I have written a lot about the way progressives, liberals, environmentalists, etc. are connected back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Romanticism. This is not an original thought. Here is a review of a book written in 2000 by a Frenchman that explores the relationship.

Since Obama took office there has been a rash of terrorist attacks, or "man-caused disasters" as the Obami like to call them. Here is a list from "Flopping Aces." Charles Krauthammer reports that a state department official told him off the record that Obama had de-emphasized profiling of Muslims, in contrast to the way the Bush Administration operated. It is clear that Obama does not believe that Jihadis are at war with us.

Newt Gingrich points out that Sarah Palin mis-named the commission planned by the Democrats. It is not a Death Panel. Instead, it decides who gets to live, so it is a “Life Panel.” Obama and his Advisers think that old people have no value to society, so money should not be wasted on medical treatment of them. That’s the way it goes for me; just as I get old, society decides that old people are an unacceptable burden. Obama’s intention is clear, since he plans to make huge cuts in Medicare to pay for “Obamacare.” Old people need to be sure to save their money because after “Obamcare” goes into effect we are going to have to travel overseas for healthcare. I expect that India will be the primary destination for the elderly who need knee and hip replacements, or bypass surgery. Obama will effectively outsource medical hare for the elderly. I wonder what effect this will have on Canadians, who currently come to the US for their serious healthcare. I guess the will have to go to India also. This could be an opportunity for Mexico, if they can shake their socialist attitudes to take advantage of the situation. They will be able to get some American doctors I would think. Here is a discussion from American Thinker.

Here from American Thinker is a reprint of a 1953 speech by Admiral Ben Moreell, then President of Jones and Laughlin Steel, and leader of the Seabees during WWII. This speech was given about the time that I started to college and encountered first hand the Marxist Professors who advocated “social engineering.” A lot of what those professors advocated has come to pass, and Obama is attempting to enact the rest of it. Although Obama and many of his Democrat supporters were not alive when this speech was given, the speech details their actions in support of their belief that Americans are not smart enough to take care of themselves, so the government should take control of all aspects of their lives.

There have now been two recent terrorist attacks in the US, the last, an attempt to blow up an airliner on Christmas, failed. The Obama Administration has indicated that they do not consider the US to be in a war with the Jihadis, but rather consider terrorist attacks to be a criminal matter. This seems to be the case given that in the case of both attacks, the perpetrator had been identified as a potential threat, but for some reason the warning was ignored. The Obama Administration appears to have the attitude expressed by Kerry during the 2004 election that we should "just take the hits." In other words we should sacrifice people to avoid perception of infringement of the terrorist's Constitutional rights. Obama clearly thinks that Bush was too aggressive in acting to prevent terrorist attacks. The voters sided with Obama in 2008. If we experience a few more attacks, I wonder if voter opinion will change. The liberal Democrats will not change, but the Independents may.

The debate on greenhouse gas-induced climate change is polarized, with people on both sides unwilling to agree with the other side. I have studied the issue for a long time, reading a lot of papers on the subject, and doing some analysis myself. I am convinced that CO2emissions do not pose a threat to humankind, though it is likely that some temperature increase will occur. I think that other activities of man have more impact on climate than CO2 emissions. One aspect of the debate is that the burden of proof has to be on the side of the alarmists; the skeptics cannot prove a negative. If temperature does not increase after many years, the hypothesis will be disproven. The problem is that the supporters of the hypothesis have politicized the issue through the corrupt UN, and are moving to immediately impose draconian measures on energy generation that will enrich many of the activists including 3rd world nations who are pushing the warming hypothesis. Here is an article by one of the UN IPCC authors that is true, and I think that supporters of the Hypothesis would have to agree with the specific points made, though they would maintain their religious belief that greenhouse gases will destroy the world.

The White House Christmas Tree has an ornament with an image of Mao Zedong on it. I suppose this should not surprise us given that Mao is one of the favorite people of the Obama team. Today's Democrats really seem to like Communist Dictators. The thing that bothers me about this is that Mao killed abut 40 million people, more than Hitler. It bothers me that Democrats idolize a guy who killed so many people to gain and maintain power. One might fear that their approval of Mao means that they would be willing to use his methods themselves.

Victor Davis Hanson has a good analysis of the Obama phenomena.

