The Chill Factor Versus Al Gore's Global Warming Talk-a-Thon

While Al Gore engages in a 24-hour talk-a-thon to convince Americans that "global warming" is real and a big threat that demands "green" energy, "alternative" energy, "conservation", et cetera, national weather services provide a different look, an accurate picture, of the chill factor that is the reality for September 15-16 in the USA.

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It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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First Ignored, Then Attacked: 6th International Climate Change Conference

By Alan Caruba

In the words of Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Thursday, June 30, will mark the beginning of the Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a free market policy center headquartered in Chicago. The conference will be held in Washington, D.C., an appropriate location considering how much hot air emanates from Congress and the White House.

I attended the first conferences that took place in New York City, just across the river from where I live, so I was “there at the beginning” for conferences that were, in the words of Gandhi, largely ignored by the mainstream media and subsequently mentioned but only as the object of mockery.

When, in 2009, emails exchanged between a handful of scientists who provided the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the most specious, deliberately duplicitous “data” to prop up the “global warming" hoax were revealed, the whole house of cards began to collapse.

It has since been propped up by a bunch of media, political, and science dead-enders who had stacked their reputations on pulling off the great hoax of the modern era; that an infinitesimal amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—0.038 percent—was causing the Earth to heat up, the seas to rise, and Minnie Mouse to announce she was pregnant.

The success of the forthcoming conference, however, has been blessed by the modern form of respect, a preemptory news release attacking it. The Center for American Progress issued a “press call advisory” titled “Climate Deniers Congregate in the Nation’s Capital.”

It began, “The Heartland Institute, a conservative group funded by Exxon Mobil and Charles Koch…” Whoa! Mr. Chairman, we rise to question why the Center for American Progress would engage in an outright lie? Answer: That’s what progressives do because they are immune to the truth.

For the record, neither Exxon Mobil, nor Mr. Koch, has contributed to the cost of the conference. The former has not contributed to the Institute since 2006 and the Kochs have not sent any money in more than a decade.

But let’s finish the Center’s opening sentence that characterized the conference as “boasting a full agenda of notable climate deniers.” The term climate deniers has long been attached to any scientist, academic, politician, or commentator such as myself who had the temerity to point out that every single claim made on behalf of “global warming” was pure horse-hockey.

Since 1998 we have been discussing the new climate cycle, a COOLING one!

The Center for American Progress sought to make light of the conferences’ theme, “Restoring the Scientific Method.” And a damn fine theme it is considering the damage to the entire scientific community that, prior to the global warming hoax, was not famous for deciding what the truth was by “consensus.”

Real science still depends on peer review and the thorough testing of a hypothesis until it can no longer be disputed because it is reproducible. You can say the Earth is flat until you are blue in the face, but it is still round. The “warmists”, however, did everything they could to short-circuit this rigorous process.

The Center for American Progress is concerned that the forthcoming conference asserts that “global warming is not a crisis” and it will be devoted to “ending global warming alarmism” and “disputing that global warming is man-made.”

Would someone please tell the Center that the Earth is now more than a decade into a perfectly natural cooling cycle and that mankind does not control the sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, or any climate event? Whenever a tsunami, blizzard, or tornado occurs, Mother Nature’s advice to mankind is “Get out of the way!”

Since I am loath to travel further these days than the Bagel Chateau one town over from where I reside, I shall be watching the conference on streaming video, June 30 to July 1. It should be noted that, in addition to a roster of some of the world’s most respected climate scientists who will make presentations, the Institute has routinely invited some of the most prominent alarmists—warmists—to participate.

A recent Forbes article noted that “a virtual Who’s Who of global warming media hounds” had been invited to participate in the conferences over the years. Conference coordinator, James Taylor, the Institute’s senior fellow for environment policy, said that Al Gore, James Hansen, Michael Mann and others “all seem to have some sort of scheduling conflict whenever they have to share the stage with a scientist who will be challenging their evidence.”

Meanwhile, the egregiously misnamed Center for American Progress will hold a conference call on Wednesday to launch an attack on the conference. No longer ignored or mocked, the Heartland Institute and its conference are clearly on the winning side.

Funeral ceremonies for “global warming” will follow with the mourners all wearing green.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The New "Consensus" Predicts an Ice Age

By Alan Caruba

Since the late 1980s a “consensus” of scientists, we were told, agreed that the Earth was in a period of “global warming” and anybody who disputed that was a “skeptic” or a “denier.”

