Droolers, eye rollers, knuckle draggers and window lickers please note...

...What WILL they think of next? ...A few months ago, for a joke, Brendon O'Neil set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder (Facebook login required) ...HERE... It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 73 members. (Sign up !) An excerpt...
...The Science proves two things beyond a shadow of a doubt: 1) Planet Earth will be consumed by a furious hellfire unless we reduce our carbon emissions by 92.8 per cent within the next eight years, seven months and two weeks. 2) This warming is DIRECTLY caused by human beings shopping in supermarkets (especially Tesco) and taking cheap flights to Prague.
There is a clear, proven and unquestionable link between human "fun" and the melting of the glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula, which will cause floods in Bangladesh and an epidemic of diarrhoea in Botswana (see the "Fun/Death in Botswana" pie chart produced by Danish climatologists for more information). So why do some people still DENY global warming, and call for a debate (!!!) about it?...
This group believes that these people are mentally disordered. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics...more from Brendon O'Neil, of Spiked here, who observes...environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes....
... That is of course the reason that obsessive compulsive people like myself, who have to drink green blood every full moon, keep attracting, baiting, taunting and trapping greenies. Have a look at the Facebook site (link above) and add to the comments section...More ...here...

The green/left can relax now...

...it's business as usual. The honeymoon with the Obama presidency is over, and normal warfare can resume immediately....Hostilities re-commenced after Todd Stern, chief US climate negotiator in the State Department announced a split (read full text of Stern's speech here) between the US and the IPCC...

"...He argued that pushing for overly ambitious midterm targets is not required by the science and would undermine the political goal..."
NB. Climate Debate Daily featured this article from Quadrant in November 2008 predicting this split...
While we mustn't get too excited and read too much into this inevitable encounter with realism and discord, I predict that this schism marks (as Churchill said) "the end of the beginning."
What strikes me as particularly significant is the sentiment from Stern that the IPCC's mid-term goals were "not required by the science"... Hang on Sir...We have been led to believe that "the science" is settled, the scientists unanimous, and that "the science" predicts the end of the world as we know it, and furthermore that the Obama administration agreed with all the catastrophic scenarios...
Well they still do but.....as Prometheus points out...

...While many people have pointed to the fact that the science of climate change has advanced since the 2007 IPCC report, far more importantly, the ongoing discussion of policy options has rendered the IPCC obsolete. Pachauri has criticized the Obama Administration for its climate policies, so it will be interesting to see how the broader IPCC community reacts to the scaling back of expectations being set forth. This will be especially interesting as many IPCC scientists gather in Copenhagen later this month to “influence policy.” Will the Obama Administration be criticized by the scientists?
The second important point to take from this passage is a realization that climate policy must be governed by common sense and what is politically “possible” and “feasible.”

...so, the debate revolves around ongoing scientific advancement since 2007 and "common sense"and what is "politically possible"(ie, not everyone's fooled by this global warming/climate change BS) ...

...and meanwhile, the mainstream news media ignore the cooling planet...

...Temperatures have plummeted to record or near-record lows in 32 states this winter. On March 2, a global warming protest in Washington, D.C. was buried by nearly a foot of snow. And a new study warns that the Earth could be in for a 30-year cooling trend. Reality is not cooperating with the network news’ global warming theme, yet reporters are unwilling to even discuss the possibility that the Earth is cooling...more here...

Some light relief...

...click above to enlarge...and ditto for the stunning recruitment poster for the BNP. (Never mind that the Spitfire is flown by a Polish airman from a Polish squadron, and that the BNP is stridently anti-E.U...so why would they want representation there ? ) ...never mind, the spin doctors can handle the fall-out...

...and a candid picture of Al Gore (left) dispirited and down and out after the disappointing anti-global warming protest in Washington...

Weather forecasters have always been the butt of jokes...

...particularly in the UK, where foul weather is the national preoccupation...

The UK Met Office famously forecast this past winter to be milder than average...
25 September 2008 ...The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.
Seasonal forecasts from the Met Office are used by many agencies across government, private and third sectors to help their long-term planning.

The meteorological winter is over, and the official results are in :

The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said.
The average mean temperature across December, January and February was 3.1C - the lowest since the winter beginning in 1995, which averaged 2.5C...

...from "milder than average" to "the coldest winter in 13 years" is not just a slight blunder for a quasi-scientific body, on whom many individuals, businesses and institutions depend. Forgive the cynicism, but it seems that Met office personnel may just have made a guess, or let their ideology about global warming interfere with their objectivity, or perhaps just closed their eyes when they threw the dart...
Where are all the satirical TV shows of the past when they're needed ?

...and this, from another sceptic, William Happer Professor of Physics, Princeton University in a testimony to the US senate..."...Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come from large computer calculations, "general circulation models," that try to mimic the behavior of the earth's climate as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. It is true that climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers. But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative..." more here...

Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases...

...Al Gore, in his (in)famous movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, explained that as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, more energy is trapped, warming the planet. This assumption is central to the General Circulation Models (GCMs) and the current consensus on climate change. Michael Hammer, an engineer who specializes in spectroscopy, is sceptical of the GCM but his criticism is more fundamental. In the following paper, using the basic laws of spectroscopy, he shows that a significant portion of energy loss from the Earth’s surface is by direction radiation to space at wavelengths not absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This is in direct contrast to the IPCC explanation that there is low radiation from the Earth’s surface to space and potentially high radiation from the atmosphere to space.
Science is a process of getting it wrong and hopefully learning - on this single issue Michael Hammer and the IPCC can’t both be right.... more from Jennifer Marohasy, here...
...and this startling news too...
... It appears that global cooling recognition may be starting to make headway in the scientific community. We have this Discovery/MSNBC article about a NOAA scientist titled “Warming might be on hold, study finds“
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
And Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years...more, here... and here...

...and from William Briggs, statistician...

...Everybody knows it hasn’t been getting warmer, but it has been getting colder. So, are the climate models which predicted warmer and not colder wrong?
Well, Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee says, “temperatures should have gone up”. But nobody told the temperatures. Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton said, “warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.” Not to worry, “we’ll have explosive warming” Held says.
In other words, the models have been wrong up to now, they are still wrong, but we still believe them....

The bitterness, anger and hysteria levels are rising...

...further to yesterday's post below, allegations have been made that to criticise Al Gore's position on climate change is akin to colluding in mass murder. The attempted imposition of political correctness, is (as predicted by many), a tool of totalitarian thought with its only aim to stifle dissent...
...Pielke Jnr. (Prometheus) responds...
“I am beginning to get a better understanding why some scientists react so strongly to some of the things we write here at Prometheus. For instance, one climate scientist suggests that my calling out Al Gore for misrepresenting the science of disasters and climate change (as well as Andy Revkin’s comparison of that to George Will’s misrepresentations) to be morally comparable to killing 1,000 people. I kid you not. I wonder how many climate scientists share this perspective.” ...see the full exchange here... , and here...

How long before "climate change denial" becomes a thought crime ?

Not long at all...before the thought police come calling...more here...

The fear of global warming catastrophe...

...is the fuel that drives the motor of the green ideologues. If the natural cyclical warming of the planet isn't accompanied by threats of famine, floods, disease, mass migration, hurricanes and plagues of locusts then the non-problem is seen for what it is.
Roger Pielke Jnr. (blogging as Prometheus, right) is established as one of the world's foremost authorities in environmental studies. Al Gore is established as a politician and film maker...
Gore's premise, as expressed in An Inconvenient Truth, that AGW means calamity for humanity, has been discredited as factually incorrect on several counts by UK courts. Pielke Jnr. has been investigating Gore's claim that increased extreme weather conditions, ie hurricanes, are an associated phenomenon of AGW...
In this article, Pielke Jnr. concludes...
...I do not fault Gore for being selective in his presentation of evidence or relying on non-peer reviewed sources. This is of course what politicians do in trying to make the best case possible for the actions that they support. However, when they do so, they run the risk that someone will call them on it....more, here...

Another nail in the coffin of global warming alarmism...

Biography...Roger A. Pielke, Jr. joined the faculty of the University of Colorado in 2001. He is currently Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES). At CIRES Roger serves as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. He also served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the University's Graduate Program in Environmental Studies from 2002-2004. More, here...

Footnote...also see the trillion $ Porkapalooza, here...

The Germans have a pithy word for it...

...called "schadenfreude" (apologies to German speakers for earlier mis- spelling).

Schadenfreude means taking pleasure in others misfortune; an inside out umbrella on a windy day for example, Helen Clark getting a tongue lashing at Waitangi... stop it...I am taking a lot of pleasure from the fact that James Hansen's orchestrated agitprop exercise to draw attention to global warming has met with a frosty response...

...IntelliWeather Monday and hour by hour forecast for Washington, DC.
WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 2 PM EST MONDAY Includes the Counties: District Of Columbia, Arlington/Falls Church/Alexandria
Includes the cities: Washington, Alexandria, Falls Church
Tonight…Snow. Snow accumulation of 4 to 8 inches. Brisk with lows in the lower 20s. North winds 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.
Monday…Cloudy. Snow likely in the morning…Then a chance of snow in the afternoon. Additional snow accumulation around an inch. Total snow accumulation 7 to 8 inches. Brisk with highs in the mid 20s. Northwest winds 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow 70 percent...more from WUWT here...

Yes, yes I know weather isn't climate, nor is it always cooperative...

The world needs heroes, and here's one...

... in an era of stifling political correctness the celebrity had better watch out for the blacklist of our age...and unlike the era of Senator McCarthy it's not leaning towards socialism that earns a place on it. Today's Hollywood star mustn't espouse conservative values or be sceptical about the political ambitions of the green church. The sports star too, must take great care not to offend the liberal elite. Hats off then to Andy Roddick...

...the world has become the 4th Reich, when the United Nations is the fount of Hitler's hate-Jew ideology, it is incumbent upon all the remaining people on the planet who are not Nazis and Nazi sympathizers to support the rare non-Jews who stand up to the 4th Reich.
Andy Roddick was the first tennis player to publicly refuse to play in Hitler's tennis tournament in Dubai because the World Tennis Association wimped out and allowed Dubai to ban a Jewish Israeli player, Shahar Peer. Andy Roddick is a hero...more from ProCommerce, here...

Prime time US TV debate on global warming...

...is a definite possibility after John Kerry laid down a challenge to nationally syndicated columnist George Will.
Says Kerry "...A highly organized, well-funded movement to deny the reality of global climate change has been up and running for a long time, but it doesn’t change the verdict: the problem is real, it’s accelerating, and we have to act. Now. Not years from now...Stubborn or stupid — lets have a real debate and lets have it now.I know George Will well, I respect his intellect and his powers of persuasion — but I’d happily debate him any day on this question so critical to our survival..."
Wonderful news. Let's hope this is not mere bravado from John Kerry and that the chance for real debate doesn't slip away...the question is too important and the cost to us all is too high to ignore. If this debate comes to pass, then further televised debate between scientists would be a logical consequence...and the ratings !
Read more, here...
Someone must write, and possibly is writing a book about this unprecedented debate in modern scientific circles. An outsider can only begin to imagine the hostility within a university or research campus, (Auckland University for example) where staff exchange barbs via the letters column to the local paper. Shades of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim !

Living the green sustainable lifestyle...

...takes dedication, sacrifice and embracing risk...
Greenies concerned about toilet paper, ( OMG it's made from trees ! ) have urged rationing and limited use, ie, recomending no more than 2 wipes and a gentle polish per sitting, but to be even more earth friendly, and in the hope of diminishing their carbon um, bumprint, have now come up with the greener (browner ?) alternative to paper; (and this is not a spoof,) recyclable cloth bum wipes...

...Using cloth toilet wipes actually has many advantages. For one, it's a lot more comfortable and soft on your most delicate body parts. It's also more economical, uses less paper, and saves you those late-night trips to the store. And cloth wipes can be used wet without any of the sopping disintegration that regular toilet paper is prone to. For a discussion of the practical aspects of using cloth toilet wipes, please check out our page detailing How to Use Cloth Wipes... (caution, may offend...)
...Wallypop customer Mary F. prefers to keep her wipes stacked in a basket next to the toilet, and her used wipes go in the wet bag hanging from the toilet paper holder...
...For some people, making the switch to cloth toilet wipes is a huge leap, that's true. But it doesn't need to be!
...Lately, with all the media attention, there've been a lot of naysayers talking about the stench. I can honestly say, our wipes don't stink...

...They even have a hemp alternative variety, and they don't stink...more, from Wallypop Family Wipes, here...

Corporate motto of Wallypop Family Wipes...Let us Explore your Niche Market...

And he's not even a proctologist...

...I have seen some ugly, ugly things this week. Some of them have focused on me for views that I have, but others involve people I know and respect. People who know better, or should know better, are engaging in tactics that can only be described as bullying, strong arming, character assassination, threatening, and McCarthy-esque. Most of these people characterize themselves as progressives...more here...

...Roger Pielke Jnr. (Prometheus) indulges the left, and their love of Orwellian newspeak by describing their self-appointed, hypocritical righteousness as "progressive". (Click on image to enlarge.) The left, assisted by a compliant news media, have misappropriated many words and phrases in the English language; social conscience, politically aware, gay, caring etc, etc, but none grates as much as "progressive," when describing their blindfold backwards march to socialism...

...Pielke Jnr's comment above comes after a hostile interview with a global warming alarmist here...

The left/liberal "progressive" these days is the true nostalgic, old fashioned Tory conservative; intolerant of dissent, arrogant and hostile to ideas other than those that are "ideologically sound"...

...and quote for the day, from Dr William Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton University...

"...I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind, ... the frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2...are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits of prohibition were wildly exaggerated, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapour and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player...” more here...

Japan's Energy Commission dismisses the IPCC, Aussies launch an online petition...

...is it safe to say that Japanese scientists look sideways at IPCC doomcasters ? or that they have spotted a chink in the IPCC armour ? or that they regard the IPCC as a load of ah so's ?
(that last one from Obnoxio the clown.)
...Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.
Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.
One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.
The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan’s native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.
JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document - the first to appear in the West in any form...more from the 1988 Science Blog of the Year here...
and from the comments...
...the...leading Japanese party is about to loose (the) next elections. Their probable successors have declared to pursue a more Asian focused policy, and not to follow the US as uncritically as before.
I wonder if greenpeace’s extremely aggressive attacks...may have contributed to this...
...from Australia, news that The Australian Environment Foundation today launched an online petition opposing the federal government’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”. The petition will eventually be presented to Parliament by Dr Dennis Jensen, MHR ...more here...

Being green, "is not cool anymore"...

...Today's climate change hysteria is on the wane; in spite of greenpeace agitprop, James Hansen's scare mongering and media adoration of bad news... there is an increasing and ongoing dissent within political and environmental circles, and a palpable sense of boredom about doomsday scenarios. In this essay by Steven Hayward, a clear parallell with "yesterday's crisis mongers" (the 60's and 70's population control movement) is clearly evident...

...More than 30 years ago political scientist Anthony Downs wrote in the Public Interest of a five-step "issue-attention cycle" through which public enthusiasm for an issue gradually diminishes as we come to recognize the high cost of drastic action, and that the nature of the problem was exaggerated or misconceived. The environment, he wrote, would have a longer cycle than most issues because of its diffuse nature, but it appears that the public is finally arriving at the late stages of Downs's cycle. Opinion surveys show that the public isn't jumping on the global warming bandwagon despite a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and full-scale media hysteria. More broadly there are signs that "green fatigue" is setting in. Magazine publishers recently reported that their special Earth Day "green" issues generated the lowest newsstand sales of all issues published in 2008. "Suddenly Being Green Is Not Cool Any More," read a London Times headline in August....

... A few environmentalists on the left understand the profound defects of the radical green approach to politics, along with the conventional green approach to global warming. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, self-described "progressives" and authors of one of the most challenging recent books on the environment, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, recognize and lament the authoritarianism of conventional environmentalism. "Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in quasi-authoritarian politics," Nordhaus and Shellenberger observe. While environmentalists like Eckersley embrace the postmodern language of "privilege" to denigrate traditional individual rights, Nordhaus and Shellenberger point up the obvious irony that it is environmentalism that is making the boldest claim to be given the most privileged position in politics: "The problem is not simply that it is difficult to answer the question ‘Who speaks for nature?' but rather that there is something profoundly wrong with the question itself. It rests on the premise that some people are better able to speak for nature, the environment, or a particular place than others. This assumption is profoundly authoritarian." ...more (well worth a read) here...

This post brought to you by the green movement...

...this, in an unusually serious vein, from the maestro Iowahawk...

...This is Bakouma Kpatekatola, a young man from the West African nation of Togo. In 2003, when Bakouma was 9 years old, my family became his sponsor through the Childreach-Plan USA organization. In the years since we became occasional pen pals; a few times a year we'd get a letter from him, in his native French, along with an English translation from his caseworker. Sometimes he spoke of coming to America. At Christmas the letters would contain a photo, which we ritually magnetted up on the fridge to chronicle his growth. We reciprocated with our family pictures. I sometimes wondered if he wondered about us like we wondered about him. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I didn't really notice when we didn't receive his annual Christmas letter last year. Yesterday we received a letter from his caseworker explaining why: Bakouma died in December of malaria. He was 14 years old...more here...

...ah, the hypocrisy of the "caring" left...Denis Dutton made Iowahawk's exact point in the NZ Herald in 2002...Why fear mongering greens doom children to death... remember this, when the attractive, naive young greenpeace volunteer accosts you in the mall next time...

Quotes for the day...

...the continuing reliance on data from Munich Re (insurance company) does not solve the basic issue, which is that attribution of the increasing toll of disasters to human-caused climate change remains speculative at best and not supported by science. To the contrary, increasing societal exposure and growing wealth in vulnerable locations are the overwhelming drivers of the increasing losses, a conclusion well supported by many studies...more from Roger Pielke Jnr (Prometheus) here...

...and note, "Fear is to the insurance industry what oil is to Exxon"... Anon.

The failure of multiculturalism...

...in Britain is leading to the steady rise of the British National Party (BNP). Decried as racist extremists by the political and media establishment, the BNP is gathering momentum with a recent win for a council seat in Kent, and is tipped for a European Parliament seat and other victories in the near future.

The left are of course aghast, but after decades of insult, the leftwing taunt of "racist" rings hollow. If they have been labelled racist so often, reason the voters, why not vote for a similarly labelled party ?

Melanie Philips explains...Britain is changing before our very eyes. As a result of the current rate of immigration, within half a century the projected steep increase in the UK’s population will be entirely made up of people not born in Britain — most of whom will have come from the Third World.
Meanwhile, the fanatically imposed doctrine of multiculturalism has brought about the erosion or denigration of Britain’s history, religion and identity, leaving generations of children — both indigenous and immigrant — appallingly ignorant of the common culture they need to share.It is entirely reasonable to want one’s country to express its own culture through its institutions, laws and practices. Yet those who defend this principle are called ‘racist’.
Britain is witnessing an alarming growth of separate Muslim enclaves ruled by a parallel Islamic Sharia law. It is entirely reasonable to want one system of law for all. Yet those who say so are called ‘Islamophobic’...more here...

...and news that the radical islamist MP, Lord Ahmed is to wear the striped pajamas for 12 weeks...The peer also faces expulsion from the Labour Party following his jail sentence.
A Labour Party spokesman said: "The Labour Party does not comment on individual cases, but under the party's rules any member who receives a custodial sentence is subject to automatic exclusion."

... Don't drop the soap M'lord...more here...

The Sorrow and the Pity...

...was the title of a 1971 film about French capitulation and cooperation with Hitler in WW2.
The movie title captioned a stunning photo (right) taken in 1940, of a weeping middle aged Frenchman watching the triumphant Wehrmacht march down the Champs Elysee. His tears are likely to have stemmed from the shame of French defeat and capitulation, and the realisation that the deaths of millions of his own friends and countrymen at Verdun and along the Western front in WW1 had been pointless and worthless slaughter...
...We now read that the Britain, the universal bastion of freedom, is to its eternal shame, the first EU country to bar an elected European legislator (Geert Wilders) from its territory for his political opinions...
...when two members of the House of Lords invited Wilders to give a screening of his film, the rabble-rousing Labour peer Lord Ahmed threatened to put 10,000 people in the streets. The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, warned Wilders that he would not be admitted to the U.K., since "your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the U.K." Wilders came anyway, on a British Midlands flight packed with 50 journalists and cameramen.When he was turned away as promised, he called British prime minister Gordon Brown "the biggest coward in Europe..."
...The problem is that Britain has--by act of Parliament--subordinated its own laws to the European Convention on Human Rights. Brussels, not Westminster, sets the rules. In the human rights context Wilders is a fellow European. And the British action sets a new precedent for relations among EU citizens.
...more, here...
...Winston Churchill, who promised and delivered to Hitler uncompromising and never ending resistance, and every British citizen who has served his country and values its ideals would join the unknown weeping Frenchman for the sorrow and the pity of sacrifice and abandoned principles. Although there is still some life in a few of them...
...from cantankerous, foul mouthed Old Holborn, comes a defiant and triumphant war cry...
...but compliance and cowed obedience from the European left...
...In the confrontation with Islamism, the Left has abandoned its principles. In the past it stood for cutting the ties to convention and tradition, but in the case of Islam it reinstates them in the name of multiculturalism. It is proud to have fought for women's rights, but in Islam it tolerates head scarves, arranged marriages, and wife-beating. It once stood for equal rights, now it preaches a right to difference – and thus different rights. It proclaims freedom of speech, but when it comes to Islam it coughs in embarrassment. It once supported gay rights, but now keeps silent about Islam's taboo on homosexuality. The West's long-due process of self-relativisation at the end of the colonial era, which was promoted by postmodernist and structuralist ideas, has led to cultural relativism and the loss of criteria....more, here...

Question for the day...

...the Poms want laughing boy Abu Qatada (left) deported. Hardly surprising, as he is Osama bin Laden's right hand man in Europe.
...Cranmer hears that Abu Qatada has won compensation from HM Government (ie the taxpayer) for the years he has spent in prison. This is by order of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.This is lunacy, when one considers that Mr Qatada could have walked free at any time if he had simply agreed to leave Britain...
Cranmer gently asks...
...Abu Qatada is concerned that his enforced repatriation to Jordan is likely to result in him being severely punished, even executed, for his alleged involvement in acts of terrorism. Again, Cranmer, does not mean to be thick. But why should those Muslims who wish to see Shari’a law in the UK be protected from its punitive excesses when they are obliged to go and live in a more Shari’a compliant country?...more here...

Perhaps the questions should also be put to all the other terrorist/crypto-refugees who make the same demands...

Stop the monkey business...

...says kapa haka judge.

(For the culturally unaware, kapa haka is an essential component of our New Zealand school curriculum. Kapa haka is based on the Maori traditional challenge, and encompasses song and dance.)

A judge at the national kapa haka festival (contestants at left) is reported as saying... "...there are some people who don themselves in all sorts of regalia, short capes, and when they roam the stage they look more like monkeys than Maori. They go hu hu ha. That's not Maori. Charles Darwin would be a proud man - he was the one who said we came from apes."

We are indeed a wise, superior and tolerant society here in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Nod nod, wink wink. Such a publically aired comment elsewhere could be interpreted as an ethnic slur and mean public shaming, dismissal and ridicule...more, here...

The green dilemma...

...revolves around the provision of safe, secure, cheap energy supplies. The fundamentalist red/greens (the ideological force behind the green church,) hate the idea of abundant, cheap and safe energy, hence their laughable and ludicrous "precautionary principle" . Their vision of humankind is that we are all programmable socialist robots at best, at worst a cancer on mother earth. However, deeper thinkers within the green and Labour movements see green socialism/nihilism as an albatross around their collective necks. For example, Tom Harris UK Labour MP, writes on his blog... for some...environmentalists the fight against global warming has another aim: the defeat of capitalism, of economic growth, of prosperity.Which is why I find their arguments so nauseating...(Tom, which green/left faction is the most "progressive" ?)

The differentiating point between red/green socialists and genuine environmentalists is their respective attitude to nuclear energy. Within the left, the argument has forced an ideological split. In Germany the Fundi's hate the pro-nuclear Realo's leading to a dysfunctional environmental movement. On the blogosphere the war rages on... Check this out and the entertaining comments/argument after it...

