The Unhinged Will Always Be With Us
Oct 8, 2009 Political
Understand this- I am not going to prove the axiom that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. The liberal loons that occasionally come on here and try to make the argument that I am wrong and they are not, well, I know I am not going to change their minds about anything- indeed, they have been too indoctrinated too well. They will never change. Too bad, but then some people you just cannot save, and that is the truth.
Case in point- the climate- they will insist that the sky is falling, and we need to do something NOW, or we will all die, and that is just not the case. Far from it, the science is not settled, the debate is not over- there are still two sides to every story, but only one of them is correct, and it isn’t theirs. That fact is something they veritably foam at the mouth about when you question their specious “science”, where they fit the theory to very questionable “facts”. Other facts contradict theirs.
For years, claims that UN climate reports represent the consensus of the majority of international scientists have been mindlessly accepted and regurgitated by left-leaning policy makers and the media at large. But in the past week or so, it’s become more apparent than ever that those who’ve accused the international organization of politicizing science and manipulating data have been right all along.
This latest disclosure again concerns what has become the favorite propaganda propagation tool of climate activists — the infamous “Hockey Stick Graph.” The familiar reconstruction, which deceitfully depicts last millennium’s global temperatures as flat prior to a dramatic upturn last century, has been displayed and touted ad nauseum as irrefutable proof of unprecedented and, therefore, anthropogenic, global warming (AGW).
americanthinker.com
Now, we could all have dueling graphs at ten paces, and still not solve a thing, because they so truly believe they are right- so much like jihadists willing to throw themselves on the pyre of rational thought, hoping the sheer mass of their bodies puts out the fire of sanity.
The years 900-1300 AD have been labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous epoch — the Dark Ages — to levels several degrees warmer than today. A sudden period of cooling then followed and lasted until the year 1850. This Little Ice Age (LIA) brought on extremely cold temperatures, corresponding with three periods of protracted solar inactivity, the lowest temperatures coinciding with the quietest of the three (The Maunder Minimum 1645-1710).
And then began the modern warming period, which, by the way, many scientists believe ended with the millennium itself.
Given these natural shifts over the past 1000 years, it’s certainly not surprising that after a period of cooling, which followed a period of warming, we’d again enter a period of warming.
And that, of course, presented quite the quandary to opportunists hell-bent on blaming warming on industrial revolution-triggered atmospheric CO2 increases. Something had to be done to convince the world that modern warming was unprecedented and could therefore only be explained by something unnatural, specifically — the “Greenhouse Effect.”
americanthinker.com
Yeah, its a booger when you really, really want to blame man, and the dang climate doesn’t play along– so you just have to make up the facts, or eliminate some data to skew your findings the way you want them.
Now that’s some good science, isn’t it?
Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?
The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.
Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:
A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.
worldclimatereport.com
Oh SNAP! That’s an inconvenient graph- I bet that just scalds Gore’s chestnuts- but the liberal- warmers would try to say that the cooling just proves their warming. Or something like that, something that they believe sounds so confusing that it just has to be true. Goebbel’s Big Lie is a trick they have adopted as their own, and they make liberal (pun intended) use of this doctrine.
The trouble comes in the form of the truth.
The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.
It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs).
But not a peep.
worldclimatereport.com
When the facts don’t fit, don’t say a thing- ssshhh- otherwise, the climate bill, which is just a government takeover, designed to squeeze more money from the taxpayers, might not pass. Politicians abhor a vacuum- in their pockets. And like other addicts, there is never enough to satisfy them. So they lie, plain and simple.
The truth is so inconvenient.
But this time around, nothing, nada, zippo from NASA when their ice melt go-to guy Marco Tedesco reports that Antarctica has set a record for the lack of surface ice melt (even more interestingly coming on the heels of a near-record low ice-melt year last summer).
So, seriously, NASA, what gives? If ice melt is an important enough topic to warrant annual updates of the goings-on across Greenland, it is not important enough to elucidate the history and recent behavior across Antarctica?
worldclimatereport.com
In a year where the Northeast had its coolest summer since records have been kept, it is really, really hard for anyone to say with a straight face that the cool weather was caused by Global Warming, which is why the liberal climate- alarmists changed the term to “climate change”- which is stupid on its face, because that is what climate naturally does, but this verbal farce makes them feel better, indeed it makes them feel righteous about their cause du jour.
