A (hypothetical) conversation with a climate alarmist

It's hard when you're a climate alarmism skeptic to carry on a conversation about global warming climate change climate challenges with a true-believing climate alarmist because once they find out you're a skeptic they invariably end the conversation and storm off in a huff, presumably to breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes before dashing off to an Al Gore seminar to have their fears validated. So here I'll try and speculate how such a discussion might go if an alarmist ever stuck around for a discussion.

SCENE: Office break room in April, with snow falling outside the window.

Me: Wow...I could really use some of that "global warming" right about now.

Climate Alarmist: It's not called global warming any more.

Me: Oh, that's right, excuse me...global climate change.

CA: No, it's called "global climate challenges" now.

Me: So we've gone from the fairly specific "global warming" to the rather nebulous "global climate change" to the totally amorphous "global climate challenges"?

CA: Um, yeah.

Me: But what does that even mean?

CA: That we'll be faced with desertification, rampant flooding and other forms of climate extremes.

Me: You mean half the planet will be desert while the other half is under water?

CA: Well, not exactly. It's complicated.

Me: And how do we know this? I mean, just how do we know that weather patterns and cycles are significantly different now from, say, ten thousand years ago? It's not like we have concrete global historical weather data going back more than 150 years or so.

CA: Climate scientists use proxy data to figure that out.

Me: And just what are the proxies for precise historical weather data?

CA: Well, it's complicated, but they look at tree rings, among other things.

Me: Ah, tree rings. Well I guess that settles it. So everyone living in coastal areas should immediately move to higher ground, which will soon be desert?

CA: It's not quite that simple--

Me: No, of course it isn't.

CA: --but it's generally accepted that sea levels will gradually rise over the next 50 to 100 years and that some areas will experience drought while some very dry areas will see increased rainfall.

Me: And that's never happened before in the history of the planet? Ever?

CA: Well, um, yeah. It has.

Me: And why is this a crisis now?

CA: If we don't stop the warming of the planet soon--

Me: Wait a second...didn't you just say it's not called "Global Warming" any more?

CA: Uh...

Me: First it's warming, then it's not, then it is again. What is it, exactly, that's causing these "global climate challenges"?

CA: Greenhouse gases.

Me: Which do....what?

CA: Um, raise temperatures. Like in a greenhouse.

Me: So, the problem once again is global warming.

CA: It's complicated.

Me: Yeah, so you've said.

CA: Could you hand me that empty paper bag over there?

Yes, Climategate DOES discredit climate research

The files and e-mail exchanges from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia are damning in several respects. What's readily apparent to anyone reading objectively is that CRU systematically engaged in a practice to stifle peer review of their work. This is a fact and not subject to dispute, and by itself ought to be sufficient to summarily dismiss any reports or recommendations coming from CRU.

Also readily apparent is advocacy for a specific outcome of their work. Take it away, AoSHQ:

> >From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx]
> >Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
> >To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
> >Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
> >Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009
> >
> >
> > Tim, Chris,
> > I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
> > till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
> > press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
> > half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
> > record, 1998!
> > Still a way to go before 2014.
> >
> > I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying
> > where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal
> > scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

Dammit...curse this global cooling! I want to wipe some "smug grins" off people's faces! Oh, and never mind the fact that 1998 was NOT the hottest year on record. That was 1934, but that hardly fits the anthropogenic global warming narrative. This reveals an emotional investment in a desired conclusion which is incompatible with objective, honest scientific inquiry.

As for CRU researchers deliberately manipulating data to fit their needs, it certainly appears that happened, but the evidence is - for now - less than conclusive. But what may be even worse than fudging the data is that...CRU evidently has no idea what their datasets represent.

First, a few things about that Fortran source code you've probably heard about. For the uninitiated, "source code" is the program code that a programmer actually types into a computer. It might look funny to someone who's not a programmer, but it's still readable by humans. The source code is then run through a compiler which converts the source code to machine-readable form for execution.

