Democrat Opponents Of Scientific Inquiry

Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, asked a very pertinent question recently: “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?”
The mainstream media narrative, as dictated to them by such luminaries as Al Gore and Roseanne Barr, dictates that anthropogenic global warming is “settled science,” and that no serious scientist disagrees. As CNN’s ever vigilant and unbiased reporter Miles O’Brian phrased it, “The scientific debate is over,” and that skeptics “are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually.” That’s only true if you cover your ears, your eyes and your mouth like the little monkeys who hear, see and speak no evil. There’s a reason why Al Gore will only take the stage alone and refuses debate invitations.
According to atmospheric scientist Stanley B, Goldenberg, the debate isn’t over. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming,” he said. Goldenberg serves in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division.
Time Magazine perhaps summed up the mainstream news media’s narrative that Democrats are guided by science while Republicans are anti-scientific: “By picking Steven Chu — who shared the 1997 prize in physics for his work trapping atoms with lasers — as his candidate for energy secretary, Barack Obama looks to turn the tide on a government bureaucracy that under the Bush Administration often minimized the importance of scientific expertise.”
But this is pure bunk. The ideological left is virulently anti-science when it comes to such matters as nuclear energy, genetically modified crops and, of course, the dismal science of economics.
Ivar Giaever can match Stephen Chu’s scientific credentials. Like Dr. Chu, Ivar Giaever is a Nobel Laureate in physics. He recently insisted that, “Global warming has become a new religion,” and declared himself, “a skeptic” of the new faith. He has company. In 2008 a Senate minority report cited 650 fully credentialed atmospheric scientists who disagreed with the pop culture’s scientific certainty. Anti-science?
And there are a great many other highly credentialed physicists and scientists who dissent from global warming orthodoxy. The often-cited United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did not reach its conclusion unanimously. And it’s worth noting that it was an intergovernmental panel, with its scientific representatives chosen by governments. If there is one principle that most governments agree upon, it is that they should exert ever more power over their subjects. And the only anthropogenic global warming solutions seriously considered by these governments all have the effect of tightening governments’ grip on their people. It’s reasonable to suspect that IPCC scientists were chosen to represent government interests rather than scientific integrity.
It’s ironic that the supposedly scientifically grounded left embraces global warming models that fail to predict atmospheric behavior and ignore models that demonstrate the economic non-viability of such nonsensical alternative energy solutions as wind power and corn ethanol.
The disappearance of global warming finally caught the attention of the Discovery Channel. Climate modeler Kyle Swanson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison notes: “This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950. Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one.”
Those of us with more than a few tree rings recall that 1950 ushered in a period of global cooling that atmospheric scientists insisted was the imminent herald of an ice age.
A report issued by the Japanese Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) ridiculed the pop science conventional wisdom regarding anthropogenic global warming in remarkably harsh terms. The JSER is a panel of scientists that advises the Japanese government on issues of energy and resources. Panelist Kanya Kusano, Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology, dismisses anthropogenic global warming models as the modern day equivalent of “ancient astrology.”
I have spent my entire adult life as a scientist. A central scientific principle states that, when data conflicts with a hypothesis, it is the hypothesis that is at fault. To argue otherwise, or to stifle debate, is quintessential anti-science.

The Relentless March of Global Cooling

Does this mean that global warming isn't the "imminent threat" that Algore says it is?

"Absolutely not!"

Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

Calling Al Gore: Global Coolin In Full Swing

The International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project has the latest data on global cooling. It's not quite what Al Gore and Joe Biden say it is.

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit

Global Cooling To Continue

I'll predict right here and now, that this winter will be even worse than last year's. Why? Solar activity is declining.

As of Thursday, the 276th day of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., had counted 205 days without a sunspot.

In another sign of solar quiescence, scientists reported last month that the solar wind, a rush of charged particles continually spewed from the Sun at a million miles an hour, had diminished to its lowest level in 50 years.

