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Cold killed dolphins

Posted by Richard on March 5, 2011

I remember the story on NBC Nightly News, preceded by a warning about "disturbing images": dead baby dolphins were washing ashore on the Gulf Coast in unusually high numbers. The report mentioned that researchers were performing autopsies to determine the cause of the deaths, but made it clear that there was no doubt that the BP oil spill was to blame.

Oops, wrong. It seems that a precipitous drop in Mobile Bay water temperatures — caused by cold-water runoff after nearly unprecedented cold weather and snowfalls in the area — was the most likely culprit.

But BP won't get off the hook that easily. It won't be long before some clever leftist points out that, thanks to Al Gore and his acolytes at the IPCC, NOAA, and Hadley CRU, "everyone knows" the unusual cold and snow were caused by — wait for it — global warming! And of course, global warming is caused by those evil capitalist oil companies! Ipso facto, QED. Renewables! Renewables!

(HT: Instapundit)

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Everything is a symptom of global warming

Posted by Richard on February 3, 2011

The blogosphere is abuzz about Al Gore's claim that recent heavy snowstorms are a symptom of global warming. But this is nothing new. Gore made the same claim in a New York Times op-ed last February.

This time, Gore quoted noted scientist Clarence Paige: 

Last week on his show Bill O’Reilly asked, “Why has southern New York turned into the tundra?” and then said he had a call into me. I appreciate the question.

As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming:

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”

Eleven years ago, scientists at East Anglia's Hadley CRU (yes, the epicenter of ClimateGate) warned that global warming would make snowfalls a thing of the past: 

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

…

… According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

To the true believers in anthropogenic global warming, everything fits their theory: droughts or floods; warm, dry winters or cold, snowy ones; more hurricanes or fewer. As Paige put it, "all sorts of havoc" are consistent with global warming. Nothing that happens can ever cast doubt on their "settled science." Nothing can serve as evidence against their claims.

A claim that isn't falsifiable isn't science. It's religion.

UPDATE: More evidence of global warming. Instapundit wondered if it's time to "Party like it’s 1046?"

Last Thursday, Denver hit 70°. Since then, we've had a record low high of -1°, followed by a low of -17° and wind chills of -25° to -40°. Those cheap homes in Phoenix are starting to look more appealing.

Although, if another Little Ice Age is about to begin (and some people, including reputable scientists, think it is), Tucson might be a better bet. Or, better yet, Costa Rica or Belize. Maybe I should look into Rosetta Stone and learn some Español. 

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Great moments in environmentalism, part 1

Posted by Richard on January 28, 2011

Scientists at Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology claim their "research" shows that if you kill enough people over a long-enough period of time, it's good for the environment:

His empire lasted a century and a half and eventually covered nearly a quarter of the earth's surface. His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green.

Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader's bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.

Apparently, the "research" was all done with today's favorite science toy, computer models. Why bother with all that tedious gathering of empirical data or messy experiments, when you can just write software that embodies your assumptions and cranks out conclusions? ("What are you going to believe, reality or my carefully constructed, elaborate, and expensive computer model?")

They had a lively and fun discussion in the comments at Mother Nature Network. The defenders of this "research" insisted that it was just a study, not advocacy, and everyone should calm down. But I can't help but think that the environmentalists who publish such dispassionate, objective studies are only one part of a green movement that includes many passionate advocates. And the eco-fascists of the green movement have a long history of expressing sentiments like these: 

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last! — Stewart Brand

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight — David Foreman, Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS — Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. — David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans. — Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels. — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

I wonder what these scientists are working on next — maybe a computer model to determine whether the ecological benefits of the Third Reich's population reduction efforts outweighed the harm done by the emissions from those ovens? 

