I just came across this article by Dr. Richard Lindzen. I don't know him personally, but read many of his papers on atmospheric waves while doing my own research in that area. One of his former graduate students said "He's only half as smart as he thinks he is but still twice as smart as any of us." I wouldn't know about the first part of that assessment, but the second is certainly true as far as I'm concerned. So to find some of my own thoughts on global warming reflected in his article, well, modesty forbids.
The part about then-Senator Gore was new to me. It seems he's only gotten worse with time, and probably regrets no longer having any official government position from which to harass people who don't BELIEVE (see the June 16 and June 13 posts)
Anyway, enjoy.

Update following the article

From OpinionJournal

Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

BY RICHARD LINDZEN
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.

If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested--a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences--as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union--formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.

All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

Mr. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

Here's another example of what happens when you deviate from the global warming party line:

From Denver Westword:

The Skeptic

Celebrated and shunned, CSU's Bill Gray is taking heat in the global warming debate

Galileo got crosswise with Pope Urban VIII. Robert Oppenheimer didn't see eye-to-eye with Edward Teller. Every original thinker has a bête noire who torments and goads him.

For William Gray, a lean, six-foot-five emeritus professor at Colorado State University and one of the world's leading experts on tropical storms, the bugaboo on the horizon is another tall, charismatic fellow named Albert Arnold Gore Jr. You can call him Al.

Sitting in his office on the northwest edge of Fort Collins, Gray thumbs through Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, the coffee-table companion book to the documentary of the same name. Gore has been making the rounds of talk shows and bookseller conventions promoting both efforts. Turn on cable news and there he is, reciting the we're-in-deep-shit message he's been delivering by slide show for years, now bolstered by a website (www.climatecrisis.net) and startling computer graphics that depict the earth being ravaged by a gauntlet of man-made catastrophes over the next few decades.

Gray doesn't believe in the planetary emergency. Never has. Still, he picks his words carefully. A few weeks ago, a Washington Post article quoted him comparing Gore's convictions about global warming to Hitler's beliefs about the Jews, a burst of rhetorical overkill he says he sincerely regrets. So he's going to try to sound a diplomatic note here, even though the book, which some colleagues have asked him to review, strikes him as a piece of outright hysteria.

"I admire Al Gore," he says. "There's no doubt, with over six billion people, we have a lot of environmental problems in this world. He's pointing them out. That's fine. But that doesn't mean it's all due to global warming, or that you're going to solve these problems by cutting back on fossil fuels."

The tone seems conciliatory enough. But soon Gray is out of his seat, pointing out features on a map of the world pinned to the wall, reading passages from Gore's book aloud, scribbling lines of convection on a yellow legal pad. "This is a slick propaganda book," he declares. "The pictures are very good. But there are factual errors."

He's off and running. The people who are spreading the global-warming alarm, including the scientists, just don't understand the way the atmosphere works, he says. The ones who see a link between increasing ocean temperatures and more intense hurricanes in recent decades don't understand the ocean or hurricanes. The global computer models projecting that heat-trapping greenhouse gases will warm the earth between three and seven degrees Fahrenheit in the next hundred years -- melting polar ice, flooding shorelines and disrupting weather patterns everywhere -- are fatally flawed.

Now 76 years old, Gray is an old-school meterologist who prefers observational data to computer modeling. "I could assemble fifty of my colleagues who are very skeptical about global warming," he says. "The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] never talks to us, but I have a bit of an obligation, at my age -- I was trained to tell the truth. There's a lot of hogwash in this. If I don't speak up, I'm not doing my job."

[break]

A key scene in the film An Inconvenient Truth is the moment Al Gore reveals that we are literally reaping the whirlwind. He stands on a stage, palms up in silent supplication, while images of a flooded New Orleans play on a big screen behind him. Pump enough crap in the air, the ocean warms up, and boom! -- Katrina trashes the Gulf Coast.

Such oversimplified notions of cause and effect exasperate Bill Gray. The scientists who've tackled the global-warming/ hurricane connection -- currently one of the hottest questions in science -- have stopped far short of blaming any one storm or season on CO2 emissions. But some have concluded that rising temperatures over the past three decades have produced more intense storms, and that a growing number of monster hurricanes should be expected in an increasingly warmer world. Such statements are greeted in Gray's office like a shot across the bow. The global-warming crowd has taken the battle to his turf.

