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I read with great interest an opinion piece in RIAN by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin called "A cold Spell Soon to Replace Global Warming." It opens with "Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" and based on Dr. Sorokhtin's analysis, and what this year's winter is like thus far, I'd say that is good advice.

Sorokhtin's piece focuses on the science behind the current warming trend and ongoing climate change, especially the solar cycle and the question of CO2. He also points out that the current warming trend began in the 17th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. It's a darn good piece out of Russia.

In his piece he writes:

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason-solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Much of this is covered in other papers and books, specifically (my favorite) Unstoppable Global Warming (Avery and Singer). Not sure why he missed variations in the Earth's orbit (According to Singer and Avery, it has its own VERY long cycle), but that is a minor nitpick, and falls neatly into the "etcetera" category. The salinity fluctuations are, however, a new one for me. It would be worth learning more about it. Since he is attached to the Oceanography Institute (Russia), this falls well into his area of expertise.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

The solar activity he is referring to is the sun spot activity cycles which impacts the amount of energy the sun gives off. The more sun spots, the greater solar activity is, the more luminosity hits the Earth. Fewer sun spots results in less activity. This also has a direct relation to the solar wind which influences the amount of cosmic rays hitting the Earth.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

I am not familiar with Svante, although it rings a bell in the back of my mind. Sorokhtin then compares the environmentalists that insist that the current warming trend is a result of man-caused pollution being like jousting with windmill's in a Quixotic fashion. What a wonderful analogy he came up with!

He goes on to point out the many flaws with the theory that it is man-generated hothouse gases causing the warming trend rather than natural forces. Read the entire piece for the full scope.

He is right on the money and in agreement with other works I have read by Avery, Singer, Michaels, Christi, and others.

It also corroborates the current trending being experienced this winter as it is the first one in my seven years in Minnesota that we have had snow on the ground for the entire month of December (about eight inches, currently) and the temperatures have cracked 32 degrees for only a few hours once since December 1st. In 2004, here in Minnesota, we were experiencing little snowfall and temps well into the 50s after Christmas

I guess Sorokhtin is one more scientist coming out of the closet and spoiling the so-called "consensus" on global warming science.

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Sorokhtin Natural Causes

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The amazing thing about the left is their propensity to stoop to name-calling those who disagree with them. Such is the case with the latest from hard-left Liberal Moonbat Dave Lindorff and his piece on the impact of Global Warming on the possible changes to the political landscape in the U.S., published in the Baltimore Chronicle recently.

Lindorff is a poster-child for showing how stupid, hateful, and power-mongering those on the hard-left really are. In his piece, he proclaims that despite the current warming trends and the hypothetical doom-and-gloom scenario pushed by Al Gore and the I.P.C.C. (which is subservient to that pillar of corruption, the United Nations), "there is a silver lining."

He goes on to illustrate that the areas most likely to succumb to the rising sea level are predominantly conservative regions, like Texas and other parts of the south East, and San Diego. We'll set aside the fact that the sea level rise of a few inches over the next few decades is unlikely to cause San Diego to be under water. Only Al Gore and Lindorff believe that the Earth will see a deluge of biblical proportions over the next few years. Even the IPCC isn't predicting as much of a rise in sea level as the Boracle is.

Lindorff then goes on with the Midwest:

Then there's the matter of the Midwest, which climate experts say is likely to face a permanent condition of unprecedented drought, making the place largely unlivable, and certainly unfarmable. The agribusinesses and conservative farmers that have been growing corn and wheat may be able to stretch out this doomsday scenario by deep well drilling, but west of the Mississippi, the vast Ogallala Aquifer that has allowed for such irrigation is already being tapped out. It will not be replaced.

This part is news to me. I don't know about the aquifers in most of the Midwest, but here in Minnesota, there are numerous aquifers that haven't even been tapped as yet. I find it hard to believe that the bulk of the Midwest is relying on only the Ogallala Aquifer. Also, no where in his diatribe does he cite who these "climate experts" are that are making such doomsday claims that much of the Midwest will be unfarmable. He also ignores the fact that it is the hard-working farming community that produces the food that Lindorff and his cronies on the Left put on their table. No farm land, no food.

Further, water management and irrigation practices constantly improve. Plus, should the Ogallala Aquifer run dry (unlike to happen in my daughter's lifetime, let alone mine), there are other, deeper aquifers that can be tapped.

Will there be another '30s style dustbowl as the Earth's climate warms? Maybe, but probably not as we've been able to more efficiently tap our underground water resources since that time, allowing efficient irrigation of crops, thus relieving farmers of the necessity of relying solely on rainfall to water their crops, and making desolate places like the San Joaquin Valley, an area that gets maybe 10 inches or so of rain a year, highly profitable farmland.

Lindorff goes on to point out that Southwest retirement communities are being hit with rising energy costs, which may well put them on the path of becoming ghost towns.

What is hilarious about this is Lindorff's stand:

There is a poetic justice to this of course. It is conservatives who are giving us the candidates who steadfastly refuse to have the nation take steps that could slow the pace of climate change, so it is appropriate that they should bear the brunt of its impact.

How about those on the Hard-Left, like Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, John Kerry, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and a host of other Hard-Left (and even some "moderate") Democrats who insist that the theory that global warming is man-caused, rather than a natural phenomenon, and are hell-bent to bankrupt working Americans by forcing them to pay higher energy costs while they sit on their laurels jetting to Bali for their CO2 rallies.

Al Gore, one of the biggest champions of "Cap and Trade," the shell game where power companies will be forced to purchase "carbon credits" from "green" power plants, such as wind turbines, owns Generations Investment Management, a firm dedicated to brokering such trades (and provides the Boracle with his carbon credits).

If the Hard-Left has its way, America will be pushed into second world status instead of world leadership, while reducing jobs, raising energy costs, and bringing us higher taxes, all of which will combine to significantly lower the American standard of living. Meanwhile, the wealthy liberals who are pushing this on us will continue to live a life of leisure, prestige, and privilege while telling those of us who have to work for a living (assuming we still have jobs) that we must conserve and use less of everything.

The capper in Lindorff's piece is when he states that conservatives should be denied any future say in government because, in his mind, we've screwed the world up.

The important thing is that we, on the higher ground both actually and figuratively, need to remember that, when they begin their historic migration from their doomed regions, we not give them the keys to the city. They certainly should be offered assistance in their time of need, but we need to keep a firm grip on our political systems, making sure that these guilty throngs who allowed the world to go to hell are gerrymandered into political impotence in their new homes.

There will be much work to be done to help the earth and its residents-human and non-human-survive this man-made catastrophe, and we can't have these future refugee troglodytes, should their personal disasters still fail to make them recognize reality, mucking things up again.

Based on this, Lindorff must be okay with silencing and disenfranchising the hard-left for all of the things they've done to screw up the world: Abandoning South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to communism in the '70s; abandoning the Shah of Iran thus allowing a totalitarian theocracy to be established in the Middle East that has been supplying terrorists with money, arms and training; hog-tying the nuclear industry by making it illegal to reprocess fuel rods, which has forced nuclear power plants to stock pile spent fuel rods rather than send them to other facilities that can reprocess the rods (like is done in France) and extract more energy and consequently reduce the amount of radioactive waste that needs to stored; not enforcing our immigration laws and allowing a huge influx of illegal aliens and then pushing for amnesty and citizenship for millions of people who do not respect our laws; providing nuclear technology to North Korea and then turning a blind eye as this totalitarian regime develops and tests its first nuclear weapon. I could go on and on listing all of the ignorant and dangerous decisions that have been foisted on America and the World by Hard-Left Liberal Democrats, but what would be the point? Most conservatives are aware of these issues, and Liberal/Progressives don't care.

As for Dave Lindorff, congratulations, you are the latest winner of the Moonbat Award.

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Moonbat Lindorff Global Warming

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Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore, at the U.N. sponsored conference on Climate Change may be undiplomatic enough to "name the elephant in the room," he is also able to prove, in one fell swoop, who the "jackass in the room" is.

From the Financial Times:

Al Gore savaged the US government's "obstructing" attitude and urged delegates at the UN conference on climate change to ignore Washington if necessary to pursue the "moral imperative" of a new global regime.

"My country is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," the former US vice-president told 2,000 of the 12,000 people attending the conference on Thursday. "[But] over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now."

Someone needs to inform the Boracle that winning the Nobel "Peace" Prize in Propaganda does not turn science fiction into science fact. Especially when the person receiving the propaganda award has a financial interest in the outcome of any talks on global warming (Generation Investment Management - "got carbon credits?").

Quite frankly, the U.S. is not, nor are Republicans, standing in the way of reducing carbon emissions. Coal burning plants are now cleaner than they were half a century ago, reducing emissions. Nuclear energy is cleanest and most economical means for generating electricity, but the Dems have hogtied the nuclear energy industry since the Carter administration, preferring to set up countries like North Korea with nuclear weapons at U.S. tax payer expense rather than easing the way of building new and modern nuclear reactors in the States; not to mention allowing for the reprocessing of fuel rods so as to reduce the amount of radioactive waste that power plants are now stockpiling.

Although the hard-left claims there is a "consensus" that the current warming trend is man caused, there is more scientific evidence coming to light everyday that indicates that the trend is, in fact, natural and not attributable to the extremely minor amount of trace gases, such as carbon dioxide, being dumped into the atmosphere.

The amazing thing is the amount of carbon dioxide that is being dumped into the atmosphere thanks to this Climate Summit. From Bloomberg:

Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.

The delegates each will produce an average 4.07 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or CO2, to reach the resort island 950 kilometers (600 miles) from Jakarta, according to estimates e- mailed to Bloomberg by the UN agency holding the conference.

Over 4 metric tons per attendee? Including Senator Barbara Boxer, champion of reducing said emissions? And Al "I need a paycheck" Gore? Okay, Gore probably dumped more CO2 on this junket, but then he owns Generation Investment management which supplies him with carbon credits, a product that that company deals in. No doubt the Boracle is writing the whole trip off as a business expense while he pushes his product line of carbon credits.

Now the Moonbats in Bali want us to believe that they can offset their emissions by planting trees, which take years to grow, and takes lots of, to absorb that much carbon. Then they forget to tell you that trees also produce CO2, though the decomposition of tree litter (leaves) and through photorespiration, which is the night time process trees go through. Offsetting one's emissions is nothing more than a shell game for people with the means (and in this case, via tax dollars) to continue to live a life of luxury and privilege while those of us who work for a living get stuck holding the bill.

As if the "Cap and Trade" shell game to tax working Americans isn't bad enough, here is what the U.N. is cooking up (from the EPW blog):

A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent "a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations."

I have no doubt that the hard-left in America will go along with this, despite the fact it goes against the U.S. Constitution and everything America stands for: No Taxation Without Representation! The U.N. has no taxing authority over the United States, its members are not elected, which is the baseline for representation when it comes to taxation, and any move by the U.N. should be met with a veto by the Security Council.

Such a global tax would be more harshly applied against the United States as a punitive move against Americans, forcing our energy prices to increase even more.

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Bali Carbon Tax Cap and Trade UN Al Gore Boracle

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Last week, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed from its committee a bill that would implement "The Gore Initiative", or, more formally known as "Cap and Trade" which would put limits on the amount of carbon dioxide energy companies can produce, and companies exceeding these government determined levels would be forced to either pay fines or purchase carbon offsets from greener companies; most likely these carbon offsets will be brokered through a company such as Al Gore's Generation Investment Management.

Essentially what this will do is cause increases to the cost of producing electricity while at the same time providing subsidies to less efficient and more costly production means such as wind turbines and solar energy. The end result is that working Americans will be forced to pay for these increases in costs as these expenses will be passed on to the consumer in their electric bills.

Business and Media reports that the costs of this "Cap and Trade" initiative, should it become law, is set at $4 to 6 Trillion over 40 years, which works out to about $500 per year for every person in living in the U.S., including your children. That is a huge cost increase for working Americans to incur.

The irony of the passage of this Global Warming bill from committee is that it took place during a week in which many parts of the Northern United States received record setting snowfall.

From Maine Today:

Portland tied the record for the date set in 1890 with 8.5 inches of snow on Monday, according to Bob Marine of the National Weather Service.

Elsewhere, Marshfield in Washington County had 18 inches of snow, Lakeville in Penobscot County 17 inches, Island Falls in Aroostook County 16, Brassau Lake near Moosehead 15.7, Farmington 14.7 inches and Andover 13, the weather service said.

