Cause for alarm?

“During a March 2009 closed-door meeting, Department of Energy senior advisor Matthew Rogers outlined his “dilemma” over how to comply with his new mandate to quickly spend $36.7 billion in grants and loan guarantees from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka, the Stimulus Act) on renewable energy and climate change. ”
Easy. Buy a battery-powered Lotus Elise (or “Tesla”) for every official. Or better two. So one can recharge while he/she drives the other.

Perhaps all the alarmists could be provided with large white sandwich boards to increase albedo, thus helping to cool the planet. No printing on them of course.

“They’re pouring tens of billions of dollars into the effort.”
…… Not quite right. They are misappropriating our hard earned tax dollars, is more like it. They never use their own money.
In Australia our Labor government has even included Climate Change spending in the foreign Aid budget. …. Also money for “enviromental programes” gets redirected to climate change groups under the guise of “educating awareness”….. It’s a G’damn rort and the Labor party is happy to oblige.

Amazing piece! This year we have seen in a number of nations that the public is not as stupid as the UN/IPCC would like to believe.

The polite style of discourse in the academic and scientific worlds is traditional and appropriate for an abstract discussion. But that is not appropriate in the AGW attack on the West. From time to time, readers new to these issues should be directed to a website such as
http://www.green-agenda.com
to learn the extreme political and philosophical attitudes behind the AGW facade. There is a lot more than grant money for a subculture of professors at stake. The AGW hoax is a deliberate and well-funded attack on all industrial nations and anyone to the right of Karl Marx. Lysenko was a choir boy by comparison.

“MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW. DECEMBER1898
ARE OUR WINTERS CHANGING’?
By ALFRED J. HENRY.
The frequency and severity of the cold waves that have
visited the soutbern portion of the United States in late
years, and the fact that the present winter season began
much earlier than usual have led a number of people to bake
inquiry as to what are the reasonable expectations for the
future ‘? Is it prolsable that a more or less permanent change
in the character of the winters has taken place? This problem
is important since it involves a possible readjustment
of present economic conditions. It is not new, nor is it any
nearer a clear and definite solution than it was fifty years ago.
According to the trend of the best thought of to-day the climate
is not perceptibly changing. The mean temperatures
obtained by the earliest instrumental observations, both in
this country and abroad, show no differences greater than
might reasonably be due to the character of the instruments
used and their environment.
The impression that the climate is changing is partly due
to the fact that in recent times an account of every severe
frost and freeze that occurs in the South is sent broadcast to
all parts of the country, whereas, during earlier times no record
was preserved except of the very severe freezes. This
very lack of information respecting the earlier minor freezes
prevents us in a measure from asserting in a more positive
manner a rule of climate that appears to be common to all
parts of the United States, viz, that periods of great refrigeration
generally extend over several years.”
And today, with the focus on every thing that can be found to bolster the claim of Global Warming, no matter how trivial, convoluted or isolated, is our weather changing once again?
Or, is the obsessive preoccupation with warming a fatal attraction, whereas the real movement of climate in the populated zones of the Globe are going in exaclty the opposite direction, catching many off-balance?
Yes, I do believe it is an obsession.

I hear them talking all the time on the CNBC business channel about countries like China going green and fighting climate change. Fighting climate change is a losing battle as the climate has bee changing for millions of years and cannot be stopped. I just want to rip the TV off the wall sometimes. The TV propaganda machine is Earth’s enemy. They must be stopped.

It now also causes UFO sighthings….
“There has been an unusual number of sightings recently.
“Some experts believe it could be linked to global warming and craft from outer space are appearing because they are concerned about what man is doing to this planet.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2261941/British-UFO-sightings-at-bizarre-levels.html

Reading warmist press releases, you’d think the sun was already expanding into a red giant.
Oddly, if it was they would downplay it because it would be natural instead of human influenced.

“It may not be corruption. But it sure skews the research, conclusions and policy recommendations.”
If squandering billions of taxpayer dollars on distorted scientific research in order to skew public policy and create a perpetual self-sustaining gravy train of political and corporate kickbacks is not corruption — then what the hell is?!