I have written for some time now about the activities of Maurice Strong in attempting to use "climate change" fears to establish a world government (socialist, of course), while increasing his personal fortune at the same time. The activities of Strong, Al Gore, the Club of Rome, and other NGO's and environmental groups, in an attempt to take over the world are similar to the plot of a James Bond movie. The characters and their scheme sound as far-fetched as a movie narrative, yet they are real, and they are on the cusp of success. I am glad that some journalists are picking up on the story now, so there is at least some hope that Obama and his friends can be stopped. Here is an example.

I wish I was as optimistic as Mr. Dunn is that AGW is finished. I think the trillions of dollars involved, and the lure of a world government will be irresistible for some, so they will continue the propaganda campaign.

Here is more about the Democrat's desire to ban hydraulic fracturing to release oil and gas from deep underground shale deposits. The usual suspects appear to be the hand in the Obama sock-puppet. George Soros has a lot of financial interests that would be harmed by development of the natural gas resources in the United States. Soros and the Democrats also are interested in reducing energy consumption in the US, and cheap gas is a threat to that initiative. Obama has said he supports reducing CO2 emissions in the US by 80% from 2003 levels by 2050. On a per capita basis, that would put US energy consumption back to the level experienced in 1910. Looks like no more air conditioning or cars for ordinary folk. Of course Obama thinks that windmills and solar cells would take up the slack, which is highly unlikely. Nuclear power could take up a lot of the slack, but Democrats don't like that either. Obama seems intent on achieving his desire, as revealed by some of his aides, to manage the decline of the United states.

I noticed some time ago that Wikipedia was not a reliable source on the subject of global warming. It turns out that putting disinformation into Wikipedia was part of the conspiracy, as noted here. The important thing to realize is that there was a conspiracy to promote fear of global warming that had nothing to do with science, but rather was about politics.

The advocates of catastrophic AGW like to denigrate those AGW "deniers" as being in the pay of big oil. But there are a lot of rent-seeking major corporations like GE and Duke Power that are on-board with draconian action in support of AGW. What about the "climate change" deceivers? We all know about Al Gore's activities in carbon trading and "renewable energy." But what about the head of the UN IPCC? Here is a rundown on how he profits from the global warming hysteria he promotes. Like Al says, it is just good business to take advantage of what you know is going to happen. (That is, that governments will waste trillions of dollars to counter something that is not really a threat. This is the best of all worlds, because the counter efforts are bound to succeed, since the threat is not real.)

I have written a lot before about how AGW (or climate change) is just the means by which the UN was trying to establish a world government. Maurice Strong, the Canadian billionaire socialist started the UN IPCC with the expressed intent of "destroying western civilization." The UN doesn't care whether or not the AGW hypothesis is correct, it is just the means by which the UN would like to achieve its true objective of establishing a world government, one with taxing authority. Here is a good discussion of this matter.

You wouldn't know it from reading the newspapers, but there are many respected scientists in the world who think that global cooling is a more imminent threat than global warming. There are many such scientists in Russia, China and Japan. It is curious that there is more intellectual freedom in those locals than in the West. And, cooling is more harmful to mankind than warming. Here is an article about one scientist who is worried about global cooling.

I have written a lot about the corrupt process used by the UN IPCC to create the catastrophic AGW hysteria. The process is political, not scientific, and amounts to outright fraud. Here is a comment from one of the lead authors of the IPCC report who shares my view of the UN IPCC process. (This came from Newsmax.) Note that he doesn't even refer to the leaked email situation now called "climategate." Climategate shows that the situation is even more fraudulent than we thought.


Scientist Points to U.N. ‘Fraud’ on Climate Change

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be dismissed as an authority on global warming, according to a scientist associated with the IPCC.

In an article that appeared on South Africa’s BusinessDay Web site, Dr. Philip Lloyd, who has been a coordinating lead author for the IPCC, writes about the “flaws behind the whole process” of the IPCC.

The IPCC “claims that it has thousands of scientists and almost as many reviewers of the scientists’ work to produce their reports,” noted Lloyd, an honorary research fellow at the Energy Research Center at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

However, Lloyd says the reviewers of IPCC reports have been neither independent nor anonymous, as they should be. In Lloyd’s experience there has been no review “in the accepted sense of the word — there was no independence of review, and the reviewers were anything but anonymous. The result is not scientific.”