Then there is Business and Media:

Nothing inspires taking on the "planetary emergency" of global warming like the first snow of the winter in Washington, D.C.

Ain't that the truth.

Even here in Minnesota we have more snow on the ground than we have had in the last five or six years. And it is staying cold enough for it to persist. Not surprising as temperatures have been struggling to break into double digits, and most mornings I am greeted with the outdoor thermometer registering ZERO, and occasionally in single digit negatives, making this the coldest December I have experienced in my seven years in Minnesota.

From Reuters on Boston:

New England dug out on Friday from a record-setting storm that dumped 10 inches of snow on Boston, more than the city typically sees in the entire month of December.

Even North Dakota has reported record snow falls. From KXMB:

The National Weather Service says the Grand Forks airport had 8.1 inches of snow yesterday, setting a record for the date. And Fargo set a record with 5.9 inches.

The previous mark in both cities was set back in 1926.

Grand Forks and Fargo also had record snowfall last Saturday.

From VOA News:

"We are facing a crisis that will hit our children and our grandchildren the hardest if we do not act now. Not to act would be wrong, cowardly, and irresponsible," said Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, chairwoman of the committee.

Yep, higher energy costs and a lower standard living for working Americans while Senator Boxer, Moonbat extraordinaire, jets off to Bali for the big climate conference, dumping even more of that evil gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere and, according to Boxer, contributing to Global Warming. Well, at least it is warm and sunny in Bali unlike most of North America.

What a week, and it only gets better.

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Loons Gone Wild Energy Carbon Tax Cap and Trade Senate

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The "man caused global warming" zealots are really showing their (lack of) brain power. This time, from Australian Barry Walters, who claims to be a doctor (of what, I don't know) is pushing a plan to apply a birth levy of $5000 (Ausie) for each child a couple has after the first two, and then the couple would be taxed an additional $800 per year for the lifetime of the child. I'm not joking, this guy is serious about it. His letter was published in the online version of the Medical Journal of Australia.

What then should we do as environmentally responsible medical practitioners? We should point out the consequences to all who fail to see them, including, if necessary, the ministers for health. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a "Baby Levy" in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the "polluter pays" principle.2 Every family choosing to have more than a defined number of children (Sustainable Population Australia suggests a maximum of two3) should be charged a carbon tax that would fund the planting of enough trees to offset the carbon cost generated by a new human being. The average annual CO2 emission by an Australian individual is about 17 metric tons,4 including energy usage. As the biomass of trees in a mature forest sequesters about 6 metric tons of CO2 per hectare (104 m2) per year,4,5 each child born should be offset by planting 4 hectares of trees, to allow for the time they take to reach maturity, and attrition through crop losses, bushfires, dieback and so on. This infers a levy per child of at least $5000 at birth (to purchase the land needed and plant trees) and an annual tax of $400-$800 thereafter for the life of the child (for maintenance of the afforestation project) (based on 1990 figures,4 and probably much more now).

First off, CO2 has not been proven to be the main contributor of the current warming trend of the Earth. It's a theory, and, unlike evolution, it is a bad theory at best. Clearly, this is yet one more attempt to take money from people, their hard earned dollars, in order to push a social agenda based on BAD science.

But this champion moonbat of the left gets even better by suggesting that the use of a variety of contraceptives and even sterilization should be rewarded with carbon credits.

By the same reasoning, contraceptives, intrauterine devices, diaphragms, condoms and sterilisation procedures should attract carbon credits for the user and the prescriber that would offset their income taxes, and lead to rewards for family planning clinics and hospitals that provide such greenhouse-friendly services.

I noticed he left out granting carbon credits for getting an abortion. Must be an oversight on his part.

He closes his piece in the MJA by pushing the "citizen of the world" line (I am not a citizen of the world, but a citizen of the U.S. of A.!) and that Australia (and assumedly the rest of the world) should adapt the same population controls of India and communist China.

A response to the piece published on News.com has this:

Australian Family Association spokeswoman Angela Conway said it was ridiculous to blame babies for global warming.

"I think self-important professors with silly ideas should have to pay carbon tax for all the hot air they create," she said. "There's masses of evidence to say that child-rich families have much lower resource consumption per head than other styles of households.

Sounds like a plan to me. Can we add Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore to the list?

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Loons Gone Wild Walters Carbon Dioxide Baby Tax

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I wanted to write about this report on Global Warming when I read about it last Friday, however my time to write was severely curtailed over the weekend. Family comes first!

Canada.com Financial Post has a piece on the impact that alignment of the major planets in our solar system may have on the Earth's climate. According to Rhodes Fairbridge of Columbia University, when the planets Jupiter and Saturn are closely aligned in their orbits, they shift the solar system's center of gravity, and this has an influence on solar behavior. From Canada.com:

Changes in sunspots and other solar activity, scientists have realized for more than two centuries, correlate closely with the climate of Earth, explaining the ice ages and periods of great warming. But what, Dr. Fairbridge wondered, causes these changes in our sun?

The answer, he discovered with the help of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lies largely in the solar system's centre of gravity. At times, the sun is at the solar system's centre of gravity. Most often, this is not the case-- the orbit of the planets will align planets to one side or another of the sun. Jupiter, the planet with by far the largest mass, most influences the solar system's centre of gravity. When Uranus, Neptune and especially Saturn -- the next largest planet -- join Jupiter on one side of the solar system, the solar system's centre of gravity shifts well beyond the sun.

The sun's own orbit, he found, has eight characteristic patterns, all determined by Jupiter's position relative to Saturn, with the other planets playing much lesser roles. Some of these eight have orderly orbits, smooth and near-circular. During such orbits, solar activity is high and Earth heats up. Some of the eight orbits are chaotic, taking a loop-the-loop path. These orbits correspond to quiet times for the sun, and cool periods on Earth. Every 179 years or so, the sun embarks on a new cycle of orbits. One of the cooler periods in recent centuries was the Little Ice Age of the 17th century, when the Thames River in London froze over each winter. The next cool period, if the pattern holds, began in 1996, with the effects to be felt starting in 2010. Some predict three decades of severe cold.

This is interesting as I was unaware that such variations in the solar cycle existed. Shifting the gravitational center of the system in respect to the sun would be a lot like the influence that the Moon has on the Earth's tides, only instead of the Earth's tides it influences solar activity.

How much the gravitational effect that the various planets have on solar activity remains to be seen. It does indicate yet one more factor that the Al Gores of the world neglected to account for in their claims that global warming is caused by CO2 emissions. How many more variables unaccounted for remain is unknown and we may never learn all of the factors that influence the Earth's ever-changing climate.

The universe is a complex system. Perhaps that is why there are number of papers by solar scientists indicating cosmic influences on the Earth's climate are on the rise.

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Sunspots Fairbridge Jupiter Climate

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Global Warming and the Chicken Littles at the U.N. are pushing the release of the latest IPCC report that is supposed to release a summary of the thousands of pages of scientific papers on the subject of Global Warming. Yvo de Boer of the U.N.'s IPCC has stated that it is "criminally irresponsible" to ignore the urgency of Global Warming. In other words, if the U.S. continues to refuse to ratify Kyoto and subsequent emissions control treaties, we're "criminally irresponsible."

From Yahoo News:

Environmentalists and authors of the report expected tense discussions on what to include and leave out of the document, which is a synthesis of thousands of scientific papers. A summary of about 25 pages will be negotiated line-by-line this week, then adopted by consensus.

So we have a bunch of folks at the U.N., many of whom have an axe to grind with the U.S. who are going to decide what information on global warming will be included in this "synthesis" of scientific papers, and what will be suppressed. I am willing to bet that the vast material that will be included will be material claiming it's "our fault" that the Earth's climate is changing, while papers that prove that factors such as sun spots and the solar wind, variations of the Earth's tilt and orbit about the Sun which play a significant role in climate change, will be censored out of the final documents. It will suppress facts such as the ice growth on Mont Blanc, the Greenland ice sheet (where nearly 300' thick sheet of ice formed to cover a squadron of aircraft forced down there in WW2), as well as expanding ice in most of Antarctica, while the Antarctic peninsula where ice is receding accounts for only 3% of that region will, no doubt, be heavily cited.

If the U.N. and the IPCC were a deliberative body dedicated to the truth, it would not seek to censor out information that disproves their political agenda of seeking to control mankind. Of course, the U.N. being the corrupt organization that it has been allowed to become, this comes as no surprise.

This latest document is supposed to "sum up the scientific concensus" on the current state of Global Warming: It's Man produced carbon dioxide. Never mind the conflicting data that has been produced over the last 30 years. Never mind that there isn't a scientific consensus on the subject. Forget about the fact that the computer models used to produce the results are only as good as the data used, and that the parameters for such models can be manipulated to return the desired results (the ultimate in "garbage in, garbage out").

And, according to this report, the IPCC has "established that the climate has begun to change because of the greenhouse gases emitted by humans," according to Chicken Little de Boer.

The fact of the matter is there are a number of theories and the IPCC has established NOTHING. The Earth's climate is cyclical and there are millions of variables involved, probably more than we shall ever know. The only thing about global warming provable as being a scientific fact is that the Earth has warmed slightly (0.8 degrees Celcius) since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.

Avery and Singer showed in their book, Unstoppable Global Warming that increases in carbon are a result of increased temperature, not the other way around as Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore and the Moonbats at the U.N. would have us believe.

Which ever theory you subscribe to, whether it is Man caused carbon emissions or the result of the natural cycle of the Universe, the IPCC owes it to humanity to publish all of the data regardless of how it fits into their agenda, not just that which supports their agenda while suppressing that which contests their claims. Anything less than that is "criminally irresponsible." Of course, we are talking about the U.N. here, which is famous for such scandals such as "food for sex" in Africa and various pre-Liberation oil deals with Iraq, so I won't hold my breath waiting for that organization to do anything other than push its political agenda on the world.

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IPCC United Nations Carbon Dioxide

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I am not surprised to learn that the Hillary Political Juggernaut is planting questions at open forums. I am surprised that they are admitting to it.

FoxNews has a report on this admission by Clinton staffers that state that they planted questions in a townhall forum in Iowa. From the FoxNews report:

"After her speech, Clinton accepted questions. But according to Grinnell College student Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff '10, some of the questions from the audience were planned in advance. 'They were canned,' she said. Before the event began, a Clinton staff member approached Gallo-Chasanoff to ask a specific question after Clinton's speech. 'One of the senior staffers told me what [to ask],' she said.

"Clinton called on Gallo-Chasanoff after her speech to ask a question: what Clinton would do to stop the effects of global warming. Clinton began her response by noting that young people often pose this question to her before delving into the benefits of her plan.

"But the source of the question was no coincidence — at this event 'they wanted a question from a college student,' Gallo-Chasanoff said."

It seems odd that with all of the brain-washed kids out there these days, Hillary still has to plant questions on the topic of global warming in order to push her energy agenda which includes the trading of carbon credits ala the Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore plan where the wealthy continue to live as they do in mansions that use far more carbon-based energy in per month than the average American uses in a year, while the middle class who can't afford to buy carbon credits get stuck footing the bill.

What I especially like is her plan that all Federal buildings be carbon emission free. That must mean they will shut down all Federal buildings and eliminate all Federal jobs.

Hillary also claims that her plan will create 5 million jobs. The only jobs government creates are government jobs, so she must intend on expanding government by that much, which is too much, especially since the average American will be forced to pay for all of that through increased taxes.

If Hillary has to stoop to planting shills in an audience in order to advance her cause, then that must mean there is something dreadfully wrong about her "cause."

And how will Iowa respond to the fact that Hillary has to have these shills in their midst?

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Hillary, Iowa, Townhall

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Debra Saunders over at the SF Gate, and picked up by the Star Tribune, has a lot to say about Barbara Boxer and Global warming. It's a fine piece and I encourage reading it.

Sen. Barbara Boxer of California delivered a speech in the Senate last week in which she linked global warming to the San Diego wildfires, Darfur, the imminent loss of the world's polar bears and even a poor 14-year-old boy who died from "an infection caused after swimming in Lake Havasu," because its water is warmer.

Forget arson. Forget genocide. Forget nature. There is no tragedy that cannot be placed at the doorstep of global-warming skeptics.

I missed Boxer's speech, but I am not surprised by her claims that all that is bad in the world right now can be blamed on Global warming and, consequently, on America as it is the biggest producer of greenhouse gases alleged to be causing the current warming trends (despite the volumes of scientific evidence to the contrary!).

