Himalayas, going, going ...

Himalayan Glaciers Last Century Yeah, what was that IPCC typo controversy? Facts are stubborn things and a picture is worth a thousand words, especially if the words are conservative BS. Get on board the reality train, man.

Record Heat

warmest first half of year on record 2010 tops 1998 temps; question now is whether 12 months will break 2005 record for warmest year

So I guess global warming didn't end in 1998. Whoops there goes another zombie lie.

Bring in the Clowns

So with the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding states drizzled with oil, what does the right-wing press have to say about it? We have Good Ole climate denier in Chief Joe Barton licking BP's befouled boots, and now Al Gore has stepped into a pit of quicksand at the hands of the fine journalists in Lantana, Florida. Let's see, if we pay a million bucks to a washed up masseuse to report on Al's room service etiquette in 2006, maybe that will take heat off the gulf?

Even columnist Howie Carr, the author of this screed, is befuddled by the length of time that has passed, never mind the truth served up in The Enquirer. But that doesn’t keep him from his appointed rounds per decree from the Hive.“The odd thing is, this alleged incident happened in 2006, before the global-warming scam imploded in the wake of plummeting temperatures and the hide-the-decline e-mails among Gore’s flim-flamming co-conspirators. Back then, it was practically a crime to be a non-believer - “denier” was the word the moonbats used. Usually these religious hucksters like Pope Albert get caught touching the third rail on the downhill slide, after they predict that the coming of the Rapture or the mothership or whatever and the date arrives . . . and nothing happens.”

Right. Did someone predict the world actually would end? Carr has confused Al and by association, the climate scientists, with the Millerites I guess. Never mind what NASA says about the subject. Nope, Al Gore has been caught, allegedly with his pants down, thus global warming science is defacto disproven as it clearly has been in Carr’s head. This reminds me of the bad syllogisms used in Logic class.

So The Portland paper held the story, possibly, because facts were involved? Damn that liberal press! The nerve. Iced. It’s the “limousine liberal” way, as Carr puts it. Not enough name-calling for you? Throw in “green Bernie Madoff” for good measure. Green entrepreneurship must be bad because we know oil is good and it isn’t green. Got it.

We don’t know what Al Gore has done behind closed doors but I’ll withhold judgment until he hikes the Appalachian Trail to Argentina to have a weekend with the babysitter, his true soulmate. Then, as is the case now, it will be irrelevant.

Hide the Incline

Easterbrook's projection. It's fitting that this band of Heartland Institute frauds blatantly do what they accuse real climate scientists of doing: Faking graphs and editing data to bolster their case. They don't have a case and thus need fraud to make it. Busted.

Night of the Jack-booted Thugs

University of Virginia should fight the Va. attorney general's inquiry (Against Dr. Michael Mann)

Maybe Massachusetts should launch a similar investigation against Richard Lindzen? He's the one taking grants to do junk climate science while taking oil industry money to deny the science of global warming, which is a fact. Talk about double dipping. Mann's work stands. No number of Jack-booted right winger cops can change that Inconvenient Truth.

Earth Day 2010

I attended an mini eco festival out in Ventura yesterday. More of a street fair than a clearing house for solutions of environmental problems, but it's the idea of Earth restoration and preservation that's important. Once the concept is in the collective consciousness the entrepreneurial solutions come forth. Use less, spend less, live more.

Individual and collective action will drown the noise of the denialists and all they'll have is the penalty for overuse.

"Everyone pays to play." Mark Knopfler

Jones cleared of scientific fraud

Phil Jones Exonerated by British House of Commons.

We knew that would happen.

Climate scientist Dr. Phil Jones to Parliament

Jones said he expected to be cleared of accusations that he tried to pervert the scientific process.

Sceptics Nigel Lawson and Benny Peiser embarrassed themselves today with their sceptic foolishness, while UK scientists neutered the hostile interrogators with facts.

Under questions from the committee, prominent climate sceptics Nigel Lawson and Benny Peiser, who represented the Global Warming Policy Foundation, conceded that the use of the word "trick" was innocuous. Lawson said the issue was that the scientists had not disclosed the way they blended several separate data sets into single graph, which he called a "fudge". Jones said this was not true, and the technique was widely discussed in scientific papers.

Lawson and Peiser said they did not think the release of the emails questioned the underlying science of climate change. "This is nothing to do with the basic science, that's not the issue," Lawson said. Peiser said the emails had "tarnished the image of British science around the world"

Yeah and falsely so as the testimony shows.

Sea Level Rise

Is happening now* of course and many solid papers and direct measurements by satellite confirm it. In the wingnutosphere, though, finding out that one set of scientists found flaws in another group's paper is a sign of all AGW climate change theory is a hoax. This is laughable. Nothing rides or falls on one paper.

As usual, it's old news too, but on the contrary, this is an example of how science is self-correcting. This is a concept that wingnut sceptics and their madcap followers running on venom and blind faith will never get.

*Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.

Climate Clown Media Circus

Blub blub blub

The complacency of major news outlets in print and television in repeating disproven lies about climate scientists and the science is unprecedented. It goes to show that when conservative activists lose a battle, they gather and storm the gates with lies and misinformation covered non stop by the easily duped press. As the cartoon above shows, that does nothing to change the facts.

UCS Factcheck:
The overwhelming consensus of more than 1,250 authors and 2,000 scientific expert reviewers from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as 18 American scientific associations, is that global warming is observably happening and a growing threat to our world.

key Indicators

Of course if you happen to think that Limbaugh, Beck and Palin know more than NASA and NOAA, then you have more serious cognitive issues to contend with.

Update: This is a nice takedown of the misuse by sceptics on the answers of Dr. Phil Jones.



Kudos to Andy Revkin for providing the link on Dot Earth.

Wrong Way Weathermen

"But in fact, the basic question of whether rising greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change hinges on mostly simple, and predictable, matters of physics. The short-term variations that throw the weathercasters’ forecasts out of whack barely register at all."

That's about it, and why the local weathercasters, who mostly lack the graduate education required in climatology, can't grasp the long term effects of a well-tested theory, in place since the mid-19th Century and tested in a lab. They skipped that class.

The March of the Loons

As I wrote at the Washington Post-- The ratio of denier loons to those trying to inform them [on the comment thread] seems to be growing. That's a good sign. So is the Copenhagen Accord. The other treaties didn't work because we didn't join in, nor did China. Imagine if we compete to see who will contribute the least CO2 and to lose is to lose face? This is the future. It will happen so we can all have one.

Barbarians at the Climate Gate

Review: E-mails show pettiness, not fraud
Climate experts, AP reporters go through 1,000 exchanges.

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

As was clear from the start. The break in and resulting smear attack worked as planned. I say subpoena Christopher Horner and make him sit in a corner wearing a dunce cap, eating his turds and ways. Follow the money to CEI.

The "Decline" is in the journalistic Inquiry, Stupid

Boy as a science journalist myself I find this piece very disheartening, not only for the climate, but for journalism, which just about the only thing in decline on the issue.

"some scientists say the Earth hasn't warmed as predicted over the past 10 years --"

Who? Whoever they are they get more credit than NASA. Great work as propaganda. Reporting, not so much. "Cry me a river Pielke Sr," who is not a physical science professor to start with, simply wants a special pleading for conclusions that don't pass muster. That may work in journalism and for the partisan fuzzy social scientists, such as skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, but it doesn't in a hard science field like climatology. Sorry charlie. Life is tough.

This is a non scandal but has worked according to the plan's instigator, most likely a denial group such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute or the George Marshall outfit. It's a good bet the hacker got a paycheck. Go talk to Bob Woodward and follow the money. You'll find the real culprit. There's nothing that can wipeout the measurements and facts about global warming. And nothing has.

350 Awareness Day

I attended a great presentation ay NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory this afternoon promoted by 350.org. Sea level rise was the most disturbing discovery. The displacement of water from the melting of ice sheets in both hemispheres congregate around the US coastline. Sea level rise is not uniform. Talk about your chickens coming home to roost.

Yet whack job deniers still persist. Like the Superfreakowingnuts and their hose to heaven pie-in-the-sky "solution" from the people who brought you the incompetent Windows OS, and commenters on major newspapers who claim this sort of wisdom.

"To respond to the carbon dioxide claim, true scientific data show that we had higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in 1820 and 1940 than we do now."

Why does this sort of ignorant garbage litter a major newspaper's web site? I mean really, many of us know we are riding on a ship with fools but are a long way from being a ship comprised of fools. One won't get that impression reading a comment thread at an environmental article on The Washington Post. What sad times for media.

CO2 is now at 388 ppm and climbing. 350 is the safest level of carbon dioxide we can have without drastic climate repercussions.

Political forecast:Increasing cloudiness for many among us.

Flim Flam WSJ

They keep at it over at The Wingerville Journal.

My response on the forum page.

"poster child for how to lie with statistics"

Doesn't this title belong to Bjorn Lomborg? It still does. The logical fallacies in play here are evident and not on the side of the so-called true believers of Anthropogenic global climate change. As long as true deniers don't connect random weather events, and their disastrous results, to a long term trend of a warmer climate that is undeniably attributable to emissions then it will all be moot for you. I suspect your heads will be in the sand long after the waters dry up inland and inundate coastal areas worldwide. It may be caused something else? Your job as a critic is to find it. What is your theory?

Critical Birds of a Feather: Kookaburras

Reached by telephone, Hansen [Dr. James Hansen, NASA Climatologist] sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

Global warming is a Rorschach test on the foibles of human reason and of projection. The handful of kooks aren't right. The consensus is. This the outsider is right business is the stuff of novels but rarely is in real life. Dyson and the whackjobs on FOX play the victim when the truth is they're just flat wrong. See Occam's Razor. ex parsimoniae. End of story.

Andy Revkin Drinks the Kool-Aid

NYT science reporter Revkin on a so-called exaggeration of Al Gore."While climate scientists foresee more intense droughts and storms, there is still uncertainty, and significant disagreement, over whether recent patterns can be attributed to global warming."

Right. It's either that or the Tooth Fairy. That's a tough one. There's been a huge flap over this and with the wingnut Glenn Beck vilifying climate modeler and T. Texas professor Dr. Michael Tobis, in a breathtaking case of creative defamation that headlined on Beck's show on FOX. It's bad news personified. And totally false at its core. I'll not repeat it here, but as I told Tobis, this is the skeptic media modus operandi. I'm sorry to see Revkin co-opted in this way in another example false equivalency comparing Al Gore's so-called exaggerations to the falsehoods of George Will.

Willful Disgrace

George Will has lied through the years as it has suited his personal biases, as Media Matters points out.

"Washington Post can hide behind multi-layer processes all it wants, but as long as it publishes Will, it will continue to misinform its readers. The Post doesn't need to give Will a better fact-checker; it -- along with the rest of the media elite -- should instead give him a good, thorough shunning."

Will has no expertise on science or banking or anything except political history. One thing is certain: lies sell papers. And wars.

Send him over to The Washington Times where he belongs.

Willfull Ignorance Part ....?

There's been so many it's hard to know, but George Will continues to spout lies about global warming. Are conservatives just blind on this or inherently stupid? It has to be deliberate. Then again opinion is opinion and some are worth less. His is one of the latter.