But the facts say otherwise- C02 is not the boogeyman, and temperature fluctuations are more closely correlated to sunspot activity than to anything man has done, but since these alarmists can’t gain political traction on “sunspot guilt”, they try to convince us that it is all about our wanton ways,
Man Bad, Nature Good- that is the simplistic liberal version- in an egotistical fashion, it is all our fault- somehow, think that if we enter the equation at all, we are but a very tiny part of it, and what we truly do that does change our environment is build- build cities, roads, and in the process, cut down the trees that breathe the Co2, and change it to oxygen in the process.
There are things we can do to change our ways that will be beneficial, and indeed should be done, as responsible citizens, but to have the government mandate some of the things they want, is just a blatant attempt to get more money for their purposes, and their purposes are never good. Ever.
If politicians are involved, the issue should die- that should be the rule, because politicians are venal, lying, grasping little insane people who rightly should be forced to live under bridges as the trolls they are- but under no circumstances should they be allowed control over our money. They have no conception of how to use it.
And that is wasteful, and bad for the environment.
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Tags: antarctica, clearcutting, co2, environment, lies
EPA Comment Period On CO2 Ends Today
Jun 22, 2009 Flight 93, Political
EPA comment period closes Tues: tell ‘em no state-establishment of CO2-phobic religion
Only a couple more days to let the EPA know what you think of its proposed war against CO2. Just click on the little yellow “add comments” balloon. The following is a comment (ending at “sincerely”) that you can copy and paste. (If you choose to roll your own, feel free to leave it here too.)
Dear EPA:
There is overwhelming statistical evidence that the primary driver of natural temperature change is solar-magnetic activity, yet the solar flux is completely omitted as an influence on climate in all four IPCC assessments and in the Obama administration’s new “Climate Change Impacts in the United Sates” report. This omission is rationalized on grounds that the existing theories of how solar activity affects climate are still formative. The scientific method rejects this rationalization. Observational evidence is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa, but the IPCC is using theory (its distrust of existing theories of the mechanism by which solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature), as an excuse for ignoring the overwhelming evidence that solar-magnetic DOES drive global temperature. Not all religions are anti-scientific, but the demonstrably anti-scientific nature of CO2 alarmism proves that it IS religion, not science.
EPA regulations are supposed to be science based. Imposing restrictions based on an anti-scientific religious doctrine would not just violate the EPA’s mandate, but would violate the constitutional prohibition on state establishment of religion.
Solar-magnetic warming: theory and evidence
The sunspot-temperature theory is actually looking pretty solid. It is known that a strong solar-magnetic flux shields the earth from high energy cosmic rays which otherwise, according to the theory of Henrik Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, would ionize the atmosphere, seeding cloud formation. Thus the solar wind in effect blows the clouds away, giving the earth a sunburn.
Whatever the precise mechanism, researchers have found that solar-magnetic activity “explains” statistically about 60-80 percent of global temperature change on all time scales going back hundreds of millions of years. On the decadal time scale, see the seminal 1991 paper by Christensen and Lassen (“Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate”) and the 2003 isotope study by Usoskin et al (“Solar activity over the last 1150 yrs: does it correlate with climate?”), which found: “a correlation coefficient of about .7 – .8 at a 94% – 98% confidence level.”
For longer time scales, see the 2003 paper by Shaviv and Veiser (“Celestial driver of Phranerozoic climate?”), which found that found that the cosmic ray flux explains statistically about 75% of global temperature variation over the last 550 million years.
Omitted variable fraud
Solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels from 1940 and 2000 which, given the historical correlation between solar activity and temperature, could easily explain most or all late 20th century warming. When the IPCC and others omit the solar-magnetic variable from their models, any warming effect of solar activity gets misattributed to whatever correlated variables ARE included in their models.
By sheer coincidence, CO2 reached its own “grand maximum” levels (at least compared to the rest of the Holocene) in the second half of the 20th century. Thus in the alarmist models, whatever warming effect the omitted solar-magnetic variable is responsible for gets misattributed to CO2.
You can find rationalizations for this omitted-variable fraud in every IPCC report. For instance, section 6.11.2.2 of the Third Assessment Report does not question the correlation between solar activity and climate, but dismisses the cosmic-ray cloud THEORY as too speculative to include in their climate models:
At present there is insufficient evidence to confirm that cloud cover responds to solar variability.
