Outrunning Glaciers on Acid

Remember The Acid Rain 'Scare'? Global Warming Hysteria Is Pouring Down - Forbes:

Back in the late '70s when I was in college, we needed to go fast on I-94 to get to Madison for other reasons, but we all thought that it would be funny to tell any officer that pulled us over that we were "outrunning the glaciers". Those were the days of Global COOLING ... which I know as now gotten the left all riled up to be reminded of, so they have went to work trying to rewrite that part of history.

No, it WASN'T "the same" then,  since not EVERYTHING had been fully politicized yet! One of the outcomes of that was that "research" tended to end up in a lot of different places, and maybe more importantly started from a lot of different premises. Today, you can set out to "continue to prove" GW, or you can get no money, get no degree, lose your professorship, etc. Tough choice if you are an academic that wants an advanced degree and needs to eat.

In the "old days", we all watched, read, or listened to the same message on NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, NYT, WaPO, etc and if you were a complete low brow reactionary, you MAY have gotten some wild right wing thinking from the EDITORIAL page of the WSJ, although their news pages were (and still are) just as left as the rest of the media. Oh yes, there was Buckley and National Review -- which I had never heard of until I got bummed out because Jimmuh assured me that the era of fun in America was OVER!

"Many" scientists thought the data showed we were cooling. It was NOT a "religious issue"! The idea of using "science" as a political cudgel to pound down the apostates had not been even remotely associated with "science" in those days (we still had religion for for the fixed outlook).  "Acid Rain", "Coming Ice Age", "Ozone Hole", "DDT", "we are going to turn Japanese", "Detente --- the obvious reasonableness of surrender to the USSR", "the world is OUT of petroleum" .... those were the "smart topics" of the day.

The list of topics aren't an accident, They were ALL considered to be "common sense", and if had Fox news in those days, you could likely have done a poll showing that people "didn't know the answers to the issues of the day" ... as in, "all the forests will die from acid rain" (probably before the glaciers ran over them, but they were not clear on that), all us country kids will be dead of skin cancer long before now, and the penguins would ALL be gone due to the "ozone hole".

DDT, well, it turned out to kill 50 million plus 3rd worlders by NOT being around, but we are back to using it now with no problem to birds (if a couple beers are OK, a keg isn't necessarily better), we not only didn't turn Japanese, they started their eternal  government managed recession in '90 and are still in it.

We didn't ever try the surrender to the USSR route -- but given BO, maybe there is still time. Oh, and world oil reserves were at "400ish Billion Barrels BB) in '80 and they are N of 1.6 TB today with a lot of countries using less ... + a lot of the Baaken isn't even online! The US could push Venezuala and the Saudis for the the top of the list!  We talk about that as about as much as GW folks talk about GW during a record cold March.

Don't get the impression that EVERYONE was just stupid back then, and we have obviously gotten smarter. SOME predictions DID happen! Reagan DID consign the USSR to the ash heap of history for example (until BO resuscitated it like a long dead Chicago voter).

So the linked article brings back memories:

And lobby they did. Between 1994 and 1996 the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million to the Nature Conservancy, and together with the Pew Center and the Heinz Foundation they engaged in an energetic and successful global warming fear campaign which included attacks on scientific dissenters. Incidentally, the Heinz Foundation, headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry, generously provided a $250,000 award to Al Gore’s star congressional hearing witness, NASA’s James Hansen, who subsequently went on public record supporting her new husband John Kerry’s failed presidential bid.

A bunch of people hardly remember Enron ... going from the most admired business in America in the late '90s with a myriad of connections to both parties, to an early example of "W's fault ... he met with Ken Lay" (the CEO of Enron). As WSJs "Best of the Web" likes to point out, Paul Krugman was an Enron advisor and proponent and proud of it in the late '90s. Ah, how easy the memory hole works for one side of the political spectrum.

Historically, mankind inherently understood the relation between age and "wisdom", because it was ASSUMED, and UNDERSTOOD by at least the educated that to a very significant extent "education + experience = wisdom". Put that was before the cult of "progressivism", which assumes that the data/information/knowledge that they pick up today is INHERENTLY superior to the past (mostly because they have no clue about what happened in the past)

So, most no longer learn from the past ... even just a few short years in the past. It matters not that every time a set of policies has been applied in history, they have failed. If the "smart guys" think that printing bags of money + taxing it away from the economic winners so that the economic losers get "another chance" (typically to lose bigger amounts faster), it doesn't really matter how many times it doesn't work until you end up in Greece or Japan and you are just STUCK --- no capital to go forward, no successful folks left, and a bunch of unsuccessful ones that have even lost the will to fail after pissing away multiples of borrowed / subsidized fortunes.