Then, in 1998, the Earth began to cool. The handful of scientists at the heart of the global warming hoax began to sweat and not from the heat, but because they knew their scheme, created and blessed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would soon be revealed. Frantic emails went back and forth as they tried to come up with some way of keeping the lie alive.

Literally thousands of scientists had climbed on the global warming bandwagon, scooping up billions in research grants that were all intended to “prove” that global warming was real. Nations, including ours, were making investments and controlling people’s lives based on the hoax. By 2009, the game was up. A huge blizzard concluded the 2009 IPCC Copenhagen climate change conference. The next one was held in Acapulco.

On June 30-July 1, the Heartland Institute, headquartered in Chicago, a free-market policy center, will hold what may likely be the last of its six climate change conferences, all of which debunked global warming by bringing together some very brave scientists to present seminars based on real, not fraudulent, science. It will be held in Washington, D.C. You will be able to “attend” by watching it on streaming video.

In 1997 Robert W. Felix published a book, “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, a softcover. It’s second edition, can be purchased from his website, IceAgeNow.com. For anyone interested in knowing the truth about the Earth’s many cycles of warming and cooling, and especially about its ice ages, I recommend it. While there, pick up his other book, “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps.”

Fourteen years ago Felix pointed out that ice ages occur in a “dependable, predictable, natural cycle that returns like clockwork every 11,500 years.” Then he noted that the Earth is at the end of the current interglacial period!

The human species, homo sapiens, that had been evolving from an ape-like state really hit its stride around 500,000 years ago while modern humans showed up around 200,000 years ago. It took a while to learn how to use fire, make tools, develop language, and spread around. It wasn’t until about 5,000 years ago that what we call civilization began.

In addition to developing agriculture, building pyramids, and such, our ancestors spent their time making war on each other. With each passing century we developed new weapons of war, plundering, looting, raping and pillaging. Religions were invented, discarded, refined, but the wars have continued unabated. Now we are so “advanced” we can kill thousands of people with a single bomb.

Civilization was greatly facilitated by an interglacial period that provided increasing crop yields to feed armies and populations clustered in cities, virtually all of which were surrounded by large walls.

Since the weather was critical to agriculture and the waging of war, humans began to pay greater attention to what the sun was doing and keeping records. It was noticed that lots of sunspot activity was an indicator of warmer climate.

From 1645 to 1715, virtually no sunspots appeared and this phenomenon called the Maunder Minimum coincided with the Little Ice Age. Rivers froze over in Europe and America. Crops failed. Revolutions occurred.

Now, instead of “global warming”, scientists are agog over a new slowing of sunspot activity—enormous magnetic storms—something that occurs every 11 years, half of the 22-year sunspot cycle. Now the U.S. National Solar Observatory and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory are suggesting that a new Little Ice Age is on its way.

Robert W. Felix told them that back in 1997 while most U.S. climate agencies were still blathering away with global warming predictions. This time, though, based on cycles known to the ancient Chinese and others, they have gotten it right.

What is not being said, however, is that this predicted Little Ice Age could very well turn into a very Big Ice Age. It’s due. It could start tomorrow. Bundle up!

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Whatever Happened to Global Warming?

By Alan Caruba

A recent Gallup Poll surveyed people in 111 nations to find out whether they regarded global warming as a serious threat and a slim majority responded saying, in effect, they did not.

Worldwide, only 42 percent said global warming was either a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” threat. In the United States, 53 percent still think it is a somewhat or very serious threat. That was, however, down from 63 percent in polling done in 2007 and 2008.

The Earth began to warm in 1850 after a long period of cooling that began around 1300. It was a natural response to that cooling cycle as the Earth has always gone through such warming and cooling events, some of which we identify as ice ages. The last cooling cycle is frequently referred to as a mini-ice age by meteorologists and climatologists, the latter of whom study long term trends.

The global warming hoax got a kick start in 1988 when Dr. James Hansen, employed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), testified before a congressional committee that, unless carbon dioxide emissions were drastically reduced, the Earth would heat up. After that, scientists of every description climbed on board the global warming bandwagon and began producing billions of dollars worth of absolute rubbish based on computer models that were deliberately concocted to “prove” it was real.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coordinated the hoax, periodically issuing reports predicting death on a massive scale unless people abandoned using “fossil fuels” such as coal and oil. According to the IPCC, even flatulent cows posed a threat to the Earth’s atmosphere.

