OMG, I might become a believer.

How can you not believe in God when stuff like this keeps happening!  :)

Big chill buries global warming protest 

Global warming activists had stormed Washington for what was billed as the nation’s largest act of civil disobedience to fight climate change, only to see the city almost shut down by a major winter storm.

As Washington was blasted with its heaviest snowfall of the winter, politicians cancelled appearances and schools and businesses were closed.

The storm also buried under 15cm of snow any hope of global warming activism.

Reports said the activists had hoped to swarm Washington in an effort to force the Government to close the Capitol Power Plant, which heats and cools government buildings, including the Supreme Court and the Capitol.

Fox News said the scene was reminiscent of a day in January 2004, when Al Gore made an address on global warming in New York — on one of the coldest days in the city’s history.

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The storm was more serious elsewhere, paralysing most of the east coast yesterday.

For the first time in five years New York City cancelled school for its 1.1 million students.

I think God invented global warming just so he could mock the climate scientists like this!

Income Mobility: How the Liberals Lie about the Income Gap.

We are frequently inundated with frantic cries from the left concerning the widening income gap, or how the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. These are, of course, emotional arguments designed to pluck at our heart strings as opposed to rational arguments based on facts and data.

One of the unspoken assumptions in that emotional argument is that “the rich” are invariably the same group of people and that “the poor” are likewise the same. This implicit assumption is key to the emotional reaction that the liberals are counting on because it evokes images of a huddled mass of helpless and starving poor who are trapped in a system which exploits them on a daily basis, and unfairly so. But does this assumption stand up to rational scrutiny?

A November 13, 2007 Wall Street Journal article titled Movin’ On Up discusses some of the findings in a U.S. Income Mobility Study conducted by the Treasury Department which exposes these emotional appeals as being just “so much populist hokum:”

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

So what does this mean? In the ten year period being studied almost 60% of those who started out in the lowest income group in 1996 had made use of the opportunities afforded them in the United States to significantly improve their circumstances by 2005, with 25% of them having risen to the middle and upper-middle income quintiles, and with around 5.3% having completely reversed their fortunes to move up to the top of the income strata. So rather than a stagnant huddled group of people trapped in poverty, as the liberals would like us to believe, we have significant evidence of a dynamic system which affords a wealth of opportunity for everyone to improve their lives if they so choose.

But what of the rich, you ask? The upper 5% or even 1% of the income earners? Well, as the graphic above illustrates these groups have not faired nearly as well since they are the only groups to experience an actual decline in their median incomes over the study period. The upper 5% had their median incomes decline by 6.8% and the upper 1% had their median incomes decline 25.8%.

In a period where the lowest quintile saw their median incomes increase by 90.5% (almost double) the upper 1% actually lost about 25.8% (about one quarter) of their median income. This is hardly an example of the rich getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Clearly the group that benefited the most over this 10 year period were the poorest in the nation, not the richest. Yet the liberals persist in claiming exactly the opposite.

Also encouraging is the fact that the after-inflation median income of all tax filers increased by an impressive 24% over the same period. Two of every three workers had a real income gain — which contradicts the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin about stagnant incomes. This is even more impressive when you consider that “median” income and wage numbers are often skewed downward because the U.S. has had a huge influx of young workers and immigrants in the last 20 years. They start their work years with low wages, dragging down the averages.

In other words, overall the median income (in real, inflation adjusted dollars) increase by 24% which means the everyone benefited to some level. Two-thirds of the workforce did better throughout the study period and the one-third that lost out were predominantly in the higher income quintiles:

Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income — the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005. Some of these people might have been “rich” merely for one year, or perhaps for several, as they hit their peak earning years or had some capital gains windfall. Others may simply have not been able to keep up with new entrepreneurs and wealth creators.

The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up — another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The “rich” are not the same people over time.

So much for that implicit assumption that the rich are always the same group of people. Clearly they are not. This also deflates the class envy notion that the rich only inherited their money, that they didn’t really work for it. To go from middle or even lower incomes to the upper income brackets takes work and as this study shows the percentages of people moving both up and down the income ladder is significant.

All of this certainly helps to illuminate the current election-year debate about income “inequality” in the U.S. The political left and its media echoes are promoting the inequality story as a way to justify a huge tax increase. But inequality is only a problem if it reflects stagnant opportunity and a society stratified by more or less permanent income differences. That kind of society can breed class resentments and unrest. America isn’t remotely such a society, thanks in large part to the incentives that exist for risk-taking and wealth creation.

And this last point is key. America is NOT the permanently stratified, class based society that the liberals would have you think. The American dream is alive and well and providing opportunities for people of all income levels. As has been the case all along, risk taking and hard work are the keys to success, not the luck of the draw in nature’s parent lottery.

 

James Hansen: Global Warming Scientist for Hire

Anyone familiar with the Global Warming propaganda machine knows who James Hansen is, and no he isn’t the creator of the Muppets, Jim Hansen, but given their obvious similarities such a mistake is easy to make. No, James Hansen has become the poster boy for Global Warming alarmism over the past few years because of his work at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which is part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). For years we have heard just how pure his research in the area of Global Warming is because he is funded by the government and not by energy industry companies.