I have to admit that as much as I'm looking forward to warmer temperatures, a nice big continental glacier forming would be VERY cool. Sure, the "30-40 tops" years I have remaining would only allow for a few100 feet of snow and ice AT BEST, puny by the 5000+ full monty behemoth, but the warmist tap dances would be a thing of beauty ... and there is always tracks for the Ranger!

Oh, never mind ... they will claim it is "due to human caused climate change" ... or it will just go down the memory hole like Krugman/Enron, "out of oil", "ozone", etc.

It is the age of OZ, and even when Toto pulls the curtain, the lefty witches will conjure SOME way to hide the humbug!

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Pedo-Earth Religion

When Did Global Warming Begin? | Power Line:

Many Christians are "Young Earth Creationists". They believe that the earth is 6K years old because that is what they believe they have extrapolated from the Bible. For them, it often becomes a "faith test" for someone to deny glaciation, light from galaxies billions of years old, the huge number of craters on the moon, etc. If you don't believe the earth is less than some date old (say "10K years max"), then you are not a Christian.

My personal view, (as it is in many things) is that an all powerful, all knowing and eternal God can create the universe any way he sees fit. If he did it in the last 10 min, it would likely have "the appearance of age" to an "unbiased observer", not because he is trying to "fool anyone", but because babies for example are not going to be able to live on their own, so doing creation with no ready made adults would be very counterproductive.

As an old boot path computer guy, I'm typing on a good analogy for this. When this iMac booted, there were a series of "bootstraps" (as in pulling up from bootstraps model) that were loaded in memory to set up the environment for the "boot load", that at the moment it began execution at some fixed address had memory tables, open file handles, a series of processes, etc that to someone looking at memory that was NOT from the boot path team would look like a whole bunch of things had happened that actually had not ... certain files being "opened", certain memory spaces being "allocated", certain processes being "initiated", etc.

A perusal of the state of the system would have certain "appearance of age" that would be "fake", not to "fool anyone", but just because it is OFTEN that "initial conditions" are different from the standard state.

It happens that I know WAY less about creating a universe than I do about booting a computer, and humans in general were not on the "universe boot team".  In the "it all just happened by accident" model, we only showed up after the thing had been running for like 14ish BILLION years.

I tend to be very magnanimous about allowing omniscient, omnipotent and eternal beings pretty much complete freedom in how they do their creation (call me libertine). I'm  interested in "how creation looks to me" and as in the case of the early stages of the running iMac, I doubt if the Apple boot load team would sentence me to any punishment for looking at a little memory and trying to understand what they did. My guess is that God is even more unsurprised by our curiosity about creation. So relative to a lot of young earth creationists, I'm a very liberal sort!

**NOTE** there is a principle here! The more "out there" the position, the more radical and combative it's adherents. True "Flat Earthers" are very zealous compared to "Sphereists". Watch this tendency in yourself and others, and you will have a powerful ally in wisdom. ** END NOTE **

What I find utterly amazing though are the "Young to Pedo-Earth Warmists", and the fact that their faith requires absolute fealty to their dogma or you receive all sorts of attacks relative to your intelligence and unwillingness to believe.

To get all nuts about current climate, you have to:

1). Completely ignore 100's of thousands of years of very good data about climate as in the linked column.

2). Focus ONLY on 130 years of data on "global temps", that is actually limited to something like "30ish" years of GOOD data, meaning data from orbiting platforms that can actually have a good bead on something approaching "planetary scale", as opposed to a bunch of anything but random local measurements extrapolated together.  Where thermometers and reporting stations were located in 1800 to say "1950" was NOT "random" in any sense ... cities, airports, universities, etc being the locations.

Even the most casual of skeptical people can see the difficulty of "global temperature".  The heat island of the Twin Cities to the N of me tends to run 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding temps. The area along Lake Superior is often TWENTY or more degrees cooler than just a few miles away during the summer. Mark Twain once commented on "the coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco" ... a phenomenon I first experienced on my honeymoon, where **I** (who am almost always warm compared to everyone around me) FROZE in the damp fog in late June after sweltering up a Yosemite in 100+ degree blast furnace heat. The list of local climate variation difficulties on scales of 10 miles or less is gargantuan, and must be accounted for in "global temperature".

Naturally those of the Warmist Faith assure us "it's all been worked out" ... at least as long as we pay no attention to their secret e-mails.

Even with satellites and computers, the amount of data required to compute an accurate "global temp" is very daunting, and requires A LOT of really unbiased and detailed analysis to be "accurate" by some measure. Ideally, the globe would be split up into say "10 mile cubes" and the temps at all levels ... ocean surface and depths, air column and land surface (and possibly depths in areas like tundra) would be gathered on a "few times a day" basis, say sunrise, noon, dusk, middle of night".

