Scientist Tells Congress:

‘The increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind’. Children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.

“Award-winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer declared man-made global warming fears “mistaken” and noted that the Earth was currently in a “CO2 famine now.” Happer, who has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, made his remarks during today’s Environment and Public Works Full Committee Hearing entitled “Update on the Latest Global Warming Science.”

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“Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it’s been quite higher than that,” Happer told the Senate Committee.

““Earth was just fine in those times,” Happer added. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started.”

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In reading of sunspots (and particularly their possible effect on our climate) many of us wonder if and what kind of records exist from the past, now:

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OR

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Leif Svalgaard provided the link below on Watts Up With That? responding to crosspatch commenting that: “I believe there were observers who would, at regular intervals, sketch the surface of the sun and make a drawing as photography had not yet been invented.”

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“”On what principle is it,” wondered Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, “that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” Environmentalism didn’t exist in its current form in Macaulay’s time, or he would easily have discerned its essential pessimism bordering at times on a loathing of humanity. A trip down the environment and earth sciences aisle of any larger bookstore is usually a tour of titles that cover the narrow range from dismay to despair.

“On the surface this is not exceptional. Titles predicting decline, decay, and disaster are just as numerous in the real estate, economics, and social science shelves, though, ironically, not so much in the religion book racks, where one would expect to find apocalypticism well represented. This is an important distinction: unlike the eschatology of all major religions, the eco-apocalypse is utterly without hope of redemption for man or nature.”

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“Opinion surveys show that the public isn’t jumping on the global warming bandwagon despite a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and full-scale media hysteria. More broadly there are signs that “green fatigue” is setting in. Magazine publishers recently reported that their special Earth Day “green” issues generated the lowest newsstand sales of all issues published in 2008.”

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Steven Hayward

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via Andrew Bolt

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Alan of Sydney, commenting in Mr Bolt’s blog, adds a nice quote:

H. L. Mencken

Although…

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“But at stake is what was supposed to be a central lever in the world’s effort to turn back climate change. Intended to price fossil fuels out of the market, the system is instead turning them into the rational economic choice…

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“The theory sounded fine in the boom years, back when Nicholas Stern described climate change as “the biggest market failure in history” – a market failure to which carbon trading was meant to be a market solution. Instead, it’s bolstering the business case for fossil fuels.”

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Julian Glover

THOMAS SOWELL

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This was not said in relation to the fear that the extremism of climate alarm is threatening the stability of the entire western world, although this could well be seen as one of the disastrous threats Sowell identifies for America today in this essay.

No; it was not a part… but I draw it to your attention because that line highlights an important truth in chaos theory, reiterating “the butterfly effect” and thereby issuing a challenge to the more sober of this world to continue the winds of reason so that the trajectory of alarm unlimited is modified by wisdom… modified in time to halt the dangerous lack of wisdom allowing a freefall into servitude and grey misery.

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Investor’s Business Daily

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“Calls are mounting for President Barack Obama to fire James Hansen, the controversial figure in charge of climate studies at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Hansen has a record of allegedly doctoring temperature data to hype his argument that global warming is a crisis. The new calls for his resignation or termination come following his appearance in a video calling for civil disobedience at a protest at a power plant in Washington, DC…

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By James M. Taylor

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94% of the carbon in the atmosphere has the same isotopic signature as the natural background.

6% is of an organic origin, fossil fuels included.

Half of that organic source, 3% is what the IPCC itself says man is contributing.

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“tallbloke” comments:

““It’s politically necessary, scientifically necessary and legally necessary,” said David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel at the Sierra Club, a plaintiff in the Supreme Court case.

“It’s politically motivated, scientifically unjustified and legally ridiculous” said tallbloke, chief of himself, a contributor on Whats Up With That.

“Co2 a pollutant? Are they on this earth or fullers?” He added.

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And the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker says that the Government must be absolutely sure that their data on climate change is accurate.

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Which may seem a statement too obvious to even bother making; but it is not.

High standards of integrity, men of wisdom, and a commitment to truth, are missing from the halls of power, which instead houses those of a selfish greed for fame (however transitory) and fortune.

Rogues with degrees are abroad amongst us, often running in harness with power-hungry politicians of no integrity and the bitter crew of intellectuals of self hate who would condemn their fellows to a basic misery of life in a giant commune on the way to complete eradication.

But… beneath the mass-propaganda mills a new phenomenon has risen boisterously from within the new world of communications: the web log, now referred to universally as the blog. It communicates what the traditional media often misses, or chooses not to notice or not to publish, giving both the free thinker and the non-partyline toiler a place to display their wares, their concerns, their insights, to the entire world.

Or simply to ask hard questions and note critical doubt.