Another problem cited by Lloyd is that the IPCC issues a Summary for Policy Makers four months or more before a scientific report is published.

Lloyd concludes: “It isn’t necessary to list all the changes I have identified between what the scientists actually said and what the policymakers who wrote the Summary for Policy Makers said they said. The process is so flawed that the result is tantamount to fraud. As an authority, the IPCC should be consigned to the scrapheap without delay.”

Lloyd’s article makes no mention of the so-called climategate scandal, which has called into question the validity of some of the IPCC’s science supporting man-made global warming.

In a related note, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, following the eruption of the climategate controversy, acknowledged that the science supporting man-made global warming may not be “as certain as its proponents allege.”

But The Telegraph in Britain reported that Blair believes the world should take action on climate change “even if the science is not correct.”

Note that the socialist Tony Blair is willing to admit that the AGW science is shaky, but thinks we should stop using carbon based fuels anyway. Democrat Party socialists in the US have said the same thing. Former Senator Wirth has said it doesn't matter whether or not the AGW hypothesis is correct, we should be curtailing energy use anyway.

Here is a blog from Strata-Sphere that discusses the incompetent error analyses (that is, uncertainty in instrument accuracy plus error introduced by the computations involved in creating measurements out of thin air) done by the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis advocates. The chart from NOAA showing the difference in raw temperature data and the "corrected" data is revealing. According to the raw data there was no warming during the 20th century; all of the warming came from the "corrections." Is this why they say the warming was "manmade."

Here is a discussion of the insanity of attempts at "global warming" mitigation. This article discusses problems with applying the "precautionary principle." The article also points out that the UN IPCC predicts that global average temperature will increase by 2 degrees F by the year 2100. This is curious because the Copenhagen conference wants draconian action to reduce future temperature increase to 2 degrees C (which is 3.6 F) by the year 2100. My question is, why do they think they need to take any immediate action since their own predictions are that temperature will go up not much more than half their goal?

The Copenhagen conference is attempting to impose draconian reductions on the use of fossil fuels in order to limit the temperature change by 2 degrees C by 2100 (or maybe it was 2050). Here is a discussion of a paper that used statistical analysis to predict future temperature. This paper predicts a temperature rise of 0.2 degrees C by 2100, apparently regardless of what is done with regard to fossil fuel. The paper discusses the difficulty of modelling a chaotic, dynamic system using conventional fluid flow representations such as the Bernoulli and Euler equations. I always had good look with incompressible flow predictions with the Bernoulli equations. Analyzing rocket exhaust heating effects on structures and spacesuits was a bit more difficult. Using a lot of computer time we were eventually successful, and managed to design space systems that worked. Analyzing the climate of Earth is many orders of magnitude more difficult. I had absolutely no confidence in the ability of the UN IPCC modelers before the release of the Hadley CRU emails, and even less now with the revelations that they fudged the historical temperature data. I suppose statistical methods would be just as good as the voodoo that the UN IPCC is using. I have no confidence in any of the predictions. Basically I think it is beyond our capability to predict future climate, not only because there are significant unknown influences, and some of those are unknowable.

The Global Circulation Models (GCMs) do not accurately model clouds, as was mentioned in the Hadley CRU emails. All of the GCMs used by the UN IPCC as proof of the apocalyptic AGW hypothesis have clouds as a positive feedback. That is, as the earth warms due to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration, clouds cause the increase to be amplified. Satellite data indicates that the opposite is true, that clouds decrease the warming. Here is a discussion by climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer.

Here is an article that discusses how the anarchists are trying to force action at Copenhagen. The article mentions Maurice Strong, a major player in the movement which has as its goal the destruction of Western Civilization. Most of the people involved in the movement know little about science, and care less. They are politically motivated, and favor anything that harms the United States and capitalism.

The climate control meeting is proceeding in Copenhagen as if climategate had never happened. Yet the shoring holding up their platform is eroding away daily. The latest shoe to drop comes from the Russians who report that Hadley CRU cherry picked the temperature data from Russia by ignoring huge areas that have been getting colder rather than warming. This is on top of revelations from New Zealand, Australia, and the United States that data were fudged to make recent warming more pronounced. It appears that the temperature records that have been used to support the AGW hypothesis are corrupt, and indicate significantly more warming than has actually occurred. There are also now reports that soot in the air rather than CO2 may be responsible for half of the warming that has occurred, particularly warming in the arctic. This was not included in the GCMs used to project future temperature. Land use changes have also had a significant impact in my opinion, and these have also not been included in the GCMs.