Saunders enlightens us to some history on Boxer's stand on Global Warming: Boxer was one of 95 senators that voted in support of a resolution directing then President Clinton NOT to sign on to any global warming treaty (Kyoto!). Now she has changed her tune, and she has done so with a vengeance.

There is also the ongoing battles between Boxer and Inhofe on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe strikes me as someone who looks at the facts and doesn't eliminate those that do not fit the conclusions he wants to push.

Last month, Inhofe took on the Al Gore suggestion that polar bears are in peril because of global warming. Inhofe pointed to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services estimates that show the polar bear population at about 20,000 to 25,000 bears -- up from the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 polar bears in the 1950s and 1960s.

The polar bear population, much like the timber wolf and bald eagle, has been on the rise, despite global warming. Yet Boxer is cited as claiming otherwise:

Boxer rejected Inhofe's claim that there are more polar bears, selectively citing the "best-studied population" of Canada's western Hudson Bay that found a 22 percent reduction of polar bears from 1987 to 2004. Then she referred to a World Conservation Union prediction that the polar bear population will drop by 30 percent by 2050

Of course for the area that Boxer cites to prove her point is accurate FOR THAT AREA. That is not sufficient to make a global claim when other data shows just the opposite.

Saunders mentions the new book by Bjorn Lomborg called "Cool It, the Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," which mentions the polar bear population studies, and what Saunders cites from his book also refutes the Boxer/Gore claim that polar bears are heading towards extinction. I'll have to add this book to my reading list.

The bottom line isn't a matter of whether or not the Earth's temperature is climbing and that the climate is changing. It is! We can debate the causes of the changes on end, as long as scientific fact is fully included and recognized in the debate. But to use scare-mongering tactics and blaming all of the Earth's woes on global warming doesn't do anybody any good. Unless you are running against Boxer when she comes up for re-election in 2010. This could provide plenty of ammunition to a GOP opponent looking to unseat Boxer.

Let's face it: fear-mongering makes good press and plays well to the Leftist agenda while scientific fact is forced to take a backseat.

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The editorial staff of the Red Star Tribune ran an editorial piece about Al Gore and his recent Nobel Peace Prize for his work in propaganda. In it, they claim the Boracle can do more good outside the beltway rather than reentering the political arena, while blasting at conservatives critical of the award as being naysayers.

Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize has set off a firestorm of commentary, from both liberals and conservatives. While his prize is well-deserved, despite right-wing naysaying, the country would be better served by Gore remaining outside Beltway politics.

Actually, Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore does more damage by staying out of the race. Why? The answer will become clear in a minute.

Some conservative pundits complained about the relevancy of a peace prize for work on climate change. With a little knowledge of political behavior, however, it's easy to predict how a shifting climate will change natural resources and complicate international relations. When some areas of the world dry up, inhabitants will migrate elsewhere, bringing conflict in their wake.

Yes, the relevancy is highly questionable. The Boracle's An Inconvenient Truth was more political propaganda than science, and much of the science reported in it was erroneous with even more scientific facts ignored, just as was done in the latest IPCC report. Yep, the climate is changing, however that is nothing new. The Earth's climate has undergone change since the beginning of time and will continue to do so until the end of time. People will move with the resources, just as they have done in the past. That's just the way things work.

The science of global climate change survived vicious attacks on its credibility (in part due to the consensus of nearly all scientists familiar with the issue). Backers of the big polluters are now trying to assassinate the character of the messenger. [By] staying out of the political arena, [Gore] will deprive the cynics of claiming [his] work is for personal gains in power. ...

"Credibility (in part due to the consensus of nearly all scientists familiar with the issue)"? What credibility is their when they ignore the ice core samples that cover hundreds of thousands of years of climate data? Or the impact of sun spot activity on the climate? And a host of other factors? As for the consensus? What consensus is there? Check here and here for an update on the so called "scientific consensus". There is a consensus that the climate is changing, but not on the cause.

The piece also gets it wrong that the Boracle deprives those who disagree with him on the cause of the current warming trend that this is about personal power. I don't think any one has claimed he is doing this for personal power. However his staying out of the political arena allows him to steer clear of open debate on the issue and having to back up is claims when faced with real scientific data.

Elder statesmen are freed from the constraints of facing reelection. Hence, they may be candid about what they believe. People with vested interests in issues rarely give an accurate portrayal, and elected officials always have a vested interest in political matters.

Sure, he can be candid about his beliefs, but is he giving us an scientifically accurate analysis? One thing the piece is right about is that people with vested interests "rarely give an accurate portrayal" on the issues they are involved with. The same is true with Al gore and his carbon credit business:

By staying clear of the political arena, Gore does more damage in that he is able to maintain his ongoing conflict of interest where carbon emissions is concerned (through Generation Investment Management) and not have to defend his claims in open debate. a double win for the Boracle. Not bad for a failed presidential candidate.

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Looks like the Global Warming Loons are at it again, this time Downunder and encouraging eating roo meat instead of beef.

From Herald Sun

The controversial call to cut down on beef and serve more of the national symbol on our dinner plates follows a report on curbing greenhouse gas emissions damaging the planet.

Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham urged Aussies to substitute some red meat for roo to help reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas.

Something to think about: raising more kangaroos for human consumption in place of cattle will not do much, if anything, to reduce the amount of green house gas emissions. They will have to raise significantly more of the critters to match the consumable output of a good steer, and it doesn't taste as good as a classic t-bone steak. Nor is a leg of roo as appealing as a leg of lamb.

It also coincides with recent calls from climate change experts for people in rich countries to reduce red meat and switch to chicken and fish because land-clearing and burping and farting cattle and sheep were damaging the environment.

Chickens don't pass gas? That's news to me. Try riding your bike past a poultry farm and see how nice it smells. Okay, pigs smell worse than poultry.

I like chicken, fish, turkey, duck, and so on. But how much of the land does grazing live stock damage? I wish I had a copy of the report that shows that a significant amount of the land used for pasturing cattle is ill-suited for row crops like tomatoes.

As for eating roo instead of red meat, I've had roo. It's okay but it ain't beef.

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Just when we thought it wasn't possible for the Nobel Peace Prize to become even less relevant than when it was after being awarded to Jimmy Carter (the man who brought us a totalitarian theocracy in Iran, fostered Islamic Terrorism, and helped arm North Korea with nuclear weapons), the International Peace Research Institute has announced that it has nominated Gore for the Peace Prize for his work on Global Warming.

Why would they award the Peace Prize to one of the biggest contributors to Global Warming, the man with the carbon footprint the size of Mount Everest, is beyond me. Political expediency does come to mind.

From Times Online:

"A prerequisite for winning the Nobel peace prize is making a difference and Al Gore has made a difference," said Boerge Brende, a former Norwegian environment minister who nominated Gore and Watt-Cloutier.

"I think they are likely winners this year," said Stein Toennesson, director of Oslo's International Peace Research Institute. The winner will receive $1.5m (£750,000) in prize money.

It sounds to me more of a case of building on the fear that it is man-caused carbon emissions causing global warming rather than on the natural cycles of the Earth, Sun, and solar system, as being the reason to give the Boracle the Peace Prize. It is a blatant attempt to further legitimize a badly formed theory for the causes of Global Warming over the vast amount of research being done that proves a different theory as being the real cause of the current warming trend.

The article has a couple of extremely biased statements in it:

Global temperatures will rise 2.5C within the next century even if the world hits its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, according to the scientist leading research into the issue.

Okay, they are potentially half-right: temperatures are likely to increase even if greenhouse emissions are cut (no thanks to Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore). The problem is the use of "will rise." This is all theory not fact. Will temperatures rise 2.5C? Maybe. But we won't know until 2100, and there is a likelihood that the Earth will go through a slight cooling trend before then due to cycles in sun spot activity. To claim that it is a fact that temperatures "will rise 2.5C" is very biased and bad reporting.

Consequences could include widespread starvation, as farm yields fall 50% in parts of Africa, water shortages for 300m and the destruction of 20-30% of species.

More bias and missing quite a few points.

Widespread starvation and drops in farm yields in Africa will be offset by the agricultural production in northern regions of Canada, Europe, Asia, and even Greenland will become farmable again as it was during the last major warming phase: the Middle Ages (or Viking Age). With greater farming capacity offsetting the potential reduced farming capacity in areas that become to hot and arid, combined with better/faster transportation of goods, starvation may well not happen, unless we allow those many corrupt regimes in Africa to continue to exist (the main cause of starvation in Africa is corrupt governments, not lack of food supplies).

Water shortages can also be counterbalanced by building desalination plants to provide fresh water for drinking, bathing, and watering crops.

As for the destruction of 20-30% of species, this is an unknown but dubious claim. Just a few days ago a number of new species of plants and animals were discovered in Vietnam. Will Global Warming also trigger the rise of other new species? Will the species that do go extinct do so as a result of Global Warming (doubtful) or the activities of man (like the dodo bird or golden frog)? Or will they merely migrate along with the changing climate?

If Al Gore is given the Nobel Peace Prize, then it will be clear that the International Peace Research Institute is no longer interested in promoting Peace in the world, but rather pushing a politicized agenda on humanity.

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Business must not be going to well for Al Gore's Generation Investment Management. That's the London-based company he formed that deals in carbon offsets and provides him with his own set so he can claim to be "carbon neutral."

Why do I say this? Because Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore is back in the news pushing for the U.S. and other nations to adopt mandatory restrictions on carbon emissions. Of course is such happens he stands to make some good financial gains through the dealing in carbon credits.

It's bad enough that Congressman Dingell is calling to eliminate the mortgage interest deductions on houses over 3000 square feet, something that won't impact the Al Gores of the world as they don't have mortgages and have to struggle to make ends meet, but it will impact Midwestern homeowners that have finished basements of any size under their house.

From the Financial Times:

"This is an emergency," Mr Gore told the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative. "I think that the key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming … I think what we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this."

A "global Marshall plan?" Global poverty? Okay, first off the best way to fight global poverty is to get rid of all the dictatorships and end all forms of socialism. Both stifle freedom (look at Iran, North Korea, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and the list goes on). When people have access to the same kind of liberties that our Founding Fathers had here in North America, and they have the ability to achieve without the shackles of big government weighing them down, poverty can come to an end on a global scale.

As for reducing global warming, there isn't anything mankind can do to slow down a natural process. There are many factors known to influence the warming of the Earth's climate that are not related to carbon emissions, include sunspot activity.

There is a lot of material in the FT piece. I just wish that Al Gore would pick up and read a science book before spouting off about how his company isn't doing well in the carbon offset market.

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The Dems are going crazy over Global Warming. with Rep. Dingell (D-MI) leading the charge by proposing a 50 cent excise tax increase on gasoline, phasing out mortgage interest deductions for homes over 3,000 square feet in size (supposedly to fight suburban sprawl), carbon tax of $50 per ton (watch your energy bill go up), all in the name of combating green house gases that some people wrongly theorize is causing the current warming trend.

Earth to Dingell, ever read a science book?

He calls these tax increases "fair" as it will mainly fall on 10% of Americans, mainly those people in the upper-end of the middle class.

This type of extremely taxation over a scientific fraud not only goes against the grain of what is best for America, it will also cripple the economy. A lot of people who have busted their behinds to afford a nice home to raise their families will be forced to sell their homes, most likely at substantial losses as they will no longer be able to afford the increased tax burden brought on by removing the deduction for mortgage interest. (For disclosure, yes, there is a high probability I will be impacted by this, because, although my home is 2100 sq. ft. in size, it also has a full walkout basement. And I am by no means wealthy.) If you think the house market is bad now, just wait until you have a few hundred thousand nice houses tossed on the market because the owners are being taxed out of their homes.

This whole global warming thing has gone too far. It has been clear to me that it is nothing more than a excuse to raise our taxes. Now the Dems are coming out of the closet and have declared war on the American Middle Class.

Because, let's face it, if you think Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards or any of these other filthy rich owners of multi-million dollar homes will be impacted by the phase-out of mortgage interest, forget it. Do you really think these people carry mortgages on those homes? Or will there be built in loopholes that will allow them to become exempt?

From Washington Post:

A carbon tax would impact everything from the cost of electricity to winter heating and add to the cost of gasoline and other motor fuels. But economists say a cap on carbon also would raise these costs as burning fossil fuels becomes more expensive.

If the Dems are serious about reducing carbon emissions, then they should first look into eliminating their multi-million dollar homes then remove the barriers to building new modern nuclear power plants and allow for the reprocessing of fuel rods.

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It's amazing how so many "world leaders" ignore scientific fact and latch on to fantasy. so it is with Ban Ki-moon, current chief of the U.N. and global warming. He is now calling the case for global warming beyond any doubt, despite the fact that there is no scientific consensus on the causes of global warming and the fact that of the carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere every year only about 2.5% is attributable to the activities of mankind.

From BreitBart:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told an unprecedented summit on climate change Monday that "the time for doubt has passed" and a breakthrough is needed in global talks to sharply reduce emissions of global-warming gases.

"The U.N. climate process is the appropriate forum for negotiating global action," Ban told assembled presidents and premiers, an indirect warning against what some see as a U.S. effort to open a separate negotiating track.

If, as Ban stated, "the time for doubt has passed," then let's be sure we have our scientific ducks in a row and base our actions on what is provable and not what is thought could happen. For a theory to be valid, it must take into account all scientific data that is available and evaluate from there; it should not be done in such a fashion as the IPCC report where substantial amounts of data were either ignored or eliminated in order to come to the conclusion that you want to prove. That's the Al Gore way of doing things, not the scientific way.

As for the claim that "the U.N climate process is the appropriate forum," according to whom? The U.N. is dominated by dictators, communist and socialist regimes that don't believe in freedom and have a horrendous human rights record. The fact that the U.S wants to run its own forum on global warming should be embraced. We are still a sovereign nation; other nations invited are also sovereign nations; and it is the way free peoples operate.

Rather than accept treaty obligations, Bush has urged industry to cut emissions voluntarily, and emphasizes research on clean-energy technology as one answer.

First off, we are not under any treaty obligations in regards global warming; we never signed off on Kyoto, therefor, no obligations. I'm not excited about China being a participant as they are one of the greatest totalitarian regimes that has murdered 10s of millions of people. But I am not the one organizing the event.

The Bush tactic, urging industry to voluntarily cut emissions, is an example of how things are done in a free society.

The U.N. summit follows a series of reports by Pachauri's U.N. scientific network that warned of temperatures rising by several degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and of a drastically changed planet from rising seas, drought and other factors, unless nations rein in greenhouse gases.

Earth to U.N.: Guess what, the planet is constantly changing. This has been going on since the beginning of time. The Earth is not the same as it was during the Viking Age when the Earth's climate was significantly warmer than it is today; it is warmer today than it was 200 years ago during the Little Ice Age. This is normal.

Cutting the measly 2.5% of man-caused portion of greenhouse gases, even eliminating it altogether, will have a net impact on global warming of so close to zero as to be meaningless.

The article wraps up by claiming that the Earth's temperature has risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, but fails to note that most of that took place prior to 1950. It also notes that the sea level has risen 6.6 inches. Has anyone, aside from scientists, actually noticed?

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The Senate EPW runs a good website on global warming that I don't read anywhere often enough. This week they have an article on a paper being published that shows that "man-made global warming" is NOT a scientific consensus. In fact, the article points out that less than half of all peer reviewed publications support the U.N.-Al Gore position that it is our fault that the Earth is getting warmer.

From Michael Asher's piece on Daily Tech:

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

According to the piece, there is a very small margin between those papers that explicitly accept and those that explicitly reject the Al Gore position on global warming. Even playing loosy-goosy by claiming the middle ground implicitly supports "man-made global warming" you still don't get anything resembling a consensus on global warming.

The article also points out that of all of the published papers in the last several years there is only one that claims that there will be catastrophic consequences due to "man-made global warming." That's probably the paper the social engineers who brought us the IPCC report read.

Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." The introductory "Summary for Policymakers" -- the only portion usually quoted in the media -- is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations. By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself.

I think that this last is something many people are unaware of: that the reports quoted as touring the "consensus" and the "90% likely" claim were not written by climate scientists but by politicians. In other words, the "Summary for Policy Makers" was written by and for policy makers. This is also pointed out in the Avery/Singer book, as well as other shortcomings to the IPCC reports, such as charts of scientific data modified in a way to so as to support the climate alarmist viewpoint.

On the EPW site there is another article posted last week on new peer-reviewed publications that shoots down the "man-made" global warming madness.

"Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust," declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned "in one fell swoop" the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled "Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth's Climate System," was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. (LINK)

"Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of ~ 1.0 K by 2100 A.D." Dr. Wilson wrote in a note to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee on August 19, 2007. Wilson, a former operations astronomer at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore MD, was referring to the trillions of dollars that would be spent under such international global warming treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

"Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a doubling of CO2 were far too high i.e. 2 - 4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase for a doubling of CO2," he added.

It goes on to point out that0.7K of that warming has already taken place, thus leaving a mere 0.4K of warming that can be predicted from CO2 forcing, providing that CO2 levels continue to increase to the point where it has doubled to roughly 560 parts per million, That's a very small fraction of a percent of the atmosphere. This is in keeping with scientific understanding that CO2 loses its capacity to force temperature increases as it grows in abundance in the atmosphere.

This second article on the EPW website goes into a lot of other material that proves that the current warming trend ain't our fault, including a little talked about fact that of the 0.038% of the atmosphere that is CO2, only 2.75% is derived from human activity. That means of the 383 ppm of atmospheric CO2, only 10.5ppm is caused by man. Talk about insignificant!

One more quote from the article, and I would encourage reading the entire piece:

In May 2007, the "father of meteorology" Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin, dismissed fears of increased man-made CO2 in the atmosphere.

"You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide," Bryson, who has been identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world, said. (LINK) "All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it's absurd. Of course it's going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we're coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air," Bryson added.

Bryson is right on the money. Just as the Earth cooled down after the Medieval Warming Period (Viking Age) as it entered the Little Ice Age, so it is with the Modern Warming Period. Solar activity, sunspot cycles, the Earth's tilt and variations in its orbit, and so many other factors, all play a role in the ongoing changes in climate, and all are ignored by the global warming fear mongers.

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Al Gore is back in the news making waves on the global warming debate. He is now claiming that those scientists that put forth research materials that prove that the current climate warming trend is predominantly due to outside forces, such as the sun spot activity, the solar wind and cosmic rays are similar to the people who were poo-pooing claims that tobacco causes cancer. There is a huge difference between these sets of claims, and Al Gore has a responsibility to not use such silly and irrelevant comparisons.

From MyWay News:

"There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10 million a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community," Gore said at a forum in Singapore. "In actuality, there is very little disagreement."

Certainly there isn't in Al Gore's mind. However, for anyone who is actually following the debate and reading the science behind global warming, the general concensus is that it ain't man's fault.

In the piece, gore claims that there is a program that pays $10,000 for each article published that counters the false-claims that it is man-made carbon dioxide causing global warming. If so, when do I get a check? I could use the money. Gore continued, "They're trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools." That's not hard to do, and gore does an admirable job doing so without anybody else's help. After all, we are talking about the man who invented the Internet.

The World Climate Report has pegged Al gore to a tee. As more and more scientific material is released proving that the current climate warming is a natural phenomenon independent of what mankind is doing, Gore has chosen to take on even more scare tactics, even using Venus as an example of what is happening.

Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground - having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years - and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.

As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. It's the carbon dioxide.

Some points he missed: Mercury doesn't have a permanent atmosphere as its gravity is too weak to retrain one. What atmospheric elements it does have from time to time, are captured from the solar wind and trapped temporarily in its gravity well. Venus has a permanent atmosphere. Venus, being closer to the sun and a slightly weaker gravity than Earth, it is unable to retain large quantities of lighter gases in its atmosphere for long periods of time. Eventually, just as with Mercury, the lighter gases escape the gravity well leaving behind larger quantities of heavier gases such as carbon dioxide. There is also a lot of scientific theory about how Venus ended up the way it is, but very little proof to support such theories.

What we end up with is Al Gore grasping at straws to legitimize his claims that it is carbon dioxide that is causing the warming of the planet.

Now, if Al Gore really and truly believes that this is a case, why has he helped start and run a company that trades in the carbon offset/credit market, allowing himself to profit from the claims that it is carbon dioxide causing global warming. Sounds like he is just as guilty of the same kinds of wrong-doing that he claims Exxon and other companies that are supporting scientific research that indicates that it is not carbon dioxide causing the problem. If Gore wants to accuse others of a conflict of interest, perhaps he should divest himself of his on conflict of interests first.

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In a Hugo Chavez like move, MoveOn.org, that icon of the First Amendment and left-wing darling, is pushing hard to silence the Fox News Channel by calling for an advertiser boycott. Gotta love these folks who believe so much in the First Amendment.

From FoxNews (who else?):

MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America's Future and liberal blogs like DailyKos.com are asking thousands of supporters to monitor who is advertising on the network, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Once a database is gathered, an organized phone-calling campaign will begin, said Jim Gilliam, vice president of media strategy for Brave New Films, a company that has made anti-Fox videos.

The groups have successfully pressured Democratic presidential candidates not to appear at any debate sponsored by Fox, and are also trying to get Home Depot Inc. to stop advertising there.

This is a blatant attempt to silence a news organization from exercising their Constitutional right under the First Amendment. They hate open discussion on the issues and seek to squash opposing views. Why?

One primary example sighted in the article, as well as on Gilliam's web site is the issue of Global Warming. The have bought into the mass hysteria that very small fraction of one percent of the atmosphere that is carbon dioxide is causing the current warming trend in the Earth's climate, despite scientific FACTS that prove it is solar activity and other elements, none of which are (or can be) influenced by human activity.

If Gilliam, MoveOn dot org, Daily Kos, and other such mouthpieces of the hard-left were truly interested in an honest and open debate, they should first read up on the hard science that has been published by researchers in recent years.

Admittedly, there is more to their movement than just their hysteria over climate change. They oppose the war in Iraq and want to see that country fall into the hands of terrorists and Islam-fascist extremists. They don't like the fact that the U.S. is pushing for ballistic missile defense and maintains a nuclear arsenal. Yet they are okay with Russia, North Korea, China having whatever nuclear arms it wants, and to let Iran have the same.

Fortunately, it is reported in the article that Home Depot is not in the market of censoring media and has no intention of changing its marketing strategies. Kudos to them!

One final note on global warming: it isn't that there is climate change going on that is disputed, it is the cause of those changes that is disputed.

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Elizabeth Edwards has shown her other ignorance on the issue of global warming by pushing an agenda of "eat locally" in order to reduce "carbon footprint."

From Politico:

The politics of global warming got very concrete, and oddly difficult, In a meeting with local environmentalists in the coastal town of McClellanville today, where Elizabeth Edwards raised in passing the importance of relying on locally-grown fruit.

"We've been moving back to 'buy local,'" Mrs. Edwards said, outlining a trade policy that "acknowledges the carbon footprint" of transporting fruit.

"I live in North Carolina. I'll probably never eat a tangerine again," she said, speaking of a time when the fruit is reaches the price that it "needs" to be.

Does this mean she is giving up orange juice and coffee? How about chocolate, tea, and anything that may contain alcohol?

As a general rule, I am okay with eating locally grown produce because it is generally in better condition as well as for taste. However there are a lot of fruits and vegetables that do not grow where I live, starting with citrus fruits. I do not advocate limiting one's diet to locally produced foods because of an unwarranted fear that carbon emissions is the cause of global warming.

Then, when John Edwards was questioned, he said:

"Would I add to the price of food?" he asked. "I'd have to think about that."

Such additional food costs would be in the form of adding carbon emission costs to the price of food.

I think that as a general rule all candidates should have studied the hard science about such issues as global warming before they are allowed to open their traps and show their ignorance. If they did, we wouldn't be hearing a word about "carbon footprints" but rather we would be hearing about the solar cycle and the impact of cosmic rays.

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With snow falling there for the first time in so many years, what will be the response of the global warming moonbats?

Simple…

It worked! Al Gore and his Live Earth concerts have succeeded in averting catastrophic global warming. The proof is in Buenos Aires, where snow fell for the first time in 89 years.

Well, maybe not.

From the BBC online:

Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, has seen snow for the first time in 89 years, as a cold snap continues to grip several South American nations.

Temperatures plunged to -22C (-8F) in parts of Argentina's province of Rio Negro, while snow fell on Buenos Aires for several hours on Monday.

One Argentinean is quoted in the article as never having seen snow in Buenos Aires despite being 82 years old.

The report said it is a result of a cold snap passing through the area and is expected to last several days.

Despite this turn of events, and all of the science refuting the claim that carbon emissions, or other "greenhouse" gases play a significant role in global warming, there is no doubt that the hard-left will continue with their mantra of "it's Man's fault." No doubt, they will call it a freak anomaly. I call it winter.