At present it is the science blogs which are doing this on the question of our time: man-made global warming, and they are doing it successfully because many of their contributors are men of true science scandalized by the corruption of science to agenda, and those equally shocked by the dislocation of sober fact to support grandiose schemes of power and fortune to the detriment of the citizenry.

These blogs are universally important; and powerful.

Note these words from the Christopher Booker article linked below:

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“Unfortunately, some educators besides Al Gore have taken liberties with the ice core data.  Children’s global warming author Laurie David published the incorrect graph below, which shows that CO2 levels changed prior to the temperature levels.  The graph misleads children into believing that ice ages are driven by changing CO2 levels, rather than the other way around.  It is difficult to understand how this error could have happened accidentally.”

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Guest Post by Steven Goddard

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Mike Campbell comments on Watts Up With That?: “I had to laugh when I saw in a review that David’s book claims that hungry polar bears have been spotted in “Halifax” (the city in Nova Scotia where I live) and “Ontario, Canada” (a province which extends north to Hudson Bay and would therefore be part of the polar bear’s normal range) scrounging through garbage cans.

“Halifax is south of 45 and we do not ever see polar bears.”

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And Laurie David replies on The Huffington Post in a rather flip manner, and assures readers: “We will correct the illustration in the next edition.”  (She does not mention the bears.)

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No recall?

No.

If your children read the first edition you just have to hope they will be so awed by it they snatch for the second edition, too, and their eagle eyes spy the correction immediately.

Where is a Ralph Nader of education?  We need you.

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p.s. And if you wish to see how a class children’s author writes an environmental tall story you can read Giant.

Warning: This paper has been rejected by Science and Nature. It may be hazardous to your research grant.

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“Since the energy of that 1998 warming peak did not come from the ENSO system it is entirely unaccounted for and could well be cosmogenic. Gamma ray burst GRB 971214 is a possible candidate source.”

(cosmogenetic: produced by cosmic rays)

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“Finally, a word about Al Gore and the IPCC Nobelists. I am sorry to say that the emperor has no clothes on.  A trace amount of carbon dioxide in the air does not cause global warming as required by their religion.  There was no warming in the eighties and nineties and the warming that does exist started only in 1997, is entirely different in kind, and is not understood. Time for them to close down that Kyoto shrine of theirs and start doing some real climate science.”

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(Subsequent warming was discontinuous and was not caused by carbon dioxide)

Arno Arrak

via Icecap

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge | The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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Guest post by Bill Illis

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“Like so much churnalism, this story originates with a press release.

“How, you may ask, does a snake refute the idea of a climate thermostat? The science-free assertion is left unchallenged. The BBC then picks up the story, and Head makes his fridge-emptying soundbite.

“But even the BBC producers must have noticed a strange whiff about this story. One of the corporation’s own environment correspondents, Richard Black, is wheeled in to qualify Head’s assertion.

“There may be other factors”, Black admits, that contribute to the size of fossil…

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Thermageddon, the BBC and a giant snake

By Andrew Orlowski

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Worth reading for Andrew’s humour, alone.  But it is much, much more than that.  Revealing.

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via Climate Debate Daily

( dearieme on Watts Up With That?)

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Two Titans spar on Watts Up With That? beginning with:

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David Archibald writes: “One of the things that the now disbanded NASA Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel told us was that is that solar minimum is marked by a flat heliospheric current sheet.”

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With Leif Svalgaard on the thread responding to one comment (One of the things that the now disbanded NASA Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel told us was that is that solar minimum is marked by a flat heliospheric current sheet.):

This is a misunderstanding of what has been known for the last 30+ years.

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The sun may be quiet; but the scientists deeply involved in solar sonnets are not…

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(The “red cabbage” will be revealed on the thread itself)

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By James M. Taylor

Environment & Climate News

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Conduct of Life by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

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And now Hansen writes of “death trains” because they carry that coal.

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Read on to Watts Up With That? on those “death trains and coal and CO2

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A retrospective for perspective:

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In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973).

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This is just a clip from

By George F. Will

The Washington Post

I cannot contact John McClean, the author of this page (the email address provided rejects mail), for further information, but the text and graphic representations are well worth browsing as an example of the Urban Heat Island effect demonstrated over a specific area; the Australian state of Victoria.

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By keeping his data points sparse, John has been able to highlight this effect, and concludes:

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References for further reading are provided at the bottom of the page.

Dr. Hansen warned in The Guardian that President Obama has:

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“Then,” writes Steven Goddard in Watts Up With That? “something remarkable happened…

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A story which spills into the “comments” with much additional news along with opinions.

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Marc Sheppard

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If that line sounds a bugle-call in your head, then the surrounding story in Watts Up With That? will give you a concert.

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And still the Wolf Cry inspires.