That sort of a measurement over a few thousand years would give an excellent basis for understanding climate. Once we had such a record for say "500K years", we would have a number of samples of how climate fluctuates relative to continental glacial advance and retreat, etc. Once we had that, then it would be much easier to try to figure out what the causes of the global climate changes are.

It is a testament to man's capacity for inconsistency that on one hand, science can wax poetic about "billions and billions of years", and on the other, base supposedly "settled conclusions" costing billions of dollars and affecting billions of people on AT BEST 130 years of data, which is so minimal as to provide only the most minimal of backing for even a "fad", let alone the proposed religion that Global / Warming cum Climate Change have become for many. Sadly, the Warmist Faith has become a state religion, breaking the Constitutional separation of Church and State.

I have a hard time with people that have faith in a religion that hasn't been around at least a thousand years! Even Scientology is "tried and true" relative to Pedo-Warmism!

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Arctic Ice Free in 2013, Global Temps Rise 4-8 Degrees in Century

Report: Global temperatures to rise at least 4°C by 2100 | TG Daily:

It's fortunate that the climatologists long range predictions are becoming more accurate while their short range predictions are failing miserably. The IPCC reports show that we have had "no significant warming" in the past 15 years, and the arctic ice expanded significantly and trapped vessels this past summer. Now in the antarctic we have a research vessel trapped and 50 climate scientists being rescued. The NE of the US braces for a major winter storm in the next couple of days, and our temps here are predicted to be negative double digits for at at least one day next week.

I find the local cold temps to be especially fun. MPR has been having an every Thursday "Climate Cast" going over the effects of "Climate Change" locally here in MN (all politics is STILL local!) One of the hallmark "markers" driven home on this show is how "sub zero overnight temps are a thing of the past in MN". Indeed.

Another major topic every time we have high heat or a big storm event is "Warming and Weather Variability". While it is always carefully pointed out that those events are definite signs of GW, days like today, record low temps in Spring, Summer and Fall of 2013 seem to be non-existent on the show  ... "just weather" you know!

The credulity of your average American is absolutely stunning. It is like believing someone trying to sell you a house in '08 telling you "houses always go up in value".

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain"!!!

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Corruption, Climate, Consistency

Hit piece journalism:

The first linked piece is by the eminent Thomas Sowell, who covers the fact that there are "experts" that likely have no bias beyond "that is what they think". But, given the broad range of opinions, a "supporting expert" can usually be found for virtually any position.

The 2nd aspect is that "money talks" ... private money, corporate money, and CERTAINLY Government money as well ... since the government has the deepest pockets of all, and it has a gigantic role in educational institutions where ALL of the PHDs are trained and must pass muster if they want to achieve that degree.

Is the discussion of "Human Caused Global Warming" biased? Well, certainly!! There is money on both sides, their are interests on both sides. I for one prefer a few inches more ocean level and some higher temperatures to mile thick ice sheets covering most of the food growing area on earth.

That is my personal bias, but unfortunately given the historic scientific record, I'm pretty sure that in the next thousand years or so, and possibly AT ANY TIME, we will slip back into an ice age no matter what I or the rest of mankind might prefer. Why? Because as best we know, climate has generally been much cooler and more volatile than what we have seen the last 10K years or so, and "regression to the mean" is a common phenomenon.

Given that ANY view on climate is likely to be biased, I like to search out information when I can on BOTH sides.

Here is some data that would indicate that even though the experts are always telling us to believe THEM rather than our lying eyes (and shivering bodies), there may be something to snow in May, shivering cold the last week of July, and plenty of snow and cold in Nov-Dec. http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/2013-one-of-the-ten-coldest-years-in-us-history-with-the-largest-drop-in-temperature/

Do you think NOAA has a bias? How good would it look for BO, "leading scientists", NASA, etc if it came to light that their claims of "settled science" had a lot more to do with "settled politics" than anything else? Nah, no reason at all for them to have a bias, right?

Naturally, the claim will be "that is WEATHER" ... usually accompanied with things like one being a "foolish denier", or some other crack about lack of intelligence, being a rube for the oil companies, etc, etc.

So here we have an exhibit from last summer dealing with a significant number of climate researches trapped in the ice at the NORTH Pole ... which BTW had been predicted in '08 to be "Ice Free" by '13, but instead the ice EXPANDED significantly http://bilber99.blogspot.com/2013/09/ipcc.html

Now, with nature providing no shortage of irony, we have climate scientists trapped in the ice at the SOUTH pole ... http://www.cbsnews.com/news/blizzard-stops-latest-rescue-bid-for-ship-trapped-at-antarctica/

Ok, North America is cold, BOTH poles, SO WHAT! Right?

