The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2 greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.
Which, given this work by two physicists, chips away another brick in the wall of "scientific concensus." And which the authors also address (p. 94 middle)
A theoretical physicist must complain about the lack of transparency here, and he also has to complain about the style of the scientific discussion, where advocators of the greenhouse thesis claim that the discussion is closed, and others are discrediting justified arguments as a discussion of "questions of yesterday and the day before yesterday." In exact sciences, in particular in theoretical physics, the discussion is never closed and is to be continued ad infinitum, even if there are proofs of theorems available.
Are these gentlemen right about the lack of a CO2 greenhouse effect? Good question, well worth a legitimate scientific discussion, one not subject to blackballing from "peer-reviewed" journals or secret data and even more secret calculations and models.
By the way, this was published in January 2009, well before the ClimateGate emails emerged.
First up, the Wall Street Journal discussing the terrorist attack on Northwest flight 253:
Brian Jenkins, who studies terrorism for the Rand Corporation, says
there were more terror incidents (12), including thwarted plots, on
U.S. soil in 2009 than in any year since 2001. The jihadists don't seem
to like Americans any better because we're closing down Guantanamo.
This increasing terror tempo makes the Obama Administration's
reflexive impulse to treat terrorists like routine criminal suspects
all the more worrisome. It immediately indicted Mr. Abdulmutallab on
criminal charges of trying to destroy an aircraft, despite reports that
he told officials he had ties to al Qaeda and had picked up his PETN
explosive in Yemen. The charges mean the Nigerian can only be
interrogated like any other defendant in a criminal case, subject to
having a lawyer present and his Miranda rights read.
Yet he is precisely the kind of illegal enemy combatant who should be interrogated first with the goal of preventing future
attacks and learning more about terror networks rather than gaining a
single conviction. We now have to hope he cooperates voluntarily.
A man on a terrorism watch list gets on a flight bound for the U.S. with a bomb strapped to his body and "the system worked?" Give me a break. Such a statement by the head of Homeland Security shows either unconscionable ignorance of the facts or laughable prevarication. Further, isn't it apparent that the Cairo speech, outreach, and closing Guantanamo notwithstanding, the terrorists are not going away. Michelle Malkin highlights another mistaken belief that seems to permeate the Obama administration.
As I noted last summer, Barack Obama clings, like so many willfully blind,
to the myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist in the face of years and
years of contrary evidence. The “essence” of the 9/11 “tragedy,” he
wrote days after that attack, “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”
This woeful misdiagnosis allows the apologist to treat deliberate,
carefully planned evil acts of the long-waged Islamic war on the West
as responses to social injustice.
These are not common criminals. These are not poor, oppressed minorities struggling for social justice and freedom. And these are not individuals who are otherwise indistinguishable from the general population. The Fort Hood shooter gave strong indications all through his training and deployments of his bent. Similarly, the Northwest bomber was outed by his own father for his jihadist views. And each of these individuals, and others, has had contacts with radical Islamic teaching and with terrorist infrastructure, like Al Qaeda. So stop pretending that these are random acts by random persons, as they are clearly not.
It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to continue to insist that you're right when the evidence that you're wrong is overwhelming. If Mr. Obama and his administration continue to ignore the obvious, Matt Damon's Will Hunting has an appropriate analysis.
"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is that in 50 years you're going to start doing some thinking on your own, and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped $150 grand on a &%**#$ education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late charges at the public library."
Or perhaps you dropped the money on an education you'd have been better off without.
And it may be helpful to, you know, offer some comment about this near miss, where 300 innocent air travelers might have been blown from the sky, before the year is done. Just sayin'.
[NBC's Matt] Lauer pressed: How does a guy who’s on this general terror list, who
buys a one-way transtlantic ticket with cash, who checks no luggage,
and who’s own father has flagged him to authorities, get on the plane?
Napolitano said that “our system did not work in this instance” and no
one “is happy or satisfied with that.”
The Obama administration continues to demonstrate that they believe
counterterrorism is a law enforcement problem to be managed, not a war
to be won. Hence Attorney General Eric Holder’s insistence on sending
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorists to New York for a
civilian trial in federal court...
The Flight 253 incident was an intelligence failure. Instead of
focusing on convictions, the Obama administration should be focusing on
gathering the intelligence necessary to best protect the American
people.
