Tag Archives: Global Warming

The Volcano

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Eyjafjallajokull. Even when they provide the pronunciation guide, I can’t pronounce it. (ay-yah-FYAH’-plah-yer-kuh-duhl). It’s a Black Swan!  Who could have predicted that a volcano in Iceland combined with wind and weather patterns would wreak such havoc, shutting down the EU for days and causing “the biggest airspace shutdown since World War II?”

Because it’s below a glacier, its magma mixes with the melted ice and cools more rapidly than would normally happen causing explosions that eject plumes of volcanic grit up to 30,000 feet into the sky. Unlike the smoke of a fire, which is mostly made of wimpy bits of carbon, this thing is churning out tiny bits of jagged volcanic rock (and if you’ve ever walked up a cinder cone, you know what I mean by “jagged”) and volcanic glass. Where smoke might clog an airplane engine, volcanic “ash” will tear it to pieces.  Thus airspace of most of Europe’s been closed down.

All sorts of people are stranded, many suffering the horrible tragedy of being unable to get to weddings, graduations, school, meetings and funerals. Even Prime Ministers. The airline industry is said to be losing at least $200 million a day. Warnings are going out that soon people may not be able to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, and many other things taken for granted that must be flown in from all over the world. The event has shown us how interconnected we are.

It’s also shown us how with all our interconnectedness and technology and sophistication how… weak and wimpy and out of control we really are. That’s the part I love about it. As one news story put it, “The eruption was a single act of nature, but it stopped the world in countless ways.”

Not nature, of course, God.

Below is a radar picture of the craters taken by the ELTA radar from an Icelandic Coast Guard airplane. People have compared it to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” a work whose inspiration is thought to come from the blood-red skies caused by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.

Bizarre.

And of course the thing is spewing smoke, ash, glass, rock, CO2 and I don’t know what all else, except that I”m pretty sure it’s pollution on a scale that dwarfs anything man has yet produced.

The poor Green Police. How in the world are they going to deal with the likes of this?

Exonerated!

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Cows have been absolved of causing global warming with their methane emissions. I think they still emit just as much methane as before, but a new study has shown that their grazing on grasslands can cut “emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas: nitrous oxide.” (Does it seem ironic to anyone else that climate change fanatics are in a tizzy about the over-production of laughing gas?)

According to an article in the online Telegraph.co.uk, cows, once noted as the greatest source of methane production on the planet, have been found to make up for that by their grazing. A study of grasslands in China revealed that when the grass is long, the snow lies atop it, trapping heat and moisture on the ground which encourages the growth of microbes in the soil, and those microbes produce the nitrous oxide. When the grass is cropped by herbivores like cows (I love cows) the snow settles close to the ground, freezing it and thus compromising the environment conducive to microbe proliferation.

Long live cows! (And sheep — they’re good, too)

Down with microbes! Has anyone measured the carbon footprint of microbes? I understand they are quite active in tropical and swampy areas. And rice paddies.

Actually I also recall reading a study a few months back that said the greatest source of CO2 was not man, but the soil itself, breaking down as it aged. There is an awful lot of aging soil on this planet…

Global Warming and the Ten Plagues

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Oh. My. Goodness….

The latest from the Global warming front…

Scientists have ascertained that the ten plagues of the Exodus which occurred, oh, about 3500 years ago, had nothing to do with God but were the product of a volcano and… you guessed it… Global Warming.

ROTFL

Surely they are kidding. They’ve got to be kidding. The Nile turned to blood? Caused by climate change? Why, yes, of course… The warm dry weather, they say, caused the river to become a slow-moving muddy watercourse, which in turn encouraged the growth of toxic freshwater algae called Burgundy blood algae. The toxic algae overstressed the frogs causing them to grow suddenly to adulthood, and leave the waters of the Nile all at once. Then as they died, they drew flies and mosquitoes and lice, which, as known disease vectors led to sick cattle and boils in people (why not boils in the cattle and sick people?) Meanwhile, 400 miles away, a volcano erupted accounting for the plagues of hail, locusts and darkness.

Unfortunately, all this conjecturing is based on a dry spell and volcano that occurred/erupted around 3000 years ago, during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279 BC and 1213 BC. Which is the dating for the Exodus accepted by those who don’t think the Bible is inerrant. I opt for the 1446 BC dating accepted by those who do think the Bible is inerrant. I Kings 6:1 says the Temple was begun 480 years after the Exodus. Since we know the Temple was started in 966 BC, that puts the Exodus at 1446 BC . There’s also the perhaps too subtle clue in the fact that the Pharoah’s name at that time was not Ramses, but…ahem… Thutmose. Or Thutmosis, as it is alternatively spelled. Mose, Mosis, Moses…

Thutmose I was the father of Hatshepsut and also, by a “minor wife,” the father of Thutmose II, who became the “fully royal” Hatshepsut’s consort. This half-brother/half-sister pair had a daughter Neferure.Thutmose II also fathered a son, Thutmose III, by his own lesser wife, though DNA analysis indicates Thut 3 was not actually the son of Thut 2, so the lesser wife must have been fooling around… And most likely “the fully royal” wife Hatshepsut knew it.