The senate is considering putting water under control of the EPA. This is no doubt the brain child of Carol Browner, the Energy "czarina." Obama would have liked to have put her in charge of the EPA, but she could not have been confirmed by the Senate because at the end of the Clinton Administration she destroyed her records in violation of the law. (As energy czar she told auto executives to put nothing into writing and to communicate with her only verbally.) Browner has allegedly given up her leadership role in the socialist organization, but I think is still a socialist. She wants control of water so so can stop hydraulic fracturing, and so stop drilling for oil and Gas in shale formations. She wants to get rid of all carbon based fuels.

For a long time now I have argued that the UN IPCC is not a scientific body and that the work produced by them is flawed, and that the whole organization should be disbanded. here is one of the lead authors who agrees with me. (I wonder if Carol Browner knows that one of the "2500 scientists" she cites does not agree with her. Actually there are others; one of the authors even sued to get his name removed.)

According to the highly suspect Global Average Temperature Anomaly history, the past 10 years have been the hottest on record. That may even be true, given that the record only extends back to 1900 and doesn't include the the Medieval Warm Period. But, by the suspect record, it has been cooling for the last 10 years. Here is an explanation.

The environmentalists have now decided that the proper atmospheric CO2 concentration is 350 ppmv, to prevent the destruction of the planet. The current level is 390 ppmv, so they think draconian measures to reduce the concentration are justified. How did they determine that the maximum allowable level is 350 ppmv? It seems unlikely they did any logical parametric analyeses to establish that. The Global Circulaion Models have proven to have no predictive competence, so how was the proper level established? I suspect they devined it, perhaps with a soothsayer, or an astrologer. Climate science has about as much creibility as astrology.

Here is another good article about the "climategate" issue. The emails came from Russia: did the Russians hack the Hadley computers? I doubt it. I suspect it was an inside job. There are, I suspect, a lot of climate researchers who have serious doubts about the AGW hypothesis. Kieth Briffa appears to have some doubts, and he got mysteriously ill about the time this happened. I suppose a disgruntled grad student is more likely.

The Hadley CRU emails cast doubt on the reliability of the temperature records of CRU. Supporters of the AGW hypothesis contend that the issues with CRU data are not significant because of the data from other researchers. The problem is that the other researcher’s data appears to be as questionable as that of CRU. It is claimed that the work of the AGW Hypothesis proponents has been peer reviewed. But there is indication that the reviewers never had the raw data involved, nor examined how that data had been manipulated. (It is also highly doubtful that the reviewers ever examined the computer programs that were used in producing the works. The reason is that it is difficult and time consuming to make such a review and many of the prominent scientists doing the reviewing are not expert coders, nor should they be. Actually the reviews would have been better if done by persons less exalted but more expert in the actual work.) I always had doubts about the global warming, but never doubted the reported Global Average Temperature Anomaly (GATA) until I read a not-very-good book by Michael Crichton titled, as I recall, State of Fear. In an Appendix to the book there was a compilation of raw temperature data from locations across the United States that showed that temperature fell for most of the 20th century. It was hard to see how the GATA was increasing when looking at that data. Dr. Crichton was a highly successful though below average author of fiction, but was a brilliant man. Everyone should read his testimony to the Senate in which he described the need for truly independent research, particularly in matters that were political.

It is abundantly clear that the people who are doing climate research that supports the AGW hypothesis are not truly independent, nor are they unbiased. This becomes clear when one looks at the results of independent review of the raw temperature data from around the world. Here is an example from Australia. There are similar examples from New Zealand and the United States. These examples are not proof that the accepted GATA values are not valid, but they certainly indicate the need for independent review before making policy decisions that involve draconian changes to the economy.

There are also some serious issues with the proposition that sensitivity to increase in CO2 temperature is greater than one, but that is complicated. But, it means that GATA is not going to spiral upward even if temperature has been going up recently.