The first major salvo was fired two years ago by Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at NCAR, who suggested that warmer oceans were producing stronger hurricanes. That was followed by a paper last summer from Kerry Emanuel, a well-respected hurricane expert at MIT, who re-examined historical data and found the intensity of storms in the Atlantic had basically doubled in thirty years, a phenomenon he attributed to rising water temperatures linked to global warming. Then came a study by NCAR's Holland, Webster and two other Georgia Tech researchers, Judith Curry and H.R. Chang, who'd set out to challenge Trenberth's work but concluded that the number of intense tropical storms had doubled around the world since 1970.

Gray took them all on. There are too many factors besides sea-surface temperature that influence hurricane intensity, he insisted. The data his colleagues were using was suspect, he told reporters, because of erratic weather information-gathering methods in certain parts of the world in the 1970s. They were playing with numbers and ignoring the cyclical nature of hurricane seasons. You want to talk busy hurricane seasons? How about 1933? From 1933 until 1965, the Florida peninsula was hit by major storms eleven times. From 1966 until 2003, it was hit only once. Up until the last two seasons, in fact, there'd been a great downturn in major storms making landfall, despite increased activity in the Atlantic.

Gray was hardly alone in his dissent. NOAA officials denied that global warming had anything to do with current hurricane patterns, which were "due to natural fluctuations and cycles." Chris Landsea, a former Gray student who now works as science operations officer at NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, re-crunched the numbers and found no increase in the number or intensity of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes globally over the past fifteen years; by his calculations, even a four-degree increase in ocean temperature by the end of this century would have only a small effect on hurricane intensity. CSU's Klotzbach zeroed in on the past twenty years of storm data, considered more reliable than that of previous years, and found a large increase in major North Atlantic storms and a large decrease in Northeast Pacific ones, but no global trend that would support the notion that global warming is whipping up stronger hurricanes.

The rebuttals have prompted a flurry of additional papers and responses; Georgia Tech's Curry, for example, has suggested that Klotzbach is "cherry-picking" his data. But the most biting exchanges have involved Gray's critiques and the counter-volleys. Gray has "brain fossilization," Curry told a Wall Street Journal reporter a few weeks ago, and "nobody except a few groupies wants to hear what he has to say."

Read the whole thing

Judith Curry is head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. She really should have more respect for someone like Dr. Gray, who has forgotten more about tropical weather than she ever knew. Plus, the Institute itself should be very wary of someone, like her, who is too ready to jump on the global warming bandwagon. About 20 years ago, Tech learned the hard way about bandwagon science. Remember cold fusion? One or two days after Pons and Fleischmann announced their results, a team from Georgia Tech made headlines by confirming that they also had acheived cold fusion. It was very embarassing when they later had to retract their findings because they hadn't realized that their neutron detector was temperature sensitive and they were just observing an exothermic chemical reaction, not nuclear fusion (as were Pons and Fleischmann, evidently). Of course, we won't know if the climate model predictions are right or not for many years, so none of the current modelers will ever have to retract or face other consequences, more's the pity.

An updated list, with links, of things caused by global warming

Thanks to Numberwatch

Air pressure changes, anxiety, aggressive polar bears, algal blooms, Asthma, avalanches, autumn leaf colour change, billions of deaths, blackbirds stop singing, blizzards, budget increases, building season extension, bushfires, cannibalistic polar bears, Cholera, civil unrest, cloud increase, cloud stripping, CO₂ emissions from plants, conferences, coral bleaching, cold spells, damages equivalent to $200 billion, declining fish stocks, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, desert advance, desert life threatened, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, disappearance of coastal cities, Dolomites collapse, drought, drowning polar bears, dust bowl in the corn belt, early spring, earlier pollen season, earthquakes, Earth light dimming, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning out of control, Earth wobbling, El Niño intensification, erosion, emerging infections, evangelicals and environmentalists united,
Everest shrinking, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (ladybirds, pandas, gorillas, whales, frogs, turtles, orang-utan, elephants, tigers, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, penguins, a million species), experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, famine, five million illnesses, floods, Florida economic decline, footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frosts, fungi invasion, Garden of Eden wilts, glacial retreat, global cooling, glowing clouds, Gore omnipresence, greening of the North, Gulf Stream failure, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, heat waves, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, human health improvement, hurricanes, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, inclement weather, Inuit displacement, insurance premium rises, invasion of midges, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, krill decline, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawyers' income increased (surprise surprise!), Malaria, malnutrition, marine diseases, Maple syrup shortage, Melanoma, methane burps, melting permafrost, migration, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, more bad air days, more research needed, mudslides, next ice age, no more French wine, ocean acidification, ozone loss, ozone rise, plankton blooms, plankton loss, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rainfall reduction, refugees, release of ancient frozen viruses, rift on Capitol Hill, rivers raised, rivers dry up, rocky peaks crack apart, salinity reduction, Salmonella, sea level rise, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall reduction, societal collapse, squid population explosion, tectonic plate movement, tree foliage increase (UK), tropics expansion, tsunamis, Venice flooded, volcanic eruptions, wars over water, water supply unreliability, water bills double, West Nile fever, whales move north, wildfires, wind shift, World bankruptcy, Yellow fever.

and all on 0.006 deg C per year!

Also we could add bad journalism, bad science, and general hysteria.

They really need this poster over there:


Accidental grenade explosion kills two Palestinians

GAZA CITY (AFP) - Two Palestinians were killed and another seven, including a baby, wounded when a grenade accidentally exploded in the southern Gaza strip.

Family members were playing with a grenade in the town of Khan Yunis when it exploded, killing 23-year-old Qassem Massud and his one-year-old niece, medical and security sources said Wednesday.

All the casualties were members of the same family.

Not content with merely screwing up US intelligence efforts, the NYT now advocates messing with the entire planet:

The Energy Challenge | Exotic Visions

HOW TO COOL A PLANET (MAYBE)

In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said the focus should be on reducing greenhouse gases and preventing global warming in the first place.

But now, in a major reversal, some of the world's most prominent scientists say the proposals deserve a serious look because of growing concerns about global warming.

The plans and proposed studies are part of a controversial field known as geoengineering, which means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability. Dr. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist, will detail his arguments in favor of geoengineering studies in the August issue of the journal Climatic Change.

Practicing what he preaches, Dr. Cicerone is also encouraging leading scientists to join the geoengineering fray. In April, at his invitation, Roger P. Angel, a noted astronomer at the University of Arizona, spoke at the academy's annual meeting. Dr. Angel outlined a plan to put into orbit small lenses that would bend sunlight away from earth — trillions of lenses, he now calculates, each about two feet wide, extraordinarily thin and weighing little more than a butterfly.

Let me just interject here before my head explodes. CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL! AND WE DON'T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT HOW THE PLANET WORKS TO BE DELIBERATELY FOOLING AROUND WITH IT ON A LARGE SCALE!

Martin A. Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, said of geoengineering at a recent meeting in Washington, "Let's talk about research funding with enough zeroes on it so we can make a dent."

Ah, the REAL reason for all this!

Dr. Crutzen, the Nobel laureate from the Max Planck Institute, has also drawn fire for his paper about injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. "There was a passionate outcry by several prominent scientists claiming that it is irresponsible," recalled Mark G. Lawrence, an American scientist who is also at the institute.

It is.

The stratospheric plan called for fighting one kind of pollution (excess greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide) with another (sulfur dioxide), though it appeared that any increase in sulfur at the earth's surface would be small compared with the tons already being emitted from the smokestacks of coal-fueled plants.

Dr. Cicerone of the science academy helped broker a compromise: Dr. Crutzen's paper would be published, but with several commentaries, including his own. They will appear in the August issue of Climatic Change. The other authors are Dr. Lawrence of the German chemistry institute, Dr. MacCracken of the Climate Institute, Jeffrey T. Kiehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Lennart Bengtsson of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany.

In a draft of his paper, Dr. Crutzen estimates the annual cost of his sulfur proposal at up to $50 billion, or about 5 percent of the world's annual military spending.

The obligatory dig at the military.

"Climatic engineering, such as presented here, is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises" if international efforts fail to curb greenhouse gases, Dr. Crutzen wrote.

"So far," he added, "there is little reason to be optimistic."