Fortran is a programming language whose name comes from "FORmula TRANslator". It's been around for a long time (I did a little bit of Fortran work in the mid-1980s back in my programming days when I had to do some complex life insurance rate calculations), and it's still commonly used by scientists in number-crunching applications. Unlike other programming languages, Fortran source code can be pretty cryptic, even to an experienced programmer. For this reason, it's common practice to extensively comment the source code (comments are ignored by the compiler) so that someone coming along later to make changes to the code can understand what the hell's going on. This is why the Fortran source code from CRU has those long-running comments sections. Like this one:

7. Removed 4-line header from a couple of .glo files and loaded them into Matlab. Reshaped to 360r x 720c and plotted; looks OK for global temp (anomalies) data. Deduce that .glo files, after the header, contain data taken row-by-row starting with the Northernmost, and presented as '8E12.4'. The grid is from -180 to +180 rather than 0 to 360. This should allow us to deduce the meaning of the co-ordinate pairs used to
describe each cell in a .grim file (we know the first number is the lon or column, the second the lat or row - but which way up are the latitudes? And where do the longitudes break? There is another problem: the values are anomalies, wheras the 'public' .grim files are actual values. So Tim's explanations (in _READ_ME.txt) are incorrect..

8. Had a hunt and found an identically-named temperature database file which did include normals lines at the start of every station. How handy - naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!! Re-ran anomdtb:

It doesn't take a programmer to read this and realize that the guy writing the code was faced with a bunch of climate data files, the structure of which was unknown. Picture opening up an Excel spreadsheet with column after column of numbers, and no column headers telling you what each column contains.

Think about all this as President Obama jets off to Copenhagen to discuss a global climate change treaty with other world leaders, and think about what Obama's climate czar, Carol Browner, had to say about the appalling evidence coming out of CRU:

Ms. Browner initially shrugged when asked about the e-mails, saying she didn't have a reaction. But when a reporter followed up, she said she will stick with the consensus of the 2,500 climate scientists on the International Panel on Climate Change who concluded global warming is happening and is most likely being pushed by human actions.

Wow. I'm sure glad that science is being returned to its rightful place in this administration.

Update: I can't believe I forgot to mention the conspiracy to circumvent FOIA requests.

Hot Air links. Thanks!

Too Jive CRU

jive –noun
1. swing music or early jazz.
2. the jargon associated with swing music and early jazz.
3. Slang. deceptive, exaggerated, or meaningless talk: Don't give me any of that jive!

Too Jive CRU...2 Live Crew...see what I did there? Yeah, I know...lame. I doubt anyone even remembers today what 2 Live Crew was. Anyhoo...

When I first heard that someone had hacked into the University of East Anglia (UK) Climate Research Unit (CRU) and posted something north of 60MB worth of files and e-mails, I thought it was no big deal...there'd probably be a bunch of indecipherable climate data files and incomprehensible e-mails talking about the indecipherable climate data. But the e-mails between Phil Jones discussing "tricks" for cooking the books and - worse - conspiring to conceal their methods and data from prying eyes and FOI requests were in plain enough English.

Ace has a great post up today summarizing the chronology to date, but his addendum at the end about climate models, to me, is one of the most damning things I've seen yet on the charlatanism that is climate research. It seems that the models used to predict future climate trends - yes, those models which politicians world wide are citing to tax the living shit out of everyone and reduce us to a hunter-gatherer society - can't even properly predict the past, which, as Ace quips:

...is unfortunately quite knowable, and so we can check their "predictions" against actual records.

They all fail. They all fail.

I'll just quote from the link the same part Ace quoted, because I'm lazy like that:

None of the multiple computer simulations used by a UN climate-change agency for assessments of global warming appears good enough to predict how India’s monsoon will behave, two Indian scientists have said.

The researchers examined 10 simulations of future climate scenarios used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and found none could reproduce correctly the behaviour of even 20th-century rainfall.

Not a single model could simulate realistically key features of the Indian monsoon...

In attempts to assess impacts of global warming, the IPCC considered 17 models of how climate would evolve as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose. Some models predict more rainfall over India, but with great uncertainty.

“The models have very serious problems in simulating even 20th century monsoon patterns,” said Madhavan Rajeevan, a senior scientist at the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory, Tirupati, and a co-author of the paper.

