Istvan Marko interview on ADDE

Professor Istvan Marko explains that COP21 results in nothing as the agreement is nonbinding. Carbon dioxide is plant food and has resulted in the greening of the Earth. He explains that wind and solar power requires large subsidies with back-up from conventional power. Climate has changed cyclically. Temperatures were warmer during previous warm periods than now.

Thought for Today

"The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm."

~~~~~ Freeman Dyson

Candidate for Quote of the Century

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age."

~~~~~ Richard S. Lindzen

Thought for Today

"It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming."

~~~~ John Coleman

Thought for Today

"Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists."

~~~~~ Fred Thompson

Thought for Today

"Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?"

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"A liberal mistrusts lessons bought with experience. For him, theory is all. He's the only man who would sit down on a red-hot stove twice. That makes well-meaning Democrats marks for shysters selling health-care 'reform,' global warming and appeasement of radical Islamists."

~~~~~ Wesley Pruden

Thomas Jefferson on Global Warming

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the spot of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Smith, December 8, 1822

Doctor Zero on Climategate

Over at Hot Air, there's an outstanding new post by Doctor Zero in the form of an open letter to the Warmist True Believers, A Memo To The Global Warming Cult. Here's how it begins:

Dear global warming fanatics,

Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Clima[te]gate are only making you look foolish. The con job you’ve been running for the last thirty years is busted forever.

I know this is difficult for you to accept. Things seemed to be going well. You’ve got the cap-and-trade bill lurking over the United States, ready to shatter an already weakened economy plagued with unemployment problems, and effectively end America’s role as a dominant industrial power. Your beliefs have been instituted in public schools as the official state religion, whose rituals and incantations are forced upon millions of school children. The wealthy royalty of popular culture is pleased to produce an endless string of movies, music, and television programming to market your beliefs. Your critics were marginalized to the point where the presidential candidate from the 2000 Democrat ticket felt comfortable referring to them as Nazis.

By all means read the whole thing.

Imagine There's No Global Warming

Thought for Today

"I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that
they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation... It is precise mathematically, but the mathematics is far too difficult for the individuals that are doing it, and they don't draw their conclusions with any rigour. So they just guess."

~~~~~ Richard P. Feynman

Feynman was commenting on superstring theory, but could just as well have been describing the theory of man-made global warming.

Henry Payne on Climategate

Thought for Today

“Before we panic about ‘global warming,’ we should take a look at six-day weather forecasts and see how much they change during those six days -- quite aside from how much they differ from what the weather actually turns out to be.”

