – not about his mission to Niger and not about his wife – the myth endures. We’ll join the former president in hoping that future historians get it right.

 

mm

 

 

 

NASA’s global warming evidence page filled with lies, half truths and suspect data.

This is the problem when you have an administration that hires the most dedicated radicals and is willing to politicize most everything.

If you doubt just how politicized NASA has become:

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden created a firestorm after telling Al Jazeera in June 2010 that President Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things:

1 – inspire children to learn math and science
2 – expand international relationships and
3 – ‘perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.’

So much for NASA’s primary mission of space exploration says former NASA administrator Micheal Griffin who calls the change in priorities “deeply flawed“.

Let us begin with the image at the top of NASA’s AGW evidence web site:

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Source: NOAA)

 

The ice core data never has shown CO2 levels above 284.7 over the last 70,000 years (see official Vostok Ice Core Data below) so where in the world did they get this graph and how was it generated?

First I started with the linked reference to NOAA, yes the same outfit that gets its recent data from James Hansen who stated that energy industry CEO’s should be put on trial for crimes against humanity, the same NOAA/NASA/ Goddard that has been caught manufacturing data and prefers data from ground station sensors that have been found on black top parking lots (don’t walk on it barefoot on a sunny day), next to building heat vents, at the beginning on runways so that jet engine jet wash hits them, placed on rocky like gravel, in refuge dumps, and all sorts of other places that serve to drive the measurements up.

So as I was saying, I examined the NOAA link and it brings you to this intimidating looking page filled with a long list of links to data sets. Seems pretty convincing right? Until I started examining the data on the page. The first thing I noticed is that no where on the page does it explain how these data sets were put together to generate this graph. So much for transparency. The second thing I noticed is that many of the links do not go to CO2 data sets at all many of them go to methane data sets like this one and ionized oxygen data sets like this one.

Again what is the claim made on NASA’s web site:

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution.

[Keep that reference to the industrial revolution in mind because soon we are going to come back to it - Editor]

The final “hockey stick” shaped part of this graph I have seen before, but to make sure I wasn’t missing something I started looking for this image on the web sites of “noted” proponents of global warming alarmism. So I started doing some Google image searching and I found it. I should not have been surprised when I discovered that famed global warming alarmism debunker Anthony Watts had already outed one of the chief suspects using this bogus graph.

This is the photo of Dr. Bradley right on  his University of Massachusetts  web page.  Dr. Raymond S. Bradley who is listed as:

University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Director of the Climate System Research Center (http://www.paleoclimate.org).

As Anthony Watts correctly reminds us, “Readers may also recognize Dr. Bradley from his co-authorship with Dr. Michael Mann in the famous MBH98 paper which produced the embattled ‘hockey stick’ graph.”

The hockey stick graph is a result of the now infamous computer model made by Dr. Michael Mann (of ClimateGate fame) and Dr. Bradley that generated this hockey stick no matter what numbers were entered into the model. The model could not generate known measurements when genuine data form the past was entered into it. Mann and Bradley tried to hide the raw data so that no one could verify their claims until they were forced to hand the data for the “hockey stick” over.

This video shows the story of how how the famed ‘hockey stick’, which was a key component of the IPCC and Al Gore’s movie, was destroyed by Professor Ross McKitrick and Professor of Applied Mathematics Christopher Essex:

Look at the circled parts of Dr. Bradley’s picture. He claims that this data is from the Vostok Ice Core Data with a number showing over 360. Anthony Watts examined every ice core data set to check for these numbers:

For readers not familiar with the CO2 data from the Vostok Ice Core, you can find the official data set here from NOAA’s FTP servers:

CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center)
ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/trends/co2/vostok.icecore.co2

NCDC (National Climatic Data Center)
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/co2nat.txt

NASA Goddard also offers access to the official Vostok data here:
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_CDIAC_CO2_VOSTOK_ICECORE.html

…and they offer this helpful graph, which is time reversed from Dr. Bradley’s graph, with the present day on the left:

The answer is seems, is that there is no new data from the Vostok Ice core. It ended, and the official repositories of that data have no new data. The last CO2 value for the Vostok Ice Core dataset is listed as being 284.7ppm.

So how does Dr. Bradley get ~360ppm? Easy, I think he uses the same technique he and his co-authors learned when writing the famous MBH98 paper that made the hockey stick -splice the instrumental record onto the paleo record:

[IUSB Vision Editor's Note - Notice how this graph eliminates the "Medieval Warming Period" from the proxy hockey stick method used to generate the pre-1850 temperature record? See why this manipulation was important to them HERE and HERE;  as they show how the proxy data averages can be manipulated and how the proxy data methods when used passed 1850 show gaps where it does not match the temperature record. It was because of this variation in the proxy method of measuring temperature post 1850, which shows global temps falling, that the ClimateGate scientists had to "hide the decline". As has been argued and demonstrated by many data sets that skeptics have pointed out there is evidence that pre-1850 temp measurements have been steered down and more recent instrument data , such as the NOAA ground station data and the filling in the gaps data mentioned above have been used to steer modern measurements up.  There are indeed several data sets that show that global temps have been flat-lining within the margin of error and/or show a slight cooling trend as you will see below, but global warming alarmists do not wish to discuss those... and they accuse us of cherry picking data. Pot meet kettle!]

Dr. Bradley’s 1999 article in Nature that shows (PDF) to the first Vostok Ice Core Data to have a CO2 PPM count of just over 280 and yet his photo shows it at over 360. The latest data sets linked above from the Vostok Ice Core is from 2003 which gives us the 284.7. So where does this 360+ number come from? [Keep these bold text years (1999 & 2003) in mind as that becomes crucial in a moment - Editor]

Aside from the bogus  aforementioned ‘hockey stick’ method of graphing, there is only one raw data set that shows numbers that appear in the NASA graph and the Bradley picture. That dataset is from the weather station atop Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii.  data is controversial because it always shows the very highest amount of CO2 in the atmosphere of any data set. Why? First,  it sits atop an active volcano that constantly spews CO2. Second, Hawaii is a small land mass that sits in a very hot part of the world which is surrounded by the ocean. The warmer it gets the more the ocean releases its CO2 (think of the ocean like a giant CO2 sponge.) Not exactly the most objective choice to measure “global” CO2 to be sure.

