2009 Picture Review

Special Edition: Warm of the presses

Rod sent me an important source for researching global warming.  You can click on the title to get in the general area.

I can't believe the real cause of the cooling-warming change has been found.  The correlation is perfect!   QED.

Great White #2

First, in Canada today's Financial Post, Business Section large headline:  

U.S. DEFICIT THREAT LOOMS

Flaherty worries shortfall could 

have 'serious' impact on Canadian economy

At least someone is paying attention to the U.S. collapse.  Canada is working to survive our insanity. They seem to think there are only two things that we can do. Either alone or together:  stop spending or tax less. Jerks. There is the Obama option:  raise taxes, cost of government, borrowing, transfers to friends, and spending.  There was a piece reporting on John Hussman's crazy notion that Geithner and Bernanke are premature in their "mission accomplished" events. He is a Maryland economist with a fund.  


The paper reports that in 2012 the U.S. deficit will be more than 100 percent of the GDP.  Canada's will max out 2010 at 79%. Of course, the proposed socialist taxes on everything will kick in about that time, as well.
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I am trying to figure out when to leave Toronto, an inter-storm exit.  I see Europe is also being blanketed by snow.  From a climatological perspective, we remain in the scientifically settled Gore Effect. 


I think we were in an El Nino year, but haven't checked.  That, coupled with no sun spots this year, until recently, Florida will likely have a freeze or tow, so buy orange juice.  Or, its futures.


Rod sent in a piece from the National Post, again Canadian, from the Deniers series.  I will quote a bit.  You can hit the title to get to the full story.  This piece will go along with what I stated, as a non scientist, long ago.  Once the cat is out of the bag, those socientists who want to keep their reputations will become, if not deniers, then insipid doubters. Of course, this article is over two years old, so the cat has been wiggling out for some time.

Within the article are the links to other parts of the series.  Again, recall this is over two years old.  

Allegre's second thoughts

Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.

BY NATIONAL POSTMARCH 6, 2007

Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.

"By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie.." Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's "potential risks are very great" and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe's fragility in order to stave off "spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse."

The full Deniers series

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I

Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II

The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III

Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV

The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V

The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI

Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII

The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII

Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX

Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X

End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI

Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII

Allegre's second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII

In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists. With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in l' Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. "The cause of this climate change is unknown," he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the "science is settled."...

Great White North Notes: John Coleman and Cayman Fee Simple

I am in Toronto enjoying global warming and planning to get back and to NYC before the next snow storm.

Greg sent along a video John Coleman. He is the guy who started the Weather Channel and is not a "scientist," like the head of the IPCC.  Greg sent this to me and it agrees with two years of my blogs; therefore, it is good.  Click here.

It is only fair I warn you he uses a few graphsand links thoughts together. 

On another front,  Rex, who lived on the Cayman Islands, but still linked there, and in N.Y. for ta reasons as he is studying law here in Ontario although he is a barrister....anyway, Rex pointed out that the Cayman Islands are the only place where one owns his real estate. 

In the English tradition that was called "fee simple absolute" and that term is still used, but it is a lie.  As Rex pointed out in North America and elsewhere, the government lets you say you own it fee simple, but only as long as you pay taxes. 

This is a reversion back to the old system, pre-Magna Carta, but no one is paying attention.  Just try not paying you taxes and see how absolute your fee is. Tbis "tax" is really rent.  You don't really own your home; you merely go along with the protection racket.

There are no more freeholders.

Merry Christmas from the Société Générale

I followed up on a note from Irene:

"Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible ‘global economic collapse’ over the next two years,” reported the UK Telegraph in a recent story...."

Click on the title to read a pdf of the Societies' worst case scenario.  I didn't want to just hand over someone's summary.  It is a 61 page worst case scenario, sure, but I bet you would prefer to know that and plan accordingly. Of note, the bank nearly collapsed recently, taken by surprise, but you saved it through money from AIG.  I suspect they do not want to be surprised again and are providing a warning to customers. 

I don't know how to grab pdfs, so let me repeat what the terrifying front page shows in a red graph.

