Climate
March 20, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Last night the low temperature where I live was one degree. Tonight in church I learned that it was the coldest first day of spring since 1965. We are going on vacation to a warmer place in a few days, and none too soon. So I was reminded of this post, which I did one year ago, on March 16, 2012. We had a fabulously warm spring last year, and
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March 17, 2013 — John Hinderaker
We wrote here about a recent effort by a group of climate alarmists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott to resurrect Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick. The Marcott paper, as you would expect, received uncritical coverage in the liberal press. But it didn’t take long for climate scientists to begin taking it apart, as we noted in our post. Now Steve McIntyre, who was principally responsible for showing that Mann’s original
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March 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
For a long time I and others have argued that the climate campaign’s crusade for carbon constraints (how’s that for alliteration?*) is failing. Between the total farce of the Kyoto protocol (the climate diplomacy equivalent to the Kellogg-Briand Pact) and the collapse of cap and trade in the last Congress (the climate policy equivalent of wage and price controls), I think it is time to change verb tenses on this
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March 13, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Last week, a group of climate alarmists headed by Shaun Marcott, a geologist at Oregon State, released a study that purported to resurrect the infamous hockey stick. Relying on an assortment of data sources, Marcott and his colleagues tried to reconstruct global temperatures over the last 11,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. While acknowledging that the Earth has often been warmer than it is today, they
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March 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Two days ago Tom Friedman weighed in urging further civil disobedience to block the Keystone Pipeline. The title of the column is ironically apt: “No to Keystone; Yes to Crazy.” Apparently Friedman is in competition with Paul Krugman to be the most egregiously wrong NY Times columnist, which is rather like a contest between Hitler and Stalin to see who is the worst tyrant—a contest impossible to judge since they
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March 11, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Mackubin Thomas Owens served as an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. He now serves on the faculty of the Naval War College while also also serving as the editor of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a scholar of civil-military relations, as evidenced his book, US Civil-Military Relations After 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain.
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March 11, 2013 — Scott Johnson
As North Korea announces the nullification of the 1953 armistice, so notes my daughter, this report arrives via the Boston Globe (not the Onion): CAMBRIDGE — America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific
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March 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward
What do you get when you mashup a boomerang with a hockey stick? Probably a game that even drunk Australians wouldn’t play.* Yet that is the latest new wrinkle in climate change this week. Science magazine has just published a new article that purports to be the latest “smoking gun” of human caused global warming. The article, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the past 11,300 Years,” uses
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March 8, 2013 — John Hinderaker
There is a new film out, a purported documentary on the environment, called “Greedy Lying Bastards.” Surprisingly, it isn’t about Al Gore. Nor is it about “green energy” executives who parlay connections with the Obama administration into millions of dollars, leaving taxpayers with the tab. And scientists who collect billions in government subsidies while fudging data to make a bogus case for more government power–what a coincidence!–don’t figure in it,
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March 4, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Remember George W. Bush’s famous “16 words”? They came from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, where Bush said: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” That was a true statement, but it caused immense controversy, for reasons that are now hard to remember. Fast forward to 2013, and President Obama’s State of the Union, where he said, talking about
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March 1, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The climate campaign always tries to downplay the fact that the global cause du jour in the mid-1970s was the prospect of a new ice age. It was only a handful of marginal scientists (though Newsweek reported the scientific community was “almost unanimous” about the threat of cooling, almost as though it was a “consensus”), and a few scattered media reports. The indispensable WattsUpWithThat website of Anthony Watts has done
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February 23, 2013 — John Hinderaker
In Europe, as in the United States, the climate alarmists’ failed predictions have become an embarrassment. In Germany, warmists have been warning hysterically that Germany and the rest of Central Europe would soon have hardly any winter at all, and little or no snow. Instead, however, winters have been getting colder. P. Gosselin, who translates climate-related papers written in German at No Tricks Zone, writes: With 11 days remaining, Germany
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February 11, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Lord Christopher Monckton offers ten questions that should be asked of climate alarmists. Here are some of my favorites: 1. CO2 concentration has risen by 10% in the past 23 years, but the RSS satellite global lower-troposphere temperature-anomaly record shows warming over that period that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. How come? 2. Aristotle, 2350 years ago, demonstrated that to argue from “consensus” is a logical fallacy – the headcount
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February 10, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Global warming: is there anything it can’t do? CNN anchor Deb Feyerick accomplished a remarkable two-fer yesterday, when, in the space of a few seconds, she suggested that global warming may be causing both 1) blizzards and 2) asteroids: “Global warming” has evolved into one more form of magical thinking on the part of liberals. Via Newsbusters.
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February 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
For a sophisticated yet understandable introduction to the global warming debate, it is hard to beat this article by Professor Robert Carter at the American Institute for Technology and Science Education site. Dr. Carter notes that there is considerable common ground between the climate alarmists and the climate realists: Though you wouldn’t know it from the antagonistic nature of public discussions about global warming, a large measure of scientific agreement
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January 31, 2013 — John Hinderaker
When it comes to global warming, the Japanese can’t quite get their minds right. Anthony Watts explains: Each year, four international science institutions compile temperature data from thousands of stations around the world and make independent judgments about whether the year was warmer or cooler than average. “The official records vary slightly because of subtle differences in the way we analyze the data,” said Reto Ruedy, climate scientist at NASA’s
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January 31, 2013 — John Hinderaker
On the way home from the office tonight, I picked up a six pack of beer. When I pulled into my garage, the temperature was -1 F. Not epic by any means, but pretty darn cold. We have a sort of overflow refrigerator in our garage, and I realized I had better put the beer there–not to keep it cold, but to keep it warm. If I had left it
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