So lets look at that Mauna Loa dataset. And at what year is the measurement just over 360 as in the Bradley picture and is today 380 just as it appears in the NASA graph  – ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt :

The 1999 values are (hey look its Dr. Bradley’s numbers from the picture) -

1999   3    1999.208      369.46      369.46      367.90     26
1999   4    1999.292      370.77      370.77      368.19     30
1999   5    1999.375      370.66      370.66      367.84     29
1999   6    1999.458      370.10      370.10      367.87     30
1999   7    1999.542      369.10      369.10      368.42     30
1999   8    1999.625      366.70      366.70      368.21     30
1999   9    1999.708      364.61      364.61      367.95     29
1999  10    1999.792      365.17      365.17      368.41     31
1999  11    1999.875      366.51      366.51      368.58     29
1999  12    1999.958      367.85      367.85      368.58     29

And the 2009 numbers are (Hey look its the numbers from the NASA graph)

2009   3    2009.208      388.77      388.77      387.18     30
2009   4    2009.292      389.46      389.46      386.66     28
2009   5    2009.375      390.18      390.18      386.98     31
2009   6    2009.458      389.43      389.43      387.10     29
2009   7    2009.542      387.74      387.74      387.27     31
2009   8    2009.625      385.91      385.91      387.65     30
2009   9    2009.708      384.77      384.77      388.05     27
2009  10    2009.792      384.38      384.38      387.77     31
2009  11    2009.875      385.99      385.99      388.14     30
2009  12    2009.958      387.27      387.27      388.15     21

Well well well, we have found our dataset and it is NOT from Vostok Ice Cores or any other ice core; nor is it just a direct CO2 reading from Vostok. Dr. Bradley, obviously using the same academic integrity he displayed in his “hockey stick’ sham, pasted the Mauna Loa data onto the Vostok Ice Core data to make one impressive looking graph. He of course just didn’t believe it was necessary to reveal that little detail. I examined the properties of Dr. Bradley’s photo and it was last modified on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 2:51:19 PM also known as Barack Obama’s inauguration day. Was someone trying to get attention for a grant or a job?

This data is also certainly not “a comparison of more direct measurements” as the NASA graph states or an average of the data given as the NOAA source link. It is the pasting of the raw numbers from the most elevated dataset they could find onto the Vostok Ice Core dataset, and presented as if it was some kind of “average”.

Anthony Watts states it this way:

Now here’s the problem. If you took surface temperature data [or CO2 data for that matter] from Antarctica, and spliced it with surface temperature data from Hawaii, and then presented it as the entire historical record from Antarctica, our friends would have a veritable “cow”.

Or, if you took stock performance data from poorly performing Company “A” and spliced on better performing stock data from Company “B”, and then made a new graph and used that graph to sell investors on Company “A”, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would have a veritable “cow” when they found out, wouldn’t they? People go to jail for such things.

But hey, this is Climate Science.

Remember how we told you to keep in mind the comment from the NASA graph about the Industrial Revolution? Keep in mind that CO2 is but one of the smallest players in global temps and global temps do not always follow CO2 levels. The sun has a much larger impact than man made CO2 and global temps often, but do not always follow solar output cycles. This shows that there are many factors that affect global temperatures.

Examine the graph [above] carefully. It shows that most of the warming that has happened in the last 200 years occurred before 1940; well before most industrialization and before most people had used cars. It shows that global temperatures actually decreased from 1940 to 1975, which is the time of the post war economic boom, the highest period of global industrialization in world history. According to the theory of man made global warming the temperatures should not have gone up much before 1940 and should have went up quickly after 1940. Exactly the opposite is what took place.

Says Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the director of the International Arctic Research Center, “[man-made] CO2 began to increase exponentially in about 1940 but the temperature actually began to decrease and continued ‘til [sic] 1975. We cannot say that CO2 and temperature go together.” Dr. Nir Shaviv of the Institute of Physics, University of Jerusalem states that “there were periods in Earth history when we had three times as much CO2 as we have today or ten times as much CO2 as we have today and if CO2 has a large effect on climate we would see it in the temperature reconstruction.”

Dr. Piers Corbyn, lead climate forecaster for Weather Action (England) said, “None of the major climate changes in the last 1000 years can be explained by CO2.” Dr. Patrick Michaels from the University of Virginia and IPCC author states that “Anyone who goes around and says that CO2 is responsible for most of the warming of the 20th century hasn’t looked at the basic numbers.”

Dr. Ian Clark a leading paleo-climatologist from the University of Ottawa says, “If we look at climate in the geological time frame we would never suspect CO2 as a major climate driver. You can’t say that CO2 will drive climate. It certainly never did in the past.”

What about the rest of what is on that NASA page? While I do not have the data to refute all of the points listed, I do have the data to refute, or at least very credibly challenge,  several data points they have listed.To see a long list of IPCC retractions go HERE, HERE, and HERE.

 

 

NASA Gives a Dire Warning About Global Sea Levels

Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.

This is a typical example of relatively accurate information delivered with an “attitude” to imply a coming catastrophe. Look at the temperature chart above. The global temps did indeed rise several tenths of a degree before 1940 which shows why measurement over a century would show a sea level rise. Then for 35 years the Globe cooled during the massive CO2 output of the post war industrial boom. Then global temps rose quickly from 1976 to 1998 which would result in a rapid warming and expansion of the ocean just NASA says which makes sense given the date of their data set,  but since most of this happened before the post war industrial boom how is this mans fault?

IPCC is already retracting doom and gloom claims of massive sea level rises.

UK Guardian 21 Feb 2010:

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown.

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results“. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper’s estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.

UK Guardian 20 Jan 2010:

IPCC officials admit mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers

Senior members of the UN’s climate science body admit a claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 was unfounded.

The UN’s climate science body has admitted that a claim made in its 2007 report – that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 – was unfounded.

The admission today followed a New Scientist article last week that revealed the source of the claim made in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not peer-reviewed scientific literature – but a media interview with a scientist conducted in 1999. Several senior scientists have now said the claim was unrealistic and that the large Himalayan glaciers could not melt in a few decades.

In a statement (pdf), the IPCC said the paragraph “refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”

 

 

 

NASA Says Global Temperatures Rising

All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. 5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. 6 Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase. 7

They are correct that the Earth warmed much since 1880 before the post war industrial boom. But they left out the cooling form 1940 to 1975 as shown in the chart above. The claim that most of the warming happened after 1970 is disputed to the point where I feel safe saying that the claim is demonstrably false. The claim that the surface temps continue to rise from 2007 to 2009 is from those NASA/NOAA/Goddard ground stations we told you about above. The other source for this is the discredited CRU which was the epicenter of the ClimateGate data manipulation and destruction of raw data. There are satellite datasets that dispute the 2007-2009 claim.

Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia (CRU) climate scientist at the centre of the Climategate scandal, concedes to the BBC we’ve had warming bursts just like the last one that the IPCC claims was probably man-made. Jones also admitted there has been no statistical significant warming since 1995. Herald Sun of Australia 15 Feb 2010 (another link HERE).

[Editor's Note  - So I get a tweet from one of the pro-AGW alarmist telling me that "Phil Jones was misquoted". So I go to the LINK he sends and right there on the page it says:

Phil Jones is saying there is a warming trend but it's not statistically significant. [Hello isn't that what we just said - Editor] He’s not talking about whether warming is actually happening. He’s discussing our ability to detect that warming trend in a noisy signal over a short period. To demonstrate this, look at the HadCRUT temperature record from 1995 to 2009. The linear trend is that of warming. However, the temperature record is very noisy with lots of short term variability. The noisy signal means that over a short period, the uncertainty of the warming trend is almost as large as the actual trend.

This makes my point exactly, when the “noise” and the “trend” are within the margin of error and amount to tiny variations (CRU of ClimateGate fame has already shown that they are desperate to steer temperature data upwards anyways) there is a term for this, its called flat-lining. There is noise and variation within the margin of error that is not statistically significant. Maybe one day that will change, but is this the data that we want to completely reform our economy on and turn it over to far left central planners in the government?  This is from the same guys that tried to make the entire world believe was catastrophic by manipulating the data and the peer review process to scare the hell out of people.

This dataset shows a flatline, other datasets show a slight cooling trend, some say we are going into a mini ice age, other alarmist scientists insisted that 2010 would be the warmest year on record which just hasn’t shown to be the case. Now they point to Pakistan that did have a hot year:

Socialist Worker blames global warming and capitalism for floods

UN Links Pakistan Floods to Climate Change

But hey guys that’s weather not climate. I can do the same thing so why not link the following to the type of  global cooling the IPCC author predicts in the video below?. England had the coldest year since 1996, Norway just had the coldest November in living memory, Europe is snow covered and cold (2) and the British Meteorological Office data shows that global temps have flat-lined for 15 years.]

The UK Hadley Center which (is global warming alarmist) published a dataset with the University of Alabama showing global cooling since 2002 HERE.

 

 

 

 

Roger Helmer from the European Parliament comments:

This graph shows average global temperature records for the last five [to 6.5 years] years from two of the world’s most respected meteorological institutes, the UK’s Hadley Centre, and the University of Alabama in the US. Both show a clear downward trend, and the graph contrasts that trend explicitly with the rising trend of atmospheric CO2.

This dataset form the National Climactic Data Center (a part of NOAA/NASA) shows the same cooling trend:

NCDC now has December 2008 in the database. Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades. If you can get the graphic, the heavy black line is the average over the century 1901 to 2000.

There was so much cooling that the UK Telegraph published a column declaring 2008 to be the year that mane made global warming was disproved complete with a load of good links.

An IPCC lead author Mojib Latif  tells us to expect 30 years of cooling –

So much for the old “All scientists agree” and “total scientific consensus”.

 

 

 

 

NASA Warns of Warming Oceans

The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.

But IPCC lead author Mojib Latif just told us in the video above that changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation and studies in changes of ocean temps would result in 30 years of cooling or a mini ice age [perhaps like Europe had a few hundred years ago].

 

 

 

 

NASA Warns of Shrinking Ice Sheets

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

Sounds ominous, luckily we have the University of British Columbia to make us all feel better as they went and ruined the alarmists day by publishing a study in Nature telling us about that Greenland ice sheet melt: “it’s weather, not climate”.

While there are some data sets that say Antarctic sea ice is shrinking, other data sets say quite the opposite. The CATO Institute quotes the IPCC which states that they expect Antarctic ice to grow in the 21st century and they also quote Nature in 2003 showing cooling and January 2008  Geophysical Research Letters expressing doubts.

 

 

 

 

NASA Warns of Declining Arctic Sea Ice

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. (And they show a picture of the ice at its minimum – scarey!)

Arctic sea ice now 28.7% higher than this date last year – still rallying Oct. 15, 2008:

10/14/2008 7,064,219 square kilometers

10/14/2007 5,487,656 square kilometers

A difference of: 1,576,563 square kilometers, now in fairness, 2008 was a leap year, so to avoid that criticism, the value of 6,857,188 square kilometers can be used which is the 10/13/08 value, for a difference of 1,369,532 sq km. Still not too shabby at 24.9 %. The one day gain between 10/13/08 and 10/14/08 of 3.8% is also quite impressive.

You can download the source data in an Excel file at the IARC-JAXA website, which plots satellite derived sea-ice extent:

Watch the red line as it progresses. So far we are back to above 2005 levels, and 28.7% (or 24.9% depending on how you want to look at it) ahead of last year at this time. That’s quite a jump, basically a 3x gain, since the minimum of 9% over 2007 set on September 16th. Read about that here.

Go nature!

There is no mention of this on the National Snow and Ice Data Center sea ice news webpage, which has been trumpeting every loss and low for the past two years…not a peep. You’d think this would be big news. Perhaps the embarrassment of not having an ice free north pole in 2008, which was sparked by press comments made by Dr. Mark Serreze there and speculation on their own website, has made them unresponsive in this case.

What I like about the IARC-JAXA website is that they simply report the data, they don’t try to interpret it, editorialize it, or make press releases on it. They just present the data.

November 22, 2010 AccuWeather Sea Ice Report – Northern Sea Ice still coming back – Southern Sea Ice on long increasing trend.

http://www.accuweather.com/video/683773758001/monday-morning-sea-ice-and-glo.asp

All of the charts are posted on the Sea Ice Page for all to see. Northern Sea Ice went on the downward curve on its cycle with the bottom coming in 2007. Now the ice trend is curving back up just as cycles do.

 

 

Related:

Polar Bears in decline or is Michael Mann of ClimateGate fame propagandizing? AccuWeather responds – http://www.accuweather.com/video/666221245001/hunting-not-global-warming-m.asp

Global Warming Policy Foundation: A Year After Climategate, The Corruption Of Science Persists

EPA Tried to Supress Global Warming Report Admitting Skeptics Correct

The Roundup.

