Eric Holthaus vows to stop flying, have no more children, all because of the weather.

I hearby nominate meteorologist Eric Holthaus for a Darwin Award.
 (The Darwin Awards are given to those who remove themselves from the gene pool, sometimes via accidental death by dumbness, thereby ensuring survival of the fittest.) 

Weatherman Eric Holthaus has taken a look at the U.N.'s Climate Change report and vowed to stop flying. 
Actually, that's not the way our friends on the Left speak. 

"I'm committing right now to stop flying."  he Tweeted.  "It's not worth the (harm to the) climate."  

These guys don't vow or promise to do anything.  They're like a trendy restaurant, and are "committed to a smoke-free environment".  Or "committed to ensuring diversity".  They're not promising.  They're just committed to the idea.   

He's also going to get a vasectomy so that no more offspring of his will warm the planet.  This, of course, has prompted numerous wags to suggest that the entire liberal tribe (in the American sense of the word) go therefore and do likewise. 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2436551/A-weatherman-breaks-tears-vows-NEVER-fly-grim-climate-change-report.html#ixzz2gC04tmH

I did my part by going to Mr. Holthaus's Facebook page and wagering that he can't stick to his no-fly resolution for five years.  (He's a Wall Street Journal weatherman who flies to conferences and meetings and seminars and crap.  He'll no more stay grounded than Al Gore.)  

As far as the vasectomy goes, that's no one's business but his.  The gene pool does have a way of policing itself, right?  Seriously.  Eric knows how accurate TOMORROW'S weather report is.  He's going to end his branch of the family tree because of something printed by the freakin' United Nations???  A Darwin Award is in order. 

Has anyone else noticed....

Has anyone else noticed that the individuals wanting to save the earth from Global Warming/Cooling/Weather/Etc. for the sake of "the children" are almost always the same people who want to avoid paying as they go for political and economic boondoggles, leaving behind crushing debts to be paid by "the children"?

It makes me nuts. 

That's all. 

Have a great Friday !! 

Nice work if you can get it

James Hansen, one of the more famous of NASA's global warming/cooling/changing alarmists, has been milking the AGW cow in double shifts.  In addition to his government salary of $180,000.00, he's pulled in the following:

-- A shared $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation for his "profound contribution to humanity." Hansen's cut ranged from $333,000 to $500,000, Horner said, adding that the precise amount is not known because Hansen's publicly available financial disclosure form only shows the prize was "an amount in excess of $5,000."

-- The 2010 Blue Planet prize worth $550,000 from the Asahi Glass Foundation, which recognizes efforts to solve environmental issues.

-- The Sophie Prize for his "political activism," worth $100,000. The Sophie Prize is meant to "inspire people working towards a sustainable future."

-- Speaking fees totaling $48,164 from a range of mostly environmental organizations.

-- A $15,000 participation fee, waived by the W.J. Clinton Foundation for its 2009 Waterkeeper Conference.

-- $720,000 in legal advice and media consulting services provided by The George Soros Open Society Institute. Hansen said he did not take "direct" support from Soros but accepted "pro bono legal advice."

As long as the weather continues to get either warmer, cooler, or changier, Hansen will be able to claim that 1) he predicted it, and that 2) it is your fault, and that 3) taxpayers should continue to give him more money. 
Nice work if you can get it. 

The pic of Hansen traveling to a protest to speak out against traveling came from here. 

Good news on the Climate Bill

Here's Politico, reporting on some good news about the Climate Bill, also known as "the convenient excuse for a tax increase and a massive power grab":

The Senate climate bill has been at death’s door several times over the past year. But with the days before the August recess quickly slipping away, the case may truly be terminal now.

Hit the link to read the whole thing.  And then from The Washington Examiner, here's a post-mortem on the whitewash of the Climategate scandal:

When the Climategate e-mails were released last year, the evidence of misconduct by the scientists involved was so strong that the climate establishment was forced to commission a series of tribunals. Yet the conclusions of those inquiries are as specious as the science they were supposed to investigate. By asking the wrong questions -- or not asking them at all -- they have failed to advance the climate debate one iota. 

....This panel did not examine the other e-mails on the CRU server, as it was supposed to do. It cleared the scientists of perverting the peer review process simply because their efforts did not succeed, thereby ignoring their clear intent as expressed in the e-mails.



Further, the inquiry failed to ask the most basic questions of the CRU scientists, such as whether Professor Phil Jones had actually deleted inconvenient e-mails. Britain's freedom of information office said that the Cimategate e-mails provided the most cogent evidence imaginable that there had been efforts to avoid FOI requirements, yet the Muir Russell review did not investigate this appropriately.

Even this inadequate investigation, however, found that the way the hockey stick graph was handled was misleading. Imagine what it -- and the parliamentary committee -- would have found if there had been some witnesses for the prosecution.

