The Russians are Coming

By the time Obama is done, his name will be the most hated in America:

The Obama administration is poised to ban offshore oil drilling on the outer continental shelf until 2012 or beyond. Meanwhile, Russia is making a bold strategic leap to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. While the United States attempts to shift gears to alternative fuels to battle the purported evils of carbon emissions, Russia will erect oil derricks off the Cuban coast.

Offshore oil production makes economic sense. It creates jobs and helps fulfill America's vast energy needs. It contributes to the gross domestic product and does not increase the trade deficit. Higher oil supply helps keep a lid on rising prices, and greater American production gives the United States more influence over the global market.

... more on the Russians.

The Dinosaur Powered Electric Car

The Leaf:

You can tell that civilisation as we know it is coming to an end when they call a car "The Leaf", the new Nissan electric fantasy which is going to cost the British taxpayer £20.7 million in grants, topped up with a soft loan from the European Investment Bank of £197.3 million.

We are told that this thing will have an average range of 100 miles and a top speed of 90mph, although the egregious hacks writing this stuff forget to tell us that it is one or the other – not both. They don't tell either that you need a calendar rather than a speedometer to gauge the acceleration.

Nor, of course, do they tell you that, in terms of net efficiency, the electric car performs far less well than a petrol-driven motor, by the time you have taken into account the power station and transmission losses, to say nothing of the conversion losses in charging the batteries.

And then, since about 40 percent of our electricity comes from coal, and will do so until it is replaced by gas generation, the odds are that this wonderful "green" car will be driven by fossil fuels, only very inefficiently at one stage removed.

Shocking: Climate Change Disrupting US Government

In a stunning release, the US government confirms that climate change is now reducing its ability to be effective:

Climate change is already having “pervasive, wide-ranging” effects on “nearly every aspect of our society,” a task force representing more than 20 federal agencies reported Tuesday.

“These impacts will influence how and where we live and work as well as our cultures, health and environment,” the report states. “It is therefore imperative to take action now to adapt to a changing climate.”

Indeed, climate change has begun to affect the ability of government agencies to fulfill their missions, reports the White House Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.

The group is led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It is made up of representatives from more than 20 federal agencies, departments and offices, including the Department of Commerce, the National Intelligence Council, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Pentagon. That’s diverse – and it’s definitive.

As in all things progressive, the only remedy to the horrors described will likely be an increase in funding.

How Cooling is Warming

The Deeper we delve into the chicanery of climate science, the more guano seems to float to the surface. In recent days serious questions are being asked about the significant global cooling that took place in the 1970 ... the significant cooling that was so severe the northern hemisphere actually warmed.

First, there is the old record:

Human emissions of carbon dioxide began a sharp rise from 1945. But, temperatures, it seems, may have plummeted over half the globe during the next few decades. Just how large or how insignificant was that decline?

Frank Lansner has found an historical graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from the mid 70’s, and it shows a serious decline in temperatures from 1940 to 1975. It’s a decline so large that it wipes out the gains made in the first half of the century, and brings temperatures right back to what they were circa 1910. The graph was not peer reviewed, but presumably it was based on the best information available at the time. In any case, if all the global records are not available to check, it’s impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is. The decline apparently recorded was a whopping 0.5°C.

But, three decades later, by the time Brohan and the CRU graphed temperatures in 2006 from the same old time period, the data had been adjusted (surprise), so that what was a fall of 0.5°C had become just a drop of 0.15°C. Seventy percent of the cooling was gone.

It's interesting, that once one stirs the pot, more lumps pop to the surface:

Frank Lansner has done some excellent follow-up on the missing “decline” in temperatures from 1940 to 1975, and things get even more interesting. Recall that the original “hide the decline” statement comes from the ClimateGate emails and refers to “hiding” the tree ring data that shows a decline in temperatures after 1960. It’s known as the “divergence problem” because tree rings diverge from the measured temperatures. But Frank shows that the peer reviewed data supports the original graphs and that measured temperature did decline from 1960 onwards, sharply. But in the GISS version of that time-period, temperatures from the cold 1970’s period were repeatedly “adjusted” years after the event, and progressively got warmer.

