That's a wrap...

"Historic Northern Hemisphere Inactivity" - that's the quote from the Center For Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies... 2007 was a notable hurricane year after all... SEE LINK HERE

HA! Nice One Mr. Klaus

So the Czech President has always been a funny guy, but this was a perfect pun:

"The relationship between his activities and world peace is unclear and indistinct,"

Was he referring to the relationship between human CO2 and Global Warming? We'll never really know, the old fox is that crafty...

He continued: "It rather seems that Gore's doubting of basic cornerstones of the current civilization does not contribute to peace."

I love it. Full article HERE.

I Can't Handle This...

There's a lot going on in my life right now - been pretty busy, hence limited posting. That said, this might actually put me over the edge, I might not be able to recover. A dark, dark holiday season. Al Gore gets a nobel prize. See link here:

Sen. Barbara Boxer's office just contacted us to say former Vice President Al Gore has been called "overseas" for a trip related to his work on global warming and has canceled his scheduled appearance Thursday in San Francisco at a fundraiser for Boxer's re-election effort. So the Boxer fundraiser -- which was to include Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne -- is off until Nov. 9.

SANITY!!!!!

A California judge threw out the state's lawsuit against the auto indistry ---> ENJOY

Great Commentary On The GISS Flub

Since the GISS revised its data there's been debate, meaningful or not meaningful? A blip but irrelevant and warming is still happening, or a major blow to the Gore ilk? A blow to those oil-funded... ah whatever I am just still irked by the Newsweek flub.

The key argument here lies with the fact that the data is US-specific... and we're less than 5% of global landmass. The argument, then, is that its not relevant. The article makes a great case otherwise.

Anyway read the editorial and decide for yourself - only 2 pages - here's an excerpt (full article here):

But, notes Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre, who exposed the false figures, “The Hansen error . . . has a significant impact on the GISS estimate of U.S. temperature history . . .” (Emphasis added.) Is this important because we’re a major world power or that we produce the best fried chicken? No, it’s important because we have a far more sophisticated system of temperature monitoring than countries with far larger land masses. Hence, data from each of these nations affect the global model more than the American data.

“Many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas,” observes McIntyre. This can produce hotter temperatures, yet some of the major trackers of the data from these countries, including the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, make no attempt to adjust for monitor placement errors. In any event, for some reason “the U.S. history has a rather minimal (warming) trend if any since the 1930s, while the ROW [rest of the world] has a very pronounced trend since the 1930s.”

Thus if the U.S. model, by far the most accurate one, became the model, it would be a gut punch to those claiming we must take drastic, horrifically expense measures right now to ameliorate warming.

----> FULL TEXT OF THE ARTICLE HERE

This One Is Important - Remember It

I am giddy...

So we've all read that the last decade has been the hottest on record, that 1998 was the hottest year on record and 2005 tied that record. Right?

WRONG

Yesterday NASA changed the data - now it seems 1934 was actually the hottest and the temperature spike recently was artifically high (NASA has acknowledged the mistake).

In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math. After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review. Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998. More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius. (article here)

So what does this mean????? Here's what:

1934 is now the hottest, and 3 others from the 1930's are in the top 10. Furthermore, only 3 (not 9) took place since 1995 (1998, 1999, and 2006). The years 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 are now below the year 1900 and no longer even in the top 20. (source)

Here's the raw data by the way straight from NASA...

All I can say is, WOW. Remember this one because it'll be out of the headlines (if it even gets there - maybe Newsweek will retract their article?) before you know it.

MSNBC Strikes Again... May Destroy Planet

Just click here and enjoy... Gotta love the tradeoffs between cooling the earth and setting off a global chain reaction that might kill us all in the process. My favorite is the solar umbarella... ella... ella... eh... eh... eh... No clouds in my storms.

The "Propaganda Machine" Rolls On...