Scientists are not sure why this minimum has been especially minimal, and the episode is even playing into the global warming debate. Some wonder if this could be the start of an extended period of solar indolence that would more than offset the warming effect of human-made carbon dioxide emissions. From the middle of the 17th century to the early 18th, a period known as the Maunder Minimum, sunspots were extremely rare, and the reduced activity coincided with lower temperatures in what is known as the Little Ice Age.

Who knows? Maybe Al Gore new 100 foot long houseboat will be trapped in ice.

How's That Global Warming Thing Going?

Okay, last year was so cold that it wiped out a century of global warming. And the sun is the least active that has ever been recorded.

The sun normally experiences 11-year-cycles between periods of great activity and lesser activity.

But, Smith said, the Ulysses mission's recent results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that "we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated."

Bundle up!

Prehistoric SUV's?

Scientists have discovered irrefutable proof that Antarctica was once at least 30 degrees warmer than it is today.

Marchant estimated that the summer temperatures in Antarctica would have been about 30.6 degrees F (17 degrees C) warmer than they are now.

This warmer period started to end when the first continent-sized ice sheets began appearing on Antarctica around 34 million years ago, around the end of the Eocene epoch. These ice sheets expanded and contracted until around 14 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch, when a dramatic cooling took place and transformed the tundra into an environment "that today looks like Mars," Marchant told LiveScience.

Marchant said climatologists are uncertain exactly what caused this intense period of cooling.

Clearly, it was prehistoric carbon taxes.

Screw The Polar Bears, Drill Here, Drill Now

Elitist opinion treats anthropogenic global warming skeptics as the moral equivalent of Nazi holocaust deniers and the intellectual equivalent of flat Earth adherents. All of the computer models, all of the newspaper editorial boards, all of the Hollywood stars, the Democratic Party leadership, both major party presidential candidates, the Weather Channel and the infallible United Nations all agree – burning fossil fuels will warm the Earth, melt the glaciers, flood coastal cities and cause kidney stones. In fact, just this last Wednesday, I received a letter from that noted atmospheric scientist, Leonardo DiCaprio, warning me that cute little polar bear cubs would die screaming in anguish as their melting snow dens collapse.

Global warming seems to have everything going for it, except for warming. Ten years ago the news that 1998 was the warmest ever recorded made headlines. What has not made headlines is that, ever since, the Earth has been cooling and today its temperature is about the same as it was a century ago. This data was verified by thousands of buoys scattered around the world’s oceans to measure water temperatures at depths down to several thousand feet. These buoys confirmed what your bones already know, that the Earth is growing colder.

Have you seen that in the headlines? I haven’t. I don’t watch television news, but I doubt that any of the networks have mentioned it. Even Shepard Smith, host of the supposedly conservative Fox News recently expressed his incredulity that anyone could doubt global warming: “It’s hard to believe this, but there are people watching us right now, and I’ll get e-mails from hundreds of them, who don’t think we have anything to do with this [global warming]. They refuse to believe it. They believe that what’s happening is they want to try to tax us on our carbon eventually, and that this is all a conspiracy to get us. ”

It strikes me as curious that computer models predicting global warming qualify as news, while the actual fact of global cooling is not news. Those of us who place more faith in data than theory are the fools. And of course, computer predictions of global warming are the primary reason why we are not permitted to develop any new oil in this country. Instead we are told that we have to pursue whimsical solutions like wind and solar power, even though any reasonable evaluation of data or computer models prove conclusively that both are losers. Meanwhile, nuclear remains a taboo. And so, we are paying more than four dollars per gallon to drive our cars. And much of the money we spend on that fuel ends up in the hands of America’s most venomous enemies.

All the while, we remain the only nation in the world that chooses to leave undeveloped all the fuel we would need to wean ourselves from imports. Tens of billions of barrels of easily recovered oil are sitting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and along our coasts. According to the Institute for Energy Research, our shale oil deposits hold at least 8 times as much petroleum as the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.

