Oh, those wacky, fundamentalist “destructionists” :

You gotta hand it to the global warming crowd. They have mind-bending gall.

New Scientist, which used to be a good pop science magazine, now quotes a NASA scientist saying:

“The Antarctic wintertime ice extent increased…at a rate of 0.6% per decade” from 1979 to 2006, says Donald Cavalieri, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. … Since 1979 … the average year-round ice extent has risen too.”

Let’s see, that would be 27 years, so a total increase of about 2.0% in the extent of sea ice in the Antarctic. That’s a lot of frozen daiquiris.

Millions of tons of increased ice in the Antarctic colder rather than warmer, no?

But the Eye of Gaia has a different way of spinning these facts. New Scientist begins the article with:

“The amount of sea ice around Antarctica has grown in recent Septembers in what could be an unusual side-effect of global warming, experts say.”

You see, when it gets hotter it proves global warming. And when it gets colder it also proves global warming.

They get you coming and going.

And these people think creationism is unscientific?

No sunspots for an entire month:

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.

When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month.  Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero.   Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year — which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 — has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise. In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

In this case, controversial means heretical: speaking against the religion of global warming just ain’t allowed in polite scientific society.

In the past 1000 years, three previous such events — the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a “mini ice age”. For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs a climate data auditing site, tells DailyTech the sunspot numbers are another indication the “sun’s dynamo” is idling. According to Watts, the effect of sunspots on TSI (total solar irradiance) is negligible, but the reduction in the solar magnetosphere affects cloud formation here on Earth, which in turn modulates climate.

This theory was originally proposed by physicist Henrik Svensmark, who has published a number of scientific papers on the subject. Last year Svensmark’s “SKY” experiment claimed to have proven that galactic cosmic rays — which the sun’s magnetic field partially shields the Earth from — increase the formation of molecular clusters that promote cloud growth. Svensmark, who recently published a book on the theory, says the relationship is a larger factor in climate change than greenhouse gases.

From Cracked.

With the threat of global warming looming, it’s more important than ever that all of us appear to care about the environment.

Maybe no one works harder on this than celebrities, who make it a point to show up in the papers every now and then with their latest eco-friendly gesture. We would applaud them for this, if it wasn’t for the fact that the gestures are often mind-blowingly retarded.

Read on.

Do you like living in the suburbs? Well, you might as well go to hell, because your Democrat overlords — using global warming as their cudgel — mean to kill off new suburbs.

Will Californians drive less to reduce global warming? Maybe not on our own — but state officials are ready to nudge us.

Nudge = boss us around.

The Legislature is on the verge of adopting the nation’s first law to control planet-warming gases by curbing sprawl. The bill, sponsored by incoming state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), is expected to pass the Assembly today and the Senate on Friday.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has not taken a position on the bill, but sponsors expect him to sign it once the state passes a budget.

Man-made global warming is a godsend to busybodies and know-it-alls (liberals), which is why they invented it.

An earlier version of the bill was blocked last year by the building industry and by organizations representing cities and counties.

 Aka, the people.

Developers feared their suburban projects would be delayed or halted. Local officials were wary of ceding zoning powers and transportation planning to the state.

In other words, they resisted a state power grab.

But momentum for the legislation has grown as the state seeks to implement its landmark 2006 global warming law, which would slash California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a 30% cut from expected emissions. To accomplish that, state officials say, fuel-efficient cars and factories won’t be enough. Subdivisions, commercial centers and highways must be planned so that Californians can live and work closer together, reducing the amount they drive.

“Our communities must change the way they grow,” Steinberg said.

Hear that? You must!

All this is sickening given the way liberal Democrats have behaved in the past. Ten years ago, this same bunch killed a planned community in Ventura County, the Ahmanson Ranch.

AR was everything libs ask for: a 3,000 home mixed-use community planned so that residents would have shopping and work opportunities right on site. It set aside vast acres of open space. But local LA County NIMBY’s enlisted self-righteous nitwits such as Rob Reiner and even Al Gore to lobby its demise.