Roger Pilon of Cato:
The one main reason we have government at all is to better protect us
from domestic and foreign threats than we ourselves, acting alone,
could do. But as planes were flying to the twin towers, the Pentagon,
and the Capitol, Mr. Bush was reading to elementary school children.
Perhaps Mr. Obama should turn his attention from taking responsibility
for the nation’s health care — the market and private charity can
handle that, if he’d just get out of the way — to taking his main
responsibility more seriously.
Everyone remembers Frosty The Snowman, the classic Christmas cartoon. With narration by Jimmy Durante, it features the most recognizable version of the song by the same name. Well, back in 1992 someone came up with the idea for Frosty Returns, a pathetic attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the original. They gave Frosty a much deeper voice (John Goodman, who made a great Sully in a later voiceover incarnation) and an environmental message. The animation style was inconsistent. And curiously, Frosty no longer seemed to need his magic hat to come to life, which really eliminates the initial premise behind the enchanted snowman. I found this review quite amusing.
John Goodman cannot sing. Not on pitch and not on key. Not that they
gave him a song you would ever, ever want to hear again anyway.
So, environmentalism is what Frosty is all about now? I would have
called it horribly preachy except that it was too confused to manage
being preachy.
{...}It would have been bad enough if they had ripped off the animation
style of the Peanuts series but instead that was only one of a dozen
different styles they ripped off, often all in the same scene. Watch
the scale of Frosty to the girl he hangs around with. Apparently
Frosty's hight fluctuates a lot due to his composition.
Oh, I see. Frosty can take off his hat now? And still be animated even
when he doesn't even have that hat! Come on! This isn't Star Trek, they
don't have a canon of a thousand different stories to keep straight
here, Frosty is animated by the hat and he says "Happy Birthday" every
time he reboots. That's it!!!! And you can't even do that?
So Merry Christmas, everyone. And if you ever are forced at gunpoint to watch Frosty Returns, remember as cringes follow one after the other that, mercifully, it will be over in about a half hour.
As I watch the impending train wreck of payoffs and bribes, double counting, and six years of services paid with 10 years of taxes, of tax increases during an economic downturn and with unemployment still high, of freedoms stripped from Americans, of the threat to healthcare as we in America know it (and we know it pretty well), I thought of two cultural references that captured the moment for me. The first, from Joni Mitchell and her Big Yellow Taxi:
"Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." The second, from Charlton Heston, featuring a lady friend from France:
I know, American medicine isn't "paradise." Right. Just like Churchill's formulation on democracy, it's actually the worst system in the world ... except for all the others. Although, with the way Congress has approached this issue maybe the American representative democracy ain't all it's cracked up to be.
I hope to have a lot more to say about all this soon, but business has been crazy lately, and with holidays upon us I've been over my head with responsibilities. But hey, Merry Christmas everyone.
December 21st has acquired an increasing aura of
ominous significance for my family and me. In 1988 Pan Am 103 was
blown from the skies by now-convicted Libyan terrorists, falling to
earth in Lockerbie, Scotland and taking with it the lives of 259 people
on board the plane and 11 on the ground. One of those lives on the
plane was my brother, returning from a semester overseas in London
during his time at Syracuse University.
Annually on this date I have been reprinting my first post from
the start of this blog, which I dedicated to my brother. It posts at
7:03 PM GMT, the time when the plane disappeared from the radar screen, and
all those lives, my brother's included, were tragically ended. Two
years ago the pain of this shortest day of the year in the northern
hemisphere became that much greater, when my father was taken from our
family suddenly. The irony - or possibly the design - of the two dying
on the same date has not escaped our notice. This post now contains
the original first post, from September 2004 and the material I wrote
about my father when, after his death, I
returned to this blog.
The original first post:
My Reason for Being
There are a lot of ways this weblog could begin. I think the best is
with a brief history and explanation. You see, I lost a wonderful
younger brother in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie,
Scotland. I miss him every day; he would be 38 now. I recall thinking
back then that the attack constituted an act of war. I couldn't believe
that there wasn't the moral clarity and certitude of purpose on the
part of our government to prosecute a war against those who had
attacked us. That lack of moral clarity persisted through the Desert
Storm war, leaving Saddam in power, through the first bombing on the
World Trade Center, through the embassy bombings, the USS Cole attack,
etc., etc., etc. With the devastation of the attack on 9-11 finally, at
long last, all Americans would see that we may not have thought
ourselves at war, but an enemy was at war with us. The same America
that fought World Wars I & II would surely unite to fight against
an enemy that attacked us on our home soil - but I was wrong.