All true and deplorable. But why give an out to them with …”We’re not suggesting fraud or corruption by Caldeira or anyone else”…??? I do suggest that the entire case for global warming rests on corruption and scientific fraud. It starts with Hansen’s testimony in 1988 when he claimed that global warming had started and that CO2 we were putting into the air was the cause. He already had a computer projection then showing that 2020 would be one to one and a half degrees warmer than the seventies. This energized the global warming movement and brought us IPCC, Kyoto, and Copenhagen among other things. But satellites have been measuring global temperatures for over thirty years and they simply cannot see that warming that Hansen is talking about. What they do see in this time slot are temperature oscillations, up and down by half a degree for twenty years, but no rise until 1998. That is twenty years after Hansen’s talk. Real warming began with the 1998 super El Nino, not with Hansen’s bogus warming. It was caused by a storm surge in the Indo-Pacific region that dumped a large amount of warm water at the beginning of the equatorial countercurrent near New Guinea. The countercurrent brought it to South America where it ran ashore, spread out, and caused the observed warm peak of the Super El Nino. Its aftermath was the twenty-first century high, a run of six warm years that ended with a La Nina cooling in 2008. Its cause was left-over warm water from the super El Nino. Its average temperature was 0.3 degrees higher than the average of the nineties. This, and not some greenhouse effect, makes the first decade of the century exceptionally warm. And since Hansen’s warming is non-existent and subsequent warming was not carbonaceous we can say that anthropogenic global warming has never been observed. But now comes the real crime: NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office temperature curves all show a “late twentieth century warming” in the eighties and nineties, just as Hansen testified. How is this possible? To find out what is going on I compared their temperature curves with satellite temperature curves. Figures 16, 17 and 20 of “What Warming?” show these comparisons. It turns out that they are all cooked. As in falsified. Lets take the HadCRUT3 from the Met Office and observe what they have done. It has the same resolution as the satellite curve does and the El Nino peaks in both curves can be matched up. They start out by cherry picking the peaks and then raising up the valleys in between to change a horizontal temperature trend into a rising temperature trend. But this works only with the first four El Ninos. The fifth one is out of line and too low for them so it gets raised up. The super El Nino is next and it helps them out but the twenty-first century high is too low for their taste so the entire right side of the curve gets raised up. NASA (Land-Ocean, from Hansen 2006) starts out exactly like Hadcrut3. It almost looks like someone passed out the word to stay with the peaks and adjust the low values as needed. But this works only until 1990 and after that they had to do their own data manipulation. Where HadCRUT3 lifted the curve NASA does not have the nerve to do it and their twenty-first century high is in the right place. NOAA is also in the game and they simply eliminated the low values between peaks and then lifted the right side. This is colossal scientific fraud. Trying to extrapolate this fraudulent warming as the IPCC modelers do will produce nothing but GIGO. And since three organizations are involved it is also a criminal conspiracy. The entire global warming movement rests upon this fake warming but Uncle Sam not only keeps funding it but is taking their policy advice too that will destroy our economy if followed.

Finally! Someone writes an article which gets right to the heart of the Global Warming Mania, namely the billions in Climate Ca$h being consumed by our friends in the Global Warming Industry – Bravo!
“Clearly, too much money is being spent on one-sided global warming advocacy cloaked as “research,” not enough on natural causes and adaptation. Despite the best of intentions, too much money can corrupt, or at least skew the science.”
And, as someone pointed out above, it’s NOT their money – it’s OUR hard-earned tax money they’re spending like drunken sailors. It irks me to no end to think that 2009 “stimulus” funds were actually dumped into climate “research.”

…as best I can tell, the origin of “runaway global warming” really took off with Hansen in the 1970’s. He was an astronomy student at University of Iowa and studied the atmosphere of Venus (see related WUWT threads on this topic), and spread great fear that, if we reached a certain tipping point, the Earth would evolve into something drastically different and horrible, Venus-like.
Here’s a recent document by Dr. Hansen:
http://www.mediafire.com/?trm9gnmznde
On Page 22 of 39, Dr. Hansen says:
“The Venus syndrome is the greatest threat to the planet, to humanity’s continued existence.”
AGW crowd have a real problem with their SOCO (single overriding communication objective). Their SOCO changes minute-by-minute…..on some days, it is catastrophic melting & loss of coastal areas, the next it is death of polar bears, then hurricanes etc. etc. Each scenario is more extreme than the next.
They’ve lost the trust and even the interest of the public, and really seem to resent “one man, one vote.” Oh well, tough nails, I hope we can stall off the really drastic economic and geoengineering debacles that many propose. Loss of faith in AGW seems to be a worldwide movement, which is interesting.