The curious thing about global warming was the constant predictions that it would occur in five, ten, twenty, or fifty years. Mother Nature, however, had other plans in mind and, in 1998, the Earth began to demonstrably cool.

The cooling coordinated with well known sunspot cycles on the Sun; the fewer, the colder. They virtually disappeared In 2009, an international panel led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sponsored by NASA, predicted that Solar Cycle 24 would peak in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

We’ve all been victimized by NASA and NOAA predictions, beginning with Dr. Hansen’s. In 2009, Dean Pesnell of GISS admitted that “It turns out that none of our models were totally correct. The Sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way.” This is an obfuscation of the fact that all the models were the equivalent of a marked deck of cards or loaded dice.

According to a January 2011 announcement, one of the latest such models, ginned up by “researchers” of the government agency, Environment Canada, claims that, by the year 3000, global warming will cause the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse and global sea levels to rise by about 13 feet. This, we were told, would occur if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continued to accumulate in the atmosphere.

It is more of the same nonsense that verges on criminal conduct by all those who have been making such claims for the IPCC, NOAA, NASA, and every other citadel of science, including the world’s leading environmental organizations. They have in common an agenda that opposes the use of all the traditional sources of energy which, in turn, would crash the world’s economies and return us to a pre-industrialized era.

The November 2009 “Climategate” revelations about the IPCC scientists who colluded to deceive the world dealt a lethal blow to the global warming hoax, but the Gallup poll indicates that the news has gotten out rather slowly. The term “global warming” is no longer in use, having been replaced with “climate change.”

Climate change is, in fact, a good description of the Earth’s four seasons. The current global cooling cycle is a reminder that climate change has been occurring for the last 4.5 billion years on planet Earth.

At the very least, the next time you hear anyone using the term “global warming”, you can be sure they think you are stupid enough to fall for whatever he or she has to say on the subject.

These are the people pushing wind and solar power.

These are the people insisting we all drive electric cars.

These are the people doing their best to crash our economy.

These are dangerous people who, wherever possible, should be removed from positions, elected and appointed, of power.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Long Winter of 2010-2011

By Alan Caruba

For New Yorkers and those in my part of New Jersey across the river, snow has fallen eight times since December 14, an average of once every five days, 56.1 inches in Central Park as of Jan 27th, and people are, shall we say, taking notice?

Along with the snow come power outages, disrupted bus schedules, air travel delays, commuting by car becomes an auto body repair business bonanza, schools shut their doors, and some people die from weather-related accidents or just from trying to shovel the snow from the driveway.

Having battled the “global warming” hoax since it was first perpetrated in the late 1980s, I have had the good fortune to make friends with many of the world’s top meteorologists and climatologists who joined in the long effort to educate people to the fact that there never was a rapid rise in the planet’s overall temperatures.

Even so, some mainstream media news outlets have continued to file stories incredulously blaming the winter snow storms on “global warming.” The hoax for too many media folk has long since become a religion in which blind faith replaces the objective fact obvious to everyone. It is cold. There is snow. Lots of it.

Indeed, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since around 1998 as verified by meteorological satellite and other data. Piers Corbyn, an astrophysicist and leading forecaster, said “We’re now headed for a Maunder minimum of very low solar activity. The globe will be much cooler until about 2035, so there will be a lot more of these cold winters in Europe and the USA.”

Considering how the climatologists and meteorologists of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been telling everyone for decades of a coming warming, why should we believe Corbyn and others predicting decades of cold weather? Corbyn studies solar cycles and they determine how warm or cold the Earth is.

It’s the Sun, Stupid

Corbyn’s astonishing record of accuracy has put his native England’s meteorological service to shame for deliberately misleading the British to believe the “global warming” hoax. Not given to vague talk, Corbyn recently said, “The claim that 2010 is the second warmest year on record is delusional, irrelevant and disingenuous. Warmist (warm is cold) explanations for extreme events are as useless as saying ‘Wet days cause rain.’”

It is useful to keep in mind that U.S. agencies such as NASA and NOAA have been issuing similar politically correct and meteorologically incorrect “global warming” claims for years.

Consider weather events just since the beginning of the year.

For the first time since 1945, the maximum daytime temperature in North Korea has remained below zero for nearly a month. In neighboring China, the snowfall in northwest China was accompanied by extreme cold and a snowfall that flattened or damaged 100,000 homes. All around the world there have been similar reports, including sunny Italy that set new cold records, -48.3 degrees on January 19.

In the United States, Minnesota shattered its cold records on January 21 reaching an astonishing -46 degrees. In Florida, eight new record lows were set by January 17 and there was snow in every State of the lower 48. And spring will not debut until March 21!

It’s not like this is a new weather phenomenon. As any meteorologist will tell you, the Earth has gone through numerous warming and cooling cycles. In its 4.5 billion years, scientists estimate there have been at least seventeen full-blown Great Ice Ages. In near past history, the last Little Ice Age is well documented, having begun around 1300 and not ended until 1850. Whatever warming occurred since then, however, has amounted to just over one degree, but that was enough!

Reaching its peak in the 17th century, in England the Thames River froze over. The Little Ice Age is credited with bringing down the French monarchy and ruining Napoleon’s subsequent Russia campaign. In America, the tiny army of George Washington weathered a harsh winter at Valley Forge.

As in previous cooling cycles, it was low solar activity that determined the temperature, not carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gases.

People’s lives depend on our government’s ability to measure and forecast the weather. A government that continues to tell people that “global warming” is real and then throws billions of money on “research” to prove it, while issuing utterly false claims, must be forced to acknowledge reality. The same applies to the energy policies on which everyone depends for electricity, a reliable supply of heating oil, and other elements of the infrastructure.

The lies must end. The end of the cooling cycle is nowhere in sight.

Editor’s Note: To follow cold weather events, visit http://www.iceagenow.com/. For instruments with which forecast weather, visit http://www.weathershop.com/.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Journalistic Misfeasance

By Alan Caruba

The Gallup Organization has just released the results of a poll that, for the fourth straight year, reveals that the “majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.”

Those that do express trust in the media (43%) tie a record low. “Nearly half of Americans (48%) say the media are too liberal…Overall, perceptions of bias have remained quite steady over this tumultuous period of change for the media, marked by the growth of cable and Internet news sources.”

A perfect example of the reason for this mistrust is an October 3rd article in The Washington Post by staff writer, Juliet Eilperin. “Threat of global warming sparks U.S. interest in geoengineering.”

There is no threat of global warming. The Earth has been a cooling cycle for a decade.

Unless Washington Post editors and this reporter have been living in complete isolation for a while, it would have been impossible to ignore the fact that we are coming up on a one-year anniversary of the leak of thousands of emails between the handful of scientists responsible for the global warming hoax. These were the men who provided misleading and false data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The leaked emails led to the complete collapse of last year’s Copenhagen international climate conference.

Why, then, is the reporter referencing global warming as if it had any basis in fact? Perhaps because, on October 6th, in Washington, D.C., the Woodrow Wilson Center will be the site of a presentation by James Roger Fleming, a professor of science, technology and society at Colby College and author of “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.”

If, as the Washington Post article suggests, there is an interest in geoengineering, Fleming writes that “Geoengineering is in fact untested and dangerous. We don’t understand it, we can’t test it on smaller than planetary scales, and we don’t have the political capital, wisdom, or will to govern it.”

The key words here are “political capital” as clearly, without it, geoengineering cannot garner the billions equivalent to those squandered on the many scientists who received taxpayer funding for utterly bogus research to demonstrate that everything and anything was caused by global warming.

Ms. Eilperin covers herself nicely by noting that “For years it was considered downright wacky in official Washington to discuss geoengineering; altering the climate by reflecting sunlight back into the sky, sucking carbon dioxide from the air or a host of gee-whiz schemes.”

The reason for this is that it is wacky. That, however, did not deter Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, from suggesting that global warming could be deterred by painting roofs and highways white!

The primary method put forth to stop a non-existent global warming is to limit "greenhouse gas emissions", especially carbon dioxide (CO2). Ms. Eilperin cited the fact that the British government will spend $4.5 million over the next three years on geoengineering research, but neglected to mention that the Royal Society just backed off its support for global warming, sending a small shock wave through the international scientific community.

The bad news for Americans is that a Cap-and-Trade bill to control CO2 emissions awaits a Senate vote and, failing that, the EPA intends to exert control.

This article and all the thousands that preceded it, claiming a global warming threat, is nothing more than journalistic misfeasance. It is deceptive. It picks and chooses the information it imparts but neglects to mention that the Earth is cooling, not warming.

Little wonder that the public holds U.S. media in such low esteem. The so-called mainstream media has earned it.

Happily, people seeking to make sense of the news and issues of the day turn to Internet news and opinion sites they do trust.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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