Well yes, I listen to NPR, I certainly KNOW that record hot temps, lack of cold temps and anything that can be called "changeable weather" is PROOF of Global Warming ... and anything that is record cold, early / late snow, etc, etc is "just weather".  Oh, and anyone that doesn't agree with that is certainly either poorly educated, just stupid,  or "under the influence of big oil".

We also happen to have the 112 year Mideast snow anomaly  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/blizzard-stops-latest-rescue-bid-for-ship-trapped-at-antarctica/

Is any of this "proof"? Certainly not. IT IS DATA! However when people come up with labels like "Denier", and start going to great lengths to call the other guy "corrupt", I tend to smell a rat. Name people you know that are immune to corruption? If you named any, I'd suggest you look a little harder. We are ALL very prone to corruption.

Most people don't like to be called stupid ( for some reason, I rather like it, but I know that is an odd predilection). Most people like to feel that the "powers that be" have some reasonably correct handle on what is going on ... again, I don't, and I have been told this all means that I'm an "iconoclast". I've always assumed that "the experts" each know everything about nothing ... while I like to know nothing about everything! Clearly a FAR superior position!

My advice in 2014 is the same as my advice in any year. Don't believe in ANY currently breathing human. Love them, forgive them, but DON'T believe in them. They are NOT reliable! That goes quadruple for me, and unfortunately includes yourself, ESPECIALLY yourself. We are HORRIBLE at even coming close to the truth about ourselves.

Look for what is OLD. What has stood the test of time, and try your best to understand WHY it has done so ... but realize that it is way more important to know it HAS survived rather than to understand why. That is likely impossible in any case! But that is actually really good news!

Happy New Year!

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Yellow Cake, Meaningless Facts, Stained Glass

The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush - Larry Elder - Page 1:

This article goes through a topic that I've covered before with some new data. Saddam either had WMD, or everyone thought he did. This article says that Yellowcake was acquired and was there -- to which the left will say one of two things; 1). It's a lie 2). It doesn't matter, because it isn't severe enough to go to war (with hindsight).

To which Elder tries to say "But you SAID that talking about Yellowcake WAS the "lie" ... and we had a special prosecutor and everything based on the "proof" that was a lie!"

To which the left replies "Consistency is NOT an issue ... WINNING is the issue and we already WON! BO is in power, we spy on you at will, we target you when we want to for audits or other government harassment! W is long discredited as "Bush lied, people died", the America you fought for is history, SHUT the F UP!!!!

They are "right" in the sense that "might is right". Note how unpopular "speaking truth to power" is now! The rule of law has been destroyed, our poor bankrupt children have been brainwashed to servitude and each day we realize new revelations of how we now live in a new "changed" nation, no longer America. BOville.

We have been running down this road for a century now. First slowly ... "Progressive" became "liberal" because "progressive" was tied to "Socialists" and "National Socialism" didn't turn out very well. Fascism was identified as "right" (as in "libertarian fascists") ... so the people no longer knew the difference between political left and right (statism vs extreme liberty or 'anarchy").

The "New Deal" was the "Raw Deal" for what was America. FICA was a massive assault on future generations by the current -- a time bomb that only now is becoming somewhat visible.  The various government progroms  converted the once great engine of growth into a geriatric nation with hardening arteries and gout. We live today in that sad shadow.

WMD in Iraq is just one more in a long tired litany of these topics. The Alger Hiss / McCarthy smear was a big one -- Watergate was really the left just finally getting around to punishing Nixon for being right. The release of KGB papers after the end of the USSR proved that Hiss WAS a spy and Chambers was right -- but no matter, for 90%+ of Americans, the left still won.

The whole myth of the USSR was a huge left scam. Even in the early '80s I listened to NPR breathlessly describe their "free health care", their "full employment", their "state education" ... to listen to our own Public Media, one would have thought that the USSR was heaven on earth. In the early '80s, Reagan was a MADMAN for ever suggesting that the USSR had ANY potential of ending. By the end of the '80s, the lefty message was that it had been obvious for a long time the USSR was in real trouble, and the foolish Reagan likely slowed their demise with his bellicose posturing.

It **IS** true that the winners write history -- and the left has been writing and re-writing our history for nearly 100 years.

Such is the looking glass world we live in. Acid rain, DDT, impending global starvation, the ozone hole, Japan taking over the world economy and the planet being "out of oil" in the late '70s, an impending global ice age in the early '70s, are all examples of massive "total truths" that one was once a fool to not be in agreement with. What it takes many years to learn is that from the perspective of those that purveyed and believed in those "truths", "deniers" are STILL fools, or at least "weird scary odd ducks".