First off sorry for the delay in posting - it was a crazy couple weeks at work. Anyway, I was traveling a lot... Somewhere between Indiana and Charlotte I was in a store at the airport and saw the following Newsweek Cover:
(note: if you can't read the asterisk it says: "Or so claim the well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine.")

Now I have to say - this is awesome. Awesome why? Because its one of the best BS pitches to the mass and mindless audiences I've ever seen. I mean hall of fame good. The more exciting important thing though, in a perverse way, is that it suggests to me that I am on to something. I mean anyone with half a neuron invested in the global warming discussion knows that this is at least a debatable topic. Even the people out there pitching it say "look, its happening, and even if its not 100% fact right now we should invest ahead of the curve because once we know for sure it'll be too late". But there's Newsweek, all shiny and new, speaking to an audience of 3.2 million a week (and declining no doubt) pitching that the informed view is that there's a conspiracy afoot and that anyone questioning the mainstream is either on the payroll or brainwashed by those that are (i.e. me - but which one am I???!!!!!).

As usual, the article strated with the consensus science of the IPCC (see the full Newsweek article here by the way). Pity they decided not to quote all those scientists that were either elbowed out of the panel or left because they felt they were being railroaded (just ask Chris Landsea - I STRONGLY encourage you all to read his letter of resignation from the IPCC and his stated reasons by clicking HERE).

Have a great week - watch out for the brainwashing. Also watch out for that guy from Dangerous Confressions.

Mental Bookmarks Precipitates Change!

For all of you that wrote me regarding my post HERE, thanks... Looks like our arduous multi-day long crusade has yielded progress:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - PepsiCo Inc. will spell out that its Aquafina bottled water is made with tap water, a concession to the growing environmental and political opposition to the bottled water industry. FULL ARTICLE

Now that's impact - thanks to all my readers... More to follow.

Blame it on the rain, and by rain I mean Global Warming

Look at Milli and Vanilli, no idea what's going on. Kind of like you, no idea. It's fitting in a way, they fooled everyone... ahhhh the metaphor almost writes itself.

Anyway, one of the beauties of the "debate" being settled on Global Warming is the ability to now blame basically anything on it... Take the floods in the UK this week and the resulting quote:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown linked the floods to climate change and pledged 200 million pounds (298 million euros, 411 million dollars) extra funding, plus a review to address future issues. "Like every advanced industrialised country, we are coming to terms with the issues surrounding climate change," he said after a visit to an affected area.

I suppose whatever makes you sleep at night, right? But haven't rivers been flooding since like 150 years ago? I read somewhere this is the worst flooding in like 100 years over there...

Pure Manipulation

I'm assuming most people reading this (if anyone actually does) drink bottled water... I'm also assuming from time to time you hear stories about how it's not that much cleaner than tap - as a former New Yorker I was constantly reminded that The City had some of the cleanest water in the country.

An intreresting Op-Ed piece in the Boston Globe Sunday (click here) noted the following:

Nationally, we'll drop $16 billion on bottled water this year. That's 27.6 gallons for each of us. Since most of the bottles it comes in never get recycled, we're helping to clog landfills with 4 billion pounds of plastic annually. And when you consider the energy it takes to make and move those bottles into and around the United States, you might as well fill a quarter of every single one of them with oil.

Interesting right? The piece also talks to (and this blew my mind) Aquafina basically being tap water (specifically comes from a tap in Ayer, MA and then is filtered):

...Ayer, Massachusetts. Best known for mills, railroads, and a former military base. And the water comes not from some gently burbling spring in a picturesque valley, either, but from the municipal water supply. Which pumps a slightly less-filtered but equally safe version of that same water into residents' homes for a quarter of one cent per gallon.

Have to love it - we're wasting economic resources and polluting the environment to drink water that's as good as what's coming out of the tap. Take a look at what's on the table at the next congressional hearing on the enviroment. I'm guessing it's not a pitcher...

Hurricane Update: July 20th

Those pesky records...