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More green supremacist imagery

Posted by Richard on October 7, 2010

On Tuesday, I posted the environmentalist 10:10 Campaign's execrable little movie, "No Pressure," and quoted James Taranto, who dubbed these anti-human slimeballs "green supremacists." On Wednesday, Ed Driscoll posted about green supremacists, too, and added another disturbing example of the mindset:

And of course, as was the wont of the original White Supremacists, the Green Supremacists really dig fantasizing about a few lynchings, as Australian journalist Andrew Bolt recently discovered. …

Writing in Australia’s Herald Sun, Bolt notes that the photo below is a screen capture of a flier promoting a tradeshow last year put on in Cannes by ACT-Responsible — the ACT stands for “Advertising Community Together.” Not at all surprisingly, Kofi Annan was announced as attending, meaning that presumably he was OK with this image:

green supremacist lynching ad

Read the whole Driscoll post, which has much more fascinating information. This image is apparently admired by the leftist advertising community and enviro-bloggers.

Then be sure to check out this Photoshopped version of the above ad, which says all that needs to be said. 

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Eco-fascist humor

Posted by Richard on October 6, 2010

The big-name, big-budget environmentalist mini-movie "No Pressure" has drawn sharp reactions in the last few days, with criticism coming from both the right and the left. James Taranto did the most thorough job I've seen of taking apart this light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, gory eco-fascist murder fantasy. He observed that in the past, white supremacists have blown up children, as have Islamic supremacists. "Green supremacists" are still only joking about it — for now: 

There's a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven't blown up any children–not in real life. But they've been thinking about it.

A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut "carbon emissions." The result, titled "No Pressure," struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London's Daily Telegraph, as "deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful." He's being too kind.

Read the whole thing. And watch the movie: 


[YouTube link ]
[alternate YouTube link]
[another alternate YouTube link]

Taranto closed with: 

One may hope that Jim Edwards is right when he denies that "this is actually what environmentalists want." But it's bad enough that this is what they fantasize about–and that they manifestly felt no inhibition about airing such a depraved fantasy in public.

But we have plenty of evidence that this — or much worse — actually is what quite a few environmentalists want. We have their own words: 

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last! — Stewart Brand

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed. — Pentti Linkola

I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems. — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs. — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. — Economist editorial

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight — David Foreman, Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS — Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. — David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans. — Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels. — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

That's just a portion of the quotes collected at one site. There are many more here, here, and elsewhere. 

The leadership of the environmentalist movement is full of people who are anti-capitalist, anti-industrial-revolution, anti-modernity, anti-progress, and ultimately anti-human. There's nothing amusing about the sick self-loathing that causes a person to wish most or all the members of his species were dead. 

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Yet another climate scare

Posted by Richard on August 3, 2010

You've got to hand it to the True Believers in anthropogenic global warming — they just don't quit. Some of their leading lights were pretty thoroughly disgraced, and the laughable "investigations" that purported to clear them have been torn to shreds. But that doesn't stop them. They just crank up a new computer model, feed it a handful of dubious data, and it spits out a new prediction of the dire consequences of climate change.

Case in point: Princeton "environmental scientist" Michael Oppenheimer and some economist colleagues have come up with a computer model predicting that, by 2080 (!), as much as 10% of Mexico's adult population, or 6.7 million people, will migrate to the US due to climate change. Really.

The University of Colorado's Roger Pielke (who thinks "climate change is real and worthy of our attention") didn't mince words regarding the value of this study: 

To be blunt, the paper is guesswork piled on top of "what ifs" built on a foundation of tenuous assumptions. …

To use this paper as a prediction of anything would be a mistake. It is a tentative sensitivity study of the effects of one variable on another, where the relationship between the two is itself questionable but more importantly, dependent upon many other far more important factors. … It is almost as if the paper is written to be misinterpreted.

… The paper reflects a common pattern in the climate impacts literature of trying to pin negative outcomes on climate change using overly simplistic methods and ignoring those factors other than climate which have far more effect.

A commenter on Pielke's post pointed out that the math makes little sense:

"The silly PNAS paper makes three mistakes"

add another oops..

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mx.html

Total mexican labor forces 46.2 million
Percentage involved in agriculture 13.7%.

46.2 * 13.7% = 6.3 million agricultural workers.

Projecting more then 100% of the Mexican Agricultural labor force emigrating due to 'tough times on the farm' seems somewhat unrealistic.

Tom Nelson noted that, according to a 2007 NewsBusters post, Michael Oppenheimer is a "science adviser" to the radical Environmental Defense Fund who helped NBC News smear "global warming deniers." 

I can't wait to see what the next climate scare will be. I'm surprised, really, that someone hasn't come up with a computer model blaming climate change for all the foreclosures, the persistent unemployment, and the failure of the economy to recover during "Recovery Summer." After all, that "blame Bush" mantra is getting pretty stale. 

UPDATE: It occurs to me that, as I was writing the above, I forgot that this stupid study projects migration through 2080 — I suppose because that's such a ludicrously long period of time that it didn't really sink in. That means that both Oppenheimer's claim that the total migration amounts to 10% of the current adult Mexican population and the observation of the commenter I quoted that it represents more than 100% of the current agricultural labor force are pointless and meaningless.

Over the 70 years covered by the computer model's projection, most of the current population of Mexico will have died and been replaced by succeeding generations (and total population will have grown). How the total number of migrants over such a long period compares with the current population doesn't matter. How does the annual rate compare with the current rate? The study claims up to 6.7 million will migrate over 70 years. OK, that's a maximum of not quite 100,000 per year.

In 2008, FAIR (an anti-illegal-immigration organization) claimed the annual rate of illegal immigration was 500,000, and they cited an INS figure of 350,000. So the Oppenheimer study's claim of what amounts to less than 100,000 is far less than the current level. Are they saying the current rate will increase by that amount? That's not what the news stories about the study suggest. They suggest that the 6.7 million number is absolute, not relative. If so, their computer model predicts a significant decline in illegal immigration due to "climate change."

If the study suggests an incremental increase by that amount — well, they should say so. And it's fairly modest as such things go — I'll bet the rate varies by more than 20% depending on economic conditions on both sides of the border. 

Either way, this study is garbage, and the way they present it is misleading, mendacious fear-mongering. Typical of global warming "science." 

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Carbon pollution

Posted by Richard on June 9, 2010

Lots of people in the blogosphere are laughing over the latest evidence that Sen. Barbara Boxer is dumber than a box of rocks. Ed Morrissey has the video clip and money quote:

Let’s see how Senator Ma’am’s priorities work in this revealing clip from her speech earlier today in the Senate. We’ve had four terrorist attacks in less than a year, two of which succeeded in killing people and another two which only failed because of the incompetence of the terrorist. Iran is a year or less away from getting a nuclear weapon. Turkey is rapidly sliding towards Islamism. North Korea is doing their best to restart the Korean War.

And what keeps Barbara Boxer awake at night? A raging case of the vapors:

I’m going to put in the record, Madam President, a host of quotes from our national security experts who tell us that carbon pollution leading to climate change will be over the next 20 years the leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm’s way. And that’s why we have so many returning veterans who want us to move forward and address this issue, so we can create those new technologies that get us off this foreign oil.

Yeah, claiming that "carbon pollution" and "climate change" are greater threats to our national security than Iran, al Qaeda, or North Korea is pretty silly.

But what strikes me as absurd to the point of being surreal is that a carbon-based life form, standing on a planet full of carbon-based life forms, where carbon is one of the most abundant elements, would speak seriously of "carbon pollution" — as if the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe were some dangerous, unnatural substance being introduced into our environment by those evil chemical companies.

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I forgot about Earth Hour!

Posted by Richard on March 28, 2010

Aw, jeez, I completely forgot that Earth Hour was tonight! From 8:30 to 9:30 PM, Gaia-worshipping idiots around the world who think the planet would be better off if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred turned off their lights "to reduce energy consumption and draw attention to the dangers of climate change."

As I have in the past, I'd intended to counter this anti-technology, anti-reason, anti-modernity, and anti-human nonsense by turning on every light and electrical device in the house. But I spaced it out. So I only had on the usual lights, two computers, big-screen HDTV, satellite receiver, 6.1 audio system, and assorted small electronic devices. Damn! I could have done so much more!

Well, maybe I'll just leave some lights on overnight to compensate for my earlier slacking. And I'm sure there'll be another Carbon Belch Day this June, and I can celebrate by maximizing my carbon footprint then. 

As I've said before, "My ancestors didn't survive the Black Plague and Dark Ages, create the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, and bring about the past two hundred years of astonishing scientific and technological progress so that we could huddle in the dark." 

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NYTimes story: no warming in a century

Posted by Richard on February 27, 2010

Don Surber pointed out an interesting story from the New York Times. It's about a study by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists published in a journal called Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers examined a century's worth of temperature and precipitation records from U.S. weather stations.

According to the New York Times, they found "no significant change in average temperatures or rainfall in the United States over that entire period" and "no trend in one direction or another."

No, I'm not making this up. It really was a NOAA study, that's really what it found, and it really was reported in the New York Times. On January 26, 1989.

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More global warming pettifoggery

Posted by Richard on February 17, 2010

Roger Pielke, Jr., pointed out two conflicting claims, made less than a year apart, regarding "climate change" and fog:

National Geographic reports yesterday:

Declining fog cover on California's coast could leave the state's famous redwoods high and dry, a new study says.

Among the tallest and longest-lived trees on Earth, redwoods depend on summertime's moisture-rich fog to replenish their water reserves.

But climate change may be reducing this crucial fog cover. Though still poorly understood, climate change may be contributing to a decline in a high-pressure climatic system that usually "pinches itself" against the coast, creating fog, said study co-author James Johnstone, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Last summer the San Francisco Chronicle carried a story about research on fog and climate with a different conclusion:

The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it's about to get even foggier.

That's the conclusion of several state researchers, whose soon-to-be-published study predicts that even with average temperatures on the rise, the mercury won't be soaring everywhere.

"There'll be winners and losers," says Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University. "Global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast."

The study, which will appear in the journal Climate, is the latest to argue that colder summers are indeed in store for parts of the Bay Area.

More fog is consistent with predictions of climate change. Less fog is consistent with predictions of climate change. I wonder if the same amount of fog is also "consistent with" such predictions? I bet so.

More fog or less, more snow or less, more drought or less, more acne or less — whatever is currently happening is, to the true believer, evidence of anthropogenic global warming (a.k.a. "climate change").

If you don't believe me, check this list.

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Global cooling forecast, Phil Jones considered suicide

Posted by Richard on February 11, 2010

I don't know that there's any connection between these two bits of news, but they're both from the same Daily Express story, and for some reason the juxtaposition gave me a chuckle:

Professor Michael Beenstock said theories of climate change are wrong.

He warned climatologists have misused statistics, leading them to the mistaken conclusion global warming is ­evidence of the greenhouse effect.

…

The economics professor from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that just because greenhouse gases and temperatures have risen together does not mean they are linked.

He claims that the real cause of ­rising temperatures is the sun, which he says is at its hottest for over 1,000 years but is “beginning to stabilise”.

Professor Beenstock said: “If the sun’s heat continues to remain stable, and if carbon emissions continue to grow with the rate of growth of the world economy, global temperatures will fall by about 0.5C by 2050.”

Citing predictions by climatologists in the 1970s of a new Ice Age, Professor Beenstock said: “I predict that ­climatologists will look equally foolish in the years to come. Indeed, it may be already happening.”

Some of the commenters quickly seized on the fact that Beenstock is an economist, not a climatologist, claimed he was from a "right-wing think tank" (Hebrew University?), and said the Express had no business presenting him as an expert on climate.

I disagree. The "evidence" for global warming consists of statistical output data from complex computer models analyzing statistical input data (carefully chosen and adjusted to "normalize" it — or to arrive at the desired conclusion, depending on whom you believe). An econ professor is typically quite expert in statistics, mathematics, and computer modeling, and is thus quite qualified to comment on the manipulation of data relating to climate change. Certainly more so than the IPCC honcho who is a sociologist, or a flamenco dancer, or something. 

Later in the story, we learn that the fallout from the first ClimateGate scandal (how many have there been now, four?) has taken its toll on the chief perp:

Meanwhile, Professor Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit – the expert at the ­centre of the Climategate scandal – said he had considered suicide and had death threats over leaked emails which appeared to show ­scientists rigging the data.

The story ends with this, apparently presented with a straight face: 

MPs have called on the Government to consider a carbon tax of £100 a ton “or higher” to force down greenhouse gases. But there are fears it could push up fuel and food prices.

Gee, higher fuel and food prices from a carbon tax — ya think? Really?

 

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Warren on Washington weather

Posted by Richard on February 10, 2010

From Americans for Limited Government, here are a couple of William Warren cartoons that might amuse (or maybe annoy) those of you back East trying to dig out from the latest massive winter storm.

Warren cartoon - snow or irony

Warren cartoon - Capitol South
ALG Editor's Note: William Warren's award-winning cartoons published at GetLiberty.org are a free service of ALG News Bureau. They may be reused and redistributed free of charge.

Not to rub it in or anything, but the total snowfall to date in Denver this winter is less than what much of the East Coast got in the last 24 hours. Happy Snowmaggedon!

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Scamming the carbon credit scam

Posted by Richard on February 3, 2010

The idea behind carbon credits is that you can "offset" the alleged harm done by your CO2 emissions by paying someone else for not emitting an equivalent amount of CO2. Imagine Tiger Woods or John Edwards making everything all right by paying someone else to "offset" their infidelities by remaining faithful.

It's a fraudulent bit of nonsense through and through, but it's made Al Gore and his cohorts hundreds of millions of dollars from selling believers in the Church of Climate Change the modern equivalent of the medieval Roman Catholic Church's indulgences. 

Now, I think the authorities need to subpoena Gore's records from his ISP and check his online activities over the past week. Just to see if he had a role in this scamming of the scam:

Sneaky cyber-thieves have made millions by fraudulently obtaining European greenhouse gas emissions allowances and reselling them. The scam has hampered trading of the credits, which are seen as an important tool in curbing climate change, in several European countries.

…

According to a report in the Wednesday edition of the Financial Times Deutschland, hackers sent e-mails last Thursday to several companies in Europe, Japan and New Zealand which appeared to originate from the Potsdam-based German Emissions Trading Authority (DEHSt), part of the EU's Emission Trading System (EU ETS). Ironically, the e-mail said that the recipient needed to re-register on the agency's Web site to counter the threat of hacker attacks.

The cyber-thieves then exploited the user data that was entered into their spoof Web site to transfer emissions allowances to other accounts, mainly in Denmark and Britain, from which they were quickly resold. The new owners of the allowances would have assumed that they had acquired them legally.

"The attack was highly professional," a DEHSt employee told the newspaper. Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is now investigating the incident.

Of course, Gore might not be involved, or might not have been acting alone. Other credible suspects in any scam related to climate change include Phil Jones, James Hansen, Murari Lal, and Rajendra Pachauri.

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ClimateGate, the NASA version

Posted by Richard on January 23, 2010

What little credibility the promoters of global warming hysteria had remaining has now been shredded. From Investor's Business Daily (emphasis added):

We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.

In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.

As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."

Joseph D'Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA "systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations." The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.

E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D'Aleo, said he found "patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations." The more he looked, the more he found "patterns of deletion that could not be accidental."

…

Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA's data and conclusions suspect. D'Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.

I wonder — if we graphed the amount of scientific fraud uncovered in the field of climatology over the past few decades, would it look like a hockey stick?

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400,000 years of climate change

Posted by Richard on December 14, 2009

I finally got around to checking out a link that David Aitken sent me (someone please persuade him to post these things on his blog). It's fascinating. J. Storrs Hall of the Foresight Institute presented a series of graphs showing temperature readings derived from Greenland ice cores (and, for the 400,000+ year perspective, Antarctic ice cores). In a masterful bit of presentation, he starts with a graph for the past 500 years, then a graph for the past 1200, then 5000, then 12,000, …

Check it out. It's like looking at a picture of our galaxy and seeing our place in it — it changes your perspective. And puts all the climate change blather by dipwads like Al Gore into a different light. As Storrs observed (emphasis in original):

… we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history.  But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still.  It doesn’t even stand stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.

Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.

Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.

Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels?  Of course not. …

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.

Somebody tell all those clowns in Copenhagen that they should shut up and quietly fly their private jets home. 

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