Here is a discussion and an example of temperature adjustment being done by US researchers, either NASA/GISS or NOAA/NCDC (it could have been either, or both). I’ve studied the apocalyptic AGW hypothesis since the late 80’s, and I have been amazed at how the temperature from many years ago is continually revised downward. I agree that the accuracy bound of the instruments was probably larger than the temperature change that has occurred over 100 years, but how could current researchers possibly figure out that the old data had a bias that could be precisely established now? Personally I think that the most generous explanation is that the researchers are suffering from a confirmation bias. I saw that a lot in my system engineering career, particularly in missile failure investigations

It amazes me that someone like Kevin Jenkins would ever be a key figure in the US government. Here is some info about him from the blog Hot Air. Jenkin's behavior is not appropriate, and would not be if he were straight instead of gay.

Barack Obama has famously said that his election would mark "the time when sea level ceases to rise." According to this article, that won't be hard for Obama to accomplish since sea level doesn't seem to be rising much anyway. The world's leading expert on sea level, University of Stockholm Professor Nils-Axel Morner, says sea level hasn't risen at all over the past 30 years.

Here is a reconstruction of temperature history for a few spots in the world going back hundreds of thousands of years. We are fortunate to live in a warm period which occurs for a far smaller percentage of the time than cold intervals. The large swings in temperature happened without the intervention of man. The current temperature is high, but is not the hottest that ever occurred. Unlike the claims of the warmist community, it is not now the hottest it has ever been. Note discussed in the article, but as far as humans are concerned, warm is a lot better than cold.

Steve Sailer has written a piece speculating on the political implications of breaking Texas into five states. Sailer appears to be a Californian, but is familiar with Texas because he attended Rice University in Houston.

Obama has some strange friends, which would be OK I guess if he didn't put them in his Administration. His Safe School Czar has to be one of his worst personnel choices. It seems to me that Jennings should be in prison rather than around young children.

Environmentalists love the precautionary principle. They invoke it in all policy discussions to avoid doing cost-benefit analyses. Here is an article that explains that in the catastrophic AGW discussion, the people favoring draconian measures to reduce CO2 emissions do not entertain the arguments of the potential harm of the policy. One of the worst outcomes would be the creation of a socialist global government. Of course, that is the goal of many of the warmists. Ilya Somin discuses this idea.

Al Gore has commented on the Hadley CRU emails leaving one to wonder whether he is a liar or just dumb. I vote for both.

Obama stiffed the Norwegians several times, including skipping a children's charity concert the Nobel Peace Prize awardee is supposed to attend. The Norwegians responding by putting up a cardboard cutout of him. I wonder if people noticed, or if they just thought his teleprompter had failed.

Barack Obama said he was going to improve the image of America around the world. I wonder how he thinks he is doing. Everything is all about him. I think other countries are figuring out that he has a massive ego. He has now offended the Norwegians who gave him an undeserved Nobel Peace Prise. He even stiffed the king of Norway, refusing to have lunch with him. He even refused to go to an event in his honor. But, he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. He seems to like Muslims OK.

I have questioned the validity of the cataclysmic AGW hypothesis for 20 years. The recently revealed Hadley CRU information confirmed what I thought was happening. The socialists behind the fear mongering took advantage of two scientific facts; first that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation over a narrow range at 2.7. 4.3, and 14.77 microns (peak radiation from earth at 60 F is at 10 microns), and second that there was a natural upward trend in temperature that started in the early 1800's. The current Global Average Temperature Anomaly (GATA) is on that earlier established trend line. Here is another view of this situation.

Here is more about how raw temperature data was "massaged" to support the AGW hypothesis. Michael Crichton pointed out some years ago that most of the raw data that could be found did not support the AGW hypothesis. The anecdotes about warming were sometimes hilarious. For example I read that pine beetles in the south of the US were more active because of global warming. But even the warmists data indicated that the south of the US had actually cooled in the latter half of the 20th century. So, my question was, how was the existence of global warming communicated to the pine beetles?

Here is another good description of the problem with the AGW hypothesis. One should not expect much from government sponsored research. It is likely that results will correspond to the desires of the funding bureaucracy.

The hacked Hadley CRU emails just show that scientists are human. So says Paul Krugman, the eminent economist and commenter for the NYT, and and self-proclaimed unbiased observer even though he was employed as an adviser to Enron in their attempts to set up a carbon trading system. No doubt the scientists are human, and it may be argued that there is nothing sinister in their emails to each other. But the hacked material includes their computer code, and it clearly shows deliberate manipulation to support the Apocalyptic AGW hypothesis, as discussed here.