Worst-case debt scenario

Protecting yourself against economic collapse

(not the central scenario)

2001     $18,000,000,000,000

2003     $23,000,000,000,000

2005     $26,000,000,000,000

2007     $30,000,000,000,000

2009e   $35,000,000,000,000

2011e   $45,000,000,000,000

I wonder what comes after "trillion."

So, upfront, here were the recommendations:

1.  SELL DOLLAR

2.  BUY Government bonds (my recommendation is TIPS)

3.  Cherry pick:  equities and commodities

My take on this for most of us normals is, as I have been concerned with: get out of the dollar.  That is the basic, survival mode.  Part two is to go into TIPS NOW.  Bob recommends this and he is the professional in asset investment.  He also eats muffins every day to mock me.

Does getting out of the dollar mean gold or silver?  To a degree.  If all hell breaks out, gold will likely be confiscated, especially if there will be a new currency.  Since silver is lagging gold anyway, I recommend "junk silver" which is former U.S. currency (I guess it still is).  But this stuff on the coming dip.  Buy several thousand dollars worth if you are normal.  If you have a little money, buy, what 20% of your investment. It will float on the top of inflation and chaos. Also, everyone will know the value of an old silver quarter, unlike that of a candelabra.

Then buy TIPS.  These Treasury notes are in dollars, but they will increase in value to reflect inflation, which is more than likely (except if things are really screwed up and we go into deflation).  Don't think of this as an investment, think of it as a bank account that just may keep its value. Bob thinks these are curiously under priced. Probably, there is too much interest in running with the stock market.  Of course, TIP account will be on big brother's  radar.

Stocks.  Who knows.  If you are interested, you should wait.  Things will collapse eventually.  Right now there may be a dip, there is year end selling and fatigue, but next year, when the interest rates go up, stocks, the theory goes, will collapse along with gold.  Stocks will be good for the long term, but don't start betting on the long term now.  I suggest betting on survival.

Stocks sort of keep up with inflation and will do fine as business picks up, but who knows when that is and what companies are going to do well?

The Society suggest oil is a good protection, but sees the price going down to the 50s as short term demand will fall (they may be planning on global warming.)  At that point, a fat cat, evil capitalist pig company like Mobile would be interesting.  A dividend would be nice.

Re Mrs. Obama's Staff

This is a posting in lieu of an entry. I stopped email replies without going through me so as to stop viagra ads.


From Ray

The Canadian press may not be an American source but turns out to be just as sloppy when it comes to checking facts. As verified by factcheck.org - 

http://m.factcheck.org/2009/08/michelle-obamas-staff/ Obama may have up to 24 staff members as reported by the White House.

But where they really went wrong was on previous First Ladies. Turns out Hilliary had 19 and the Washington Post reported that Laura Bush had 24:

Laura Bush’s Staff UPDATE WASHINGTON POST

2008 White House Office Staff List – Salary

Published Thursday, July 24, 2008

bunch of names and salaries followed

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Though this is from factcheck.org doesn't mean it is wrong.  Of interest is they cited the Washington Post, so short of looking it up, lets assume it is true.  

I mentioned to Ray that the papers in Toronto would NOT be right wing mouthpieces, so there report must be a screw up. I would more rely on them than any US paper for research.  

Then again, the Financial Post ran a series on "The Deniers" last year, perhaps two, I lost track of time, where some 21 scientists were interviewed. One could hardly say the paper was onboard with the true believers.

Mr. Solomon of that paper was on CSPAN yesterday, a replay, discussing his book the Deniers.  He mentioned something I have never heard before:  the 2,500 scientists who are touted as signing off on the IPCC report were not a peer review or did they approve of the document or its findings. 

What happened was small parts of the document were sent to appropriate scientists for "review." They are listed as "reviewers." This explains why Dr. Mindzen blew his top when he read he was a supporter of the propaganda. 

Another overt distortion of reality.

Internet and the All In

Below is a  portion of a Daily Bell article.  The current class warfare, which is the very upper class using lower class to control everything, is, as the Bell sees things, moving, perhaps, too fast, that something is going wrong with the long-term, concentration of wealth plan. As Greg put is, "These people are 'all in".

