Just how hard is it to go outside and read a thermometer every day ?

RFK Jr. has described James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute For Space Studies as The Paul Revere of Climate Change.  (The glaciers are melting !  The oceans are rising !  The thermometers are bursting !)
Hansen has a new book out called "Storms Of My Grandchildren", which I skimmed during my lunch yesterday.  In short, the earth is warming, the glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, and that's your fault.  Therefore, you should give Hansen and his friends a lot of money.  Grants, funding, subsidies, the works. 

You may have heard of the problems with the datasets at East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit.  Thanks to some hackers, we have evidence that the CRU cooked the books a bit, mostly to improve the infamous "hockey stick" and to eliminate the inconvenient warming period that popped up during the Middle Ages.
Thank God we have an independent data set at NASA, right? 

Well, no.  Hit that link.  Go on, hit it.  Read it.  Giggle. 

Damn those Inconvenient Truths.   

Global Warming is man-made. With erasers and computers

Some more Global Warming/Cooling/Climate Change scientists may have been naughty.

Here's the latest update in the Tree Ring Circus (Mark Steyn's term):

The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

Wow. Hotter than a whore in church. Hot enough to make you return things that you didn't steal. Hotter than the hinges of hell. Hotter than two bears fighting in a forest fire. Hotter than two cats in one pair of long johns. Hotter than a two dollar pistol on Georgia asphalt. Hotter than the Presbyterian hell for dead babies. It looks hot.

But what happens when you look at the raw numbers, before the guys in the white lab coats massage them to weed out politically incorrect readings ? It doesn't look as hot. In fact, the trendline looks erratic and random. Surely not hot enough to give the Hopers and Changers near-control of the rest of the economy.

I've been wrong about this ever since I started blogging, having always acknowledged that there have been wild swings in earth's temperature but denying that those swings were caused by man. Well, the swings recorded in the first chart were man-made, weren't they? Man caused the earth's recorded temperature to increase by using erasers and hitting the "delete" key on their computers, not by running factories or driving SUV's.

I apologize for my earlier hardheadedness. Man does indeed cause Global Warming. Men with doctorates, mostly.

Here's Robert Tracinski, at Real Clear Politics:

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

If you haven't read Ayn Rand's novella "Anthem" yet, now is a great time to do so. You can read it standing in the aisle at Barnes & Noble in about 30 minutes. One of the great moments in the book comes when you realize that the government in the story won't allow the hero to supply everyone with his new discovery - the light bulb. Why not? Because it would endanger the livelihood of the candlemakers.

It sounds so ridiculous doesn't it? But we're getting so close. Imagine all those ridiculous Green Jobs slowly circling the drain, about to disappear forever unless somebody does something to preserve the ongoing farce.

Obama is going to Copenhagen soon, to help re-invent the flat tire. The Fix is in.