It looks like Great Britain has decided to commit suicide in order to do their part to save the planet from Global Warming, despite their almost insignificant contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Here is an article by the excellent English commentator, Melanie Phillips:

From economics to airconomics
Daily Mail, 30 October 2006

Not since Nostradamus penned his obscure 16th-century verses prophesying the end of the world has a publishing event had the anticipated impact of today’s report by Sir Nicholas Stern, about the threat to the planet posed by man-made global warming.

If the leaks are correct, Sir Nicholas is saying that unless the world takes immediate drastic action, we are all doomed. Floods and other natural disasters caused by global warming will trigger an economic catastrophe worse than the 1929 Wall Street crash. Far from green policies putting prosperity at risk, it is only such policies, he says, that will keep our consumer societies from global economic catastrophe.

Even before his actual words were published, the political game of greener than-thou had begun in earnest. First past the post was the Environment Minister David Miliband, after a leak from his department of proposals aimed at addressing global warming which would simply end modern life as we know it.

If these were implemented, drivers would be forced off the roads by swingeing increases in taxes and fuel duties. Cheap air flights would become as distant a memory as Concorde. Household goods, from washing machines to lightbulbs, would be priced off the shelves. In other words, we would be taxed back to an earlier, less prosperous age, and those on modest incomes would be hit the hardest.

Mr Miliband was promptly fried to a carbonised crisp by Gordon Brown, doubtless for daring to steal the Treasury’s own environmentally-friendly thunder. If Brown is to be the new green, the Chancellor wants to take the credit himself. Mr Miliband’s greater crime, however, was surely that his outrageous proposals at least had the merit of honesty. Reducing carbon emissions must cause considerable pain to western consumer societies. But the deeper question is, for what gain?

After all, Britain accounts for a mere 2 per cent of the world’s energy demand. If we garaged every car, grounded every plane and rationed families to one lightbulb apiece, it would make virtually no difference. China alone — which is opening a new power station every day — would make up our carbon emissions in 13 months. In short, whatever we do to curb our carbon emissions is all but irrelevant to the future of the planet.

Sir Nicholas is well aware of this fact. So his message is that the whole world has to co-operate in reducing carbon emissions. But the greatest flaw in his argument is that the science upon which he is basing his dire predictions is flaky.

Sir Nicholas, Mr Miliband, the Royal Society, the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King, and a host of other terrifically grand panjandrums all claim there is no longer any scientific debate about whether man-made global warming is happening. It’s a settled fact. Argument over.

Phooey. They are all simply playing green politics.

You have only to read the scientific assessments made by the ecological holy of holies itself, the International Panel on Climate Change, to see that the science that is used to support the theory actually stresses over and over again the uncertainties surrounding it, and the extreme unreliability of the computer models that produce the apocalyptic forecasts of huge rises in global temperature.

Such models bear about as much relation to reality as astrology. As the distinguished American meteorologist Professor Richard Lindzen observed last weekend, the computer modelling performed at the Hadley Centre, one of Britain’s most vociferous proponents of man-made climate change, was seriously at odds with the actual warming that was taking place.

The facts are that the rise in temperature over the past century, 0.6C (plus or minus 0.2C), is unexceptional; and that clouds and water vapour are far more significant presences in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Yet this is an issue where ideology is simply driving out evidence. Sir Nicholas will apparently highlight the threat of catastrophic rises in sea level. But according to the IPCC, the seas are not rising. Although they were higher in the last century than in the previous one, it says in its Third Scientific Report: ‘No significant acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise during the 20th century has been detected.’

Yet people prefer to believe the absurdities propounded by former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore in his eco-doomsday film An Inconvenient Truth. In the film he cites, for example, the Polynesian island of Tuvalu as a place where rising sea levels forced residents to evacuate their homes. But this isn’t true. Sea levels at Tuvalu actually fell during the latter half of the 20th century. An inconvenient truth indeed. But who cares about the facts when there’s money to be made out of human credulity?

For the Treasury, whose speciality has been to devise ever more fiendish stealth taxes, the hysteria over climate change has presented it with a bonanza plucked from the air (literally). It doubtless thinks it can impose eye-watering new taxes by proclaiming that this is the only way to save the planet. Since Sir Nicholas is a senior Treasury official, it might be assumed that the Chancellor intends to tax modern life until the electoral pipsqueaks turn green.

But this isn’t the only pound sign now flashing emerald at the Treasury. A lot of people are making a fortune out of climate change doomsday scenarios. Carbon trading, in particular, is now an enormous global business.

This is how it works. Governments set limits on carbon emissions and then permit companies to trade in the credits they stack up for meeting these targets. If companies want to emit more, they must buy more credits from companies with a carbon surplus. The aim is to give firms an incentive to reduce their carbon emissions.

The credits, however, are given for a virtual commodity — tonnes of carbon dioxide which have not been put into the atmosphere. The system can easily be abused — by setting the targets too high, or by rewarding countries such as Russia or the Ukraine where emissions have fallen because their economies are failing.

Nevertheless, this virtual market is producing vast profits. Thus the bank Morgan Stanley recently unveiled a £1.6bn investment in carbon trading; and the World Bank, where Sir Nicholas previously worked as chief economist, is heavily involved in the trade. Is it any surprise, therefore, that his report is expected to give carbon trading an enormous boost?

And the Chancellor is already there before him. In a speech delivered last April, Mr Brown said: ‘Our ultimate goal must be a global carbon market,’ which he saw as a driver of future economic growth. In other words, on the back of an alleged global catastrophe, Mr Brown sees an unrivalled national business opportunity. Sir Nicholas, it would appear, was brought in to make the argument for a policy that had already been decided.