...Modern reactors are incredibly safe, with physics-based 'passive' safety systems requiring no user-operated or mechanical control to shut down the reaction. Indeed, a certification assessment for the 'Generation III+' Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) put the risk of a core meltdown as severe as the one which occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) in 1979 at once every 29 million years. For reference, the TMI incident resulted in no deaths. Similarly, comparing the inherently unsafe Chernobyl reactor design to an ESBWR is a bit like comparing an army revolver to a water gun. Fast spectrum reactors, also known as 'Generation IV', are able to use 99.5 per cent of the energy in uranium. There is enough energy in already-mined uranium and stored plutonium from existing stockpiles to supply all the world's power needs for over a century before we even need to mine any more uranium. Once we do start mining again, there is enough energy in proven uranium deposits to supply the entire world for at least 50,000 years. Fast reactors can be used to burn all existing reserves of plutonium and the waste stream of the past and present generation of thermal reactors...more here...

Quote for the day...

...Scientific authoritarianism, weak or strong, has no role in climate politics.

Roger Pielke Jnr, (Prometheus) criticising megalomaniac doomster James Hansen, more here...

...Pielke Jnr and Senior have differing views on AGW, although both condemn the bastardisation of science for political ends. Hence the quote above, and the comment...
...Climate politics is collapsing because of political realities, and not real or perceived changes in how people see the science. As I have often argued, in the ongoing battle between climate scientists and skeptics there will be disproportionate carnage, because the climate scientists have so much more to lose, and not just as individuals, but also for the broader field, which includes many people simply on the sidelines....More from Prometheus here...

...and thought for the day...

...from columnist Johann Hari... ...It would be a betrayal ...to apologize for what I wrote. Yes, if we speak out now, there will be turbulence and threats, and some people may get hurt. But if we fall silent – if we leave the basic human values of free speech, feminism and gay rights undefended in the face of violent religious mobs – then many, many more people will be hurt in the long term. Today, we have to use our right to criticise religion, or lose it...read what Johann Hari wrote in The Independent, here...
...and the riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who published the article above that followed...
...My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states have successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it...more here...

Where is the public outcry over this ongoing suppression of free speech and its entrenchment by the UN?
In the 1980's as a member of Amnesty International I wrote dozens of letters to heads of state protesting about human rights infringements. We based our protests on the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. In particular...
Article 18. "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief...
Article 19. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression...

Today in response to Islamic threats and intimidation the UN is diluting its own 1948 raison d'etre, and to their shame Amnesty International is more concerned over the rights of Islamic fifth columnists than the people they oppress...

From the Manchester Guardian again...

...an organ which risks becoming a regular source of global warming scepticism (in spite of the over-excited George "Moonbeam" Monbiot, its environmental editor), this from Patrick Michaels...

...so, Antarctic cooling and warming are both now consistent with computer models of dreaded global warming caused by humans. In reality, the warming is largely at the beginning of the record – before there should have been much human-induced climate change. New claims that both warming and cooling of the same place are consistent with forecasts isn't going to help the credibility of climate science, and, or reduce the fatigue of Americans regarding global warming. Have climate alarmists beaten global warming to death? The Pew Research Centre recently asked over 1,500 people to rank 20 issues in order of priority. Global warming came in dead last. We can never run the experiment to see if indeed it is the constant hyping of this issue that has sent it to the bottom of the priority ladder. But, as long as scientists blog on that both warming and cooling of the coldest place on earth is consistent with their computer models, why should anyone believe them? More here...

...and again in the Guardian, this time from Bjorn Lomborg (right), re the forthcoming round of climate change talks in Copenhagen. (Waterloo may be a more apt venue for the alarmists,)... doomed to failure he thinks... more here...

...and Roger Pielke Snr. alerts us to the curse of "yellow journalism"...
...since papers and weblogs have documented that the warming is being over-estimated in recent years, and, thus, these sources of information are readily available to the reporters, there is, therefore, no other alternative than these reporters are deliberately selecting a biased perspective to promote a particular viewpoint on climate. The reporting of this news without presenting counter viewpoints is clearly an example of yellow journalism;
“Journalism that exploits, distorts, or exaggerates the news to create sensations and attract readers.”
When will the news media and others realize that by presenting such biased reports, which are easily refuted by real world data, they are losing their credibility among many in the scientific community as well as with the public...more here

...and a very interesting (albeit a bit pointy headed) debate re AGW at Skeptiko, here...

Here's a "tipping point"...

...alarmists like eco-pornographer Al Bore and James Hansen like to warn that we must act immediately to save the planet. "Tipping points" are frequently mentioned; the moment in time where calamity is an imminent inevitability, but note this...
...Sceptics now have a tipping point of their own, a moment in time where the crack in the alarmist case widens to a chasm. From WattsupWithThat...

...today’s Guardian has a lead story unlike anything we have seen before.
‘Apocalyptic climate predictions’ mislead the public, say experts’
Experts at Britain’s top climate research centre have launched a blistering attack on scientific colleagues and journalists who exaggerate the effects of global warming. The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world, says recent “apocalyptic predictions” about Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that global warming does not exist...
...The Met Office has been badly burned by their seasonal mispredictions of warm UK weather, particularly during the current winter and the last two summers. But particularly interesting to me are the comments about Arctic Ice. (Caption above... "Dr Vicky Pope claims losses of Arctic ice could be due to natural fluctuations in the weather")
I was about to write an article forecasting the return of the Arctic to near normal ice conditions this summer, based on the light polar drift this winter. It appears that The Met Office agrees with that prognosis.The walls are tumbling down in the UK. President Obama promised to align with the Europeans about global warming. Will he keep his promise?
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall... Pink Floyd

The (AGW) walls are tumbling down in the UK...more, here...
...and the original article from the Guardian, here...

