There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days

What President Eisenhower did not explicitly point out was the likely effect of these same forces on science. Los Alamos and Oak Ridge -- anthills of brilliant physicists -- were only the start of Big Science, dependant upon the Government, the Military, and Big Industry.

Professor Harold Lewis has resigned from the American Physical Society:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence---it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

[snip]

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people's motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don't think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

Read the whole thing, including Dr. Lewis' specification of the astonishing machinations of the Society.

We're Ready to Deal

Someone named "Stan Cox" wrote a little piece in yesterday's Washington Post titled "In the heat wave, the case against air conditioning." Mr. Cox, moved by love for his fellow man, moral scruple respecting Mother Gaea, and the fact that he has a book to sell ($16.47, and not available in an environmentally friendly Kindle edition) explains:

Washington didn't grind to a sweaty halt last week under triple-digit temperatures. People didn't even slow down. Instead, the three-day, 100-plus-degree, record-shattering heat wave prompted Washingtonians to crank up their favorite humidity-reducing, electricity-bill-busting, fluorocarbon-filled appliance: the air conditioner.

This isn't smart. In a country that's among the world's highest greenhouse-gas emitters, air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers. The energy required to air-condition American homes and retail spaces has doubled since the early 1990s. Turning buildings into refrigerators burns fossil fuels, which emits greenhouse gases, which raises global temperatures, which creates a need for -- you guessed it -- more air-conditioning.

A.C.'s obvious public-health benefits during severe heat waves do not justify its lavish use in everyday life for months on end. Less than half a century ago, America thrived with only the spottiest use of air conditioning. It could again.

He goes on to describe his Utopian vision of the future without A/C.

(In the interest of full disclosure, your humble and obedient servant grew up on a farm in a house without air conditioning, and attended grammar school in a similarly unsullied building. Mr. Cox sounds rather like one of those fellows who gets all misty-eyed and poetic respecting the virtues of hard work on the family farm, who has himself never spent a mercilessly hot Summer day shoveling chicken shit.)

But we're ready to deal, and we'll make a deal with both Mr. Cox and the Environmental Magisterium: we agree to turn off our air conditioning in the Summer, and to wear sweaters in the Winter, and to make a $100,000 contribution to the organization of alGore's choice, the day after the Congress of the United States prohibits air conditioning in the Capitol, all Congressional offices, and all automobiles used by members of Congress. Put another way, we'll believe it's a crisis as soon as the folks telling us that it's a crisis themselves start to behave as if it actually were a crisis.

There'll Always Be an England

Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has his doubts about anthropogenic global warming. But as a Peer of the Realm, he is, well . . . . very English.

Here Lord Monckton discusses AGW with a Greenpeace sympathizer who, it turns out, really doesn't know very much . . . but feels very strongly:

Nobody expects the English Inquisition.

Ice Hockey

AGW: Anthropogenic Global Warming.  The question of the day.  But it's a two-part question.  First question: is the Globe Warming?  Second question: is it our fault?

The first question would seem to be entirely a matter of fact.  By it's structure, it is the sort of question that should have an answer.  But reliable thermometers -- let alone reliable records -- have only been around for about a century-and-a-half.

But there exist much longer "data sets."  People who have spent a lifetime studying such things tell us that the amount of ice laid down in a glacier in any particular year is in large part dependent on the mean temperature that year.  And in Greenland and Antarctica there exist glaciers that have been around since considerably before 1850.

Here's a graph of the inferred temperate data extracted from a Greenland glacier (click to embiggen):

Uh oh. Even worse, the slope goes even further up after 1900. While this hardly answers the question of whether this is all our fault, it certainly suggests that the earth has been warming in the last 150 years or so, at least as compared to what was going on between 1400 and 1850. It's that fricking hockey stick.