This is literally making money out of thin air. Surreal, or what? Our Chancellor is taking us from economics to airconomics. The biggest business opportunity of the century may make the South Sea Bubble look like the acme of prudence.

The great satirist Jonathan Swift mocked scientists by inventing a scheme by which they made sunbeams out of cucumbers. Making money out of the air, on the back of a scientifically unproven panic, would surely defy even the powers of a Swift to invent a more preposterous fiction.

Here is an interesting article about global warming. It appears to me that the socialists have more hysterical about it in the last few years because the warming is not happening. They were hoping to use this to destroy capitalism. They need a full court press to get their program in place now before people realize it is a hoax.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/29/nclimate129.xml

On TV this morning I heard that the Democrat's plan for the upcoming election is to say nothing. That makes sense to me. If the Democrats told people what they want to do, they would be certain to lose.

I guess the "say nothing" plan is for local elections, because Nancy Pelosi has talked about what she plans to do, though no details were given. She intends to
- raise taxes on the rich (but not on the middle class)
- put a "windfall profits" tax on oil companies (to force them to work on developing "alternative energy" sources: make them spend money on things they no nothing about instead of doing what they are good at, which is finding oil)
- change directions in Iraq (apparently that means leave)
- reduce drug prices (no details provided)
- make the US "energy independent" (without drilling for oil or building nuclear power plants)
- combat "global warming" (whether or not it is real: and make certain that the growing body of climatologists who don't agree with Al Gore on this are silenced)
- negotiate directly with Iran and North Korea on their nuclear weapons programs (even though we know that neither of them will negotiate in good faith).
- increase the minimum wage (may cost some jobs, but who cares)
- start Bush impeachment process (it's a waste of time, but payback feels good).

The Muslims in Palestine are complaining that the Israelis are attacking them during the period of Ramadam. At the same time the Muslims in Iraq are increasing their attacks during Ramadam. It appears that Muslims are hypocrits. They are what we call in Texas "one way":It's their way or the highway. In their case that would be "their way or the graveyard."

One of the interesting aspects of the current "global warming" hysteria by Gore and others is the prediction that life will get worse with more bad weather, more disease, etc. When one considers what happened during the "little ice age" it seems that life got worse as the weather got colder. There more more storms, more severe storms, and more disease to go with crop failure. From a historical perspective it appears that warmer is better. Now I read that some of the zealots want to have trials for those who deny that man is having a catastrophic impact on the environment(who are termed the "deniers"). Here is a link to an interesting article about the witch trials of those accused of causing the bad weather.

http://antigreen.blogspot.com/

Here is an interesting web site for those interested in studies of IQ or the g-factor. I suppose IQ is not politically correct, but it does predict how well someone will do acedemically, or economically. I have always been interested in creativity as well as IQ. These seem to be separate attributes, though it appears that a certain level of IQ is necessary to support using creativity to advantage.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/

There's a new book out caleed "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism." According tothe blog "My Right Wing Conspiracy" the book contains this tidbit:

In his book, which came out this week, Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan’s foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts. The letter, dated May 14, 1983, was sent from the head of the KGB to Yuri Andropov, who was then General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.

I'm not surprised. Ted is willing to do pretty much anything to defeat Republicans. He was responsible for the US cutting off promised military aid to South Vietnam which lead to the North defeating the South. As I recall he said the South Vietnamese didn't deserve democracy. More ecently he has said te same thing about Iraqi's. I don't think he likes democracy in America either.

Here is a piece on Global Warming hysteria by Bill Gray. I got this from the blog Greenie Watch.