Thus it seems to me that Hatshepsut was most likely the Pharoah’s daughter mentioned in Exodus. She doesn’t seem to have been terribly happy about being married to Thutmose II, and seems to have been the real power behind his reign. Wikipedia says that Thutmose III “would have succeeded as the only male heir under typical circumstances. [He] was born to a secondary wife or concubine of [his]father and was a youth at the time of his father’s death.[2] After the death of their father, a marriage between Neferure and her half-brother would have assured his place in the royal succession, but events led to his becoming only a co-regent for a long time before he became pharaoh.” Thutmose III was probably the Pharoah that Moses ran away from after killing the Egyptian who’d been beating a Hebrew.

Wikipedia doesn’t say what the events that led to Thut 3 being co-regent, but I think the story in Exodus where Pharoah’s daughter finds baby Moses and takes him in as her own makes sense when considered in light of the events outlined above. In Hebrews, we’re told that Moses, “by faith, when he had grown up refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter…” that is, he was being groomed to be her successor, most likely to marry Neferure so that the false son of Thut 2 would never ascend to the throne…

None of which has anything to do with the Global warming theory, but IS interesting. And, as I said earlier, supports the 1446 BC dating of the Exodus. Which is NOT when the scientists’ volcano erupted.

Oh, and the deaths of the first-born? Fungus in the grain. The first-born males would have had first pickings, say the scientists, and thus died first — instantly, I would guess, if they were to save those who ate after them. I’m not sure if the first-born of the cattle would fall under this first pickings rule, either, so this supposed evidence is even more lame than the rest. Especially since none of the Jews who put the blood on their doorposts sustained any losses. How was it the slaves got the unfungus-infected grain and the royals did not?

Why do people have to tie themselves into knots in order to not believe that the Bible is true and that God can do miracles? They put on this facade of objectivity and intelligence and open-mindedness, and come up with the most convoluted, laborious and ultimately absurd explanations full of coincidences and challenging their own laws of statistics and then expect other people to be impressed. Well, of course, I know why: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God…”

If you want to read the article itself, it’s here.

Climate Change Consensus Continues to Unravel

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In the face of the Climategate scandal and recent admissions by the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that the reports it had published urging action to avert climate change were based on flawed data, Republican senator James Inhofe, ranking member of Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee is asking for an investigation. He wants the Obama administration to revisit the supposedly finished debate on anthropogenic climate change with regard to whether there was “research misconduct or criminal actions” carried out by the scientists involved in generating the reports relied upon the IPCC. Today the minority members of the committee have issued a statement of concern that these scientists have “violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, federal laws.”  (emphasis mine) They also want Al Gore called back to Congress to defend his movie and himself in this affair, and for the EPA to reconsider its recent “Endangerment Finding” (which would eventually lead to the agency regulating CO2 emissions) seeing as the finding was based on the particularly flawed fourth report from the IPCC.

Here’s a quote from their statement:

“Since the Climategate files were released, the IPCC has been forced to retract a number of specific conclusions — such as a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 — and has been forced to confirm that the report was based in large part on reports from environmental activist groups instead of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Dr. Murari Lal, an editor of the IPCC AR4 report, admitted to the London Daily Mail that he had known the 2035 date was false, but was included in the report anyway “purely to put political pressure on world leaders.”

The minority Senators cite four major issues revealed by Climategate:

1.The emails suggest some climate scientists were cooperating to obstruct the release of damaging information and counter-evidence.

2.They suggest scientists were manipulating the data to reach predetermined conclusions.

3.They show some climate scientists colluding to pressure journal editors not to publish work questioning the “consensus.”

4.They show that scientists involved in the report were assuming the role of climate activists attempting to influence public opinion while claiming scientific objectivity.”

Their statement also  includes a number of potential violations including:

1.It suggests scientific misconduct that may violate the Shelby Amendment — requiring open access to the results of government-funded research — and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) policies on scientific misconduct (which were announced December 12, 2000).

2.It notes the potential for violations of the Federal False Statements and False Claims Acts, which may have both civil and criminal penalties.

3.The report also notes the possibility of there having been an obstruction of Congress in congressional proceeds, which may constitute an obstruction of justice.

This report appeared on Pajamas Media and was linked to by the Drudge Report. I wonder if it will show up anywhere else? And will Inhofe’s request have even a ghost of a chance of being honored by the democratic majority? To say nothing of an adminstration that has already openly declared its intent to proceed on actions designed to “save” us from the effects of man-caused climate change whether it exists or not…

Here’s the article: Climategate and the Law

And here’s another story by the same writer, also on Pajamas Media: “Climategate: The World’s Biggest Story, Everywhere but Here.”  This one was particularly interesting in its tracing of the unfolding of the American media’s formulation of the way they would report this story — not as a failure of the scientific process and community, but as a couple of minor flaws — “mistakes were made” — but nothing significant and certainly nothing that affects the already-thoroughly-established credibility of and consensus regarding AGW “science”.

Desire, Delusion and Projection

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I got a comment on yesterday’s post that took me down a new line of thought relative to whether these global warming folks are outright lying, or just indulging in massive wishful thinking. At least as regards to whether the planet really is warming up and man is actually the cause. Though Rush Limbaugh maintains they are indeed lying, and I wouldn’t rule it out, I can’t help but wonder if desire, delusion and projection might be another way to evaluate their viewpoint/actions.

I’ve mentioned before being at the World Science Fiction convention years ago and listening to a panel of scientists express agreement that sometimes one’s hypothesis can overshadow the data. “You know in your gut your hypothesis correct,” one woman said. “You just know. And thus your job is to figure out how to make the data show it.”

Confirmation bias, anyone?

As I’ve also mentioned before, I’ve encountered that same viewpoint repeatedly ever since. I’ve even quoted from some prominent atheists/scientists to the effect that science by definition excludes God. They begin from the standpoint that God should not even be able to get his foot in the door because that would destroy the “science ” of the scientific method. I can see justification for the viewpoint in a way: if whenever you don’t understand how something works you just say God’s making it happen that way and leave it, you’re not going to learn very much about the world around you on any kind of deeper level. Such an approach operates from the premise that there is no logic, no sequence, no underlying order in what’s happening, nothing to be learned about God from the created world.

When the truth is the exact opposite. Romans 1:20 says that “His invisible attributes, eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made…” Science, then, is really just another way of finding God. Looking carefully at the natural world, you see the logic, the sequence, the building of one element upon another to produce a whole, the incredible precision and specificity of it all. None of which you’d see if you could never get past the, “God did it so we can’t figure it out” mentality. The real question behind all scientific inquiry and experimentation is how did God set this thing up to work? How will it interact with other things? What exactly is this thing and how much of it can we know? Kind of the same approach we use in studying the word of God.

But as with so many things, including the word of God, people can take a truth and misapply it. They are ignorant, arrogant, they possess a nature virulently opposed to God, their natural thoughts can’t understand God, and they live in a world system devised and administrated by a creature who is far smarter than any of them, but just as arrogant about himself and as ignorant and deluded about who God is. Many of the people who have seized upon science and the theory of evolution as truth, do so admittedly because it gives them a way to explain everything without having to acknowledge (and thus be accountable to) God.

Which brings me to the third element of my triad, projection. Projection is when you take your own sins, failings, and faulty viewpoint and project them onto others, all the while denying you have any such failings yourself. Then you criticize those on whom you’ve projected for the sins you deny in yourself. So it is here. Atheists and atheist/scientists love to mock Christians as being blind, as having “to check their brains at the door in order to believe in the things of God. “Faith is believing to be true what you know to be a lie,” one said.

I know that’s not me, because I know the Word of God is not a lie. But given the revelations of Climategate, the desperation with which the media and global warmists seek to defend their position in the face of God’s laughter (that would be the massive snowstorms burying the east coast just now) it seems to me that they are the ones who are caught in “blind belief”, the ones who truly are seeking to believe that which they know to be untrue.

And I can see why they might be so incredibly desperate because look what they have to lose… position, esteem, reputation, money, maybe their life’s work. I suspect not too many of them are eager to admit they are wretched sinners, weak and foolish and in need of a savior, either. It’s not rational, it’s emotional.And emotions simply cannot think.

ADDENDUM:  Speaking of desperation in defending global warming, a British engineering prof, Dr. John Brignell, runs a website called numberwatch where he’s collected links to media stories ascribing the cause of everything under the sun to global warming, many of them contradictory. Things like…

Lack of snowfall, too much snowfall
shrinkage of coral reefs, growth of coral reefs
destruction of bananas, growth of same
winds increasing, winds decreasing
hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late.
wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less…

All supposedly the result of global warming. He has over 600 of them at this writing. You can see them all HERE.

Admission — No Warming since ’95

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The poor Green Police are looking stupider than ever now that the global warming scientist from University of East Anglia, Professor Phil Jones, has come out with the admission that

1) he’s a terrible records keeper and has no idea where the original raw data is that he used for his analysis (the one that everyone including the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies upon to support their hysterical claims of anthropocentric global warming; the one based on the infamous hockey stick graph that supposedly closed the deal and ended the debate);

2) there has been NO global warming since 1995 ! and

3) it’s entirely possible that the Medieval Warming Period (when the Romans were growing grapes for wine in England) back between 800 and 1300 AD was warmer than anything we’re experiencing now, (ahem) , and may well have been global, they just don’t happen to have any paleoclimatic data from the southern hemisphere. (That’s because the southern hemisphere is mostly ocean and it’s difficult to measure what the ocean’s temp was thousands of years ago… ) In any case, the MWP was in NO way caused by anything man was doing at the time.

These admissions are huge, particularly coming from this individual. They entirely knock the legs out from under the whole idea of AGW (Anthropocentric Global Warming). But… are we hearing about it anywhere? I found a link on Drudge to an article in the UK’s Daily Mail. The same article Rush read from on his radio program today. I just did a quick check of CNN, ABC, MSNBC and CBS’s online news pages. Nada. (I did , however, learn that production of 24 will be suspended briefly while Keifer Sutherland has a minor, elective surgery to deal with a ruptured cyst on one of his kidneys… )

Only Fox News carried the story. And yet, it completely negates the need for cap and trade, for all these green initiatives, green cars, ethanol, wind generators, all the demonization of SUV’s and cars in general, compost regulations, light bulb regulations, carbon offsets, carbon footprints. The whole thing is a pipe dream. A hoax.  Though a very lucrative hoax for some of the hoaxers.)

Some quotes: 

“… colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’. “

Forget about the twenty year thing. What about normal scientific protocol where you’re supposed to have your data available for others to evaluate and confirm your conclusions? Something that should have been done long before twenty years had passed.

Here’s another:

“Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

“Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be…

“‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult.'”

And this is the kind of person whose conclusions are worthy of the entire nation destroying its economy, enslaving its citizens and spending millions of dollars to implement?

You can read the Daily Mail article HERE.

Green Police Ad Update

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Okay, I guess I have to take back the comment about conservatives and their sense of humor since some are taking it as a scary prediction of future tyranny and consider it no laughing matter.

I guess what I like about the satire is that it just shows how absurd it is to make rules about light bulbs, napkin use and throwing away dead batteries. (Audi put out several other ads that preceded the one in the Superbowl, one of which was a “public service announcement” designed to help us unwashed idiots figure out how many napkins to use in various situations. It’s one napkin per sandwich the uniformed spokesman tells us, complete with graphics. It was funny, too, in its way, except for in this case, we’ve already had things like this: eg, Kathleen Sibelius, US Health and Human Services Secretary, lecturing us on the proper way to sneeze. (Uh… isn’t that for Kindergarten teachers?) I cannot drive anywhere in my town without seeing billboards advising me to wash my hands, not touch my face and cover my sneezes… “Your mother was right!” they tell me. “Do as she says!”

Talk about a nanny state. And some of our citizens actually embrace this!

Well, the update here is that apparently when the mayor of San Francisco saw this Green Police ad, he tweeted that it “hits close to home.” Turns out the ad company that devised the ad is based in San Francisco where there really are ordinances like those it portrays. The orange rind, bit, for example. You really will violate the city’s new “composting mandate” if you put your orange peels down the garbage disposal. It’s as bad as Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi…

Article: Why the “Green Police” Is So San Francisco

Videos: Napkin Abuse, Powerstrip, Green Police Anteater, Interactive…

The Green Police

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This Audi ad about the Green Police is hysterical. A man arrested for choosing plastic bags over paper? Garbage cans inspected for tossed away batteries?

“Put the rind down! Sir! That’s a compost infraction…” and on it goes…

If, like me, you didn’t watch the Superbowl, maybe you haven’t seen it. Even if you have, it’s fun to watch again. So I’m embedding it here. (those of you who receive the blog through Feedblitz will probably have to go to the blog itself to see it)

I read one really silly article by someone who thought that this ad was aimed only at people who believed in “the moral authority” of  something like The Green Police. People like the writer of the article, for example. “If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise,” he asked, “why would you make a commercial like that?”

Because it’s hysterically funny. Because it’s ridiculous. Because it makes a mockery of this alleged “moral” authority. Morality associated with light bulbs? Plastic bags? Dead batteries? Puh-leeze!

Rush had it right. Audi made the ad to get attention and sell cars. Yes, the guy is allowed to go his way because he’s “obeyed” the Green Police, but really, it’s so obviously a satire that in a sense I see him as “above the rat race” and all it’s silliness. Which I think may be just what Audi appeals to. I think the satire is hilarious. In any case, it’s going to draw the attention of both crowds, which is what makes it so brilliant.  And maybe Rush is right in another way, too — in his contention that Conservatives seem to have a sense of humor whereas rabid liberals do not.

Climategate

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Many of you may have heard about the leaked emails out of the  Climate Research Unit at the University East Anglia in Britain. the CRU is supposedly the premiere research organization in the world when it comes to climate change, and the group that supplied two of the four sets of data that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used for its report. Its data and perspective are described as “key to setting environmental agenda” for the world and turns out these climate scientists were doing exactly the same things  the evolutionists tend to do: making the data fit how they want it to fit, and in some cases even making the data up.

One of the things legitimate scientific researchers are supposed to do is give other researchers free access to the data they have collected to so they may come to the same conclusions, generally by repeating the experiment or process. In this case the CRU not only refused for years to allow others to examine their original data it now turns out that they managed to “lose” the original data… these would be temperatures they took over the years from various locations, information gleaned from tree ring studies and other elements they combined to “reconstruct” past temperature profiles. (that last immediately begins to sound fishy to me. Once people start trying to reconstruct something as ephemeral as specific temperatures of the past, my skeptic lights go on)

In any case, they took the temperatures they had gathered, put them through a sequence of computer programs (also top-secret  so others could not confirm) to “adjust” the temperatures to make up for various unspecified factors in the collection process and, oh my! they came up with a tidy rise in global temperatures over the last 150 years. Then they managed to ditch original readings from which they derived their adjusted temps.

They’d like people to believe it was all an accident, it was way back in the 80s when global warming wasn’t an issue, and maybe some would believe that  if it weren’t for the emails wherein heretofore respected AGW (that’s Anthropocentric Global Warming) scientists told each other to get rid of the data, moaned about how hard it was to get their vaunted programs to spit out the right conclusions, and discussed how they might keep their opposition from ever publishing in legitimate journals, thus providing themselves with the ability to marginalize their findings by pointing out they’d never been published in a respected, peer-reviewed journal.

These people are the main scientists involved in the UN study (IPCC mentioned above) that resulted in the alarmist warning that governments had better do something about this approaching disaster or mankind will destroy the earth. The same study that’s generated the upcoming conference in Copenhagen which our President is set to attend in just a few days.

Even Global Warming advocates are horrified and shocked that their heros, the scientists they respected and believed have pretty much violated every research protocol in the book. They want the head of the CRU to step down and last I heard he was going to. But even so, there are others who tsk and sweep it all under the rug. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, (whose degrees are in Industrial Engineering and Economics, not a climate science) told the UK’s Guardian, “The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report.” So he’s just pretending none of it happened. (article)

That just blows me away. I don’t know what universe these people live in, but it’s not the same as mine. Or maybe it is, and the truth is that they don’t care if they lie, don’t care, really, if anyone believes them, they just want to continue on with their plans until they have the power they are seeking. (Pachauri also thinks “Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed.”)  (article)

I’ve said it before, and this new development makes it clearer than ever that the whole thing is a hoax. It’s all wishful thinking, self-delusion, corruption, deceit, arrogance, and clearly, I think, part of the push toward one world government.

The interesting thing, as I mentioned earlier, is how closely the methods and comments and goals of the scientists are so similar to those I quoted as coming from evolutionists not too long ago. The same approach of deciding what the truth is, then setting out to “prove” it.

I find it also interesting that in both cases, God is shoved aside, deliberately, consciously and in some cases openly, excluded from the picture. Evolutionists are searching for a rational explanation for everything that does not include God or any sort of supernatural creative event. At the other end of the spectrum, Global warming alarmists say God cannot protect His creation and they are committed to proving that global disaster which only man can avert, is on the way.

And amazingly a lot of people believe both camps.

A quote from The Black Swan comes to mind (actually a lot of concepts do, but I’ll confine myself to one.)

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but someone fall for the securities analyst — those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians.[And here I would add, global warming scientists] Using confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War…”

How weird to live in a world where people would rather trust fallible men spouting theories that the least bit of common sense would recognize as ridiculous, than God. How weird that these same people should take their own views a step further and describe them in religious terms. As happened last Monday as reported on Fox News by George Russell: “Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion ‘as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,’ according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world’s would-be environmental watchdog.”

For more on this:  Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation