Apocalypse delayed...and World Cup fever...

......President Barack Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future...At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on...H/T PKH... more here...

...and that my friends is very nearly that. What will it take to awaken the sense of urgency and panic over climate change again ? Green left activists who have bet their political credibility on climatastrophe must be having many sleepless nights, and their compliant scientist friends will be similarly aware of their own credibility problems together with the knowledge that their gravy train is coming off its rails.

As a sign of the times our local NZ Herald graciously allowed warming sceptic Chris de Freitas space for rebuttal of its recent alarmist article, here... and the best news of all this weekend from Wellington's "cake tin", NZ qualifies for the World Cup ! Mark Paston (right) man of the match...more here...c'mon the lads !

Who the hell are you to deny global warming ?

...a greenie Libertarian (right) writes...Q: I consider myself a strong free-market advocate and a fan of Ayn Rand’s writings. However, I find your denial of rising global temperatures to be contradictory to Rand’s view that we should follow the facts of reality based on reason and objective knowledge. You are not a climate scientist (your bio says “PhD in theoretical physics”), so how are you qualified to draw conclusions about global warming? If the only fact we have on which to base a conclusion is that many experts support the existence of global warming, then isn’t it only rational, under Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, to conclude that global warming is, in fact, a problem...

...the answer here...

Stop Press !

USA Democrats throw in the towel re climate bill...from WuWT...WASHINGTON... Key Senate Democrats Tuesday said it is unlikely there will be any more major committee action on climate-change legislation this year, the strongest indication yet that a comprehensive bill to cut greenhouse-gas emissions won’t be voted on until at least next year.
Although the Senate Environment Committee last week approved a version of the bill, the proposal will face strong revisions from moderate Democrats, particularly from senators on the Finance and Agriculture committees.
“It’s common understanding that climate-change legislation will not be brought up on the Senate floor and pass the Senate this year,” Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus said on the sidelines of a caucus lunch...more here... AND from comments...
...and of course, next year is election year and with unemployment likely headed to 12% and the Republicans surging in the polls, there is no way that any of the moderate dems touch these... this will not even be voted on, much less passed, and the next Congress is going to be much more conservative than this one. The passage of Waxman-Markey in the House now looks like it is going to be the high-water mark of the warmist crusade – it looks to be all downhill from there for the movement. Let it stand as a monument to hubris for all time. There are a lot of fascinating domino’s that are going to fall as a result of this failure in the Senate:
1) The Senate will not pass this bill – not this year, not next year, not ever.It would be political suicide, and they know it.
2) cap and trade will thus never be implemented in the United States.
3) Copenhagen, already set to fall apart, fades into insignificance as it becomes clear that the US, India, and China all refuse to adopt any kind of mandatory limits on their economic outputs.
4) Other, smaller countries such as Australia will abandon their efforts because it will be futile to restrict their economies when none of the largest economies are going to reciprocate...
5) some kind of voluntary agreement will be negotiated, (but)
6) all voluntary agreements will fail to be implemented, because they will merely be political lip service to an idea whose time has passed. So pay no attention to them when they occur, they will all be nonsense.
7) Eventually even scientists will give up the cause, as it become clear that there will be no great money or power flowing from supporting it.
8) within a decade or two, Warmism will be looked at like Phrenology, as a great pseudo-scientific delusion that was overthrown by events.

How could they do this ? Don't they know we'll all fry if Copenhagen doesn't result in a comprehensive agreement to roll back capitalism ? Or at least cripple the domestic economies of the developed world for 20 years ? WTF are they thinking of ?

Scientific consensus ? Baloney !

...for many global warming/climate change sceptics the alarm bells rang loud and clear when politicians and green/left political "activists" announced that the jury had returned, and that the science of climatastrophe was settled. Over these last few years the AGW debate has largely stayed out of the MSM, it has instead been fought through blogs, and day by day, poll by poll the news is that the general public are getting the message. Re recent US polling see this.

Now from the University of Bristol, UK, more bad news for the warmists and further reinforcement that computer based climate change models are worthless...

...New data (9.11.09) shows that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero...

...This work is extremely important for climate change policy, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon free sink of already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease...MORE HERE...

It was 20 years ago yesterday...

...that the shameful edifice called the Berlin wall came crumbling down. People imprisoned by the wall voted with their feet and streamed into West Germany. I belonged then to Amnesty International, and wondered how it could be that an organisation devoted to human rights could pay so little attention to this omnipresent and monstrous insult to freedom. It occurred to me then that the victims of oppression receive only half hearted acknowledgment if their oppression is deemed to be based on good intentions. Hence the (very appropriate) attention given to the Nazi's and the victims of the Holocaust with countless books, films and anniversaries. And hence too, the relative lack of attention to the victims of communism. So, on this auspicious anniversary of freedom, how about this for an idea ?

...A proposal for May Day:
May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century's other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day. I am, of course, open to suggestions for the official name of this day of commemoration. Maybe someone will come up with a better one than I have.
The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.
UPDATE: I don't claim that this idea is original, as I suspect that it has been suggested before. But whether original or not, I think it should be pursued, perhaps in conjunction with the opening of the Victims of Communism Memorial, scheduled for June 12... more here...

...and from the This Can't be True, and Isn't department...

Journalists across the nation, moved by the plight of a troubled Muslim psychiatrist whose "understandable emotional turmoil" broke out in gunfire last week at Fort Hood, Texas, will hold a major fundraising event in the coming weeks in honor of the accused shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan... more here... and from the genius that is Iowahawk...

...Connecting the dots: Tax returns show anti-government extremist carefully itemized deductions
Like many Town Hall protesters, Hassan motivated by rage, pattern baldness
Phone records: suspect tried to join Hair Club for Men
Tearful Pelosi pushes Congress for new Tea Party regulations: "our lives are at stake" ...more here...

Chill, dude...

...to add to the literature exposing the fraud of climatastrophe is Peter Taylor's book Chill. Taylor scrutinises the scientific research that underpins concern about global warming and finds that it is unconvincing. As a life-long environmental campaigner Taylor is well placed to consider the role that activist organisations have played in this process. UK blogger Harmless Sky has published a chapter (link below) from Chill, inviting the following comment...

...This fascinating chapter by Peter Taylor... raises a subject little discussed in the AGW debate: the vocabulary and debating style of many warmists, and the extraordinary prevalence of Marketspeak borrowed from the world of commerce. The most frequently encountered sociological analysis of the warmists is the Watermelon theory, which holds that greens are reds in disguise, frustrated lefties latching on to a pseudo-scientific theory as a replacemant for Marxism, in order to further their programme of world domination. I’ve long felt that a more convincing theory could be found by looking at the social and educational changes which have led to the number of university educated leaping from near nothing to 30% of the population in a couple of generations. The French sociologist Emmanuel Todd has remarked on the profound inegalitarian results of this. Whereas the acquisition of universal literacy had obvious democratic and egalitarian effects, the rise of a large university educated class has the opposite effect, leading to a proportion of the population inhabiting a kind of elitist cultural ghetto, cut off from the masses. He applied this analysis to the sorry state of the Socialist Party in France, but the same kind of analysis could be applied to the Green movement and its obsession with global warming. My generation of the newly university educated often drifted into marketing and advertising. Being overpaid and over-educated, we aped our intellectual betters by adopting the posture of the social sciences, pretending to be psychologists or social anthropologists, and developing a pseudo-science of marketing jargon to justify our existence.The current generation of environmental activists, journalists, NGOers etc. are following the same route. The old social structures of church, trade union and political party no longer attract, and a new social structure is being constructed around science (the only solid basis remaining). The Greens’ adoption of a business model and its associate jargon is due to their cargo-cult-like belief that the jargon is responsible for the success of the model (i.e. the modern technological capitalist world) rather than being an unimportant and irritating offshoot...

...so there we have it. Not all greens are reds, many are just simple minded jargon addicted yuppies, looking for a sensitive new age utopia...

Whooa ! Here's another tipping point...

...that tips the warmists ever further towards irrelevance...A new study in the journal Science has just shown that all of the climate modeling results of the past are erroneous. The IPCC's modeling cronies have just been told that the figures used for greenhouse gas forcings are incorrect, meaning none of the model results from prior IPCC reports can be considered valid. What has caused climate scientists' assumptions to go awry? Short lived aerosol particles in the atmosphere changing how greenhouse gases react in previously unsuspected ways. The result is another devastating blow to the climate catastrophists' computer generated apocalyptic fantasies.
In a stunning article entitled “Improved Attribution of Climate Forcing to Emissions,” a group of researchers from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York, led by Drew T. Shindell, have called into question the values used to calculate the “forcing” due to various greenhouse gases...more from The Resilient Earth here... shouldn't the public be told of this ? After all we/they are expected to pay for the green left warming fantasy...

...and from George Will writing in the Washington Post...Intelligent people agree that, absent immediate radical action regarding global warming, the human race is sunk. That is a tautology because those who do not agree are, definitionally, unintelligent. Britain's intelligent Prime Minister Gordon Brown gives scary precision to the word “immediate.” By his reckoning, humanity now has about 30 days to save itself. He says that unless a decisive agreement is reached at the 192-nation summit on climate change that opens Dec. 7 in Copenhagen, all is lost.
So, all is lost. The chances of a comprehensive and binding treaty are approximately nil...more...

See if you can resist this...

...Bill Bryson on the Large Hadron Collider... Is the LHC sexy or not ? Talk about getting women interested in science. The name Hadron of course, as I've pointed out before, is obviously an ad man's invention, being an anagram for ...In the event that it fell to you to identify the most exciting place on the planet, the likelihood is small, I imagine, that you would pack a bag and travel at once to Switzerland. Still less, I dare say, would you turn your back on Geneva and head out past its western suburbs and into the pleasant but uneventful countryside beyond. There, in a broad valley shared with France, stands a collection of buildings that look like the leftovers from a 1960s Festival of Bad Design.
This is it. You have found it. This is CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Over the next few days the people who run the place will cautiously restart the immensely large machine (almost 27 kilometres around) known as the Large Hadron Collider and begin swooshing particles around it in a way that will, when it is fully humming, recreate conditions as they were in the Universe one millionth of a millionth of a second after the beginning of the big bang...more from the London Times here...and click here to see a PDF graphic of the LHC...

G W Bush and President Obama...confronting the cost of war...

...with the passage of time a more realistic assessment of the qualities of President Obama and his predecessor are being made. When I began this blog in July last year, I wrote ...I offer this link from The American Interest magazine to a well articulated argument that (arch buffoon/war criminal/warmongerer) GW Bush, is in fact likely to be remembered as a great president who rolled back jihadism and defined the struggle against terror in terms that the terrorists could understand. I stand by that...Consider too, this recent reflection from DefenseTech re left wing criticism of Bush regarding a lack of empathy with grieving families of war dead...

...Yes, President Obama's Oct. 29 trip to Dover Air Force base in the dark of night to greet a C-17 car­ry­ing fallen Americans killed in Afghanistan was a vivid exam­ple of the real­ity of that war and should pause to those who call for increased com­mit­ment there. And it was hon­or­able of Obama to see for him­self the human cost of his deci­sions — as every com­man­der and chief should. But to reflex­ively defend the photo op engi­neered to cre­ate news about the president’s “sober­ing reminder” by claim­ing that the man who got us into Afghanistan in the first place never faced them is just plain bunk.
I had the honor to speak with nearly a dozen fam­i­lies of Marines killed in Iraq and Afghanistan a few years ago as part of a project with the Military Times news­pa­pers. We wrote a wide-ranging inves­tiga­tive piece on the con­duct of the ser­vices dur­ing the killed-in-action noti­fi­ca­tion process and the sup­port they pro­vided along the way.
It was an intim­i­dat­ing assign­ment, but one I cher­ish to this day. For, unlike Dowd, who I doubt has ever spo­ken with the fam­ily of a fallen ser­vice­mem­ber, I was forced to con­front the world I obliquely reported from afar — to hear the qua­ver­ing voices of moth­ers whose sons had been oblit­er­ated by road­side bombs.
And you know who else did that very same thing dozens of times in his eight years as pres­i­dent? The same man Dowd falsely accuses of declin­ing to con­front the real­ity of his war dead.
In my con­ver­sa­tions with those who sac­ri­ficed a son, a hus­band, a brother, or a boyfriend, all were uni­ver­sally grate­ful for George W. Bush’s sin­cere — and pri­vate — con­ver­sa­tions with them either before or directly after an event or speech at a mil­i­tary base. As a rou­tine, Bush would meet behind closed doors with fam­ily mem­bers who’d lost loved ones as part of his stop at mil­i­tary installations.
These were not sim­ply pro-war, anti-war, pro-Bush or anti-Bush fam­i­lies — they were all of the above. Some were against the Iraq war; oth­ers were stead­fast, despite their unimag­in­able sac­ri­fice, for vic­tory there. But to a man and women, these griev­ing Americans appre­ci­ated the president’s heart­felt com­pas­sion and deep under­stand­ing of their sac­ri­fice — and of the weight of the deci­sion to send poten­tially more of America’s young to their deaths.

Eat less meat to save the planet ? Burger off...

