All Wrong About Global Warming?

Will Congress reconsider Cap and Trade in light of this new information?

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

During the warming period, known as the “Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum” (PETM), for unknown reasons, the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere rose rapidly. This makes the PETM one of the best ancient climate analogues for present-day Earth.

No, because it's not about saving the planet. It's about empowering government and installing one world government, not the environment.

Snowiest Winter Ever In Spokane

When Earth Hour arrived Saturday night, a winter storm was raging outside. So, I did not dim my lights and sit around the house in the dark to fight global warming. It turns out that the storm was a record breaker. This is the snowiest winter ever in Spokane, Washington.

Winter season: Snowfall total

* 2008-2009: 93.6 inches

* 1949-1950: 93.5 inches

* 2007-2008: 92.6 inches

* 1974-1975: 89.0 inches

* 1992-1993: 87.3 inches

It turns out that not even Al Gore thought it necessary to dim his own lights.

I have no doubt that Al Gore paid someone else to turn off his lights.

Laughing At The Hypocrites and Mediocrities Who Rule Us

I inaugurate each new year with a column recognizing the most idiotic utterances from the politicians and media types who have anointed themselves our superiors. In truth I could write a Kozmo Awards column every week with all the barnyard effluvia that typically finds its way into the news. It requires a great deal of discipline to limit myself to just two such columns per year as we wave goodbye to the old year and greet the new. The year just past easily presented me with the juiciest selection of targets of opportunity in the 18 years that I've been doing this. Obama worship and environmental alarmism reached levels that deserve their own chapters in abnormal psychology texts.

Unfortunately, this psychopathology has so gained the upper hand in our popular culture that I've begun to feel like the man in the fable about the village whose grain bins were tainted with ergot, a natural source of the hallucinogen LSD. He was selected to receive the village's single portion of clean grain so that somebody would remember that everyone else was crazy.

And so in awarding the 2008 Kozmos, I hope to remind you of what is sane and what is not.
Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives. As such, she was easily the most powerful Democrat in the country last year. Wouldn't you find it comforting to learn that she grasped the essentials of the critical issues facing the nation? I'm sorry to disappoint you. On NBC's Meet the Press last August, Speaker Pelosi explained her opposition to oil drilling: "I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels," she explained. Later in the interview she extolled natural gas as, "cheap, abundant and clean compared to fossil fuels."

Notice to Pelosi acolytes: Natural gas is every bit the fossil fuel that oil and coal are. And burning natural gas releases carbon dioxide just as burning oil and coal does.

Nancy Pelosi fails on alternative fuels, but wins big with the Alternative Reality Kozmo.

Only one man could win the Al Gore Memorial Kozmo for carbon footprint hypocrisy, and that's Al Gore. Last year, Al Gore won for hosting a Nobel Prize celebration in Scottsdale, Arizona to which he and Tipper arrived in a private jet, as did his guests. He served exotic delicacies flown in from around the world.

Well, during the year just passed, Al Gore spent his winnings on a new carbon-belching toy - a 100-foot long houseboat complete with high performance personal watercraft. The irony proof Al Gore christened his carbon belching yacht, "Biosolar One."

For most of the last year, the mainstream media had to dig deep to stoke the alarmism that sells papers. It was USA Today that won the prize for the most Ridiculous Fear-Mongering Kozmo of 2008 with its prediction that, because of global warming, 20 foot long giant snakes would slither into the southern one-third of the United States, swallowing pets and children.

"As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps released Wednesday.
The pythons can be 20 feet long and 250 pounds. They are highly adaptable to new environments," America's News McPaper predicted.

There is no reason to believe that either Al Gore or Nancy Pelosi is willing to give up their jets, so hide your children. Snakes are going to eat us all.

But, there is a bright light in the global warming darkness. Not all environmentalist wackos simply stoke fear. Some seek out novel solutions and they deserve recognition. The Live Like Ed Begley Environmentalist Kozmo of the year award goes to Al Gore and Brad Pitt admirer, Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Craig Alan Bittner. Perhaps inspired by the movie "Fight Club," Dr. Bittner is accused of using his patients' liposuctioned blubber to fuel his and his girlfriend's SUVs. As Bittner himself boasted on his website: ""Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly but they get to take part in saving the Earth."

While this might appeal to the biofuel crowd, the California Department of Public Health and the California Board of Registration in Medicine, among others, have some issues with Dr. Bittner.

At last report, Dr. Bittner had fled to Columbia. It's too bad that California authorities can't recognize true genius when it manifests itself. Hopefully Dr. Bittner will win this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Al Gore Brings His Wit and Wisdom To The Obama Campaign

Extreme Mortman has the details.