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Over the weekend, the world was treated to Al Gore's Live Earth concerts. I was not among the dozens of attendees, probably because I was at an event that was a heckuva lot more fun (more on that later).

No doubt, there is someone that has the attendance numbers from the concerts. What I have seen are the ratings for the NBC broadcast (which were dismal) and that the concerts were rife with profanity. It sounds like "celebrities" only know how to express ideas with foul language, which, as a measure of their intellectual brainpower, should tell you something about them and the cause they are supporting.

From Hollywood Reporter:

NBC's three-hour primetime "Live Earth" special, which included highlights from Saturday's global concerts, failed to generate much enthusiasm in the ratings.

The estimated 2.7 million viewers was slightly under the 3 million viewers NBC has averaged on Saturday nights in the summer with repeats and the Stanley Cup hockey playoffs on what is already the least-popular night of television.

It also performed below the Live 8 concert two years ago, according to preliminary estimates released Monday by Nielsen Media Research.

The three-hour concert special from Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., drew a 0.9 rating/3 share in adults 18-49 --- the same as a typical summer Saturday after Memorial Day.

The special was also just under ABC's primetime coverage of the Live 8 concert, which occurred Independence Day weekend on July 2, 2005. Live 8 averaged 2.9 million viewers and a 1.0 rating/5 share in adults 18-49.

The number, 2.7 million, is pretty bad. If Live Earth was such a great event for the Global Warming cause, it should have been far higher than that. It is also noticeably down from the ratings pulled by Live 8 two years ago.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail, reporting on the U.K. concert, noted that the performers used the f-word repeatedly throughout the day. Phil Collins opened with the F-word, and set the tone of profanity, despite having been "asked" not to swear during the concert.

The BBC also received numerous complaints about the profanity, especially in regards to the broadcast taking place during family hours.

The Daily Mail also reported that the ratings for the BBC broadcast were significantly down in comparison to both Live 8 and Live Aid:

And the peak audience, which came when Madonna sang at Wembley, was a dismal 4.5 million. Three times as many viewers saw the Princess Diana tribute on the same channel six days before.

Two years ago, Live 8 drew a peak television audience of 9.6million while Live Aid notched 10million in 1985.

It went on to report about the mounds of garbage left behind by the concert goers.

Between the trash at the concerts and the amount of jet fuel, gasoline, and electricity used to run the concert, it's hard to maintain our green credentials. Maybe Al Gore should write a check to cover the carbon emission offsets needed so that these concerts can be called "green."

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Live Earth

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With the impending Live Earth concerts, Global Warming is in the news.

Scientists researching Greenland ice core samples have found the oldest plant DNA on record, and found that Greenland was substantially warmer today, even covered with lush forests and its glaciers had not completely melted away.

From BreitBart:

Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said Thursday the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed.

DNA of trees, plants and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest.

That contrasts sharply with the prevailing view that a lush forest of this kind could only have existed in Greenland as recently as 2.4 million years ago, according to a summary of the study, which is published Thursday in the journal Science.

The samples suggest the temperature probably reached 10 degrees C (50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer and -17 C (1 F) in the winter.

They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages, 116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F) higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt away.

It doesn't sound as though it was far warmer than it was during the Viking Age of the Medieval Warming Period, let alone far warmer than it is today.

As for the Gore-a-thon Live Earth Concerts, from Reuters:

Rio is the only Live Earth concert free and open to the public. If it had been stopped, it would have been the second cancellation; Istanbul was dropped last month because of a lack of interest and security concerns. Ticket sales have been slow for most Live Earth shows and organizers had to change venues in Johannesburg in a bid to improve sales there.

Odd, I thought they were all free concerts. Only Rio is free? It is also interesting to note that the ticket sales have been slow. Without big ticket sales, how are they to pay for all of the carbon credits they need to achieve "carbon neutrality?"

Meanwhile, the Arctic Monkeys has this to say about the Al Gore-a-thon, from BreitBart:

"It's a bit patronising for us 21 year olds to try to start to change the world," said Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders, explaining why the group is not on the bill at any of Al Gore's charity concerts.

"Especially when we're using enough power for 10 houses just for (stage) lighting. It'd be a bit hypocritical," he told AFP in an interview before a concert in Paris.

Bass player Nick O'Malley chimes in: "And we're always jetting off on aeroplanes!"

That's one of the biggest problems with the Live Earth concerts. They are burning huge amounts of electricity, gasoline, and jet fuel, all of which are dumping thousands of tons of that evil carbon dioxide gas into the Earth's atmosphere. All in the name of reducing carbon emissions to save the planet.

Virgin Media has a piece on a survey taken to determine the perceptions of how green the artists are. Madonna came in last place. Red Hot Chili Peppers were hot on her heels.

I'm looking forward to the day when all the carbon dioxide commandos realize that they've been had on the issue of global warming and learn that it is a natural phenomenon, not caused by Man.

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Live Earth Carbon Dioxide

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The Red Star Tribune has a piece by Brian Rambert that is, once again, calling an end of the debate on the causes of global warming and silencing those of us who do not accept the theory put forth by the hard-left that it is due to the activities of man rather than the natural cycle of the Earth and Sun.

The ethical challenge for journalists and journalism (as opposed to infotainment personalities in "the media") is stark. It means accepting what the best available science has now concluded is fact about global warming -- that it's happening and human activity is an aggravating if not principal cause -- and pulling the plug on spurious "debate" engendered by conservative ideologues, much like what credible news organizations have done with Holocaust-deniers and creationists.

In the case of major newspapers like the Star Tribune and local television news outlets like KSTP, WCCO, KARE and KMSP, this would mean largely if not completely ignoring the vocal minority railing away at the work and findings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If the talk radio choir wants to have a "debate" among itself, fine. But for journalists the debate phase has ended and the story now is, "What to do?"

Lambert is likening those who have looked at the issue of global warming and determined that it is a natural and unstoppable phenomenon with holocaust-deniers and creationists. He does not put forth any science that counters the claims that climate change is a natural cycle. Zero. Only repeats the mantra of Al Gore and it is carbon dioxide that is the cause.

Serious journalists cannot honor their professional commitment to truth while simultaneously pandering to political ideologues who are substituting campaign-style spin and misinformation for science.

Here he is right, but for the wrong reasons. The substantial amount of science that has been and is still being performed by serious climate scientists continues to point to the current warming trend of the Earth's climate has being natural and solar driven. Avery and Singer compiled a lot of this material in their recent book, Unstoppable Global Warming.

Does this guy, Lambert, read any science? Or is he just another puppet of the global warming moonbats like Al Gore?

The Star Tribune has shown its ignorance on the issue, as well as its bias, in having published this piece by Lambert.

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Star Tribune Unstoppable Global Warming Carbon Dioxide

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It seems that Global Warming is becoming a favorite topic of mine as of late. Two new pieces published this week help shed some light on the growing debate on whether (or not) the current warming trend is man-caused.

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, is proving himself, once again, to be a voice of reason in the ongoing debate on climate change. This is from the Financial Times:

Mr Klaus writes that "global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem" and the issue "is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature."

He's right on the money. There are a vast number of people out there swallowing whole the bilge that the current warming trend is being caused by man's dumping of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. The liberal-left are touting it as a means to gain power/control over the world populations. No surprise really, from the anti-freedom crowd.

This particular piece gets better.

I ask myself several questions. Let's put them in the proper sequence:

o Is global warming a reality?

o If it is a reality, is it man-made?

o If it is a reality, is it a problem? Will the people in the world, and now I have to say "globally", better-off or worse-off due to small increases of global temperature?

o If it is a reality, and if it is a problem, can men prevent it or stop it? Can any reasonable cost-benefit analysis justify anything - within the range of current proposals - to be done just now?

Surprisingly, we can say yes - with some degree of probability - only to the first question. To the remaining three my answer is no. And I am not alone in saying that. We are, however, still more or less the silent or silenced majority.

I am in agreement there, although anyone who knows me wouldn't be surprised by that.

After reading a lot of material on the topic, from Satanic Gases to Unstoppable Global Warming and numerous articles floating around, it is clear to me that the current warming trend is part of the natural climate cycle that the Earth goes through. In fact, I didn't have to read all of that material; just go back to your high school science classes and the topic of the various ice ages the Earth has gone through does the job.

Klaus also correctly points out that since modern computer models cannot with any certainty predict the weather two weeks from now, how can we rely upon computer models to predict what the Earth's climate might be like a hundred years from now? They can't! Yet people like Al "Carbon-Credit" Gore want you to believe that these models can predict the future. I bet I can do at least as well with a crystal ball.

Meanwhile, on Canada's Financial Post, R. Timothy Patterson writes:

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

The piece gets into some details of the research he lead on core samples in the Pacific Northeast as well as the role of sun spot activity, the solar wind, and cosmic rays.

It's a darn good piece and is part of a series being published by the Financial Times on the Global Warming debate.

He ends the piece by mentioning that there is a likelihood that the climate will swing again, this time with temperatures dropping and a repeat of the mantra of the '70s that there was a new ice age coming. It probably will not be another ice age, however I bet that the loons on the left will claim it is a result of efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions and not the natural change in solar activity.

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Carbon Dioxide Science Klaus

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The Live Earth concerts scheduled for July are reported to be making headway in reducing, but not eliminating, carbon emissions in relation to the concerts. There is a report on it on the Reuters website.

In the article, Yusef Robb of Live Earth outlines some of their plans, like making a choice between "dirty" lightbulbs and "greener "lightbulbs. His words, not mine. Franlkly, if the lightbulb is dirty, just dust it off. But that isn't what he means. He is talking about the amount of electricity used to power the bulb, and how much carbon emissions that would account for.

I'm all for using energy efficient lightbulbs. I have a lot of them in my house (nearly all of my light fixtures are equipped with fluorescent bulbs…it is easier to count the ones that aren't so equipped). Power to them for going that direction.

They have also hired a number of "green" consultants to help reduce the carbon footprint of their concerts. According to the article one venue has contracted for "green electricity" which the article notes as being wind and solar. Gotta wonder if they are contracting a "green" electrical company, which routinely supplements their power supplies with nuclear and/or coal/natural gas generators?

They are also attempting how to best run their generators on biodiesel, despite the following article by Steven Milloy recently published on FoxNews:

a study published in Chemistry and Industry, a journal of the Society of the Chemical Industry, reported that biodiesel, another alternative motor vehicle fuel, "could increase rather than reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional diesel."

According to the media release, researchers compared the emission of greenhouse gases by the two fuels across their overall life cycles from production to combustion in cars.

Though the results showed that biodiesel (derived from rapeseed grown on dedicated farmland) emits nearly the same amount of carbon dioxide as conventional diesel when burned in an engine, growing rapeseed emits significant levels of nitrous oxide (laughing gas), which is 200 to 300 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Sounds pretty darn Earth-saving green to me. NOT!

But the biggest carbon emission problem will be the performers and crews traveling to the venues, most likely by carbon emitting private jets and limousines, not to mention the predicted millions of people (they are expecting 1 million attendees at Rio alone) who have to get to the venues some how, and no doubt many of them will be traveling either by air or car to get to the cities where the concerts will be held.

I can't even begin to imagine how much carbon and other pollutants (is the smoke from their joints a green house gas?) will be dumped into the atmosphere in the name of "Stop Global Warming," but I bet there is someone working on figuring it out. Maybe Steven Milloy will do the job for us.

Of course, they could be buying out the market of carbon credits courtesy of Al gore and his UK based company dealing in the darn things.

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Al Gore Live Earth Carbon Dioxide

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When the leadership of the United nations was handed over to Ban Ki-moon, there was a lot of hope that we would see a change in the attitude within the U.N. towards the U.S.A. It looks like we're being proved wrong. From Breitbart:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday.

"The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

According to Ban Ki-moon, the Darfur conflict, which has raged on for several years now, is to be blamed on "global warming," which in turn is blamed on carbon emissions, which, according to the hard-left and their lackeys in the media and political arena, is all America's fault. Let's not blame all of the corrupt governments in that region of the world, or that this is more of a religiously motivated cleansing.

Meanwhile, Al "I invented the Internet" Gore has unavailed his new favorite wine. It turns out he is so upset that the media is focused more on Paris "I don't want to go to jail" Hilton and her bouncing in and out of the pokey, Gore has taken to complaining to the Sun that it just isn't fair.