When your mother asked "If all your friends jumped over a cliff, would you just follow along?", it was a trick question! The right answer is that if it was "the whole school", then YES!!! You are a social animal, and since we have thrown religion and the constitution into "the ash heap of history", a current "smart person" WILL follow the crowd -- and if tomorrow it turns out that the crowd was "wrong", that view will be completely forgotten as if it never happens. It is part of what makes it VERY uncomfortable for members in good standing of the Dominant Party (Democrat / liberal) to even TALK to someone that might bring up heresy ... The Dominant Party Message has replaced both God, the Constitution, and "foolish reality".

It looks pretty obvious from both economic and climate data that two current liberal myths that are not going to survive reality are Progressive Economics and  Global Warming, **BUT** as in the elements above, one needs to realize that DOES NOT mean that "facts, the truth, common sense, reality, etc" are going to "win".

I'm no longer certain that there exists any level of reality breaking through on these people -- we could easily be down to a few thousand people in hemp clothes shivering and starving in a cave somewhere with the onset of the next ice age, blathering away about "Global Warming", "Overpopulation", and "excessive consumption".

It seems that the best we can do is have a nicer cave somewhere with some reactors, hydroponics, connection to the sea for ice fishing and maybe some cloned woolly mammoths on the surface for steaks!  Going to have to have a REALLY good library, computer systems, AND a very nice chapel with a lot of stained glass.

We will have a lot of history to write and re-write.

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Weather, Climate, Science, Religion

Here we have a shot of our back deck this fine May 2nd AM. Were it not for a set of control freaks trying to use "science" as a religion in order to control the behavior of people, we would be able to just "talk about the weather" as man has done since he could communicate.

"Weather", like "shit", or "death" just happens. It is NOT like taxes ... taxes are actually under mans control and in even our natural social state up to a few hundred people living in a "tribe", there were no taxes. We have gotten so stupid, we seriously need to go back to basic definitions.

Science is about making ACCURATE predictions about phenomenon like climate and weather and then using MEASUREMENT to verify that the predictions match over LONG PERIODS OF TIME. A theory named "Climate Change" can certainly explain everything, which means it explains nothing. Predicting the climate will change is like predicting that the value of the stock market will change. If it is anything, it is religion.

SUCCESSFUL religion however is something that can be used to explain life from a transcendant perspective. Christianity has been around for 2K years and is one of the main drivers of what we used to call "Western Civilization" -- what gave science the gift of seeing an ordered and understandable universe. Without Christianity it is extremely doubtful if science would be any where near to the level of capability they were at before they began their "post modern" decline.

Snow in May is just that, snow in May. This will be our "ALL TIME record snowfall" here in Rochester, but of course that is absurd. We only have records for at best 100 years, which is a TINY amount of time even from a young earth biblical fundamentalist view. From the view of any good scientist, it is laughable ... this spot in MN would have been covered under over a mile of ice for tens of thousands of years at intervals of 10-20K for at least a few million years. "Snowiest on record" ... what a crock!

What we have misplaced is our place in reality and the universe. We are either pitiful little globs of protoplasm, here for but the blink of an eye in a purposeless cold random universe, or we are eternal souls, created and loved by a God whom wants us to be with him for an unimaginably wonderful eternity.

What we ARE NOT is some self-appointed deity that has any clue what is "natural" for either a God created or random accident of a universe, planet, etc. It snowed in May. It may snow in June -- the only month it has NOT snowed somewhere in MN even in our puny record keeping is JULY! Get used to it. It is EXACTLY as interesting (or not?) as last years record highs!

Climate and Weather

Is It Weird Enough Yet? - NYTimes.com:

Next winter when there is record cold and snow, we will hear how it is STUPID to mix up climate and weather. This summer while TX has a drought and high temps though, it is only intelligent to look at weather as indicative of climate. It is like "civility in politics" -- something critical for Republicans to follow, and requiring that they be chided for "war like metaphors" and such from time to time, but not an issue as they talk about "attacks on unions" and how their supporters will "take out the tea party".

Why are over 50% of people in this country followers of the climate alarmist view? I'd say that some of them just don't have the confidence to stand up against the elite and be willing to be called "stupid". Free men have always been called names (and much worse) in the face of the power elite justifying their position. The power elite screams so loudly and frequently today that they often drown out the sane and the wise.

We need to stand up and cheer for scientists willing to stand up against the elite and try to preserve the stature of science in the world http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46212

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that "global warming is occurring."

Friedman takes the shibboleth of GW, and mixes it together with the noxious corruption of Chicago style politics and doubles down claiming that scams like Solyndra could work if we had some extra cap and trade corruption to manipulate the energy market even beyond what we do now. I suppose at SOME level of corruption ($10 gas??) even disasters like Solyndra MIGHT be able to make money, but there would also have to be enough US economy left for someone to buy their bloated subsidy product at that point -- something that looks increasingly unlikely.

