“If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do the same thing ?” 

How many times did you hear that one as a kid?  It usually had to do with parents not wanting their children to go places deemed as unsuitable for any number of reasons.  Parents opinions were based on reason and experience, something most teenagers don’t have.

Similar to teenagers are today’s advocates of catastrophic global warming.  If you say you don’t  believe their sky-is-falling prognostications, you are called names, your reputation is questioned, and efforts are made to exile you from polite society.

We are being told that global warming will cause sea level increases of 20 feet in the next century.  People will tell you that “the weight of the evidence” proves the statement, and those who challenge this popular view are called “deniers” .  It is all an attempt to vilify intelligent and rational people so the alarmists won’t  have to defend an indefensible theory.

The interesting thing is that there is no empiracle evidence that sea levels will rise 20 feet.  This position rests on speculation derived attempts to model the earth’s climate system with models that have never made an accurate forecast. 

Modeling stuff does not produce real world values.  Models produce speculative results, and depend on a large number of assumptions about real world values that cannot be measured. 

So, take note of what at least one person observed about majority opinions.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.  Bertrand Russel (via iGoogle page)

I am glad to see that I am in good company when questioning a majority, unsupported opinion.

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I not only forgot Earth Hour this year, I forgot Earth Day!

We were supposed to turn our clocks back an hour

Well, I gotta tell you, Earth Day is boring.  I don’t know how many morons openly celebrated Earth Day, I just hope none of my neighbors were involved.  Since my neighborhood is SUV city, I think most of them are pretty rational people.

Here is a video from that dirty old man, George Carlin, to help you understand the issue.

Maybe George Carlin’s routine can get the message across to people that we just don’t make a whole lot of difference to the Earth and its systems.  We may be able to destroy ourselves, but we are a long, long way from being able to destroy Planet Earth.

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HT to jamiewearingfool blog.

She is a sweet thing.  Joulie, the Ocean Heat Monster,  lurks hidden in the waters of some deep ocean abyss like the Loch Ness Monster waiting for the Great Climate-Change Text Signal that reads, “OMG!  It is time to empty the heat pipeline.”. 

Unfortunately, my little piece of fiction sounds like what respected climate scientists are claiming about a non-existent pipeline storing Mega-Joules of heat energy waiting to be dumped into the earth’s ecosystem.  This is their answer to the question, “Where has all that heat gone?” It was made in an attempt to explain why there has been no climate warming for the last decade in spite of the massive accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Dr Pielke, a climate scientist of note, basically says that the idea of a heat pipeline storing “unrealized” heat is false.  If there is heat in a system, it is realized!

It gets real simple, real quick.  Heat energy is what it is.  By definition if it exists it has been realized. 

Nobody seriously contends that the earth has not gone through a period of global warming, and nobody can deny that we have been going through a period of global cooling.  The facts are the facts.

The essential disagreement is whether carbon dioxide is the dominant driver of global warming, and whether our future will be one defined by catastrophes caused by CO2 induced warming. 

It is time to get to serious science rather than inventing more non-existent monsters like Joulie.

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We were all supposed to turn our clocks back one hour at 8:30 tonight.

Dang!  Gotta get this right.

We were all supposed to turn our lights off for one hour at 8:30 tonight.  Why? It beats the heck out of me.  Some dork from Greenpuss, or the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) thinks that we should make a statement about not being able to read in the dark, or something.

The folks in North Korea don’t have adequate electric power, and this must be one of the halmarks of a country awash in socialized medicine, socialized government, socialized hunger, and socialized poverty.  Perhaps Earth Hour should be a warning of what awaits us when Obama is through with our country.  I am sure his wife will be proud.

Here is an actual satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula at night.  Note that South Korea, that quagmire of rampant capitalism, is all bright and shiny while Kim Jung Il’s North Korean paradise has no lights.  Score one for socialism.  NOT!

Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over

Photo via Wikipedia

Warning!  Boring scientific stuff will follow.

The term, “Climate Change”, is just a marketing term.  Climate changes all the time, and trying to paint this as something bad, or even controllable, is just ignorance in action.

In fact it has recently been shown that the increase in temperatures over the last century or so are completely within the limits of natural variability.

There is a climate science blog by a Dutch scientist, Bart Verheggen, where one of his posts has over 760 comments, covering a couple of weeks of some pretty deep, mathematical discussions of the hypothesis of carbon dioxide driven global warming.

You can read a layman’s account, here.