HURRICANES AND CLIMATE CHANGE: ASSESSING THE LINKAGES FOLLOWING THE 2006 SEASONBy: Prof. William M. GrayWHO AM I TO COMMENT?I am a Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where I have been employed since 1961. I have been performing meteorological research, teaching, and forecasting for the last 53 years. I have participated in many tropical field experiments over the last 50 years. These experiments were directed to the study of cumulus convection, condensation heating, evaporation cooling, sea-air energy-moisture exchange, hurricane formation, etc. These are topics of crucial importance to the physics of global temperature change. But they are not well understood by the human-induced global warming proponents. The incorrect handling of these moist processes is responsible for the major flaws in the human-induced global warming scenarios.I hold MS and PhD degrees in meteorology and geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago. Few professors of atmospheric science have had a finer group of graduate students than I have over the last 40 years (50 MS graduates and 20 PhD graduates).I am well known for my Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 23 years. Making public verified seasonal hurricane climate forecasts (2 to 6 times per year) for 23 years demonstrates, I believe, an in-depth knowledge of the atmosphere. My overall 53 years of experience in weather forecasting, atmospheric research, and teaching is, I believe, more than sufficient to justify the credibility of my comments on hurricanes and global warming. I am more than willing to discuss or debate with any of my critics provided there is an impartial moderator.I have never had a grant from the fossil-fuel industry. I presently do not draw a salary. I live off of my retirement income. To support my small Colorado State University research project I presently have two quite modest research grants, one from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for hurricane research and the other from Lexington Insurance Company (Boston) for US hurricane landfall probability prediction.My main motivation to continue my research is to help maintain the integrity of American science which, in my view, has been badly compromised by the global warming issue and now recently by the issue of global warming causing more frequent and more intense hurricanes. Having received federal support for my meteorological endeavors for over 50 years and having devoted my entire career to atmospheric science, I also feel I have an obligation to speak out on issues involving my expertise. I would feel guilty if I did not do so.[...]10. SUMMARYIt is irresponsible to claim that the scientific debate on global warming is settled. A true scientific debate on this topic has not yet taken place. The debate that has occurred has been conducted largely by the media, the environmentalists, and the scientists receiving federal grant support to supply evidence of human involvement in global temperature rise. Most warming skeptics have been purposely ignored. Federal research funding for scientists skeptical of the human-induced global warming hypothesis has not been available.Human-induced global warming scenarios have been in the headlines since the hot summer of 1988. These scenarios have been grossly exaggerated by a broad spectrum of scientists who know little about the processes of the atmospheric- hydrologic cycle and how the globe's atmosphere and oceans function in unison. It has been to their careers advantage to exaggerate human-induced global warming. They have received notoriety, career advancement, and research grants from their warming exaggerations.Many of my older colleagues and I, who have invested decades of our lives in the study of how the atmosphere functions, have been appalled by the many alarmist statements issued by high-ranking government officials and prominent scientists who have little real understanding of how the atmosphere and ocean function. Their views have been shaped by selective sources, in particular the environmentalists and the large GCM groups, who have a vested interest in promoting the warming threat.It is surprising that more experienced meteorologists and oceanographers have not spoken out about the reliability of the general circulation model simulations and the overly simplified arguments of the warming advocates. This may be partly due to the mild form of McCarthyism that has developed toward those scientists who do not agree that human-induced global warming is a great threat to society. Those holding contrary views have often been smeared as tools of the fossil-fuel industry, as if those warming advocates receiving large federal grants or grants from environmental groups were not also tools of the federal government or the environmental lobbyists. Our country has far more serious problems to worry about than human-induced global warming. Figure 17 shows the cover of Time Magazine almost 30 years ago when the majority of meteorologists and world governments were worried about and predicted a coming ice-age.APPENDIXHow Did We Get Into This Warming Hysteria?We will probably have to wait a few decades for history to fully explain to us what really has been going on during the last 15-20 years and how human induced global warming was thrust before the world as such a major threat. How was it possible to 'brainwash' so many scientists, government officials, the general public, etc.? We likely can't put all the pieces together right now, but we already know enough to speculate on some of the reasons which are listed below in no particular order:1. The winding down of the cold war and the perceived need to generate a new common enemy so as to keep the public willing to continue to support the large science efforts typical of our prior perceived need to keep ahead of the Soviets.2. The banding together of an international group of sagacious government leaders, scientists, environmentalists, etc. who wanted a science-based political cause to unite behind. Global warming was an ideal vehicle for their desire to organize, propagandize, force conformity, and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!3. Natural causes of global climate change are not well understood. Who would be able to say with confidence that global warming was not human induced if you had no other physical mechanism to blame it on? Of course, many examples of temperature increase are going to be found during any warming trend. There has been a selective emphasis on observations of warming and a glossing over of data that shows no temperature change or cooling. The ignorance of other past historic events (Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age trends) and the many paleo-global warming-cooling events has also contributed.4. The grant money desires of a broad spectrum of agriculturists, biologists, environmentalists, disease specialists, sociologists, weather and climate types, etc. New research missions to justify grant support needed to be found. The dangling of research funds is a powerful persuader. It didn't matter much if the globe warmed or not. What was necessary was to know what would happen if it did. Who among us would be stupid enough to criticize this 'need to know' if we could get grant support to study it.5. The media's desire to profit from controversy of any type at the expense of critical evaluation. For instance, the surrender of media judgment by mouthing the verbatim views of almost any credentialed scientist out for notoriety, grant money, or who has a selective warming observation to show off. It makes for good press. Opposite examples of no climate change or cooling doesn't make news. Why discuss these examples?6. It is interesting to note that most of the primary players in the international global warming crusade are credible and experienced scientists with well deserved reputations. Most of them, however, have had limited or no experience with real weather and climate studies and weather forecasting. They are being asked to make technical decisions on topics for which they have little or no background. They tend to believe what a selective set of politically motivated scientists tell them. But how are Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, or medicine (as brilliant as they might be) able to make scientifically sensible statements on the possible association of rising level of CO2 and global warming? They are just responding to the similar upward-slope of these two curves.7. The universally recognized momentous contributions to society of the computer and the growing belief that almost everything coming out of a computer is numerically correct and valid. But computer output is only as good as input, and most of the GCM modelers have not put all the right things in. Computers only allow for a bad model to be precisely wrong!8. The last 40 years of continuous improvement in initial value global numerical weather prediction out to 5-10 days. This has been a great success story. It has led to the false belief among many scientists (most of whom are without forecast experience) that this same approach could be extended to the longer climate periods.9. The great technical achievements in the computer industry led to the encouragement of never before held beliefs that skillful numerical climate models could actually be constructed that would be able to deal with the gross complexity and infinite chaos of the climate system. All you needed was bigger and better computers.10. The lack of understanding of the complicated physics of the cumulus convection process of the tropics and higher latitudes. This led to the naive assumption that climate modelers would be able to 'hop-scotch' over the sub-grid scale parameterization problems in their models and get results which had validity. They were wrong. Cumulus convection was too complex of a problem for GCMs to face up too. Right or wrong, the GCMs proceeded forward with their output runs not knowing how to deal with the sub-grid scales. They, of course, would obtain the inevitable global warming output that they wanted. And this created a stir that led to favorable publicity and continued grant support. After awhile the GCMers had gone too far to turn back. They were now too committed to global warming to worry about their sub-grid scale parameterization problems. Retreat was unthinkable. Global warming had to be the answer at least until their retirement.11. The take-up of the global warming cause by so many celebrities to demonstrate their social consciousness. Global warming was an 'IN' and fashionable cause among the elite. That they had absolutely no technical background to make such judgments did not matter.12. The overall 'quietude' of the meteorological community - many of whom knew better. We are scientists and should be above all this media-hype and controversial political in-fighting? To paraphrase John Burke, "All that was required for the triumph of human-induced global warming was that a substantial number of those meteorologists who knew better said nothing."

I think it is interesting that the Democrats think that it is necessary to let gay scout masters take 12-year olds camping, but are outraged that Republicans didn't purge a gay Congressman who sent naughty emails to male pages who were egging him on as a prank. Apparently they think that Republicans should have been monitoring former Congressman Foley's emails rather than those of terrorists.

I really wonder about Democrat's calling the Republicans the "culture of corruption." The Democrats haven't purged William Jefferson, the one who kept $90,000 of a $100,000 bribe he accepted in his freezer. (I suppose that is the definition of "cold cash.") They have Alcee Hastings, a former judge who was de-frocked for accepting bribes, in a leadership position. And how about Harry Reid's real estate deal. He says he did nothing wrong, and perhaps he didn't. But is is really odd that he made a profit of $700,000 on a "handshake" deal: no paperwork at all. It could be legit, but it looks fishy. How do we know it wasn't a bribe? And he seems to have played a role in having the land, which originally was owned by the government, sold to private hands, including his. And then he seems to have had a role in getting the land's zoning changed from residential to commercial, which made it more valuable. This kind of thing happens all of the time in Texas where legislature pay is so low that no one could afford to serve if there wasn't some way of showing a profit. It seems to me that Reid is at least a hypocrite.

The news media and the politicians amaze me with their debate on the issues. Everything that happens seems to be someone's "fault" in their view. They try to establish whether North Korea's nuclear program is the fault of Clinton or Bush. It never seems to occur to them that North Korea has their own agenda, and intends to develop nuclear weapons no matter what we do. I think Iran has a similar attitude.

I think that neither of those countries can be deterred without strong action that is unlikely to be approved by the UN. Neither political party in the US will be able to undertake the action that is required to stop North Korea or Iran. I'm afraid that we will do nothing until one of those countries uses nuclear weapons in a military strike.

It is fortunate, and not really surprising that the North Korean test fizzled. It is hard to make a good nuclear weapon, particularly a plutonium device, which I have heard is what they were doing. Hopefully we are still a few years away from Armageddon, which I fear is coming.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have been in the news a lot lately. I was thinking about their respective political philosophies. I don't think Bill has much of a philosophy except that it was good to be President since it helped him get girls. He more or less followed polls in setting his policy. Thus, he was not particularly dangerous. Hillary on the other hand appears to have a definite agenda. Her philosophy seems to be that of European Socialists. She is very dangerous.

The Democrats are still hard at work producing more "October Surprises." It is beginning to appear that they may have pulled the trigger on the so-called "Foley cover-up" too soon. They pulled it the day after the last day that Foley could have been replaced on the November ballot. Purely a coincidence I'm sure.

Now they have produced an estimate of the number of Iraqi's who have died since the US invaded in 2003. They do this just before each election. Now they say there have been 655,000 excess deaths (whatever that means) in Iraq since 2003. That seems like a lot of people to have died in a country of 25 million, especially since given the huge numbers reported by these same folks as having died in the ten years prior to 2003 due to US sanctions. I wonder why newspapers print such obviously inaccurate information. Are all of the media really shills for the Democrats? It certainly appears that a strong case can be made that they are.

I think it is interesting that there seems to be an alliance of liberals with Islamic Jihadists. It may be enough that they have a common enemy in the individualism (and capitalism) of the West. But they also share some other characteristics such as opposition to "freedom of speech." The Islamists put a death penalty on anyone they perceive as criticizing them. With regard to Liberals, consider the recent riots at Columbia University to pevent a speech by one of the "Minutemen" in opposition to illegal immigration in to the US. Then there is the opposition to scientific enquiry into the reasons for climate change. Here is an interesting discussion on that from the blog "Greenie Watch."

The Movement
Comment by Prof. Brignell:

It is the great movement with no name. It embraces the name of science but eschews its method. It embraces the method of religion but eschews its gods. It loathes industry but wallows in generous funding that was once generated by industry. It imposes rigid political correctness and despises individual freedom.It calls itself green, but in action is more like a giant fungus, its hidden mycelia creeping through the substrata of society, every now and then throwing up a prominence in the form of a mushroom with the capability of accelerating proliferation by liberating copious spores (an editorship here, a society president there, a party leader elsewhere).

The secret of the success of this movement is summed up in those immortal lines of Tennyson:

That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

Thus the seminal book by Rachel Carson exploited the fact that some farmers were abusing the miraculous discovery of DDT to create an irrational hatred of that substance. Only now, many millions of deaths later, is the world facing up to the awfulness of what it has done. The brilliant work of Sir Austin Bradford Hill in establishing the correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer led to tobacco being branded as the evil icon of The Movement and gave birth to a train of debased science whose influence has spread far beyond the draconian and unjustified ban of that substance: for the need to protect the depressed standards of statistical practice needed to create and maintain the necessary panic has caused them to spread into other areas of science and medicine, with appalling consequences mainly in the form of coercion of the masses into "appropriate" forms of behaviour.

Above all there is the imaginary monster of "climate change"; with carbon, the very stuff of life, perversely branded as the original sin. Again it is summed up in immortal words, this time by H L Mencken:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The more the scientific basis of global warming is debunked by reason and evidence, the more it is pressed as an article of faith by media that have been brought under almost total control by The Movement. Blanket censorship in the mainstream media is virtually complete, and the resistance movement exists mainly in the interstices of the internet.

