Monday, November 19, 2007

Read of the Day

Orson Scott Card really gives it to the AGW crowd. Money quote:

The Global Warming alarmists are the anti-science religion that is trying to forcibly indoctrinate and convert everyone while suppressing dissent. And the news media are their patsies, their stooges, their puppets.

The more you research AGW, the more you realize that the AGW shills act exactly like a religious cult. They use guilt to try to get you do follow their orders. They threaten some kind of apocalypse if you don’t. The way they respond with mantras like “overwhelming consensus” and “only real scientists believe”, as if it’s some kind of magic spell that’s supposed to block any criticism, is really sad. I’ve had conversations with many otherwise intelligent people who buy into this stuff. I think a lot of them believe it because they think its the right thing to do, not because they are really convinced.

It’s like the ‘60s when most people smoked because it was perceived as a way to gain acceptance with others. Many people jump on the AGW bandwagon so they will not be ostracized. Most people are desperate to fit in.

Fortunately, some of us don’t give a damn about that and aren’t afraid to point out the Emperor’s Sartorial Splendor is lacking.

AGW is the establishment line. The skeptics are anti-establishment. The AGW crowd likes to claim they’re liberals. But they take an authoritarian stance.

I guess that makes us skeptics the true liberals because we’re questioning authority. And we’re the true radicals because we’re going against the orthodoxy.

And let’s face it, when you drill down into this ideology you find what it’s really about. It’s all about diminishing Capitalism and advancing Socialism. They want to empower the state but weaken corporations. They rail against growth. They demonize companies. They talk about how people should get used to less and making sacrifices. It sounds like something out of the Karl Marx play book. So it should come as no surprise that the biggest proponents of this nonsense are lefties. 

They failed to sell the rich nations on Socialism. And Socialism was a dismal failure for any country that seriously adopted it. So, how else do you get people to buy into a failed idea? How about fraud? How about tricking people using an elaborate scam where you scare them with claims of calamity, knowing full well that nature will regularly provide disasters that you can claim were the result of your scam. Then you get some “cool people” to spread the word. You get some scientists to say it’s all true and you get a socialist-loving bureaucracy like the UN to endorse it all.

There you go.

This is also a good read.

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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Chart of the Day

[Click Image to Enlarge]

Global Warming is caused by several things. The sun, which should be obvious to anyone who has the slightest grasp of science, and volcanic eruptions, which can block sunlight for years in extreme cases. Something humans have never been able to achieve (outside of a nuke, theoretically). We can count that as a blessing.

UPDATE: From 1975, Newsweek. Talking about Global Cooling

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Sound familiar? Gee, if only we had listened. We could have made the Earth warmer and melted the ice caps. Oops.

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Monday, November 12, 2007

The Reality of Reality: Still No Takers

Junk Science is offering $125,000 to any scientist who can prove conclusively that human beings are causing global warming. So far there have been no takers. They actually raised the bounty from $100,000. I suspect it will get up to a million like the James Randi Foundation’s Paranormal Challenge. That started out just as modestly and Randi kept raising the bar. Still no winners after over 30 years.

This is one of the many things that tells me the AGW people are writing a check they can’t cash.

My skepticism comes from the fact that I grew up in the 1970s. I remember the first Earth Day in 1969. I was on board for it all. I read all the books of the movement at the time. From Paul R. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. All of these books made dire predictions about the near future and all of them turned out to be laughably wrong.

Ehrlich claimed that by the late 1970s, early 1980s millions of people would die from starvation and nothing could stop global famine. We would be out of many natural resources by then, including oil. Limits to Growth claimed we would run out of oil by 1992 and other resources much sooner. Oops!

You would think these people would hide their heads in shame after being so off base. But no. The environmentalist movement continues making the same bogus claims. Ehrlich is treated like a hero. The movement merely changes goal posts and the theories. In the 70s overpopulation, nuclear power and pollution were the source of calamity. In the 80s it was the Ozone Hole. In the 90s, Global Warming started to be the big scare story.