...nicked unashamedly from Spiked...click left to enlarge the B/K message...The truth is that eating meat, jetting around the globe and so on do not fit in with the hairshirt mentality of environmentalists, either the radical ones or the ones in officialdom. For greens, humanity should be apologising for its very existence and doing everything in its power to make the smallest possible impact on the Earth. If the treehuggers want to stay at home eating lentils and composting, that’s up to them; different strokes for different folks, as they say. However, when the leading lights of the climate change industry like Stern try to tell us that we’ve got to change our wicked ways – often on the basis of flimsy or overblown evidence – there’s only one thing to say: burger off...

...and from the UK Economist, courtesy PKH, a retired professor of physics writes...
...Indur Goklany questioned whether global warming has caused an increase in droughts and floods... Letters, October 10th. In fact, the answer is already well settled. That question was examined thoroughly by the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange. In its 2001 report, one chapter, titled "Has climate variability, or have climate extremes, changed?", concluded that there was no discernible increase in storms, hurricanes, floods or droughts. A re-examination of that issue therefore seemed unnecessary in the IPCC's 2007 report. Concerning rising sea levels, this is a more complex issue since a natural increase of 1-2mm a year has been occurring for many centuries. However,over the past few decades no anthropogenic signal in sea-level changes has been detected. This is firmly backed up by precise satellite altimetry. Meanwhile it was just last month that Professor Mojib Latif of the University of Kiel in Germany, a renowned climate expert and IPCC author, presented his latest work at the World Climate Conference in Geneva. His findings show that the mean global temperature has actually declined since 2001. Moreover, his computer models predict a further temperature drop over the coming decades. All of this beckons the question: just where are the supposedly detrimental effects of anthropogenic CO2?

Horst-Joachim Luedecke, Retired professor of physics, Heidelberg, Germany

Fair comment from a sceptic...

"I'll take the AGW proponents seriously when they agree to a full public debate with the skeptics. If the science is as rock solid as they claim then they should welcome the chance to humiliate the climate realists. How about Al Gore vs. Vaclav Klaus, Lord Stern vs. Bjorn Lomborg, Dr. Suzuki vs. Prof.Prof Pat Michaels, Michael Mann vs. Steve McIntyre? Fat chance. The adherence to AGW hinges on preventing the public from hearing both sides of the debate..." UPDATE, see this re a debate on December 1st...
...AND speaking of Al Gore...according to Andrew Bolt ...This is big. Al Gore is now saying carbon dioxide isn’t actually to blame for most of the warming we saw until 2001: Gore explored new studies - published only last week - that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual warming. Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions. Which suggests not only that Gore was wrong to claim the science was “settled”, but that the hugely expensive schemes to “stop” warming by slashing carbon dixoide emissions will be less than half as effective as claimed...more here...

...now what does all this suggest to you ? To me it seems clear that there is a call for some serious repositioning among the warming hysterics, and to get the most "progressive" deal from Copenhagen some uncomfortable backdowns will have to be made. Perhaps Al should acknowledge for starters that An Inconvenient Truth was BS propaganda of the worst order. Any other suggestions ?

...and, as you know, there's a big one in Scunthorpe, but an even bigger one in Ethiopia...

Quote(s) of the day...and the LHC at CERN...and Jew hatred...

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." C.S.Lewis.

Patrick Moore (founder of Greenpeace) now views the environmental movement as having lost its original mission of ecological protection and is now occupied with encouraging class envy and anti-capitalist rhetoric."The environmentalists try to inject guilt into people for consuming, as if consuming by itself causes destruction to the environment. There is no truth to that. You have the wealthiest countries on earth with the best looked after environment...Poverty, not wealth, is one of the biggest threats to the Earth's ecological health...Look at the environmental destruction caused by poverty. They have no money left to reforest, they have no money left to prevent soil erosion, there is no money to clean their water after they make it dirty... (Environmentalists) are mainly political activists with not very much actual science background who are using the rhetoric of environmentalism to push agendas that are more political than they are ecological..."

...and for those following the Large Hadron Collider experiment in the deepest recessess of the Swiss Alps, note that the collider is being warmed up right now for its second run (it suffered a calamitous breakdown a year ago.) As Slugger puts it...They might not know it, but this will be this generation’s moon-landing. It might seem arcane, unknowable and downright confusing, but this will be -in all likelihood- an epoch-making event in human understanding. So whilst everything else might well be grim, be glad you were there when another couple of pieces of the jigsaw were put in place...A concise and fascinating posting from The Salted Slug, here.

...and from the did you know ? and is it true ? department..."Jews are officially barred from stepping on Saudi Arabian soil. Henry Kissinger was given special permission by the House of Saud to enter the Jew-hating kingdom."

...more here...

For Copenhagen read Waterloo...

...and the spectre of total failure and defeat for the green left. And of course with failure at the Copenhagen summit later this year will come defeat for all future green scare stories. The big green guns have all been wheeled out (including Sikh Prince Charles), shot their collective bolts and failed to hit their targets. Their failure is two pronged; a failure of the underpinning science of AGW which has been shown to be wilfully astray in many instances, and the resultant failure to terrify the population into concerted (green approved) action...

Christopher Brooker in the UK Telegraph writes...When historians look back at the much-touted Copenhagen "climate conference" of December 2009, they may be unable to resist a wry smile at all the last-minute efforts made to keep warmist hysteria at fever pitch. Inevitably the biggest coverage last week went to Lord Stern's call for us all to save the planet by giving up meat. He presumably means that we should kill off all cows, sheep and pigs, say goodbye to wool and leather, and abandon large tracts of our countryside to brambles and bracken (and the wind turbines his lordship is also keen on).

This coincided with a new book by two New Zealanders, solemnly explaining that a major part of the climate change catastrophe is due to meat-eating pets. A large dog, they claim, is the cause of more greenhouse gas emissions each year than a Toyota Land Cruiser driven 6,000 miles. So goodbye also to dogs and cats.

Then there was the official Australian report, supported by their quaintly named Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, calling for a ban on all new buildings anywhere near the sea, lest warming should plunge them below the waves (this in a country 80 per cent of whose people live on the coast).

Finally, as if to confirm that belief in global warming has become a substitute for religion, we had the statement from Lambeth Palace on behalf of all Britain's "faith groups" (led by the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, but also including Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and presumably Rastafarians). They called on the governments of the world to ban fossil fuels, thus restricting any further warming of the planet to precisely 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Presumably we shall see wind turbines sprout from every church, mosque and synagogue, to keep all those clerical word-processors churning out yet more "faith-based" advice to the world's politicians.

More to the point perhaps was the attempt by the EU's leaders, met in solemn conclave in Brussels on Friday, to pretend that they can offer anything significant when they join the rest of the 20,000 delegates in Copenhagen next month. Predictably, the great divide was between the richer countries of western Europe and their poorer partners in eastern Europe, who are nothing like so keen on shelling out 100 billion euros a year to bribe China, India and the rest into curbing their "carbon emissions".

A second great divide at Copenhagen will be between the developed and developing worlds in general, which will make it impossible to agree on any mandatory emissions reduction targets. The third great divide –though unlikely to be aired much at Copenhagen – is between the bogus science favoured by all the politicians and the real science, which now points out with increasing authority that this is a problem which never really existed anyway.
All this makes it unlikely that Copenhagen will end in anything but a gigantic pile of very costly fudge. But naturally our politicians will fall over backwards not to admit anything of the kind...

California Dreamin' is a green nightmare...

...ahh California, the cradle of cool, the State of the Nation, where the American dream was first dreamt. Where, (with apologies to Garrison Keillor ) the women are all beautiful, the men are all handsome and the children are all above average...Not however, any more. California is in the death grip of a huge demented green monster, more destructive and frightening than anything seen in any of Arnie's Terminator movies. Arnie's neighbour state, Oregon is in similar financial crisis due to "green" jobs and tax breaks which are in effect breaking the taxpayer...more here... Look out, the green giant is heading our way too...This article from the current online City Journal, is in response to Time magazine's rose coloured, spin doctor cover story...Time magazine applauds California’s voters for approving “huge bonds” for stem-cell research and a high-speed rail line, and its politicians for adopting “first-in-the-nation greenhouse-gas regulations, green building codes and efficiency standards for automobiles and appliances that have rearranged the national energy debate.” These expensive innovations are going to pay for themselves, it appears, because California is “by far the national leader in green jobs, green patents, supply from renewables and savings from efficiency. It’s also leading the way toward electric cars, zero-emission homes, advanced biofuels and a smarter grid.” Which is all terribly exciting, unless it turns out that the green economy of the future is always in the future...California’s achievement of creating 10,000 green jobs annually has been overwhelmed by the loss of 700,000 jobs in the state since the start of the recession.
Worse, the state’s economic policies are based not on environmental planning but on “environmental preening,” according to Troy Senik, author of the forthcoming California at the Crossroads. The state is committed, by law, to greenhouse-gas emissions in 2020 that are no larger than its emissions in 1990. Since California’s population (like every state’s) will be much larger 11 years from now than it was 19 years ago, this goal will be impossible without “massive economic regression,” according to Senik. “Such is the fate of Californians: to live in a state where environmentalism is a religion and economics a superstition.” ...more here...

Without a doubt, we're winning...

...and by "we", I mean the "denialists" as the green left like to call us. And with that level of disdain they shoot themselves in their minute green brains, because Mr and Mrs Public have a keen sense for censorship of dissent...

A question...are the so-called climate skeptics so far out there that their views don’t qualify as within the realm of reason? Consider that the skeptics are holding their own, if not actually prevailing, in the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans on climate.
No significant federal legislation has passed and it’s not clear that any will any time soon. Polls indicate that Americans aren’t so concerned about global warming. Democrats on Capitol Hill have been advised to give up on global warming and, instead, to focus on “clean energy.” How powerful must the skeptics arguments be when this small, under-funded, rag-tag “band of brothers” has held off for more than 20 years the onslaught of the giant eco-industrial lobbying machine....Finally, consider Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel’s effort to denigrate and dismiss Fox News as a media outlet with a “point of view.” The White House may not like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, but at least those two don’t pose as unbiased journalists...more from GreenHell blog, here...

...and why are global warming/climate change sceptics winning ? For several reasons; the main one being that alarmists have overstated their case, and that the small kernel of truth in their argument has been hyperinflated to the point of farcical hysteria. Consider this...

...and this...it may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as "SuperFreakonomics" suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem. All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action? Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It's just the same with global warming...more from the Wall Street Journal here...

Time to eat the dog, (but not the cat)...

...from PKH, this gem...the carbon footprint left by domesticated animals is out of proportion to the size of their paws. A medium-sized dog has the same impact as a Toyota Land Cruiser driven 6,000 miles a year, while a cat is equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf. But rabbits and chickens are eco-friendly because they provide meat for their owners while a canary or a goldfish has little effect on the environment. At the same time a pair of hamsters do the same damage as running a plasma television, suggests the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living. New Zealand based authors Robert (Bunty) Vale and Brenda Vale base their findings on the amount of land needed to grow food for pets ranging from budgerigars to cats and dogs. They say an average Collie eats 164kg of meat and 95kg of cereals a year, giving it a high impact on the planet. But a pair of rabbits can produce 36 young annually, which would provide 72kg of meat and help decrease the owner's carbon footprint. Mr Bunty Vale, (right) an architect who claims to specialise in sustainable living, (for everything other than edible animals of course) said: "There are no recipes in the book. We're not actually saying it is time to eat the dog or the pussy. "We're just saying (farting loudly) that we need to think about and know the (ecological) impact of some of the things we do and that we take for granted." He explained that sustainability issues require us to make choices which are "as difficult as eating your dog". Mr Vale added: "Once you see where cats and dogs fit in your overall balance of things, you might decide to keep the cat but not also to have the two cars and the three bathrooms and be a meat-eater yourself." ...or have the private jet and fleet of Hummers and an open cast coal mine and participate in intensive rabbit farming. And while we're on the topic, what about the CO2 added to carbonated drinks, and belched out with gusto every day ? When will green left groups target Pepsi, Coke, and all the international brewing giants and demand that they replace their CO2 in our beverages with a non-greenhouse gas? When do the fun police start stepping in ?


Stop Press !!...Just weeks before an international conference on climate change, the United Nations signaled it was scaling back expectations of reaching agreement on a new treaty to slow global warming. Janos Pasztor, director of the secretary-general’s Climate Change Support Team, said Monday “it’s hard to say how far the conference will be able to go” because the U.S. Congress has not agreed on a climate bill, and industrialized nations have not agreed on targets to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions or funding to help developing countries limit their discharges... Copenhagen most likely won’t produce a treaty, but instead will push governments as far as they can go on the content of an agreement...more from WuWT here...

...and anyway, what is Copenhagen really all about ? A columnist in the Australian tells all here...

Oh frabjous day, calloo callay...

...the link to this article from a commenter below had me chortling with joy this morning, headed ...Science Museum's climate change poll backfires...(see disgruntled museum curator Mr Rintin Fintin Bintin at left) ...A poll by the Science Museum designed to convince the nation of the perils posed by climate change has backfired after being hijacked by sceptics... The museum’s Prove It! website, (link here ) which is designed to influence politicians at the Copenhagen climate summit in December, allows members of the public to pledge their support, or lack of it, to the environmentalist cause. But so far those backing the campaign are out-numbered nearly six-to-one by opponents. By Saturday, 2,385 people who took the poll said “count me out” compared to just 415 who said “count me in”, after being asked whether they agreed with the statement: “I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.” The website, which accompanies a major new exhibition at the venerable South Kensington museum, claims to offer "all the evidence you need to believe in climate change"...more from the UK Telegraph here... and note the FINAL results here after multiple votes were discounted...
...and this from Clive James, writing in the BBC news in praise of global warming/climate change scepticism, sliced deep fried golf balls and potato chips...In Montaigne's day you could get into terminal trouble for taking scepticism too far, which is probably one of the reasons why not even he pushed it on the subject of religion. Since then, a sceptical attitude has been less likely to get you burned at the stake, but it's notable how the issue of man-made global warming has lately been giving rise to a use of language hard to distinguish from heresy-hunting in the fine old style by which the cost of voicing a doubt was to fry in your own fat...more here...
...AND (off topic totally) quote of the day, from the misogynistic, hedonistic, dangerous and deluded bounder and cad Roissy...Many men are crippled by doubt. They have no understanding of the possible. To these men I say: Stop listening to the jealous naysayers, the bitter betas, the furious fembots, the condescending scolds, the cackling c**ts, your Mom, your Dad, your drinking buddies, your aging ex, your fat girlfriend, your boss, society, the world. They don’t have your best interest at heart. They never did, and they never will. You have no idea just what you are capable of as a man. Game is that powerful...read more from Roissy, about Game, here...

The BBC and global warming...

...Damian Thompson of the UK Telegraph happily kicks for goal with this article, and writes with palpable glee about recent BBC discomfort (see posting 12.10.09). This about face from the BBC is significant of course, because it shows a crumbling of the compliant united media front that maintains the whole global warming/climate change charade and heartens the green left...

“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy. The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.
Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans...a commenter answers...

...You miss the point, Damian.
The story was changed to climate change when they realised that global warming did not wash. The eco-marxists will continue regardless, because it’s the man-made bit that they want to focus on, not dear old Mother Earth and her menstrual cycle. The struggle is about controlling human behaviour, for therein lies power on earth. Right-thinking people believe in liberty, self-control, individual responsibilities and obligations as well as freedoms, capitalism & private enterprise, property ownership, freedom of movement and choice of mode of transport. These are all anathema to the left. So all human behaviour is bad (except that of tribes that is (sic) not white, western, conservative, Christian, etc etc). As a catholic, you will understand original sin – this is it, re-incarnated for the age of anti-Christianity. These people hate all forms of individual, non-collectivised behaviour. The BBC is part of the project – after all, without the collective, how would they get their TV tax revenue? How would they disseminate their message?
1984-style, the script changes but the conflict continues and Big Brother is watching over you...more here...

...and Deborah Hill Cone, writing in the NZ Herald puts another crack in the green media wall...the most powerful organised psychosis these days does not worship God but the environment : the Godless religion of global warming...

The green/left hate and fear this man...

...Dr Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama. While Spencer is known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society's Special Award, he has in recent years become better known for his denial of the (so called) scientific consensus that human activity is primarily responsible for global warming. (From Wikipedia.)

...Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change...more here...

...While popular press reports would lead one to believe that all reputable scientists now agree that manmade global warming will be a serious problem, there is a sizeable minority of reputable scientists who disagree. They have published peer reviewed papers on the subject, yet they are largely ignored by mainstream climate scientists. .. recent evidence support(s) the view that our climate is relatively immune to mankind’s emissions of carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere...more here...

..."There's probably a natural reason for global warming...We will look back on it as a gigantic false alarm...The Earth isn't that sensitive to how much CO2 we put into the atmosphere... I think we need to consider the possibility that more carbon dioxide is better than less."
Asked in December 2008 what his advice was for then-President-Elect Obama, Spencer responded, "He should put off the environmentalists indefinitely... Tell them we have to fix the economy first before we can afford unaffordable renewable energy 'solutions.'...

...I hope that the (Senate Works) Committee realizes that, if true, these new results mean that humanity will be largely spared the negative consequences of human-induced climate change. This would be good news that should be celebrated, not attacked and maligned. And given that virtually no research into possible natural explanations for global warming has been performed, it is time for scientific objectivity and integrity to be restored to the field of global warming research ...more here...

None dare call it fraud...

...Understanding the AGW scams is essential. Here are just a few of them...

Michael Mann’s hockey-stick-shaped historical temperature chart supposedly proved that twentieth century warming was “unprecedented” in the last 2000 years...the hockey stick was based on cherry-picked tree-ring data and a computer program that generated temperature spikes even when random numbers were fed into it.

...This year, another “unprecedented” warming study went down in flames. Lead scientist Keith Briffa managed to keep his tree-ring data secret for a decade, during which the study became a poster child for climate alarmism. Finally, McKitrick and McIntyre gained access to the data... (and found) a case study in how to lie with statistics...

...Meanwhile, scientists associated with Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) also withheld temperature data and methods, while publishing papers that lent support to climate chaos claims, hydrocarbon taxes and restrictions, and renewable energy mandates. In response to one request, lead scientist Phil Jones replied testily: “Why should I make the data available, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”...When pressure to release the original data became too intense to ignore, the CRU finally claimed it had “lost” (destroyed?) all the original data...

...The supposedly “final” text of the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report emphasized that no studies had found clear evidence that observed climate changes could be attributed to greenhouse gases or other manmade causes. However, without the authors’ and reviewers’ knowledge or approval, lead author Dr. Ben Santer and alarmist colleagues revised the text and inserted the infamous assertion that there is “a discernable human influence” on Earth’s climate...

...Highly accurate satellite measurements show no significant global warming, whereas ground-based temperature stations show warming since 1978. However, half of the surface monitoring stations are located close to concrete and asphalt parking lots, window or industrial-size air conditioning exhausts, highways, airport tarmac and even jetliner engines; all of which skew the data upward...

...With virtually no actual evidence to link CO2 and global warming, the climate chaos community has to rely increasingly on computer models. However, the models do a poor job of portraying an incredibly complex global climate system that scientists are only beginning to understand; assume carbon dioxide is a principle driving force; inadequately handle cloud, solar, precipitation, ocean currents and other critical factors; and incorporate assumptions and data that many experts say are inadequate or falsified...Not one correctly forecast the planetary cooling that began earlier this century, as CO2 levels continued to climb.

...Al Gore’s climate cataclysm movie is replete with assertions that are misleading, dishonest or what a British court chastised as “partisan” propaganda about melting ice caps, rising sea levels, hurricanes, malaria, “endangered” polar bears and other issues. But the film garnered him Oscar and Nobel awards, speaking and expert witness appearances, millions of dollars, and star status with UN... And as in the case of Briffa, the IPCC and journals typically ignore and refuse to publish contrary studies.

Scandals like these prompted EPA analyst Alan Carlin to prepare a detailed report, arguing that the agency should not find that CO2 “endangers” human health and welfare, because climate disaster predictions were not based on sound science. EPA suppressed his report and told Carlin not to talk to anyone outside his immediate office, on the ground that his “comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” which the agency supposedly would not make for several more weeks...The endless litany of scandals underscores the inconvenient truth about global warming hysteria...it will mean massive pain for no environmental gain...more from GlobalWarming.org here...

Wazzup George ?

...Billionaire George Soros, one-time railway porter, will invest $1 billion of his own money in clean energy technology to combat climate change, says The Guardian. He will also create an organization to advise policy makers on environmental issues, which will receive an annual stipend of $10 million over the next 10 years. Soros, founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management LLC and the policy think tank The Open Society Institute, made the announcement this week at a meeting in Copenhagen organised by Project Syndicate, an international association of 430 newspapers...Who will get to pocket the $10 million? Soros says that he's on the prowl for profitable opportunities, but that he "will also insist that the investments make a real contribution to solving the problem of climate change...more from New Scientist here...

...very interesting indeed. I wonder though if he sought Bjorn Lomborg's advice (I note Lomborg is listed as a "thought leader" with Project Syndicate above) re the disbursement of all this dosh ? I wonder too, if his network of 430 newspapers carry much sceptical AGW news ?...and I wonder too, if George Soros is concerned over the deaths of future populations who will be deprived of cheap and efficent energy ?...Wind power, biomass power and animal power were abandoned when the greater energy intensity of fossil fuels became available by use of the steam engine. The increased energy supply enabled more people to exist and the human population exploded. The population is now about 6.6 billion and all estimates indicate that the present population growth will continue and is likely to peak at around 9 billion in the middle of this century. That additional more than 2 billion people requires additional energy supply. Billions of people - mostly children - will die from lack of energy without that additional energy supply. Reducing the energy supply would kill more millions - probably billions - of people. Replacement of fossil fuels by wind and solar is not possible because the laws of physics do not allow it. Only an increase to nuclear power could make much reduction to use of fossil fuels and that reduction is limited because many activities require energy that is not only available where there is a wire...a perceptive commenter here...

...AND not that we're mean or anything, but just for a laugh... women drivers, here...

Where the USA goes, we go...

...with apologies to the late Peter Fraser...The most remarkable aspect of the evolving U.S. debate over climate legislation is how quickly it is evolving in the direction of Republican policy preferences while Democrats, especially the most left-leaning, are silently accepting this revolution, if not helping it along...

...could it be that even the most left leaning are aware that the American voter will not tolerate a return to pre-industrial poverty ?

...The climate bill is rapidly moving from a bill that would move money around and do little to reduce emissions, to a bill that will move money around and accommodate a Republican-preferred "all of the above" energy policy that is very carbon intensive. The take over of climate policy by the Republican agenda is the most over-looked aspect of this entire debate. Perhaps those covering the horse race can't see the forest for the trees. I wonder what will happen if drilling in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) were to become an explicit part of the climate bill negotiations? Are left-leaning Democrats willing to give that away in silence as well?...more from "the honest broker" Roger Pielke Jnr, here...

...and from the workers paradise of Cuba, the voice of blogger Yoani Sanchez...This coming Saturday, July 26, Raúl Castro will speak in Santiago de Cuba. Broadcasting live on TV, he will address a people who still remember last year’s speech in which he mentioned “structural changes,” “a glass of milk for everyone,” and “the fight against the invasive marabu weed.” More than just listening to the announcement of new measures, we Cubans are preparing ourselves to confirm how little has been accomplished in the past twelve months.
The time for promises, and for magical solutions to overcome our underdevelopment, is definitely behind us. The political discourse, without a doubt, has begun its descent. But this doesn’t mean that some day it will touch down. A man with maximum powers continues to pilot the plane, while nobody tells us, over the loudspeakers, if we are maintaining our altitude or heading into a nosedive, if we have the wind at our backs or if the engines are about the explode. Only silence, interspersed with calls for discipline and sacrifice, comes from the speakers of this Soviet-era IL-14 airplane.
We don’t expect pirouettes in the air, nor caramels under our tongues to help us withstand the turbulent ride. What we do want is for the pilot to show his face, to tell us our itinerary, and for us to decide the course. We don’t need this speech on Saturday to turn into an exaltation about floating on air; we would prefer a clear report on how and when we can board a different flight...more here...

Quote(s) of the day...

...all courtesy of WuWT...Copenhagen was essentially kicked into the long grass yesterday at another event, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s Climate Change Summit in New York. There, along with Chinese leader Hu Jintao, U.S. President Barack Obama more or less shuffled climate control policy off into the great dreamscape of unattainable plans and long range objectives. Like equality for all and peace in our time, the world will have to wait for sweeping and binding climate policy. Terence Corcoran, Financial Post, 22 September 2009...

...The UN Climate Change Summit in New York managed to produce a concrete result. It has nothing to do with CO2 reduction targets, however, but with a simple political insight: Forget Copenhagen! The chances that the Copenhagen summit will deliver more than just a non-binding framework agreement decreased further on Tuesday. They now tend towards zero. Therefore, it would be best to postpone the climate conference until the United States is ready to agree to clear progress in negotiations. Otherwise, there is a real danger that a compromise formula in Copenhagen would make any progress impossible for years to come because the big climate sinners could hide behind the agreement. Editorial, Financial Times Deutschland, 22 September 2009...

Initially, many climate activists had hoped this year would yield a pact in which nations would agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions under the auspices of a legal international treaty. But recent announcements by China, Japan and other nations point to a different outcome of U.N. climate talks that will be held in December in Copenhagen: a political deal that would establish global federalism on climate policy, with each nation pledging to take steps domestically. Juliet Eilperin and Colum Lynch, The Washington Post, 23 September 2009...

None of the alarmists and their supercomputer climate models ever predicted even a 30-year respite in their apocalyptic scenarios. Neither did they predict the sun, that thermonuclear furnace in the sky that has more influence on earth’s climate than any number of Ford Explorers, would suddenly go quiet for an indefinite period. Latif and others conclude that, at the very least, we have time to think about it and analyze and learn. We don’t have to fight global warming by inflicting global poverty. More things on Earth affect climate than are dreamed up in computer models. Investor’s Business Daily, 22 September 2009...

...AND far be it from me to pass comment on the Nobel Peace prize award to the POTUS, because Iowahawk has said it all...here...

The flag is being raised on the hill...

...these must be very trying times for those in the scientific community who have staked their reputations, their careers, their whole professional future on catastrophic global warming. Worse (for them) is still to come...

“...I have been researching and reporting on the environmental movement since 1992 and specifically on man-made global warming science over the past decade...The past few weeks have, without a doubt, seen the most dramatic acceleration of developments against the claims of a so-called 'consensus.' The Houston Chronicle science reporter Eric Berger's latest admission (below) merely reflects an inescapable reality: Man-made global warming fears are quickly descending into the ash heap of history. Even top UN IPCC scientists are now openly questioning these claims.” Berger joins other reporters and media outlets in recent times who are being swayed by latest science...more here...

...says Eric Berger...For a long time now, science reporters have been confidently told the science is settled. That the planet is warming and humans are unquestionably the primary cause. We've been told to trust the computer models -- the models which show a markedly upward trend in temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations increase. And I've trusted the scientists telling me this.
It seems pretty clear that the models forecast a steady upward trend in global temperatures as long as carbon dioxide levels rise. (Which they have). Yet according to satellite and surface temperature measurements the global average temperature has essentially remained flat for the last 12 years. This strikes me as somewhat curious. When An Inconvenient Truth came out I believed the movie to be scientifically accurate. Carbon dioxide levels were rising and so were temperatures. And hurricane activity, especially after the disastrous 2005 season, was out of control. But a funny thing happened on the way to the end of the world: hurricane activity on the global scale is near historical lows. And the Earth seems to have, at least temporarily, stopped warming...more here...

...and, on the BBC's about face, this from Samizdata...This is not the usual BBC line, is it? Whatever your opinion of A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) - mine has for quite a while been that it is wall-to-wall made-up nonsense - I think you will agree that this is quite a moment, as is further illuminated by the fact that Instapundit has just linked to the above piece. Which is how I just heard about it. I wonder if the BBC feels inclined to switch to being AGW-skeptic in order to try to make difficulties for David Cameron...I just have a question. Is it right that this marks a big shift for the BBC, or have I not been paying attention properly? This is entirely possible...But whatever the truth of that, I will certainly keep my eyes and ears open for what others, especially people like Bishop Hill, make of this, in the days and weeks ahead...more from Samizdata...

...and from the Comments on Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit...When the history of the Hockey Stick fiasco is written, you will have a very honorable place in it. And it will be written, and it will be taught in classes for many years to come. It is a real classic episode in science with all the instructive themes, importance of the subject, initial acceptance of the findings, obfuscation or concealment of the evidence, and finally refutation and repudiation. We're just now at refutation, and what everyone is afraid of is what comes next. It will be ugly, but there is no way the principals can avoid it now, as they are probably realizing with increasing dismay...

Look look ! A flying pig !

Who would have thought it ? A BBC NEWS headline "What happened to global warming ?"

From Paul Hudson, the BBC climate correspondent no less... This headline (above) may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might the fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on?
Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming. They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this? ...Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting ...claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.
If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.... So what can we expect in the next few years?
Both sides (of the climate change debate) have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly. It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998). Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely. One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

...This is a significant tipping point in the debate. The BBC, once regarded as paragons of media impartiality, lost their well earned laurels by famously doctoring President Obama's acceptance speech in favour of climate alarmism...see Harmless Sky here... they now appear to be hedging their climate change bets. However, irrespective of this, two things are perfectly clear. The climatastrophe scenario; a crude attempt at terror propaganda, has clearly failed. So too, has the attempt to bluster and intimidate by declaring that the science is settled. Note the movement towards cosmic ray/cloud/warming, cooling scenarios. The panic in other words is over. So too then, should be fruitless and draconian "remedies"...more here...

...and totally O/T, but my nomination for the highly coveted Piece Prize ? Silvio Berlusconi of course...more from the loathsome and highly entertaining Roissy here...

Newspeak, and new science...and world socialism...

...the inconvenient fact about global warming/climate change is that the planet has been much warmer than today without our modern day SUVs, flat screen TV's and air conditioning. This fact, and the knowledge that Greenland used to be green, (see the Viking farm under the sand in Greenland, here) and that climate models have proved to be a laughable failure, is a big problem for the hand wringing green left, who like to portray our few decades on this earth as ones deserving alarm and guilt...hence the need for climate propagandists to attempt to rewrite history and distort and misrepresent science. Many people have exposed the whole farcical scam; it's only held together now by the fact that the MSM refuse to accept it. This is an excellent expose from The American Thinker...
...During testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Hearing on Climate Change and the Media in 2006, University of Oklahoma geophysicist Dr. David Deming recalled “an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change” who told him that "we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." In June of this year, Deming identified the year of that email as 1995 and the source only as a lead author of that month’s Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report.
Many believe that man to be Jonathan Overpeck – which Prof. Deming didn’t deny in an email response - who would later also serve as an IPCC lead author. So it comes as no surprise that this reconstruction, which did indeed “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,” was featured prominently in the subsequent 2001 TAR, particularly in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), the highly-politicized synopsis which commands the bulk of media and political attention...alarmists know all too well that as long as citizens are convinced that warming is both enduring and unprecedented, such inconveniences as the missing hot spot, laughably mistaken climate models, 800 year CO2 /temperature latency and perhaps even current cooling can be cleverly obfuscated with Goebbels-like double-talk and outright lies. And without the Hockey Stick’s counterfeit portrait of runaway 20th century warming, climate crisis peddlers’ credibility levels are reduced to those of used car salesmen. Not where you want to be when hoping to sell the instinctively absurd premise that the actions of mankind can influence temperatures in either direction.
So they cheat. And they lie. And they have from the very beginning...more here...

...and... A taste of what's to come at Copenhagen...here is an excerpt from the treaty draft... a few people have already started reviewing the treaty, and what they are finding is less of a climate treaty and more of a blueprint for world socialism. One example, via WuWT from page 122 of the draft:
17. [[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:](a) Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees;(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures...more from the Coyote Blog here...

I thought you'd like to know...

...because those of the green left who care so deeply and passionately for the planet must be delighted and relieved; that in Geophysical Research Letters, authors Tedesco and Monaghan observe that the amount of melting ice in Antarctica between October 2008 and January 2009 (the most recent local summer) ...wait for it...was the lowest figure in the (satellite) recorded history - i.e. from 1980. The graph to the right (click to enlarge) was adapted by World Climate Report from Tedesco M., and A. J. Monaghan, 2009. An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability... Geophysical Research Letters...

...“A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.”
Not even a little peep from the climate alarmist media about this news. Now, if the melt had been a record high…more from Climate Research News here...

Nohopen hagen...the build up...

...as December draws closer, the international climate talkfest in Copenhagen looms. From Copenhagen, an outcome for NZ could be one of bizarre national economic suicide. For a small and inconsequential country like ours with a population of only 4.5 million, it would be a case of economic suicide that could only be explained by slavish adherence to the ideology of international paymasters. It certainly couldn't be because of concern for the people of New Zealand, or the wider Pacific community or because of scientific certainty... Your alternative suggestions re this are very welcome... So by the way, is an explanation for the near silence over this from Cabinet Minister Rodney Hide (who has responsibilities for Local Government, Regulatory Reform and Commerce), and who famously declared "global warming" to be a hoax...but however... this is important, from...
... Professor Chris de Freitas, climate scientist and associate professor at the University of Auckland, a timely warning and a summation...with H/T to Not PC... and from NZCPR...

... the Government has committed New Zealand to cut up to a third of current emissions by 2020. The emissions trading scheme is a first step, but this alone cannot guarantee such a massive reduction. Sweeping legislation restricting the use of oil, coal and natural gas will be required, along with far-reaching reforms in pastoral farming to cut methane release. The economic and social implications for New Zealand are immense...Given the enormity of the social and economic disruption associated with emissions reductions, we need to be convinced that the benefits are worth the enormous costs. The US federal government has spent 80 billion US dollars on climate research on the assumption that human caused rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem. Despite this, no one has yet found even a shred of objective scientific evidence that humans are causing damaging global climate change...
...The planet has warmed and cooled several times over the past 150 years, all within the range of natural climate variability. There are no published scientific papers that show irrefutable proof that any of this is human-caused. Proof is not to be mistaken for the output of hypothetical climate models, none of which has been shown to reliably predict climate. Proof is not merely evidence of warming coupled with the default conclusion “it must human-caused” when we don't know how else to explain it. This is nothing more than admission of ignorance. Even the IPCC acknowledges changes we have seen may be natural...
...The notion of an unchanging climate has been used to deceive us. It is a conveniently forgotten fact that most of the industrialised world went into hysterics during the forty years of global cooling beginning in the late 1930s. It has been replaced by global warming hysteria over a temperature rise over 100 years of less than one degree, a trend that started before modern industrialisation caused atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to rise.
According to MIT atmospheric scientist, Professor Richard Lindzen, hysterics over changes in global mean temperature of a few tenths of a degree “will astound future generations”. Lindzen says “such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.” “Climate change” has become a pseudo religion, and much of the blame lies with the media. Rather than focus on hard climate science, the media have instead become enthusiastic advocates for scientifically unfounded alarmism. There are many well-documented examples of this.
In a letter to the New York Times, Dr. Martin Hertzberg, an atmospheric scientist who featured in the 2009 ‘U.S. Senate Report of More Than 700 Dissenting Scientists on Global Warming’, accuses the newspaper of “continuously regurgitating fear-mongering, anecdotal clap trap of global warming propagandists”. He said “your coverage of the climate issues is a reflection of either extreme negligence or simply scientific illiteracy”. But the real reason may be simpler: talk of impending climate catastrophe is interesting, whereas sober analysis of climate data is boring.
The IPCC has been complicit in the scaremongering and exaggeration. The IPCC is a governmental institution that selectively accepts and rejects critical comments from expert reviewers of its reports, as my climate science colleagues and I can prove, having been part of the IPPC-managed review process. Surprisingly, given the great costs and social impacts of emissions reducing policies, there is no government “ombudsman” or any means to “audit” what is going on in the IPCC, or to tell if all the extravagantly funded research has been a good investment. The IPCC has been a major driver of global warming hysteria, which has overshadowed concern for real global-scale problems. It is a matter of social responsibility if limited resources could have been better spent on uncontroversial environmental problems such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services - which we know affect hundreds of millions of people.
Fifty years ago it became clear that global carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were increasing. It was assumed that this was the prime contributor to an observed period of global temperature increase. On this basis, the carbon dioxide data were used in climate model projections for future global warming. By 2006, despite the ongoing rise in global carbon dioxide emissions, data showed that mean global temperature rise had slowed, and currently shows signs of falling. A similar thing happened from 1940 to 1980 during the post Second World War industrial boom when carbon dioxide increased rapidly, but was accompanied by 40 years of global cooling. In contrast, there was a distinct global warm period in medieval times when carbon dioxide levels were much lower than they are now.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is currently higher than at any time in the past 600,000 years, yet global temperature was much higher during all the major warm interglacial periods that occurred during this time, despite much lower levels of carbon dioxide.
Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the longstanding claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned. If they have not heard, one wonders where they obtain advice on climate matters. Apparently, much of it comes from the eight-member Climate Committee of the Royal Society of New Zealand. At least six of the eight members of that Committee are people with direct or indirect links to the IPCC, or have actually been part in the IPCC process of reporting. Thus, it is not surprising that the Committee’s view coincides that of the IPCC, with no semblance of independence. The belief that science can be determined by “authorities” proclaiming to speak on behalf of entire scientific communities belongs to the medieval period.
That there is not one government scientist in New Zealand associated with climate issues who is willing to speak out against global warming alarmist claims says a lot about how the country is governed. This and the emissions trading scheme are proof that ideology has been permitted to trump science.
The United Nations is gearing up to create a sense of urgency about climate change in the hope that the meeting in Copenhagen can produce a solid agreement to replace the failed Kyoto treaty. But nature refuses to oblige. Eighteen years of global warming came to an end in 1998. Currently, we are in the eleventh year of a global temperature stasis. Sea levels, which have been rising for the past 300 years, show no sign of acceleration. Antarctica is cooling. Hurricane activity is down and does not appear to be connected to carbon dioxide emissions. Annual average Arctic sea ice extent, which is determined largely by wind and ocean currents, is increasing once again - the recent decline was hardly alarming as it was less than that which occurred in 1930s.
In the lead up to the December meeting in Copenhagen, what is needed is careful reflection on the consequences of actions taken as a result of widespread carbon phobia. If any good is to come from Copenhagen, it is that the anxiety about climate may allow the global community to see the need to pull together on truly pressing global problems. It is a wonderful opportunity to call for an era of global unity and the beginning of a new chapter international co-operation to address the planet’s real and most pressing problems ...more here...

So called scientists and so called capitalists...

...are groups that are by no means immune to the lure of the big dollar. "Greed is good" said Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street, and of course he was right, although he should have said capitalism, rather than greed. And capitalism when left unfettered to compete, and untainted by government subsidy, delivers prosperity to billions of people. When big government dangles big bucks it distorts capitalism (and of course science) and produces lies, thievery and pious platitudes ...another example of double-speak on climate change, focusing on some utility companies that are preening about their environmental conciousness, while preparing to take climate change legislation to the bank. As Kimberley A. Strassel writes in the Wall St. Journal:
"The carbon-based free lunch is over," declared Exelon CEO John Rowe, neglecting to mention that his company's free lunch is only beginning. Under the House's climate-change bill, a few utilities-primarily those that have made big bets in renewable and nuclear energy-are poised to clean up once Congress hands them carbon emission credits. The bill sets aside 35% of the free credits for utilities. Exelon and other "renewable" utilities will get a huge piece of that pie.
An internal memo produced by Bernstein Research in June described how Mr. Rowe met with investors to rejoice that the House legislation will allow Exelon to rake in additional revenue-by some estimates, up to $1.5 billion a year. Others will pay for this Exelon privilege, of course-notably, Midwestern customers of traditional coal utilities who will see their energy prices double. But hey, all's fair in love and lobbying.
It's disgusting, but certainly not surprising. Liberals who purported to hate "corporate greed" should recognize that big government and big business are often co-conspirators in gaming the system. Limiting government so that politicians can't dole out rewards to business (and, yes, to unions, donors, and other interest groups) is the best way to ensure a truly level playing field and protect the American people from this kind of thievery...H/T to Independent Womens Forum ...more here...

Unprecedented warming ?

...a basic tenet of Al Gore's climate porn movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and all green left climate hysteria is that recent warming of the planet is without parallell in our history...well Al et al, it's still bad news week...

Postings here last week have been about a major problem with historic tree ring data, data that was used to create Al's infamous "hockey stick" graph. Today we have news from the ANDRILL experiment in Antarctica of a scientific breakthrough; the proof of "a sudden, remarkably warm period in Antarctica that occurred about 15.7 million years ago and lasted for a few thousand years...."

ANDRILL is a multinational collaboration between the Antarctic Programs of the United States, New Zealand, (ta ra !) Italy and Germany...We all analyzed the new samples and saw a 2,000 fold increase in two species of fossil dinoflagellate cysts, a five-fold increase in freshwater algae and up to an 80-fold increase in terrestrial pollen,” said Warny. “Together, these shifts in the microfossil assemblages represent a relatively short period of time during which Antarctica became abruptly much warmer.”

Real climate science is ongoing, the complex mechanisms of climate change are little understood, and every day we see evidence that incorrect assumptions have been made about our contribution to climate change...from the comments... I do not, for the record, think that the frantic efforts to lower CO2 emissions to 19C levels are a rational response to this, partly because of the lack of evidence that it will work, partly because warming is not the problem. The problem is, we may get climate fluctuations large enough to threaten us, and right now we have no idea what we would do about it...more here...

...and as an interesting aside...The Central England Temperature (CET) record, starting in 1659 and maintained by the UK Met Office, is the longest unbroken temperature record in the world. Temperature data is averaged for a number of weather stations regarded as being representative of Central England rather than measuring temperature at one arbitrary geographical point identified as the centre of England.A Scottish statistician, Wilson Flood, has collected and analysed the 351 year CET record. Here is the comparison of the 18th Century with the 20th Century:Wilson Flood comments: “Summers in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than those in the first half and it could be argued that this was a global warming signal. However, the average CET summer temperature in the 18th century was 15.46 degC while that for the 20th century was 15.35 degC. Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming, comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the 20th century were cooler than those of two centuries previously...click on graph to enlarge ...h/t A Western Heart...

...and just because it's Monday...

Re Keith Briffa (tree ring hugger)...and IPCC assumptions...

...regarding the ongoing saga of corrupted data, and the significant influence this has had on alarmist assumptions made by the IPCC and their much beloved catastrophic global warming; Jennifer Marohasy observes...

...THE IPCC and most others who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), have been influenced by the work of climatologists relying on tree-ring data to reconstruct past climate because the thermometer record only goes back to about 1850. The claim that there has been an unprecedented upswing in temperatures over the last 100 years making 1998 the hottest year of the last thousand years, has for example, been based on reconstructions from tree-ring data.

...In response to recent suggestions by Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre that the official reconstructions may have been fudged, Keith Briffa (right) from the Climate Research Unit associated with the UK Met. Office, has responded explaining that there was no cherry picking of data in the development of the reconstructions used by the IPCC and others, rather, the methodology is not yet robust.
Given this admission from a leading UK climate scientist, it would perhaps be appropriate for the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, to now advise world leaders that there are potential problems with the methodology used in the develop of key assumptions underpining the consensus view on anthropogenic global warming and that until further notice, the big meeting in Copenhagen should be postponed...

...Dr Briffa responds...We have not yet had a chance to explore the details of McIntyre’s analysis or its implication for temperature reconstruction at Yamal but we have done considerably more analyses exploring chronology production and temperature calibration that have relevance to this issue but they are not yet published. I do not believe that McIntyre’s preliminary post provides sufficient evidence to doubt the reality of unusually high summer temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century...We will expand on this initial comment on the McIntyre posting when we have had a chance to review the details of his work...more here...

...the battle is on, and the eventual outcome of Dr Briffa's work will help settle the whole issue...

...and meanwhile, a possible reaction from the financial markets ?...We knew this was coming. Carbon Financial Instruments are now trading for 10 cents per metric tonne on the Chicago Climate Exchange. I wonder if the investors are reacting to the Hockey Stick Implosion news? As reported on WUWT, less than one month ago it was 25 cents a tonne, and a year ago it was over 1 dollar. The all time high was May 2008 at over 7 dollars a tonne. Today: poof...more here...

...the new authors used trees from the Yamal Peninsula, Northern Siberia, so their hockey stick was supposed to be an "Arctic hockey stick". Yamal means the "end of the world" in the local native language of the "Nenets" tribes ...spoooky...more here...

...AND, off topic, but fun...The Scottish brewer BrewDog, of Fraserburgh was criticised for an 18.2% alcohol content beer. So it has now produced a 1.1% alcohol beer and given it a label of “Nanny State Beer” ...H/T Kiwiblog...

Treemometers and scientific scandal...

...global warming/climate change sceptics like myself are enjoying the public expose of some of the shonky science used by the green left to further their political agenda. The stories in this post and below and the links they contain will no doubt one day make a book. (And maybe a film...Dan Brown could really get into it, the religous mumbo jumbo, apocalypse scenarios and skullduggery is all there.) The heroes and leading figures in this saga deserve public accolades...let's stay on the trail...

...A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers. At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre (CRU) at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors...Controversy has been raging since 1995, when an explosive paper by Keith Briffa at the CRU asserted that the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. Both archaeology and the historical accounts, Briffa was declaring, were bunk. Briffa relied on just three cores from Siberia to demonstrate this.

...Mann too used dendrochronology to chill temperatures, and rebuffed attempts to publish his measurement data. Initially he said he had forgotten where he put it, then declined to disclosed it. (Some of Mann's data was eventually discovered, by accident, on his ftp server in a directory entitled 'BACKTO_1400-CENSORED'.)

...The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it...As the panel states, its duty is "assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data." But as lead author, Briffa was a key contributor in shaping (no pun intended) the assessment. A small group was able to rewrite history...When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails - as it did here?
The scandal has only come to light because of the dogged persistence of a Canadian mathematician who attempted to reproduce the results. Steve McIntyre has written dozens of letters requesting the data and methodology, and over 7,000 blog posts. Yet Yamal has remained elusive for almost a decade.
Footnote:
The Royal Society's motto from the enlightenment era is Nullius in verba. "On nobody's authority" or colloquially, "take nobody's word for it". In 2007, the Society's then president suggested this be changed to "respect the facts"....more here...

Maori welfare slavery/dependency...

...is under the media spotlight once again, but it doesn't require any patronising nanny state "tough love" as the NZ Herald sub-editor suggests. What is needed is a much, much different remedy. For crying out loud, welfare slavery/dependency cries out for political leadership...can you hear me Pita Sharples ?

Lindsay Mitchell writing in the NZ Herald has pointed out the elephant in the room. It's a big hungry beast, we feed it regularly, and it's thriving and it certainly makes a huge noise and stink, yet we manage to avoid talking about it, for fear of appearing insensitive and (gulp,horror) right wing and racist.

Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia know Mr Dumbo is there, but close their eyes and hold their noses because they don't have the political courage to face up to him...

...It is a fact (says Lindsay Mitchell) that the more that is done for people, the less they will do for themselves. That includes caring for and nurturing their families. Until voters and politicians recognise this, New Zealand is going to keep on fighting a battle with childhood deprivation, transience, physical and mental ill-health, educational under-achievement, and crime - all disproportionately affecting Maori.
Distributing taxpayer funds into poor, and increasingly not-so-poor, homes has been going on for decades and every year there are people advocating for more. They claim to be trying to solve the problems associated with poverty when, in reality, they are worsening them....more here
...and why are politicians making the problem worse, year by year ? Simply because they know that the subtle slavery of welfare dependency guarantees them votes from the slaves...

Addendum: further to the broken hockey stick saga below, some random comments...
...Almost daily the credibility of the scientific community is being trashed by those prepared to manipulate data to ‘prove’ their predetermined outcome to support the AGW/Climate Change agenda of alarmism – in addition those scientists not prepared to speak out against the totally unproven hypothesis should be ashamed...
...Even those of a non-scientific bent can understand this and see that the scientific methodology has been seriously abused by the climatology community...
...this quality of reporting and whistle-blowing would have been common-place in our mainstream media only a few years ago. The fact that it no longer is, (indeed, the Guardian is actively censoring any public mention of this story), is depressing. But perhaps what we are witnessing is the slow and painful death-throes of the dead-tree press (no pun intended), to be replaced by a far more alert, honest and responsive reporting on the web - of which your writing here is a prime (and hopefully, historic) example...with grateful thanks to Bishop Hill.. who has translated the story into Laymanese. See below...

How the global warming industry is based on one big lie...

...the story behind yesterday's post has reinforced the belief that fraud and deception are behind the global warming scare. The drama has been taken up worldwide by the MSM...here's James Delingpole from the UK Telegraph...

...For the growing band of AGW “Sceptics” the following story is dynamite. And for those who do believe in Al Gore’s highly profitable myth about “Man-Made Global Warming”, it will no doubt feel as comfortable as the rectally inserted suicide bomb that put paid to an Al Qaeda operative earlier this week. (F***ing terrorists with their bum blasts...see this post...) Now read on....Those of you who saw An Inconvenient Truth may remember, if you weren’t asleep by that stage, the key scene where big green Al deploys his terrifying graph to show how totally screwed we all are by man-made global warming. This graph - known as the Hockey Stick Curve - purports to show rising global temperatures through the ages. In the part representing the late twentieth century it shoots up almost vertically. To emphasise his point that this is serious and that if we don’t act NOW we’re doomed, Al Gore - wearing a wry smile which says: “Sure folks, this is kinda funny. But don’t forget how serious it is too” - climbs on to a mini-lift in order to be able to reach the top of the chart. Cue consensual gasps from his parti pris audience.
Except that the graph - devised in 1998 by a US climatologist called Dr Michael Mann - is based on a huge lie, as Sceptics have been saying for quite some time. The first thing they noticed is that this “Hockey Stick” (based on tree ring data, one of the most accurate ways of recording how climate changes over the centuries) is that it seemed completely to omit the Medieval Warming Period...the Met Office, its Hadley Centre in Exeter and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia are among the primary drivers of global climate change alarmism. Their data has formed the basis for the IPCC’s “we’re all doomed” reports; their scientists - among them Professor Phil Jones and tree ring expert Professor Keith Briffa (left) have been doughty supporters of Mann’s Hockey Stick theory and of the computer models showing inexorably rising temperatures.
Hence their misleading predictions of that “barbecue summer” we never had. As Booker says: “Part of the reason why the Met Office has made such a mess of its forecasts for Britain is that they are based on the same models which failed to predict the declining trend in world temperatures since 2001...We “Global Warming Deniers” are often accused of ignoring the weight of scientific opinion. Well if the “science” on which they base their theories is as shoddy as Mann’s Hockey Stick, is it any wonder we think they’re talking cobblers?...more here ...and here ...and here... and a layman's guide to the whole sorry saga, from the indefatigable Bishop Hill...

...and to close from Jennifer Marohasy...This week’s claims by Steve McInyre that scientists associated with the UK Meteorology Bureau have been less than diligent are serious and suggest some of the most defended building blocks of the case for anthropogenic global warming are based on the indefensible when the methodology is laid bare...It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre associated with the UK Meteorological Bureau explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign.

PS Dr Briffa replies...Due to illness, Keith [Briffa] is currently away. He will not be able to respond to emails for some time. He is not currently accepting invitations to review papers or proposals...

...and this apparently is no mere excuse. The sceptical community wish Dr Briffa a speedy recovery from his kidney disease and look forward to continued debate re all of the above...

A tipping point for the warmists...

...may have arrived. The blogosphere is in full arousal mode over the latest exposure of climate change data fraud. The sleuth who has "driven a coach and four" as one commentator puts it, through one of the major planks of AGW (the use of tree ring analysis to determine a historical temperature record) is Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit...another blogger writes...

...let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose you are an AGW advocate who for some reason believes we need to limit our CO2 and economies at all costs, you know in your heart that this is the right course of action. Additionally you fully believe we are heading toward certain doom by heating the earth a few degrees C. Suppose again, you are a good mathematician and you understand the problems with statistical analysis and know how to work around them. Now you are also an expert in the types and styles of proxies available in the field and have a small network of like-minded friends to work with... remember this is hypothetical not accusatory.
Suppose further, that as an expert you are of course aware of the incredibly limited usefulness of trees as thermometers but also aware that trees are known to grow faster in warmer temperatures at times. It cannot be denied. Therefore, wouldn’t it be perfectly reasonable to make papers which reach the correct conclusions using this data (link and below) in the face of all of these known problems? If the conclusions are justified for the good of humanity, aren’t you doing a good and just thing even though the result is probably not accurate?

...and from Tilo at Jennifer Marohasy.com...This means that we either have to conclude that the surface temperature record is wrong, or that the tree ring reconstructions are wrong. If the tree ring reconstructions are wrong, then it is impossible to make the statement that the current climate is in any way unusual. If the surface temperature record is wrong, then the 20th century rise is either not there or it is greatly exaggerated...

...precisely...as leading catastrophist Dr Stephen Schneider observed way back in October 1989... "Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective,and being honest."

...and from the comments...I wish I could find an innocent reason for what CA has reported. Steve McIntyre’s analysis is devastating in its simplicity and wholly fatal to the last 15 years of work by Briffa, Mann and their many co-authors. They who who have hid behind a wall of pride and activism are now exposed.It may however be too late to stop the AGW juggernaut before the economies of the developed world are shackled by the environmental fascists and their leftist political brothers.
I grieve for science and the human species if they succeed...

...and what does it all mean ? Quite simply this expose is likely to destroy the so-called scientific consensus over global warming/climate change. Scientists who have been wavering warmists must now conclude that the science can't be settled if it is built on shonky foundations. I expect more defections towards AGW scepticism...even Dr Strangelove had a conscience...

Tarot cards and the IPCC...

...the fact is on display for all to see. The IPCC is a political, not a scientific body and the collusion of many scientists with its political aims is a bastardisation of science...
...from The Australian editorial 26th September 2009...

...Then there is the science. The public has not been well-served by scientists' contradictory findings on such basic points as whether the world is warming or cooling. Figures predicting sea level rises fluctuate widely. Some have turned scientific method on its head, no longer proceeding through a process of conjectures and refutations, but rather conjectures and affirmation, crossing the line between inquiry and activism. The science has been politicised.

...and the science of climate change continues to shame those who claim the question is settled...

...In a detailed study of the mechanisms and effects of water vapour...Tapio Schneider and Xavier Levine of the California Institute of Technology, and Paul A. O’Gorman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have expanded our knowledge of water's role in climate regulation while showing just how poorly understood the Earth climate system really is...In the end this paper raises more questions than it answers, something many good scientific investigations do. At the end of the paper the authors pose the question, “what controls the static stability of the subtropical and extratropical atmosphere?” After listing five major unsettled questions regarding atmospheric circulation and the dynamic effects of water vapor, the study's authors summarize their findings: “The lack of a theory for the subtropical and extratropical static stability runs through several of the open questions. Devising a theory that is general enough to be applicable to relatively dry and moist atmospheres remains as one of the central challenges in understanding the global circulation of the atmosphere and climate changes.” Without such a theory it is impossible to predict changes in atmospheric circulation, it is impossible to predict changes in the hydrological cycle, it is impossible to predict storm frequencies, intensities and tracks. Future climate cannot be predicted without a theory explaining how climate works, yet the IPCC has confidently made predictions regarding changes in storms, precipitation and climate for decades, even centuries into the future. If something as seemingly simple as water vapor can have such complex and bewildering impacts on Earth's climate why does the IPCC and the climate crisis crowd continue to insist that all fault lies with CO2? It could be that even they realize that blaming global warming on water vapor would give them no political leverage. After all, 70% of our planet's surface is covered with water and not even the most wild-eyed geoengineering proponent would propose we attempt to control the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. What does this have to say about all of those general circulation models (GCM) used by the IPCC to divine the future of Earth's climate? It means they can't accurately simulate our planet's climate engine because they don't know how the atmosphere works. If they don't know how climate works today, how can they tell us what the climate will be like 100 years in the future? The predictors of future climate disaster may as well be using tarot cards...more here... and (left) just for progressive readers...

Afghan child brides...and Western feminists...

Why western feminists support the war in Afghanistan....Stephanie Sinclair travelled around rural Afghanistan photographing child brides in 2003. She returned with a series of moving, upsetting portraits of terrified adolescents born into a world of misogynistic duties and suicidal despair...
...Sinclair asked of a man who had just won someone's daughter in a bet. "Don't you think she's a little bit young ?" He replied: “Well, we have a saying out here that if she doesn't fall down when you hit her with your cap, she's old enough to marry.”
More, including narration of images by the photographer, here... and today from Cranmer...Some Muslim men hold literally to the exhortation of Sura 4:34, which speaks of the treatment of women: 'As those you fear may be rebellious, admonish, banish them to their couches, and beat them.'And Muslim women may indeed suffer such abuse if their hair, necks or faces are seen by men other than their family members...more here...

and, for an extra special treat, visit Johnny Rottenborough here, and Sing Along with Allah...

Obama, climate change and the polls...

...the jibe that a politician is "out of touch" is slung around at every opportunity by political activists. Sometimes the jibe is deserved and the aloof politician suffers the consequences of his/her disdain and arrogance at election time. Election time however for US voters is 3 years away, yet the issue of the day for this blog (and for the international green/left) is the battle for hearts and minds over catastrophic climate change. The battle has now been raging for over 2 decades and the forces on the left have used the multi-billion dollar MSM and entertainment industry to wage it. The result ? Note the most recent poll at left.
Meanwhile, here is the text of a speech President Obama gave to the UN yesterday.
...Did anyone mention hubris?

...Good morning. I want to thank the Secretary-General for organizing this summit, and all the leaders who are participating. That so many of us are here today is a recognition that the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. Our generation’s response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it — boldly, swiftly, and together — we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe.
No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees...more here...

Another devastating expose of the green left climate rort...

...I am a climate change sceptic for one simple reason; I despise and distrust the green left. I think they disguise their real left wing aims (click on picture to enlarge) with phoney environmental concerns and lure in the unthinking, well intentioned and weak minded. Other climate change sceptics are less emotional about lefties than I am, and far more scientifically orientated, and are climate change sceptics because they simply doubt the science of catastrophic, human induced climate change. A forum for debate over climate science and the green left influence on it is at JenniferMarohasy.com. A contributor has written a wonderful 14 reason synopsis of his scepticism...have a read, (note the feeble strangled objections from the left) ...an excerpt from the synopsis...

...The mainstream media keep reporting that the current situation is increasingly dire and is much worse than even the previous pessimistic projections. When I examine this statement I find that previous projections predicted rapid atmospheric warming during the last 10 years whereas in fact we have had cooling. They predicted rapid increase in rate of rise of sea level when in fact the rate of sea level rise has recently declined. They predicted a very rapid increase in Arctic summer sea ice loss whereas in fact, for the last 2 years, it has been increasing. They predicted a rapid rise in hurricane incidence and severity when in fact there has been a decline. To me the media’s many claims are not supportable. I also consider it to be beyond simple error. At best it is unpardonable gross carelessness in checking the data they are reporting and at worst it is deliberate bias in reporting...more, here...

It's official. Green is a religion...

...a few posts back I commented on an article by Mick Hume in the UK New Scientist. Hume was presenting climate change as an esoteric entity rather than an explainable and rational scientific phenomenon. Here's a quote...

...The world's climates will keep on changing, with human influences now inextricably entangled with those of nature. So too will the idea of climate change keep changing as we find new ways of using it to meet our needs. We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence...

Hume is postulating a spiritual approach to climate change, an approach that would allow the climate to be used as its devotees interpreted and wished. In so doing though, Hume is signalling and acknowledging the defeat of the green/left science based approach he once championed. Coincidentally, in support of Hume's argument a UK judge has ruled that an employee with extreme green views is acting out of a deeply held belief and that his (political) belief is a spiritual matter...The decision, (favourable to the loopy green employee) which is being challenged by the company, comes two years after the law on religious discrimination was changed so that beliefs no longer had to be "similar" to religious faith to receive protection in the workplace...more here...


...as Counting Cats observes...It shows we are winning. It shows on the subject of AGW that they no longer have scientific powder in their pouches and are having to fight on the grounds of mysticism. The grounds of mysticism is a battlefield where science has slain mystics unnumbered...

Memo to voters. Here's the deal...You go broke...

...official US Treasury figures estimate the cost of cap and trade carbon legislation (aka The Waxman Markey Bill) to be $US1761/year/household... According to CBS “the equivalent of increasing personal income taxes by about 15 percent”. This comes in way over previous claims made by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) that claimed that the legislation would cost $83.95 /year/person.

So, what do taxpayers get in exchange for expensive green legislation ?

Answers on the back of an envelope (Freepost) to:

Nick Smith

Minister of Silly Green Posturing

Parliament Buildings

WELLINGTON.

...and a warning for Nick Smith...I’m betting that the Senate never bothers to even put together a bill that they can vote on. Too contentious, too dangerous for too many Senator’s re-election chances. And the best part is that if US efforts fall apart, (they will) then everyone else in the world who’s facing hard choices will take that as a cue and their efforts will fall apart too.
Copenhagen could easily turn out to be a sad joke...more from WuWT here...

...and Quotes of the day; re education and intellectuals ...By the end of that summer, I had concluded that the population cannot be divided into an intellectual class and a nonintellectual class; instead, I concluded, everyone is to some extent an intellectual. The college professor is an intellectual who, it is hoped, applies his intellect to his teaching and research. The skillful auto mechanic is an intellectual who uses logic to eliminate various possible causes of an engine's failure in order to narrow it down to the actual cause. Everyone is an intellectual. Compulsory schooling has robbed millions of people of the knowledge of their intellectual birthright...more here... H/T Samizdata...

...and re ex-President Jimmy Carter's opinion that opposition to President Obama is race-based...Carter's remark drew the condemnation of Michael Steele, the first African-American to become chairman of the Republican National Committee. "President Carter is flat out wrong. This isn't about race. It is about policy," he said in a statement. "This is a pathetic distraction by Democrats to shift attention away from the president's wildly unpopular government-run healthcare plan that the American people simply oppose."...more from Reuters here...

Our cooling oceans...

...with patience, and ongoing science the myth of catastrophic global warming continues to be exposed. Click on graph at left to enlarge...There has been a change in direction by global warming alarmists, as shown by “Synthesis Report - Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions,” published in Copenhagen and released in June. In that report, those claiming there is a human-induced global warming crisis have abandoned air temperature as a measure of global climate and switched to ocean temperature. The change in focus from air temperature to ocean temperature was predictable given the sustained decline in global air temperature over recent years. The new report claims ocean temperatures are rising, and fast.
This is rubbish, but it will take time to inform the public and politicians that it is rubbish. With the U.S. climate bill and the Copenhagen meeting of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up, proponents of carbon dioxide restrictions need only to make the public believe these fables for a few months. All the public education the climate realists have accomplished regarding air temperatures will have to start all over regarding ocean temperatures. Here are some key points to be made: Ocean temperatures can be measured adequately only by the Argo buoy network. Argo buoys dive down to 700m, recording temperatures, then come up and radio back the results. There are 3,000 of them floating around all the world’s oceans According to Argo temperature measurements, the world’s oceans have shown a slight cooling since Argo became operational in 2003. In sharp contrast to model predicted heat build-up ...more here...
...and from Peter Taylor’s new book CHILL: a Reassessment of Global Warming Theory, reviewed here...“The oceans play a crucial role in the absorption and dissipation of heat over decadal and millennial timescales and with distinct cyclic patterns.These patterns are poorly understood and not replicated in global warming models, and any conclusions drawn with respect to those models being able to isolate an anthropogenic global warming signal must be regarded as unproven and unlikely”.

Stop Press...more tragedy and panic...

...A charity pantomime in aid of paranoid schizophrenics and homosexuals descended into chaos yesterday when somebody shouted ' He's behind you!'

...H/T NMH...

...and...A new climate magazine drawing together major stories and blog-postings on global warming has launched today. "Climate Reality" is a free monthly that its publishers hope will fuel further public debate about the science behind global warming theory, and challenge media complacency on the climate change issue...get it here...

"The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in /Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin /A nuclear error, but I have no fear /London is drowning-and I live by the river..."The Clash 1977 “London Calling”

Global warming ? Enjoy it while it lasts...

...in 1975, Newsweek predicted the beginning of a new ice age, and suggested warming the planet by coating the polar ice caps with soot. More recently of course, polar melting and global warming have excited the green left, although to their dismay their climatastrophe scenario hasn't disturbed most of us, who now tend to believe that the green hysterics and the media are exaggerating the issue. And of course many of us appreciate the idea of a more tropical climate. However, over the last decade warming appears to have stopped, although CO2 emissions have still risen. Professor of Meteorology Henrik Svensmark of Denmark observes...The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth...global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.
The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.
So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate...more from WuWT here...

FOOTNOTE: Professor Norman Ernest Borlaug has died. He may well have saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived..a tribute from Iowahawk, Reason Online here...and more here...

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." Norman Borlaug March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009... H/T The Salted Slug

Lest we forget...

...today is the anniversary of heroism, cowardice and religious fanaticism. Heroism known and unknown, in the air on United Airlines Flight 93, and on the ground after the aircraft hit. One New Zealander was on board United 93; Alan Beaven, who would have used his strength and courage in the final hours of his life to help defeat the terrorists. Alan Beaven was one of over 3000 victims of Al Queda on September 11th 2001. We owe it to them all to maintain the struggle and the rage against the cavemen of Islam...The Twin Towers were all about modernity and the future. Islam is all about the past and about the demand that it be imposed on the present and the future...Every year when September 11th comes around, we must remind ourselves of the triumph of our Constitution, our dedication to freedom and liberty, and our capacity to defeat the enemies of these inalienable rights.Our grandparents defeated the Nazis and the imperialistic Japanese. Then they and our parents held steadfast against the Soviets for nearly five decades. We fought in Korea and we fought in Vietnam. The current generation’s bravest and best have been fighting our enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq.We must draw on the reservoir of courage they bequeathed us and, for my part, we must never let lose of the anger we felt eight years ago when a handful of evil men attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, with yet another intended target.Al Qaeda? Hunt them! Find them! Kill them!Do not listen to the appeasers, the Blame America crowd. Surrender is not an option...more from Alan Caruba at Warning Signs here...

I remember that with one jab...

...of my needle in the Punjab, I have cured the beri-beri and the dreaded dysentery...as the Peter Sellars, Sophia Loren song goes. Deepak Lal is a Punjabi gentleman who wishes to cure the west of its hand wringing CO2 fetish. Take some time with this and relish Indian outrage expressed in clear, uncompromising English...Nothing is more hypocritical and immoral than rich Westerners driving their gas-guzzling SUVs emoting about the threat to Spaceship Earth from the millions of Indians who want to drive Nanos... (See also "When Poor People Pollute, the Tato-Nano and Eco-Crime, here )...Whilst the salving of their consciences by buying carbon offsets (as Al Gore claims to do every time he jets around the world) is akin to the Papal indulgences sold by the Catholic Church, which allowed its richer adherents to assuage their guilt and ‘fornicate on clean sheets’. For Gore to have the lights on his mansion blazing throughout the night, and seek to restrict the emissions from Indian power stations, when most Indians don’t even have an electric light bulb, is deeply wicked...This is particularly heinous as the claim by the IPCC that, it is scientifically proven, CO2 emissions are the cause of global warming, is increasingly being questioned by climatologists. Particularly, as since 1997, both the terrestrial and more accurate satellite temperature readings (which are not contaminated by the ‘heat island’ urbanisation effect) show global cooling, even though there has been a large increase in CO2 emissions. This is also the period in which the sunspot activity in the Sun has ceased...This new and growing scientific evidence that human CO2 emissions have little to do with climate change makes the current Western political obsession to curb carbon emissions at a vast economic cost extremely foolish. For India it would mean not only reversing the current trends in poverty alleviation, but a vast increase in the numbers of the poor who would otherwise be pulled out of poverty. India should have nothing to do with Copenhagen. If this means there is no climate change treaty, it might also save the West from its current path to committing economic hara-kiri...more from Deepak Lal in New Delhi, here...

...AND, considering an investment in carbon credits ? ...Back on September 2nd, 2006/2007 instruments were selling as low as 20 cents and held that way until Sept 8th. So this is a boost. See the table below. Zimbabwe money notes are doing pretty well on Ebay. Right now they are actually more valuable than carbon credit notes...more here...

AND, from Smokey, and observation that...only one CO2 molecule out of 34 is emitted by human activity, the rest are natural emissions...

Global warming contortions and backdowns...

...are now becoming the norm. Even the UK New Scientist magazine, a past staunch cheer leader for green climatastrophe is looking sheepish, admitting...Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers (Mojib Latif of the Liebniz Institute of Marine Sciences, and an IPPC author) said ... we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool....and that natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming...

In other words, the much loved planetary emergency is over.

Breaking with IPPC orthodoxy, Latif said Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference...more from Fred Pearce and New Scientist here... and this from Mick Hulme... in a New Scientist article interestingly titled Climate Change : No Eden, No Apocalypse...

...The world's climates will keep on changing, with human influences now inextricably entangled with those of nature. So too will the idea of climate change keep changing as we find new ways of using it to meet our needs. We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change (are you listening Al Gore ?) and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence...

So here we have the new (age) green approach to climate guilt... It remains too, to be seen what contribution to this new thinking the ongoing results from the ARGOS sea temperature project, satellite monitoring and the CLOUD experiment will provide, but two things are now very clear...the AGW mirage is collapsing, and greens tell lies...

Another doubting Thomas writes...

...I'm the science reporter for the Houston Chronicle, the daily newspaper in the petrochemical capital of the United States, if not the world. I've been called a global warming skeptic by environmentalists, and I've been called an environmentalist toady by the skeptics. I'm neither of these things. Rather, I'm just trying to grasp what is happening to the planet's climate, and how humans are impacting it. For a long time now, science reporters have been confidently told the science is settled. That the planet is warming and humans are unquestionably the primary cause. We've been told to trust the computer models -- the models which show a markedly upward trend in temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations increase. And I've trusted the scientists ...the key point here is that scientists are acknowledging that natural variations are playing a very important role in our present and future climate, perhaps cooling it. Therefore it stands to reason that natural variations might also have played a role in the temperature run-up of the 20th century. Do not misunderstand me. I am not a climate change skeptic. I do not deny that the planet warmed 0.6°C in the 20th century. I do not deny that humans played some part in that significant warming.
But I am confused. Four years ago this all seemed like a fait accompli. Humans were unquestionably warming the climate and changing the planet forever through their emissions of carbon dioxide. The problem is that some climate scientists and environmentalists have been so determined to see something done about carbon dioxide emissions -- now -- that they have glossed over the uncertainties....more from Eric Berger here...
...and it is this dogmatism, inspired by political ideology not science that will bring the AGW house down...

You light up my life...

...I have on my bookshelves a gift from a dear friend, now dead, the late William Manchester's book "A World Lit Only by Fire". It is a wonderful collection of fact and anecdote about medieval Europe; its cruelty, superstition, bigotry and its fear of heresy. Looking at this satellite image of the Korean peninsula is to look backwards and forwards at the same time. Backwards at the underdeveloped, fearful and idelogically constipated North Korea and forwards to what 50 years of capitalism have achieved for South Korea.
If the green/left have their way, if, as Maurice Strong (founder of the UN Environment Programme) hopes; that the industrialised nations collapse, then the lights will go out again, and not just all over Europe and South Korea...more here...and here...
...and for a UK perspective...It is ironic that this week’s stories about the Government admitting that we face the possibility of blackouts should have originated with the Tory Party, whose own energy policy has long been indistinguishable from the Government’s — windmills, ‘carbon capture’, ‘smart meters’ and all. The truth is that, if David Cameron comes to power in nine months’ time, there will be no bigger headache confronting him than how to avoid precisely the disaster which his spokesman was yesterday warning about. If there is one issue to which he and his colleagues should now be giving their fullest attention it is how to keep Britain’s lights on without prices going through the roof. And that will mean abandoning a lot of that childish Milibandian make-believe which now threatens us with as great a crisis as any our politicians have ever landed us with...more from Christopher Booker, here...

...and the red/green church under the spotlight here...My desire to live a free, mundane life is a fundamental cog in our messy, glorious, capitalist democracy. It is built on millions of such small entrenched postitions. Red-filtered, my desires are despicable and bourgeois and must be beaten out of me with indoctrination or force. Green-filtered, my small desires are despicable acts of ecological vandalism. My house is a carbon factory. My desire to travel, to own stuff, to eat meat, to procreate, to heat my house, to shower for a really, really long time; all are evil. The word evil is used advisedly. Both the green and red positions are infused with overpowering religiosity. Dissenters from the consensus are shunned apostates. Professor Ian Pilmer, the Australian geologist and climate change sceptic, could not find a publisher for his book Heaven and Earth, which questions the orthodoxy about global warming. He is the subject of hate mail and demonstrations...Our intransigent refusal to choose green will be met by a new militancy from those who believe we must be saved from ourselves. Ultra-green states cannot arise without some form of forced switch to autocracy; the dictatorship of the environmentalists...more from Timesonline, here...

...and totally off topic, but extraordinary, Normandy 1944 then, and now...

Fairy tales from Copenhagen...

...the city of Hans Christian Andersen and the venue for November's climate change talkfest will be a watershed for the green/left. When the Kyoto agreement was signed notable dissenters were George W. Bush and John Howard...time has proved their dissention correct. Kyoto was an unworkable fraud and the lesson taught to the world by its failure, and the resolution of Bush and Howard will not be lost. Many deep greens will be losing sleep over the likely Copenhagen outcome...according to Spiked magazine....

...Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is organising the talks, told the BBC: ‘You’re looking at hugely divergent interests, very little time remaining, a complicated document on the table and still a lot of progress to be made on some very important issues like finance.’ No doubt, some kind of agreement will be signed in Copenhagen, even if it is simply to carry on talking, but the notion of an effective, binding deal to substantially reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the next few decades seems an awfully long way away. Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth, that may be no bad thing. The idea of bringing down GHG emissions, without the technological means to do so, is coming up against the very rational desire to improve living standards.
The first thing to note is the relative failure of the Kyoto protocol itself. In more than half of all industrialised countries, GHG emissions have increased since 1990. Germany and the UK have seen substantial falls in emissions (at least, as measured by the treaty). The UK’s emissions reductions are largely due to a shift from coal-fired to gas-fired power stations, and much of the fall occurred before Kyoto was signed.The ‘saving grace’ is the utter collapse of the economies of Eastern Europe and Russia after the end of Stalinist rule there. The result has been huge reductions in emissions as great swathes of heavily polluting industry have been wiped out. Kyoto just about succeeded in its own, narrow terms, but due to one-off, entirely coincidental changes rather than anything to do with the treaty itself...The problem of climate change is one that will unfold over decades, so we have time on our side if we put the research effort in now. Another Kyoto-style deal is likely to be an expensive mistake.In Copenhagen, the city of Hans Christian Andersen, a global deal that arbitrarily seeks to cut emissions at the expense of future living standards would be an ugly duckling that will never become a swan.

We're all progressives now...

Quotes of the day "...How can you spot a communist sympathizer in the U.S. Congress? You can visit the website of the “Progressive Caucus” where, as of February 2009, more than 80 members of the House, including two from the Senate, self-identify themselves as progressives. “Progressive” was the term communists used after the McCarthy era. It is still in use today..." More from Alan Caruba at Warning Signs here...

"...The tragedy is that for seven years, politicians of all parties have refused to face up to Britain’s fast-looming energy gap because they have all been bewitched by 'the great green dream’, that we could somehow save the planet by generating much of our electricity from ‘renewables’, such as building thousands more wind turbines...Almost the only politician who realised this was John Hutton, the former energy minister, who last year reversed Government policy by announcing that we needed at least a dozen new nuclear and coal-fired power stations to fill the gap. As he starkly declared to the 2008 Labour conference: ‘No coal and no nuclear means no power, no future.’ Two weeks later, however, Hutton was moved to another department, and Britain’s energy policy was handed over to Ed Miliband, a ‘green’ zealot...more from Christopher Booker here...

...and finally (with H/T Theo Spark) ...An elephant asked a camel, "Why are your breasts on your back?" 'Well," said the camel, "I think that's an inappropriate question from somebody whose dick is on his face."

Lest we forget...

...where socialism can take us...on the 70th anniversary of the beginning of WW2...at 4:45 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1939, to be precise—the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein began to shell the Polish military base at Westerplatte. For the Germans, for the Poles, and for the British and French, who immediately declared war on Germany, this was the beginning of World War II. The Soviet Union, having signed a secret agreement with Nazi Germany, did not declare war but was itself preparing to invade Poland and the Baltic States. Which it did, two and a half weeks later, on Sept. 17... The former Allies prefer to remember the bits of the war—D-Day, for example—that contribute to their memory of the 1945 Triumph of Democracy, preferring to forget that the war's initial raison d'être, the independence of Poland and the freedom of Central Europe, was not really achieved until 1989... The majority of Russians, a recent poll shows, do not know that the USSR invaded Poland in 1939...more from Slate here...

...nor I would guess do the majority of the rest of us. Perhaps we all need to reflect on the fact that the Soviet Union today is still attempting to recover from decades of a corrupt ideology, and that Nazi Germany followed a similar course, taking the world down a road to hell...

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," Santayana's Law of Repetitive Consequences...

...and how does all this relate to climate change/global warming ?