One by one the citadels of science are invested and brought under control - the once great journals, the academic societies, the research funding bodies etc. - all abandon the scientific method and adopt the faith. It is a great irony that it should all happen most effectively in Britain , the home of sceptical science. From the Bacons, through the likes of Locke, Hume and Russell, to the magnificent climax of Popper's statement of the principle of falsifiability, the scientific method was painfully established, only to be abandoned in a few short decades. The method is essentially sceptical, as Thomas Huxley put it:

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

The Movement, by a long and elaborate process of subversion of the western education system and the institutions of science, has completely eliminated this concept. Thus we have the Royal Society, in total betrayal of everything it has ever stood for, trying to suppress the very method of science in favour of the authoritarian faith and journals such as New Scientist, in truly Orwellian style, labelling that scientific method as "the abuse of science." Alas poor science!

Here is an interesting article about the effect of cosmic rays on the Earth's climate. As evryone knows, one of the major deficiencies with the Global Circulation Models that are being used to project global warming trends is the inability to accurately predict cloud action. I doubt that any of the models consider the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation. No one can predict the future cosmic ray flux, so it is therefore impossible to have a reliable GCM.

Exploding Stars Influence Climate Of Earth

Cosmic radiation entering Earth's atmosphere.
Credit: Danish National Space Center.by Staff WritersCopenhagen, Denmark (SPX) Oct 06, 2006

A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth's climate.
An essential role for remote stars in everyday weather on Earth has been revealed by an experiment at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

It is already well-established that when cosmic rays, which are high-speed atomic particles originating in exploded stars far away in the Milky Way, penetrate Earth's atmosphere they produce substantial amounts of ions and release free electrons.

Now, results from the Danish experiment show that the released electrons significantly promote the formation of building blocks for cloud condensation nuclei on which water vapour condenses to make clouds.
Hence, a causal mechanism by which cosmic rays can facilitate the production of clouds in Earth's atmosphere has been experimentally identified for the first time.

The Danish team officially announced their discovery on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, published by the Royal Society, the British national academy of science.

The experiment

The experiment called SKY (Danish for "cloud") took place in a large reaction chamber which contained a mixture of gases at realistic concentrations to imitate the chemistry of the lower atmosphere.
Ultraviolet lamps mimicked the action of the Sun's rays. During experimental runs, instruments traced the chemical action of the penetrating cosmic rays in the reaction chamber.

The data revealed that electrons released by cosmic rays act as catalysts, which significantly accelerate the formation of stable, ultra-small clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules which are building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei. A vast numbers of such microscopic droplets appeared, floating in the air in the reaction chamber.

"We were amazed by the speed and efficiency with which the electrons do their work of creating the building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei," says team leader Henrik Svensmark, who is Director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research within the Danish National Space Center. "This is a completely new result within climate science."

A missing link in climate theory

The experimental results lend strong empirical support to the theory proposed a decade ago by Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen that cosmic rays influence Earth's climate through their effect on cloud formation.

The original theory rested on data showing a strong correlation between variation in the intensity of cosmic radiation penetrating the atmosphere and the amount of low-altitude clouds. Cloud cover increases when the intensity of cosmic rays grows and decreases when the intensity declines.
It is known that low-altitude clouds have an overall cooling effect on the Earth's surface. Hence, variations in cloud cover caused by cosmic rays can change the surface temperature. The existence of such a cosmic connection to Earth's climate might thus help to explain past and present variations in Earth's climate.

Interestingly, during the 20th Century, the Sun's magnetic field which shields Earth from cosmic rays more than doubled, thereby reducing the average influx of cosmic rays.

The resulting reduction in cloudiness, especially of low-altitude clouds, may be a significant factor in the global warming Earth has undergone during the last century. However, until now, there has been no experimental evidence of how the causal mechanism linking cosmic rays and cloud formation may work.

"Many climate scientists have considered the linkages from cosmic rays to clouds to climate as unproven," comments Eigil Friis-Christensen, who is now Director of the Danish National Space Center.

"Some said there was no conceivable way in which cosmic rays could influence cloud cover. The SKY experiment now shows how they do so, and should help to put the cosmic-ray connection firmly onto the agenda of international climate research."

Published online in "Proceedings of the Royal Society A", October 3rd Title: "Experimental Evidence for the role of Ions in Particle Nucleation under Atmospheric Conditions".

Authors: Henrik Svensmark, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, Nigel Marsh, Martin Enghoff and Ulrik Uggerhoj.

It is good that Democrats have finally developed an interest in protecting the young from sexual predator congressmen. They certainly had no such concern a few years ago when Gerry Studds was having an affair with a 17-year old page. Most Democrats wouldn't even vote to censure Studds. And then there was the convicted child rapist Mel Reynolds. Bill Clinton gave him a get out of jail free card in the dark of night just as left office. And then there was Clinton himself. Democrat's said "So he's having sex with an intern in his office, so what? It's no big deal, it's just sex." The Democrats couldn't be hypocrites could they?

Here is an email I sent E. D. Hill about her show on Fox News today.

Today a guest mentioned to E. D. Hill that North Korea is mad at the US because of a bank closure. I was surprised that Hill did not know about that since it has been discussed a lot on the internet. The guest failed to mention that the bank was closed because it was used in North Korea’s activities in counterfeiting US currency. For some reason this has not been discussed much in the mainstream media. I suppose this has been neglected because counterfeiting another country’s currency is an act of war.

In the discussion about the case of former congressman Foley, there was no discussion about how ABC got the Instant Messages. Apparenetly they did not come from the recepients. In that case how does anyone know they are genuine? Because ABC says so? I believe ABC would lie to harm Republicans. It would seem that someone broke the law in acquiring the messages, assuming they are not fake. They may have been acquired with a warrant, but in that case leaking them to the press would be a crime. Why wasn’t Rangel asked about the Democrats who have known about this since December, but made a conscious decision to hold up release of the information until near the election. The Democrats say Republicans risked children for political purposes; if so, the Democrats did the same. Of course that might have caused Charlie to go into the whirling dervish spin mode.