Greg and I were wondering why the leftists in the U.S. are ignoring public opinion, logic, and the looming termination of their careers.  Their "all in" activity is decidedly new and contrary to triangulating everything.  Those who are all in can't articulate any consistent reasoning, other than they have to do it and besides, the  science or whatever is settled.  It may be the new communication system has had an influence.

The Internet is an amazingly disruptive influence. Internet time waits for no old socialist to organize a thought.  It does not provide for a glossy punch like in the face of rapidly evolving data. All the elite and their running dogs can think to do, of late, is attack people personally - that doesn't quite work anymore.  Again, many, if not most, people are catching on and educating themselves before being told what to think.

Were it not for the Internet, few of us would have ever heard of Swift boats or email gate. Now, it takes only an hour to publish data taken real time, like Lord Moncton's recent publishing the disruption of his meeting in Copenhagen by a bunch of American teen morons.  Obama/Alinski tactics were turned around on a worldwide basis in an hour.  The tactics of the 1960s don't work anymore.

 Moncton told the teenagers - right then - that their demonstration had already put their faces all over the world and that they were identified as Hitler Youth.  The students were almost speechless at this, he was right IN THEIR FACES.  That was supposed to be their plan. The only retort was some clown was offended at being called a Hitler Youth because he was Jewish.

The Internet can quickly defang the planners, the manipulators.  At the Moncton meeting, the published emails from East Anglia were to be discussed to show the non-scientific atmosphere among true believers.  It was the Internet that spread these words around the world.  The examples are endless.  Sure, TV told us about large crowds demanding world government to save us from my car, but who watches those shows? YouTube is far more powerful, though not for the drones.

Young people, the basic tool of the manipulators, use the Internet rather than watch the low IQs on the nightly news. Who watches that Kouric person? MSNBC? etc, etc.  This is real problem to the planners whose model involves controlling group think and creating confusion.  The best made plans gang aft agley.

Talk radio reaches older people and is another serious problem.  Again, the Swiftboats were common fare on the radio six months before the networks had to deal with the testimony of false bravado and fraud - they had to try and kill it.  To my mind, their delay killed Mr. Kerry.

 Mainstream media, and yes it exists,  eventually got its talking points out to the drones, but the rest of us already knew the entire story and are increasingly dismissing the drones.  If a person already know the story, the spin is obvious.  Now, the established media attacks the Internet with derision saying the information has not been vetted by real journalists - do they realize what they are saying?

An almost real-time video of an event is a little better than a repair job three weeks later on ABC.  If you want a news digest, I continue to recommend Xinhuanet.com, where reporters remember they are reporters. Other than that, you are on your own; perhaps the Economist will offer differing views on many matters.

Be prepared, Congress has no choice but to act against both talk radio and the Internet, and they have precious little time to act. Otherwise, the ministry of propaganda can't succeed. A serious concern is the GOP  is not a much of an alternative.  We should move beyond the idea of voting for the least bad candidate. They will still be bad.

...Here at the Bell, we do believe the pace of dominant social themes (promotions) has picked up in the 21st century just as the Fabian Society promised. Of course, we still note these are gradualist promotions - they are not out-and-out power grabs, or at least they are not meant to be. There is in fact, a very specific strategy being followed. Some of these promotions have no immediate impact in the sense they are meant merely to confuse and dismay. Others, like necessity of central banking, are endlessly pernicious and economically disastrous. They are all meant to concentrate power and wealth.

Today, we are living through the fallout - yet again - of the central banking meme. Central banking has taken root throughout the world and the results are truly ruinous. In America, as we can see from the article excerpt above, some are predicting that joblessness and general economic wretchedness may last another 20 years. We tend to agree with this, though we also think data and news will make it LOOK as if things are getting better when they are not.

Of course, the latest economic crunch could not have come at a better time for those who want to impose global change from the top down. As Western economies shudder, people are too concerned with jobs and money to worry about the larger changes taking place. Or they become more malleable as the Irish did recently and vote for authoritarian solutions such as the EU because of the hope that large government entities may provide more funding and general economic stimulation than the private sector. This is actually a false hope. Government provides with one hand and takes away with the other. Most of all government decreases opportunity and substitutes barriers to entry.

We are not surprised at the depth of the economic downturn. We are not surprised at the vehemence of those who are proposing yet more of the world's economy be socialized in pursuit of diminished cow flatulence. We are not surprised that more regulation of all types are being proposed - and always at a global level.

And yet, we wonder if the power elite is not now moving TOO quickly. And we wonder WHY it seems so driven. We wonder in fact if the power elite is not as aware as we are (and you, too) of the force for change that the Internet has become. Is it possible that the sudden rush of promotions and subsequent globalist solutions have as much to do with the Internet as they do with the sudden evolution of humankind's globalist sensibilities?

The Gutenberg press played havoc with the power elite 500 years ago. We wonder if a generational elite is not quite aware of the possibility of history repeating itself. Nothing else actually makes much sense to us (assuming you accept the above analysis.) The power elite (and its proxies) is actually acting with increasing rashness, we think. True, in the past we could cite wars, general kinds of civil chaos and variants of economic ruin in which the power elite has participated and even initiated, in our humble opinion. But this is different. This time, the power elite's machinations are being carried out in front of an Internet audience of millions. Each statement, each movement, each fraudulent announcement and every cover-up is being DOCUMENTED by a thousand, no a hundred thousand, bloggers.

Read the emails below mainstream British and American articles on any one of a number of power elite memes from global warming to swine flu to globalist financial regulation. They are mostly full of invective and disbelief. This is not the way it once was. Even a few years ago, there were fervent believers in peak oil, in global warming, in any one of a dozen promotions or more. But the Internet has exposed each of these. And people read ...

It does not take a billion, or even a hundred million, to make a worldwide change. As little as ten million converted to reality and spreading the word to family and friends can upset the apple cart in a single generation. And yes, perhaps this is happening. All the tricks have been played, after all. The world's economy is in a shambles. The globalists meet endlessly. And endless war is fought for endless peace. But we would ask you to defy, dear reader, the Orwellian hopelessness that you are supposed to feel right about now. Don't be enervated. Allow yourself the possibility of action. Human action.

Times are changing. All is not lost. We could document the unraveling of power elite memes. In fact, we do so on a regular basis. We believe the unraveling is taking place at quite a rapid pace. These social promotions in fact seem to be going backward. There is no consensus for what is about to happen in Copenhagen. The EU stumbles ahead even though most in Europe and Britain would vote it down if they had a chance. The whole idea of creating promotions was to ensure that people would accept an increased concentration of wealth and power. But it is not possible to start a serious world war right now and the Internet is muting the impact that economic ruin would ordinarily have.

We will leave it at this. We are in some sense, primarily an investment publication as we mentioned the other day. What investors - our kind of free-market thinking investors - will have to grapple with over the coming years is the struggle between the power elite's dominant social themes and the exposes of the Internet. Those who use our paradigm will have to decide if the power elite's "solutions" will win out or whether the Internet will increasingly cover - and uncover - the inevitable hype.

Conclusion: These will not be idle decisions. There are billions, nay trillions, riding on the acceptance of the green meme promotion. Thousands of companies will be started and hit major stock exchanges based on whether or not these dominant social themes are accepted and successfully promoted. That of course includes the continued appreciation of gold and silver - which the power elite despises, but which it has lost control of for the moment. Yes,

Here comes the sun, again

Irene sent a news clipping that people in Copenhagen are talking about the influence of the sun, duh.  We went over this nearly three years ago.  See entry below.

Columbia U noticed the problem of the missing sun in the equations being used by Mann, UN, and other frauds back in 2003.  

I continue to marvel at how the obvious is ignored until enough people say it is alright to think about it.  If you find someone who can actually analyze things and think, rather than drone on, prize that relationship. 

Gene

January 26, 2007

Oops, Sun does heat the earth! - Duke U

It seems the current "Global Warming" model, which I assume is not the same as a "Climate Change" model, didn't include inconvenient accurate data that the sun's increased output would affect the earth. (A subtle concept) Duke, building on a Columbia analysis improves prior "flawed" analysis.
On the right - sunspots are predictive regarding solar storms. I hear this means we are in for a global cooling for a few years. See graph.

Sun's Direct Role in Global Warming May Be Underestimated, Duke Physicists Report

Study does not discount the suspected contributions of 'greenhouse gases' in elevating surface temperatures

Durham, N.C. -- At least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades may be due to increased solar output rather than factors such as increased heat-absorbing carbon dioxide gas released by various human activities, two Duke University physicists report...[edited out para on this doesn't kill off the man is evil theory.]
Scafetta's and West's study follows a Columbia University researcher's report of previous errors in the interpretation of data on solar brightnesscollected by sun-observing satellites.
The Duke physicists also introduce new statistical methods that they assert more accurately describe the atmosphere's delayed response to solar heating. In addition, these new methods filter out temperature-changing effects not tied to global warming, they write in their paper.
According to Scafetta, records of sunspot activity suggest that solar output has been rising slightly for about 100 years. However, only measurements of what is known as total solar irradiance gathered by satellites orbiting since 1978 are considered scientifically reliable, he said.
But observations over those years were flawed by the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which prevented the launching of a new solar output detecting satellite called ACRIM 2 to replace a previous one called ACRIM 1.
That resulted in a two-year data gap that scientists had to rely on other satellites to try to bridge. "But those data were not as precise as those from ACRIM 1 and ACRIM 2,” Scafetta said in an interview.
Nevertheless, several research groups used the combined satellite data to conclude that that there was no increased heating from the Sun to contribute to the global surface warming observed between 1980 and 2002, the authors wrote in their paper.

Lacking a standardized, uninterrupted data stream measuring any rising solar influence, those groups thus surmised that all global temperature increases measured during those years had to be caused by solar heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases such as carbon dioxide, introduced into Earth's atmosphere by human activities, their paper added.

But a 2003 study by a group headed by Columbia's Richard Willson, principal investigator of the ACRIM experiments, challenged the previous satellite interpretations of solar output. Willson and his colleagues concluded, rather that their analysis revealed a significant upward trend in average solar luminosity during the period.
Using the Columbia findings as the starting point for their study, Scafetta and West then statistically analyzed how Earth's atmosphere would respond to slightly stronger solar heating. Importantly, they used an analytical method that could detect the subtle, complex relationships between solar output and terrestrial temperature patterns.
The Duke analyses examined solar changes over a period twice as long -- 22 versus 11years -- as was previously covered by another group employinga different statistical approach.
"The problem is that Earth's atmosphere is not in thermodynamic equilibrium with the sun," Scafetta said. "The longer the time period the stronger the effect will be on the atmosphere, because it takes time to adapt."
Using a longer 22 year interval also allowed the Duke physicists to filter out shorter range effects that can influence surface temperatures but are not related to global warming, their paper said. Examples include volcanic eruptions, which can temporarily cool the climate, and ocean current changes such as el Nino that affect global weather patterns.
Applying their analytical method to the solar output estimates by the Columbia group, Scafetta's and West's paper concludes that "the sun may have minimally contributed about 10 to 30 percent of the 1980-2002 global surface warming."
This study does not discount that human-linked greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, they stressed. "Those gases would still give a contribution, but not so strong as was thought," Scafetta said.
"We don't know what the Sun will do in the future," Scafetta added. "For now, if our analysis is correct, I think it is important to correct the climate models so that they include reliable sensitivity to solar activity.
"Once that is done, then it will be possible to better understand what has happened during the past hundred years."

For more information, contact: M

Mrs. Obama: 22 assistants

Those annoying emails should stop.  Some people got in as members, though I have no idea how, before I shut off access from non members.  I will watch.