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

This one's for the Global Warmists among us:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

~~~~~ Richard Feynman

Sen. Alexander on Cap-and Trade

Saturday's mail brought me a form letter from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). I had been in contact with his office about the cap-and-trade legislation, urging him to oppose it when it reaches the Senate. Here is what Sen. Alexander had to say:

July 20, 2009

Dr. Morton A. Goldberg
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lebanon, TN 37087

Dear Morton,

Thanks very much for getting in touch with me and letting me know what's on your mind regarding climate change.

Every two-year Congress since I was elected to the Senate, I have sponsored clean air and climate change legislation that would place caps on carbon emissions from power plants -- but not caps on fuel used for transportation, because that would drive up the price of gasoline. In 2007, Congress passed into law an energy bill that included an amendment I cosponsored that raised fuel economy standards for the first time in 30 years, to an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Telling automakers in this country that they have to make cleaner cars and trucks that use less fuel is the single best way our nation can start curbing our dependence on foreign oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The National Academy of Sciences of the United States – as well as the National Academies of Japan, Germany, China, and other nations – has concluded that human activity is having a significant impact on global temperature increases. While I believe it is appropriate for Congress to take reasonable steps to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, I'm very reluctant to impose any sort of cap-and-trade, even on power plants, this year in the middle of a big recession. Now is not the time to put a national sales tax on every electric bill and every gasoline purchase.

As a member of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, I'll be deeply involved in this debate and will be sure to keep your comments in mind as climate change is discussed in Washington and in Tennessee.

Sincerely,
/s/ Lamar

Translation: Despite the fact that that he sits on the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works – of which his colleague, the sainted Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), is the Ranking Minority Member – all of the overwhelming evidence against man-made global warming which Sen. Inhofe has assembled in his ongoing Minority Report impresses him not at all.

Sen. Alexander has already accepted as a given that man-made global warming is real, and is only quibbling about the timing and severity of the "corrective" measures he wishes to impose on us. No doubt, I, as one of his constituents, am supposed to be grateful that Sen. Alexander has only partially caved in to the environmental extremists pressing for draconian CO₂ restrictions regardless of their effectiveness in preventing (imaginary) man-made global warming – or their effects upon our national economy and standard of living.

For whatever reason, Sen. Alexander chooses to ignore these inconvenient facts:

1. The most recent ice core evidence shows irrefutably that during the last 650,000 years of Earth's history, rising CO₂ levels have invariably occurred approximately 800 years AFTER warming temperatures, not before. Therefore, rising CO₂ cannot possibly be causing the warming. Instead, it is far more likely to be caused by the warming.
2. As has become increasingly obvious, average temperatures have not risen since 1998 despite the fact that atmospheric CO₂ continues to increase. Instead, we are experiencing record cold temperatures, and may well be entering a period of dramatic cooling.
3. While CO₂ is unquestionably a greenhouse gas, and has been recognized as such for a century, the relationship between its atmospheric concentration and its greenhouse effect is not linear, but logarithmic. In plain English, that means that the CO₂ in the atmosphere is already doing just about all the warming it can do. Doubling its concentration would cause a temperature increase so tiny as to be unmeasurable. In fact, by far the most important greenhouse gas is not CO₂, but water vapor. Its role dwarfs those of CO₂, methane, and oxides of nitrogen combined.
4. As a direct result of the role of water vapor as the primary greenhouse gas, the theory behind man-made global warming posits the existence of an atmospheric "hot spot" located at the top of the troposphere within the tropical latitudes at an altitude of about 10 kilometers (6 miles). Yet, despite the existence of detailed and accurate radiosonde (weather balloon) data going back nearly 50 years and the increasingly desperate efforts of Global Warmists to massage it to fit their theory, no such "hot spot" has been shown to exist. Here, from a paper by Dr. David Evans (PDF), is a graphical comparison: observed data on the left; theorized data derived from computer models on the right. It's a fine example of that old joke, "Who are you going to believe – me or your lying eyes?"
   
   Of course, the reason the Global Warmists are desperate to prove the existence of the non-existent "hot spot" is simple: without it, their theory is obviously erroneous. If their theory is erroneous, then the entire man-made global warming house of cards collapses.
   

Sen. Alexander, with all due respect, in view of the ongoing controversy among qualified climate scientists about the validity of the man-made global warming theory, as well as the threat to our economy from the consequences of well-intentioned, though misguided, legislation, don't you think it might be wiser to hold off on the passage of any laws aimed at controlling our emission of CO₂ until the relevant science has been settled?

A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

Jo Nova brings us an important new article, A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action, written by one of the world's foremost climate scientists, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen. This is one you'll want to read all the way through, then share with as many intelligent people as possible. (Don't bother showing it to the dummies – you'll be wasting your time.)