Here is an article by Fjordman about how Bat Ye'or's concept of Eurabia came about. I got this from Pamela's blog "Atlas Shrugs." This is another story of France stabbing America in the back.

The Eurabia Code, Part I
From the desk of Fjordman on Sun, 2006-10-01 07:53
I decided to write this essay after a comment from a journalist, not a Leftist by my country’s standards, who dismissed Eurabia as merely a conspiracy theory, one on a par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I do not disagree with the fact that conspiracy theories exist, nor that they can be dangerous. After all, the Protocols and the Dolchstosslegende, or “stab in the back myth – the idea that Germany didn’t lose WW1 but was betrayed by Socialists, intellectuals and Jews – helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis before WW2.
However, what puzzles me is that it is a widely-held belief of many (not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and even in the United States) that the terror attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11th 2001 were really a controlled demolition staged by the American government and then blamed on Muslims. I have seen this thesis talked about many times in Western media. While it is frequently (though not always) dismissed and mocked, it is least mentioned.
In contrast, Eurabia – which asserts that the Islamicization of Europe didn’t happen merely by accident but with the active participation of European political leaders – is hardly ever referred to at all, despite the fact that it is easier to document. Does the notion of Eurabia hit too close to home? Perhaps it doesn’t fit with the anti-American disposition of many journalists? Curiously enough, even those left-leaning journalists who are otherwise critical of the European Union because of its free market elements never write about Eurabia.
Because of this, I am going to test whether the Eurabia thesis is correct, or at least plausible. I have called this project The Eurabia Code, alluding to author Dan Brown’s massive bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Brown’s fictional account “documents” a conspiracy by the Church to cover up the truth about Jesus. I’m not sure my work will become equally popular, but I’m pretty sure it’s closer to reality.
The next time Mr. Brown wants to write about massive conspiracies in Europe, he would be well-advised to set his eyes at Brussels rather than Rome. It would be a whole lot more interesting. What follows is a brief outline of the thesis put forward by writer Bat Ye’or in her book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.” My information is based on her book (which should be read in full). In addition I have drawn from some of her articles and interviews. I republish the information with her blessing, but this summary is completely my own.
In an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bat Ye’or explained how French President Charles de Gaulle, disappointed by the loss of the French colonies in Africa and the Middle East as well as with France’s waning influence in the international arena, decided in the 1960’s to create a strategic alliance with the Arab and Muslim world to compete with the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union.
“This is a matter of a total transformation of Europe, which is the result of an intentional policy,” said Bat Ye’or. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicized and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world. The European leaders have decided on an alliance with the Arab world, through which they have committed to accept the Arab and Muslim approach toward the United States and Israel. This is not only with respect to foreign policy, but also on issues engaging European society from within, such as immigration, the integration of the immigrants and the idea that Islam is part of Europe.”
“Europe is under a constant threat of terror. Terror is a way of applying pressure on the European countries to surrender constantly to the Arab representatives’ demands. They demand, for example, that Europe always speak out for the Palestinians and against Israel.”
Thus, the Eurabian project became an enlarged vision of the anti-American Gaullist policy dependent upon the formation of a Euro-Arab entity hostile to American influence. It facilitated European ambitions to maintain important spheres of influence in the former European colonies, while opening huge markets for European products in the Arab world, especially in oil-producing countries, in order to secure supplies of petroleum and natural gas to Europe. In addition, it would make the Mediterranean a Euro-Arab inland sea by favoring Muslim immigration and promoting Multiculturalism with a strong Islamic presence in Europe.
The use of the term “Eurabia” was first introduced in the mid-1970s, as the title of a journal edited by the President of the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity, Lucien Bitterlein, and published collaboratively by the Groupe d'Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), and the Middle East International (London). Their articles called for common Euro-Arab positions at every level. These concrete proposals were not the musings of isolated theorists; instead they put forth concrete policy decisions conceived in conjunction with, and actualized by, European state leaders and European Parliamentarians.
During a November 27, 1967 press conference, Charles de Gaulle stated openly that French cooperation with the Arab world had become “the fundamental basis of our foreign policy.” By January 1969, the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, held in Cairo, in its resolution 15, decided “to form special parliamentary groups, where they did not exist, and to use the parliamentary platform support of the Arab people and the Palestinian resistance.” Five years later in Paris, July 1974, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation was created, under the Euro-Arab Dialogue rubric.
Bat Ye’or has highlighted this shared Euro-Arab political agenda. The first step was the construction of a common foreign policy. France was the driving force in this unification, which had already been envisaged by General de Gaulle’s inner circle and Arab politicians. The Arab states demanded from Europe access to Western science and technology, European political independence from the United States, European pressure on the United States to align with their Arab policy and demonization of Israel as a threat to world peace, as well as measures favorable to Arab immigration and dissemination of Islamic culture in Europe. This cooperation would also included recognition of the Palestinians as a distinct people and the PLO and its leader Arafat as their representative. Up to 1973 they had been known only as Arab refugees, even by other Arabs. The concept of a Palestinian “nation” simply did not exist.
During the 1973 oil crisis, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced that, due to the ongoing Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors Egypt and Syria, OPEC would no longer ship petroleum to Western nations that supported Israel. The sudden increase in oil prices was had lasting effects. Not only did it create a strong influx of petrodollars to countries such as Saudi Arabia, which permitted the Saudis to fund a worldwide Islamic resurgence, but it also had an impact in the West, especially in Europe.