...I don’t believe that the (U.S.) Administration’s sense of urgency is driven by Copenhagen. Copenhagen simply gives them another argument for swift passage of a bill – any bill. Instead, I think that they need to act quickly before:(a) Obama loses any more popular support(b) Additional data comes in confirming the fact that global temperatures have stopped rising(c) People have time to review the (Waxman Markey) bill and the facts.
We know that the bill is not about reducing global warming since even its supporters admit that it will have a negligible impact. We know that it’s not about raising money since the government is giving away most of the emissions rights. The most likely motive is to shift power to Washington – which is in line with the direction of the Administration’s other actions. Their strategy of moving quickly, attempting to curtail debate, and vilifying the opposition is also consistent with their actions in pushing for the stimulus package and for national health care. I think the goal in each of these cases has been/is to get something – anything – passed in order to get the federal foot in the door...more here...

The green/left on trial...cont...

...a trial that is ostensibly over "global warming" and the green eco-porn fantasy of Thermageddon. A trial though that in reality, would deliberate on green/left credibility. Little wonder they fear it so much...The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has shocked the global warming debate by its formal call to hold a public global warming trial to decide on the “evidence” that mankind is driving a climate catastrophe. The Chamber seeks to have a complete trial “complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.” Some are referring to the potential for a global warming trial as the “U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanting to put AGW creationism on trial.”
Brenda Ekwurzel of the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists, is discouraging the idea of a trial. This is the same Ekwurzel who claimed global warming made it “less cool” this summer... More significantly, it is the same Ekwurzel who badly lost a public debate over man-made climate fears in 2007...No wonder the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has called for a full trial on global warming claims. Desperation time has arrived for the promoters of man-made global warming fears, as the science of man-made climate fears continues to collapse. [Update: U.S. Govt Scientist: If climate 'trial' occurred 'only those with religious convictions of warming claims would continue to hold any support for man-made global warming': 'Falsehood cannot be sustained indefinitely' - August 26, 2009]...more from Climate Depot here...

...and further to the tragic and untimely death of Teddy Kennedy see 'Kennedy Curse' Claims Life Of 77-Year-Old Tumor-Riddled Binge-Drinker...at The Onion, here...

...and news just to hand...we learn that in deference to The Archbishop of Canterbury and The Royal Commission for Political Correctness, it was announced today that the local climate in the UK should no longer be referred to as "English Weather"
Rather than offend a sizable portion of the population, it will now be referred to as ‘Muslim Weather.’ In other words – ‘partly Sunni, but mostly Shi’ite’...H/T again to Slattsnews...

Iraq today...

...if any one feature typifies the political left (all right, all right almost everyone who enters politics) it is hypocrisy. And it is blatant hypocrisy on display that will guarantee green/left unpopularity and eventual demise. The internet and the vast network of file sharing and communication means that the left can never again posture and pretend and get away with it for long.

George W. Bush in comfortable retirement in Texas has been one of the left's most hated political figures. Yet, it is the left who claim a copyright on concern for human rights for all, and like to think they are the true "progressives" amongst us.

Surely then the left must be rejoicing in the recent progressive developments in Iraq, and regretting their hatred for the man whose policies and political principles ensured Iraq's liberation from dictatorship. George W. Bush will go down in history as a liberator of Iraq, and his opponents will be seen in the cold light of historical, objective examination as choosing to side with tyranny and oppression.

A month by month analysis of present day Iraq is carried out by The Brookings Institute. Its latest report is a thorough and fascinating snapshot of Iraq today and the hopes of its people. Among other facts, it's worth noting that under Saddam Hussein, prior to the invasion; there were NO commercial television stations and NO independent newspapers. By 2006, 54 commercial TV stations were operating and 268 independent newspapers and magazines were in circulation.
In 2003, there were 833,000 telephone subscribers. Today, there are 17.7 million cellular subscribers and 1.3 million landline users, In 2003 there were 4,900 internet subscribers, compared to 820,00 in April 2009...

These facts, together with nationwide polling, indicate that confidence for the future and support for Iraqi democracy is strong and growing stronger. Clearly then, Bush's war in Iraq was a war of liberation from a tyrant who deserved his fate. Not a war of liberation however, that the hypocritical left like to recognise or acknowledge...

...more from The Brookings Institute here...H/T Eric, at The Pool Bar...

Joke of the day...

...no not Tau Henare (left) ...
"An old guy's wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, "We're out of meat." The old guy blows his top. He yells, "I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you're out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . " A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, "Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things." The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, "Calm down and go home." The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, "What's the matter, are they out of meat?" "Worse than that," says the old guy, "they're out of bullets." P.J.O'Rourke, H/T Samizdata

A mighty totara has shot through...

...It’s a sad day. Ted Kennedy, lion of the left, has passed from this world. A vibrant melting pot of Americans of every persuasion mourn the loss, and hope to carry on his ideals in their own lives. I, too, shed a tear. With a lump in my throat, I have written a deeply felt eulogy for Senator Kennedy. Pardon the hastily penned thoughts, but the words came spilling out of me like a deluge...

From commentator Roissy in Washington...here... all about Chappaquaddick here...

...and from William Briggs... Now he is dead, but he will be lauded and remembered fondly, more because of his status than what he has accomplished. For we must recall the tale of the counterfactual: while it true that this man has produced some benefit, just as he has certainly caused much harm, we are forced to ask what better and what different could he have been had he, instead of joining the Senate, been farmed out to an ambassadorship in Latvia. These necessary ruminations will not be pleasant to the aristocracy and so they will be ignored...

...and Mark Steyn... As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo’s – but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not?

...and Quote of the day...from a group of scientists who scoff at the green/left's statement that "the science is settled..." the CLOUD experiment at CERN...

"...If a causal connection between GCR (galactic cosmic ray) intensity and low cloud cover were to be confirmed, it could have profound consequences for our understanding of the solar contributions to the current global warming. During the 20th century the Sun’s magnetic activity increased dramatically and the solar wind more than doubled in strength... As a consequence, the mean GCR intensity on Earth diminished by about 15%. The implied reduction in low cloud cover by about 1.3% absolute could have given rise to a radiative forcing of about +0.8 Wm−2 (3.3 · 10−3), which is comparable to the estimated total anthropogenic forcing of about +1.3 Wm−2...

The chains of pain...

...not the epic from Bob Geldof, but Climate Chains, which are being used by the green left to shackle capitalism. Rattle those chains and view the trailer of the about to be released movie ...
...An epic debate is soon to begin in the U.S. Senate. The proposed Cap-and-Trade legislation would have a far-reaching impact on your standard of living and give government a portal into every aspect of your life. The affordable, dependable and abundant energy upon which any great civilization is built is about to be rationed. Please make the time to view this short video trailer and share it with your friends...here...
...and an update (H/T and thanks to A Western Heart) on the enquiry into the Australian bushfires...
...Residents in one of the areas devastated on Black Saturday were not allowed to clear highly flammable, noxious tea tree on their land because it was classified as native vegetation by the local council, the royal commission into the bushfire disaster has been told. Peter Wiltshire, who suffered serious burns and damaged airways trying unsuccessfully to save his home at St Andrews on February 7, said yesterday the tea tree, known as burgan, was "extremely flammable and lets off gases in heat". Wildfire from burning burgan on a neighbouring property created enough radiant heat to cause a horsefloat at one end of his house to instantaneously burst into flame.But the local Nillumbik Shire Council stopped landowners clearing burgan without applying for permission, Mr Wiltshire said. "They call it native vegetation and we are not allowed to clear it without a permit. It is probably the most noxious and flammable material. It really is a pest and dangerous." ...more here...

If this is the only surfing you do today...

...you couldn't do any better than spend a few minutes with the brilliant Bill Whittle, and his expose of media and academic political correctness. H/T and thanks to Slattsnews. Have a look at this superb commentary. This is outstanding and startling... Here...
...A note too, on a rarely seen commodity in NZ politics; political principle. Rodney Hide, Minister of Local Government, offered to resign his ministerial post if a new Auckland "supercity" was created offering designated seats to Maori only. Such racial separatism Rodney Hide observed, was contrary to the principle of "one man, one vote." What he should have added also is that it is contrary to what the left like to refer to as our founding document; The Treaty of Waitangi. (A fact conveniently forgotten by Maori protesters as they brandish their taiaha in street protests.) As always, lefty PC hypocrites within the media, particularly the craven NZ Herald and TVNZ, follow their PC guidelines and depict Rodney Hide as a bullying blackmailer and populist, not a politician of conviction. What utter hypocritical bullshit !
But now, the left have a fantastic opportunity to use the provision for a citizen's initiated referendum to test public opinion on institutionalised apartheid in outeroa... C'mon you leftie hypocrite scumbags, show your courage and let the people of Auckland vote on the matter... Some hope. ( Cartoon from NotPC with thanks.)
(Note to Rodney Hide. Well done, let's see much more of the same. Let's also see a press release about the futility of an ETS. Didn't you say last year that AGW was "a hoax" ?)

Greens and global warming on trial...

From The LA Times...The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect."It would be evolution versus creationism," said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. "It would be the science of climate change on trial."...
Well no, Mr Kovacs. The Scopes trial was over an issue involving morality, racism and religion. This debate is purely scientific. It would be a definitive forum where the watching general public could view and listen to the competing arguments over the defining issues of our times. Bring it on...
...Exciting news ! More here... and from WuWT...

Do you support the idea of putting “global warming” on trial with the EPA?
After getting over 2200 responses over two days, I’ve closed the poll. Here are the results:
Yes 94% (2084 votes)
No 4% (87 votes)
Undecided 2% (51 votes)
Total Votes: 2222

...and an update from Climate Depot, here...

G'day cobber...

...while Kiwis don't like to seem smug, and have had to get used to failure and mediocrity quite a lot lately, they are naturally quite shy and would hesitate to talk to an Aussie about THE BLEDISLOE CUP, or even ask about THE ASHES. Meanwhile, Prime Ministers John Key and Kevin Rudd are doing a lot of talking, and are concerned about steering NZ and Australia ever closer politically. The MSM like to report on such issues as transtasman trade and travel and a new joint ANZAC rapid response force.They would rather overlook of course (apart from the esteemed Australian) the chaos unravelling in the backrooms over the question of climate change management. Here both governments are in a classic lose-lose scenario. Whatever they decide to do it will not, (and we know it, and they know it too) in any way whatsoever effect climate change. LOSE. Whatever they decide to do it will not be enough to placate the desperate and loopy greens and their loopier supporters. LOSE. Whatever they decide to do, it (unless they do nothing at all) will cost all of us dear in increased utility prices and taxes. LOSE LOSE. It is no wonder then, that in Australia the opposition National/Liberal coalition is unwinding, and in NZ, we have a farce worthy of Sir Humphry and Yes Minister, where green sounding sanctimonious platitudes and fence sitting have become an art form.

If you were a Green MP named Sue Bradford you'd want to cry over all this. And if you did, you'd want to weep bucketfuls of tears to wash away all the eggs and custard pie off your fat face. (For expats and foreigners, Bradford's attempt at subverting the Kiwi family via her private members bill has been rejected by a whopping 88% of participants in a referendum.) The greenest part of Ms Bradford today will be around her more than ample gills. But dry your eyes Sue my sweet, and tuck into some of that custard pie dripping off your chops, you know you want to...

Free Carbon Certificates ! Get 'em while they're hot !

Birthdays, anniversaries, special gift giving days...here's the answer...

... click to get your own certificate suitable for framing here...

Warmists...read this and weep...

...In a study sure to ruffle the feathers of the Global Warming cabal, Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has published a paper which proves that IPCC models are overstating by 6 times, the relevance of CO2 in Earth’s Atmosphere. Dr. Lindzen has found that heat is radiated out in to space at a far higher rate than any modeling system to date can account for.The global surface temperature record...has shown no statistically-significant “global warming”for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend.
More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “globalwarming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale...There are only a couple of conclusions to be made of this. Either the world has been misled by scientists working for the UN and IPCC due to faulty science, or faulty science has been deliberately used in a global scheme to generate tax revenues for the Governments instituting Cap and Trade Taxation policies.
Either way, the world has been the victim of some very bad science. The results of which can be seen in drastically reduced GDP in countries with the Cap and Trade laws in place, as well a a 5 - 10% decrease in standard of living for those citizens living there...all with little or no effect on emissions globally......more here...
SPPI Monthly CO2 Report: July 2009

It looks like they were right all along...so much for global warming...

... Newsweek on April 28th 1975 predicted a new Ice Age ...The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down... The evidence...has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it...A survey completed last year reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968...satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72...the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972...the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Other (scientists) regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City. Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery...some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve...and THIS MONTH from the US National Solar Observatory...
...But something is unusual about the current sunspot cycle. The current solar minimum has been unusually long, and with more than 670 days without sunspots through June 2009, the number of spotless days has not been equaled since 1933...The solar wind is reported to be in a uniquely low energy state since space measurements began nearly 40 years ago.Why is a lack of sunspot activity interesting? During the period from 1645 to 1715, the Sun entered a period of low activity now known as the Maunder Minimum, when through several 11- year periods the Sun displayed few if any sunspots. Models of the Sun’s irradiance suggest that the solar energy input to the Earth decreased during that time and that this change in solar activity could explain the low temperatures recorded in Europe during the Little Ice Age...
...and yet the hysterics of Planet Gore continue to insist "the science is settled", the planet is warming and rising sea levels and 1000 other plagues and pestilences will make large areas uninhabitable...bah ! humbug !