Climate Money

Joanne "Jo" Nova, a science writer from Perth, Australia, has been driving the Global Warmists totally bonkers. For 17 years, she was a True Believer. Then, in 2007, she became aware of a couple of pieces of key evidence that disprove the entire theory of AGW – that is, Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

As a trained scientist (molecular biology) and a person of unquestioned integrity, once Jo realized that the theory in which she had believed was false, she changed her opinion. She began speaking and writing as a global warming skeptic, pointing out how the recent evidence had poked some pretty sizable holes in the hypothesis that humans are causing the earth to warm as a result of our CO₂ production.

At first, Jo's former colleagues tried their best to ignore her. However, she's not easy to ignore. After all, she's a professional science communicator, and is very good at what she does. Not surprisingly, within a very short time, she began to experience the same sort of vicious personal attacks as all of the other scientists who dare to question the Global Warmists' cherished orthodoxy. To them, she was now an apostate, and they made it plain that if it were within their power to do so, they would gladly burn her at the stake, then bury her ashes in the nearest environmentally friendly landfill.

Last year, Jo started a blog, JoNova, in which she kept her readers abreast of the latest developments in the field of climate science. In September, 2008, she issued an invaluable book, The Skeptic's Handbook. Here is what she wrote about it at the time:

I want to lift the debate above the mud-slinging, pathetic ad hominem attacks, and specious argument by authority. The basic rules of logic and reasoning have been known since the Greeks. Educated adults ought to do better. Maybe one day, national curriculums will too.

The attacks grew more vicious and strident, but Jo was not dissuaded. Quite the contrary. She came to realize, as some of us have for a number of years now, that the believers in AGW theory were acting not like scientists, but like religious acolytes hanging on every word emanating from Prophet Al Gore and High Priest James Hansen. By the end of October, 2008, Jo realized that AGW is a religion, and had the temerity to say so in a blog post.

Reading the comments following that one post is a real education. Jo enforces certain standards of civility in her comment section, so you won't find the most depraved and vicious of the ad hominem attacks there (to see them, hang out in the left-wing blogs for a while and search on her name), but I was in turn amused, amazed, and disappointed to read some of the comments obviously intended as logical, reasoned discourse.

This month, Jo has just come out with another informative booklet, this time in cooperation with the Science and Public Policy Institute. It's called Climate Money, and you can download it as a PDF file from this page. Here's a summary of what you'll find within its 19 pages:

• The US government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.


• Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of the theory and compete with a well funded highly organized climate monopoly. They have exposed major errors.


• Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.


• Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.


• The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into one theory, have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation?

Jo is also a talented artist and cartoonist. She illustrated both The Skeptic's Handbook and Climate Money herself with clear, easy-to-follow charts, graphs, and occasional cartoons, such as this one from the cover of Climate Money:



By all means, download a copy of Climate Money and, if you don't already have one, The Skeptic's Handbook, too. By the time you finish reading them, you'll have a pretty good understanding of why the theory of AGW is wrong, and why we are nevertheless spending billions of dollars in an attempt to prove its validity.

As is, sadly, so often the case – follow the money.

O'Reilly Finally Gets It

Last night's O'Reilly Factor marked a watershed of sorts. Bill finally recognized the truth of what thousands of us have been saying for years: cap-and-trade is a giant scam, and Al Gore is a shameless con man and hypocrite. Welcome aboard, Bill. What took you so long?

Bill took pains to explain, though, that he still believes that man-made global warming is real. It's just that he has finally gotten it through his thick skull that the measures which would be imposed upon us by Waxman-Markey would do nothing to stop it, but would do enormous damage to our economy while transferring billions of dollars to a few well-connected corporations and individuals.

Later in the program, Bill spoke briefly with Glenn Beck, who tried to gently inform him that man-made global warming is itself a scam, and that the data upon which O'Reilly has been relying is not true. However, Bill is not yet ready for that next step. He'll have to be led to the truth slowly and carefully over a period of time.

Nevertheless, the fact that Bill, until now a zealous missionary in Gore's Church of Global Warming, has gone apostate on the cap-and-trade scheme is yet another hopeful sign that public perception on this issue has finally turned the corner. It appears that from now on, the Global Warmists will face an increasingly uphill struggle.

Those of us who have been signally honored by being labeled "Deniers" by con man Gore cannot afford to relax, though. While the tide may be turning in our favor, the battle is far from won. If there is one thing we know for certain about the opposition, it is this: they never give up until they have attained their objective. Even when they have suffered a major setback, they never consider a defeat to be permanent. They will lick their wounds for a while, rally their forces, and attack again from a different direction. We cannot afford to let our guard down even for a moment.

Thought for Today

"If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and none dare criticize it."

~~~~~ Anonymous

Half Slave and Half Free – The True Value of Energy

Hat tip: Jay Nordlinger as cited by Edward John Craig writing in NRO's Planet Gore