He believes we have just TEN YEARS to begin saving the planet before it is too late.

But he struggles to get his message across when TV networks are donating the majority of their airtime to American socialite Paris Hilton's stint behind bars.

He goes on to talk about his proposed "Save The Earth" concerts that will be responsible for dumping untold tens of thousands of carbon into the atmosphere, the very gas that he claims in his factoid "An Inconvenient Truth" is the cause of the current climate warming trend. Let's see, we're going to save the Earth by polluting even more with carbon-dioxide? Tell me again, Al, how does that work?

And then there is this from News.com:

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth's current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

The question now is, how will Al Gore account for these trends? Or is he so full of hot air that he is a one man global warming machine?

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Al Gore Carbon Dioxide

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There is a lot on Global Warming and being "Carbon neutral" in the news this week. Since I haven't hit on this topic much in recent days, I'll cover as much as I can.

First up is the announcement that Rolling Stone Magazine is moving to a "carbon neutral" paper for its rag. Let's be clear on this: there is no such thing as "carbon neutral," unless you're dead, and even then you aren't really "carbon neutral."

According to the information released via the New York Times, the new paper will be produced by a Canadian mill called Catalyst Paper.

Catalyst offsets the small amount of carbon released in making the paper by planting trees that will not be harvested for more paper, but rather left standing to help cool the climate, said Lyn Brown, a vice president at Catalyst.

There are a few things wrong with this claim. First, trees drop off debris in the form of leaves and dead branches that emit carbon; second, trees go through a process called photo-respiration where they dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So much for being "carbon neutral."

On the flip side of the coin, Rolling Stone is taking heat for not switching to recycled paper. The rag staff claims, correctly, that the quality of print is greatly reduced when using recycled paper products. At least they get a brownie point form me on that bit of honesty. Besides, the hippies that read their rag can recycle the paper themselves during their joint sessions.

Meanwhile, Denver, Colorado, is moving in lock-step with the anti-Freedom coalition of the "it's man's fault" global warming coalition by pushing an agenda to force their residents to give up their freedom's or pay a price.

From the Rocky Mountain News:

The new plan is aimed at making Denver a national leader in reducing gas emissions that have been linked to global warming, giving a major push to alternative energy, stepping up recycling and changing building codes to encourage energy conservation.

But the proposal also contains some ideas that may be unpopular, such as penalizing heavy users of electricity and natural gas and basing auto insurance premiums on the number of miles traveled.

Let's see, we'll force you to cut back on your use of electricity and natural gas (you know, the stuff that heats your house in winter) by making you pay absurdly high prices, despite the fact that they are already high and will be going higher anyway, and force the auto insurance companies to become tax collectors.

This is what you get when you elect a bunch of socialists to office in local government.

Meanwhile, the Denver Channel is reporting that Denver has experienced its coldest morning in 50 years. It was 31 degrees on Friday morning, making it the latest freeze for the city of Denver, the previous record being June 2. Sounds to me like Global Warming may be a misnomer and should be Global Cooling. But that wouldn't be politically correct, nor entirely scientific. Neither is the blame mankind and carbon emissions theory on global warming. So what else is new?

Not to be outdone, the same report contains a footnote that Pueblo also set a record low of 37 degrees for the same date. The previous record low for that date was 41 degrees, set in 1890, so the phenomenon isn't localized.

Coincidentally, there is a NOAA chart that lists the warmest years on the books for Denver, with 9 out of 12 of those years occurred BEFORE 1950.

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John Travolta claims he is concerned about global warming. From ThisIsLondon:

"It [global warming] is a very valid issue," Travolta declared. "I'm wondering if we need to think about other planets and dome cities.

"Everyone can do their bit. But I don't know if it's not too late already. We have to think about alternative methods of fuel.

"I'm probably not the best candidate to ask about global warming because I fly jets.

"I use them as a business tool though, as others do. I think it's part of this industry - otherwise I couldn't be here doing this and I wouldn't be here now."

Travolta is proving himself to be yet another "do as I say, not as I do" liberal.

The article details out the five jets Travolta owns (maintained on his own private runway), and estimates that his flying habits have resulted in 800 tons of carbon emissions. How much carbon does the average American dump into the atmosphere? Whatever the number is, I seriously doubt that it is measured in hundreds of tons.

He claims that it is due to the business he is n, but one has to question even that. He could easily fly first class for any and all of those business trips. Uses his jets as a "business tool…as others do?" He talks as though everyone has their own private jet, just as though it were an car.

Actually I like that. Time to update the old adage "A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage" to "a jet in every garage." I’ll take a Gulfstream G200.

At least he admits to not being the best candidate to talk about environmental issues.

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There is a lot being written on the 'Net in response to Al Gore's recent testimony (which was not under oath) in D.C. this week, including a piece by Steven Milloy for FoxNews. Milloy covered the testimony quite well, hitting on some very important highlights, and exposing the Goracle (Boracle?) as a "do as I say, not as I do" alarmist. From the tale of the little girl who has two winter coats, which sounds pretty good until it is revealed that one is for wearing indoors as her family cannot afford to properly heat her home, to debunking the Boracle's claim of using "green power" on more than one front - for instance, only in the last couple of month's has the Gore plantation been running on "green power", and part of that "green" power is from a methane/coal burn that produces carbon dioxide.

What is really interesting is this part:

If temperature increases come before carbon dioxide increases, the notion that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are changing global temperatures would have the cause-and-effect relationship exactly backward.

Gore responded by describing how, depending on the Earth's tilt and wobble as it revolves around the sun, sometimes carbon dioxide increases precede temperature increases and other times temperature increases precede carbon dioxide increases.

That led attentive listeners to wonder, well, why worry about manmade global warming if it's the Earth's tilt and wobble that define the carbon dioxide-temperature relationship?

Apparently realizing his self-defeating statement, Gore then tried to backtrack by saying that currently, carbon dioxide increases are preceding temperature increases. It was a desperate and revealing effort to get back on message.

One problem with Gore's assertion that CO2 is currently leading temperature increases: it isn't!

I pulled this chart from the Friends of Science website.

As you can see, with the exception of a few years centering ‘70s, CO2 concentrations have been a lagging indicator in regards to global warming. Avery and singer make the same assertions in their book Unstoppable Global Warming, and their assertions were based on volumes of scientific data. Great book, by the way.

The other interesting point is Gore's referencing the Earth's tilt and wobble as having an impact on CO2 levels. It is more accurate to say that these factors, as well as variances in the Earth's orbit, play a role in climate change in regards to the cooling and warming cycles. Again, a lot has been written about how these cycles impact the Earth's climate.

With the Boracle's appearance in Washington, and his frothing at the mouth rhetoric about "impending doom and gloom" and that it is all man's (America's?) fault, it is very clear that global warming will be a highly polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign. Let's all hope that the real science shines through the carbon-dioxide smoke-screen being spewed by the party of totalitarianism. Otherwise, be prepared to wear winter coats in your home in 2009. And watch your wallet.

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Al Gore Goracle Boracle

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Global warming seems to be the hot-button issue today, either a hair ahead of, or behind, the war in Iraq. Al Gore has been center stage on the "let’s blame man/America" for the current warming trend, especially with his appearance before a Senate committee headed by Barbara (why the heck did I ever vote for her) Boxer. From MyWay News:

"The planet has a fever," Gore said. "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."

There’s a couple of things wrong about his analogy. First, a baby’s (or adult’s) temperature is a relative constant, 98.8 degrees. People, and animals, are subject to developing fevers when they are ill, a fever signaling there is something wrong. As far as that goes, Gore is right. However, in relation to the Earth, this is a false (and deliberately deceptive) comparison as the Earth’s temperature is anything but a constant: it is dynamic and highly variable.

It is a known fact that the Earth’s temperature as increased slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age in the first half of the 19th century. The cause, though the moonbats and loons on the left would have you believe otherwise, is not man-made carbon dioxide emissions. It is staring you in the face every morning: the Sun. The amount of science that supports the position that it is the sun and not man-made CO2 is increasing every year, while the reverse still has any real science backing it, just a lot of socialists and failed presidential hopefuls pushing a political agenda.

When Al Gore speaks on the topic, it is doubly suspicious as he is co-founder of Generation Investment Management, a company that trades in carbon offsets, and provides its employees, including Gore, with free carbon offsets. This presents a conflict of interest as he pushes an agenda from which, if adopted, will make him a lot of money.

I would dearly love to find a transcript of his testimony, as it is being reported that Gore is, once again, calling for a carbon tax. If this is applied only to industry, then that will force an increase in the price of goods and services. It will also [put a hefty tax on energy, driving up those costs dramatically. Either way, the working middle class will take the brunt of the financial damage, while the rich, like Gore, will deal in "carbon offsets" so as to enable them to ignore carbon taxes, while the poor get credits and the working middle class ends up taking the full brunt of these taxes.

As Gore stands to profit through his GIM on carbon offsets, you can bet he’ll do everything he can to convince Congress that carbon taxes should be implemented immediately. he’ll be laughing all the way to the bank, in more ways than one.

Gore continues to claim he is "carbon neutral" thanks to the carbon offsets he receives from himself, but the fact is such claims are bogus and disingenuous. You can’t be running up an electric bill that is 20 times that of the average home owner, fly around in private jets, drive gas guzzling cars, and claim to be carbon neutral.

But for the man who single-handedly invent the Internet, I guess anything is possible.

Also, see Planet Gore at National Review Online.

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Al+Gore Carbon+Dioxide Tax

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I've never thought about "environmentalism" as being the new "communism", however Vaclav Klaus brings up a very interesting point. From Signon San Diego:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Wednesday that fighting global warming has turned into a a 'religion' that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms.

The right-wing president, a free-market champion, wrote to the U.S. Congress that adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.

'Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,' Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.

This not to say that communism is no longer a threat to freedom - just look at what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela. Klaus is right in that the religion of environmentalism is a bigger threat globally than communism currently is. It is also far more insidious than communism, by playing on people's fears that mankind (more specifically, Western countries) are destroying the environment, causing mass extinctions, not to mention global warming.

Environmentalism pushes governments to force people to give up that which helps make the world go round: cars, planes, heating and air conditioning, modern agriculture techniques. The cult of environmentalism also forced the ban of DDT, which could have saved the nearly 6 MILLION people who have died of malaria since its ban.

This is not to say we should not be concerned about the environment. There are many things man has done that has an impact on the environment, and, yes, we should work o minimize our impact. However, it should be done based on factual evidence, not because of the scare-mongering rantings of Moonbats such as Al Gore. The sky is not falling. The Earth is warming, but that is due to increased solar activity, not increased carbon dioxide.

Left-Wingnuts use the religion of environmentalism to exercise control over you and me, taking away our rights, our very freedoms, by forcing us to drive small economy cars that are veritable death traps, or preventing the construction of nuclear power plants to supply the electricity that a growing population hungers for. Environmentalism, like communism, is about control, not freedom. And that is why it is a threat to freedom.

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Enviromentalism

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Leave it to Steven Milloy of FoxNews "Junk Science" column to bring the Gore's "Carbon Emissions" into greater focus. There has been more and more talk about how Al Gore's mansion uses about 20 times the amount of electricity than the average American, all the while preaching how everyone needs to cut their use of electricity (i.e. standard of living) by not heating or cooling their homes, or using less hot water, or switching to fluorescent light bulbs (which are not only expensive to buy, but also expensive to dispose of).

Meanwhile in the latest column from Milloy, it is revealed that Gore's pool house runs up a $500 monthly electric bill. All I can say is that it must be nice to have that kind of money to throw around.

Gore has countered criticism by claiming that he is purchasing carbon offsets in the lucrative market created by Kyoto. We'll set aside the fact that the company he acquires these offsets from is a company he owns, and provides offsets to all of its 23 employees, including Gore, as a benefit. The fact of the matter is that trading in carbon offsets has ZERO impact on carbon emissions, nor does it reduce the Gore's carbon footprint from whatever it is (much higher than nearly every American) to zero.

From Milloy's column, Junk Science on Fox News:

The Carbon Neutral Company - one of the two vendors that sell offsets to GIM - says that offset purchases "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… in the short term."

Instead, they merely: (1) demonstrate commitment to taking action on climate change; (2) add an economic component to climate change; (3) help engage and educate the public; and (4) may provide local social and environmental benefits that help to encourage the use of low-carbon technologies.

The real design behind offsetting, then, is to impact the public debate, not to avert the dreaded global warming. This purpose is consistent with what I heard Al Gore say about the Kyoto Protocol following a private presentation of his climate slide show I attended at the Americans for Tax Reform offices in January, 2006.