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Tom Friedman's house

Next time you read something about how everything ought to be green by Tom, just remember where he lives. I assume that he just writes about the green stuff to make money -- I guess that is OK. The thing I never get about liberals is how once you say what they want to hear, they really could care less if you follow any of what the preach. As long as you are liberal, you can pollute all you want, own all you want, be as rich as you want, and treat "the little people" with complete disdain.

In this world, liberalism provides forgiveness of all that they might see as "sin", past, present and future, save the unforgivable sin. Turning conservative.

Shoot Toto!

RealClearPolitics - We-Don't-Want-to-Talk-About-It-Gate

Remember in the Wizard of Oz when Toto was pulling the curtain back so you could see that "the great Oz" was nothing more than a machine being manipulated by an old guy behind the curtain? He spoke through the machine saying "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain", when it was obvious that there was no "Oz" -- only a big machine and a regular old guy manipulating it.

Thus, as some hackers have pulled the curtain back from the "The Great Global Warming Hoax", the MSM, the Democrats, and the Copenhagen grifters admonish us "pay no attention to it being a hoax".

Amazingly, most of the masses are gullible enough that even when they see the main perpetrators of this supposed "settled science" right in the act of silencing those with data that calls their hypothesis into question, and in some cases being forced to delete data and manufacture data to show what they could not show honestly, they are afraid to question the "Oz" of Global Warming.

Have we lost all ability to independent th0ught?

The Warmest Year On Record

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | What happened to global warming?

2008? 2009? Nope ... according to that bastion of conservative global warming deniers, the BBC -- 1998. Good article -- it actually sounds like SCIENCE -- not "settled science" which is an oxymoron. Does it say that Global Warming is over? No, it just says we may have 20-30 years of global cooling or maybe more. Even if we do, it MIGHT be that those years won't cool as much as they otherwise would have and that even greater warming may start at the end of that.

The point is that the global warming models did not predict cooling -- not since '98, and certainly not 20-30 more years. In science, prediction and repetition of the predictions are what takes one at least in the direction of "settled science" -- while NEVER getting there!

However, when your models predict WARMING, and you get "a pause", any sort of "science" says it is time for a new model!

Message In Here Somewhere?

Power Line - Protesting Global Warming in the Snow

It just seems to happen too often for pure coincidence -- Al Gore seems to regularly give his speeches on Warming in some sort of "freaky cold weather".

Sensor Drift

Well, there was a solid NSIDC prediction that in 2008, the North Pole would be ice free! Only the evil "disbelievers" had an doubt at all. OOPS, small problem, the sensors were off and it didn't melt -- and now the ice in 2009 is tracking ahead of 2005-2008. Hmmm.

"The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has been at the forefront of predicting doom in the arctic as ice melts due to global warming. In May, 2008 they went so far as to predict that the North Pole would be ice-free during the 2008 'melt season,' leading to a lively Slashdot discussion. Today, however, they say that they have been the victims of 'sensor drift' that led to an underestimation of Arctic ice extent by as much as 500,000 square kilometers. The problem was discovered after they received emails from puzzled readers, asking why obviously sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as ice-free, open ocean. It turns out that the NSIDC relies on an older, less-reliable method of tracking sea ice extent called SSM/I that does not agree with a newer method called AMSR-E. So why doesn't NSIDC use the newer AMSR-E data? 'We do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data.' Turns out that the AMSR-E data only goes back to 2002, which is probably not long enough for the NSIDC to make sweeping conclusions about melting. The AMSR-E data is updated daily and is available to the public. Thus far, sea ice extent in 2009 is tracking ahead of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, so the predictions of an ice-free north pole might be premature."

Pay No Attention to Any Cooling

or that man behind the curtain either (Wizard of Oz)

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide - Ocean Cooling to Briefly Halt Global Warming, Researchers Say

While the MSM is quick to point out at any signs of warm temps -- record highs, warm spells, hurricane's, etc that only complete fool could see those and not realize the planet is warming, this requires slightly more sophistication. Paying attention to what you experience is important when it agrees with the "proper world view", but when your experience and the "proper world view" don't align, then it is obviously your experience that should be ignored.

The Leibniz study, co-written by Noel Keenlyside, a research
scientist at the institute, will be published in the May 1 issue
of the journal Nature.

``If we don't experience warming over the next 10 years, it doesn't mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us,'' Keenlyside said in an interview. ``There can be natural fluctuations that may mask climate change in the short term.''

So there you have it. When it is warmer, that is caused by humans, when it is cooler, it is a "natural fluctuation". The bottom line is that no matter how cold it may be, that is no reason to believe that warming isn't a problem! You just have to "run the model longer". Simple.

Ice Age?