However, Arab leaders had to sell their oil. Their people are very dependent on European economic and technological aid. The Americans made this point during the oil embargo in 1973. According to Bat Ye’or, although the oil factor certainly helped cement the Euro-Arab Dialogue, it was primarily a pretext to cover up a policy that emerged in France before that crisis occurred. The policy, conceived in the 1960s, had strong antecedents in the French 19th-century dream of governing an Arab empire.
This political agenda has been reinforced by the deliberate cultural transformation of Europe. Euro-Arab Dialogue Symposia conducted in Venice (1977) and Hamburg (1983) included recommendations that have been successfully implemented. These recommendations were accompanied by a deliberate, privileged influx of Arab and other Muslim immigrants into Europe in enormous numbers.
The recommendations included:
1. Coordination of the efforts made by the Arab countries to spread the Arabic language and culture in Europe,2. Creation of joint Euro-Arab Cultural Centers in European capitals,3. The necessity of supplying European institutions and universities with Arab teachers specialized in teaching Arabic to Europeans,4. The necessity of cooperation between European and Arab specialists in order to present a positive picture of Arab-Islamic civilization and contemporary Arab issues to the educated public in Europe.
These agreements could not be set forth in written documents and treaties due to their politically sensitive and fundamentally undemocratic nature. The European leaders thus carefully chose to call their ideas “dialogue.” All meetings, committees and working groups included representatives from European Community nations and the European Council along with members from Arab countries and the Arab League. Proceedings and decisions took place in closed sessions. No official minutes were recorded.
The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) is a political, economic and cultural institution designed to ensure perfect cohesion between Europeans and Arabs. Its structure was set up at conferences in Copenhagen (15 December 1973), and Paris (31 July 1974). The principal agent of this policy is the European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, founded in 1974. The other principal organs of The Dialogue are the MEDEA Institute and the European Institute of Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation, created in 1995 with the backing of the European Commission.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of Frontpage Magazine, Bat Ye’or explained how “in domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centers, school textbooks, student and youth associations, tourism. Church interfaith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations – a comprehensive symbiosis with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture.”
Eurabia’s driving force, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, was created in Paris in 1974. It now has over six hundred members – from all major European political parties – active in their own national parliaments, as well as in the European parliament. France continues to be the key protagonist of this association.
A wide-ranging policy was sketched out. It entailed a symbiosis of Europe with the Muslim Arab countries that would endow Europe – and especially France, the project's prime mover – with a weight and a prestige to rival that of the United States. This policy was undertaken quite discreetly, and well outside of official treaties, using the innocent-sounding name of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The organization functioned under the auspices of European government ministers, working in close association with their Arab counterparts, and with the representatives of the European Commission and the Arab League. The goal was the creation of a pan-Mediterranean entity, permitting the free circulation both of men and of goods.
On the cultural front there began a complete re-writing of history, which was first undertaken during the 1970s in European universities. This process was ratified by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in September 1991, at its meeting devoted to “The Contribution of the Islamic Civilisation to European culture.” It was reaffirmed by French President Jacques Chirac in his address of April 8, 1996 in Cairo, and reinforced by Romano Prodi, president of the powerful European Commission, the EU’s “government,” and later Italian Prime Minister, through the creation of a Foundation on the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations. This foundation was to control everything said, written and taught about Islam in Europe.
Over the past three decades, the EEC and the EU’s political and cultural organizations have invented a fantasy Islamic civilization and history. The historical record of violations of basic human rights for all non-Muslims and women under sharia (Islamic Law) is either ignored or dismissed. In this worldview the only dangers come from the United States and Israel. The creators of Eurabia have conducted a successful propaganda campaign against these two countries in the European media. This fabrication was made easier by pre-existing currents of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in parts of Europe, although both sentiments have been greatly inflated by Eurabians and their collaborators.
On January 31, 2001, with the recrudescence of Palestinian terrorist jihad, European Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten declared to the European Parliament that Europe's foreign policy should give special attention to its southern flank (the Arab countries, in EU jargon), adding that he was delighted by the general agreement to give greater visibility to the Mediterranean Partnership.
Bat Ye’or thinks that “Our politicians are perfectly informed of Islamic history and current policies by their embassies, agents and specialists. There is no innocence there, but tremendous inflexibility in corruption, cynicism and the perversion of values.”
In the preface to her book, she states that “This book describes Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers.”
The new European civilization in the making can correctly be termed a '”civilization of dhimmitude.”' The word dhimmitude comes from the Islamic legal designation “dhimmi.” It refers to the subjugated, non-Muslim individuals who accept restrictive and humiliating subordination to Islamic power in order to avoid enslavement or death. The entire Muslim world as we know it today is a product of this 1,300 year-old jihad dynamic, whereby once thriving non-Muslim majority civilizations have been reduced to a state of dysfunction and dhimmitude. The dhimmis are inferior beings who endure humiliation and aggression in silence. This arrangement allows Muslims to enjoy an impunity that increases both their hatred and their feeling of superiority, under the protection of the law.
Eurabia is a novel new entity. It possesses political, economic, religious, cultural, and media components, which are imposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies. While Europeans live within Eurabia’s constraints, outside of a somewhat confused awareness, few are really conscious of them on a daily basis.
This Eurabian policy, expressed in obscure wording, is conducted at the highest political levels and coordinated over the whole of the European Union. It spreads an anti-American and anti-Semitic Euro-Arab sub-culture into the fiber of every social, media and cultural sector. Dissidents are silenced or boycotted. Sometimes they are fired from their jobs, victims of a totalitarian “correctness” imposed mainly by the academic, media and political sectors.
According to Ye’or, France and the rest of Western Europe can no longer change their policy: “It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently through immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration. Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it.”