I hear you desperately asking if there might just be similar data for BEFORE 1400. An excellent question. Glad you asked. Here's the data from the same source, plotted all the way back to about 3,000 B.C.:

Those of you who know a bit of European history will observe the Medieval Warm Period around 1,000 A.D., followed by the Little Ice Age, which explains why the Tudors wore all those warm clothes. You'll also notice a rather precipitous decline between about 500 A.D. and 800 A.D. And you always wondered why Europe was so backward after the fall of the Roman Empire, while North Africa thrived.

If only there were data going even farther back. As it happens, there are ice sheets in Antarctica that have been there for more than 400,000 years. Here's their tale:

Our readers are all of them smart enough to draw their own conclusions, and take appropriate steps to protect themselves, their children, and their grandchildren. After all, it's all about the children, right? We know what we're going to do. We're going to practice hunting mammoths.

All of this information comes from Andrew Watts' website "Watts Up With That?" DO NOT fail to read his recent articles on problems with and adjustments to temperature data.

They Said . . . .

. . . . we were making this up. We were NOT making this up. Gifted as we acknowledge we most certainly are, we could NOT make this up.

New Years Day - 2008

Of some things, we may be certain. John Tierney greets the new year:

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

Leading the Way

"The day’s events began when the White House sent an ox cart to pick up Mr. Gore at his hotel, where he had arrived by S.U.V. motorcade last night following a charter jet flight to Washington D.C."

More HERE.

We'll Wait for the Movie

From ForUm, which describes itself as "an influential informational analytical resource, free of commercial interests and political bias, the primary aim of which is to inform readers about events happening in Ukraine and around the world in a fast and objective manner," comes this important story:

“Regionals” deny accusations of bribe “oranges”

Party of Regions considers that inability of BYuT to carry out political activity constructively, has transformed to chronic stage. ForUm reports, referring to PR press service.

“The brightest example that proves this diagnose is systematic unsubstantiated statements to PR, spread by BYuT representatives. In particular, the matter concerns accusations of attempts of bribery of BYuT people’s deputies by PR in order to derange formation of so-called “democratic coalition”, the statement of PR says.

“Party of Regions denies all accusation, both current and future accusations of this political force who is used by white lie to hide its own political failure, irresponsibility and inability to hold dialogue even with its allies,” the PR press service says. “At the same time we do not intend to ignore such accusations and actions from BYuT side, that’s why we are going to defend out honor and dignity from raging fantasy of professional demagogues,” PR statement says.

Earlier Yulia Tymoshenko noted that she keeps record of those People’s deputies from BYuT who were tried to be bribed by opponents.

Quagmire!

After the all of endless days of the California fire quagmire, it's time for America to admit that it can't win this battle. We must immediately withdraw our forces and go home. But until our so-called "leaders" in Washington wise up to the folly of their current course, all we can do is ask ourselves, "why does fire hate us?".

Why, indeed? More HERE.

Ripped From The Headlines

Washington Post headline:

Arctic Ocean Getting Warm;
Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt

From November 2, 1922.

And, winning our "overwhelming evidence of climate change" contest, it turns out that somebody was reading the thermometer wrong.

Global Warming News

Surface temperature monitoring stations have recorded about a one-degree rise over the last 100 years.

Unless they haven't.

Just Die

The Times (the real one, you twit) reports that our environmental masters now command not only that we're not to drive our cars, but that your evening walk is killing the planet:

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes.

Some day the planet will have been environmentally perfected; there just won't be anyone left to visit the exhibit.

Cat Had Kittens

When I was rather younger, everything oddly wrong was blamed on the Atom Bomb. Violent thunder storm? Atom Bomb. Cow went dry? Atom Bomb. Bad crop? Atom bomb. I recall an issue of Mad Magazine that recited a litany of such nonsense, the punch line being, “Cat had kittens? Atom bomb!”

Comes now Pets Across America, which describes itself as being “the largest pet adoption community in the United States, serving 125 million people in the top U.S. markets.” They report an enormous increase in the number of stray cats being brought into their shelters. And they are quite certain of the cause.