Global Warming has caused thursday nights to be on tuesday mornings instead now

Frank K.: May 23, 2010 at 8:23 pm
And, as someone pointed out above, it’s NOT their money – it’s OUR hard-earned tax money they’re spending like drunken sailors.
The difference is that a drunken sailor will stop spending when he runs out of money.

Slightly O/T
pat says: May 23, 2010 at 7:20 pm and u.k.(us) says: May 23, 2010 at 7:51 pm
“22 May: Consulate General of the United States, Shanghai: U.S. Commitment to Environmental Sustainability at Shanghai Expo ..Grant from Alcoa Foundation helps make the USA pavilion green”
Coffee over the keyboard moments again guys!
I have been in Shanghai for the last 3 years. First we had to put up with the upheaval over the Olympics and for the last year its been the bloody Expo!
GREEN???? I think the Consulate General has probably not been out of the U.S. compound for 18 months!
Putting aside the Expo site itself and the impressive engineering that has gone into it, Shanghai has once again been ripped apart and painted! Imagine ripping up the many parquet block pavements and replacing them! Miles and miles of the bloody stuff, forcing pedestrians to chance there luck with Shanghai’s fine drivers! The crazy thing is, the old pavements were in good condition but I guess if someone has a budget to spend..they find a way to spend it!
China has spent an estimated $4.2 billion on this fun, get together, so how the Consulate General can claim to be “Green” is beyond my confused brain. The amount of air travel alone that the inept U.S. organizers ( http://shanghaiscrap.com/?p=2926 ) have made would be in the “Carbon Budget” of the building? What about the Expo visitors travel? Make me wonder how they plan to “Green Cool” the building in the next few, hot, humid, months!
Putting all that all aside, I am sure Anthony, with his love affair with L.E.D. lighting, would love to visit the Expo simply for the light show each evening. It even made a cynical old goat like me stand open mouthed watching it!

A possible “cause for alarm” might, repeat might, be EQs in the region of Katla in Iceland.
Lo & behold!
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/myrdalsjokull/
Steinunn Jakobsdottir, a geophysicist from the Icelandic Meteorological Office, told the BBC that the Eyjafjallajokull volcano was “kind of dormant for the moment”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/10144911.stm

“It may not be corruption.”
No? It sure smells like it.

I think that on the evolutionary tree we have a long way to go.
We are primates with self consciousness and awareness, who can ask: “who am I”.
We still are dominated by the primate herd’s instincts and social responses.
Alarms are very important on the evolutionary scale. We, our genes, are from ancestors that heeded alarms. The ones who didn’t never propagated their genes. The reaction of primates to alarms is with the whole body. First run away, then evaluate.
When we had the series of earthquakes in Athens in 1981 or so, for about a month we were like a bunch of monkeys on tree being shaken to fall down. The physiology takes over, the impulse on the muscles to run with every tremor is immense, even though the brain says one is safe. I have promised myself that if it happens again, I will put on my running shoes and run around the block to dissipate the anxiety.
The fact that we have a brain and imagination means that the scope of alarms can expand enormously with imagined dangers . That is where the quacks and semi literates can take over a crowd’s mentality, where the precautionary principle arises . Even though the alarms are intellectual, the physiology resonates and forces the primate patterns, “run first, look back later”.
In our earthquake case, we got earthquake prophets alarming the populace, scientists who were quite good in their original field taking over and becoming seismic experts, measuring this that and the other and predicting with flimsy numbers and bad statistics and analysis all sort of large earthquakes. The populace gobbled hungrily the lot. It is again primate behavior/impulses, the need to have leadership in the herd, expressed on the intellectual level .
In a sense, if there were truly a danger, this collective behavior would be useful. Suppose the data shows the ice age is coming in 200 years. Collective anxiety about this would be useful to husband resources and find ways to face the change.
What has happened with global warming is that some people are manipulating society with a false alarm. Some in good faith, following their prophetic delusions, but more and more it becomes obvious that the thesis “follow the money” applies, as shown here.
We could say that the manipulators are like cannibal predators ,they are aware of the primate herd behavior and are directing it for their own well being, treating the crowd as prey.
Let us hope that the winters turn colder and colder. No manipulation can work then. Reasoning, facts and scientific evidence have small weight against the released behemoth of AGW and the avarice of cap and trade.

