Off-Topic Roundup

I've read three excellent articles today and thought I'd share them.

At City Journal, Nicole Gelinas explains why the Democrats' spending plan may just send us over the cliff: Can the Feds Uncrunch Credit? Maybe—but Washington’s unprecedented interventions could make things much, much worse.

Also at City Journal, Bruce Bawer looks at the Religion of Peace, Geert Wilders and the shame of the Netherlands: Submission in the Netherlands: The trial of Geert Wilders represents another blow against Dutch freedom.

Last but not least, Andrew Bostom debunks the anthropogenic global warming scam: Horse Hockey Climate Scientology: “Getting Rid” of the Medieval Warming Period.

Thomas Jefferson on Climate Change

A change in our climate, however, is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie below the mountains more than one, two or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the Winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the Spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighborhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the Spring of the year, so fixed an ascendancy as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their development, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the Winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the Spring, produced those overflowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now.

Thomas Jefferson, Earth in the Balance Notes on the State of Virginia, Query VII, Climate.

Thanks to Edward John Craig at National Review's Planet Gore blog for the lead.

The picture, by the way, is of a drawing of a pastoral scene from a Vatican manuscript of Vergil's Georgics.

Global Warming Claims Another Victim

I guess it wasn't beauty killed the beast after all:

LEGENDARY Nessie hunter Robert Rines is giving up his search for the monster after 37 years.

The 85-year-old American will make one last trip in a bid to find the elusive beast.

After almost four decades of fruitless expeditions, he admitted: "Unfortunately, I'm running out of age."

World War II veteran Robert has devoted almost half his life to scouring Loch Ness.

He started in 1971. The following year, he watched a 25ft-long hump with the texture of elephant skin gliding through the water.

His original trip was to help another monster hunter with sonar equipment and quickly identified large moving targets.

He was smitten and returned the next year, which is when, he says: "I had the misfortune of seeing one of these things with my own eyes."

Since then, he has been obsessed with tracking down the creature with a staggering array of hi-tech equipment. It was this gear that took the famous "flipper" picture that year which created a stir around the world.

Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.

What's "Ridiculous" in Swedish?

Poor Alfred Nobel must be turning over in his grave:

One of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

"Read the Sunspots"

In a recent article, "Read the Sunspots," R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, describes findings that that suggests a strong correlation between solar activity and variations in the Earth's temperature. Global cooling, not global warming, may be the greater concern in coming years:

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Climate Change

Unfortunately, the stilted translation makes this interview somewhat difficult to read, but if you want to begin to get some idea of the uncertainties underlying the climate change, try it anyway:

Recently the SPM of IPCC’s AR4 stated that it’s now very likely that most of the warming of the last 50 years is the result of anthropogenic CO2. Are Global Circulation Models crucial to ‘prove’ that AGW is already taking place the last 50 years?

My answer is ‘no’. The primary aspect that GCM’s have claimed to be able to show skillfully is a globally averaged surface temperature trend (e.g. see). But the models do this without including all the forcings. The models are incomplete. What they have shown is that CO2 is just one important climate forcing, but the 2005 National Research Council report Radiative Forcing of Climate Change: Expanding the Concept and Addressing Uncertainties shows there are other first order climate forcings. Another problem is that our research suggests that the actual warming, particularly the minimum near surface-air temperatures on land, have been overstated. There is a warm bias in these data. So if the models agree with the temperature trends, they do this, at least in part, for the wrong reasons..

Climate Change

At National Review Online, Jim Manzi reviews and explains, for lay dummies like me, the tremendous scientific uncertainties underlying the global warming debate. Even I can understand the following:

When evaluating model reliability, the second test—can it predict accurately?—is the acid test. We can debate all day about whether a model is complete enough, but if it has correctly predicted major climate changes over and over again, that is pretty good evidence that its predictions should be taken seriously. There are plenty of studies that show what is called “hindcasting,” in which a model is built on the data for, say, 1900-1950, and is then used to “predict” the climate for 1950-1980. Unfortunately, it is notoriously common for simulation models in many fields to fit such holdout samples in historical data well, but then fail to predict the future accurately. So the crucial test is actual prediction, in which a model is run today to forecast the climate for some future time-period, and then is subsequently validated or falsified. No global climate model has ever demonstrated that it can reliably predict the climate over multiple years or decades—never.

At the Right Coast, Mike Rappaport comments, "My understanding of the debate is that all of this is uncontroversial. Why there should be a consensus in favor of the stronger predictions, not to mention the extremism of Al Gore, would seem to be a mystery."

Climate Change: Greenland

This article appears to contain a really inconvenient truth:

Petr Chylek of the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia notes that Gore in his movie "suggests the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005."

But, Chylek points out, "1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland" and that "if Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner."

Climate Change

Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center of the National Space Science and Technology Center, has a column well worth reading in today's New York Post: "Not That Simple: Global warming: What we don't know."

Climate Change

Here is a thoughtful article at Opinion Journal: "Plus Ca (Climate) Change: The Earth was warming before global warming was cool."

National Review Online has a new feature/group blog dedicated to climate change called "Planet Gore." If you're interested in getting something other than the party line, keep an eye on it. Thanks to Jay Richards at Planet Gore for the link to the Opinion Journal piece.

Climate Change

This Thomas Sowell article, "It's the Science, Stupid" discusses some of the academic dissenters.

Another Climate Change Link

"Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictions."

More Climate Change Links

Melanie Phillips has a recent post that conveniently links to and discusses several articles casting doubt on the global warming orthodoxy and point out hanky-panky involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary: "Dirty Work at the Green Crossroads."

Climate Change

A nice article in the Times of London, "An Experiment that Hints We Are Wrong on Climate Change."

I remember shaking my head in wonder when I first read the story of the capitulation of Soviet science to the quackery of Trofim Lysenko. How could scientists allow politics to trump science? Well, now we have a taste. The current situation is somewhat different. Soviet scientists were quite understandably cowed by Stalinist terror. Today's scientists have only the excuse of political correctness.

Thanks to Captain's Quarters for the link.