New peer reviewed paper shows just how bad the climate models really are – LINK

How Global Warming Propaganda Works

IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT: Most global warming models are exaggerated, many scientists in it for the grant money or treat it like a religion

More ClimateGate One Year Later

Top Scientist Resigns from American Physical Society: says global warming is a scam – scientists corrupted by big money

Professor to Students: ‘Blood Will be on Your Hands’ if You Don’t Fight Global Warming

More Hadley Center Global Warming Horror Claims Debunked by Real Science

Bjorn Lomborg: Government Plans to Stop Global Warming Won’t Work

National Association of Scholars on the “ClimateGate” Scandal

UN IPCC Co-chair: climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth

IPCC Author Dr. John Christy Lecture on Climate Change

NOAA Claim: Warmest June Ever – But They Made Up Much of the Data!

Climate Scientist Idiotic Quote of the Day: Only 10% of Population Will Survive Global Warming

Global Warming Alarmist Defender Flowchart

Global Warming Alarmist Defender Flowchart. These are the tactics commonly used by global warming alarmists when they start to lose the argument. Be sure to see the evidence in our Alarmism category.

Via Anthony Watts.

Democrats in House vote to give more tax dollars to illegals, raise taxes on all taxpayers, stop extension of unemployment benefits, demand a full reinstatement of the 55% death tax.

Democrats led by Pelosi in the House stopped the tax rate extension which will result is tax increases on all tax payers, stopped a 13 month extension in unemployment benefits for the pre 99 weekers, stopped a tax break for those businesses who actually hire, and why? Because they wanted a full reinstatement of the 55% death tax.

Just a few days ago the House Democrats voted to give MORE taxpayer funded benefits to illegals with the Orwellian named Dream Act.

It is time to clean House of more Democrats again in 2012

How Global Warming Propaganda Works

The video below is typical of global warming propaganda. It is filled with ad-hominid attacks, claims that people like me are paid by someone combined with some very cherry picked and take out of context quotes. This video, by itself, makes an argument complete with emotional prodding that seems pretty convincing, until its claims are examined a little more closely.

But let us be clear first of all who it is that is getting paid.

Al Gore could become the world’s first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.

Africa wants $67 BILLION a year in global warming funds (your money).

These are just a couple of examples of some very serious cash. Evidence is readily available that Goldman Sachs, other investment bankers and people such as George Soros  have big money riding on the acceptance of legislation like Cap & Trade schemes (look at the list of those who invested in the Chicago Climate Exchange which is now going through a reformation after Glenn Beck went after them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Other big businesses will pile on when they realize that they can use their money and influence to buy exemptions in the regulations for themselves while those regulations stick to their smaller competition.

While the alarmists claim that “deniers” are all paid for, which is demonstrably false, any examination of the grant money that goes to pro AGW groups and scientists shows massive money from just the groups we mentioned including ideological groups that have always favored centralized control of the economy. In fact as we reported just recently UN documents state that 31 out of the 62 final IPCC reviewers had a vested interest in promoting the AGW cause.

On with the propaganda complete with advanced associative advertising techniques. The production value and the cleverness of the techniques used shows that this was not done for free on someones Imac. The name of the video, and pay close attention to this as we will come back to it later, is Climate Denial Crock of the Week – The “Temp leads Carbon” Crock.

1 – At first you get the term “deniers” as if it is akin to holocaust deniers and then they go about with the Wizard of Oz imagery.

2 – They talk about what is a straw man argument, you put a false or incomplete argument in your opponents mouth and proceed to knock that down rather than the contextual argument that your opponent really presents.

3 – But at 1:30 they make a straw-man argument. They state that Dr. Ball and the other scientists in the video are falsely saying that climate scientists they oppose are claiming that “CO2 has always been and in every case the single controlling factor of global temperature” – The video they are showing is from a documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle in fact when you watch the entire clip you will see that they are not responding to the claims of climate scientists in that section of the film, they are responding to the claim of Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth when we all saw Al Gore show that 600,000 year chart and say “Now do they ever match up” directly implying a causation between CO2 global temps. The whole point of that section of the film is to begin to educate the layman viewer on the science and to debunk false narratives that are driven in the elite media.

Below is the same clip but just expanded a few moments and you can see that they are specifically and by name talking about Al Gore’s claims. A much longer clip can be seen HERE.

The truth is that the so called “deniers” never made that claim about all global warming alarmist scientists. Their careful bit of straw man making was pretty slick wasn’t it?

Let us continue.

4 – Like all good propagandists they follow their lie with something that is true. In the next minute of the video they accurately explain that changes in Earth orbit likely cause a glacial “ice age” period every 100,000 years. Keep in mind that this section of the video is a direct admission that natural forces far out-way CO2 as a climate driver.

5 – The BS starts again, as he quotes James Hansen who is one of the most zealous proponents of global warming alarmism.  He even said that energy company CEO’s should be put on trial for crimes against humanity. It is important to understand just who it is that the video relies on as “the expert”.

Hansen is now at the NASA’s Goddard Institute/ NOAA. Data from NASA’s Goddard Institute has come under fire for making up gaps in data sets

NOAA Claim: Warmest June Ever – But They Made Up Much of the Data!

The NASA/Goddard/NOAA ground stations have been touted as evidence of AGW for the last few years but look at where these ground stations have ended up – On parking lot black tops, next to heat vents on buildings, on the back of a runway so that hot jet engine jet-wash can hit the censor, in junk yards, in rock gravel areas. Anthony Watts has been tracking these sensors down and it has led to a long series of articles called “How not to measure temperature“.

Editor’s Note – But wait a minute haven’t they been telling us that heat is being trapped at the greenhouse layer because of more man-made CO2 and Methane? If that is so then it would be easy to measure the heat changes at and just below the greenhouse layer with satellites and balloon instruments? Well guess what, climate scientists have and now those methods are made fun of and minimized by the alarmists (LINK see CBS story at the link) because much of that data just doesn’t show the warming they want to see (LINK – LINK). So they only want to use methods like the NASA ground stations which you can see by the evidence directly above such data is not just lacking in scientific scrutiny, it is laughable.

6 - At 5: 05 the video claims that “deniers” are cherry picking data and he actually shows us the “source” from Nick Caillon. Now remember this entire section and purpose of the video is to convince you, as the title says, that the 800 year lag in CO2 statement is a “crock”.

Well here is the link to the actual paper that is mentioned in the video – http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/CaillonTermIII.pdf

The narrator says that “deniers” do not want you to read the paper, but in reality it is the narrator who is hoping that you will not see what we are about to show you.

