I've Moved

Don't worry, everything looks the same, I just got my own URL.

So I moved here.

Hope to see you there.

About that Global Warming Report--

Turns out, for all of the hoopla surrounding the report, most of the projections were revised downward. From Opinion Journal:

Take rising sea levels. In its 2001 report, the U.N.'s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. Lord Monckton notes that the upcoming report's high-end best estimate is 17 inches, or half the previous prediction. Similarly, the new report shows that the 2001 assessment had overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

It's worth noting that many of the policymakers who tinker with the IPCC reports work for governments that have promoted climate fears as a way of justifying carbon-restriction policies. More skeptical scientists are routinely vetoed from contributing to the panel's work.

U.N. scientists have relied heavily on computer models to predict future climate change, and these crystal balls are notoriously inaccurate. According to the models, for instance, global temperatures were supposed to have risen in recent years. Yet according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, the world in 2006 was only 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 2001--in the range of measurement error and thus not statistically significant.

The models also predicted that sea levels would rise much faster than they actually have. The models didn't predict the significant cooling the oceans have undergone since 2003--which is the opposite of what you'd expect with global warming. Cooler oceans have also put a damper on claims that global warming is the cause of more frequent or intense hurricanes. The models also failed to predict falling concentrations of methane in the atmosphere, another surprise.

I've taken a lot here, but there's more at the link. Worth a read. I quoted an article by Monckton extensively in my last post, and it's safe to say that I think he raises some very good points. At the least, there's enough that we don't know, and enough conflicting information, that the debate should rage on.

It also should be noted that these projections come from models. There's no hard and fast rule that these models have to come true, you know. Might they? Sure, I guess they could come true, if all of the assumptions and guesses come true, and conditions are exactly as input into the model. But what are the odds of that, really? Meteorologists predict weather using mathematical models too, but weather forecasts are notoriously inaccurate too. They're getting better, but they still screw up here and there. While I understand that "weather" is not "climate", I also understand that much of the math is the same. You can't figure the climate without figuring the weather, and determining how that weather might trend over time. If you can't predict weather accurately in the first place, how can you accurately determine how that weather might change? And why, pray tell, shouldn't anyone be allowed to ask such a simple question?

90% Likely? O RLY?

I still don't buy it. What continues to confound me is that people who should know better, don't. Take Pam, for instance. Pam is a real-life, living and breathing actual flesh and blood SCIENTIST. She's even got a lab and everything. A Ph.D.! As such, she should know better.


My impression of science is not that we should all agree on a conclusion, but that we should attempt to prove or disprove that conclusion using facts and observations. Not so, it seems, with the Theory of Global Warming. Nope. If you don't agree with the theory, you don't deserve the opportunity to say your piece. At least, that's how I read this:

Come on now. Why is Inhofe even being given air time? Why is this still a debate?

Of course, she links to Dan with the "Inhofe," who has a post that says this:

The real global warming debate ended months, if not years, ago, but as predicted previously here, the political and cultural deadenders continue to mount their spin insurgency.

According to Dan, and many like him, we shouldn't even be allowed to have the debate. They're right, we're wrong, end of story, off to bed with us, and NO DINNER!

But I can't reconcile that "debate's over" nonsense with this article by Christopher Monckton in the Sunday Telegraph(UK). At the very least, he raises good points, and backs them up with references and calculations. And he's not making the charge that it's 90% likely that humans are responsible for global warming, and using bad data to do it.

Some interesting points-

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch).

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.

Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass.

The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict.

My apologies for taking so much of the article, it's worth a read.

The problem here, of course, is that global warming isn't a scientific issue anymore. It's completely political. This debate is simply an attempt to wrest control of your life from you by making you feel guilty for causing global warming. You drive, you contribute to the impending disaster. You cut down trees, you may as well set the forest afire. It's your fault we're in this mess, because you're greedy. And how can you conquer your greedy nature? Why not try some socialism? The government controls your intake, defines your output, and handles all the details. All you are is the strong back that does the government's bidding. And the government wants you to stop with all the polluting, and stop with all the consuming, and all of the producing, because you're just fueling your greed.

They're leading you by your guilt, and you'll do as they say, so long as you feel that guilt.

I MUST BE A F'N WIZARD OR SOMETHING

I tell you, when I said that Biden, Hillary, and Edwards were going to come after Obama, I had NO idea that it would start so soon. Hillary trying to pin "madrassa" on him was nothing- Biden went and played the ARTICULATE card.

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"

Any card-carrying cracker KNOWS that it's verboten to use the word 'articulate' when describing a black man. Even if the description is apt, the implication behind the word is that it's surprising that a black man would be articulate. That's why you don't f'n do it.

Much the same for 'clean'. Is it surprising that a black man would be clean, to anyone but Joe Biden? 'Bright?' Is it so hard for Joe Biden to fathom a smart black man?

But don't you dare say that a Democrat might be racist, NO SIR! Not a member of the party of civil rights!

They Was ROBBED!

I no longer doubt that the ACC officials are firmly in the Duke camp- they put WAY too much time back on the clock after Vernon Hamilton's three-pointer. 4.4 seconds? More like 3.2, from what I saw. For goodness sake, he had time to set his feet! There's NO way he caught the inbounds pass, set his feet, and launched a three, which then sailed through the net, in 0.6 seconds! Call me crazy, but that's alot of stuff to happen in just over half a second.
Here's the recount from ESPN.com:

Duke looked on its way to the win when freshman Gerald Henderson hit two free throws to make it 66-61 with 12.7 seconds left. Hamilton scored a layup to cut the deficit to three with 5 seconds left, then stole McRoberts' inbounds pass and buried a tying 3-pointer with 1.8 seconds left.

But officials stopped play to review the time left and restored the clock to 4.4 seconds left, setting up the final play.

Yep, the officials set up the final play, all right.