Heresy!

National Review? The Weekly Standard? Some crackpot from the Cato Institute?

Who writes:

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.

But no! It is no less an established Apostle of the Unreformed Church of Secular Orthodoxy than Alexander Cockburn, in the May 17 issue of The Nation.

Life on Mars!

The Sunday Times (no, you twit, the real one) reports irrefutable proof of the discovery of an extensive, advanced industrial civilization on the red planet. Deja Thoris to replace Katie Couric. John Carter to take charge of Iraq war.

Same Old Same Old

You know those eight eco-friendly rich guys (and one rich girl) who had that meeting in South Carolina last night? You know, the meeting that all of the networks did free advertising for? You know, THIS meeting:



Well, guess how all these Nanny State true believers, each of whom has a long list of commands for you to follow in order to fight Global Warming (peace be upon it) got to last night's debate? Yup. You guessed it. You'd a thunk at least one of these buffoons would have bicycled in just as a stunt. But their contempt for the average American apparently prevents even gestures.

More Congressional Perfidy

Of course we believe in Global Warming, as part of that faith which has been once for all delivered to the saints.

Only recently, however, have we learned of an important contributing factor: Daylight Savings Time. "You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate."

It makes sense to us.

Via Boing Boing.

Yes, yes, we agree. We don't think she's serious. The question is whether the Letters editor was serious.

Live a Cat-Neutral Life!

Hardly a day goes by without yet another story about some nutball whose trailer is overrun by 427 cats. So this may be an idea whose time has come: Cat Ownership Offsets!

It's 75 Degrees in Sunny San Diego

If you want to know how warm it is outside, you look at the thermometer. That's a fact that has meaning. Forty-four degrees means something. Ninety-five degrees means something else.

But in the great Global Warming [movealongnothingtoseehere] Debate, I've always been troubled by trying to understand how one could possibly overcome the fact that, for example, National Airport (the official weather measuring point for Washington, D.C.), was in the middle of nowhere 50 years ago, but is today surrounded by development. Surely that has a great effect on the temperatures recorded there. And how the heck do we know (and within a few degrees) what the temperature was at this particular bend of the Patawomeke River (as John Smith's map had it) in 1650?

Even worse: What does "global temperature" mean? Apparently, it doesn't mean hardly anything useful.

Attack of the Metrosexuals, orWhy Don't Cappuccino Machines Steam Al Gore?

From the National Ledger:

The latest point of emphasis in the global warming movement is that cattle farming endangers the planet by producing too much methane. So now, steaks and hamburgers are classified as instruments of destruction, along with large vehicles, lawn mowers, and charcoal grills. It can't be much longer before cowboy movies, cigars and hockey are held to be enemies of the earth as well.

[snip]

Many environmentalists believe that the earth is a living organism, personified by the Greek goddess Gaia. Conveniently, it turns out that Gaia is a shrew, who demands that her men be reduced to henpecked, metrosexual noodles. Manliness makes Gaia angry, and we wouldn't like her when she's angry, because she'll turn into a green monster and start smashing everything to bits. Hell hath no fury like an earth goddess exposed to excessive cattle-produced methane emissions.

Wouldn't it be more plausible if a few items like styling gel, latte makers and tofu were said to destroy the planet as well? Perhaps, but that would not serve the purpose of expanding the base of the global warming movement. Since no liberal cause can produce much support on its own, any one of them must ally itself with all other liberal causes, so that they can pool their resources.

That's why it's almost impossible to distinguish the original purpose of a left-wing political rally. What starts out being an 'anti-war' demonstration will invariably become an convention of environmentalists, gun control advocates, pro-abortionists, animal rights activists, racial Balkanists, and outright Communists, because that's the only way to prevent the size of the crowd from being laughably small. Therefore, environmental alarmists must incorporate other causes within their own, in order to keep their core of support relatively large and energized. Clearly, they've determined their alliance with the feminists to be vital to these ends.