At first we were surprised that Al Gore endorsed so early in the contest. It’s only June, and he’s already made his mind to support Barack Obama.

Then we realized why he made the courageous act to rush out his announcement: it’s because he’s got killer material, but it’s quite topical.

From Gore’s endorsement speech last night:

If you care about food safety, if you like a T on your BLT, you know that elections matter.

Hilarious. Bush to blame for salmonella. If only Gore had some funny way to blame Bush for the Iowa floods. Sure beats kissing a pig at the Iowa state fair.

Or kissing a pet, as evidenced by this Gore line also from last night:

After the last eight years, even our dogs and cats have learned that elections matter.

Hilarious again. No, you wouldn’t wanted to sit on jokes with a shelf line so short.

Go get ‘im Al — maybe there’s still more Supreme Court jokes in you.

He's still got that rip-tootin' touch!

I'd Like To Wish Al Gore A Happy Earth Day

Investor's Business Daily really hits the nail on the head with its Earth Day editorial today.

Shortage: Al Gore sees no climate improvement since he made "An Inconvenient Truth." Actually, things have gotten worse. As the environmentalists celebrate Earth Day, the rush to replace fossil fuels threatens global famine.

A week after Tax Day, April 15, we are forced to endure another indignity, Earth Day, April 22. This Earth Day finds the world threatened not by rising sea levels, but by rising food prices. Many on the planet are more likely to starve than drown, and we have only Gore's disciples to blame.

In an interview with the British paper The Sun, the jolly green giant whined: "I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the movie in 2006." The polar bears, he says, are still going to drown, and boats will soon be moored to the top of the Washington Monument.

To be sure, we're setting weather records, but they're not what Gore has in mind. Record cold temperatures have occurred over the globe this winter, and the only concern about flooding is from record snowfalls across the planet.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently warned of a more imminent threat, one ironically created by the rush to save the planet. Speaking in Accra, Ghana, the U.N. chief said the world must drastically increase food production to ease skyrocketing prices that have caused food riots in countries like Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Haiti.

The production of food grains has increased. But it is being diverted to empty gas tanks, not empty stomachs. Gore and others have warned that climate change is an imminent threat to the world. We would argue that climate-friendly policies are more of a threat.

The Gore-induced rush to biofuels has diverted crops such as corn, soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. Vast swaths of rain forest in places like Malaysia and Indonesia have been cleared to provide farmland not to feed the hungry but to fuel our cars. Our own grain belt has been increasingly diverted to ethanol over corn flakes.

This has pressured food prices while damaging the environment. In the U.S., more cultivation has increased runoff from pesticides and fertilizer, creating dead zones for aquatic life from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

As Indur M. Goklany of the Cato Institute reports, agricultural expansion leads to higher releases of carbon from biomass and soil above and below ground. Fertilizers that increase yields also increase nitrogen discharge into waters and emissions of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas that heats the atmosphere 300 times more effectively than carbon dioxide.

According to World Bank data, as of March, world grain prices had tripled and fertilizer prices had quadrupled since 2000. Food prices have risen an astounding 65% just since the beginning of this year.

"Climate-change remedies can lead to greater poverty, starvation and disease, as well as widespread ecological destruction — some of the very misfortunes that they're supposed to prevent," Goklany wrote in the New York Post. "In our haste to address global warming, we have yet to think seriously about our policies' unintended effects."

In his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich warned of famine and mass starvation from overpopulation. Ironically, that might yet occur, not from overpopulation, but from overzealousness in trying to save Earth from a nonexistent threat.

Happy Earth Day, Al.

Al Gore? Global Warming? Never Mind

A century of global warming wiped out in one year?

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

As Lily Tomlin used to say, "Nevermind."

Where in The World Is Al Gore?

Perhaps he's in Southeast Asia, where they're suffering through their worst winter ever.

Vietnam is currently suffering from the longest ever cold spell on record.
60,000 head of cattle are dead and 100,000 hectares of rice are ruined due to the record cold.

Where in The World Is Al Gore?

Fully 10 percent of China's forestry resource have been destroyed by snowstorms in just the last 3 weeks.

Where in The World Is Al Gore?

Nearly 10,000 passengers were stranded when Tokyo International airport was shut down by a snowstorm. Has anybody seen Algore lately?

A rare snowfall in Tokyo left nearly 10,000 passengers stranded overnight at Narita airport after about 50 international flights were canceled, the airport authority said Sunday.

The season's first snowfall in the greater Tokyo region measured 3.5 inches in the center of the capital on Saturday, the heaviest accumulation in eight years, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

At Narita airport, some 40 miles from downtown Tokyo, 51 international flights were cancelled as airport workers were unable to remove snow from runways quickly enough.