We confirm the close correlation between CO2 and Vostok temperature during deglaciations (1). However, Fig. 3 indicates that CO2 increases and peaks at a shallower depth in the core than 40Ar. To closely examine their phase relationship, we searched for the best fit between those two properties by adjusting the scaling ratio between 40Ar and CO2. The best correlation (R2  0.88) was obtained when we shifted the CO2 profile by 800100 years (Fig. 4). Combining this uncertainty with the uncertainty introduced by ice accumulation (800  0.2, i.e., 160 years), we obtain an overall uncertainty of200 years, indicating that the increase in CO2 lags Antarctic warming by 800  200 years, which we must consider a mean phase lag because of the method we used to make the correlation. We cannot think of a mechanism that would make 40Ar lead the temperature change, although a lag is possible if the temperature or accumulation change affects the nondiffusive zone (27).

Now wait a minute, isn’t the entire point of this video that the 800 year lag in CO2 statement is a crock… as in not true? Yet there it is in black & white right on the very study he says that “deniers” didn’t want you to read. In fact I would be thrilled if you read the paper because the whole point is this:

Does climate change  – yes

Is there such a thing as greenhouse effect – yes

Is CO2 a greenhouse gas – yes

With that said, CO2 is a trace gas, if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was doubled it would still be a trace gas. There are plenty of other gases that have a much higher impact on the greenhouse effect such as water vapor. Man’s contribution to CO2 is dwarfed by natural forces that put CO2 back into the air such as animals, insects, decaying plants, volcanoes etc. There are plenty of other natural forces that effect global temps other than greenhouse gas.

You all know the old saying that a butterfly flapping its wings can effect weather. This study says, and most people agree that made made CO2 may be responsible for a tiny portion of the greenhouse effect. Nut the question is, if we all started driving a Prius tomorrow and replaced all coal plants with nuclear what would the effect be and the answer which has been stated by Bjorn Lomborg, Lord Monckton,  and countless others is that the answer would be a tiny fraction of 1 degree over many decades.

Back to Nick Caillon:

The 800-year lag cannot really rule out any of these mechanisms as having sole control. Any of these mechanisms might plausibly require a finite amount of warming before CO2 outgassing becomes significant. Nevertheless, we think that our results are more consistent with a process that involves the deep ocean, as its mixing time is close to the observed 800-year lag.

Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent anthropogenic CO2 increase. As recently noted by Kump (38), we should distinguish between internal influences (such as the deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as the anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system. Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere. The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter
4200 years of the warming. The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the present day and future climate.

So once again Caillon is making it clear that natural forces are the big movers and shakers in global temperature changes and that CO2 MAY have some amplifier affect on the changes that happen naturally. I agree, just as the butterfly’s wings also have an effect on a hurricane, man made CO2 may have an effect on large natural forces that are the movers and shakers of climate change, but for us to really feel it and see it the big natural mover has to happen. No where in the Caillon study does it predict that the CO2 caused by man will bring catastrophic results that require the wholesale change of society nor does he claim that by eliminating all fossil fuels can we save the planet as NASA’s Dr. Hansen likes to fear monger on about.

Also notice that Caillon indicates that this CO2 amplifier effect may participate  in the last 4200 years of warming in the 100,000 year ice age cycle; the end/beginning of which we are no where even close to near.

Scared yet? Ready to trash the economy and turn freedom over to government central planners now? Cooler heads prevail.

7 – At 7:48 in the video the narrator starts his summation with a totally new false statement, “We know that the Sun has not been a significant factor in the last 50 years”. Wow, 50 years is a pretty short time, weren’t we just talking about lengths of time in 30,000 and 100,000 years? Wait a minute how does he “know” that ? The Caillon article nor the clip from the “deniers” film mentioned the sun, so where is this coming from?

Well it wasn’t from the University of Colorado data set featured on Tony Watts’ site showing a correlation between sea level rise and solar activity:

More NASA/Goddard nonsense outing soon.

IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT: Most global warming models are exaggerated, many scientists in it for the grant money or treat it like a religion

Dr. Lindzen is a top atmospheric physicist and teaches at MIT.

 

Michelle Rhee: Some schools got their funding doubled and scores still went down

For those of you who do not know Michelle Rhee, she is one of the stars from the hit film “Waiting for Superman”. The film is a brilliant documentary about people who made a difference or who tried to make a difference in public schools. Rhee was the Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor. While she was able to make positive changes, the key aspects of her reform plan were stopped by the teachers union who is desperate to maintain the failing status quo (if you think that what I just said is even a MILD exaggeration consider this your personal invitation to demonstrate otherwise).

Gov. Christie to superintendants of failing schools: I am capping your salary to what I make. If you want to qualify for a bonus your students need to show improvement.

If you care about kids or education at all this is a must see.

MSNBC Devotes ‘News’ Time to Asking if Bristol Palin Has a Facebook Ghost Writer

More of the same from MSNBC which has become the network of hate. You don’t see Republicans attacking candidates (or former candidates) kids like this and you don’t see this nonsense on FOX.

Via NewsBusters:

MSNBC Anchor Thomas Roberts began by reporting on Bristol’s high school transcript.

ROBERTS: Some people are saying that maybe Bristol has a ghost writer. As I said, she graduated from high school –

SMALL: Maybe?

ROBERTS: Has roughly a 3.5, a 3.5 grade point average. So smart young lady.

SMALL: Right.

ROBERTS:  But there’s been postings on her page where she used the word “canard.”

SMALL: Canard. I know a dude, I know a guy named Canard. That’s how black I am. Spelled with a K. Don’t even think about the words she used. If she’s using subjects and predicates together in a sentence, somebody else is writing it for her.

ROBERTS: Well, it just seemed like, you know, there were some words didn’t seem like they would be in the vocabulary, or in the firing back of, you know –

SMALL: She never used the word canard in her life.

ROBERTS: You know, I had to go to Dictionary.com to look it up.

SMALL:  If I didn’t have a friend named canard, I wouldn’t use it either. So come on.

Senator Kyl Repeatedly Corrects Schieffer: No Tax ‘Cuts’ for Rich, Just Preserving Existing Rates

As usual the elite media parrots the Democrats rhetoric and misleading premises hook line and …

Via NewsBusters:

What happened to the ‘warmest year on record’: The truth is global warming has halted

UK Daily Mail:

A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, ‘is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record’ – a deeply worrying 0.58C above the 19611990 average.

World temperatures, it went on, were locked inexorably into an everrising trend: ‘Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far – 1998.’

Met Office officials openly boasted that they hoped by their statements to persuade the Copenhagen gathering to impose new and stringent carbon emission limits – an ambition that was not to be met.

Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again.

Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.

Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications – not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

This isn’t meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.

According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences.

Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.

The maths isn’t complicated. If the planet were going to be six degrees hotter by the century’s end, it should be getting warmer by 0.6 degrees each decade; if two degrees, then by 0.2 degrees every ten years. Fortunately, it isn’t.Actually, with the exception of 1998 – a ‘blip’ year when temperatures spiked because of a strong ‘El Nino’ effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) – the data on the Met Office’s and CRU’s own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

 

 

 

More ClimateGate One Year Later

Part I HERE.

A small group of corrupt scientists peer reviewed each others work to promote it. They set out to shun and ridicule anyone who tried to publish data that opposed theirs. They conspired to delete original data if they were called on it (they were called on it and they did destroy the data). They also conspired to falsely debunk the well established “Medieval Warming Period” (These videos show why HERE and HERE). Recently they have been setting up groups to “investigate” each other for the purpose of exonerating one another.

Russia Today: More IPCC claims not based on real science. ClimateGate researchers hiding data. 141 scientists sent letter to UN stating that the solutions to global warming are not backed by the facts.

Russia Today: British MP investigating the leaked emails: This group of scientists were determined to agree with each other rather than agree with the facts. Massive money vested in this theory. They manipulated the data.

John Stossel discusses distortions in climate warming debate: 2500 IPCC scientists… well not quite

According to UN documents released through FOIA how many fully qualified climate scientists actually reviewed the IPCC report. The answer is 62. The UN admits that 31 of the 62 had a vested interest in pushing global warming alarmism. Of the 31 with no conflict of interest how many completely agreed with the IPCC report? While it says that many of them agreed with parts of the report, only four agreed with it in its entirety.

More scientists speaking out:

Top Scientist Resigns from American Physical Society: says global warming is a scam – scientists corrupted by big money

Here we go ….. and be sure to read every delicious word.

RWB News As reported by the Gateway Pundit:  Top US scientist Hal Lewis resigned this week from his post at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  He admitted global warming climate change was nothing but a scam in his resignation letter.

From the UK Telegraph (What! No American elite media coverage?):

Professor Emiritus Hal Lewis Resigns from American Physical Society

The following is a letter to the American Physical Society released to the public by Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

Twas the night before a nondenominational winter holiday…..

San Francisco Fed – Jobs created by stimulus is statistically zero

Via Reason Magazine -

The folks at e21 point out a new study by Daniel J. Wilson of the San Francisco Fed on the effects of the stimulus :

Wilson’s study makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing on state-by-state comparisons. A large portion of stimulus funding at the state level was based on criteria that were entirely independent of the economic situation that states faced. For example, the number of existing highway miles was used to calculate additional transportation spending.

The study uses this resulting variation in state-level stimulus funding to determine what impact ARRA funding had on employment — including both the direct impact of workers hired to complete planned projects, as well as any broader spillover effects resulting from greater government spending. Administration economists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of this indirect employment growth in driving economic recovery.

The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.

Next time that Democrats tell you that ObamaCare will make the cost of health care cheaper, in spite of adding millions of people to government programs, because of “inherent efficiencies” in the government bureaucratic system, remember this.

Chronicle of Higher Ed publishes hate screed against Senator Jim DeMint

Remember the constant theme we repeat at this web site. College administrators are paid six figure salaries to exercise good judgment. While the people at the Chronicle are not technically college administrators, they are certainly a part of that peer group.

Here is a sample…

Chronicle of Higher Ed with writer Laurie Essig:

But God, I need more.  I need You to smite this character Jim DeMint (R-SC).  There are a lot of people praying to You to help DeMint spread his hate.  In fact, according to the Family Research Council (FRC), they’ve organized tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people to pray to You for DeMint’s success.

…

That’s why I’m hoping You’ll listen to this one prayer and smite this man.  I’m not asking for much.  Just a little gay scandal.  Perhaps he could be caught with another man like Rekers?  Or maybe a mistress like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford?  Or a very expensive sex worker like Eliot Spitzer?

Nice.

The comments on the article… well:

t_paine - November 14, 2010 at 6:53 pm

Laurie Essig

The light humor thing doesn’t work so well for you because too much of the bitter leaks through. You and god know right and wrong?

You are a pretty good hater yourself. Don’t be modest.

notsurprised - November 14, 2010 at 7:56 pm

Is this sort of material really what the Chronicle aspires to publish? I thought this was a journal of serious thought and discussion…

mainiac - November 15, 2010 at 5:58 am

Essig needs serious counseling, and fast.

cmsmw - November 15, 2010 at 7:02 am

I’m generally in agreement with Dr. Essig on this issue, but this was not the Chronicle’s finest moment.

rab60 - November 15, 2010 at 7:33 am

I don’t care for Jim DeMint’s politics either, but this article is pathetic and should never have passed the Editor’s desk.

jffoster - November 15, 2010 at 8:00 am

tattletale_.. (2 above), the CHE deserves criticism because it doesnt publish just any opinion column that comes along. It is selective, has “hired” Professor Essing to do these, and as another commenter notices, the attempt at humor doesn’t work here because “the bitterness comes through”. So does the incoherence.

I don’t think, at least I hope, she’s not typical of the faculty of The College on the Hill. Maybe a good whack with Gamaliel Painter’s cane would help.

blog21 - November 15, 2010 at 8:07 am

This one and the “I want my students to fail” article have really set the tone for my Monday. How much more dripping cynicism can I handle before 8am?

mindnbodybuilding - November 15, 2010 at 8:22 am

Laurie Essig

Did you think you were being clever? It didn’t work.

nuffsed - November 15, 2010 at 8:35 am

Liberals are the real purveyors of hate. This is low. This is right down there in the gutter with Wanda Sykes wishing that Rush Limbaugh’s kidney’s would fail. Why would you wish ill on someone just because you don’t like their politics? And worse drag God into it? The worst thing I have ever wished on someone is that they would lose an election, get recalled, or impeached.

Matthew 7:5

Professor to Students: ‘Blood Will be on Your Hands’ if You Don’t Fight Global Warming

And they let thus nut job have access to your kids folks….

College administrators are paid six figure incomes to have good judgment…

 

Longer version –

The heat wave that he talks about in Europe, it wasn’t as bad as he states but there were thousands of deaths, of course the government run health care system could not deal with the load from a hot summer, yet any bets that this clown supports a government take over of health care? I like the farming scare he uses about cutting down Brazilian raid forests to have farm land. As technology improves history has shown that we grow more with less.