—
The authors above mentioned a recent study published by Carnegie Institution investigators Long Cao and Ken Caldeira, and observed that they had “…based their findings not on actual experiments, but on yet another computer model that allegedly predicts future temperatures.
I immediately flashed on the statement articulated by Dr. William Happer of Princeton University on 20 May 2010 before the House Select Committee on Energy and Global Warming at the invitation of Edward Markey (National Socialist, Massachusetts), in which he said:

“Over the past ten years there has been no statistically [significant] global warming. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC computer models. The existence of large climate variability in the past has long been an embarrassment to those who claim that all climate change is due to man and that man can control the climate. To the best of my knowledge, none of the climate models designed to predict future climate have been successful in explaining these past fluctuations of the climate. If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?”

And then I recalled my experiences in wargames design and development.
When I was in college, commercial “conflict simulations” boardgames – wargames largely employing die-cut cardboard counters and hex-gridded maps – became something of a flourishing industry. This continued through the mid-80s, whereupon “SPI Died For Your Sins.”
Having been there while it was happening, I tend to go along with Greg Costikyan’s explanation of why the industry got kilt, but I strongly suspect that a major factor – unaddressed by Costikyan – was that by the mid-80s a great many of us baby-boomer males who had been largely supporting the wargames publishers not only got married but started raising kids.
Ceteris paribus, wives hate their husbands’ hobbies. And keeping a diningroom-table-deployed wargame from being catastrophically dislocated by cats and house-apes is effectively impossible. To this day, there is a cardboard counter designating the Scharnhorst somewhere behind a baseboard in my home. I have long since resigned myself to its loss.
Now, in addition to being a former wargamer, I am also a former wargames designer and developer, strongly affiliated with Simulations Publications, Inc. I have some considerable experience of the methods by which SPI games entered the gestation process, how systems were devised to effectively model historical events, what mechanisms were used to make these conflict scenarios into real, playable, balanced games instead of heuristic intensive manual simulations (and at SPI we did just that – once and never again).
Think of those wargames created in the ’70s and ’80s in much the same light as we speak of computer models for any purpose.
The sine qua non of our work – for a damnably finicky core clientele of grognards whose knowledge of military history rivaled that of the teaching staffs at Carlisle, Leavenworth, and Newport – was that each wargame must be capable of simulating the historical events of the war, campaign, or battle we were addressing, and doing it pretty goddam precisely.
The “what if?” element had to come later, despite the fact that our customers bought and played these games chiefly out of a desire to explore possible alternative outcomes. I cannot tell you how many times (and how many ways) I have been involved in explorations of what might have happened if Longstreet’s corps had swung wide to the south of Round Top on that second day at Gettysburg to take the Army of the Potomac in the left flank and rear.
(Mostly, the answer to that question is found in Clausewitz’ “friction of war.” It doesn’t work all that well. By the afternoon of 2 July, VI Corps was lurking back there in reserve, and it would take a helluva stretch on the credulity muscles to assume that Longstreet wouldn’t have Sedgwick down his throat like a dose of castor oil had he tried an end-around like that.)
Despite the fact that commercial wargames design and development in those days was a completely informal and non-rigorous process – decidedly not undertaken for any academic purposes whatsoever – we were held to exacting standards when it came to our obligation to “model the past” accurately.
Much more so than are these AGW fraudsters today.
The reason why the AGW hucksters cannot come up with accurate and reliable models of the climate (or any aspect thereof) is because their incentives are precisely the opposite of those under which we were operating in the commercial wargames industry twenty and thirty years ago.
We were under immense pressure to maintain adherence to documented factual reality, and their “Fortune and glory” comes entirely from supporting blatant falsehoods which are conducive to socialist and mercantilist scheming on the part of professional politicians and other bloodsucking sons-of-anonymous-fathers.
Interestingly, I recall being involved in the late ’70s with a young meteorologist whose hobby was wargaming, and who wanted to develop a “conflict simulation” that modeled a succession of hurricane seasons impacting the southern and eastern United States. He planned to have the game system “generate” the hurricanes according to then-understood principles of Atlantic tropical storm gestation, and the game player would allocate resources, both in anticipation of likely landfalls and remediatively, to get the maximum positive outcome for the expenditures made.
The damned thing foundered on our conjoint inability to get a hurricane-cranking system that came remotely close to simulating historical hurricane season events.
And by the looks of it, even with their oh-so-sophisticated megabuck mathemagical computer models today, the “climatologists” aren’t doing any better than he and I – working on paper and without much more than a calculator – could do back in ’79.
—

Thanks anna v – I enjoyed that analysis, though I guess Greeks have more than earthquakes to be alarmed about atm…where’s Σωκράτης when you need him?

Your example of higher CO2 on plants typifies the difference between the sound science and the climate alarmists.
On the one hand we have a certain, measurable benefit that can be tested and reproduced by any researcher in a laboratory: higher CO2 causes plants to close their stomata, leading to less water loss, thus less requirement for water. That’s an absolutely certain benefit where agriculture, especially where marginal and water-stressed areas are concerned.
The other side of the coin is that reduced evapotranspiration results in slightly increased temperatures, supposedly leading to a slight global warming. Here, the effect is much more tentative and remote. For a start, it is a very tiny effect on a global scale, and not to be compared with the benefits of reduced water usage and the ability to grow crops in dry areas.
Moreover, I wonder whether the alarmist researchers did their homework on the full effects of increased CO2. Increased CO2 not only reduces transpiration, it also increases the rate of photosynthesis, and photosynthesis is an endothermic process, thus cooling the plant. Thus, any reduction in transpiration must be netted off against increased photosynthesis, and when this is done, is the result positive or negative?
In reality, these alarmist ideas are pure folly – highlighting a minor, tentative and uncertain downside when there is a major and certain upside. In many fields, such a one-sided presentation would be regarded as dishonest. For example, if one creates alarm by only mentioning some possible minor side effects of a drug or intervention without mentioning the life-saving and definite advantages.
Simply by crunching the numbers it is obvious that increased CO2 is going to have a dramatic benefit to crops for humankind, but a negligible effect on global temperatures due to transpiration. A doubling of CO2 would increase agricultural production by at least 30%, not only by increased photosynthesis but also by bringing some dry but rain-fed lands into productive use, and enabling a limited supply of water to be used for irrigating more land. That’s a very real benefit. On the other hand, vegetation utilizes only around 1% of incoming solar radiation. Plants only cover part of the earth – not oceans, not icecaps, not deserts etc; C4 plants are up to 7% efficient, and C3 (which are the most abundant) up to 3.5% efficient; so, all told, less than 1% of solar insolation utilized. Changes to photosynthetic rates and transpiration rates are playing around with fractions of this 1%. Who knows whether the effect will be positive or negative from a heating point of view? Whatever the answer to that, the magnitude of the effect is utterly negligible in the scale of things, whereas an increase in crop production by over 30% is definitely NOT negligible, and an unquestionably positive benefit.

The populace gobbled hungrily the lot. — anna v (May 24, 2010 at 12:44 am)
Which is probably the full answer, Anna V. “When we had the series of earthquakes in Athens in 1981…”
Now, having done our running away, we will pause and look back and allow ourselves time to think and consider. We will then be more difficult to bolt, and as the dark side grows more shrill it will begin to meet resistance, and finally contempt.

Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says:
May 23, 2010 at 5:32 pm
You forgot their magic term for what they are trying to do to us – “behaviour change”.