“When a model (computer simulation) cannot even show with reasonable accuracy monsoon behaviour in the past, there’s a big question mark over its ability to predict future patterns,” Rajeevan told The Telegraph.

CRU is just too jive to be believed, too jive to get further grant money, too jive to continue operating.

Update: My reply to Charles in the comments about the programmer's remarks in the source code, because I think it's an important point:

Here's the scandal:
The guys writing the software to produce the climate prediction models don't know the structure of the data sets they're dealing with.

Climate change freak pining away for natural disasters

Er, don't quit your day job, mkay?

How an economist - even a Nobel Prize winning one - comes to be considered an authority on climate change is beyond me, but apparently The Atlantic believes Thomas Schelling to be just that. But then again, they consider Andrew Sullivan to be an authority on, well, something or another, I guess. Oh, right...Trig Palin's real birth mother.

Anyway, in July The Atlantic ran an interview with Schelling in two parts dedicated to the topic of climate change. Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. The interview is, er, revealing to say the least, in terms of the insights it provides to the fevered mind of the true global warming/climate change believer.

In Part 1, we learn that Schelling isn't happy with the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, not for the reasons that an economist might be unhappy with it, such as the loss of millions of jobs and the huge cost to consumers, but because it caps energy production in the wrong place:

If you were putting a cap on oil at the wellhead -- and a cap on coal at the minehead, a cap on gas at the wellhead, and on oil and gas at the port of importation -- so that it was essentially a cap on the fossil fuels, rather than trying to put a cap on electricity in the middle west versus electricity in the South. Or a cap on various manufacturing industries. Or a cap on refineries, even. That seems to me a not very serious way to tackle the problem where it originates. And my actual feeling is that the best you can hope for with this Waxman-Markey bill is that it'll take a few years to discover that it's a huge nuisance of the problem, and they ought to find a way to simplify it. And the way to simplify it is to put the cap on the fossil fuels, not on different industries.

In Part 2, we find out just how well he fits in with the climate change crowd, both in terms of exaggerating the threat and in expounding on scientific topics outside his area of expertise:

It's a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there's a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane from permafrost, and from huge offshore deposits of methane all around the world. If you begin to get methane leaking on a large scale -- even though methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere very long -- it might warm things up fast enough that it will induce further methane release, which will warm things up more, which will release more. And that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious.

And finally, Schelling wishes death and destruction upon the non-believers in fly-over country:

But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening -- you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth -- that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don't think that's going to happen.

Yup...that'll lend a lot of credibility to the climate change movement.

Paint it white

Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees a black roof, and he wants to paint it white.

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday the Obama administration wanted to paint roofs an energy-reflecting white, as he took part in a climate change symposium in London.

The Nobel laureate in physics called for a "new revolution" in energy generation to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

But he warned there was no silver bullet for tackling climate change, and said a range of measures should be introduced, including painting flat roofs white.

I don't get it...silver bullets work on werewolves, and the climate change "crisis" is about as real.

Global warming nuts find something else to freak out about

A group of scientists people who rely on global warming fear-mongering to make a living are sounding their latest alarm. It seems the Great Lakes just ain't freezing over like they used to.

Ice cover on the Great Lakes has declined more than 30 percent since the 1970s, leaving the world's largest system of freshwater lakes open to evaporation and lower water levels, according to scientists associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In other news, a new study shows that timing is everything:

Lake Superior last froze over in 2003. It has now, again, frozen over. The frequency of freeze overs has historically been around once every 20 years. Now, in the last decade, we have seen two freeze overs.

Chicken Littleism

I think I heard something about this nearly a year ago, but I'd never seen or heard video or audio of the comment itself. Behold the spectacular level of ill-informed jackassery from noted climatologist moonbat Ted Turner.

To dream the impossible dream

Via Mickey's Muses, we get a great big bucket of ice-cold water thrown on CO2 reduction goals...