I wasn't going to post anything on this at all, because I no more believe in the coming ice age than I do in Global Warming (GW) ... which means I don't DISbelieve in either one either, I'm an agnostic. I don't think we have nearly enough data to reach a conclusion given glaciation cycles that take order 10's of thousands of years. What is more, our understanding of star behavior is really jaded by our close proximity to a sample of precisely ONE.

In terms of "sensational" though, the idea of rapid expansion of the polar caps and most of the northern hemisphere under continental ice sheets ought to make it. No doubt food production would drop off precipitously as growing seasons became shorter and shorter and eventually were gone over much of our current major food growing areas. Do I believe that is likely? No, it is just what one might want to consider if they were to be close to as alarmist about another set of data than what the GW folks have had their undies in a bundle over for a long while.

Ice Age Data Article

Something a little closer to my own heart as we close to less than two weeks from the MN fishing opener. Note that the latest Mille Lacs had ice out was May 6th, which would be a week from tomorrow. It is still 100% ice covered. (lake cam here). Worse, we are making ice tonight, and the 10 day forcast for Garrison (NW corner of Mille Lacs) is all 50's by day and 30's by night until May 7th when they are supposed to hit a blistering 62. The all-time record is in danger

Here is some data from a couple of MN lakes, just to show the potential for getting the wrong impression from shorter term data. One MIGHT think that there was a BIG warm-up from '96 to 2000 ... and even do some other extrapolation and decide "it is obvious we are warming up". If one looked at over 100 years of data however, they would see that 1878 was WAY earlier (meaning warmer) and 1856 was not much cooler than '96, which would give the impression that at least on that data we had COOLED since the late 1800s. Of course 100 years of data in a data set of 10's of thousands for just ONE glacial cycle, with 10's and 100s of MILLIONS of years of data for multiple cycles is about as close to completely useless as one can get. It is "just data". Any sort of trend projected from it is just like reading the farmers almanac.

Data from MN DNR:
Mille Lacs - Avg April 24, Earliest April 2, 2000, Latest May 6,1996 (42 years of data)
Minnetonka - Avg April 11, Earliest March 11, 1878, latest May 8, 1856 (129 years of data)

There are NOT enough facts to make a decision here, but we know that the best data we have says that the planet has a N hemisphere ice age bias in this land mass configuration. "On average", most of the US is under a sheet of ice, as is Europe for the last 40 million years or so. We are actually IN an "ice age" because there are polar caps. Supposedly the previous case with ice caps was 430-460 years ago, so there was something like 400 million years of "global warming" prior to our current "ice age". This may indicate that it is possible for the planet to warm and cool on it's own, but you can draw your own conclusions about human intervention 400 or even 40 million years ago. Suffice to say we have no tracking data on Mille Lacs from those times, and I have no idea what the fishing regulations were even a mere 40 million years ago.

April Flurries, Warming Worries?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/04/020387.php

We are suffering a cold weekend here in MN. There was snow in the air here in SE MN, but not the sticking stuff. The combination of a lot of wind and temps in the lower 40s felt plenty cold though.

The Powerline link above is a good one, but I think it also shows the general futility of trying to offset the MSM/sheep connection. Most people simply want to have the POPULAR VIEW. Yes, they may feel some "cognitive dissonance" while they see the snow fall in April, but they will see no news articles on how this might mean that GW isn't as certain as sometimes reported. When we have our next good warm spell, reporting of GW will be back. We have gone two years with no hurricanes hitting the US when it was predicted that GW would cause MANY more and each would be more severe. BUT, there was no reporting that those predictions not being true in the last couple years to cast any doubt on the predictions.

I find it tiresome to listen to discussion of GW or to engage in it myself. My personal belief is that temps in decades or even multiple decades can flucuate up or down and not mean anything that we can understand. BUT, I'm not a climatologist (and neither is Al Gore). The fact that GW is such a big story and political issue for the left, and the degree to which the MSM can get the sheep to follow is really the main story in my view.

I believe the longer term climate record supports my "it fluctuates" view.

Snow Jobs

We seem to be enjoying the start of a normal winter here in MN. I say "seem", because although I was out riding snowmobile in December on limited snow in Dec 2004, it promptly melted and it was still a mild winter. Last winter was mild as well, but we did have a monster late-season storm and we were able to get out. It was also somewhat colder, since we were able to ride in Iron River WI on solid snow for the first time in years rather than having to go all the way to the Keweenaw Peninsula of upper Michigan.

I make these observations somewhat with tongue in cheek because although Christian, I am not a young-earth fundamentalist that believes in a 6K age of the planet. Even on that scale, trying to discern climate trends on years and decades would normally considered completely irrational. This however is the age of "Global Warming", now re-christened "climate change". Now, only the "most foolish" fail to believe that not only climate direction on a planetary scale, but causality for same as, can be discerned in years and decades. In any case, we have to "assume the worst" and "play it safe".