One thing that always gets me is a "new record temperature". One day last year it was the "hottest day since 1913" or something. So I have to ask, if we can't even beat the 1913 record I mean, pretty weak right? In all seriousness though these people would have you believe this was the hottest our planet has ever been.

Another LiveScience special I came across today:

In 2100 Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be much higher than anytime during the past 650,000 years. (IPCC)

So here's my point - earth is 4.5 billion years old or so. Life hasn't been around for that full length of time, but let's put a couple things in perspective here - dinosaurs DIED OFF 65 million years ago and they were around for upwards of 200 million years. Before that we have several hundred million years of complex life. 650,000 years since we broke the record? If we compare that to the 200 million years since the dinos died off we're looking at about 0.3% - comparing that to my hottest day on record since 1913 example that basically means we would have had the hottest day in the last 4 months.

Anyway check this graphic out - it'll be a while before we break the CO2 record.

Nothing is really provable, so everything is possibly true? Exactly.

So one of my favorite arguments by the "Debate is over" and "If you debate this you're a nut-joerb" crowd goes like this: "There will always be some piece of data that someone with an anti-environment agenda will argue, but for all purposes the debate on global warming has been settled". If my last post introduced Climate BS Point #1: "Who cares if it's not true, it'll do some good", this one is undoubtedly #2: "Everything is debatable in science [so even though there's ample data / debate regarding human cause for global warming it's unimportant]".

Take this clip from an MSNBC article (which by the way I have to ask - this is clearly an agenda-driven editorial, shouldn't it be flagged as such - much like my WSJ article below was found on the EDITORIAL page?). Anyway, read this (thanks to Andrea Thompson at LiveScience):

From catastrophic sea level rise to jarring changes in local weather, humanity faces a potentially dangerous threat from the changes our own pollution has wrought on Earth’s climate. But since nothing in science can ever be proven with 100 percent certainty, how is it that scientists can be so sure that we are the cause of global warming?

For years, there has been clear scientific consensus [note: not true, see a great collection here] that Earth’s climate is heating up and that humans are the culprits behind the trend, says Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at the University of California, San Diego.

....

[the best part] Contrary to popular parlance, science can never truly “prove” a theory. Science simply arrives at the best explanation of how the world works. Global warming can no more be “proven” than the theory of continental drift, the theory of evolution or the concept that germs carry diseases.

OK, so where do I go with this. I guess first, how do you argue the debate is settled on warming by arguing that science can be wrong? Aren't you basically saying your "definitive" consensus on warming might be wrong? Good argument Andrea.

More interesting, though, is the proactive effort to fray the faith in science here as a legitimate study... a full-blown #2 - "anything's possible", "nothing can ever reallllly be proven". How do som many people eat this up? I view this as a dangerous path to walk (Mike C says it far more eloquently than I).


Oh, and um, continental drift can be proven by measuring movement in land mass over time (South America and Africa moving apart at 5.7cm a year) and through fossil records (by the way it used to be called the theory of continental drift but was replaced with plate tectonics, so much for LiveScience); germs carrying disease can be proven by exposing an organism to those germs (horrible choice of example by the way Andrea); natural selection (if not evolution) can be measured through generations of fruit flies (as another aside I find it great that the lefties arguing environmental causes find sanctuary with the righties arguing evolution - awesome).

Save the polar bears... save the world

So there's a lot of discussion about the polar bears losing their habitat as a result of global warming. Comes up regularly in the "debate". Anyway I put it in the category of points people will accept simply because they view their validity as a secondary consideration - let me explain. Let's say I told you children were being murdered in the U.S. at a rate of 1,000 a day and we needed to invest heavily in school security to reduce that number. Many of you would look at that and say "maybe its true, maybe not... heck, I'm not even sure I believe it, but does it matter? If it gets people investing in school security that's ok by me."