An anonymous statistician, VS, did an analysis of Dr. Verheggen’s data and concluded that the temperature increases since 1880 (where the data starts) to the present are not distinguishable from natural variations in the climate.  In other words even though the world has gotten warmer over the last 120 years, it is mathematically inside the realm of natural variations.

VS is an econometrician, and not a climate scientist.  Now, this may seem odd, but, both climate science and economics try to model large chaotic systems, and both disciplines use the same or similar mathematics to analyze their data.

The difference is that the economics guys have been at it a lot longer, and have developed some very sophisticated statistical tools in the process.  By comparison, climate science is not ready for prime time.

VS’s analysis further reveals that there is little or no linkage between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and long term global warming.  Indeed, CO2 and other green house gases have only second order relationships with temperature.

Stated differently, CO2 is NOT a primary driver of temperature.  It has only a secondary effect.  We know this from the physics of CO2, but the total effects of CO2 on temperature have never been accurately quantified.

If VS and his references are correct, global warming has just suffered a fatal mathematical blow.  Now, maybe we can get to some real climate science and forget all this Al Gore type of nonsense.

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Dr. Michael Mann, Penn State Scientist Guilty of Bad Science

In spite of all the press Climategate has had over the last couple of months, most people in the United States are either ignoring it, or haven’t heard about it.  That’s a shame, because the truth is coming out about how some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists have lied about their studies, and have withheld important data and documents from the public.

We all learn in high school that for a scientific experiment to be considered valid, others must be able to replicate the experiment and the results.  This is where the British climate scientists at the world famous Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University have stuck it to the British and American taxpayers.  Yes, some of their work was funded by American taxpayers!

Thanks to a “theft” of emails and computer code documents from the CRU computer servers, there is now an investigative hearing in progress.  Thanks to Anthony Watts’ blog, WattsUpWithThat?, you can read a running account of the hearing.

Several scientific and mathematical societies have sent comments to the investigative committee, all recommending that scientific data and computer codes from scientific studies be made available to the interested public, and that Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit, is guilty of promoting bad science practice, and hiding the results of his data.

You may think this is a United Kindom problem, but, the CRU science criminals are joined by some equally objectionable scientists in the United States.  You see, they are all part of the same clique that cosponsor and review their own studies.

One such scientist guilty of participating in the climate frauds is Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University.  There is an inquiry into Dr. Mann’s questionable activities, and it looks like Penn State is giving him a complete white-wash.  Dr. Mann wrote one of the early studies generating the fraudulent “Hockey Stick” graph that purports that current climate warming is without precedent.  He has been proven wrong on many occasions, yet, keeps producing phony studies.

So, be aware of the garbage science being perpetuated by scientists like Dr. Mann.  There is lots of good science out there about climate, but, his is not in that category.

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Note: Photo from Watts Up With That?

Yep!  It’s snowing in Atlanta.  It is one of those globby, wet snows that piles up on cars, but melts as soon as it hits the streets.  Yards are getting a covering of white punctuated by yawning black crevasses channeling melt water to storm sewers.

This is not the pretty snow seen in northern climes.  This is sloppy, ugly, wet, pneumonia breeding Southern rebel-yell snow. To add to the local misery, the kids won’t even get out of school.

Bummer!

Last night, I went to the grocery store to pick up a few items for our dinner.  There was hardly any bread on the shelves, and there was no milk at all.  You see, it is a tradition in Atlanta that whenever “SNOW” is mentioned in the local weather forecast, everybody runs to the grocery store and stocks up on milk, bread, and other important items just in case.

Now, hoarding perishable food items is not as irresponsible as you may think.  A couple of times per decade, we get an ICE STORM.

Ice storms are terrible things, and ice storms love pine trees.  Atlanta, Georgia is cursed to be covered in pine trees.  Pine trees are the worst kind of tree you can have.  They are the weeds of the tree family.

If only all those weirdo environmental, tree-hugging idiots knew the real worth of these criminal conifers. The darned things are not even worth burning as firewood, and you can’t kill them fast enough to keep them out of you yard.

Pine trees will fall over in a heavy rain. Put a quarter of an inch of ice on their limbs, and you will have them crashing on power lines all over the Southern United States. Millions of people will be out of power, and heat, for weeks. That’s why we hoard milk and bread.

Beer works pretty good, too.  If only we were shut in for a while, and I could work down this supply of beer I have laid in for the bad times.

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Cartoon by Chip Bok.

Those Minnesota folks are hilarious.  Here is more of their creativity.

Hat tip to The Reference Frame.

The Minnesotans for Global Warming are a creative crew.  View the following video, and expect to see more of them in the future.