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Anyway, just an idea of where our problems come from.  This list is from the Canadian Free Press, not an American source:

Total Personal Staff members for other first ladies paid by taxpayers:
Mamie Eisenhower : 0;    1 paid for personally out of President's salary
Jackie Kennedy: 1
Roseline Carter: 1
Barbara Bush: 1
Hilary Clinton: 3
Laura Bush: 1
Michele Obama: 22

 How things have changed! If you're one of the tens of  millions of Americans facing certain destitution, earning  less than subsistence wages stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart  or serving up McDonald cheeseburgers, prepare to scream and then come to realize that the benefit package for these servants of Ms Michelle are the same as members of the national security and defense departments and the bill for these assorted lackeys is paid by YOU, John Q. Public:

Michele Obama's personal staff:
 1. $172,200 - Sher, Susan (Chief Of Staff)
 2. $140,000 - Frye, Jocelyn C. (Dep Asst to President and Dir of Policy And Projects for  First Lady)
 3. $113,000 - Rogers, Desiree G. (Spec Asst to the President and WH Social Sec for Mrs. Obama)
 4. $102,000 - Johnston, Camille Y. (Spec Asst to President and Dir of Communications for First Lady)
 5. $100,000 - Winter, Melissa E. (Spec Asst to President and Dep Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)
 6. $90,000 - Medina , David S. (Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)
 7. $84,000 - Lel yveld, Catherine M. (Director and Press Secretary to the First Lady)
 8. $75,000 - Starkey, Frances M. (Director of Scheduling and Advance for the First Lady)
 9. $70,000 - Sanders, Trooper (Deputy Director of Policy and Projects for the First Lady)
 10. $65,000 - Burnough, Erinn J. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
 11. $64,000 - Reinstein, Joseph B. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
 12. $62,000 - Goodman, Jennifer R. (Dep Director of Scheduling & Events Coord For The First Lady)
 13. $60,000 - Fitts, Alan O. (Deputy Director of Advance and Trip Director for the First Lady)
 14. $57,500 - Lewis, Dana M. (Special Assistant and Personal Aide to the First Lady)
 15. $52,500 - Mustaphi, Semonti M. (Assoc Dir and Dep Press Secretary To The First Lady)
 16. $50,000 - Jarvis, Kristen E. (Spec Asst for Scheduling and Traveling Aide To The First Lady)
 17. $45,000 - Lechtenberg, Tyler A. (Associate Director of Correspondence For The First Lady)
 18. $43,000 - Tubman, Samanth a (Deputy Associate Director, Social Office)
 19. $40,000 - Boswell, Joseph J. (Executive Assistant to the Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)
 20. $36,000 - Armbruster, Sally M. (Staff Assistant to the Social Secretary)
 21. $35,000 - Bookey, Natalie (Staff Assistant)
 22. $35,000 - Jackson, Deilia A. (Dep Assoc Dir of  Correspondence for the First Lady)
 (total = $1,591,200 in annual salaries)

Of course, either these people are no shows or they are working on other matters without review. You wonder what they are really doing.  A real journalist would look into this private army.

The Marxist path to Statism

From today's LA Times, soon to be a recipient of TARP funds, I am sure, for support of the Ministry of Propaganda:

Reporting from Washington and Copenhagen - The Obama administration on Monday declared that greenhouse gases produced by vehicles, power plants and factories were a danger to public health, clearing the way for broad federal limits on climate-warming emissions.

The announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency is a key step in a legal process that would allow the agency to act, without Congress, to develop tough rules to control emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that scientists blame for global warming.

"The vast body of evidence not only remains unassailable, it's grown stronger, and it points to one conclusion," said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson in announcing the decision. "Greenhouse gases from human activity are increasing at unprecedented rates, and are adversely affecting our environment and threatening our health." etc etc.

The EPA is part of the Reich and, along with the LA Times, is giving the Copenhagen magical mystery tour some sort of support, though no one outside the true believers sees such a power grab as good. I have mentioned many times that the left in Europe and Russia has been using the "green" strategy since the 1960s and it works where people feel and can't think.