Even
before the first strikes in Afghanistan many, particularly in the
media, were questioning the action, opining that we would find
ourselves in a quagmire. With the attacks in Iraq the same voices were
heard. Now, as Iraq struggles to find a footing for democracy many who
in the 1990's thought Saddam needed to be ousted and, if necessary,
preemptive action taken have changed their mind, simply because it's
not their guy doing the ousting.
President Bush is doing exactly what needs to be done - aggressively
prosecuting the GWOT. The critics note that terrorists are flocking to
Iraq to fight against Iraqi and US soldiers - to which I answer "Good.
Get more of them together, rather than chasing them to the ends of the
earth." To those who think Iraq is not part of the GWOT and that we
should have left Saddam in power I ask, do you really think the world
would be a better place with Saddam still in power?
This is the history that has influenced me. As Senator Zell Miller
said at the beginning of his speech at the Republican National
Convention [link]:
Since I last stood in this spot, a whole
new generation of the Miller Family has been born: Four great
grandchildren. Along with all the other members of our close-knit
family -- they are my and Shirley's most precious possessions. And I
know that's how you feel about your family also. Like you, I think of
their future, the promises and the perils they will face. Like you, I
believe that the next four years will determine what kind of world they
will grow up in. And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has
the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best protect my
family? The clear answer to that question has placed me in this hall
with you tonight. For my family is more important than my party. There
is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that
man's name is George Bush.
My family, and in fact
all Americans, are too important to me. This blog will stray onto
lesser topics regularly, my passions and interests. But it will likely
always return to this vital effort.
Lastly, I'd like to write briefly about my dad, who passed away
eight days ago, on a professional level. He was a remarkable
physician, a cancer specialist in a way that really no cancer
specialists are anymore. He performed all manner of cancer surgery,
soup to nuts, including the plastic reconstruction of any deformity
created. He guided the radiation therapy and chemotherapy for his
patients. He read their MRIs and CTs himself. He looked at their
pathology slides. This was one-stop shopping cancer care, something
that you need six or seven different doctors to provide now. You might
think that each of those six or seven physicians would be more highly
informed in their particular area to optimize their portion of the
care. You would be wrong. And you'd have to coordinate six or seven
different physician offices to get anything done.
He retired four years ago, and had to be dragged kicking and
screaming from his practice. When he left, he spent the next two years
staying in contact with his patients, and working with each of them to
be sure they had the best follow-up care he could arrange. That's
something you don't see either.
I won't be writing here on a personal level. That's something I did
for his burial two days ago. We miss you, Dad. We all miss you very
much.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of The Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.
Now wrap your mind around the uncannily similar actions of a British scientist and member of the Green Party, William Connolley: (From Lawrence Solomon, writing in the Financial Post)*
But the UN's official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not
existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and
other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take
decades, time that the band members didn't have if they were to save
the globe from warming.
Instead, the band members turned to
their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website
called RealClimate.org."The idea is that we working climate scientists
should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly
'bombshell' papers that are doing the rounds" in aid of "combating
dis-information," one email explained, referring to criticisms of the
hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were
not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member
Realclimate.org team -- U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William
Connolley -- would take on particularly crucial duties. Connolley took
control of all things climate in the most used information source the
world has ever known -Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when
opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel,
Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia's
articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the
instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate
models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice
Age; on Aug. 11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his
attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the
politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of
the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world's most
distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets,
followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon
and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told,
Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His
control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he
obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to
act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn't like the subject of a
certain article, he removed it -- more than 500 articles of various
descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the
arguments that others were making, he often had them barred -- over
2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves
blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing
conformed to Connolley's global warming views, in contrast, were
rewarded with Wikipedia's blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned
Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The
Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global
warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the
disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period
will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe
how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.
Dr. Lindzen, Dr. Singer, those Wikipedia contributors barred from participation - William Connolley would probably refer to them as "unpersons." He and his band were probably also working on textbooks, ones to supplant earlier versions with updated and approved versions.