That's what these carbon emissions offsets are about: influencing the public debate, and further fanning the flames that global warming is a disaster that man brought on and can influence and change. Of course, such claims that the global warming trend is the result of man's carbon emissions is a fabrication by people who want to exert control of mankind.

The whole piece by Milloy is a good read. Check it out.

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Some scientific Dunsels on the U.N. payroll are at it again, calling for a global temperature ceiling. From Voice of America:

A group of 18 scientists from 11 countries is calling on the international community to act quickly to prevent catastrophic climate change.

In a report requested by the United Nations and partially paid for by the privately funded U.N. Foundation, the panel warns that any delay could lead to a dangerous rise in sea levels, increasingly turbulent weather, droughts and disease.

Question to these "scientists:" How do you stop the unstoppable?

The modern warming trend, which has been going on since 1850, is a natural phenomenon, not something mankind has triggered. All one has to do is look at the geological evidence to understand that there isn't anything, short of extinguishing the sun, that can be done about it.

Still, they clamor about carbon dioxide emissions (with CO2 accounting for about 350 parts per million, a little less than 0.04%, in the atmosphere), and that something has to be done about those nasty fossil fuels.

Some of their concerns, such as rise in sea levels, regardless of the fact that sea levels change as the Earth's climate warms and cools, rising and falling with each cycle; droughts can be countered with the construction of desalination plants in the coastal region; the spread of virulent diseases, such as the bubonic plague, were spread by rodents during times of global cooling.

Now we get to the main focus of their agenda:

Holdren, however, says even these measure will achieve very little unless they are accompanied by a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions. "We don't think ultimately society will get it right in terms of the full range and scope of activities needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, until there is an additional incentive in the form of a price on greenhouse gas emissions, either through a carbon tax or a cap and trade approach," he said.

As the United States is considered the "worst offender" when it comes to CO2 emissions, it is clear that their agenda is to tax America into oblivion. Such a tax goes against the very foundation of our society: no taxation without representation. The cornerstone is that there shall be no taxation except through by the consent of the people to be taxed, via there ELECTED representatives. This is why all tax bills begin in the House of Representatives. We "the people" do not have elected representation in the United Nations. The U.N. is made up of a bunch of appointed bureaucrats, mainly from socialist countries and totalitarian regimes. Any such global tax, which is clearly designed to break America economically, is a clear violation of sovereignty (as are all international laws) and adoption of which would be a direct violation of our Constitution.

Quite frankly, I've pretty much had it with the U.N. and the puppet governments that make up a large part of that body politic. Their petty jealousy of America has further corrupted that already heavily corrupted organization. With incidents as the "food for oil" scandal in Iraq, and the "food for sex" scandal in the Congo, how can we accept anything the U.N. claims as being legitimate?

If any such treaty as Kyoto, or its planned successors, is signed by the United States, every politician involved with passing and signing such, should be immediately removed from office for violating the U.S. Constitution, which they have sworn to uphold.

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This is from Newswise.com:

A new report on climate over the world's southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.

This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth's climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.

It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.

David Bromwich, professor of geography and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco.

Thus proving the results from the climate models used by the U.N.'s IPCC are overblown.

Bromwich does make an attempt to defend the models, stating that they are global, and not region specific, however, that just proves, once again, that the accuracy of these computerized climate models. If they are being used to predict warming trends on a global basis, then they should have been designed to include data and variables on a global basis. In computer talk, "garbage in, garbage out."

This is not to say that there isn't a warming trend. As many scientists have pointed out, including Avery and Sanger in their book Unstoppable Global Warming, as well as the 1995 IPCC report, this warming trend has been going on since the Little Ice Age ended in 1850.

However, the politicization of Global Warming has resulted in known facts, such as the Medieval Warming Period (Viking Era) and the Little Ice Age to be ignored by groups pushing the "it's man's fault" agenda.

The factors impacting the Earth's climate appear to range in the millions, and some are only recently being understood, such the circumpolar westerlies, as pointed out in the article.

When one takes into account the science of the Earth's climate, it becomes obvious that it is, in fact, a natural phenomenon.

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Al Gore is pushing a series of "Save Our Planet" concerts in order to get out the message that Global Warming is all man’s fault; CO2 emissions are caused by our lust for technology. The concerts are being planned to take place in Europe, China, South Africa, Australia and the United States.

Here’s what’s wrong with this picture. They claim Global Warming is due to our CO2 emissions, so they plan on helping curb the amount of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere by getting a number of rock and rollers (with their support entourage) to travel the world, on jets that emit large amounts of CO2; ground travel from the airports to various hotels and the concert venues for hundreds (thousands) of concert crew and performers, not to mention the hoped for hundreds of thousands (millions?) of concert attendees, all of which will be dumping CO2 into the atmosphere; put on these concerts that will use huge amounts of electricity, generated by power plants that emit CO2 (unless they specify that the electricity is coming from non-CO2 power plants, like nuclear reactors). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They also plan on broadcasting the concerts around the globe, all of which will be powered by electricity received from CO2 emitting power plants.

If they truly believed that CO2 emissions are causing global warming, then why are they putting on this series of concerts promoting their political agenda and dumping huge amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere? How hypocritical can you be?

Meanwhile, California crops are taking a beating due to freezing cold, no doubt brought on by greenhouse gases induced Global Warming.

I guess this brings a whole meaning to the term "frozen orange juice."

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Global Warming seems to be the hottest topic in the news right now. Virgin Airlines Branson is now offering $25 Million to any one who can come up with a means from eliminating CO2 from the atmosphere. From Reuters:

Flanked by climate campaigners former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, Branson said he hoped the prize would spur innovative and creative thought to save mankind from self-destruction.

"Man created the problem and therefore man should solve the problem," he told a news conference to reveal the Virgin Earth Challenge.

"Unless we can devise a way of removing CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the earth's atmosphere we will lose half of all species on earth, all the coral reefs, 100 million people will be displaced, farmlands will become deserts and rain forests wastelands."

Now this is lunacy at its highest point. Branson wants to remove all CO2 from the atmosphere. He uses fear tactics that death, destruction and extinction will result if we don't. Never mind the fact that all life on Earth is dependent on CO2, and removing it from the atmosphere is not only impossible (all living creatures exhale CO2 and plants use CO2 as part of its biological functions), eliminating all CO2 would end life on Earth. Plant life cannot function without CO2 in the atmosphere.

Yeesh!

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Ellen Goodman, writing for Boston Globe has come out and said it straight out: those who do not accept that mankind is to blame for the current warming trend the Earth is experiencing are no better than Holocaust deniers. From her column:

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

Those of us who question the validity of the U.N.'s "blame America, er, Mankind" global warming claims are doing so based on the historic and geographic evidence found in ice cores from Greenland to Antarctica and sediment cores from Ireland to the coast of Africa. There are literally hundreds of scientists that question the claims from the Left that it is due to CO2 emissions and it's all Man's fault.

Goodman would be well advised to look at the geological record as Avery and Singer have done in their new book, Unstoppable Global Warming. Some of the researchers analyzing the geological record include Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland, who are the first to analyze such ice cores, the first series providing some 250,000 years worth of data.

The Greenland ice core data has been corroborated by data from the analysis of samples taken from other points around the globe.

That the Left is resorting to such despicable name calling tactics is no surprise. It is a clear attempt to squelch real science in order to push threw their agenda that the current warming trend, which began at the conclusion of the Little Ice Age, is our fault. Instead, she is guilty of drinking the Kool-Aid like the rest of the Liberal-Left and the Main Stream Media.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The science is readily available, in publications and on the net. Perhaps Ms. Goodman should take the time to study the topic of climate change as I am doing. Of course, I seriously doubt she will, as she is focused on replacing her light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs (she says she has three; I have over 20 such bulbs…most of the lights inside my house are fluorescent lights).

She goes on (and on and on):

This great divide comes from the science-be-damned-and-debunked attitude of the Bush administration and its favorite media outlets. The day of the report, Big Oil Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma actually described it as "a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain." Speaking of corruption of science, the American Enterprise Institute, which has gotten $1.6 million over the years from Exxon Mobil, offered $10,000 last summer to scientists who would counter the IPCC report.

Inhofe is right in his description of the IPCC report. It ignores the research of many scientists in regards to climate change, uses skewed data from ground stations to measure the Earth's temperature, as opposed to weather balloons and satellite data and filtering out the data from heat sinks at airports and large cities. It focuses on computer models used to "prove" it is CO2 emissions driving the arming trend, despite the fact that CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere. It ignores solar activity and the geologic record. It ignores the impact of cosmic rays and other forces in the solar and galactic neighborhood. It ignores variations of the Earth's orbit, which has a 100,000 year cycle. It ignores shifts in the Earth's tilt and its "wobble" as it rotates, both of which have their cycles that influence climate. It also ignores the overwhelming influence of water vapor in the atmosphere which has a greater impact on a greenhouse effect that a trace gas such as CO2.

As for the AEI providing money to any scientist who refutes the IPCC, how is that corrupting science? The U.N. has provided how many millions (or is it billions) of dollars (our TAX dollars at that!) to scientists to claim it's all Man's fault, and for political gain? Especially since the "it's Man's fault" pseudo-science has been disproved as early as 1983, before the current hysteria about CO2 came into focus.

The U.N. for some time now has been a highly questionable organization, plagued by corruption; as such, why should we believe any of their claims where the current warming trend is concerned?

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I’ve known that Oregon has been part of the Loony-Left for sometime now, however, it wasn’t until today I knew how far to the left that state is. From KGW News Channel 8:

In the face of evidence agreed upon by hundreds of climate scientists, George Taylor holds firm. He does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change.

Taylor also holds a unique title: State Climatologist.

Hundreds of scientists last Friday issued the strongest warning yet on global warming saying humans are "very likely" the cause.

"Most of the climate changes we have seen up until now have been a result of natural variations," Taylor asserts.

This is the problem when science is perverted for political reasons. View points that are counter to the popular view are silenced through a variety of means, from blackballing meteorologists, as has been floated by Cullen of the Weather Channel, to calling them “deniers” which carries the negative association with “holocaust deniers.”

Those on the left are making it more apparent that they have no interest in the real science being performed in the U.S. and abroad, only pushing their agenda of controlling the world’s populations and keeping the poorest of the poor living in near stone-age type conditions. It also satisfies they unwarranted belief that oil is evil.

Taylor is a scientist. He understands the difference between theory and fact. And the fact is global warming is part of a natural cycle that has been occurring since the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. Man caused global warming is nothing more than theory that has not only failed to provide proof of validity, geological samples taken from Greenland to Antarctica prove that the popular theory is nothing more than junk science politicized to fuel hysteria.

When science is politicized, as is being down with the current warming trend of the Earth’s climate, everyone loses. The scientists whose research is unjustly squelched; the people denied access to adequate power sources; and Western civilization as it gets taxed into oblivion in an effort to stop the unstoppable.

Plug: Read Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer. I am a good chunk into it, and it is one good read.

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Astrophysicist Nir Shariv has outlined how Global Warming is man-caused came about in a recent article published on Canada's National Post. Scientists use carbon dioxide to explain a greenhouse effect; then the climate warms; no other apparent cause for the warming is present.

The problem with this process is that many variables that impact the Earth's climate have been ignored.

From the Canada's National Post:

All we have on which to pin the blame on greenhouse gases, says Dr. Shaviv, is "incriminating circumstantial evidence," which explains why climate scientists speak in terms of finding "evidence of fingerprints." Circumstantial evidence might be a fine basis on which to justify reducing greenhouse gases, he adds, "without other 'suspects.' " However, Dr. Shaviv not only believes there are credible "other suspects," he believes that at least one provides a superior explanation for the 20th century's warming.

"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist."

The sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much of an influence on the climate -- that C02 et al. don't dominate through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially potent drivers of climate change. The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate.

Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

The evidence from astrophysicists and cosmologists in laboratories around the world, on the other hand, could well be significant. In his study of meteorites, published in the prestigious journal, Physical Review Letters, Dr. Shaviv found that the meteorites that Earth collected during its passage through the arms of the Milky Way sustained up to 10% more cosmic ray damage than others. That kind of cosmic ray variation, Dr. Shaviv believes, could alter global temperatures by as much as 15% --sufficient to turn the ice ages on or off and evidence of the extent to which cosmic forces influence Earth's climate.(emphasis added-Sqotty)

In another study, directly relevant to today's climate controversy, Dr. Shaviv reconstructed the temperature on Earth over the past 550 million years to find that cosmic ray flux variations explain more than two-thirds of Earth's temperature variance, making it the most dominant climate driver over geological time scales. The study also found that an upper limit can be placed on the relative role of CO2 as a climate driver, meaning that a large fraction of the global warming witnessed over the past century could not be due to CO2 -- instead it is attributable to the increased solar activity.