The Australian bushfires...

... link here . Click on photo to enlarge, red dots represent fires.
Photo uplifted from the NASA site and well worth viewing as a high resolution image at link above. I can see my house (kidding) in the bright sunshine, and under the smoke the home of a dear friend and his family in Benalla. Hope things are OK mate...
...worth pondering too, while you're viewing the full image, the fact that the atmosphere over the globe contains approximately 380 parts per million of CO2; and that this whole debate re catastrophic global warming, is whether another 100 parts per million will melt Greenland and inundate the planet...
...see The FatBigot for a wider perspective on these figures...
...and read the angry anti-green backlash over the fires...
...So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies...
...from the Sydney Morning Herald here...
...and from The Melbourne Age...
...and this commentary from Germaine Greer (!) in The Australian... (thanks to cartoonist Zeg... click on cartoon to enlarge)

...Liam Sheahan was one of the few whose home survived the bushfires in Australia. As you can see from the photo, he cut himself a firebreak a hundred yards wide all around his home.
The council, however, would only permit him a firebreak six metres wide and took him to court for disobeying them. This action cost Mr Sheahan nearly $100,000 in costs and fines.
Even with the wide firebreak he had illegally put in place, it was a close-run thing. His house caught light eight times as the bushfire passed. His is now the only house standing in the area...

..."the council" had better have massive indemnity insurance for the legal actions that will surely follow. Apart from the total devastating loss of property it may be argued they have blood on their hands...H/T Bishop Hill, ...

...an Australian poll, here, asks "Was conservation policy to blame for the bushfires ?" 62% answered yes, 38% answered no.

...and while the fires still rage, news that the Royal Commission of Enquiry will have the "broadest possible" terms of reference...this will allow Justice Teague to look at early warning systems, “green” planning codes, permanent firebreaks, fire bunkers and other ideas canvassed in The Australian and other media outlets last week... more here...

More on the Ibuki space probe...

...for those like eco-porn kings Al Bore and James Hansen who claim the debate is over, the science settled... the Ibuki space probe will collect data for 5 years to help determine atmospheric levels of methane and CO2. Ibuki is part of an ongoing programme aimed at determining whether the planet is warming or cooling, and helping to identify the reasons for temperature changes . ...
...The Ibuki can log incontrovertible evidence, observing over fifty thousand locations every hundred minutes. It's pretty much the best measurement you can get short of confiscating the atmosphere and sticking it through a spectrometer. Whether the data will support the current greenhouse gas scenarios or suggest that something else is taking place remains to be seen, but whatever it says people will have to listen or brand themselves as utterly ignorable from then on. When someone actually comes back with numbers based on "leaving the planet for a better view," you either accept them or put on your novelty "I ignore what doesn't suit me" baseball cap (with complementary blinkers)...more, here...

Now, even The Pope and Environment Minister Sam Wilson MP (who ?) has joined in...

...and when the late Pope John Paul stepped into the ring he helped to dismantle communism.

The wonderful Cranmer points out that Sam Wilson MP is in exemplary spiritual company by pointing out the pseudo-science behind Al Gore's environmental fantasies...

...Sam Wilson MP is Northern Ireland’s Environment Minister, (take note Rodney Hide) and he is persuaded that man-made global warming is an ‘hysterical pseudo-religion’. And so he has halted a government advertising campaign – which gave people ‘the impression that by turning off the standby light on their TV they could save the world from melting glaciers and being submerged in 40ft of water’ – denouncing it as ‘insidious propaganda’...

...Sammy Wilson will find a religio-political soul-mate in Pope Benedict XVI. For he too has dared to challenge the orthodoxy of the political aspects of the global warming movement around the world. While Sammy Wilson calls for ‘reasoned debate’, the Pope has also demanded the application of the scientific method to counter the hysteria surrounding the half-baked theories of pseudo-scientists and ignoramuses like Al Gore. The Pope is proving himself to be the defender of the protestants of postmodernity, confronting head-on the climate change ‘prophets of doom’ with the warning that any solutions to global warming ‘must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology’. Truth is not made by consensus...

...he is quite right: no amount of money is ever going to control solar activity, no matter how well-meaning the religious fervour which underpins the theory, or how sincere the fanatical zealots who propagate it. The notion of man-made global warming is a political agenda to deprive people of their liberty, property, and livelihoods. They shall be taxed in their homes, in their cars, on aeroplanes and on trains. They might even be taxed for breathing...more here...
...and how the panic-stricken BBC report the shocking news...

The treason of the intellectuals...

...is nothing new.
While voices of dissent are being raised within the scientific community regarding AGW, some of the opposing voices are branding dissenters as deniers, cranks and flat earthers and comparing them to war criminals. And while backbiting, jealousy and intimidation among intellectuals may be perennial, within science such discord and know it all dogmatism is somewhat rarer. Dominating the scientific debate of AGW today is "the debate is over" sentiment espoused by NASA's James Hansen.
In the 1930's news was filtering through to the West about wide scale mass famine produced by Stalin in the Soviet Union. During those times many Western intellectuals, convinced that communism would usher in a new world of brotherly love, blithely ignored or downplayed the tragedy faced by the Soviet people. Those in the West who articulated their concern were treated with contemptuous disdain by the generally left wing intelligentsia.
This episode of intellectual shame, intimidation and dishonesty has been covered by Robert Conquest in his book The Great Terror.
In this book, Conquest accuses Western intellectuals of denying the full scale of the famine and attacks their politically blinkered and morally ambivalent views as "an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale." He later wrote that the Western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s, and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one: "Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms. To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists, and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented, is not a rational act." (Wikipedia.)

The AGW parallels are there, but today, thanks to free speech within the blogosphere the dissenters possessing "contradictory evidence" are being heard...

H/T PKH.

The history of the great global warming scam...

...The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle saw the opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy for doing measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute's areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago, who was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle tagged on to Suess studies and co-authored a paper with him in 1957. The paper raises the possibility that the carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming...

...Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation's bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meetings...

more, here...

and this, in a nutshell is what it's all about...

....Now that pretty much all (OK, all) evidence now directly refutes the global warming premise–ice core data, lack of relationship between CO2 and temperatures, missing greenhouse gas signature, falling temperatures last ten years while CO2 is soaring, etc.–the entire theory is like a house almost completely consumed by termites, and ready to collapse into dust with the next strong wind. What will that do to the scientific and journalistic community? It will set back their credibility for years, maybe decades. By suggesting that the “scientific debate” is now a side show, and the real debate is on a political level, Dr. Pielke I believe is trying to cushion the backlash against the scientific community that is becoming inevitable. That’s an honorable goal and I hope it succeeds. The scientific community is going to have to go through an era of soul-searching to make sure such a vast amount of mis-information is not served up to society ever again...

...more here...

Another Obama appointee bites the (dead hobo) dust...

...caution, satire alert...WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary and Al Gore lookalike Stephen Chu (left) announced his resignation this morning amid new reports that Alameda County workers had unearthed more than a dozen additional dead hobo bodies at his former home in Berkeley, California. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist had been the subject of a week-long controversy after he amended his White House application form to declare "3 or 4" hobo corpses in his crawl space, but after this morning's discovery, Chu said he felt he could no longer serve as an effective spokesman for Administration energy policy.
"Getting America on the road to energy independence requires a secretary who is focused full time on developing comprehensive strategies for alternative fuels, rather than a political distraction over a handful of decomposing drifters," said Chu. "I'm afraid I am no longer that person."
Chu said he would return to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he will resume his scientific work investigating particle dynamics and local homeless shelters. President Obama said he would accept the resignation with regret, and expressed hope that a new Secretary could be named within the week.
"It was an honest mistake on Dr. Chu's part," said the President. "The section of the screening questionnaire about dead hobos has been confusing for a lot of nominees. In his defense it only specifies 'basement/crawl space/storage shed,' so I can somewhat understand why he didn't mention the ones discovered by the backhoe yesterday. That said, it's important that we move forward with revitalized American energy leadership. I'd like to thank Dr. Chu for his service and delicious home-made beef jerky, and wish him well in his future endeavors...
... Sources inside the administration say the President is favoring University of Texas petroleum geologist / registered sex offender G. Harland Tellis as Chu's replacement. Tellis is expected to face stiff opposition from netroots blog sites like the Huffington Post, who have thrown their support behind British pop singer Gary Glitter...

More from the ever vigilant Iowahawk, here...

The Collapse of Climate Policy and the Sustainability of Climate Science...

...We are witnessing the end of an era. An era in which some politicians have attempted to use and distort science to achieve their political goals.Churchill had an inkling of an unholy alliance between science and politics when he warned of "... a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science..." Here, Roger Pielke Jnr. addresses the beginning of the end for the marriage of climate science and politics...

...The political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing. If you are not aware of this fact you will be very soon. The collapse is not due to the cold winter in places you may live or see on the news. It is not due to years without an increase in global temperature. It is not due to the overturning of the scientific consensus on the role of human activity in the global climate system.

It is due to the fact that policy makers and their political advisors (some trained as scientists) can no longer avoid the reality that targets for stabilization such as 450 ppm (or even less realistic targets) are simply not achievable with the approach to climate change that has been at the focus of policy for over a decade. Policies that are obviously fictional and fantasy are frequently subject to a rapid collapse...

Climate politics is collapsing because of political realities, and not real or perceived changes in how people see the science. As I have often argued, in the ongoing battle between climate scientists and skeptics there will be disproportionate carnage, because the climate scientists have so much more to lose, and not just as individuals, but also for the broader field, which includes many people simply on the sidelines....More from Prometheus here...