Dec 23 2008

Time to get RADICAL?

Category: economy,energy,environment,global warming,Obama — harmonicminer @ 10:49 am

The last time I looked, Thomas Friedman is neither a climate scientist, meterologist, physicist, or economist.  His academic training is in “Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies”. He’s a journalist. That’s it. So I hope Obama is not taking seriously this advice from Friedman to him, which presupposes Friedman’s ability to make scientific and economic judgments:

[Friedman] insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.

“We can do it if our next president, who I have great hopes for, is ready to be as radical as the moment we are in,” Friedman, whose previous bestseller was “The World is Flat”, told a lunch hosted by The Asia Society.

“Our next president is going to be called on to be more radical — I am talking crazy, wild-hair, paint-on-your-face, ring-in-your-nose radical — in what he does, than any president since FDR,” he said, referring to Franklin D Roosevelt, US president during the 1930s depression and the Second World War.

Continue reading “Time to get RADICAL?”

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Dec 17 2008

Who writes this stuff? Can they read?

Category: global warming — harmonicminer @ 12:06 am

NASA reports 2008 is ninth warmest year since 1880 – Yahoo! News

The year 2008 was the ninth warmest year since instrumental temperature measurements began in 1880, and all of the nine warmest years have occurred in the past 11 years, NASA reported on Tuesday.

This is simply false.  The hottest year on record since 1880 is 1934.  The second hottest year is 1998.  Don’t expect a correction on this report.  But be aware that you simply cannot believe what is reported on this in the major media.

The ten hottest years are, according to NASA (after some recent, painful revisions, embarassing as they were), in order of heat:

1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

Draw your own conclusions about AP’s and Yahoo’s ability to read and research, and remind yourself of that whenever you read a story from either on this point…  and many others, of course.

In any case, NASA has established a recent habit of false reporting, and failing to validate its own records and reports, and then having to recant later.  Call it the Hansen effect.  When you’ve publicly committed to such an extreme position, you’ll say anything to put a good face on it.  Sadly, a great many more people have the same commitment, particularly politicians and media types.  Every time you see an “anthropogenic global warming (AGW) denier” accused of being paid by “big oil”, ask if the accuser knows how much money is taken by scientists from the government, IF they’ll sign on to AGW as the thing they are researching.

By a factor of ten or more, scientists get more more money to support global warming than to deny it, even if you assume that all “big business” money is given purely to fund the denial of AGW.  It IS clear that no scientist can get ANY money from the government unless their research proposal assumes AGW in the first place.

So how surprising is it that they keep “confirming” it, on the government nickel?

But they really should get their story straight.

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Dec 14 2008

A little history for the eco-panicked

Category: global warming — harmonicminer @ 1:24 am

This is priceless.

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Oct 19 2008

Global warming reduction: at what cost?

Category: economy,environment,global warming,politics — harmonicminer @ 9:05 am

Bjorn Lomborg asks, why cut one 3,000th of a degree? That’s about how much difference Britain’s proposed policies will make, while costing ENORMOUS sums of money. Key graphs:

Continue reading “Global warming reduction: at what cost?”

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Sep 23 2008

Brrr.. a look back at the winter

Category: environment,global warming — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Smile. Buy a nice warm coat. You may need it.

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Sep 16 2008

Don’t get hot under the collar

Category: environment,global warming — harmonicminer @ 1:47 pm

Take that, eco-panic global warming fear mongers.

And if this isn’t enough for you, start here.

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Sep 10 2008

The Left suddenly notices ideological “scholarship”

Category: global warming,Group-think,science — sardonicwhiner @ 9:37 am

Some academics are expressing concern that a new Pentagon initiative to fund social science research that will be helpful for our military could be corrupted by the ideological presuppositions of the military.

The Pentagon is funding academic research to better understand the attraction of terrorism and violent groups in the Middle East — among other things. But some scholars are concerned the military is only interested in funding research that reinforces its world view. We discuss the complex relationship between the Pentagon and academia.

Say it isn’t so! You mean we can’t trust all those global warming studies that were funded by government agencies, the UN and other NGOs in order to find evidence of global warming? Who would ever have guessed that the agenda of the researcher could creep into the results of the research?

OK, it’s time to just start over. What we need is not just double blind research studies; we need double blind funding of research. If no one knows what research is being funded by which agency, and if no one knows who is funding their own research, and if the people doing the research have no idea who decided which research should be funded, then the agendas of the funders, the approvers and the researchers should be eliminated from the results.

What we need is a giant game of research funding “spin the bottle”. The funders of research will just hurl money into a huge common pot of research funds, the research approvers will initiate a giant lottery system that’s so complex that even they can’t understand it (harder to cheat that way) and the researchers won’t know whom they are trying to please, so they’ll just do their best work, we hope.

Of course, we won’t be willing to actually believe anyone’s research results until someone duplicates them… and given the lottery system of funding and approval, it may be awhile before anyone duplicates anything done by anyone else. Oh well…. science demands sacrifices of us all. I’m willing to wait for the gold.

Personally, I am shocked and appalled to learn that the funders and approvers of research studies have any influence on the outcomes. It shakes my faith in science. I wonder if we should reconsider leeches in medical care….

Or, maybe the Left just wants us to think that only research studies funded by the Pentagon are tainted by their origin, but all others are golden in their investigative purity.

Sure. I believe that.

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Sep 07 2008

More political “science”

Category: Al Gore,environment,global warming,Group-think,science — harmonicminer @ 9:16 am

Powerline has a nice summary of the latest attempt of the political “scientists” to convince us that every single weather phenomenon is caused by “climate change”, the meaningless term whose usage has replaced “global warming” in many quarters, due to the inconvenient truth that the warmest year of the last 100 was 1934, and the second warmest was 1998.

Here’s more information on the very serious and eminent scientists who demur to the group think, politically inspired conclusions of the eco-panic Left.

As always, you have to read the fine print in the studies to learn the truth, and you have to ignore the summary and conclusions that make it into the press.  Powerline has a nice deconstruction of the latest.

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Aug 02 2008

Environmentalism unleashed = disaster

Category: Al Gore,environment,global warming,media — harmonicminer @ 9:26 am

Here is a new book that exposes the really, really inconvenient truth behind eco-panic myths about the environment, and what the real effect of many “environmental policies” has been.

Who is the inspiration behind the single biggest human caused environmental catastrophe, causing the most preventable death, of the 20th Century? Al Gore’s heroine, Rachel Carson, with her crusade against DDT, the use of which would have saved tens of millions of lives taken by malaria, but which was banned due to her efforts, and a sycophantic crowd of Gore’s predecessors in the eco-panic movement.

Yep: Al’s in fine company.

This book is a needed corrective for the total collapse of the media’s reporting in the area.

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Jul 25 2008

Global warming and tree rings in Finland

Category: Al Gore,global warming,Group-think — harmonicminer @ 9:06 am

An interesting article on Finnish tree ring studies which have been reconstructed to provide a 7000 year baseline of temperature changes, given the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature variation. The whole article is worth scanning, but the money quote is:

…a case for recent warming can be made based on the tree-ring record, but the recent warming is paled by many past events including many red-hot summers in Finland 7,000 years ago. If nothing else comes from their figure, be keenly aware that climate always changes, flat line periods simply do not exist!

In other words, sure, the climate is changing… again. It always has. But those changes have had nothing to do with human inputs, and current changes (which are overblown according to many experts) probably don’t have much to do with humans, either.

hat tip: chaos manor

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