CO2 does play a role in climate, Dr. Shaviv believes, but a secondary role, one too small to preoccupy policymakers. Yet Dr. Shaviv also believes fossil fuels should be controlled, not because of their adverse affects on climate but to curb pollution.

Cosmic Rays having a large impact on the climate is a new theory to me. And appears to have a fair amount of validity.

CO2 is only a minor gas in the atmosphere, accounting for .037%, while greenhouse gases account for a total of 3%. (from Friends of Science) Not a lot. Plus CO2 is necessary for all life on Earth, so it is not surprising that there is some amount in the atmosphere. Without it, all life would cease to exist.

Shaviv goes on to state that he supports various alternative energy usage; wind, solar and fusion (if we ever achieve it). Surprisingly, he ignores fission, which has come a long ways since the '60s (but that's another story). These technologies should be implemented, especially nuclear energy, despite the fact that reducing carbon emissions will not change the current warming trends of the Earth's climate.

There is also mounting evidence that solar activity, especially sunspots, has a significant impact on the Earth's climate. Despite these trends in the scientific community, the U.N. IPCC report, and the bulk of the Main Stream Media ignore these facts.

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With the impending publication of a new U.N. report that puts the blame for Global Warming on mankind, along with Al Gore being nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work on Global Warming, there has been a great deal written on the subject.

The Liberal-Left, which controls much of the media and other sources of information and research, have been pushing climate change as being a man-made phenomenon, rather than a natural planetary cycle. They even use hostile rhetoric towards those who take positions contrary to their "it's all man's fault" attitude.

Climate change is natural and ongoing. It was only about forty years ago that there was a huge clamor that the Earth was entering another ice age. Now the sky is falling, and they are concerned about the current warming trend, without looking at all of the facts, not to mention all the variables that impact the Earth's climate.

They use images of polar bears stranded on ice floes, some of which have drowned as they drifted to far from shore. Sad as this is, one must remember that polar bears survived the last warming period that occurred at the time when the Vikings explored much of the Northern Atlantic when the Earth's average surface temperature was much higher than it is today. At that point in time, and up until about the 14th century, it was possible to grow crops in Greenland. At this same time, there is evidence that citrus was grown in Mongolia. Currently, Mongolia is unable to support the farming of citrus fruit. The end of the Viking Age and agriculture in Greenland coincides with the beginning of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that lasted for several hundred years, and gave way to the current warming trend that the Earth is now experiencing.

The computer models used to predict future climate conditions are only as good as the data that is used. It is only recently that they began to incorporate clouds and ocean currents into these models. What about the impact of solar flares, sun spot activity, cosmic rays, gravitational effects from the solar neighborhood, variations in the Earth's orbit, and the list goes on for extra-planetary influences on the climate. Then there are those of terrestrial nature that may not be accounted for, such has shifts of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth's continents, volcanic activity which is highly variable and unpredictable over large time spans. How can these changes be accurately modeled when there are so many variations in these activities that influence the climate? Bottom line, the data used in these models can be manipulated to return any set of desired results, thus "proving" whatever it is that the people involved want to "prove."

The Earth's warming is a natural phenomenon. There isn't anything we can do about, and there is no valid proof that mankind is causing it. It may well bring the extinction of many species, and not just polar bears, and that is a regrettable side effect. On the flip side, agriculture will spread into areas that are currently unfarmable, thus enabling us to feed the world's population, and we may even see evolution in action over the next million years or so.

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President Chirac of France has announced intentions to use extortionary tactics against the United States if the U.S. does not sign the Kyoto climate protocol as well as other future agreements concerning Global Warming. From the NYTimes:

But he warned that if the United States did not sign the agreements, a carbon tax across Europe on imports from nations that have not signed the Kyoto treaty could be imposed to try to force compliance. The European Union is the largest export market for American goods.

"A carbon tax is inevitable," Mr. Chirac said. "If it is European, and I believe it will be European, then it will all the same have a certain influence because it means that all the countries that do not accept the minimum obligations will be obliged to pay."

Trade lawyers have been divided over the legality of a carbon tax, with some saying it would run counter to international trade rules. But Mr. Chirac said other European countries would back it. "I believe we will have all of the European Union," he said.

Since the U.S. recognizes that Kyoto is nothing more than a U.N. sponsored tax on the U.S., as well as being an anchor on our economy, the threat of a carbon tax on U.S. goods is pure extortion to force the U.S., and other countries, into a bad deal.

Quite frankly, if France and the rest of the E.U. does use such a tactic as a "carbon tax" to extort more money from U.S. businesses, then it would only be appropriate to implement a counter tax that can be used to provide credits to businesses that do business in the E.U. to make up the difference. Otherwise, the price of U.S. goods would be higher than they currently are as business always passes such expenses on to the consumers.

Either way, such tactics are damaging both to business and to consumers, not to mention the average working joe who gets caught in the middle of such tactics, and is put at risk of losing his job.

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Kyoto and Global Warning are in the news again. As usual, the MSM is taking the side of the Loony-Left that Global Warming is Man's fault, and not part of the natural cycle of the Earth and the Cosmos.

Canada's Harper gets it right, referring to Kyoto as nothing more than a socialist scheme to tax wealthy nations. From CBC News:

"We're gearing up now for the biggest struggle our party has faced since you entrusted me with the leadership," Harper's letter says.

"I'm talking about the 'battle of Kyoto' - our campaign to block the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto accord."

Harper, like Bush, gets it right. Kyoto would be very damaging in the U.S., and any other highly Westernized country, like Canada, Japan, Australia, the U.K., to name a few.

It would suck wealth out of our economies, and shift it to smaller/poorer countries, most of which have corrupt governments that would not use the funds to build up their country's economies, but shift it to their own personal bank accounts.

Never mind the fact that there are a growing number of scientists that are refuting Kyoto as being based on nothing more than junk science.

There are also two new books out that look to be worth a read. Unstoppable Global Warming and The Chilling Stars. Time to put those on the reading list.

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Ms. Cullen, a self-proclaimed expert on Global Warming has this to say about those who do not subscribe to her viewpoint:

I'd like to take that suggestion a step further. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming. (One good resource if you don't have a lot of time is the Pew Center's Climate Change 101.)

Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy. If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.

Well, she is half-right, there is a big difference between peer-reviewed science and junk pseudo-science with a political agenda. Unfortunately, the peer review process is controlled by those who subscribe to "the one true way" of it's man's fault the Earth is warming.

Her call for decertification of meteorologists who to not subscribe to the "one true wayism" of the "Global Warming" is an outrage.

Scientific consensus can only be given when the theory is proven to be law, which in the case of man's contributions to carbon emissions and the overall impact is still under debate, it is people like Ms. Cullen who want to silence differing opinions.

What is laughable, is that Cullen calls herself a scientist, and a meteorologist, yet she claims that it is incorrect to state that hurricanes rotate clockwise. Here's a bit of real scientific facts for Ms. Cullen (from wikipedia):

A tropical cyclone is a warm storm system fueled by thunderstorms near its center. It feeds on the heat released when moist air rises and the water vapor in it condenses. The term describes the storm's origin in the tropics and its cyclonic nature, which means that its circulation is counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. Tropical cyclones are distinguished from other cyclonic windstorms such as nor'easters, European windstorms, and polar lows by the heat mechanism that fuels them, which makes them "warm core" storm systems. Depending on their location and strength, there are various terms by which tropical cyclones are known, such as hurricane, typhoon, tropical storm, cyclonic storm, and tropical depression.

Egads! She's supposed to have a Ph.D in this stuff. In her case Ph.D. must mean "Piled higher and Deeper."

It gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view. From the epw.sentate.gov blog:

Cullen's call for decertification of TV weatherman who do not agree with her global warming assessment follows a year (2006) in which the media, Hollywood and environmentalists tried their hardest to demonize scientific skeptics of manmade global warming. Scott Pelley, CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent, compared skeptics of global warming to "Holocaust deniers" and former Vice President turned foreign lobbyist Al Gore has repeatedly referred to skeptics as "global warming deniers."

And:

In addition, Cullen's December 17, 2006 episode of "The Climate Code" TV show, featured a columnist who openly called for Nuremberg-style Trials for climate skeptics. Cullen featured Grist Magazine's Dave Roberts as an eco-expert opining on energy issues, with no mention of his public call to institute what amounts to the death penalty for scientists who express skepticism about global warming. See: http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=264568

These people are determined to silence opposition opinion and research that contradicts their assertions. This is scary stuff.

Yet, Cullen is undeterred. She calls herself a scientist and a skeptic. Yet her writings on her own blog show otherwise.

On her blog, a comment posted on her blog included a link to a site called Friends of Science, which has lots of useful information. On the front page is a chart that shows some interesting trends, including sun sport activity in relation to carbon emissions and warming. There is more to Global Warming than meets the eye, regardless of the source.

There are also a number of other sites out there doing similar work, as well as a number of publications, including Satannic Gases from the Cato Institute.

The bottom line is this: silencing opposing viewpoints is about as un-American as you can get regardless of the issue. And comparing people who question the validity of the "one true way of global warming" to "holocaust deniers" as is being done on a routine basis, is outrageous.

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In Antarctica, scientists are mapping the effects of temperture change on the ice shelf by drilling into the ice sheets to the ocean floor. FoxNews:

So far, the cores show a dynamic ice sheet that advanced and retreated more than 50 times over 5 million years.

Some of the ice shelf's disappearance was probably during times when the planet was 36 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) to 37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) warmer than it is today - "much like it will be in the next 50 to 100 years," said Tim Naish, a lead scientist on the project from Victoria University in New Zealand.

What Naish is saying is that the Earth has been much warmer than it is today, and is in a warming cycle. It wasn't too many years ago that we were in a cooling cycle, and people were in a tizzy over a potential mini-iceage.

The Ross Ice Sheet, where the drilling is taking place is a floating glacier about the size of France.

The historical geological science is interesting as it proves that the Earth's climate is quite cyclical, subject to changes as it moves through the Cosmos.

Of course, the lefties of the world will no doubt blame this on Bush.

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A few weeks ago, Opinion Journal ran a letter written by Senators Rockefeller and Snowe to the CEO of Exxon/Mobile, demanding that they cease funding of research that runs counter the "global warming" mantra. There is also an accompanying editorial:

its essential point is that the two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should "end its dangerous support of the [global warming] 'deniers.' " Not only that, the company "should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history." And in extra penance for being "one of the world's largest carbon emitters," Exxon should spend that money on "global remediation efforts."

The Senators aren't dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can't refuse. But in case the CEO doesn't understand his company's jeopardy, they add that "ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years."

Regardless of what you believe where global warming is concerned, the comparison to the tobacco industry and lung disease is a lot of horse-hockey. They are also attempting to marginalize anyone who holds an opinion that is contrary to what they believe in by using terms like "global warming deniers" and referring to research into this area as not being legitimate if not peer-reviewed by the same types of people who brought us a lot of hype about "cold fusion" being the next great thing. We all know where that one ended up. Never mind the fact that these so-called "peers" are attempting to use their status to control what information and knowledge is disseminated to the general public. In other words, they want to censor what conflicts with their views, just like much of the mainstream media does on a daily basis.

Lord Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, has sent a scathing rebuttal to the two U.S. Senators, blasting them for their blatant attempt at curtailing the First Amendment Right of Freedom of Speech.

You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to "senior elected and appointed government officials" who disagree with your opinion. You are elected officials yourselves. If you do not believe in the right of persons within the United States to exercise their fundamental right under the world’s greatest Constitution to petition their elected representatives for the redress of their grievances, then you have no place on Capitol Hill. You must go.

Monckton then goes into a lot of data, some of it referencing UN reports, and events, such as the death of 3,000 people in France during a heat wave a few years back, which was blamed on "global warming" and how the media predominantly ignored the death of 25,000 people in the U.K. last year during a severe cold snap.

The letter from Monckton to these two rogue Senators does a good job of providing information that refutes the "global warming" doomsayers. An excellent letter that I highly recommend reading.

Posted by Sqotty at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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