Those who hope that these inquiries exonerate global warming science are engaging in wishful thinking. The Climategate e-mails are still there for all to read and the questions they raise remain unanswered. Until there are answers, Climategate rolls on. 

Gerald Dickens in Nature Geoscience: the climate change models are wrong

From USA Today:

Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?

Yes.

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

But the Global Warming Global Cooling The Sky Is Falling Chicken Little Regulatory Busybodies Climate Change prevention advocates have long been saying that Global Cooling Global Warming Climate Change is "settled science".
What gives? I thought we were about to redesign and remake our entire economy based on the prophecies of Saint Albert, The Goracle Of Music City? And what about the Climate Change bill that is still sitting on The Obamessiah's desk? Does it need to be reworked in light of new info? Is this study in Nature Geoscience the equivalent of a last minute reprieve from the Governor?

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

Oh shit.

Note to my friend in Korea, Cedric Katesby: Please find out if the journal "Nature Geoscience" is peer reviewed. I still haven't made it to the TCU library to research the 1970's journals. Am thinking this might happen sooner, rather than later.

Note to everyone who votes: There's no such thing as "settled" science. That's the difference between, say, science and theology. People talking of "settled" science are generally seeking more funding from the public tit.

The Emily Litela "Nevermind" video came from "Yid With Lid". The Yid also has a few more excerpts from the study, which at this point can only be accessed with the proper academic credentials.

Global Warming leaves the northeast, said to be "looking for more gullible nations"

If Congress intends for Kleiner-Perkins-Gore and Generation Investment Management to make money off a Global Warming bill, they better get it signed quickly.



Can you imagine the nerve of someone selling the Global Warming con, ramming it through Congress, and then having to sign it with this happening? Or this? Or how about this?


A fresh coat of Whitening to Now Hampshire for the video link.

The Fierce Urgency Of NOW (before everyone figures it out)

This is from David Freddoso, at Beltway Confidential:

By all appearances, the House is about to vote on a very long bill of which it has no completed official copy.

And it's going to have more impact on American manufacturing than any other legislation considered this year.

Texas Republican Reps. Joe Barton and Louie Gohmert have just asked the chair whether there exists a complete, updated copy of the Waxman-Markey carbon-cap bill.

The short answer: No.

"If a bill for which there is no copy were to actually pass this body," Barton asked, "could the bill without a copy be sent to the Senate for its consideration?"

The short answer: Yes. They did it with the stimulus package.

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers' amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk's desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.

But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: "Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..." How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?

None. But it's going to change your life more than you can imagine.

Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can't even wait until members of Congress know what they're voting on.

Yes, and that's because public opinion is shifting on whether or not the whole thing is a scam. Couldn't we go back to changing the weather through prayer? Or throwing virgins into volcanoes? Making sacrifices to the corn god?

If we're going to use superstition to change the weather, is carbon cap the only thing still under consideration?

Picture of superstitious people throwing human sacrifices into a volcano in an attempt to influence the gods came from here.

Cooling, Warming, Ice Ages, the 1970's, Disco, Nixon, Cedric, Charts, Graphs, etc....

It's time to discuss Global Warming Climate Change.

My friend Cedric Katesby has sent me an assortment of videos intended to annhilate the commonly held view that in the 1970's, there was a widespread fear of another Ice Age.

Click here to see one of our earlier discussions. It goes on forever, and continues underneath various "Does God Cause Hurricanes To Hit New Orleans Because Of Gays And Lesbians" posts for about a year.

The video below features lots of Nixon, Travolta and Disco before getting down to bidness. Essentially, Cedric is concerned that I've had too much fun with the contradictory Time and Newsweek magazine covers like the ones above.

Cedric will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we're supposed to view the Ice Age cover from the 1970's with extreme skepticism, and approach the "This Is Your Planet On SUV's" cover with the reverence we always hold for peer-reviewed research.

I've carried around a listing of some of the supposedly "neutral" articles in my briefcase for more than a year now, and have made it into the TCU library to look 'em up. Some of it is over my head, and some of it isn't.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here is a chart showing estimated mean temperature from the last 5 million years, provided by these folks. (HT, of course, to Wikipedia.) See the uptick 3 to 3.5 million years ago?

Now that is some Climate Change.

VANITY FAIR ISN'T GOING TO ISSUE A "GREEN" ISSUE ! ! ! WILL THE PLANET SURVIVE???

After three years, Vanity Fair is dropping its annual "Green" issue.

Please tell me that Global Warming, Cooling, Dimming, and Climate Change aren't just a fad that briefly caught the eye of the media, politicians, celebrities, money-hungry entrepreneurs, and the Nobel Prize Committee. Please.

A tip O' the hat to Captain Capitalism for alerting us to the outrage.

JUST 94 MONTHS UNTIL THE CLIMATE TIPS ! ! !

Check this out: A countdown clock that shows how many months we have before passing the "climate's" tipping point.

Note that they didn't say the Global Warming tipping point, or the Global Cooling tipping point.

It's just a countdown to the "climate's" tipping point, which, in spite of serious competition, is the most ignorant-assed statement I've ever seen gullible organizations sponsor (see list at the bottom of the clock page).

It started at 100 months, and now it's down to just 94.

PANIC ! PANIC ! PANIC ! THE CLIMATE IS GOING TO TIP ! ! THROW AWAY YOUR MONEY ! ! RUN NEKKID IN THE STREETS ! ! VOTE FOR ANTI-CLIMATE TIPPERS IN 2010 ! ! !

It's too bad they don't post the HTML for the clock, otherwise I'd have it in the sidebar with appropriate doomsday verbiage.

Here's The Devil's Kitchen on the topic of Climate Tipping, the motivations of Climate Tipping alarmists, and such like. Pleae, please, please hit that Devil's Kitchen link. It's glorious.

Dr. James Hansen, high priest of Anthropogenic Global Warming, comes in for well-deserved abuse in Satan's Snackbar. What most people don't understand is that Dr. Hansen isn't going to get any money to study AGW unless he can convince people that AGW exists.

(Anthropogenic Global Warming is the belief that we change the weather with our actions. It's very similar to the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell belief system that homosexuality causes hurricanes to hit New Orleans.)

Thanks again to NickM with the Cat Counters for telling the world about THE DAY THE CLIMATE TIPS ! ! !

Global Warming, Global Cooling, Global Dimming, and now....

Have you ever eaten a huge platter of Mexican food for lunch, gone home and taken a nap, and as long as you were undisturbed, there were no "inappropriate" side-effects?

Planet earth supposedly did that prior to the last ice age. Sat down and had the bean burritos, the refried beans, and the 3-bean salad, all washed down with Coronas. Then earth curled up and went to sleep for about 800 years.

According to Slate.com our planet is now awakening from its wintertime digestive slumber. Our friend Mr. Earth is now lying in bed, wondering if he can release some digestive pressure, but keep it contained within the bedsheets and not disturb Mrs. Earth. Or maybe it would be better to just get up and trot down the hall to the restroom? Either way, the consequences could be disastrous for humanity.

If earth asks you to pull its finger? Don't do it.

The picture of "Methane Ice" came from here.

Global Dimming. Yes, Global Dimming.

Prepare to be inundated with information about Global Dimming.

Yes, Global Dimming. It has absolutely nothing to do with the high reproductive rates among Lou Dobbs fans.

As usual, Wikipedia has the most concise summary of the concept:

Global dimming is the gradual reduction in the amount of global direct irradiance at the Earth's surface that was observed for several decades after the start of systematic measurements in 1950s. The effect varies by location, but worldwide it has been estimated to be of the order of a 4% reduction over the three decades from 1960–1990. However, since 1990, the trend has reversed.

In other words, less sunlight is making its way to earth. And what causes Global Dimming? Could there be any beneficial side effects? Here's Popsci.com:

Wait, now pollution is preventing global warming? That’s the conclusion of a recent study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which says rising temperatures seen in Europe over the last few years result as much from the reduction of air pollution as from the creation of it.....

(The authors of the study) realized the temperature rise was assisted by more sunlight penetrating the newly pollution free skies. It seems that the stricter pollution standards, adopted in part to slow global warming, may have sped it up.....

The idea that pollution may be reflecting some of the sun’s energy is not new. The term global dimming is decades old, and some believed that the reduction in pollution was the cause global warming. But now, with the link between greenhouse gas pollution and global warming firmly established, papers like this one highlight how complex the situation is, and how solutions like simply cutting air pollution may have a range of unintended and counterintuitive consequences.

The link between greenhouse gas pollution and Global Warming is firmly established? I think the jury is still out on that one. (What caused our earlier ice ages to end?) Anyway, get ready to hear a lot about Global Dimming, which may or may not turn out to be a bad thing. We're still waiting on Nancy Pelosi to send out a memo before we develop any firm opinions, aren't we?

In the meantime, assuming that pollution increases Global Dimming, which slows the process of Global Warming, and assuming that Global Warming is the great evil of the age, here are some suggestions for helping decrease the amount of sunlight that hits the earth:

- Bring back Right Guard aerosol deodorant.
- Purchase a Ford F-150 STX. Drive it a lot.
- Drill for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve. To counteract the harmful effects of these wells on the environment, start a well fire once a month. Wait a couple of days before putting it out.
- Stop worrying about your carbon footprint. Build a house that makes Al Gore's look like Snoopy's. Heat it with coal.
-Discontinue emails. Send smoke signals.
- Do the right thing, and insist on products and food produced on the other side of the world. Lobby Congress to have these items transported to your city by coal-burning locomotives, steamships, and 1940's Soviet tractors.
- Move Senator Harry Reid to the top of Mount Everest, so his emissions will reach the upper atmosphere faster.