When the threats of the past turned out to be wrong, the scaremongers just changed the subject. And no apologies are ever forthcoming for the time and money they wasted. Nuclear power is suddenly being called a Green Energy source after being vilified for so long. If we had built the nuclear reactors we intended since the 1970s, our “carbon footprint” would be radically less than it is now.

Classic example. The aforementioned Paul Ehrlich made a wager with Julian Simon, a member of the Cato institute and a professor at Maryland University. Here’s the bet:

Simon had Ehrlich choose five of several commodity metals. Ehrlich chose 5 metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that their prices would go down. Ehrlich bet they would go up.

“The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with - Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.

You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted - copper, tin, whatever - and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.” ... Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon. ... Between 1980 and 1990, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich’s selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor. Chrome, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.

Ehlrich still hasn’t paid up.

So, pardon me for being a skeptic. But AGW doesn’t pass the smell test no matter how many “peer-reviewed” studies from “experts” get trotted out.  In my next piece on the AGW movement, I will go into the deceptions and games the movement engages in. This further discredits them and their alleged “facts”.

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Friday, November 09, 2007

The History of Climate Change

Here’s an interesting article that shows journalists have been getting hysterical over climate change for a 100 years now. Like I said, it’s a cycle of nature. But cynical politicians and crackpots have decided to exploit it for their own ends.

Excerpt:

It was five years before the turn of the century and major media were warning of disastrous climate change. Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover Cleveland. And the Times wasn’t warning about global warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers of a new ice age. 

The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.”

Just as the weather has changed over time, so has the reporting – blowing hot or cold with short-term changes in temperature.

Now politicians have an all pervasive media in which to ram down their agendas. It’s really dangerous to believe any hype of this kind. After all, the weather is always changing. That’s a given. Whenever any kind of disaster happens, its easy to blame it on something. Once upon a time it was blamed on angry gods. Now the superstition is greenhouse gases. 

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

Scary

In some distant future, they will look at the people of today and think we were crazy. Kind of like we do looking back at Nazi Germany or the Spanish Inquisition. Maybe this is not as bad, but the very idea of calling CO² a pollutant, when it’s a natural process, is nothing short of wacko. Yet a bunch of media whores politicians are champing at the bit to pass some laws. Laws which will cost you a lot more money.

California sued the federal government on Thursday to force a decision about whether the state can impose the nation’s first greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and light trucks.

More than a dozen other states are poised to follow California’s lead if it is granted the waiver from federal law, presenting a challenge to automakers who would have to adapt to a patchwork of regulations.

The state’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was expected after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed last spring to take legal action.

“Our future depends on us taking action on global warming right now,” Schwarzenegger said during a news conference. “There’s no legal basis for Washington to stand in our way.”

At issue is California’s nearly two-year-old request for a waiver under the federal Clean Air Act allowing it to implement a 2002 state anti-pollution law regulating greenhouse gases.

Eleven other states have adopted California’s standard as a way to combat global warming and five others are considering it.

“Our position is that it’s time for EPA to either act or get out of the way,” said Lee Moore, a spokesman for New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram.

All of this means car prices will go up and the climate will not be affected one bit. Only you will be.

And if they succeed here, trust me (as Arnold likes to say), that’s just the beginning. They will start going after other things. And where will it end? How many more laws restricting business and people will they pass? I shudder to think.

All the caterwauling about the Patriot act is fine. But there is plenty more to be concerned with from nanny state and “green” legislation. It’s all getting out of hand. 

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Fools to the Left, Cowards to the Right

When a hysterical meme gets rolling, the weak minded and the gullible are swept up in its path. History is full of examples. Here’s another one.

Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), once a skeptic of global warming, got a hint that the political winds might be shifting when a longtime supporter warned that he might vote against Inglis if he “didn’t clean up his act on the environment.”

The warning came from Inglis’ eldest son, Robert Jr., now 22.

His daughter was no less blunt about the congressman’s refusal to embrace the view that global warming was being caused by human actions and that a serious response is needed. “I have three more kids coming up — and they seem to share the same view,” Inglis said.

Family pressure worked. Inglis traveled to Antarctica and, most recently, to Greenland to witness the effects of rising CO2 levels and temperatures. He now believes the science behind global warming. And he believes the politics are equally conclusive: Republicans will “get hammered” if they do not reckon with the issue soon.

First of all, if young people believe something to be true, that’s a sure sign its bogus. Simply because the young are the easiest people to con. They are more emotional and their critical facilities aren’t as well formed. This is why political hacks like Gore go for a young audience. Indoctrination works best on fresh minds.

Republicans are notorious for backing down on things. They’ve strayed so far from their principals over the years, it wouldn’t surprise me if they jumped on the GW bandwagon, even though its on fire and heading for a cliff. The Dems love GW because they love emotional arguments that seem to b about doing something good, even though its almost always an empty gesture or a road to hell paved with good intentions.

Most of the global warming argument is based on logical fallacies and discredited theories. The balance is made up of computer models, which is worthless, since GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) is a fact any programmer can tell you about (and I’m a programmer. Hello).

The GW hysterics have run a good con. But like any con it will fall apart in time. The question is, how much damage will be done in the process and how many people will be fleeced?

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Monday, November 05, 2007

What a Dufus

His arguments are childish. His defense is puerile at best. It amazes me that anyone doesn’t see through this. 

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

Cracks Begin To Appear

Is the Global Warming Hype starting to crumble? A leading British paper writes a devastating article on the “Deceit Behind Global Warming”.

I’ve noticed more critical stories have been coming on out GW, especially since Al Gore and the IPCC scientists won a Nobel Peace Prize. When anything gets built up as high as GW has, it’s inevitable people will tear it down. And this is one instance where I won’t feel sorry for it.

Oh, yeah, and here’s another propaganda film. This one talking about the evils of corn. Watch how they try to make corn the next tobacco/global warming.

UPDATE: Climate skepticism sweeps Europe. The climate frauds are about to find themselves in hot water. I think this skepticism is going to grow exponentially to the hysterics actions.

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Saturday, November 03, 2007

It Keeps Getting Worse

Just when you think they can’t get any more annoying, the GW hysterics crank it up another notch. This one from England.

Britons must swap their wasteful habits with food for the thrifty approach of previous generations by buying less and eating leftovers if the UK is to play its part in averting climate change, shoppers were warned yesterday.

The call for a “cultural” move against overshopping was made by Joan Ruddock, the Environment minister, after research showed Britons threw away one third of their food, at an enormous hidden financial and environmental cost.

Annually, the UK dumps 6.7 million tonnes, meaning each household jettisons between £250 and £400 worth of food each year. Most of the waste – which nationally costs £8bn – is sent to landfill where it rots, emitting the potent climate- change gas methane.

Ms Ruddock, the minister for climate change, warned that, although many people had not made the connection between scraping food into the bin and climate change, waste food presented a bigger environmental problem than packaging. “We cannot fail to do what is necessary,” she said.

“The Minister for Climate Change”? This is what happens when agencies are created to “fight” something. Endless nimrods come out of the woodwork issuing edicts about the dangers of poppycock and horse feathers.

Methane is created by rotting biomass. However, as much as humans throw away, many more tons, perhaps incalculable amounts, are created by nature as dead animals and plants rot in forests and country. And let’s be clear, there is a lot more land where human beings don’t live, then places where we are. More humans live in cities. Cities take up a small amount of land compared to everything else.

But alarmists will find everything to be causing global warming. I’m waiting for them to tells us we should breathe slower because we emit CO².

Oh, and this is utter BS. The exact opposite happens as they describe it. The earth was much hotter during the dinosaur eras and there was an insane amount of life.

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Thursday, November 01, 2007

Global Warming Smackdown

One of the scientists who was awarded a Nobel Prize with Al Gore has refused it. Why? Because, he says:

Both halves of the award honor promoting the message that Earth’s temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.

I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming—around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.

Got that? This is what I’ve been saying this for years. Now an IPCC scientist says the same thing. It’s really common sense. GW alarmism is a scam. It’s good to see another scientist speaking out.

Those who claim the debate is over are liars. Point blank.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the political clowns are trying to ram an anti-carbon bill down our throats. This would only be the start. Believe me.

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