Against the-President-as-First-Responder-in-Chief

Paul Mirengoff lays out what is pretty close to my opinion on the matter of the oil spill and the President's proper role in the response.

What has just turned me in favor of global warming

Not in favor of believing it exists (which I already do, although I'm skeptical of details), but in favor of it happening. As in: I want more of it!

Take a look at this record of historical temperatures from ice core samples in Greenland and Antarctica and quake in fear. Good GRIEF we're lucky to be living in one of those warm, terribly-short interglacial periods! And from the Antarctic data, it looks like this is by far the loooongest interglacial in the 400,000 years recorded in that ice core.

Meaning: fear the coming ice age! Maybe we're meant to be producing extra CO_2 to prevent another ice age and save civilization itself.

Climategate: roundup of the deeper analysis of "Mike's Nature Trick"

There have been a few really excellent articles lately that probe "Mike's Nature trick" in good depth.


Anthony Watts has cross-posted this article from The American Thinker, which is the best one I have found for understanding just what "Mike's Nature trick" really is. We've been wondering if there was any outright manipulation of the data to reach a predetermined conclusion, and I believe Marc Sheppard has found the smoking gun. Briefly: in the IPCC reports, when they've shown the so-called "hockey stick" plots (a thousand years of nearly-constant temperatures, followed by a sharp rise in the 20th century), they've had several data sets to use for reconstructing the historical temperatures. One of those is from tree rings. Thermometer records aren't consistently applied until about the 20th century, so we can't compare them with the tree rings or other "proxy" measurements except in the 20th century. But the tree ring data show a decline in temperatures from about 1940 (and a steeper decline after ~1960) to now, while the thermometer records go sharply upwards in the late-20th century. The discrepancy is a little embarrassing. So what do you do, if you're trying to convince people that this is all settled science? In order to "hide the decline," you either don't plot the tree ring data after 1960, or you simply fake it to make it match the thermometer records.

The UK's Daily Mail provides a good summary of the foregoing article, along with some context. The American Thinker piece is more technical, and the Daily Mail's might make a good introduction to it.

One of the rare things that will make me visit my Senator

Let me introduce you to Section 304 of the "Cap and Trade" bill (Waxman-Markey).

This will be the law that forces you to make your home much, much more energy efficient. Wait--did you think you owned your house? That how you lived in it was your business? That the kinds of appliances and the windows and the furnace and whatnot were all matters for you, a free man, to decide?

Hah, hah, hah...silly person! No, you, my friend, are a ward of the state and unable to live your own life. Here, let us decide these things for you.

What?!!?

Rush Limbaugh is talking about the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill the House passed last week. He has said that hidden within it is a nationwide home energy-efficiency standard for new buildings. One, that's unconstitutional. The Federal government can't legislate how you build your house, although your state can. Second, according to Rush, it is based on California's standards. That's to be expected, but those must be pretty stringent, considering the state's politics. That's an "ouch" in practical terms. Third, and here's where I want to check that Rush has his information straight, he thinks it would regulate the sale of inefficient homes in some way. Specifically, he said it would prohibit their sale, unless you upgraded the efficiency, although he said it was how he understood it, so he's not quite as sure as on the previous points.

What?! That's going to really, really come down hard. If this is true, I'm fighting it.

Cap and Trade passes the House--but there's no correct copy of the bill!

This just makes me angry. Not only could the lawmakers voting on the awful cap-and-trade bill last night not possibly have read the whole document in the time given, but there is no complete copy of the bill in existence! The 300+ page additions (to the 1000+ page bill itself) that were slipped in at 3:00 AM Friday aren't even simple additions. They're instructions for revising the rest of the bill. Filled with things like,

"Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..."

Absolutely spitting mad. That's what I am. Deceitful, good-for-nothing centralizers of power at the expense of liberty and the Constitution...and they can't even know what they're voting on....

UPDATE: I'm going to breathe more just to emit more CO₂ for spite.

Human Achievement Hour and Wikipedia politics

Liberal Wikipedia editors are at it again. This time, they're repeatedly deleting an article about Human Achievement Hour, the pro-Man counterpoint to the so-called "Earth Hour." This is the kind of thing that keeps me from letting my students cite Wikipedia as a source. Since I looked it up, it's been deleted, while I had the page open.

Let's regulate the press when it comes to global warming discussion

So a lefty British professor of journalism is advocating a government regulatory scheme to oversee published material discussing global warming. Let's keep this caricature of the Left as the guarantors of free speech and a free press going, right?

Here's a bit from the opposing side. A good antidote.

Obama is pro-inflation but anti-drilling

Dean Esmay does the math on Obama's inflate-your-tires energy plan and says they don't add up. There's some wiggle room in there for Obama, but you've got to give generous interpretations of his words, and even then it's not a practical solution.

One thing technocrats often miss is that they're dealing with live people in a society, and people have their own ideas about how they're going to live and what they're going to do. So while it's good advice to properly inflate your tires and keep the car in good working shape, and most people already do, you won't be able to force the remaining 27% of people (those driving around with seriously underinflated tires) to do your bidding. Maybe a major publicity campaign for inflated tires will reduce that percentage somewhat, but you will always, always have some percentage who won't take your advice. Maybe they're lazy. Maybe they don't have the time or money to go and get the car tuned up as often as you want them to. Maybe they don't want you telling them what to do. And so you won't get to that magical number you've cited for a goal. You won't equal even the predictions for oil from offshore drilling, much less from ANWR.

So: how about encouraging vehicle maintenance and expanding exploration and drilling? Offshore, ANWR, South Dakota, whereever! Put in new nuclear plants, windfarms, and even solar panels. The best of all worlds.

Eco nonsense

Why does the press give any attention to a group like "Friends of the Earth"? They're complaining that an American Airlines flight from New York to London had only 5 passengers on board...and (oh my gosh!) it still flew!!! They're spitting mad. They don't seem to notice that planes don't fly passengers in one direction only. That plane was going to turn around in London and fly right back to America, carrying more passengers. So what do you gain by not flying out there? You strand another whole planeload of passengers who were going to go the opposite direction!

Nutty environmentalists.