This is actually my own #2 or #1 objection to the AGW movement. They are apparently unaware that you can’t change people. Certainly, you can’t change people’s core values, aspirations, and needs. If they just consulted developmental psychology properly, they’d see it can’t be done. Nobody knows how to do it. At most you can coerce people, force them, impose stuff. That is all.
Even if AGW was 100% true and catastrophic, relying on progressive behaviour and social change is the slowest most ineffective and least likely to succeed method when time is short. Positive social change takes 50 to 100 to 200 years, depending on how deep you need it to go.
The only solutions are technical. If the technology doesn’t succeed, then we are screwed and civilisation will be thrown back to more primitive culture. That’s the irony — they focus on social progress but without technical foundations it would just create social collapse to a more barbaric era.

“Mass Delusion” is right. What’s driving the alarmisn is a form of neurosis, which a writer at the Wall Street Journal summed up nicely at:
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis, By Bret Stephens, July 1, 2008; Page A15
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486841811817591.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
As for activists & intellectuals knowing what’s best for the rest of us, consider Eric Hoffer’s observation:
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.”

Obama’s energy contest so far has been a bogus bust.
But I did enter into another contest ConocoPhillips Energyprize and recieved an e-mail from them to submit a good presentation for the judges as the contest fits exactly into efficiency of energy which this contest was made for the research I have done of 18 times more efficient turbine.
Last years winner was an oil for windturbines that is more efficient.
This contest still allows me to keep my ownership of the technology and ConocoPhillips has the right to make the first offer on any technologies.
I do not fit into the government grant area of belonging to any approved organization or institution. So that avenue is out.
In the long term, this will be how I will fund that web school on mechanical science.

This shows just how utterly one-sided climate change research has become. Whereas a genuine and impartial climate scientist would look for both pros and cons, to these guys, the word “pro” doesn’t even exist. You can almost imagine them in their crisis headquarters:
“Damn, these higher CO2 levels are gonna lead to higher levels of plant productivity. If we don’t stomp on this right away, the public is gonna get the idea that more CO2 might even be – gasp – good for the planet. We’ve got to find something negative about CO2 on plants – no matter how minor, irrelevant or risible is sounds. Yeah, here’s one – too many plants means more hayfever. That could be a major economic cost – billions of hayfever sufferers fleeing across borders to escape pollen tsunamis.”

John Maddox, past publisher of “Nature” magazine, noted this with disdain.
He wrote a book about this problem called “The Doomsday Syndrome”.
I urge anyone who wants to understand how scientists and media and political forces have combined many times to over state threats, misstate risks, spread pointless fear and waste great sums of money to read the book.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday_pr.html
The book is available on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Syndrome-John-Royden-Maddox/dp/0070394288

—
Frederick Davies speculates: “How they managed to measure the farting behaviour of the mammoths is something best left unanswered.”
Best or not, I can assuredly answer that.
They didn’t measure the critters’ greenhouse gas emissions.
They modeled ’em.
—

It also enables plants to absorb CO2 more efficiently, so they don’t have to open stomata (pores) in their leaves as much, and they evaporate less water.
But, but, but, I thought the IPCC said increased water in the atsmosphere was a positive feedback? /sarc

Why is AGW called a mass mania, an anti-humanism and a new age doomsday religion preaching apocalyptic Thermageddon?
Because us realists have been watching this dumbing-down of society and the government-funded education system for years, and global warming alarmism is just one of many indications of the spiral into oblivion of Western civilization, i.e., behaviors leading to the ruction of morals, ethics — the principles of the scientific method — that undermines our personal faith and shared cultural confidence in our abilities to overcome ignorance and superstition with reason and knowledge, and rubs all of our collective noses in societies’ lack of will to discriminate between good and bad or reward excellence and personal achievement over self-destruction and self-defeating nihilism.
If you don’t know and understand that fear of global warming is simply a symptom of a sick, corrupt and mentally dysfunctional zeitgeist — a case of global societal ADHD that has spread across and infected all of the Leftist and liberal fascists in the Northern hemisphere — then, answer these questions:
“Why do scientists and news stories blame everything on global warming?
“… Why is warming always framed as bad news?
“Why does so much ‘research’ claim a warmer planet ‘may’ lead to more diarrhea, acne and childhood insomnia, more juvenile delinquency, war, violent crime and prostitution, death of the Loch Ness Monster – and even more Mongolian cows dying from cold weather?”
“… Why is it a bad thing that more CO2 helps plants tolerate droughts better and re-vegetate deserts?
“… Why do ‘error corrections’ always seem to result in more warming than originally predicted, instead of less?
“And why do taxpayers have to shell out Big Bucks on this stuff?
“… If we didn’t know better, we’d think the operative rules were: Never seek logical or alternative answers, if you can blame a phenomenon or problem (like decreasing frog populations) on global warming. Do whatever it takes and fund whatever research is needed, to advance the goals of ending hydrocarbon use, increasing government control and ‘transforming’ society. And always include the terms ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ in any grant application.
“It may not be corruption. But it sure skews the research, conclusions and policy recommendations.”
[Paul Driessen, Willie Soon, and David R. Legates, Cause for alarm, May 23, 2010]