In the ten-plus years AR was litigated, adjoining communities in LA County, such as Calabasas, built 3,000 houses, a few here, a few there. No urban planning. No mitigating traffic. Nothing.

Pompous hypocrites.

Ah, the dangers of inbreeding (people, not crops):

A government minister today challenged the Prince of Wales to prove his claim that firms developing genetically modified crops risked environmental disaster.

“If it has been a disaster then please provide the evidence,” said Phil Woolas, the environment minister, in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph.

He accused Prince Charles of ignoring the needs of the world’s poorest countries by attacking GM crops, and insisted the government would go ahead with trials unless scientific evidence showed they were harmful.

On Wednesday, after the prince told the Daily Telegraph that GM crops were an experiment “gone seriously wrong”, the government said it welcomed all voices in the debate and stressed that safety was its priority.

But in highly critical comments that suggest high-level anger at the prince’s intervention, Woolas said the government had a “moral responsibility” to investigate whether GM crops could help alleviate hunger in the developing world. It was easy for people in countries where food was plentiful to ignore the potential of GM to raise agricultural productivity, he said.

“I’m grateful to Prince Charles for raising the issue. He raises some very important doubts that are held by many people. But government ministers have a responsibility to base policy on science and I do strongly believe that we have a moral responsibility to the developing world to ask the question: can GM crops help?

GM crops? Let ‘em eat cake.

The global warming cult was amusing at first — all those earnest people throwing the word planet around. But now they’re doing real damage with their junk science, all the while wrapping themselves in the flag of righteousness.

Charles Krauthammer observes how Nancy Pelosi — who this week told an interviewer she’s obstructing domestic oil drilling because ”I’m trying to save the planet” — is advancing policies that will only make it worse.

…has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium’s effects on the planet?

Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it’s 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day, the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?

Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population — which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.

The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling — essentially drilling down, then sideways — allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi’s no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world — thereby increasing net planetary damage.

Is thinking through the consequences of feel-good policies too much to ask of liberals? Rhetorical question, that.

From Obama’s Berlin speech:

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Wrong. Sea levels have been rising. The midwest is moist, not dry.

Tigerhawk has the facts, stubborn things that they are.

Remember the much touted “consensus of scientists” about man-made global warming? Well, it is dead.

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.  The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.  The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling.   A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.” 

Just as John F. Kennedy set his sights on the moon, Al Gore is challenging the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years, an audacious goal he hopes the next president will embrace [AP].

Al Gore’s house uses 20 times the national average.

But even as Gore is expected to ask legislators to turn away from fossil fuels and embrace alternative energy sources, the current environmental policy proposals in Washington seem to be tending in the opposite direction.

Hmm. Maybe pie in the sky isn’t so attractive when gas costs $4.50.

The Interior Department on Wednesday made 2.6 million acres of potentially oil-rich territory in northern Alaska available for energy exploration…. The decision will open up for drilling much of the northeast section of the Northeast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, holding an estimated 3.7 billion barrels of oil [The New York Times], with production expected to begin in 2010. Congressional Democrats are not opposed to this move, which leaves the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge untouched for now.

I was in a cab en route  to the Atlanta airport this morning and told my fellow passenger about the purported Blackhawk Down - Global Warming connection (see post below). Suddenly the cabbie burst out laughing.

His name was Eule and was from Somalia, and had been living in Mogadishu when the incident happened. He thought the global warming angle was a real hoot. He chuckled about for at least half a mile.

Eule loves America, by the way. “You can do anything here!” he exclaimed.

This cretin has been in Congress too long.

On the Spot (CNSNews.com) – A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, also equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women’s suffrage in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

But one global warming expert from the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) told Cybercast News Service that such a remark reveals Markey’s ignorance on the subject of global warming.

“In Somalia back in 1993, climate change, according to 11 three- and four-star generals, resulted in a drought which led to famine,” said Markey.

“That famine translated to international aid we sent in to Somalia, which then led to the U.S. having to send in forces to separate all the groups that were fighting over the aid, which led to Black Hawk Down. There was this scene where we have all of our American troops under fire because they have been put into the middle of this terrible situation,” he added.

Markey was referring to the battle of Mogadishu in 1993, when 18 members of a U.S. military team were killed in a helicopter crash and a resulting firefight. The battle was made famous by a 2001 Academy Award-winning film, “Black Hawk Down.”

Markey was speaking to 25 students from the World Wildlife Fund’s Allianz Southeast Climate Witness Program. The students had come to the Capitol to brief members of Congress on the risks of global warming. The students were from the Gulf States.

“Yes, that part of the world is subject to drought at times, but it has very little to do with global warming,” said Ebell. “It is subject to drought whether the global average temperature is going up, down, or staying the same. To say you know the conflict was caused by global warming is to show how really ignorant you are of the scientific issues involved.”

And he gets to spread his ignorance.

 The students who testified at the event, most of whom had lived in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, described the difficulties they faced after the storm and blamed global warming for the disaster.

“Katrina woke me up and made me pay attention,” said 17-year-old Danielle Wold from Harvey, La. “One of the worst disasters in history made me want to do something. In 100 years, New Orleans could just be another Atlantis.”

Time’s Joe Klein hates air-conditioning and thinks you should, too.

I will confess a bias here. I love warm weather, even when it slouches toward humidity. I detest the harsh, slightly metallic quality of the air forced through even the fanciest AC systems. The only air conditioner I own sits, unused, in my car; my home is happily unrefrigerated. But given the energy mess we’re in, I can now gild my personal preference with a patina of high-mindedness: air-conditioning is bad for the planet, and for national security, and for our balance-of-payments deficit. Unfortunately, it is not as bad as I’d like it to be — in part because not all of our electricity is provided by fossil fuels (although coal does predominate). And also because air-conditioning represents a relatively small slice of our energy use, an estimated 4%.

But that’s still pretty egregious. We used an estimated 4 quadrillion British thermal units on air-conditioning in 2006, which is more than the total energy usage of all but 21 countries. And a fair amount of that is peak usage — the sort that sends the electric grid crackling toward brownouts and meltdowns and increases the demand for the construction of more electric power plants (and the pollution they spew — unless they use renewable sources like hydropower or, as John McCain correctly insists, nuclear power, which should be carefully reconsidered).

“A lot of utilities supplement their main power sources with quick-acting oil- or gas-driven generators on the hottest days of the year,” says Lee Schipper of the University of California, Berkeley. Schipper estimates the cost of peak usage is 20 cents per kW-h, as opposed to an average of 13 cents for “baseload capacity” usage, and it is far more carbon-intense because it is generated by oil or gas.

So little time, so much meddling to get done.

Instapundit:

JERRY POURNELLE ON SHORT-TERM THINKING:

Five years ago we were told that increased refinery and oil pumping capability in the US would do no good because it would take five years for those to affect gas pump prices. Query: if we had greatly increased supply over the past five years, would not oil be at about $75/bbl, still high, but not headed to $200? And if we do nothing to increase supply now, where will oil go? . . . We are in a time of national emergency, but it does not affect the politicians, who continue business as usual.

My response to those who say that increased drilling is pointless because it won’t yield immediate results — like Arnold Schwarzenegger –is why worry about the greenhouse effect, then? Nothing we do will cool the planet immediately. Yet we’re told immediate action there is vital. In fact, we’re told that by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the very same speech.

UPDATE: TigerHawk: “One would have thought that this point was so obvious it would not have to be made at all.”

You can never be too obvious, it seems.

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

And the Left is always crying about the “stifling of dissent!” Isn’t spreading doubt just another way of saying “counter argument” or “dissenting point of view”?

Hansen is more politician than scientist, a man so cocksure of his righteousness, he regards any disagreement criminal. He’s also an admitted liar.

Robert Novak wrote about Hansen after “60 Minutes” did a puff piece on him in 2004:

In his “60 Minutes” interview, Hansen gave the impression of a faithful government scientist who, frustrated by politicians, at long last dared to speak out. Asserting the need to reduce CO2 emissions, Hansen warned: “If that doesn’t start within 10 years, I don’t think we can keep additional global warning under 1 degree Celsius. And that means there’s a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets once begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it?”

Hansen sounded much the same alarm in 1988, when he energized the global warming movement by predicting a temperature rise of 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 10 years. When the actual rise in surface temperatures over the decade was only 0.2 degrees, Hansen stepped back from his earlier predictions.

“The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change,” Hansen wrote in 1998. He later admitted devising “extreme scenarios” about global warming to get the attention of “decision-makers.”

Now, it’s earthquakes affected by global warming. Oy!

New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr. Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago.

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of “global warming” is comprehensively and urgently addressed.

The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990.

HT: Pat Dollard

The sun has been lying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites.

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. Minimum activity generally occurs as the cycles change. Solar activity refers to phenomena like sunspots, solar flares and solar eruptions. Together, they create the weather than can disrupt satellites in space and technology on earth.

The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today’s sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren’t sure why.

“It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.

Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t like weather forecasters; They can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period, from approximately 1650 to 1700, occurred during the middle of a little ice age on Earth that lasted from as early as the mid-15th century to as late as the mid-19th century.

Meanwhile, this week Democrats nearly wrecked the US economy over global warming fears.

Last week Democrats tried to kill the economy in the name of solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Republicans should hang this bill around their necks in every district where an incumbent voted for the woefully misnamed and deservedly DOA Climate Security Act, technically S.3036. Asking Americans to pony up even more at the pump with already record gasoline prices creeping higher almost daily seems offensive enough.

But compelling such burden under the guise of moral imperative to curb global warming at a time when the planet is actually cooling rings downright obscene. And that’s why last week’s cavalcade of Senators opposing the Act — which would have directed the EPA to decrease emissions of greenhouse gases — entirely on economic grounds was so confounding.

Don’t get me wrong — the fiscal arguments against the bill’s draconian business regulations were inexorable — its massive consequent spike in energy costs would be nothing short of ruinous to the nation. An April EPA analysis of the bill estimated a 53 cents per gallon increase in the price of gasoline and a 44% jump in electricity costs by 2030 should it become law.

Even those figures precariously assumed a 150% increase in nuclear and “significant use of biomass” for electricity generation; otherwise costs will be “significantly higher.” Add a projected net loss of almost a trillion dollars in GDP by that very same year and this blatantly socialistic power-grab attempt deserved the pauper’s funeral it received on financial grounds alone. That’s without even considering that there’s no proof whatsoever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction.

Environmentalism has become a substitute religion for many, and the worst of them are downright Puritanical about it. With CO2 now defined as a pollutant, the very act of breathing — of living — is a sin against earth.

We should all be ashamed. Be fruitful and multiply? Feh!

Now Australia’s ABC network has created a website for kids that measures their resource use and tells them when they should die.

No kidding. It says I should have died at age 16.3.

HT: Simon Bass

Wired Magazine presents 10 Green Heresies, such as Live in Cities, A/C is OK and farm the old forests.

So much for Al Gore’s global warming consensus. 

The National Press Club in Washington will today release the names of as many as 32,000 American Scientists who reject not only Kyoto-style greenhouse gas limits, but the very premise of manmade global warming itself.

On Saturday, Lawrence Solomon wrote a great piece in the National Post (h/t Benny Peiser) which begged the question:

“How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?”

How many, indeed?
Solomon, author of The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so, reminds us that 32,000 scientists have now signed the “Oregon petition,” which states that

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

How might anyone of clear mind consider these words from these numbers and still accept claims of scientific consensus?  Or calls for any — let alone immediate — action?

Solomon also points out that these dissenting scientists - over 9,000 of whom hold Ph.Ds — now outnumber the environmentalists that attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that actually kicked off the global warming craze.  And, I might add, far exceed the count of UN IPCC “scientists” whose calamitous predictions lie at the very heart of climate hysteria and what Solomon calls “the Kyoto Protocol’s corruption of science.”

But will their sheer numbers nullify the “settled science” argument?
Not if the alarmists have any say it won’t.  Solomon offers a brief history of attempts to bury all such previous accords. First by mocking the limited number of signatures on earlier appeals, and then — when the original Oregon petition boasted 17,800 signatories — claiming duplicate or fraudulent names.  And even when all names were ultimately verified as authentic (save one actually planted by agents of Greenpeace), the MSM still ignored their consequence.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:

After a year of falling temperatures, global warming fanatics grow more desperate. From Australia comes a scheme that only can be described as deranged, in my opinion:

IN a doomsday scenario straight out of the Matrix trilogy, top scientist Tim Flannery has claimed humanity may need to blot out the sun to survive global warming.

The former Australian of the Year says sulphur could be pumped into the Earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.

“It would change the colour of the sky,” Professor Flannery said.
“It’s the last resort that we have, it’s the last barrier to a climate collapse.

“We need to be ready to start doing it in perhaps five years’ time if we fail to achieve what we’re trying to achieve.”
In the Matrix trilogy, the human resistance “scorches the sky” to block out the sun and deny humanity’s man-made mechanical enemies solar energy.

Now a similar strategy is being proposed to counter another human-created threat that’s just as grave.

Professor Flannery said climate change was happening so quickly that mankind may need to resort to his radical plan to survive.
He said the sulphur could be dispersed above the Earth’s surface by adding it to jet fuel.

He conceded there were risks to global dimming via sulphur.

Let me get this straight:

Carbon dioxide, which is essential to human life, is deemed a pollutant (by no less than the Supreme Court), but we are supposed to contemplate spreading sulfur into the atmosphere. Has this clown ever heard of acid rain, which is the result of sulfurous emissions from coal-burning power plants?

Scratch the surface of virtually any liberal political initiative and you’ll find a sick need to mind other peoples’ business. Perhaps some day they’ll discover a “busy body” gene and we’ll indeed enjoy a new politics.

Alas:

As someone who commutes by bicycle into Manhattan, I would normally applaud any scientific rationale for more bike lanes. But some calculations in the new issue of the Lancet make me uncomfortable. The authors argue that policies promoting cycling and walking are good for the planet because they could reduce obesity — and obesity, the authors calculate, contributes to global warming.

Do we really need to give fat people one more reason to feel guilty?

The Lancet authors, Dr. Phil Edwards and Dr. Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, crunch the numbers and conclude:

Compared with the normal weight population, the obese population consumes 18% more food energy. Additionally, more transportation fuel energy will be used to transport the increased mass of the obese population, which will increase even further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more.

Urban transport policies that promote walking and cycling would reduce food prices by reducing the global demand for oil, and promotion of a normal distribution of B.M.I. [Body Mass Index] would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food. Decreased car use would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus the need for biofuels, and increased physical activity levels, would reduce injury risk and air pollution, improving population health.

Sure, exercise has lots of benefits. But would more exercise really lead to less obesity, or would the exercisers just get hungrier and eat more? Check out this article by Gina Kolata, my Times colleague and the author of “Rethinking Thin.”

John McCain has joined the choir, probably by necessity, but his tune is a bit different. 

The centerpiece of McCain’s approach to slowing global warming is a nationwide “cap-and-trade” system for reducing emissions — setting an overall pollution limit, then letting individual polluters buy and sell emissions allowances within that limit.

Political minefields

But in delivering his manifesto Monday, he also stepped directly on two of the biggest ideological land mines around global warming reductions. He endorsed nuclear power and proposed to crack down on China and India if they don’t adopt similar caps to control their accelerating emissions.

McCain, like the other candidates, also avoided addressing some key questions about the impacts of his plan, including costs to electricity and natural gas ratepayers.

The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, pending now before the Senate but facing a potential veto from President Bush, would require roughly comparable emissions cuts by 2020 as McCain’s plan. A recent analysis by the Energy Information Administration concluded that the bill would boost utility rates from 5 percent to 27 percent by 2020, with the range depending on how fast new emissions reduction technology develops.

McCain, Clinton and Obama all favor a cap-and-trade system, similar to that used in Europe to address global warming and in the United States to reduce acid rain pollution from coal plants. Their plans differ some: McCain’s 2050 goal is for at least a 60 percent reduction; Obama and Clinton favor 80 percent.

Jonathan David Carson:

New Scientist, which revealed last year that obesity causes global warming, now tells us that global warming will make days longer, which has been confirmed by NASA. So not only is at least one global warming hysteric worried that efforts to stop global warming may slow the rotation of the earth, but the hysterical New Scientist reports that global warming itself slows it:

Global warming will make days longer as well as hotter, say Belgian scientists. A team led by Olivier de Viron of the Royal Observatory of Belgium has calculated the impact of global warming from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the air on the angular momentum of the planet.

So we might at well get used to longer and longer days. Who needs Daylight Savings Time anymore?

Oops, days already are getting longer, and have been for billions of years before Bill Clinton ate his first Big Mac or scientists had too much time on their hands and too much tax money to spend.

The Left is beyond parody.  NASA’s next manned mission to the moon is further away than the first mission was when President Kennedy announced the goal of getting there and back within the decade.  Iran is building an atomic bomb, North Korea has one, the Russians and Chinese are rapidly increasing the size of their militaries, Islamofascist fanatics are killing people over cartoons, and NASA is busy calculating that a hypothetical half meter increase in sea level brought on by global warming will increase the effective radius of the earth by one part in 20 million, thus slowing its rotation and lengthening the day.

Apple is rotten at being Green, say some. Why hasn’t board member Al Gore done something?

… Al Gore claims the Burma cyclone was related to Global Warming.

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR’s May 6 “Fresh Air” broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross about the release of his book, “The Assault on Reason,” in paperback.

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said.

“And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

The Reference Frame: 

In this dose of peer-reviewed literature about the climate, we look into Nature.

Noel Keenlyside et al. (from Kiel, Germany)

wrote an article called “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector.” Yes, I mean Kiel where Max Planck was born.

They look at the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) influencing the meridional overturning circulation (MOC). The Gulf Stream is the part of the MOC along the East Coast of the U.S., mostly driven by Western winds (i.e. directly by the rotation of Earth). Its extension towards Europe, the North Atlantic Drift, is also supported by thermohaline circulation.

MOC: Warm water flows from the equator to the North and returns at depth in the ocean. The intensity of this circulation depends on the AMO phase. See a detailed picture of Atlantic currents.

The oscillation is a slow quasiperiodic pattern that usually switches into the opposite regime after 60-70 years. It is a slower process than PDO we discussed a few days ago. Because only sea surface temperatures are available for previous decades, they use them to reconstruct the temperatures inside the ocean. The results are incorporated as a new term in their otherwise “conventional” computer model. With this new term, (validation) skill is improved markedly.

Their conclusion? The predictions for a foreseeable future change dramatically. The MOC will weaken to its long-term mean. The Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and America will cool down slightly in the next decade while the Pacific Ocean won’t change. In plain English, the AGW hoax may take timeout till 2018.

Their choice of words is a testimony of the political correctness. For example, in Richard Black’s article in the BBC, Keenlyside says:

One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

If you wonder what this sentence means, it means “Our models, if correct, imply that the IPCC projections for the next 15-20 years are incorrect.” Recall the words that are being used when a controversial published article disagrees with a detail of a skeptic’s theory: we typically read about one last nail in the coffin of an oil industry stooge. But when 2,500 hacks are proved wrong in a completely essential aspect of their paper - the projection of temperatures for the whole next decade -, a very different language must be chosen, right?