Lets take a deep breath and remember a few facts:

1. Greenhouse gases are NOT the only agents of climate change.

2. The earth's climate goes through cycles of warm and cool periods. We DON'T KNOW WHY. Some of the factors that control this are insolation, orbital eccentricity, orbital precession, plate tectonics, ocean circulations, volcanic activity, surface albedo, clouds, and other things I just can't bring to mind at the moment. Anybody who claims to completely understand the climate system is lying.

3. "Global warming" should have different effects on different regions of the world. Presumably global cooling would, too. For whose benefit are we going to make these efforts to stop the process? The regions around the Sahara in a warmer world are projected to be wetter that they are now, surely a beneficial change for the starving people of the Sudan. Do we really want to stop that?

4. Personally, I feel much more threatened by radical Islam than climate change. So let's take the annual $50 billion that Dr. Crutzen wants for his project, buy the entire Middle East, and evict all the terrorists, preferably into another dimension. Sure, it's futuristic and expensive, but "international efforts have failed to curb" the problem and "there is little reason to be optimistic". And we know it would be good for the WHOLE planet, not just some of it.

And on the jihadi front:

Hamas operative killed in Gaza blast

A Hamas operative was killed when his car exploded Tuesday evening in northern Gaza, and at least two passersby wounded, officials said.

The blast scattered debris and body parts up to 200 meters. Security officials identified the dead man as Hamza Muhrab, a 21-year-old member of Hamas' military wing.

IDF officials denied any involvement in the blast, raising the suspicion that the explosion may have been caused by a bomb detonating prematurely, or the result of rivalry between Hamas and Fatah.

The car was traveling on a road between Abbas' residence and the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Maybe they need to put up more safety posters in their workplace. Here's a suggestion (pardon my poor photoshop skills):

Did the ECUSA General Convention cause the heavy rains in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland last week?

Let's look at the evidence:
Dark green and yellow areas on the map indicate larger amounts of rain.
We know that the urban heat island effect can cause enhanced rainfall amounts in areas downwind of urban areas. (that would be to the east in this part of the world) Notice where the heaviest rain was relative to Columbus.
Though Columbus is not the largest urban area in Ohio, the ECUSA convention there last week did generate lots of extra hot air. In fact, the daily high temperature in Columbus reached 91F on Thursday June 22, 8 F above the average high for that date.

So, it appears that such conventions really do generate more heat than light.

You make the call.

Also new today: Iowahawk scores again.

I watched another Mel Brooks movie last night, then heard and read about the NY and LA Times' little traitorous escapade this morning. This is the kind of thing they must sing in the editorial offices there:

Bush anxiety --- when victory’s near
Bush anxiety --- it’s this that we fear:
We’re so afraid he’ll win - the world will get sore,
We expose state secrets, but we want to do more!

Bush anxiety --- it’s always the same
Bush anxiety ---- it’s him that we blame
It’s very clear to us, the US must lose!
Bush anxiety --- we choose!

Guess which movie it was.

From Numberwatch:

A Complete List of Things Caused By Global warming:

Aggressive polar bears, algal blooms, Asthma, avalanches, autumn leaf colour change, billions of deaths, blizzards, building season extension, bushfires, cannibalistic polar bears, Cholera, civil unrest, cloud increase, CO₂ emissions from plants, coral bleaching, cold spells, damages equivalent to $200 billion, declining fish stocks, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, desert advance, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, disappearance of coastal cities, Dolomites collapse, drought, drowning polar bears, dust bowl in the corn belt, early spring, earlier pollen season, earthquakes, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning out of control, El Niño intensification, erosion, Everest shrinking, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (ladybirds, pandas, whales, frogs, turtles, orang-utan, jellyfish, elephants, tigers, plants, salmon, trout, woodlice, a million species) extreme changes to California, famine, farming bankruptcies (US), floods, forest die back, forest expansion, frosts, glacial retreat, glowing clouds, Gore omnipresence, Gulf Stream failure, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, heat waves, human health improvement, hurricanes, hyperthermia deaths, ice sheet growth, ice sheet reduction, inclement weather, Inuit displacement, insurance premium rises, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, krill decline, landslides, Malaria, malnutrition, marine diseases, Maple syrup shortage, Melanoma, methane burps, melting permafrost, migration, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, mudslides, next ice age, ocean acidification, ozone rise, plankton blooms, plankton extinctions, rainfall increase, rainfall reduction, refugees, release of ancient frozen viruses, rift on Capitol Hill, salinity reduction, Salmonella, sea level rise, smog, snowfall increase, squid population explosion, tree foliage increase (UK), tropics expansion, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, wars over water, West Nile fever, wind shift, Yellow fever.

and all on 0.006 deg C per year!