If a single wolf will not bring the villagers out to break the boredom, two may… worth a try, anyway

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Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

(The Australian bushfire, aka wildfires.)

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“Bushland that is not burned regularly turns into a powder keg, as the fuel load inexorably increases. The cause of these disasters is not global warming; still less is it arson. It is the failure to recognise that fire is an intrinsic feature of eucalypt bushland. It cannot be prevented but it can and should be managed. Unless there is a fundamental change of policy across all levels of government in Australia, there will be more and worse fires and more deaths.”

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The Australian

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Are some amongst us really so depraved?

Apparently.

This is a sickness amongst us. A cancer fed by some bitter self-hatred and a dreadful desire by those who suffer this psychological impairment  to inflict it upon their fellows.

These are weak people who, unable to rise to he challenges of life themselves, would pull all others back to their own self-pitying level of snivelling incompetence.

They would have been losers at school, too.

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Investor’s Business Daily

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by Steve McIntyre

Climate Audit

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If you are an Australian you could be forgiven for thinking the following story is just a copy and paste with name changes to suit the location.

Perth, Western Australia, was doomed in an almost identical scream of despair just a couple of years ago.

Have those-who-know run out of original storylines?

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The re-hash begins:

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Guest post by Steven Goddard

Take a total relax

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(but still on climate duty):

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“The graph is obviously a Mannian ploy, probably a mole here at CA. Extreme filtering, no error bars: Butterworth filter, most likely. After some time at this blog I can spot ‘em in an instant. Country-of-origin: USA. Able to narrow that down to Sheep Mountain, CA.”

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Al Gore has a new argument for why carbon dioxide is the global warming boogeyman — and it’s simply out of this world.

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By Steven Milloy

FoxNews.com

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“There is no way CO2, which at best only affects a small portion of the IR produced by earth’s surface, can heat the atmosphere by trapping IR. Contrary to the lie repeated in news stories about climate, science doesn’t say that CO2 is causing higher temperatures by trapping IR. Empirical science indicates that no such process exists in this physical universe.”

by reasonmclucus

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via Watts Up With That? from Icecap

…of a kind one can applaud for its lack of fire and brimstone.

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More scientists like this gentleman speaking out would restore reason to the debate, and begin to restore confidence in science.

With confidence restored the world could begin to consider the ever-changing climate and the implications of these changes for humanity in a sober and useful way.

Wolf! cries just bolt the faint-hearted, and leave us prone to dismiss all calls to action; and that is truly dangerous.

Considered opinion and debate creates a wide and useful arena where contemplation and wisdom can flourish, and our knowledge and innovation can take the very best of which we are capable and so nourish humanity today and tomorrow…

…as our forefathers did.

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(Climatologist David Jones)

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Simon Mossman

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Follow the humour, the intrigue… feel the suspense… beats a novel, and it is in real time…

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by Steve McIntyre

Climate Audit

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One of the great advantages of speaking in riddles ~ as savy sages have known throughout the ages ~ is that you cannot then be wrong, as only the sage himself knows what he means anyway… and that could be anything…

The laughter grows…

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With Al Due Respect, We’re Doomed

Washington Sketch

Dana Milbank

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“He actually believes, or says he believes, that man-made catastrophic global warming is going to make human life on the Earth impossible! No scientist in the world has ever made such an assertion. If one did, he would cease to be a scientist. Yet, this politician makes this assertion in Congress – and, for some reason, is not laughed out of the frozen Capitol.

“In fact, Gore was well received by Democrats and even some Republican dupes.

“So maybe the madness is contagious.”

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Joseph Farah

BETWEEN THE LINES

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Ah, the beauty ~ and the power ~ of laughter, as ICECAP notes in:

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By Andrew Revko – New York Times Environmental Reporter

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*      *      *

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How often have the buffoons of history called down upon themselves the scorn and laughter of generations to follow by their own pretensions; pretensions which morph into desperation and ever wilder and more irrational claims the further they sink into the quicksands of their own making.

Where those of wisdom learn to doubt, the fools close their minds against increasing knowledge or obvious error and ride blindly to their own destruction.

“Dunno how “important” it is. It may not be possible to figure out exactly what they did without code.

“But it looks like there’s trouble with Harry… (Steve McIntyre)

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Climate Audit

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DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 31 (AFP) Jan 31, 2009

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Czech President Vaclav Klaus took aim at climate change campaigner Al Gore on Saturday in Davos in a frontal attack on the science of global warming

“I don’t think that there is any global warming,” said the 67-year-old liberal, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. “I don’t see the statistical data for that.”

via Icecap

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“Opposition parties responded by criticising the First Minister’s green credentials, and environment groups called for Mr Salmond to act on Dr Hansen’s advice. But energy experts warned that new fossil-fuel power stations were essential to prevent the lights going out, particularly as the Scottish Government had rejected new nuclear plants.”