*I didn't intend to borrow so much, but by clipping the large section it makes for better read. Please go read Mr. Solomon's entire article.
12/20/09 0845: Speaking of Winston Smith. check out this section of 1984:
Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
I wonder who in the Obama administration is is tasked with making up the number of jobs "saved or created?"
Earlier I noted that a lot of what Copenhagen was about was the redistribution of wealth, primarily that of America, which our Fearless Leader was only too happy to agree to, even if in a "non-binding" way. And really not so much about the actual "health" of the planet.
It seems that this "redistribution" was a motivating factor for many there.
It isn't the climate that bugs "the world," or concerns about CO2, but rather the dynamism (and, as a result, unpredictability) of capitalist economies. How easy is it to handicap a juggernaut as the American economy is, or rather, was? Simple. Convince a simpatico American leader to handicap it for you.
Barack Obama, speech to joint session of Congress, Sept. 9, 2009:
"I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need."
Senator (and physician) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, in today's WSJ:
Additionally, the Reid bill depends on the recommendations of the U.S.
Preventive Services Task Force in no fewer than 14 places. This task
force was responsible for advising women under 50 to not undergo annual
mammograms. The administration claims the task force recommendations do
not carry the force of law, but the Reid bill itself contradicts them
in section 2713. The bill explicitly states, on page 17, that health
insurance plans "shall provide coverage for" services approved by the
task force. This chilling provision represents the government stepping
between doctors and patients. When the government asserts the power to
provide care, it also asserts the power to deny care.
When the government fails to pay for unapproved services (note: unapproved, not unnecessary) it of course restricts them. This is the government standing between you and your physician. Mr. Obama's statement that "no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need" has a different meaning to him than it does to the rest of us. He clearly means the statement to apply to approved services only. And in order to determine those approved services it places itself as supervisor ... final arbiter, really ... of the patient care decisions of a million physicians and their 300 million patients.
'Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’
And throw pears into the mix - much of the actual data were "adjusted," like this. And a response to it all from Doctor Zero, one I wish I'd had time to write.
Dear global warming fanatics,
Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Climagate are only making you look foolish. The con job you’ve been running for the last thirty years is busted forever.
"Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable
evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s
preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.
One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was
only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At
least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that
statement is at Darwin Zero."
They blinded me with science. Oh, and, by the way, the "scientific concensus" may not be, at least among scientists.
The professional association for physicists is facing internal pressure
from some of its most distinguished members, who say the burgeoning
ClimateGate scandal means the group should rescind its 2007 statement
declaring that global warming represents a dire international
emergency.
This isn't about climate change, anthropogenic global warming, impending ecological disaster or any other of the excuses usually cited. No, this is about world socialism, the governmentally-enforced mandatory transfer of large amounts of money from fully developed nations to underdeveloped nations.
And to get there, if the earth doesn't cooperate, requires this.
Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday abruptly canceled a Dec. 16
personal appearance that was to be staged during the United Nations'
Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which begins next week.
As described in The Washington Times' Inside the Beltway column
Tuesday, the multimedia public event to promote Mr. Gore's new book,
"Our Choice," included $1,209 VIP tickets that granted the holder a
photo opportunity with Mr. Gore and a "light snack."
Berlingkse Media, a Danish group coordinating ticket sales and
publicity for the event, said that "great annoyance" was a factor in
the cancellation, along with unforeseen changes in Mr. Gore's program
for the climate summit. The decision affected 3,000 ticket holders.
"We have had a clear-cut agreement, and it is unusual with great
disappointment that we have to announce that Al Gore cancels. We had a
huge expectation for the event. . . . We do not yet know the detailed
reasons for the cancellation," said Lisbeth Knudsen, CEO of Berlingske
Media, in a statement posted by the company
First, isn't anyone else offended that this guy is charging $1200 a head just to be in his magnificent presence? "Have a light snack with The Climate Prophet himself, for only the cost of a real nice LCD TV." And Sarah Palin gets grief for actually taking a few plane flights in the course of her bus tour for Going Rogue.
Finally, I don't think Mr. Gore will be alone in "modifying" his Copenhagen schedule. There will be a boatload of "schedule changes" by those unwilling to answer some serious questions about data, methods, and the honesty of the researchers primarily responsible for scaring as much of the planet as they can.