The most mysterious period is from 1958 to 1978, when a steep 0.3C decline that was initially recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Years later that was reduced so far it became a mild warming, against the detailed corroborating evidence from rabocore data.

Raobcore measurements are balloon measures. They started in 1958, twenty years before satellites. But when satellites began, the two different methods tie together very neatly–telling us that both of them are accurate, reliable tools.

... so far it's all just questions ... but as we learned with the CRU and NASA, where there's smoke, there's guano.

O - K

ht

Spurious Warming

What if a large part of "global warming" turns out to be UHI?

Taken together, I believe these results provide powerful and direct evidence that the GHCN data still has a substantial spurious warming component, at least for the period (since 1973) and region (U.S.) addressed here.

There is a clear need for new, independent analyses of the global temperature data…the raw data, that is. As I have mentioned before, we need independent groups doing new and independent global temperature analyses — not international committees of Nobel laureates passing down opinions on tablets of stone.

But, as always, the analysis presented above is meant more for stimulating thought and discussion, and does not equal a peer-reviewed paper. Caveat emptor.

Another Brick in the Wall

... falls out:

Oops! There go another two bricks, tumbling out of the IPCC wall of deceit on man-made global warming – there is not a lot left now; even the Berlin Wall (to which the AGW construct is ideologically allied) has survived better. Unhappily for Al, Phil, Michael, George and the rest of the scare-mongers, these two discredited components are among the most totemic in the AGW religion.

Firstly, a new study, funded by Nasa (which may be feeling the need to rehabilitate itself post-Climategate) has revealed that the ridiculous claim in the notorious IPCC 2007 report that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically affected by even a small reduction in rainfall caused by climate change, so that the trees would be replaced by tropical grassland, is utter nonsense. That assertion has already been exposed as derived from a single report by the environmentalist lobby group WWF.

Couldn't Resist ...

EU: Pulling Each our Load by Doing Less

I recall a Saskatchewan event a number of years ago which involved a canoe race. The teams in the race decided to all finish the race together ... so the fastest canoe held up to let all the rest catch up, and they finished the race all in first place.

... or was it all in last place?

Such is the mentality of the new Europe:

Germany's trade surpluses built on holding down labor costs may be unsustainable for the other countries in the eurozone, France's finance minister said in an unusually blunt warning to Berlin.

Christine Lagarde said Berlin should consider boosting domestic demand to help deficit countries regain competitiveness and sort out their public finances.

Her comments break a long-standing taboo between the French and German governments about macroeconomic imbalances inside the 16-country bloc which have been dramatically exposed by the Greek debt crisis.

"[Could] those with surpluses do a little something? It takes two to tango," she said in an interview with the Financial Times. "It cannot just be about enforcing deficit principles."

"Clearly Germany has done an awfully good job in the last 10 years or so, improving competitiveness, putting very high pressure on its labor costs. When you look at unit labor costs to Germany, they have done a tremendous job in that respect. I'm not sure it is a sustainable model for the long term and for the whole of the group. Clearly we need better convergence."

Klavan on Culture: Hollywood

Global Warming is All About Science

... political science:

Since the e-mail scandal broke, the British Information Commissioner's Office has stated that the scientists violated the United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act. The British Parliament is holding hearings. The British Meteorological Office has announced a multiyear review of its temperature data. And the Dutch government is investigating how the IPCC could have been so hapless that it incorrectly doubled the country's sub-sea level territory. Bipartisan groups of lawmakers in Washington are equally troubled and have filed legislation that would strip the EPA of its ability to regulate carbon dioxide.

Do these errors mean the globe is not warming? No, but they demonstrate that the rigorous, objective scientific process has been abandoned in favor of political science. They also mandate that the EPA conduct a scientifically valid process before making a decision that could cost Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Because the EPA failed to do its own independent scientific review, I am asking a court to order the EPA to do it.

Abbott is the 50th attorney general of Texas

The Back Draft Begins

Consider the UK one of the "greenest" places on the planet ... yet even there, a return to logic and reality seems to be taking hold:

TWO government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.

The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.

The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.

It has also referred a television commercial to the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, for potentially breaching a prohibition on political advertising.

Bruce Willis; Step Aside

It's a TKO

Stephen Harper is a Conservative ... Right?