How different this doctrine from the believability of threat assessments by our security agencies. When they asserted that WMDs were in Iraq, only to apparently be wrong because of failure to find the weapons, the culprit was the President believing the assessment. The same security services also asserted that Iran was building nuclear weapons, but apparently decided based on new information this last summer that this was no longer true. They changed their minds, thus, it is a problem for THE PRESIDENT.

I listen to the MSM all the time, so this doesn't really surprise me. The answer these days is always "bad for Bush" ... stocks up, stocks down, deficit up, deficit down, surge bad, surge working, the answer is always "Bush Bad".

As the snow drifts down as it should in early December and we complete yet another year with well below normal hurricane activity when it was publicized after Katrina that "due to Global Warming" we would have season after season of worse and worse storms, but in '06 we had none and this year we had a single barely cat 1 qualifier, one tends to wonder.

We were assured by the left that "Iraq was all about oil", by which I guess I falsely assumed meant "cheap oil". It was $20 a barrel before the war and around $90 now. Does that mean that they were wrong, it wasn't about oil? We were assured that the Surge was "a huge mistake" and "there was no way a military solution could work". Bush was called "delusional" and worse. So now even Jack Murtha says the surge has worked? (although you have to search for that almost as hard as news of a new stock market high or yet another good economic number).

So BOTH Libya and Iran apparently decide to bail out of their covert weapons programs as the US decides to invade Iraq and that invasion gets no credit for that result? We had "No Blood for Oil", would the left feel as good with a bumper sticker saying "No Blood to Stop Nukes"?

I must have listened to 100s of NPR stories on "the failure of Bush to stop the REAL threat of Iranian (and N Korean) nukes while he "wasted our blood and treasure" in Iraq. So when the best data that we have shows that they DID stop their program at about the same time we invaded their neighbor, THAT is yet ANOTHER "failure of the Bush Administration"?

The sheep must be willing to be led off the cliff even more than usual these days.

Glaciers

Woke up just after docking in Ketchikan around 6am local time with the clocks being set back one hour overnight. Low clouds, little sun peeking through now and then, very much like it looks in here quite often it sounds like. Sitting out on the balcony after a nice breakfast on the ship and a little shopping tour of town. In one respect, it seems that all ports are alike, Alaska or Caribbean; lots of T-shirts, jewelry, art galleries, and local foods. Salmon here, rum cakes and other seafood in the Caribbean.

Nice little stream that had a few remaining spawned out salmon milling about that were fun to watch for a bit, Three cruise ships sitting at the dock right now, ours, a Holland America, and a Celebrity. Ours is full to capacity, the other two certainly don’t look empty, so the terrible Bush economy must be one other thing that the unbiased MSM hasn’t been able to get exactly right. Strange how they can be so interested in “truth”, yet somehow miss something that would see to be somewhat easy for valiant reporters to ferret out. Most likely they wouldn’t even need to resort to some secret source in order to figure out that number of things are humming along very well.

While this post started in Ketchikan, it is ending out in Glacier Bay. For some reason I was just able to get my first post of the trip up, so thought I’d try another. The weather has been “ok”. Plenty of rain, fog, some very nicely arranged points of glimpses of sun and relative clear that have allowed us to see some of the great scenery, but not enough to just sit out and bask in it. The high latitude means that the distance up to the tree line is only a few thousand feet, so we commonly sail by peaks that have a good deal of snow on them even though we are of course at sea-level. The combination of the peaks with the steep inclines of the valleys cut by glaciers with the water makes for very pleasing scenery almost everywhere.

News at 11, these glaciers have been receding for 2500 years now; faster in the 1800s than in the 1900s. Yes, this would indicate “global warming”, but major surprise, a quick check for continental glaciers covering North America could clue in not even the very geologically sophisticated that we are likely between ice ages. Given the glacier data from this trip, it would appear that we are still in the warming phase, and likely have thousands of years left until the next cool-down which will move us into the next ice cycle. How much effect did the humans have to cause the glaciers to recede faster in the 1800’s than now? Probably none, although one might conclude as scientists did in the 60’s and early 70’s that we were speeding the turn to global cooling.

My analysis of Princess vs Carnival is that for the extra money one gets a less crowded ship, better fit and finish and higher quality food and food service. Kind of like shopping at WalMart though, Carnival is plenty good enough for me, although it would be hard to cruise without a balcony after cruising with one.

Well, we are getting close to what is supposed to be the prime whale watching area, so I guess I better head out to do that. We have seen humpbacks and killers so far, but only 2 pods of the humpbacks and one of the orcas so far, so it would be nice to see some more