According to Democrats the world's financial problems are all the fault of George Bush. I'm trying to figure out how Bush's tax cuts in the US caused debt crises in Dubia and Greece. I feel certain that Democrat Spinmeisters could explain it, and I'm just not clever enough to understand their doubletalk. As I understand the Democrat's it is simple: every bad thing that happens in the world is George Bush's fault.

We all knew that Tiger Woods was in pursuit of Jack Nicklaus's record on major golf championships won. Who knew he was also pursuing Wilt Chamberlain's bedroom record? (Wilt claimed to have slept with 17,000 women during his illustrious basketball career.)

Since I am a bona fide "rocket scientist" I suppose I am qualified to comment on the apocalyptic AGW hypothesis. I was also a heat transfer specialist, and did thermal design on several spacecraft so probably know more about temperature instrumentation than the academic professors who directed graduate students working on gathering world temperature data. I have never believed in the apocalyptic AGW hypothesis. The reason had to do with the assumption that the temperature sensitivity of the world to an increase in an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration was greater than 1. That is that temperature would go up faster than just the amount that would be expected due solely to that caused by the greenhouse effect of the CO2. The reason for my doubt was as follows: CO2 level had been several times the current level in the past, and temperature did not spiral upward, and, in fact, went down. Over time I also developed doubts about the integrity of the supporters of the AGW hypothesis because they continued to reduce the average temperature in their record of the past. They completely eliminated the Medieval Warm Period, something that was well established as having occurred. I also had severe doubts about the validity of the ground temperature measurements used to establish the Global Average Temperature Anomaly (GATA). Anyone who thinks he can take hundreds of temperature measurements made at poorly sited locations with instruments of uncertain accuracy and no established procedure and "correct" the measurements to get a meaningful GATA is kidding someone. Here is a discussion from the blog Strata Sphere that expresses similar concerns as mine.

Here is Hurricane expert Bill Gray's view of the apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis. Clue: he doesn't think the "science" behind it is valid.

Here is a good discussion of how the Hadley CRU team manipulated and fudged data to make it appear that there was unprecedented warming of the Earth during the latter half of the 20th century. This fraud was not confined to researchers in Great Britain, but also extended to the US. There were also questions about the accuracy of the temperature measurements because about 90% of the instrument sites are poorly situated. The data collectors claim that they have computer routines that correct the temperature data. But, contrary to normal scientific practice, they do not share the algorithms used to make those corrections. (It appears to me that the correction procedures would have to be tailored to each of the thousands of sites; a Herculean task that I doubt has been done.) There is nothing new in all of the foregoing; everyone who monitored the UN IPCC output knew what was happening. But critics were silenced and data was not shared, so people who did not agree with the apocalyptic AGW hypothesis were ignored. Politicians and the media ran interference to prevent effective criticism. By the way, contrary to what the apocalyptic AGW hypothesis supporters claim, a person does not have to be a climatologist to understand that massaging and manipulating temperature data to make appear colder in the past and warmer in the present can provide a false picture that temperature is going up like the blade of a hockestick. After all, it only takes a change of few tenths of a degree in each direction to create a freightening picture, particularly if creative chartsmanship is used.

Back during the Bush Administration Democrats complained about the use of Executive Privilege to prevent officials from testifying to Congress about classified matters. Now the Obama Administration, pledged to be the most open in history) has invoked Executive Privilege (renamed as 'separation of powers')to prevent a social secretary from being questioned by Congress.

Here is an article that covers some of the same aspects of the Hadley CRU email story that I covered in a post yesterday, but with more detail in some areas. Here is some more about 'cherry picking' data. I like calling the AGW hypothesis the 'greenhouse gas hypothesis' because the catastrophic global warming supporters only consider greenhouse gases, and ignore other possible anthropogenic causes of warming. The reason for this, I think, is that they want to reduce energy consumption that is primarily provided by fossil fuel combustion. Reducing energy is the key part of the socialists agenda for the destruction of capitalism. The scientists invoved in the global warming cabal may be apolitical, but the politicians that provided the money and drove the policy debate are purely political with no real interest in science.