Simple physics shows that in order to keep CO2 to 450 ppm, 26.5 of those terawatts must be zero-carbon. That’s a lot of solar, wind, hydro, biofuels and nuclear, especially since renewables kicked in a measly 0.2 terawatts in 2006 and nuclear provided 0.9 terawatts. Are you a fan of nuclear? To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we’ll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now. Do you like wind? If you use every single breeze that blows on land, you’ll get 10 or 15 terawatts. Since it’s impossible to capture all the wind, a more realistic number is 3 terawatts, or 1 million state-of-the art turbines, and even that requires storing the energy—something we don’t know how to do—for when the wind doesn’t blow. Solar? To get 10 terawatts by 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d need to cover 1 million roofs with panels every day from now until then. “It would take an army,” he says. Obama promised green jobs, but still.

Mickey, by the way, gets it from the Science Policy Blog at University of Colorado, who got it from Newsweek.

This assumes, of course, that all this nonsense is even necessary.

Doo, doo, doo, lookin' out my back door

Nothing like an early March snow storm to really bollocks up my day.

Brit environut wants to limit families to two children

Warning that larger families are environmentally "irresponsible", Britain's chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission wants families to limit themselves to two kids.

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

Never mind that the replacement rate is around 2.2 live births per woman of child-bearing age, just to keep a population steady. We just can't have all these messy humans around, what with the "unbearable burden on the environment" and all.

'An Inconvenient Truth' refuted

A buddy of mine sent me a link today to a PDF doc which represents a serious smackdown of Al Gore's book An Inconvenient Truth by Mario Lewis, Jr. At the risk of committing serious thievery, I'll paste the whole Executive Summary below, but you really should download and read the whole thing.

An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), Vice President Al Gore’s book on “The planetary emergency of global warming and what can be done about it,” purports to be a non-partisan, non-ideological exposition of climate science and moral common-sense. In reality, AIT is a colorfully illustrated lawyer’s brief for global warming alarmism and energy rationing. It is a j’accuse hurled at fossil-energy-based civilization, especially the USA, and above all the Bush Administration and its allies in the U.S. oil and auto industries.

We do not expect lawyers to argue both for and against their clients, nor do we expect balance from party men. However, although Gore reminds us (in the film version of AIT) that he “used to be the next President of the United States,” and concludes the book and film with a call for “political action,” he presents AIT as the work of a long-time student of climate science—and a product of meditation on “what matters.” He thus asks us to expect more from him than the mere cleverness that can sway juries or win elections.

This reasonable expectation is unmet. In AIT, the only facts and studies considered are those convenient to Gore’s scare-them-green agenda. And in many instances, Gore distorts the evidence he cites.

The present paper, a running commentary on AIT, finds that most of Gore’s claims regarding climate science and climate policy are either one sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or wrong. An extensive summary of AIT’s distortions is provided in Appendix A. Below is a list of 25 of egregious examples.

One-sided statements

• AIT never acknowledges the indispensable role of fossil fuels in alleviating hunger and poverty, extending human life spans, and democratizing consumer goods, literacy, leisure, and personal mobility.
• It never acknowledges the environmental, health, and economic benefits of climatic warmth and the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content.
• It neglects to mention that aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events declined dramatically during the 20th century.
• It neglects to mention the circumstances that make it reasonable rather than blameworthy for America to be the biggest CO2 emitter: the world’s largest economy, abundant fossil energy resources, markets integrated across continental distances, and the world’s most mobile population.
• The book impugns the motives of so-called global warming skeptics but never acknowledges the special-interest motivations of those whose research grants, direct mail income, industrial policy privileges, carbon trading commissions, regulatory power, prosecutorial plunder, or political careers depend on keeping the public in a state of fear about global warming.
• AIT never addresses the obvious criticism that the Kyoto Protocol is all economic pain for no environmental gain and that regulations stringent enough to measurably cool the planet would be a “cure” worse than the alleged disease.

Misleading statements

• AIT implies that, throughout the past 650,000 years, changes in CO2 levels preceded and largely caused changes in global temperature, whereas the causality mostly runs the other way: CO2 changes followed global temperature changes by hundreds to thousands of years.
• It ignores the societal factors that typically overwhelm climatic factors in determining people’s risk of damage or death from hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires, and disease.
• It erroneously implies that a study, which found that none of 928 science articles (actually abstracts) denied a CO2-global warming link, shows that Gore’s apocalyptic view of global warming is the “consensus” view among scientists.
• It reports that 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists accused Bush of distorting science, without mentioning that the scientists acted as members of a 527 political group set up to promote the Kerry for President Campaign.

Exaggerated statements

• AIT hypes the importance and exaggerates the certainty of the alleged link between global warming and the frequency and severity of tropical storms.
• It claims polar bears “have been drowning in significant numbers,” based on a single report that four polar bears drowned in one month of one year, following an abrupt storm.
• It portrays the collapse in 2002 of the Larson-B ice shelf—a formation the “size of Rhode Island”—as harbinger of doom. For perspective, the Larson-B was 220th the size of Texas and 1/246th the size of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).
• AIT presents a graph suggesting that China’s new fuel economy standards are almost 30% more stringent than the current U.S. standards. In fact, the Chinese standards are only about 5% more stringent.

Speculative statements

• AIT blames global warming for the record-breaking 37-inch downpour in Mumbai, India, in July 2005, even there has been no trend inMumbai rainfall for the month of July in 45 years.
• It blames global warming for recent floods in China’s Sichuan and Shandong provinces, even though more damaging floods struck those areas in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
• It blames global warming for the disappearance of Lake Chad, a disaster more likely stemming from a combination of natural regional climate variability and societal factors such as population increase and overgrazing.
• AIT warns that a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels to 560 ppm will so acidify seawater that all optimal areas for coral reef construction will disappear by 2050—implausible because coral calcification rates have increased as ocean temperatures and CO2 levels have risen, and today’s main reef builders evolved and thrived during the Mesozoic Period, when atmospheric CO2 levels hovered above 1,000 ppm for 150 million years and exceeded 2,000 ppm for several million years.
• It warns of “significant and alarming structural changes” in the submarine base of the WAIS, but does not tell us what those changes are or why they are “significant and alarming.” The WAIS has been retreating since the early Holocene. At the rate of retreat observed in the 1990s, the WAIS should disappear in about 7,000 years.
• It warns that “moulins”—vertical water tunnels formed from surface melt water—could cause half the Greenland Ice Sheet to break off and “slide” into the sea, even though the scientific study to which Gore alludes found that moulins increase glacial flow by only a few meters a year.

Wrong statements

• AIT claims glaciologist Lonnie Thompson’s reconstruction of climate history proves the Medieval Warm Period was “tiny” compared to the warming observed in recent decades. It doesn’t. Four of Thompson’s six ice cores indicate the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as or warmer than any recent decade.
• It claims the rate of global warming is accelerating, when it has been remarkably constant for the past 30 years—roughly 0.17°C/decade.
• It attributes Europe’s killer heat wave of 2003 to global warming; it was actually due to an atmospheric circulation anomaly.
• It claims that 2004 set an all-time record for the number of tornadoes in the United States. Tornado frequency has not increased; rather, the detection of smaller tornadoes has increased. If we consider the tornadoes that have been detectable for many decades (F-3 or greater), there is actually a downward trend since 1950.
• It blames global warming for a “mass extinction crisis” that is not, in fact, occurring.

In light of these and other distortions, AIT is ill-suited to serve as a guide to climate science and climate policy for the American people.

Great stuff...download and read the whole thing.

BBC manipulates Obama inaugural sound bite

I don't know what you'd call an audio-only version of fauxtography...fauxdio?

TonyN at Harmless Sky uncovered a bit of BBC trickery in their coverage of Barack Obama's inaugural address. It seems they spliced together a few segments from different parts of his speech to make it all sound like a single statement on fighting global warming.

Paragraph 16

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Paragraph 22

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the spectre of a warming planet. We will not apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Those bolded pieces that TonyN emphasized are the bits that were spliced together to make a single sound bite in the Beeb's broadcast in an apparent effort to make Obama's stance on global warming strongly than it may have otherwise sounded.

Once again, the link to the audio clip.

H/T to reader Ayrdale.

No global warming for USA in 2008

I caught this graphic over at Watt's Up With That, always a great source of material to counter the global warming/climate change fanatic in your office. You have to look real close to find any region of the US that averaged "much above normal" for 2008 temperatures (Long Island), while most of the rest of the country averaged "near normal" or lower. No area of the continental US was designated "record warmest".

Nice going, Al Gore.

Hansen gets hysterical

Actually, NASA's James Hansen's been hysterical for quite a while, but with a growing body of evidence contradicting global warming dogma and Barack Obama's inauguration coronation imminent, he needs to step it up a notch.

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

With a sympathetic ear in the White House Hansen must figure he's got a limited window of opportunity to ram through legislation that will bring us a living standard roughly equivalent to the hunter-gatherers of 10,000 years ago.

Laughable

Worldwatch Institute reports that in order to avert climate catastrophe, carbon emissions will have to drop to near zero by the year 2050...and go even lower thereafter.

To avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, world carbon emissions will have to drop to near zero by 2050 and "go negative" after that, the Worldwatch Institute reported on Tuesday.

What a joke. Here's their vision for a perfect world:

Save the planet: Stop googling

Assuming for a moment that man-made CO2 is the evil of all evils as Al Gore claims, this is still one of the stupidest things I've seen since, oh, at least yesterday.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

[ ... ]

...A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions.

OK, so CO2 makes up a meager .038% of the atmosphere, and I'm supposed to be worried about an insignificant contribution to a tiny percentage of that?

Go hump somebody else's leg.

Fox News fear mongering

I don't know who the hell decides what goes on the web site at Fox News Channel, but they're starting to look a bit like Weekly World News when they keep putting crap like this on their front page. The actual space.com article they lifted is, of course, somewhat less alarmist.

More to the point, the much ballyhooed renewed cycle of solar activity is not only largely truant, it may not live up to expectations when it does show up.

And the global warming theocrats so want solar cycle 24 to start, and start big while global temperatures remain low. The only problem for them is that when solar activity does pick up again and is followed by increases in global temperatures, how will they spin it?

'Science will not intrude on public policy'

From Hot Air headlines, who got it from Ace of Spades HQ, we hear of a Princeton scientist fired from his Department of Energy job in 1993 by Al Gore. The reason for his dismissal? He concluded that "Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science."

Dr. [Will] Happer views climate change as a predominately natural process. "The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past."

In 1991, Happer was appointed director of energy research for the US Department of Energy. In 1993, he testified before Congress that the scientific data didn't support widespread fears about the dangers of the ozone hole and global warming, remarks that caused then-Vice President Al Gore to fire him. "I was told that science was not going to intrude on public policy", he said. "I did not need the job that badly".

Dr. Happer is one of the 650 scientists mentioned in this earlier post.

Daily Mail: 76% ain't buyin' it

I saw this poll over at the Daily Mail, and while online polls are scientifically useless (sort of like global warming theory), the results are still revealing.

Something to watch

An article from space.com raises the specter once more of upcoming solar flares wreaking havoc on communications and electronics here on earth. I pretty much dismiss these since we see news items like this all the time yet I don't recall any widespread communications outages attributed to solar activity.

But since there's a faction in the scientific community which insists that solar activity affects our climate more than human-generated CO2, I found it interesting.

The Sun operates on an 11-year cycle, alternating between active and quiet periods. We are currently in a quiet period, with few sunspots on the sun's surface and fewer solar flares, though the next cycle of activity has begun.

It is expected to peak around 2012, bringing lots of sunspots, flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). CMEs can interact with the Earth's magnetosphere, causing problems for satellites, communications, and power grids.

This upcoming active period now looks like it will be more intense than the previous one, which peaked around 2006, some scientists think.

Simply put, the theory behind solar effect on the weather is that high solar activity inhibits cloud formation here on earth, leading to warmer temperatures. Low solar activity leads to more cloud formation and lower terrestrial temperatures.

The current period of cooling we're experiencing (which prompted the name change from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change") coincides pretty nicely with the current lull in solar activity. So it'll be interesting to see if we experience an increase in global temperatures concurrent with the increase in solar activity, especially if the global economic slump results in a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.