Well it has recently come to light via Investor’s Business Daily that James Hansen was not only funded by NASA, but that he had received up to $720,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Institute most likely under their “politicization of science” program. An irony under the circumstances to say the least. So here we find out that George Soros paid up to $720,000 to have James Hansen go out and publicly evangelize about Global Warming. I guess it is no surprise, then, that Hansen has gained so much notoriety of late and just why he has been such a vocal proponent of the whole Global Warming theme. Fame and fortune are powerful motivators to be sure.

James Hansen: Global Warming Scientist for Hire!

The Soros Threat To Democracy

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 24, 2007

Democracy: George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.

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George Soros & MoveOn.org: Exclusive Series

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How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute , which gave him “legal and media advice”?

That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

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High price for load of hot air | The Courier-Mail

Original Article: High price for load of hot air | The Courier-Mail

Robert Carter makes the case in the above article that the case for Anthropogenic Global Warming is completely overblown both in its effect and in its realistic level of consequences. Here are a few excerpts with some additional thoughts and perspective.

On the same day, NASA chief Michael Griffin commented in a US radio interview that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with“.

NASA is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: “We study global climate change, that is in our authorisation, we think we do it rather well.

“I’m proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change.”

Such a clear statement that science accomplishment should carry primacy over policy advice is both welcome and overdue.

I tend to agree. It is somewhat ironic, however, that Michael Griffin expresses the thought that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with” while James Hansen of GISS is one of the most visible and the most vocal of the Anthropogenic Global Warming proponents. NASA seems a bit schizophrenic on the issue as an organization.

Nonetheless, there is something worrying about one of Griffin’s other statements, which said that “I have no doubt . . . that a trend of global warming exists”.

Griffin seems to be referring to human-caused global warming, but irrespective of that his opinion is unsupported by the evidence.

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

So, to summarize Carter’s position, if we adjust the temperature record to account for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions the Earth’s observed warming is minimal despite significant increases in CO2, and given the effects likely to take place from a solar output perspective the next few decades are likely to experience a net cooling.

In fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human-caused warming.For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.

In Australia, the advice trail leads from government agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Greenhouse Office through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations.

As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.

Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.

This is an important point and one that is frequently overlooked. In today’s world we see politicians running around and making outrageous claims with respect to Climate Change based almost entirely on the advice of the IPCC which is at its heart a political, as opposed to a scientific, organization. The reports issued by the IPCC are predominantly written by the politicians first in the form of a summary, and the actual scientific papers are then scrubbed to insure that they do not contradict the political positions. By blindly accepting the positions of the IPCC on Climate Change the world’s nations are effectively delegating their political responsibilities to the bureaucrats of other countries. This is a very dangerous thing to do as most of the other nations in the world have much to gain and very little to loose as part of this exercise.

It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of government on the issue and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.

Not only do humans not dominate Earth’s current temperature trend but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.

In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.

Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.

The costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.

Professor Bob Carter is an environmental scientist at James Cook University who studies ancient climate change.

And here we see that there is an irony that we will be spending $US Billions, or more, to reduce greenhouse emissions in an effort to combat Global Warming inspite of the facts that (a) we are unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on the outcome, and (b) that outcome is likely to be cooling in the next few decades anyway based on the Solar Output trends.

Scientific Credentials:

• Curriculum Vitae for Robert M. Carter
• Wikipedia Entry for Robert M. Carter

Global Levels of Sea Ice Far from Alarming

Polar Sea Ice Cap and Snow – Cryosphere Today

Hyping concerns over the declining levels of sea ice in the Arctic seems to be a favorite theme among the global warming alarmists. Arctic sea ice is, in fact, at an historic minimum which must be proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming, correct? That is what the alarmists want you to believe, but be aware that they are trying to deceive you with selective data.

While the Northern Hemisphere is at an historic low for sea ice the Southern Hemisphere is near an historic high, so to a large extent the decreases in the Arctic are being offset by increases in the Antarctic. So how bad is the net change on a global level?

See for yourself here.

Things to note in the graph provided is that on a global scale the amount of sea ice has decreased by a little over 5% in the past 28 years. This is a far cry from the alarmist claims being made based on the Arctic alone. Other things of note include:

1. Global level of sea ice typically varies from about +2 Million Square Kilometers to about -2 Million Square Kilometers relative to the 1979 through 2000 mean. We are currently at -1 Million Square Kilometers which appears to be well within the normal range of sea ice variation.
2. We have absolutely no means of identifying whether the levels of sea ice being used as the reference (e.g. 1979-2000) are above normal, at normal, or below normal in relation to a larger historical context. If those years happen to be at a high point in the natural cycles of sea ice coverage then a downward trend for the past 28 years may not be anomalous at all. Without further historical data over a longer period of observation there is no way to say whether we should be alarmed by the observed decrease or not.

Despite the desperate attempts to convince you otherwise, the facts shown here indicate little, if any, cause for concern regarding global levels of sea ice.