It’s the Lemming instinct. It occurs in many walks of life; politics, corporate politics, any group or committe, and now science. People want to be on the “right” side of an issue. The two main reasons I have observed are 1. self benefit ie $$$ and 2. to be associated with whomever they believe to be the movers and shakers. Like the lemmings, they many times swim to their own destruction. John Wayne is credited as having said that “life is tough and it’s tougher if you’re stupid”. Remember, that by definition, the average IQ is 100 which leaves a huge portion of the population below that level. Room temperature IQ’s can now obtain any degree they desire if they have the time and money: PHD, MD, no area of education is exempt from this rule. A hundred or so years ago if you were stupid you might not make it to pass along your weak genes. Not so more recently.

Anybody catch the hatchet job ABC did on climate change/climate gate yesterday before Lost? A whole segment on poor Michael Mann and others who feel physically threatened by rabid “denialists.” They reference the latest Inhoffe report, and summarize Climategate in one sentence- that further investigations had found no wrongdoing whatever (also made it a point to claim the emails were stolen, which is not a proven fact). These guys are shameless.

The Gaia hypothesis was first posited in the 1960s by James Lovelock. This load of complete and utter hog-wash struck a chord with a group of people who rapidly developed this piece of cargo cult science to the status of religion – the worship of mother earth.
Time for people to wake up to the fact that far from being a benefactor, our environment has always been trying to kill us and this has made us who we are!

Even worse than knowing Warmanism is no more than astrology is realizing that the use of numerology by secular, socialist schoolteachers in the government-funded education dropout factories — to further the global warming hoax — represents the dumbing-down of all Western civilization.

I live in the Oakland hills at 1000 feet elevation. When I go down the hill to get a quart of milk I experience a temperature rise of about two degrees. If I were to go to San Jose a couple dozen miles south I would also experience a similar warming. So I guess I should stay here on my hill so as to avoid acne.
Years ago after reading about all the diseases that warming was going to bring I reasoned that San Francisco would come to have the same malaria rate as Los Angeles in a warmer future. LA is about three or four degrees warmer than SF. So I looked it up. The malaria rate of SF was zero. The malaria rate of LA was also zero. Hmmm?