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By Jenny Haworth

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Extract of letter from James E. Hansen

“Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.”

Groucho Marx

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“… When it comes to weather, the current Democratic majorities in the nation’s capital don’t have a clue. But neither that nor the weather deterred Gore from testifying Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the need to pursue a treaty to lower carbon emissions at a United Nations conference in Copenhagen next December.”

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By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY

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“That 1000 year forecast comes with a moneyback guarantee from NOAA. Too bad they don’t offer the same on their seasonal forecasts. the last two winters were forecast to be warm in Alaska and the lower 48 states. Susan can’t help but keep embarrassing herself first with her work on the ozone hole, then the IPCC AR4 report for which she was a Lead Author and now this.”

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Guest Post by Steven Goddard

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And another clip from this story:

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What’s up with that?  Nothing… but it sure points to something being “up with” the present science-political ratpack and their religious hyperventilating obsession with a vision of hell just ahead.

From the Abstract

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.

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Perhaps… it certainly makes a good head line to alert you that Steve McIntyre is again demonstrating his wickedly impish application of humour to shine a bright light on shenanigans abroad…

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Climate Audit

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Snow falls in the United Arab Emirates!

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“Snow covered the Jebel Jais area for only the second time in recorded history yesterday.

“So rare was the event that one lifelong resident said the local dialect had no word for it.”

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Running strongly way behind both evolving science and public opinion, Australia’s opposition leader retained carbon as a pollutant and a driver of a fearful future for the world in catastrophic climate change when today he unveiled a three-stage climate change policy.

He entirely missed the point that right now the world is focused on the economic situation and is about over the “wolf!” cries of the salesmen of salvation credits.

The fashionable pastime of saving the world by paying into the pockets of the enlightened is past as incomes diminish… climate science begins to mature… ice chills major areas of the world… and his own country is in the midst of bountiful rains in its major food bowls.

So why run an opposition on a doom theme from yesterday?

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The Australian

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“Thanks to Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green’s blog, I see that the state representative whose district includes Burlington, Republican    ”John Piscopo, has introduced a measure “to repeal global warming legislation that was passed based on the assumption that global warming is caused by human action.”

“I have a call in to Piscopo to find out why he’s seeking the legislation.

“But here is something from a 2006 transcript of the…

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via Icecap

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An excitement, a pleasure, and a relief to read:

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” These events can have a significant effect on the severity of winters we experience, and also on the amount of ozone over the poles – being able to identify them and understand their frequency is crucial for informing our current climate and weather-forecasting models to improve predictions.”

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Dr Osprey commented: “This study is a great example of what can be done through international partnerships and cross-disciplinary research. One can only guess what other secrets are waiting to be revealed.”

Dr Giles Barr, co-author of the study from the University of Oxford added: “It’s fun sitting half a mile underground doing particle physics. It’s even better to know that from down there, we can also monitor a part of the atmosphere that is otherwise quite tricky to measure”.

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(This is just a clip from a telling story and response.)

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“So I already e-mailed Prof Steig; and first I asked him, given that the West antarctic is warming at over 0.1 deg C per decade; when does he prdict it will reach the melting point and start the global flooding by raising the sea.

“He replied that he doesn’t make such predictions; but that it would be “many many decades before melting started” My guessw as 3000 years.

“So then I aksed him how deep down in the ice do the satellite measurements observe the temperature, and how deep in the ice does his 0.1 deg C per decade propagate. He replied that the satellites only measure the very surface temperature; that ice is a very good insulator so the rise doesn’t go very deep. He said that the major heat source of that 6000 feet of ice is warmth from the earth underneath.

“In other words, a storm in a teacup.”

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AUSTRALIAN CLIMATE MADNESS

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An old Australian cattle drover told me that tweny years ago. He did not accept the guilty panic of the times that blamed mankind. Shame he’s passed on; he would have liked to have seen that sentence from the professor.

The present shame is that not enough hot air is getting out that way.

Now the hot-air merchants are recycling their stories of doom in paragraphs such as:

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Ho-hum… Replay! Replay!

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The Australia

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p.s. You can read, listen, and see somethting of that old Australian cattle drover if you chance by the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame in Queensland’s central western town of Longreach.  Name is A J “Bert” Carr.

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Unless, of course, the country was to lead the rest of the world into an age of true enlightenment about climate change. That’s a campaign we can get behind.”

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“The waning faith in the church of global warming seems to have sent one of its apostles into a near panic. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is saying that time to save the planet from a blistering-hot, ice-cap-melting, sea-rising doom is running out.”

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY