Cruise ships are sailing to the antarctic, passengers and crew imagining the ice to be melting. One ran into a glacier and had a change of plans. Another was caught between two icebergs, and sunk.
In the coming arctic summer, we shall see a bunch of cruise ships attempting to pass what they expect to be the Northwest passage. I suspect that this may turn out to be entertaining. (more…)
This is a graph of the global temperature anomaly published from satellite data
To smooth the graph I take the rolling twelve month average – thus the temperature shown on the graph for 2008 January is actually the average from 2007 February to 2008 January.
The presidents that have done the most to smash capitalism have never been Democrats, because anti capitalist Democrat presidents have always found themselves paralyzed by gridlock – the pro capitalist faction unites along party lines, and the federal government system locks up, as it was designed to do. The founding fathers intentionally constructed the federal government so that it would be slow and inefficient at making large controversial changes.
The greatest catastrophes for capitalism have come from the anticapitalist Republican presidents, Nixon and Hoover, because they could get “bipartisan” anticapitalist measures through congress.
Environmentalists have always intended global warming as a justification installing a socialist command and control economy. McCain has just unveiled a global warming plan, theoretically market based, but in fact not in the slightest market based, a command and control plan which is the socialists wet dream. He calls it market based, but this merely means that bureaucrats will be able to blame markets for the chaos they create. The only role of the market in the plan is to be the guy that takes the fall. As Brutally Honest says, McCaine has drunk the koolaide
Maybe Obama is just as anti capitalist, or even more anti capitalist than McCain, but if he is, he will face gridlock.
Bryan Caplan writes
When someone says “There are too many Jews,” we suspect that he wants to kill Jews. Similarly, it turns out that at the root of Hitler’s propensity to kill people was his belief that there are too many people.
And if you’re tempted to say that Hitler proposed a barbaric solution for a real problem, take a look at how Germany actually did feed its population since 1945: increasing agricultural productivity and increasing exports. The two methods that Hitler dismissed out of hand transformed Germany into one of the richest nations in history.
Religions that command human sacrifice are good at providing power to their priesthood. Thus we see the first greenie famine being welcomed with delight by the true believers, much as they previously welcomed the return of malaria.
Environmentalists confidently state with immense confidence all sorts of “facts”, most of which are impossible to meaningfully test, some of which can be easily tested, and which test false – which test does not impair the confidence of the environmentalists in the slightest, just as the obviouse falsehood of the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation does not trouble those Christians who believe in it in the slightest.
Two obvious and extreme example are:
When environmentalist “scientists” report the disappearance of ice, they are not in fact reporting the disappearance of physical corporeal ice and snow, the stuff that causes your car to slide, and has to be shovelled off the path, the stuff that is apt to sink ships at sea. What they are really reporting is the disappearance of magic ice, the spirit of the ice, Gaia’s infusion of spirituality into a frozen wilderness that they contemplate from the comfort of Starbucks. Hence their total indifference to physical evidence. The holy ice, which is melted merely by man’s unholy gaze is disappearing, even though the merely physical ice continues to endanger shipping in pretty much the same places as it has for the last century or so.
Similarly when environmentalist “scientists” report that the polar bear is endangered, they are entirely indifferent to actual numbers of polar bears. Far from being endangered, polar bears, like deer, a pest and a hazard. Rather, because they raid garbage dumps, because they have become a pest and a hazard, the holy spirit of wild nature of which the holy bear is a manifestation, is in danger of going extinct.
One measure of world temperature that is relatively objective is the total amount of ice. It is hard to measure average world temperature precisely, hard even to say what such an average means, and those that claim to measure it with great precision over great periods of time are liars, but ice, ice is a fact.
And so, from time to time, one gets an anthropogenic warming story, “Oh no the ice is melting”.
Whenever you read such a story, check the total amount of ice. It does not change much, and has not changed much. Some times it goes up a bit, sometimes down a bit. When ice melts dramatically in one place at one time it usually freezes up in another place not very long afterwards. Today, it is pretty much the same as ever it was.
Which very much suggests that the world’s temperature has not changed much – that global warming, whether anthropogenic or not, is so small as to be unmeasurable compared to ordinary year to year and decade to decade fluctuations.
We have not had a really good direct measure of global temperature until the Aqua satellite was launched. And since the Aqua satellite was launched, we have had no “global warming”.
Before Aqua, the best way to estimate changes in global temperature was to look at proxies such as total ice coverage - and the proxies have been telling us that nothing much has changed.
Unfortunately, it is not only global warming global warming “science” that works like this, but most science since the late twentieth century:
Dr. Tim Ball reports that the IPCC first creates the “Summary for Policy Makers” report, then the science report that it is supposedly a summary of.
“Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) or the Overview Chapter.”
This was, in the end, the unavoidable result of government funding for science. He who pays the piper, calls the tune. He sleeps with elephants, wakes up flat. For science to be science, scientists need to cultivate a wider range of patrons and sources of funding.
It is an open question, though with the evidence mounting against a substantial anthorpogenic effect.
I often write as if Anthropogenic Global Warming was disproven or obviously false. Global Warming is an open scientific issue, one which more information is needed - and in due course will be forthcoming. The position among real scientists is that Global warming is a conjecture - not a conjecture very likely to be true, but conjecture that could be true.
Over the next decade or so, the truth, or more likely the falsity, of Anthropogenic Global Warming should become more apparent. We have plenty of time to discover the actual situation before taking big dramatic actions. If human are warming the world, it is pretty obvious we are not warming it very fast.
In 2007, there seems to have been a dramatic change in the weather on the sun. The abnormally active sun of the past several decades is most likely changing its ways. If global warming is cosmogenic, the next decade or so is going to get mighty cold.
Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, attends church after chairing the Global Warming session of the Conference of Progressive Nations, in the most severe snow of the season in the area since 1981.
Steve’s Climate Audit has found yet another entertaining example of carelessness or dishonesty by the Anthropogenic Global Warming holy Gaia rollers, as he does ever week or so.
I think the underlying mechanism of all these many errors is that the holy Gaia rollers massage the data one way, then they massage it another way, then another, and another, until they come up with a result that is on message, without ever bothering to think about what these various data massages mean.
“Global” means “let us throw any data into the pot that we can find, without regard for accuracy or even relevance, and if we cannot find any data sufficiently global, let us just make it up”, and “analyze” means “let us find obscure statistical excuses for chucking out any data that is off message, while pretending we are still taking account of it rather than rejecting it”.