Are Bat Ye’or’s claims correct, or even possible?
Bernard Lewis has pointed out that, by common consent among historians, “the modern history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte – who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease.”
In an unsuccessful effort to gain the support of the Egyptian populace, Napoleon issued proclamations praising Islam. “People of Egypt,” he proclaimed upon his entry to Alexandria in 1798, “You will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that more than the Mamluks, I respect God, his Prophet, and the Qur’an.”
According to an eyewitness, Napoleon ended his proclamation with the phrase, “God is great and Muhammad is his prophet.” To Muslim ears, this sounded like the shahada – the declaration of belief in the oneness of Allah and in Prophet Muhammad as his last messenger. Recitation of the shahadah, the first of the five pillars of Islam, is considered to mark one’s conversion to Islam. Muslims could thus conclude that Napoleon had converted to Islam. In fact, one of his generals, Jacques Ménou, did convert to Islam.
The French were later defeated and forced to leave Egypt by the English admiral Lord Nelson. Although the French expedition to Egypt lasted only three years, it demonstrated that the West was now so superior to the Islamic world that Westerners could enter the Arab heartland, then still a part of the Ottoman Empire, at will. Only another Western power could force them to leave. The shock of this realization triggered the first attempts to reform Islam in the 19th century.
A positive result of Western conquest was the influx of French scientists into Egypt and the foundation of modern Egyptology. Most importantly, it led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was later used by French philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, the encounter also left a lasting impact in Europe, and above all in France.
The French invasion of Algeria in 1830 marked another chapter in this tale. Later, the French ruled Tunisia and Morocco. Finally, after the First World War, the French gained mandates over the former Turkish territories of the Ottoman Empire that make up what is now Syria and Lebanon. After the Second World War, French troops gradually left Arab lands, culminating with war and Algerian independence in 1962. However, their long relationship with Arabs resulted in France's belief that she had a special relationship with and an understanding of Arabs and Muslims. Along with French leadership in continental Europe, this would now provide the basis of a new foreign policy. President de Gaulle pushed for a France and a Europe independent of the two superpowers. In a speech, he stated that “Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.” In 1966, he withdrew France from the common NATO military command, but remained within the organization.
Following the Six Days War in 1967, de Gaulle’s condemnation of the Israelis for their occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip marked a significant change in French foreign policy. Previously, France – as well as the rest of Western Europe - had been strongly pro-Israel, even going to war together with Israel as late as 1956 against Nasser’s Egypt. From 1967 on, however, France embarked on a decidedly pro-Arab course.
It has been said that English foreign policy has remained the same since the 16th century. Its goal was to prevent any country, whether Spain, France, or later Germany, from dominating continental Europe to the extent that it represents a threat to England. On the other hand, one could argue that French foreign policy has also remained the same for several centuries; its goal is to champion French leadership over Europe and the Mediterranean region in order to contain Anglo-Saxon (and later Anglo-American) dominance. This picture was complicated by the unification of Germany in the late 19th century, but its outlines remain to this day.
Napoleon is the great hero of French PM de Villepin. Several prominent French leaders stated quite openly in 2005 that the proposed EU Constitution was basically an enlarged France. Justice Minister Dominique Perben said: “We have finally obtained this ‘Europe à la française’ that we have awaited for so long. This constitutional treaty is an enlarged France. It is a Europe written in French.” From its inception, European integration has been a French-led enterprise. The fact that the French political elite have never renounced the maintenance of their leadership over Europe was amply demonstrated during the Iraq war.
President Chirac famously said in 2003 after Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic backed the US position “They missed a good opportunity to shut up,” adding “These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position.”
Jean Monnet, French economist never elected to public office, is regarded by many as the architect of European integration. Monnet was a well-connected pragmatist who worked behind the scenes towards the gradual creation of European unity.
Richard North, publisher of the blog EU Referendum and co-author (with Christopher Booker) of The Great Deception: Can The European Union Survive, relates that for years – at least from the 1920s – Jean Monnet had dreamed of building a “United States of Europe.” Although what Monnet really had in mind was the creation of a European entity with all the attributes of a state, an “anodyne phrasing was deliberately chosen with a view to making it difficult to dilute by converting it into just another intergovernmental body. It was also couched in this fashion so that it would not scare off national governments by emphasising that its purpose was to override their sovereignty.”
In their analysis of the EU's history, the authors claim that the EU was not born out of WW2, as many people seem to think. It had been planned at least a generation before that.
The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation.” However, as critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people are unaware of their existence.
A federation is, of course, a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. The EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.”
The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.” Booker and North call the European Union “a slow-motion coup d'état: the most spectacular coup d'état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so publicly.
The irony is that France is now held hostage by the very forces she herself set in motion. The Jihad riots by Muslim immigrants in France in 2005 demonstrated that Eurabia is no longer a matter of French foreign policy, it is now French domestic policy. France will burn unless she continues to appease Arabs and agree to their agenda.
The growth of the Islamic population is explosive. According to some, one out of three babies born in France is a Muslim. Hundreds of Muslim ghettos already de facto follow sharia, not French law. Some believe France will quietly become a Muslim country, while others are predicting a civil war in the near future.
Maybe there is some poetic justice in the fact that the country that initiated and has led the formation of Eurabia will now be destroyed by its own Frankenstein monster. However, gloating over France’s dilemma won’t help. The impending downfall of France is bad news for the rest of the West. What will happen to French financial resources? Above all, who will inherit hundreds of nuclear warheads? Will these weapons fall into the hands of Jihadist Muslims, too?