I have noticed that the believers in the catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis fail to mention water vapor when they describe the basis of global warming. Water vapor is, of course, the primary "greenhouse gas" with CO2 and methane as minor contributors. Carbon dioxide does absorb infrared radiation at 2.7, 4.3 and 14.77 microns, and in the absence of other factors would cause atmospheric temperatures to increase slightly. The AGW hypothesis is that, according to the Clausis-Clapyron equation as verified by experiment, an increase in temperature exponentially increases the amount of water vapor the air can hold, so if relative humidity remains the same there will be more water vapor. This additional water vapor will cause the air temperature to increase more, and this will further increase water vapor in the air thus temperature will ratchet upward. The people who support the hypothesis appear, based on the Hadley CRU emails recently released, to have deliberately made the past appear cooler, and the present warmer. People had suspected that for some time since there was indication of it, but the AGW proponents would not release their raw data and their data massaging scheme. I had always had doubts about the past temperature record based on my own experience. The data had been collected from all around the world by many different people with no set procedure or standards, using equipment with uncertain accuracy and variation in local surroundings over time; thus it was highly likely that the error in the data was much larger than the temperature changes being monitored. I also had some philosophical concerns about the concept of a single average temperature. They compute a monthly average temperature for a worldwide grid of blocks about 450 miles on a side. In many of these grid squares there are many measurements of maximum and minimum temperatures that are somehow mashed into a monthly average temperature for the entire grid square. In some of the grid squares there are no measurements, so they use some sort of procedure to generate the average temperature for that grid. Then they average all of the temperatures from the grids to get the monthly average for the world. It appears that there was no configuration management on modifications to the computer routines that made these computations. It also appears that the raw temperature data were not retained, so no one can verify the work. There are many other issues with this procedure that I won't go into now. The emails reveal that they have pushed down the past temperature and jacked up recent temperatures. McIntyre revealed many errors and flaws in this work and some, but not all, were subsequently corrected. Starting in 1979 there were satellite measurements of worldwide temperature. At first there were errors in that system, but the University of Alabama-Huntsville team had an open record, and accepted criticism and corrected errors. This reliable satellite measurement record put a limit on what the researchers at Hadley CRU and NASA/GISS/NCDC could do in messaging their data. This may explain why temperature has not gone up recently, as was predicted by the 'Mann Hockeystick' curve. The AGW proponents use some 21 Global Circulation Models (GCMs) to project future temperature. In developing these models, they were 'calibrated' by forcing the models to produce the temperatures of the past. There were two problems with this. First, they assumed that the natural temperature increase that started in the early 1800's suddenly stopped about 1950, and, next, that all temperature increases after that were due entirely to atmospheric CO2 increases. Thus natural increases were ignored, as were increases that might be due to things such as land use changes. This made it certain that the GCMs would project temperature increases if CO2 level increased. The problem with the GCMs is that they appear to have been calibrated to something that is not true. There is also a potential problem with error build-up in numerical solutions of non-linear equations as they are projected far into the future. At any rate, the GCMs have proven to have no predictive competence, and results from the various GCMs do not match, even on a local level (some predict flooding in California while others predict drought; there is no consistency in results). I think the proponents of catastrophic AGW have fallen into some common fallacies that I read about somewhere, but I've forgotten where:

Confirmation Bias - the researchers unconsciously manipulate data to confirm what they believe. (I have seen this a lot in my career.)

Narrative Fallacy - the tendency to accept a compelling story. Journalists are particularly prone to this. They ignore that which doesn't support the narrative.

Silent Evidence - failure to account for important parameters that are not observed. (Like effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation.)

Ludic Fallacy - willingness to over-simplify and to take models too seriously.

Epistemic Arrogance - over-estimating knowledge and underestimating ignorance of the climate system.

The proponents of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis suggest that the 'precautionary principle' should be followed, otherwise we are playing 'Russian Roulette' with the future. I would rather take that remote small risk than the certain suicide path that the politicians involved in the issue support. The socialists who initiated the UN IPCC stand on the verge of achieving their goal, which Maurice Strong said 20 years ago was to destroy Western Civilization. All of the third world counties in the UN applauded that goal; it is hard to understand why Europe and the liberals in America supported it.

The usually confused and incoherent Chris Mathews has once again revealed the true belief of liberals as he discusses Obama's Afghanistan speech: West Point is the heart of the enemy.