Archive for the Science Category

All scientists agree, we can agree on that.  Right.  Right?

New research finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades, contrary to some recent studies.

Extra credit questions:

How many liberal/progressive/moonbats that were P.O.’d over some of the comments made concerning Ted Kennedy’s passing are now piling on about Rush’s current medical event? Is it greater than the number of neo-con/right-winger/wackadoodle domestic terrorists who are wailing over the hateful comments about him from those same leftists?

Which non-Constitutional aspect of the health care pork-off bill will be the eventual stake through its heart?

How far into 2009 2010 will you still be writing “2009″ on your checks?

And here is the bonus question for all you SW Idaho folks… how many times in the past two weeks have you flipped the radio channel over to either NPR or the Christian station because you’re just darn sick of listening to college football talk? The only thing that makes me flip a channel faster these days is a Barack Obama speech… he’s gotten really tired and boring too lately.

A short while back I watched a commenter on a post at Huckleberries make a rather snide and juvenile argument to the effect that man-caused global warming is true and the fact that there is such total scientific “concensus” among “real” scientists proves it’s true.  He used a wikipedia article as support.  Some of the other Huckleberry commenters can be quite, er, critical about the links people use to support their points, but in this case the wiki link sailed through.  A wiki link?  You’ve got to be kidding me…  Wikipedia, that bastion of knowledge and untainted truth, with articles written by the smartest people on earth?  Wikipedia, that liberal slimepit of lies and fabrication, where articles are written and edited by hacks?  Which is it?

Concerning wikipedia and global warming articles, I found this piece of interest this morning

Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries.

“When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand,” Solomon wrote. “When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.”

Meanwhile, followers who adhered to Connolley’s climate views “were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings,” Solomon contends.

Through his control of the Wikipedia pages, Connolley is said to have “turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.”

Facts about the Medieval Warm Period and criticism of global warming doctrine were purportedly scrubbed from Wikipedia’s pages.

“With the release of the Climategate e-mails, the disappearing trick has been exposed,” Solomon declared. “The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.”

Interesting article. Read the whole thing. And for you progressive Huckleberry commenters who stumble over here, never mind hitting the link, it goes to a notoriously right-wing tea party friendly wackadoodle terrorist internet news site that you all hate with a furious passion for being, well, “biased”. It’ll just make you angry, and I hate it when that happens.

Our Heart to Lord Christopher Monckton.  Champion of Copenhagen?  Indeed.

More damage to the human-caused global warming theory this past week, this time from evidence that indicates Russian climate station data was cherry picked and only data that showed increased temperatures was included in the report that the IPCC used to bully the world’s politicians, scientists, and media.  There is increasingly only one conclusion an honest person can come to over this whole thing.

What can be said is this: We now have substantial evidence, from several independent sources, that the data used as the basis for the IPCC report has been adjusted in undocumented ways, and those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.

Until the data is re-examined, fully, openly, and transparently, it is impossible to conclude how much of a contribution to global climate change humans have made, or whether that contribution has been made by human-generated CO2. And without knowing that, attempts to “fix the problem,” through cap and trade or Copenhagen agreements, is misguided at best — and dangerous at worst.

Of course, as we’ve seen repeatedly in the past few months, honest people are in very short supply in Washington and Copenhagen. In fact, there is more untampered-with data to indicate the entire global warming movement is simply the vehicle of choice for 21st century socialists than there is to support the idea that human generated carbon emissions are warming and destroying the planet. Doubt me? How else do you explain the fact that Hugo Chavez has been the headliner at Copenhagen so far? How else do you explain the fact that all the rancor and bad blood being displayed at COP15 is not over whether there is a problem in the first place but over how much of the developed world’s wealth will be transferred to the corrupt little politicians governments of the “developing” nations?

Speaking of transferring the world’s wealth, can someone tell me where Hillary got the $100 billion she was dangling in front of the COP15 circus yesterday?  Unless it was buried in that last omnibus earmark bill, or it’s mentioned on page 2010 of Harry’s “healthcare” bill (which no one has seen yet), I don’t recall the nation authorizing her to be so free with our credit card.  It’s for sure we do not have the money.  If we did we could do something REAL with it, like buy health insurance for a few uninsured Americans.

But Hillary is simply the opening act for the B+arack Obama Save The Conference Save The World Tour.  Probably the most that can be said about this trip is “Why?”  He doesn’t have any money.  He doesn’t have authorization from Congress, so any “commitment” he makes on our behalf will only be backed by his own good looks.  And watching his ability to get things done here at home, I can hardly imagine what good he’ll be in Copenhagen.  “See and be seen” at the largest gathering of global socialists in a decade?  It’ll look good on his resume.

In many ways, it is a fitting place for the man… the more exposure “global warming” gets, the more the hoax is apparent.  Rather like our President, don’t you think?

Way too busy this week, and way too cold.  Four mornings below zero.  High all week was in the low 20’s.  Brrrr!  So it’s good to just spend a Saturday morning on the couch with a pot of coffee, a sleepy dog, and a list of links.

As the blog header tag says “mmmmm, climate change”.  Here’s an article from Pajamas Media about ignoring 200 years of observations that the global warming cult doesn’t want you to look at. 

Just this year, the data behind Michael Mann’s hockey stick was finally released. Mann had used only 12 carefully selected tree ring sequences to prepare his story — omitting 34 that didn’t suit his purpose. This is surely one of the most scandalous examples of cherry picking on record, a blatant attempt to keep the world scared of carbon dioxide, and to keep reputations and research budgets safe. A gravy train, of jet-set travel to conferences in choice locations around the globe, each well-laced with top cuisine for the top tables and adulation from a regular caravansary of hangers-on, swelling a spurious and unscientific consensus.

By the way, if you want more on the manipulation of climate data to fit the cult’s belief system, get over to WUWT. Multiple posts.  My degree is in Biology, so I am not totally ignorant of the scientific method, and what I see in Climategate is unbelieveable.  I remember the first “Earth Day”, and was a committed convert then, going so far as to man the table in the Student Union building getting the word out about the dangers of single hulled tankers in Puget Sound.  For that matter, I remember SDS and the Weathermen… so I’m not ignorant of radicals and radical Marxist politics either.  What is going on now in our country and the world, both in politics and in science is so frustrating and so frightening.  For heaven’s sake folks, wake up, because this country is in dire peril.

Sorry about the rant.  We’re supposed to be enjoying coffee this morning aren’t we… Let’s see now.  Oh look, here’s Rich Lowrey at NRO.

Much of what was new and different about Obama didn’t survive its first contact with reality. His core supporters on the left suffer from what Woodrow Wilson called, in a different context, the “tragedy of disappointment.” They expected a glorious new dispensation.

Instead, they got the most boring man in the world. That’s gotta hurt.  Especially when, as so many have pointed out by snarkily counting how many times he says “I” in his speeches (average is about 35 times apparently), he truly believes he was sent here to save us.  He is, after all, the one we’ve been waiting for, right?

Many of the people in the Obama administration, the president included, enjoy all the credentials we associate with the best and the brightest: the right schools, the good grades, the successful careers. Alas, whether it be allocating health care or defining the kind of jobs the economy ought to create, the policies they favor suggest a strong belief that they know what’s best not just for themselves, but for everyone else too.

Of course, the kind of people who are apt to push for government-imposed solutions are those who are also apt to believe they will be the ones imposing decisions, not the ones who have to live with decisions imposed by others. Sometimes that’s because they enjoy the wealth that gives them escape hatches unavailable to the less affluent, such as their ability to ensure that their own children never have to set foot in a public school. Mostly, however, their trust in government reflects their confidence that they have all the answers and that it’s government’s job to enforce them.

Speaking of wielding government power, there is some talk that the Obama administration’s EPA “takeover” of the whole carbon-in-the-environment issue this past week may turn out to be a case of shooting themselves in the foot. There is little doubt that the announcement by the EPA that carbon dioxide is a poison and the agency was taking over its regulation was also a showboat for Obama to take to Copenhagen. Oh yeah, the cap and tax bill is widely thought to be dead (for now) and The Won has been threatening to just do it himself, but this might turn out to be an instance of “oh crap, I didn’t think about that”. The EPS’s Carbon Bomb Fizzles

Industry groups are gearing up for a legal onslaught; and don’t underestimate their prospects. The leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in England alone are a gold mine for those who want to challenge the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming.

But the EPA’s legal vulnerabilities go beyond that. The agency derives its authority to regulate pollutants from the Clean Air Act. To use that law to regulate greenhouse gases, the EPA has to prove those gases are harmful to human health (thus, the endangerment finding). Put another way, it must provide “science” showing that a slightly warmer earth will cause Americans injury or death. Given that most climate scientists admit that a warmer earth could provide “net benefits” to the West, this is a tall order.

All this stuff is depressing sometimes, so perhaps it’s time to stop.  This past week my business took me all over the SW corner of Idaho. You folks who aren’t familiar with the real West don’t know what you lack. My Sweetie went to the big Left Coast cities to see the kids while I stayed here and she again brought back tales of the city that make me grateful that we live here in Idaho.  Over this past week I’ve seen pheasants and quail, deer and elk, a wolf, and more flocks of turkeys than even Washington D.C. can boast. Towns so small they only have four buildings, a garage, a general store, a cafe, and a church. I watched a young dad helping his boy into the cab of a tractor to take a load of hay out to the cattle. I saw real cowboys on horseback rounding up range cattle, and a young woman on a horse pushing a dozen cows through town, helped only by three cowdogs. I saw rafts of geese and ducks in the middle of a near frozen river, rafts so large you couldn’t begin to count them. I drove by ranch houses so far out you’d wonder how they got a powerline out there, and I was touched that they had a wreath on their door and their Christmas lights on. And some of the most beautiful country anywhere on earth. We are so blessed! I thank God we live here, and that at least this little part of America still resembles what we all dream of, and long for.

Well, time to go shovel snow. Y’all have a great day. Be thankful too.

In honor of the pilgrimage of the extremists faithful to Copenhagen this week, I’d like to offer this as the quote of the day. 

From 2003, Michael Crichton

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Fitting, before Copenhagen starts.

So, alright, you don’t have a sick day to spend chasing the ManBearPig all over the internet, trying to decide whether to be a scoffer or a denier or a true believer or a skeptic…

Head over to Borepatch’s place and check out this excellent and easy to read summary titled “Should You be a Global Warming Skeptic?”

(h/t Kevin at TSM)

If you have been following (or ignoring) the big story that is being called ClimateGate, you will be interested in a resource over at WattsUpWithThat that includes a ton of links to all aspects of the story.  The more I read, the more fascinating it becomes.  And the more curious it is that the big media is doing their best to sweep it under the rug.  You’d think, if the science was so bulletproof, they would be happy to prove it once and for all and tear these upstart Know-nothing skeptics a new one.  The fact that they aren’t is quite telling.

Presenter: And welcome to ‘Spot the Looney’, where once again we invite you to come with us all over the world to meet all kinds of people in all kinds of places, and ask you to . .. Spot the Looney!

Tonight, we go to Great Britian.  Well, Britain anyway, where we’d like you to meet Gordon Brown.

Mr Brown last night insisted that the science on climate change in settled, and accused those who question the consensus of being outdated.

He said: “With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”

I can think of a lot of things we must do, but Gord, I don’t think you’d approve. But thanks for being our guest tonight on Spot The Looney!

spot the looney

It appears that the same virus that infected the climate data in the UK is also present at NASA.

Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data dating as far back as the 1930s.

“I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” Mr. Horner said. “These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”

The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed its data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for the hottest years, with 1934 listed as slightly cooler.

If you change it, it isn’t data. If you hide it, it isn’t true. If no one else can duplicate it, it isn’t science.  The kind of data manipulation evident in the Climategate emails, and now in question at NASA, better get a few politicians off the fence and slamming the brakes on HARD on cap and tax.  Nothing like a good strong dose of sunlight to kill the manbearpig virus. 

The next problem will be the entrenched stupidity and progressive political ideology that infests the White House.

The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.

“Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.

It’s not about the truth, it’s about political power. Global warming has been a powerful political vehicle for the Left for more than a decade. Don’t expect them to get off that looney bus willingly. It might take some serious throwing… are you up for it?

As if we needed any more.  Wasn’t the couch routine with Nancy the Queen of the Bay enough evidence for you? 

A spokesperson for American Solutions told AT {American Thinker} that Gingrich has made “no public statement yet” on Climategate, but Gingrich, the spokesperson said, is following the issue “closely.”  The spokesperson also said that a statement on Climategate will be released “fairly soon,” perhaps as early as “next week.”

As early as next week, eh?

Newt Gingrich is irrelevant as a speaker or a leader for the conservative movement. Go away, leave us alone.

What will be interesting will be to see which scientists from among the alarmed camp step forward to denounce the cooked books and to point to flawed studies/conclusions that can no longer be trusted.  Who, in other words, are the real scientists who will follow the truth and who will deeply resent having been misled in whole or part by those who manipulated the data or the process.  

           -Hugh Hewitt

“The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments,” he added in a written statement to Reuters.

“There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed.”

            -Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you!

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it’s that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the “peer-review” process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The “science” of the CRU dominates the “science” behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the “science” behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

But don’t worry, it’s all “peer-reviewed.”

           -Mark Stein

The following quotes and links are especially dedicated to (and intended to wake up) my readers here in the Boise area who will no doubt be unaware that the evil Man-Bear-Pig has been officailly placed on “Open Season” status.  Come on everyone, there is more to life than  the BSU football game.  Turn off the TV, put down the Statesman, and ignore the local radio stations…