Mark Steyn:

Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”

Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the “war”: one degree.

If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.

So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I’d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route Seven there’s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput.

So where exactly do Time magazine’s generals want to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It’s all these third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it’s a flag of eco-colonialism.

And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, the Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on April 12. Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to “global warming” — or, at any rate, the “war on global warming” that Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since last summer and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt. Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty, and affordable? Well, one out of three ain’t bad.

Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.

So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

The green movement killed nuclear power in this country. Is it too late to say you’re sorry?

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says there is no proof global warming is caused by humans, but it is likely enough that the world should turn to nuclear power - a concept tied closely to the underground nuclear testing his former environmental group formed to oppose.

The chemistry of the atmosphere is changing, and there is a high-enough risk that “true believers” like Al Gore are right that world economies need to wean themselves off fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases, he said.

“It’s like buying fire insurance,” Moore said. “We all own fire insurance even though there is a low risk we are going to get into an accident.”

The only viable solution is to build hundreds of nuclear power plants over the next century, Moore told the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday. There isn’t enough potential for wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal or other renewable energy sources, he said.

With development of coal-fired electric generation stopped cold over greenhouse gases, the only alternative to nuclear power for producing continuous energy at the levels needed is natural gas. But climate change isn’t the only reason to move away from fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels also are a major health threat. “Coal causes the worst health impacts of anything we are doing today,” Moore said.

Plus, uranium can be found within the United States and also comes in large quantities from Canada and Australia. Nuclear Power reduces the reliance on supplies in dangerous places including the Middle East, he said.

Parse this:

Between March 19 through May 28, 2007 Harris Interactive conducted a mail survey of a random sample of 489 self-identified members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union who are listed in the current edition of American Men and Women of Science. A random sample of this size carries a sampling error of +/- four percentage points. A detailed description of the study’s methodology as well as that of the earlier Gallup survey is available on request.

Major Findings

Scientists agree that humans cause global warming
Ninety-seven percent of the climate scientists surveyed believe “global average temperatures have increased” during the past century.

Eighty-four percent say they personally believe human-induced warming is occurring, and 74% agree that “currently available scientific evidence” substantiates its occurrence. Only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming; the rest are unsure.

So it’s time to act, right? Hold on.

Scientists still debate the dangers
A slight majority (54%) believe the warming measured over the last 100 years is not “within the range of natural temperature fluctuation.”

Which means 46% must believe the fluctuation is normal, so how could they believe humans are causing what’s normal?

A slight majority (56%) see at least a 50-50 chance that global temperatures will rise two degrees Celsius or more during the next 50 to 100 years. (The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cites this increase as the point beyond which additional warming would produce major environmental disruptions.)

Based on current trends, 41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, compared to 13% who see relatively little danger. Another 44% rate climate change as moderately dangerous.

So 57% are not all that worried.

Seventy percent see climate change as very difficult to manage over the next 50 to 100 years, compared to only 5% who see it as not very difficult to manage. Another 23% see moderate difficulty in managing these changes.

A need to know more
Overall, only 5% describe the study of global climate change as a “fully mature” science, but 51% describe it as “fairly mature,” while 40% see it as still an “emerging” science. However, over two out of three (69%) believe there is at least a 50-50 chance that the debate over the role of human activity in global warming will be settled in the next 10 to 20 years.

What does “mature” science mean? I can only guess they mean that mature scientists really know what they’re talking about — the rest are guesstimating (and getting research grants).

Only 29% express a “great deal of confidence” that scientists understand the size and extent of anthropogenic [human] sources of greenhouse gases,” and only 32% are confident about our understanding of the archeological climate evidence.

Is global cooling real? Might be. The Australian:

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.