—
Parorchestia asks: …why the AGW protagonists don’t vigorously dispute the arguments in these posts. Do they think their cause is best served by ignoring all the objections raised to human-induced GW?
Speaking from recent experience, warmists do not commonly appear in this forum (or other fora like it) because their concept of an environment hospitable to disputation is one in which articulate and informed critics of the anthropogenic global warming fraud are suppressed.
Not only is this not the case on Mr. Watts’ Web log, but because it is not the case (and because Mr. Watts seeks central contributory participation from individuals like the authors of this post, who are unarguably both scientifically literate and articulate), this Web site tends to draw readers who value such literacy and who bring to their comments that proper attitude of skepticism which is required to participate effectively in the give-and-go of valid discourse.
Mr. Watts does most certainly see that his forum is moderated. What he does not do is to obliterate opinions contrary to those he himself espouses. That cannot be said about the warmist fellahin and their sorry and specious simulacra of disputation on the Internet.
What reason could a supporter of the AGW fraud have for posting in a virtual “place” like this one? They have no case that can be made for assertions that lack support, and even those who are utterly gormless when it comes to the usages of public debate sense (I’m reluctant to use the word “think”) that they have about as much persistence and efficacy in an open venue frequented by genuinely educated and honest men and women as does a paramecium in a blast furnace.
I myself take immense delight in leaping into the midst of the fascisti and whacking about in such a target-rich environment. Factual reality has pretty reliably “got my back.” These people, though….
Well, say what you like about their intellectual bankruptcy and their moral depravity, but they do show levels of animal cunning and a self-preservation instinct that any biologist must find worthy of thorough appreciation.
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Vincent says:
May 24, 2010 at 5:29 am
“Anna v’s analysis of how alarmism works is interesting but doesn’t appear to apply in this case. Although in theory a larger brain should create alarm from abstract dangers, in reality this alarm of which Anna speaks – rising heartbeat, adrenalin rush etc – does not exist in the world of AGW hysteria. ”
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It doesn’t have to. It is the same herd-stomping and rushing….just SLOWED down from the amygdala response….to a pattern of mass cognitive dissonance.
Both conditions are emotional and reflex based…not on science, reason, or logic.
In fact, the amygdala flight instinct is sometimes correct. So it deserves some credit.
Think of the throngs of New Yorkers migrating on foot away from lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.
But cognitive dissonance is rarely, if ever, legitimate.
Cognitive dissonance is rather unique [and unfortunately endemic] to our species.
And cognitive dissonance…is the chief mechanism in the embarrassing phenomenon of CAGW. We see it all the time. Bypass the data. Circumnavigate logic with clever fallacy. Conveniently slip out of honest debate. Try and instill fear in the masses, as opposed to honestly educating them to think for themselves.
The foregoing are all hallmark characteristic behaviors of individuals who convince themselves subconsciously to believe what they WANT to believe, and selectively denounce everything else. James Hansen? Michael Mann? Al Gore?
The groupthink, herd mentality is all too evident. Anna V was dead right about this being an indictment on our evolution.
And her prescient analysis very much does apply to our species, and to the Church of Hotter Day Saints…an organization that rules the current worldwide scientific community with a sweaty, hand-wringing, Inquisition-like hands.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Chris, Norfolk, VA, USA — Church of Hotter Day Saints
I’ll salute that one, Chris!

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evilincandescentbulb writes:

“The `few’ always will reject humanity’s authority and eschew all principles that underlie a belief in enduring primacy of individual liberty and personal responsibility as a God-given right that is foundational to a free people in a just world.”

I would ask that people please drop these incessant appeals to religious belief when railing against the warmists as themselves being religious True Believers.
There are ample objectively verifiable reasons for supporting the “primacy of individual liberty and personal responsibility” and really none at all when it comes down to dependence upon an appeal to the ineffable. To cite the putative ratification of a deity (“whatever you perceive him to be: hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin“) is not only unnecessary but positively pernicious.

“The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.”
— H.L. Mencken

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It always seemed to this simpleton that more CO2 would lead to more plant growth which leads to more food and oxygen. Is that such a bad idea??

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evilincandescentbulb (26 May 2010 at 9:49 am) voices a bunch of good questions.
Might I venture to suggest that answers are to be found in the writings of positive (as opposed to normative) economists, with specific attention to Adam Smith, Richard Cobden and John Bright (of the Anti-Corn Law League), Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Thomas DiLorenzo, and Walter Block
Sorry if I’ve left anybody out.
In terms of expense associated with such reading, the Web gives access to much that these scholars have written, including the opportunity to extensively sample the recent promulgations of currently practicing scholars such as Dr. DiLorenzo, Dr. Block, and Dr. Sowell.
For light entertainment incidental to this process, permit me to recommend the novels Alongside Night (J. Neil Schulman, 1979) and An Enemy of the State (F. Paul Wilson, 1980).
If you haven’t read either of those two works of fiction – which bear up remarkably well despite their ages – you really ought to get your hands on ’em.
Especially now that the Euro is descending to its intrinsic value (i.e., the smelter price of the base metal tokens into which a one-Euro note can be broken) and our Mombasa Messiah is channeling Rudolf E. A. Havenstein (look up “Weimar Republic” and “hyperinflation”) to make the U.S. dollar worth precisely as much as that JPG computer graphic image he’s been passing off as a legitimate Certification of Live Birth.
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AGW prognosticating was a smithy’s craft. In an age of technology, reason and hope, they traded for sheepskins by pounding out the coffin nails that were used to bury science.