I am almost positive, now, about this governmental insanity as we approach the next election cycle.  As Greg says the administration is "all in" and trying to do as much damage as possible without regard for the next election. They know they are on the chopping block and don't care.  It may be Obama doesn't see himself as running again, lest he have to, now, show he is a qualified candidate to several unhappy states.

The Democrat socialists have taken care of themselves and do have some sort of leftist philosophy, though any attempt to organize it is futile, to champion.  So, they make, using the word precisely, insane decisions to reach their ends - the ends analysis, as I call it.  Common sense and logic are irrelevant when in a panic to reach an end. So far, voters with common sense and logic still are permitted to vote.

Now, if we could only have some Republicans who think in ideological terms or, at least, strategic terms beyond petty party positioning. This is unlikely, hence something new this way comes.


PS:  The LA Times does not provide a way for people to respond on its blog. Get it yet?

Professor Carter on earth climate

Professor Carter, here, on the my-car global warming even if it is cooling crisis.  Irene sent it along so I won't have to do any work.

You already know some items that I have discussed, but here is a nut-job, denier from Australia who studies deep sea cores who also discussed ice core samples, and so on, covering some 400,000 years of climate. 

He is also not boring, so I will give up.

In all, we have been on a cooling trend for the last 100,000 years of this Halocene period, the spike in 1998 is not at all unusual, the climate is static since 2000, and we are most likely heading into a cooling period, a steep one.   (Not if, when.)

Oh yes, there can't be any polar bears because the world has been much warmer in the past and they are all dead.  Here is a photo of a bear obviously drowning.

I can see why the left will have to take control of the Internet.

Underwhelming support for man made global warming

Greg pointed me to a response to an article that touted

Harvard professor weighs in on climategate

James McCarthy, a respected Harvard professor who was a former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author, sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) today stressing that e-mails stolen from climate scientists do not undermine the evidenc for manmade global warming. McCarthy is board chair of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

The letter reads "The scientific process depends on open access to methodology, data, and a rigorous peer-review process. The robust exchange of ideas in the peer-reviewed literature regarding climate science is evidence of the high degree of integrity in this process. The body of evidence that human activity is prominent agent in global warming is overwhelming. The content of these a few personal emails has no impact what-so-ever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.”

Ooooh. There is a convincing argument:  "Because I say 'others say so.'" 

I have written several times over the past few years, that when the reality of what has been going on opens up, scientists will rise up to protect their own credibility where before they were afraid to lose their jobs. This just has to be. We need to look at data, not a UN/Barbara Boxer press release.

As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.

Things are getting sticky for the left-control drones.  Their most recent tool, climate fear, as a way to control the world and divert billions to them, is unraveling. Hence, the above letter to Barbara Boxer, whom I am sure didn't ask for the letter to be sent, saying all is well the the emperor does really have new clothes, even if the tailor spilled the beans that he kills anyone who can't see the garb.

Below, is all you need to read on the increasingly silly, albeit dangerous, notion that man is changing the earth's temperature and killing the polar bears by increasing their population so they may run out of food, then invade Toronto looking to eat little foreign babies  (that is my guess as to the next moving argument. )

I have been publishing denier information for, what, over two years. People refused to admit the possibility that what I said was true.  They read a statistic or report, I think, and it does not register. It is like a hum in their heads.

They ask, "Were did I get that information" which exactly raises the theme of this blog.  Read the information yourself and go look it up, don't wait for a talking head who is invested in lies or works for the liars.  Don't forget, the talking head TV news readers are, in real life, dullards:

From a wiki regarding Peter Jennings: 

...He struggled academically, and Jennings later surmised that it was out of "pure boredom" that he failed 10th grade and dropped out. "I loved girls," he said. "I loved comic books. And for reasons I don't understand, I was pretty lazy."^[2] Jennings then briefly attended Carleton University, where he says he "lasted about 10 minutes" before dropping out.^[3] He also attended the University of Ottawa^[4].

Here is a response to the article above, from someone who didn't drop out of Harvard and who took the time to mention things like facts,  If course, this entry could be a big fraud, so one may want to look at he cited references, unlike those given by the UN.   Just stop saying, "Where did you read that?" 


