Global Warming “Science” Crumbles To Dust

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With repeated “Climate-Gates” coming fast and furious and lots of science, data, political maneuvering, and just plain spin going on, we thought a nice concise summary was in order.  First the fundamental temperature data sets:

  • The British data (Hadley-CRU) maintained by the Climate Research Unit and the Hadley Center for Climate Change –  The Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) discovered the supposed warming trend was created by slowly removing more and more Russian weather stations from the yearly global averages.
  • The National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. – In the 1970s, NOAA collected the temperature data from 600 Canadian weather stations. But this number has dwindled over the years to just 35 today for the entire expanse of Canada, including just one above the Arctic Circle. (Canada currently operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, with more than 100 above the Arctic Circle). “NOAA… systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which have a tendency to be cooler”
  • NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS) – Mirrored NOAA in reducing the number of Canadian sites being averaged into the global data and cherry picking those that remained. NASA GISS is run by the “unbiased” James Hansen, who “became famous for calling coal [shipments] to your local power plant ‘death trains’ and advocating war-crime trials for the executives who daily force you to put gasoline in your car.”
  • U.S. weather satellites measuring global atmospheric temperatures – Data is too public to be manipulated or cherry-picked but has only been in operation since 1979.  Satellite data shows no increase in global temperature trends until the unrelated El Nino spike of 1998, with temperatures declining back down since then. By April of this year, that decline had completely offset the 1998 spike, with temperatures back to where they were in 1980.

The Nobel Prizing winning (with Al Gore) United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) often sited as the “gold standard” on Global Warming:

  •  2007 (Nobel Winning) IPCC Report determined a 90% probability that the massive Himalayan glaciers would melt away completely by 2035 – This was scientifically based on a single news report that sited a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist in question, says he was misquoted and provided no date to the reporter. The United Nations never bothered to confirm the claim.
  • The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, has received millions in grants to further study Himalayan glaciers, based on the original bogus 2035 melting claim. Email correspondence now proves that Pachauri was aware last fall that the 2035 melting claim was false, but he continued to try to hide that from the public through the December Copenhagen summit. After the full story became public, Pachauri and the IPCC finally admitted the falsehood.
  • 2007 IPCC Report claimed that global warming threatened up to 40% of the beloved Amazon rain forest, allegedly because it is extremely sensitive to even modest decreases in rainfall that supposedly may result from warming. (this was back when Global Warming was going to reduce not increase rain and snow) – This was scientifically based on a magazine article by two non-scientists, one being an environmental activist who has worked for the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.
  • 2007 IPCC Report projected disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps, and Africa – This was scientifically based on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine written by a hiker.
  • 2007 IPCC Report claimed that the world has “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s.”  – This was scientifically based on a unpublished study which, when published in 2008, concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”
  • The U.N. dramatically claimed that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level making it very susceptible to global flooding – the accurate portion is 26 percent.  Did the IPCC check any of it’s facts?

Professor Jones who was director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (Hadley-CRU) until emails leaked that he would destroy his data before turning it over for a Freedom of Information request.

  • Now claims the Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ that “proved” global warming has not been destroyed but is merely “lost” in his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’ – Since the data has been “missing” since October and Professor Jone’s professional reputation is currently stained with “scientific fraud”, one can only hope that a good office spring cleaning will clear all this mess up. (puns intended)
  • Now admits that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
  • Now admits there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena – that is they were not “man made”.
  • Now admits the world could have been even warmer during the medieval period than now – if true the world would be cooling despite man’s best attempts to create CO2.

Source Material:

American Unexceptionalism

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Andrew Roberts has a great piece in the February issue of the American Spectator.  It was so good I had to excerpt a great deal of it:

[Winston Churchill] believed that given the will, Americans could achieve anything, because America was special. Yet today it is precisely this trust in the exceptionalism of America that is currently being called into question. History shows that nations that retain self-belief are indeed capable of astonishing feats, but those that suspect their time in the sun has passed cannot be saved, however rich they are or successful they have been.

…Such searing hatred of the American Idea from within American society-indeed from inside its cultural elite-is far more dangerous than what non-Americans feel… but much more worrying was President Barack Obama’s reply in April to a question from a Financial Times reporter about whether he believed in American exceptionalism. He said: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

This is reminiscent of what the Dodo says in Alice in Wonderland: “Everyone has won and all must have prizes.” Yet that is simply not how international relations work. Greeks might indeed believe in their own exceptionalism, as might Belgians, Thais, or Finns for that matter, but they are not truly exceptional in the light of global current affairs. The West once again looks to America for leadership in a risky world, as we so often have in the past. Although the U.S. economy was in recession in the second quarter of 2009, she pulled out of it in the third quarter. My country, Britain, is still heavily mired in recession, but nothing so cheers our markets as much as knowing that you are finally out of it. American optimism, free market beliefs, and the can-do spirit will raise the Western world out of these doldrums-at least, they will if they are permitted to by your Congress and administration. …

SO IN A RISKY WORLD, where the hegemony of the English-speaking peoples-necessarily led by America-is increasingly being encroached upon by China, India, the European Union, and other powers, will America continue to provide the global leadership she always has, ever since she erupted onto the global stage a century ago? For it was in 1909 that Teddy Roosevelt visited Hampton Roads in Virginia to witness the return, after a 14-month, 45,000-mile circumnavigation of the world, of the Great White Fleet.