This is fairly comprehensive, though I would also add increasingly bad climate science and media hysteria. EcoEnquirer finds that global warming also increases the chances for a meteor strike.

Says it all, really- From Cox and Forkum :

See my June 13 post for more.....

More from the "What were they thinking?" files

Nude Bicyclists Seek Motorist Respect
Gives new meaning to "the naked and the dead".

Three Elderly Americans Lost for Three Days in Miami
They probably couldn't find anybody who spoke English to give them directions.

Bockwurst of Death
A German man "may have administered" a bockwurst to a woman, who then choked to death. How do you administer a bockwurst?

Fugitive Busted at FBI Construction Site
Definitely the place to be if you're a felon

Canadian Man Sentenced for Styling Girlfriend's Hair With Power Drill
????

From Reuters

Gore to train 1,000 to spread word about climate

By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Al Gore hopes to train 1,000 messengers he hopes will spread out across the country and present a slide show about global warming that captures the essence of his Hollywood documentary and book.

The former vice president, a Democrat, said on Monday that by the end of the summer he would start a bipartisan education campaign to train 1,000 people to give a version of his slide show on global warming featured in the film "An Inconvenient Truth" and book of the same name.

Are they going to go out two by two into every city? Are they forbidden to take money or extra sandals? If they are not received by whatever city they enter are they to shake its dust off their feet? Will it be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the last days than for those cities?

"This moment cannot be allowed to pass," Gore told reporters in New York. "I have seen and heard times before when the awareness of the climate crisis has peaked and then a few months later it's gone. I think this time is different, but I have to say I'm not certain of that."

The book is an expanded version of the film. Both are based on a slide show he has given more than 1,000 times over the past 30 years on the dangers of global warming. He says climate change is a crisis that has become a moral issue.

The religious overtones continue. The man really believes.

Most scientists believe carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere leading to stronger storms and rising sea levels that could swamp low-lying islands by 2100.

NO. THEY. DON"T!!!!!!! (but notice the word "believe" again).

Gore said all the profits from his film and the book will be donated to train the messengers. He said the carriers of the message will give the slide show at high schools and rotary clubs in the United States and around the world.

Gore said on Monday, as he has consistently, that he had no plans to run for president in 2008. He added that he would continue to give the slide show even as the messengers give their versions of it.

Well, I do believe that he doesn't want to run for President. He seems much more ambitious than that. Al Gore for Antichrist maybe?

The universal government urge to "do something", anything, even if it makes no sense.

From Mercury News

Schwarzenegger Calls on Western Governors to Fight Global Warming
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that Western states must work together to reduce greenhouse gasses in the fight against global warming.

I wish that once, just ONCE, some reporter or politician would get the spelling of "gases" right. "Gasses" is the third person singular form of the verb "gas" meaning "to administer gas" or "to talk in an empty, idle, or boastful way". Oh, wait............

"We are long past the time when we can just talk about this problem," Schwarzenegger said Sunday at the annual meeting of the Western Governors' Association. "We must take action."

Such as what?

Schwarzenegger, a Republican running for re-election, pointed to California's work to try to reduce emissions by 33 percent by 2020.

"In California, we now have a booming economy and are taking care of the environment, so it can be done," Schwarzenegger told governors at the three-day conference.

Schwarzenegger applauded the work of the Clean and Diversified Energy Advisory Committee, a 250-member group that has spent the past two years studying energy issues in the West.

The committee released its report Sunday, concluding that the Western states could meet or exceed several goals, including developing an additional 30,000 megawatts of clean energy by 2015, increasing energy efficiency 20 percent by 2020 and ensuring secure, reliable transmission for the next 25 years.

The governors adopted three resolutions regarding energy issues, including:

_Approving a two-year report that recommends ways to achieve a more clean and diversified energy portfolio in 10 years, including calling upon Congress to pass federal tax credits for energy efficiency investments.

_A call for more investment in ethanol, biodiesel, electricity, natural gas and the transmission grid needed to support it. The resolution was designed to call to attention the country's dependence on foreign oil as a national security risk and environmental concern.

_A resolution asking Western states to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The resolution urges federal agencies to invest in climate change research and support coordinated international research on the issue.

Oh, they approved reports and resolutions. That's what I call taking action. And it appears that the second one wasn't targeted at climate at all, but our dependence on foreign oil. Even the first one had more to do with saving CA from future embarrassing electricity shortages than stopping global warming. But I guess of you tack "global warming" onto your press release it's more likely to get attention. As for the third one, the federal government already throws plenty of money at climate research. About $173 million was given to NOAA alone last year for climate studies. That amount doesn't include climate projects funded under other agencies or money given to international efforts like the UN's Council on Climate Change. We all should realize by now that more federal money does not equal better science, and the actual science may not support our preconceived conclusions (preclusions?), but nobody seems particularly interested in the science any more.

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, said research into alternative energy could reduce dependence on foreign oil and create engineering jobs.

"Unless you're living naked in a tree and eating nuts, you're part of the problem, and I'd like to hear your solution," he said.

Well, even if you're doing that you're still breathing out CO2, the dreaded greenhouse gas. And if your diet consists mostly of nuts, you're probably emitting plenty of methane (an even more potent greenhouse gas!) out the other end.

Sunday is the first time Schwarzenegger has attended the association's annual meeting since taking office in 2003.

Just to get that headline, I'm sure.

States represented at the governors' meeting include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

But they didn't get their names in the title.

I thought the death of the Zarkman would end his guest blogger status on Iowahawk, but I was wrong.

Fortunately, it sounds like Paradise is not what he expected.

AAAAHHHH! More Bad "Science" and Americans are shown to be inferior AGAIN!

Study: Canadians Healthier than Americans

ATLANTA (AP) - You can add Canadians to the list of foreigners who are healthier than Americans. Americans are 42 percent more likely than Canadians to have diabetes, 32 percent more likely to have high blood pressure, and 12 percent more likely to have arthritis, Harvard Medical School researchers found. That is according to a survey in which American and Canadian adults were asked over the telephone about their health.

A TELEPHONE SURVEY?????

The study, released Tuesday, is being published in the American Journal of Public Health. It is based on a telephone survey of about 3,500 Canadians and 5,200 U.S. residents in 2002-03. Those surveyed were 18 or older.

The new study found that 6.7 percent of Americans and 4.7 percent of Canadians reported having diabetes; 18.3 percent and 13.9 percent, respectively, reported having high blood pressure; and 17.9 percent and 16.0 percent said they had arthritis. The Americans also reported more heart disease and major depression, but those difference were too small to be statistically significant.

About 21 percent of Americans said they were obese, compared with 15 percent of Canadians. And about 13.5 percent of the Americans admitted to a sedentary lifestyle, versus 6.5 percent of Canadians. However, more Canadians were smokers - 19 percent, compared with about 17 percent of Americans.

About 42 percent of the Americans rated their quality of health care as excellent, while 39 percent of Canadians did.

Also, 92 percent of American women said they had a Pap test within the last five years, while 83 percent of Canadian women had. But Canadians have lower death rates from cervical cancer. ``It's a little hard to interpret,'' Woolhandler said.

One more plus for the Americans: Fewer than 1 percent said they were unable to get needed care because of long waits, compared with 3.5 percent of Canadians.

However, about 80 percent of Americans had a regular doctor, while 85 percent of Canadians did. And nearly twice as many Americans said there were medicines they needed but couldn't afford (9.9 percent versus 5.1 percent).

So now people's perceptions are being reported as an objective measure of their actual health and their health care systems. Do they think they "need" medications because their doctors told them, or because they saw an ad on TV and thought "Hey, I could sure use that stuff"? The study doesn't say. I didn't see anything about how the participants were selected either, except that they were all "18 or older" (how do you confirm that over the phone?) Well, how much older? Were the Canadian and American populations compared age group to age group? It doesn't seem so, though even an AP reporter should know that it would make a huge difference if most of the Canadians interviewed were under 35 and most of the Americans over 50. I also don't see any error bars on the accompanying histogram. There's no possibility of error in these numbers? Nobody ever lies or exaggerates about their health to a phone surveyor? I'm not sure what this is, but it isn't science and really shouldn't be dignified with the title "study".

Greenpeace Just Kidding About Armageddon (from the Washington Post)

Friday, June 2, 2006; Page A17

The environmental activist group Greenpeace wanted to be prepared to counter President Bush's visit last week to Pennsylvania to promote his nuclear energy policy.

"This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet, decrying the "threat" posed by the reactors Bush visited in Limerick.

But after that assertion, the Greenpeace authors were apparently stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.

"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]," the sheet said.

The Greenpeace spokesman who issued the memo, Steve Smith, told the Web site that a colleague was making a joke in a draft that was then mistakenly released.

The final version did not mention Armageddon; instead it warned of plane crashes and reactor meltdowns.

PLANE CRASHES???????

This is just the sort of thing that tugs at the CC’s heart – smug, self-righteous young liberals stymied by their own ignorance and a complete lack of real data. Let’s help them out by supplying some alarmist factoids:

"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly –

a dozen movies starring Adam Sandler

over 130 million issues of National Geographic printed and mailed – where are all the old ones going?

six Windows operating systems – all of which can crash!

two hundred reality TV shows

three million hours of Paris Hilton footage filmed

a kajillion Harry Potter books and spinoffs

zero meltdowns or serious accidents at US nuclear power plants

Have some of your own? Post away in the comments.

Well, duh...

From the NYT via Drudge-

Scientists Say Arctic Once Was Tropical -- Before Mankind!

The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists imagined — a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees.

The findings, published today in three papers in the journal Nature, fill in a blank spot in scientists' understanding of climate history. And while they show that much remains to be learned about climate change, they suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of heat-trapping gases to warm the Arctic.

Previous computer simulations, done without the benefit of seabed sampling, did not suggest an ancient Arctic that was nearly so warm, the authors said. So the simulations must have missed elements that lead to greater warming.

They missed something? Ya think? And no humans anywhere to be found! Though they (the authors of the NYT article, not the researchers)had to get in a dig about greenhouse gases controlling climate shifts:

Experts not connected with the studies say they support the idea that heat-trapping gases — not slight variations in Earth's orbit — largely determine warming and cooling.

"The new research provides additional important evidence that greenhouse-gas changes controlled much of climate history, which strengthens the argument that greenhouse-gas changes are likely to control much of the climate future," said one such expert, Richard B. Alley, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University.

In fact, it does nothing of the kind. And elsewhere:

Almost all climate experts agree that the present-day gas buildup is predominantly a result of emissions from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests.

No they don't. Anthropogenic sources of CO2 (which is what you get from combustion)are currently thought to be about 6% of the total. The rest are natural sources. There is also a good deal of evidence that high temperatures lead to increased atmospheric CO2, not the other way around. Leave it to the NYT to try to make reality conform to their own vision - "humans HAVE to be causing climate change". Anyway, see ecoEnquirer for the likely results of global warming. I can't wait!

Read it all. (the NYT article)

Update: You won't see this one in the NYT ever. It's in Geophysical Rsearch Letters, which means it's fairly technical, but here's an extract:

"We investigate global temperature changes using surface as well as satellite measurements and
show that lower tropospheric temperature trends for the period 1979–2001 are spatially correlated to anthropogenic surface CO2 emissions, which we use as a measure of
industrialization. Furthermore, temperature trends for the regions not spatially correlated with these CO2 emissions are considerably smaller or even negligible for some of the
satellite data. We also show, using the same measure, that two important climate models do not reproduce the geographical climate response to all known forcings as found in the observed temperature trends. We speculate that the observed surface temperature changes might be a result of local surface heating processes and not related to radiative greenhouse gas forcing."

In other words, the models are not reproducing reality, there's observed warming in industrial areas but not so much in other areas, and the warming that is occurring may be due to local processes, not greenhouse gases. They're speculating about this last part, but they admit they're speculating, which is more than the people at Earth Defense or the IPCC do.