So I ask the question - is it ok? Don't get me wrong, I don't view this as an easy one... it's far from black and white, and frankly people have been manipulating statistics for years to serve a given purpose (or excluding a stat, for that matter that might not support the argument). And far be it for me to say its "bad" to recycle, or reduce emmissions, or plant a tree. In fact quite the opposite - those are good things. But to manipulate people into doing them by manipulating data that isn't accurate...? Makes me a little uncomfortable. Anyway I'll come back to this one in future posts, for now on to a great example: the polar bears.

So the bears - commonly held global warming belief goes something like this: world gets warmer, ice melts, ecosystems close to the north pole deteriorates, polar bear which (a) lives on ice and (b) depends on that ecosystem dies off. How many of you have seen pictures on the news like the one at the start of this post? I was driving home a few weeks ago and say a billboard with a pitch to save the polar bears, same melting snow all around. On the brilliantly filmed Planet Earth series recently same thing - polar bears swimming and swimming to exhaustion because of no ice... Problem is, it's not really happening - in fact the population is close to an all time high.

Which brings me to an editorial I read a while back in the Wall Street Jouranl - really worth a read (see link below) - the issue is whether the bears should be an endangered species, not because their numbers ARE in decline or historically low, but because warming is EXPECTED to drive them down. This is no rare bald eagle, but a plentiful and thriving species.

"It also turns out that most of the alarm over the polar bear's future stems from a single, peer-reviewed study, which found that the bear population had declined by some 250, or 25%, in Western Hudson Bay in the last decade. But the polar bear's range is far more extensive than Hudson Bay. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain concluded that the ice bear populations "may now be near historic highs." One of the leading experts on the polar bear, Mitchell Taylor, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory in Canada, has found that the Canadian polar bear population has actually increased by 25% -- to 15,000 from 12,000 over the past decade." - WSJ

Do we change policy and make an economic decision when the data says otherwise? Do we use pictures of melting snow to convince the public there's a problem when the evidence is shaky at best? And of course... does it matter (i.e. maybe investing in wildlife is a good thing even if the way you get the public to endorse it is by lying to them)?

You decide - here's the full EDITORIAL WSJ LINK (might require a login)

A Collection Of Global Warming Notes

Anyone who knows me understands they shouldn't raise this topic. Anyway decide for yourself - I'll always respect an informed opinion, but each and every time I come across someone who definitively believes global warming is fact I point them to the following list.

Trust me, you invest the requisite time in the below list and you'll emerge a) more informed, b) questioning whether it was written by the oil companies and c) scared it might actually be right. Trust me.

#1 - Aliens Cause Global Warming - CLICK HERE

#2 - An exceptional website working through some data / related thoughts (non-technical) - CLICK HERE

#3 - The Case For Skepticism On Global Warming - CLICK HERE

#4 - A brief article with some interested thinking in response to Gore's Movie - CLICK HERE

#5 - The Great Global Warming Swindle (movie out of the UK, in parts, at YouTube... very much worth it) - CLICK HERE

#6 - Will Farrell (perhaps the most compelling piece) - CLICK HERE

#7 - And to be fair, Gore's own words (have fun - watch this after you invest in understanding the debate more holistically by reading / watching the above... ask yourself and post if you think he actually says anything... note how he refers to the scientific community as "unanimous" / refers to "all the scientists" in minute 15 or so) - CLICK HERE

The Reason I'm Wasting My (your?) time...

Pretty simple really - frustration with factual recall on things that are important to me. Call this a digital scrapbook of sorts; I'm always coming across things I find interesting, informative or generally know I'll want to come back to at some point in the future - thing is I file it away somewhere mentally and then it atrophies, slowly at first then faster, until you're talking to someone and trying to recall a statistic or argument and can't get there. You know why you like or dislike a politician for example, but can't defend why (even though 5 years ago you read something that made you swear you'd never vote for them and would tell everyone not to as well).

Anyway that's it - things to remember. My Mental Bookmarks.

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