That siad, you may find it interesting reading the original site, "The Green Blog," not a right wing site.  Click on the title.  Read the other responses. You don't find anyone supporting the fraudulent science.

I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that "human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming" is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.

Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England). Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason.

If the MWP is "allowed" to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a "runaway greenhouse" in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen's runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.

As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why "hide the decline"?) are ignored or hidden. As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their "Copenhagen Diagnosis"); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well.

We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered. We have long known that Jones's paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380).

Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn's plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming). 

Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by "peer review" is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.

We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science "settled", refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional "overwhelming evidence" continues this anti-science activity.

All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word "trick". Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only "value added" data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud). 

But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, "peer review" was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught?

When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?
The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the "global warming believers" to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will.

Contrary to Prof. McCarthy's assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago. 

But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no "consensus" exists. The "2500 scientists agree" number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets). 

The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support. 

Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains "overwhelming support" for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted.

As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.

Posted by Sean December 2, 09 11:26 PM

Today's word

Wordsmith Words: kakistocracy Top

Home > Library > Literature & Language > Wordsmith Words

 

 

kakistocracy

 

(kak-i-STOK-ruh-see, kah-ki-)

noun
Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.

Etymology
Greek kakistos, worst, superlative of kakos, bad + -cracy, government, rule.
Usage
"Russia is proving the opposite. Late last year, the kakistocracy propping up Boris Yeltsin decided not to risk giving up power." — William Safire, Contrasting Elections, The New York Times, March 20, 2000.

So, now you have the right term to use. 

Inverse ratio of tax to home price

Irene is doing some homework regarding places to retire, as we consider fleeing to Canada, and this is exhibit is interesting.  I also thought it was obvious that there was an inverse relationship between taxes and home prices, but I guess it isn't until there is a map. It is revealing to see the nation rates.

The only reason California has a lower tax rate is the people voted in the law limiting the tax rate.  The old days, when the state could elect Reagan as a governor.  The tax ceiling infuriated democrats.  I think the legislature can't undo Proposition 13, as it was known. (I also recall it was 3%, so the number above may reflect a practical number than the official rate.)

Look at D.C.  That is a thing to ponder: 3.76 tax rate. If you don't know, Congress controls D.C. and members happen to have real estate there. So, to address the needs of D.C., one of the worst communities in America, Congress just takes your money, rather than have a high tax rate that would include them.

So, the "red" states, in politics, are, generally, the blue states, here.  (Except for D.C. where Congress people own real estate. Perhaps, we should just have a Georgetown exemption.)

And, as we are told, the really smart people live in places such as NY.  

People from NYC, LI, NJ, and MA have taken over Vermont; if you look, you see a very real estate high rate. That is relatively new.  The interesting thing is most towns don't have: police, fire, garbage, mass transit, water or sewer department.  You may wonder where the money goes? The state has taken control of the schools away from the towns, where local people met to control their costs as the people saw fit. Socialists can't have that.

Texas is interesting.  Very high property tax, perhaps, that is the main tax, as it is in NH.  In any event, high taxes keep the prices down. 

This analysis makes sense where one is not in the working years and not injured by high income tax and over regulation, which is another map.

Those, here, in Saratoga have seen in the  past few years, realty value go up rapidly, so revenue has gone up. Since governments never expect economic cycles, they assume the same, increasing revenue flow forever, and create a budget crises when tax revenues decrease, when values go down.  Since a government never lowers its costs, Saratoga is raising its tax rate in the face of decreasing home prices (tax revenue will drop as homes are revalued).  All goverments know is to raise taxes.

The problem is, this will increase the rate of devaluation, of tax assessment, of revenue. So, the cycle speeds up: prices down and taxe rate up --- prices down, tax rate up---etc.   Not a good prospect as more people go "upside down" in their homes, which rate is 25%.  We may get a taste of what California, NY, and Florida are dealing with - insolvency coupled with "rich" targets.

My recommendation is a house boat in waters federally controlled.