But they don’t just leave solar-magnetic activity out of their models. Because their forecasts are based entirely on their climate models, they also leave solar magnetic effects completely out of their climate forecasts, despite knowing that there is SOME mechanism (even if the cosmic-ray/cloud theory turns out to be wrong) by which solar-magnetic activity is the primary driver of global temperature.
The only solar variable they do include is solar output or Total Solar Insolation (from long to short-wave radiation), which does not include the solar-magnetic flux. The Fourth Assessment Report does the same thing, looking only at TSI, as do all of the analyses that follow from these reports. For instance, if you look at he “Natural Influences” subsection of the Obama administration’s new report, you will see on page 16 that the only natural influence listed is “solar output’ (or TSI), which is why it is shown graphically to be so tiny.
Solar output is close to constant over the solar cycle (less than 0.1% variation), which is why it is called “the solar constant.” Because TSI is nearly constant, it cannot account for the many thousands of years of close correlation between solar activity and temperature. That must be coming from the one solar variable that DOES vary with solar activity: the solar magnetic flux. Every IPCC climate scientist knows this, yet they still omit the solar-magnetic variable.
Proof of omission: page 16 graphic from the June 2009 report by U.S. Global Change Research Program (in effect, the NOAA). The only natural warming effect listed is total solar output, which does not include the solar-magnetic flux. Similar graphics can be found in each of the IPCC’s assessment reports, where this analysis originates.
Religion, not science
When the alarmists omit solar-magnetic effects on the grounds that they are not satisfied with with existing theories of HOW these effects work, they are not just committing statistical fraud, but they are contradicting the very definition of science. Observation (the overwhelming correlation between solar activity and global temperature) is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa.
Consider an analogy. Until Einstein developed his theory of general relativity there was no good theory of gravity. Newton had a description of the gravitational force (that it diminishes by the inverse of the square of the distance) but nobody had any sensible account for the mechanism by which massive objects were drawn to each other. Applying the standards of the IPCC, a pre-Einsteinian or pre-Newtonian scientist should have forecast that when a stone is released in the air, it would waft away on the breeze. After all, we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the stone, but we don’t understand this thing called gravity, so we should not include it, even though we observe that heavy objects fall.
That is not science, and neither is CO2 alarmism. Data is supposed to trump Theory. By using theory (the proclaimed insufficiency of solar-magnetic theory) as an excuse to ignore the evidence (where solar activity is known to somehow warm the climate), warming alarmism perverts the scientific method.
That makes it religion in the constitutionally barred sense. Not only is this belief system embraced by millions of people WITHOUT EVIDENCE, but it is embraced in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Alarmism about CO2 is not just a religion, it is a demonstrably irrational religion, equivalent to believing that rocks will waft away on the breeze.
EPA is supposed to make science-based rulings. If you regulate CO2 based on demonstrably anti-scientific ideology, it will be an unconstitutional state establishment of religion.
The current cooling trend fits the solar-magnetic theory, not the CO2 theory
All of the major temperature records show that the earth’s average temperature has been falling for ten years now (with the 21 year smoothed temperature falling for five). In this period, CO2 has continued to increase, while the sun has descended into a prolonged solar minimum. This turn in the sun (breaking the coincidental correlation between solar activity and CO2 that existed for the previous 70 years), is rapidly unmasking the hoax of anthropogenic global warming.
It should not take a rare astrological event to unmask an obvious statistical and scientific fraud. Will the EPA now destroy its reputation by codifying the “green” religion at the very moment when the heavens themselves are exposing its dishonesty? If you choose this course, you will be destroying the nation’s economy and the lives of your countrymen in the service of your own anti-scientific religious beliefs, in violation of your oath of office.
Sincerely,
On the subject of state established religion
This is also the subject of our blogbursts, trying to stop the Flight 93 Memorial Project from stamping a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the graves our murdered heroes:
A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shape, but the archetypical mihrab is crescent shaped.)
The Crescent of Embrace memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque, replete with a full complement of typical mosque features, like the minaret-like Tower of Voices that has an Islamic shaped crescent on top and turns out to be a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial.
Outcry over the apparent Islamic symbolism forced the Park Service to make changes. They promised that they would remove the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They call it a broken circle now, but the circle is broken in the exact same places as before.
The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.
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Tags: co2, commnet perios, epa, Flight 93, Mecca