Recently, a few timid Republicans rose up on their hind legs and called for more domestic oil and gas development. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Luna) denounced this as a “hoax.” For decades now, Democrats have insisted that new oil development would take a few years before it bore fruit. But, immediately after President George Bush announced that he was rescinding the executive order banning oil exploration along US coastlines, oil prices dropped by $10 per barrel each of the next two days and another $5 on the third day. Natural gas prices have fallen even faster and farther.

That was quite a different reaction than Ms. Pelosi gained when she threatened to sue OPEC for not pumping enough and pushed through legislation barring the government from purchasing oil for the National Strategic Reserve, the only solutions that her party has authored.

Republicans need to stop seeking the approval of the mainstream media. The MSM will publish stories about how global warming will increase the incidence of kidney stones (as they did this week) or repeat the rantings of a crank who hoaxed them into reporting that global warming was causing stronger earthquakes.

If Republicans get aggressive about energy policy, they’ll not only be doing right by America, they’ll win the November election. If not, they deserve a place in the rubbish can of history.

An Inconvenient Truth: Global Temperatures Continue To Plummet

Global warming anyone?

Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of a much cooler than normal May, such as late spring snows as far south as Arizona, extended skiing in Colorado, and delays in snow cover melting in many parts of the northern hemisphere, the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) published their satellite derived Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit data set of the Lower Troposphere for May 2008.

It is significantly colder globally, colder even than the significant drop to -0.046°C seen in January 2008.

The global ∆T from April to May 2008 was -.195°C

Meanwhile, John McCain continues to support a radical power and tax grab plan that is supposed to protect us from global warming.

Arrested Global Warming, Or Where Has All The Heat Gone? Long Time Passing

Two Australian biologists have spoken aloud what global warming alarmists would prefer that no one noticed - the earth is cooling.

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Of course, data is needed, and there's plenty. 3000 buoys around the world have discovered no evidence of global warming in the Earth's oceans and direct measurements of tropospheric temperatures have shown that the earth is cooling.

I suppose that someday, we'll be laughing ironically at Al Gore's Nobel Prize the same way we snicker at Yasir Arafat's.

Update: This would all be a great disappointment to this guy.

As environmental engineer Geoffrey Schladow launched this week into his startling new findings about the potentially dire consequences of global warming at Lake Tahoe, a member of the audience gasped.

"That was the correct response," said Schladow, who directs the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.

The news about one of California's recreational jewels was grim. According to a study by Schladow and other Davis researchers, a warming trend already under way could shut down the deep churning of oxygen and nutrients that supports life in the lake – in just 11 years.

That, in turn, could trigger a wave of ecological disruptions from a "dead zone" at the bottom to unprecedented algae blooms near the surface, changing the clear, predominantly cobalt blue lake to murky green.

Schladow characterized such a change as "a really scary thing."

Don't Worry, Keep Worrying

The New York Times attempts to allay the fears of those who might be concerned that global warming is abating.

The world has seen some extraordinary winter conditions in both hemispheres over the past year: snow in Johannesburg last June and in Baghdad in January, Arctic sea ice returning with a vengeance after a record retreat last summer, paralyzing blizzards in China, and a sharp drop in the globe’s average temperature.

If a single event, like Katrina can be trumpeted as proof of global warming, then why not a world wide cool down?

Many scientists also say that the cool spell in no way undermines the enormous body of evidence pointing to a warming world with disrupted weather patterns, less ice and rising seas should heat-trapping greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests continue to accumulate in the air.

“The current downturn is not very unusual,” said Carl Mears, a scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, a private research group in Santa Rosa, Calif., that has been using satellite data to track global temperature and whose findings have been held out as reliable by a variety of climate experts. He pointed to similar drops in 1988, 1991-92, and 1998, but with a long-term warming trend clear nonetheless.

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."