More than 90 other flights were delayed for a night, leaving passengers stuck in the terminal, an airport public relations official said.

"A total of 9,690 passengers were stranded overnight at the two terminals. We provided blankets and extended the time for air-conditioning and lighting to accommodate them at lobbies," the official said.

"We also opened special paid waiting lounges for free of charge."

At Tokyo's domestic Haneda airport, some 100 flights were cancelled on Saturday, disrupting the travel plans of some 14,000 passengers.

At least 125 people have suffered broken bones and other minor injuries in Tokyo after slipping in the rare snow by midday Sunday, fire officials said, while 200 others were reported hurt in nearby prefectures.

Where In The World Is Algore?

Is it possible that he's in Baghdad?

2008 Kozmo Awards

So much absurdity and so little column space. The greatest challenge to awarding the annual Kozmo awards is not finding goofiness, but to identify with any certainty the silliest of so many deserving entries. In a year when Hillary Clinton cannot even cause a ripple in the pool by claiming that oil sheiks will fearfully reduce crude oil prices the moment she wins this November’s presidential election, it tells one something about the depth of talent and creativity in this year’s field. Nevertheless, your intrepid servant has slogged through the cesspool of leftwing wisdom and plucked from it the most worthy floaters for you to appreciate. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you part II of the annual Kozmo Awards.

Al Gore managed to sandwich winning the Nobel Peace Prize with quite remarkable demonstrations of hypocrisy. Before winning he was exposed as a world-class greenhouse gas emitter. The power bill for just one of his three mansions showed that he consumed 20 times the electricity of the average American home. Then, after winning his prize, he and Tipper flew a private jet to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he entertained friends who traveled similarly and set a buffet table weighted down with delicacies flown in fresh from Alaska, Maine and Asia.

Once again, the tobacco farmer who opportunistically turned anti-tobacco crusader collects another Kozmo for hypocrisy. It should look good on his mantle, between his Oscar and his Nobel.

Dennis Kucinich remains the only presidential candidate to take a firm stand against space based mind control weapons. But that’s not why he’s taking home a Kozmo. Nope, the congressman from Ohio wins for his commentary on American politics and cuisine: “You know how they say, Don't ever ask how laws or sausages are made? Well, I can attest to the wisdom of that with the exception of kielbasa made with tofu.”

The Anti-Bismark Kozmo goes to Dennis Kucinich.

I’d almost like to see Kucinich win the presidency, just so I can enjoy the spectacle of him “pardoning” the Thanksgiving tofurkey.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards goes to remarkable lengths to avoid informing his opinions. Fighting poverty is his primary crusade, and yet the one solution he has offered was tried and failed in the 1990’s. News to him. When it was learned that he had invested in a hedge fund, he said it was to learn more about poverty. If he did learn anything it was when that company started foreclosing on subprime mortgage loans in New Orleans.

When asked about Barack Obama’s supposed prescience regarding the Iraq War, he defended his vote for the war thusly: “He (Obama) wasn't burdened like a lot of us with the information that we were receiving on the intelligence committee and as members of the United States Senate. We were getting very detailed, intimate information about what was actually happening in Iraq.”

And so presumably, if only he had Obama’s advantage of ignorance, he too could have cast the vote he now claims he wishes he had cast in the first place.

And so, we award the Defense of Ignorance Kozmo to Pretty Boy John.

Johnny collects a second Kozmo for cynicism. This last spring it was learned that his wife, Elizabeth, had incurable breast cancer. Millions poured out their sincere, heartfelt sympathy to the Edwards family. And so John Edwards did what any loving husband would have done, he exploited his wife’s terminal illness to make money.

Visitors to John Edwards’ official campaign website were greeted with an opportunity to send Elizabeth an electronic sympathy note. Those who did were immediately solicited for contributions to the campaign.

In a normal year, Mike Huckabee would have won the Cynicism Kozmo for his media stunt with his negative anti-Romney advertisement, but John Edwards might have just retired the cynicism Kozmo. It’s hard to believe that anyone will ever again rise to the standard Edwards established.

This year’s Kozmo Supremo winner comes from academia, the fountainhead of most nonsense. Shortly after Columbia University president Lee Bolinger invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak, somebody wrote anti-Semitic slurs on a bathroom wall. Bollinger sanctimoniously railed against the offender and declared that the crime was inconsistent with Columbia’s ideals.

For Bollinger, anti-Semitism deserves a podium and a public address system. And for that, Bollinger wins the Irony Kozmo in a landslide.
Have a great 2008.