“What about the 40,000 people killed in Europe because of YOUR decision”  – wow…. this professor couldn’t win a Lincoln-Douglas style debate to save his career.

More Hadley Center Global Warming Horror Claims Debunked by Real Science

Yet another horrifying claim by global warming alarmist PhD’s debunked by real science. Reporting of the real science by the UK Guardian. Notice how American press wont cover this stuff?

 

The Global Warming Alarmist Claim:

Last year [2009], researchers at the Met Office Hadley Centre reported that a 2C rise above pre-industrial levels, widely considered the best-case scenario, would still see 20-40% of the Amazon die off within 100 years. A 3C rise would see 75% of the forest destroyed by drought in the next century, while a 4C rise would kill 85%.

 

OMG the horror of it all:

According to a study of ancient rainforests, trees may be hardier than previously thought. Carlos Jaramillo, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), examined pollen from ancient plants trapped in rocks in Colombia and Venezuela. “There are many climactic models today suggesting that … if the temperature increases in the tropics by a couple of degrees, most of the forest is going to be extinct,” he said. “What we found was the opposite to what we were expecting: we didn’t find any extinction event [in plants] associated with the increase in temperature, we didn’t find that the precipitation decreased.”

In a study published todayin Science, Jaramillo and his team studied pollen grains and other biological indicators of plant life embedded in rocks formed around 56m years ago, during an abrupt period of warming called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. CO₂ levels had doubled in 10,000 years and the world was warmer by 3C-5C for 200,000 years.

Contrary to expectations, he found that forests bloomed with diversity. New species of plants, including those from the passionflower and chocolate families, evolved quicker as others became extinct. The study also shows moisture levels did not decrease significantly during the warm period. “It was totally unexpected,” Jaramillo said of the findings.

 

It gets better:

Jaramillo found that the plants he studied seemed to become more efficient with their water use when it became more scarce….. “What the fossil record is showing is that plants have already the genetic variability to cope with high temperature and high levels of CO₂.

 

Another one bites the dust…

MEP Daniel Hannan Comparison Between US And Europe

Daniel Hannan is a Member of the European Parliament

“If you look at the policies being pursued by your current rulers they amount to a comprehensive strategy towards Europeanization. This is a sustained attempt to change the  character of The Republic into something else.

I am living in your future and believe me you are not going to like it. “

Students for Liberty Growing on Campus

Libertarianism has merits. The only thing that bothers me about SOME Libertarians is that SOME do not see that freedom without personal restraint leads to the very tyranny they oppose.

CNN: More Minority Familes Home Schooling

This is no surprise. As inner city schools continue to fail and as long as the NAACP and other such organizations that have been taken over by the far left have sided with the government union and the status-quo, more and more black families are taking this option as a solution.

ClimateGate One Year Later. Elite Media Still Lying

Be sure to see our Alarmism category for more news.

One Year Ago:

December 9, 2009 Fox & Friends talks Cheney, Palin, ClimateGate and the EPA study linked at the top of the “related” section below.

Russia Today and much of the foreign press had a feeding frenzy on this story:

Related:

EPA Tried to Supress Global Warming Report Admitting Skeptics Correct

Global warming scientists hacked emails show manipulation of data, hiding of other data and conspiring to attack/smear global warming skeptics!

National Association of Scholars on the “ClimateGate” Scandal

Examples of the “Climategate” Documents – UPDATE: BBC Had the emails and files for 6 weeks, sat on story. UPDATE II – They carried out their conspiracy threat; much of the raw data from CRU destroyed!

Climategate II: Uh, oh – raw data in New Zealand tells a different story than the “official” one.

Two short lectures on some of the data that the “Climategate” scientists tried to hide and fraud.

The Roundup: IPCC Authors Now Admitting Fault – No Warming Since 1995 – Sea Levels Not Rising. – Senator Inhofe: Possible criminal misuse of taxpayer research funds.

UN IPCC Co-chair: climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth

Global Warming Alarmism is About Achieving Central Control of the Economy and Now They Admit It Openly.

IPCC Author: Expect 30 Years of Global Cooling

OOPS AGAIN: IPCC scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits…

NOAA Claim: Warmest June Ever – But They Made Up Much of the Data!

Bjorn Lomborg: Government Plans to Stop Global Warming Won’t Work

Scientific American thinks you are stupid. The dissection of a blatant propaganda piece for global warming alarmism.

Trump: You can’t have a good economy with $80 oil – China is laughing at our stupidity – Global Warming a “Con”

New AP Article on “Global Cooling Myth” Spins a Bad Study – UPDATED: Look where they put THIS ground station…

Al Gore: Climate change issue can lead to world government

Arctic sea ice now 28.7% higher than this date last year – still rallying

Video: How Tax Cuts Work in Our Tax System

Lee Doren of “How The World Works” explains how tax cuts and increases work in a progressive income tax system like we have here in the United States.

Let us examine some charts that help to illustrate this further.

Here is the tax burden by taxable income that came out at the middle of the Bush Presidency:

You see when tax rates are cut and the economy grows the upper and top parts of the PRODUCER CLASS (notice I did not say rich as many of the super rich are NOT producers) pay the lions share of federal income taxes. Those who produce actually produce more, invest more, take more risk and hire more people when the economy grows. So as they pay a lower tax rate they actually pay more in real dollars because they are punished less by moving their money and takling risk.

Now let us look at the tax burden as it is today. According to the Tax Foundation:

Incomes reported by tax returns at the high end of the income spectrum plummeted from 2007 to 2008, as did their share of the nation’s income and income taxes paid.

In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 20.0 percent of adjusted gross income, compared to 2007 when those figures were 40.4 percent and 22.8 percent, respectively. Both of those figures—share of income and share of taxes paid—were their lowest since 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) and paid 36.9 percent of federal individual income taxes.

Each year from 2005 to 2007, the top 1 percent’s constantly growing share of income earned and taxes paid set a record. That trend reversed in 2008. In fact, the income share for the top 1 percent of tax returns was lower in 2008 than in 2000, largely due to differences in capital gains.

Another indicator of this reversal in the income and tax shares of the top 1 percent is that during 2007, the top 1 percent had actually paid more in federal income tax than the bottom 95 percent, a comparison that was much remarked on a year ago. But the diminished income of the top 1 percent in 2008 means that the comparison no longer holds. During 2008, the bottom 95 percent (AGI under $159,619) paid 41.3 percent of the total collected, a larger share than the 38.0 percent paid by the top 1 percent (AGI over $380,354).