On board the presidential yacht Mayflower, Roosevelt watched seven miles of bright white ships- they were painted battle-gray soon after-as they fired a 21-gun salute in his honor. “We have definitely taken our place among the world great powers,” he said afterward, and he was right. The places that the Fleet had visited subtly underlined this important new fact of global geopolitics. From Chesapeake Bay, the 16 battleships had steamed to the Caribbean, past the new possessions of Cuba and Puerto Rico, then down the east coast and up the west coast of South America, protected by the Monroe Doctrine. Each country of the Latin American part of the world cruise at which the Fleet stopped-including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico-could have harbored any illusions about what this massive new force portended.

After Mexico, the Fleet visited Hawaii (annexed by the U.S. in July 1898), New Zealand, and Australia, China, the (American-owned) Philippines, and then Japan. It then sailed across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, and then across the Atlantic. As a historian of America’s explosion onto the world scene recorded: “The cruise not only impressed the world with America’s newfound military strength, but excited the imagination of Americans as well. A million people had turned out in San Francisco to welcome the ships before their voyage across the Pacific.” There was no talk then of Greek exceptionalism being something that could be equated with American. …

YET ALTHOUGH THE CHALLENGES FACED by the English-speaking peoples today are undeniably challenging, they are hardly unique. History might not repeat itself, but it does occasionally rhyme. The War on Terror would be instantly recognizable to the great leaders of the English-speaking peoples of the past. Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would have heard in the overarching ambitions of the jihadists for a caliphate stretching from Spain to Indonesia an echo of the Wilhelmine ambitions that led to the first great assault on the English-speaking peoples in 1914. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt would also have seen in the viciousness and ruthlessness of the Taliban a shadow of the swastika that fell across Europe from 1933 to 1945. Harry Truman, JFK, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher would have no difficulty in spotting the similarities between al Qaeda’s creed of universality with the Marxist dialectical claim of the Soviet Communists to eventual world domination.

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than the fourth great assault on the primacy of the English-speaking peoples from aggressive totalitarian belief systems. The methods might be different each time, but the mindset hasn’t changed. Yet what I fear might have changed is a growing unwillingness of the elites of the English-speaking peoples to continue paying the price for their liberty. The sunset clause President Obama put on his latest surge at his West Point speech is the latest example of this unwillingness.

If the United States does not provide the kind of leadership in our risky world that was provided by Churchill, the two Roosevelts, Truman, JFK, Reagan, and Thatcher, and which one day-especially in the field of homeland security-will be accorded to President Bush and Tony Blair, then we must tremble for the future. For America to listen to the siren voices of isolationism and to withdraw into herself- perhaps citing Washington’s Farewell Address as she does so-would be utterly disastrous for our planet in the 21st century. Power abhors a vacuum, and America’s withdrawal would soon be followed by the emergence of another nation that would not exhibit a fraction of America’s decency, fairness, and veneration for the popular will. …

WHEN IT COMES TO THE great power that might take America’s place as the 21st century’s hegemon, consider the field. There is the European Union, with its 500 million population, its profound anti-American prejudice, its endemic corruption-its auditors haven’t signed off its accounts in more than a decade-and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the European project. Would Americans want the French and Germans to replace them and be bathed in the warm limelight of History’s favor? Or there’s China, a vicious totalitarian regime that treats its own massive population with cruelty and contempt, and would undoubtedly treat any other subject people worse, as the Tibetans’ experience proves. Perhaps the least bad would be India, which at least has similar political and legal systems, the rule of law and democracy, and 18 percent of whose people speak English, all thanks to the careful two-century stewardship of the British Empire. Yet can one really see India acting altruistically in areas of the world where her immediate self-interest is not evident, because her Founding Fathers imbued her nation with a noble and all-encompassing mission, as America’s did? …

The way that the United States can ensure that the world is never united against her is to abide by the spirit of the Special Relationship. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read the obituaries of people who have written obituaries of the Special Relationship, yet it is thankfully still with us, as is America’s special relationship with the rest of the English-speaking peoples. If one looks at the forces presently deployed in Afghanistan-i.e., in the vanguard of the struggle between civilization and barbarism in our world today-you see 98,000 American troops and 35,000 from the rest of NATO, of which the British make up the second largest element, with 10,000, then the Germans (in the safest province), but after that the Canadians, who have taken the larger per capita proportion of casualties, and there have been special forces contingents from faraway Australia and New Zealand, even though they are not in NATO. (This is one place where Greek exceptionalism does come into play, in that there are exceptionally few Greeks in Afghanistan.)

As Churchill put it: “It is the English-speaking peoples who, almost alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom. These things are a powerful incentive to collaboration. With nations, as with individuals, if you care deeply for the same things, and these things are threatened, it is natural to work together to preserve them.” Today, we in Britain fear that President Obama has little or no time for the Special Relationship. One of his acts on entering the Oval Office was to return the bust of Churchill given by the British embassy in the wake of 9/11 back to the embassy. More seriously, he canceled the European missile shield. Teddy Roosevelt and Lord Salisbury, Churchill and FDR, Macmillan and JFK, Reagan and Thatcher, and Bush and Blair have defined the Special Relationship, but nothing like that closeness exists between Obama and Gordon Brown. We must hope that Obama and David Cameron get on once the Conservatives win the 2010 election in Britain, for in this risky world we both need the Special Relationship.

“AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM is not just something that Americans claim for themselves,” Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out. “Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America-by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism-the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies.”

It is that assumption, that sense of mastery of their own fates, that I fear might be faltering in modern America, and if so it will be the forerunner of a world historical tragedy, not just for America and the rest of the English-speaking peoples, but ultimately for the whole world. With the risks facing us today, American leadership is needed as much as ever before. America should hold on to her exceptionalism, never apologize for the American Idea, and be proud of the fact that you do things differently there.

Desktop CPUs Pentium 4s To Core i7s & AMD Too – Is It Time To Upgrade?

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Tech Report has put together a 18 page round up of CPUs from yesterday and today.  The comparison is nice as it includes OLD hardware to give you a real feel for what kind of speed bump a new desktop would actually give in the real world.

The real gold however is in a single page: the value proposition:

With the data plotted [overall performance per dollar], we can see a few other contenders that might join the Athlon II X3 and X4 processors as value stand-outs at higher performance levels, including the Core i5-750, Phenom II X4 965, Core i7-920, and even the Core i7-960.  The ghosts of the P4 670 and the Core 2 Quad Q6600 haunt our value scatter plot, as well, reminding us of the dismal CPU values in days past…

The inclusion of total system prices alters the complexion of our scatter plot somewhat, too, mainly by making the LGA775 and LGA1366 processors look less attractive. The cheaper chips lose their luster, as well. The Core i5-750 and i7-870 remain nicely positioned, while the poorer values include the Core 2 Duo E8600, the Q9400, and the Core i5-661.

Tech Report even goes on to include the various electrical costs of the difference chip & system power draws which further extends the Intel lead and creates a clear cut winner.  Ok a few winners:

  • To build a reasonably beefy machine for around $700 and what the maximum bang for your buck – get the Core i5-750.
  • For more performance without breaking the bank ($1000-1200) pick up an entry level i7 – either the i7-920 or the i7-870 (the high end cores are much more expensive but only marginally faster)
  • For more efficient, always-on systems such as a HTPC consider the core i3-530 which will be easier on your electric bill and quieter than the i5

I personally invested in a i7-920 machine this summer (overclocked at 3.21Ghz with stock cooling) and love it.  I can encode a 90min movie from DVD insertion to finished file in ~16 minutes.  In fact, the two most significant performance improvements I have seen in a quite while in my own usage are my i7 core and my more recent SSD upgrade on my boot/programs drive.

Reality Snows On Global Warming Parade

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Historic snowfall frequency and amounts this winter have Global Warming fanatics scrabbling.  We even had new record of simultaneous snow in 49 of the 50 states (poor Hawaii).  Here are some of the better bits:

MSNBC’s Ratigan tries to make the argument that the global warmed air holds more moisture then the winter (not global warmed yet?) air makes it snow… Seriously? (Video)

MSNBC journalist schools meterologist what she was “taught” on global warming. Classic. (Video)

Lastly with all the politicians trying to now claim that more snow proves global warming – here’s a look back at just a few of the time’s they claimed it was less snow that “proved” global warming. (Video)  Oh and I also liked Sen Byrd’s comment that he doesn’t need to talk to a scientist about it – because he knows what’s going on…

Tebow’s Critics Intolerant, Can’t Define “Choice”

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Sally Jenkins, a pro-choice sports writer, came to Tim Tebow’s defense today:

… As statements at Super Bowls go, I prefer the idea of Tebow’s pro-life ad to, say, Jim McMahon dropping his pants, as the former Chicago Bears quarterback once did in response to a question. We’re always harping on athletes to be more responsible and engaged in the issues of their day, and less concerned with just cashing checks. It therefore seems more than a little hypocritical to insist on it only if it means criticizing sneaker companies, and to stifle them when they take a stance that might make us uncomfortable.

I’m pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I’ve heard in the past week, I’ll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the “National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time.” For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn’t be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn’t. …

You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren’t embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions. See, the best way to deal with unwanted pregnancy is to not get the sperm in the egg and the egg implanted to begin with, and that is an issue for men, too — and they should step up to that.

“Are you saving yourself for marriage?” Tebow was asked last summer during an SEC media day.

“Yes, I am,” he replied.

The room fell into a hush, followed by tittering: The best college football player in the country had just announced he was a virgin. As Tebow gauged the reaction from the reporters in the room, he burst out laughing. They were a lot more embarrassed than he was.

“I think y’all are stunned right now!” he said. “You can’t even ask a question!”

That’s how far we’ve come from any kind of sane viewpoint about star athletes and sex. Promiscuity is so the norm that if a stud isn’t shagging everything in sight, we feel faintly ashamed for him. … [emphasis added]