At what point do the Stephen Harper apologists face up to the fact that their man has only one thing in mind ... power. How he gets it doesn't matter because he is like the former LPC ... completely bereft of any core political values except one ... beat the other tribe.

For me, the last straw is that Harper, while greatly increasing spending, actually CUT military spending from a military budget that is already one of the most paltry in all of NATO. It's amazing what a man will do to grovel for Quebec and GTA votes; while taking his base utterly and totally for granted.

Previous

Climate Ninnies May be Wearing Orange Coveralls

Tricking any entity to spend billions of dollars based on false information is fraud ... the trick will be tying individual scientists and bureaucrats to specific amounts; not just the general fact that governments have sunk hundreds of billions into the climate scam, from grants to outright confiscations based on carbon taxing:

The once-respected science journal Nature recently published a whining editorial to the effect that climate scientists are not criminals, really; that attacks on them by increasingly-skeptical news media are soooo unfair; and that the fundamental science showing that the planet is doomed unless the economies of the West are shut down at once is unchallengeable.

No doubt most climate scientists are not criminals. However, some are. Many of the two dozen Climategate emailers, who have for years driven the IPCC process, tampered with peer review in the learned journals, and fabricated, altered, concealed, or destroyed scientific data are criminals. Whether they or Nature like it or not, they will eventually stand trial, and deservedly so.

After all, the biofuel scam that is one of many disfiguring spin-offs from the “global warming” scare — driven by the poisonous clique of mad scientists whom Nature so uncritically defends — has taken millions of acres of farmland away from growing food for people who need it and towards growing biofuels for clunkers that don’t. Result: a doubling of world food prices, mass starvation, and death, leading to food riots in a dozen major regions of the globe.

... keep reading.

A Taste of the Climate Mob

For a taste of how dirty the climate cabal can be, have a read of Benny Peiser's detailed piece:

On Aug. 31, Tom Wigley (a former CRU director) emailed Jones to notify him that he believed Keenan’s paper raised a valid issue: “Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect. Whether or not this makes a difference is not the issue here.” Jones was now in possession of authoritative information that undermined his claims about the integrity of CRU data products for which he is responsible. Confronted with the evidence from Keenan, and, most importantly, Wigley’s advice that Keenan appeared to have a point, Jones should have been insistent on getting the data and facts out rather than keeping them secret.

Previous @ SDA

The Great Data Robbery

Take your pick; hubris, Chicanery, or Incompetence ... either way, it's a mess:

Perhaps we need to go back to first principles?

Rule # 1:

In Science, the raw data is sacrosanct.

Rule # 2:

Corrections to raw data to compensate for known anomalies are always kept in a separate data set or adjustment algorithms

Rule # 3

The corrected data produced from applying Rule 2 is also sacrosanct.

Rule # 4

You never throw anything away.

How hard can it be for the climate “science” crowd to understand this?

It is beyond being funny any more.

Luckily, team-climate has lots of pristine data sets ... right?

Green Economics

... a one way ticket to poverty:

Turning to employment, while projections in the renewable sector convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross job growth, they typically obscure the broader implications for economic welfare by omitting any account of off-setting impacts.

These impacts include, but are not limited to, job losses from crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, indirect impacts on upstream industries, additional job losses from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices, private consumers' overall loss of purchasing power due to higher electricity prices, and diverting funds from other, possibly more beneficial investment.

Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade and other assumptions in those studies claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable.

... read the whole thing.

Amazing Temperature Reconstruction

... using clams:

Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures, says William Patterson, an isotope chemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and lead author of the study1. But molluscs grow continually, and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in which they live. The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope, oxygen-18.

The study used 26 shells obtained from sediment cores taken from an Icelandic bay. Because clams typically live from two to nine years, isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in which they lived.

Patterson’s team used a robotic sampling device to shave thin slices from each layer of the shells’ growth bands. These were then fed into a mass spectrometer, which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.

“What we’re getting to here is palaeoweather,” Patterson says. “We can reconstruct temperatures on a sub-weekly resolution, using these techniques. For larger clams we could do daily.”

... and wouldn't you know it ... no hockey stick.

Climate Chacanary

Unbelievable:

Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.

Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.

The reporter never published it.