The top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $159,619), however, still paid far more than the bottom 95 percent. The top 5 percent earned 34.7 percent of the nation’s adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.

So why did the percentage of the tax burden of “the rich” during most of the Bush presidency go UP year after year till 2007, even after the so called “tax cuts to the rich”?

And why in 2008 did a huge portion of the tax burden get shifted to the working middle class and poor?

It is just as we said, if the incentive is there to produce, if the taxes are low and if the risk is measurable those wealthier Americans and producers will take more risk and be more economically active. If you remove the incentive by threatening them with taxes, cap & trade, ObamaCare, tons of regulations, bureaucrats and the corruption that always follows such policies it creates uncertainty investors and producers can no longer make a measured risk. This is when they bottle their money up or invest it in China, who is smart enough not to punish investors and producers for taking risk.

This shows that the tax rate that the producers or “the rich” pay is secondary to certainty, confidence, and economic growth as to how much tax they pay in real dollars.

It is ironic that the left, who claims to pass this stuff in the name of the middle class and “soaking the rich”, in real dollars accomplish exactly the opposite of their stated intent. It ends up that it is the producing middle class who gets soaked with more tax burden and more inflation.

The way to crush the middle class is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. – Vladimir Lenin

Newt Gingrich is running for President and talks Wiki-Leaks

At 9: 26 in the video Gingrich talks about how flawed our government information system is. He gives a great analysis.

CPI: Big Polluters Freed from Environmental Oversight by Stimulus (government picking winners and losers)

Before we begin it should be clear that the “Center for Public Integrity” CPI is a far left outfit complete with all the spin and trimmings. And while the story they tell is spun I find it to be directionally accurate. While it is rather obvious that environmental regulations go way beyond science and are in fact used to pick winners and losers for purposes of corruption, influence and donations; this article demonstrates that fact with detail. Unknowinglyand in it’s own way, the CPI has made the case against leviathan government and the kind of “Chicago Style” regulations that always result from it as well as this web log ever could.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2565/ :

In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out billions of dollars in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters and granted them sweeping exemptions from the most basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.

The administration has awarded more than 179,000 “categorical exclusions” to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies, freeing those projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Coal-burning utilities like Westar Energy and Duke Energy, chemical manufacturer DuPont, and ethanol maker Didion Milling are among the firms with histories of serious environmental violations that have won blanket NEPA exemptions.

Even a project at BP’s maligned refinery in Texas City, Tex. — owner of the oil industry’s worst safety record and site of a deadly 2005 explosion, as well as a benzene leak earlier this year — secured a waiver for the preliminary phase of a carbon capture and sequestration experiment involving two companies with past compliance problems. The primary firm has since dropped out of the project before it could advance to the second phase.

Agency officials who granted the exemptions told the Center that they do not have time in most cases to review the environmental compliance records of stimulus recipients, and do not believe past violations should affect polluters’ chances of winning stimulus money or the NEPA exclusions.

The so-called “stimulus” funding came from the $787-billion legislation officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February 2009.

Documents obtained by the Center show the administration has devised a speedy review process that relies on voluntary disclosures by companies to determine whether stimulus projects pose environmental harm. Corporate polluters often omitted mention of health, safety, and environmental violations from their applications. In fact, administration officials told the Center they chose to ignore companies’ environmental compliance records in making grant decisions and issuing NEPA exemptions, saying they considered such information irrelevant.

Some polluters reported their stimulus projects might cause “unknown environmental risks” or could “adversely affect” sensitive resources, the documents show. Others acknowledged they would produce hazardous air pollutants or toxic metals. Still others won stimulus money just weeks after settling major pollution cases. Yet nearly all got exemptions from full environmental analyses, the documents show.

Ralated:

Corruption: Stimulus Funds Spent in Democrat Districts…

HOWARD DEAN: GOVERNMENT SHOULD PICK GUESTS ON FOX & MSNBC BECAUSE IGNORANT AMERICANS DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON

This is typical of the neo-stalinist view of the First Amendment among the far left, including many college administrators and leftist academics. I find it amusing that Dean wants to lecture the Tea Party on the 14th and 17th Amendment because I find it highly unlikely that Dean could hold is own in a debate on those amendments against most prominent bloggers who supported some Tea Party candidates. Where was the left’s support of the 14th Amendment (which incorporates the Bill of Rights to the states) when the Supreme Court quite correctly incorporated the Second Amendment in Heller and reaffirmed it in the Chicago case? The problem with the left is that they quite deliberately and obviously misinterpret the 14th to justify their entire agenda of tossing limited government out the window, much like they use the Courts revised interpretation of the commerce clause when it was under duress from FDR’s court packing threat.

Howard Dean’s formerly on fire presidential campaign was sabotaged by Dean himself because he keeps marginalizing himself with statements much like the one’s he makes here.

Special thanks to The Blaze for the video link.

Bristol Palin and John Ziegler Blast Keith Olbermann

This is great fun to listen to.

IUSB Vision Editor’s take: I am all for the counter attack, and indeed I am a master of it (no need of modesty today, but just ask some of those who took me on), BUT… fortunately Olberman’s ratings are so low and MSNBC is so small time and marginalized that he is not a threat to any Palin. It is probably best to ignore him as he has exiled himself into irrelevance. I say this because the Palin’s are such overwhelmingly huge stars when compared with anyone on MSNBC that even a masterful response serves to help MSNBC. There is an old saying about those who misbehave, “just make sure you spell my name properly”. I am not saying ignore attackers, but under the circumstances it is likely best to ignore this particular attacker.

 

One of the smartest new media ad campaigns ever.

These are music videos that promote the Norwegian television entertainment program “Golden Times“. The program runs on the TV channel, TV2 in Norway.

The video’s feature celebrities from the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s. While our friend AllahPundit didn’t like this at all, with respect, he is simply too young to appreciate what was done here. For those of MY generation it warmed my heart to see these “old friends” once again. They are targeting an audience that is aged 37 and higher, and for that purpose these ads are beyond brilliant.

Communications students:  this is new media and demographic targeting with communications at its very finest. My hat is off to those who conceived the idea.

John Boehner blasts Democrats who are playing games with the lame duck session.

First Steve Buyer had enough with Democrats ignoring process rules – now this:

Gov. Christie: Newark Schools spend $25,000 per student per year and the schools are still failing. The teachers union blocks all reforms.