Brutally Honest

Gore goes all Godwin on us

Wikipedia describes Godwin's law thusly:

Godwin's Law is often cited in online discussions as a deterrent against the use of arguments in the widespread reductio ad Hitlerum form. The rule does not make any statement about whether any particular reference or comparison to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that the likelihood of such a reference or comparison arising increases as the discussion progresses. It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued,^[4] that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

Let's now go to the latest reductio ad absurdum argument coming out of the mouth of the King of snake oil salesmen, Al Gore:

Al Gore invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill yesterday when he urged political leaders to follow the example of Britain’s wartime leader in the battle against climate change.

The former US Vice-President accused governments around the world of exploiting ignorance about the dangers of global warming to avoid taking difficult decisions.

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.

“The level of awareness and concern among populations has not crossed the threshold where political leaders feel that they must change,” he said. “The only way politicians will act is if awareness raises to a level to make them feel that it’s a necessity.”

Mr Gore, who brought the issues around climate change to a mass audience with the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, said that the great hope for the future lay in the high level of environmental awareness among young people.

He said sceptics who refused to believe that dramatic cuts in carbon emissions could be delivered should consider the example of the young scientists in the Nasa team who put a man on the Moon on 1969.

“The average age of scientists in the space centre control room was 26, which means they were 18 when they heard President Kennedy say he wanted to put a man on the Moon in ten years. Neil Armstrong did it eight years and two months later.”

He said future generations would put one of two questions to today’s adults. “It will either be ‘What were you thinking, didn’t you see the North Pole melting before your eyes, didn’t you hear what the scientists were saying?’. Or they will ask ‘How is it you were able to find the moral courage to solve the crisis which so many said couldn’t be solved?’”

There you go folks... by not buying into the global warming nonsense, you are in essence lacking moral courage and allowing the equivalent of a holocaust to take place.

Al Gore... minimizing the deaths of millions and ridiculing the threat posed so many years ago by Adolph Hitler.

What a brazen liar.

"Open Letter to Congress by a team of prominent atmospheric scientists."

Via Climate Depot:

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES: YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

You have recently received an Open Letter from the Woods Hole Research Center, exhorting you to act quickly to avoid global disaster. The letter purports to be from independent scientists, but that Center is the former den of the President's science advisor, John Holdren, and is far from independent. This is the same science advisor who has given us predictions of “almost certain” thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time.

The facts are:

The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact

THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN'T EXIST.

The proposed legislation would cripple the US economy, putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors. For such drastic action, it is only prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not just computer projections, and not false claims about the state of the science.

SCIENCE IS GUIDED BY PROOF, NOT CONSENSUS

Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Alarmists are rolling in wealth from the billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken. It is always instructive to follow the money.

Robert H. Austin
Professor of Physics
Princeton University
Fellow APS, AAAS
American Association of Arts and Science Member National Academy of Sciences

William Happer
Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics
Princeton University
Fellow APS, AAAS
Member National Academy of Sciences

S. Fred Singer
Professor of Environmental Sciences Emeritus, University of Virginia
First Director of the National Weather Satellite Service
Fellow APS, AAAS, AGU

Roger W. Cohen
Manager, Strategic Planning and Programs, ExxonMobil Corporation (retired)
Fellow APS

Harold W. Lewis
Professor of Physics Emeritus
University of California at Santa Barbara
Fellow APS, AAAS; Chairman, APS Reactor Safety Study

Laurence I. Gould
Professor of Physics
University of Hartford
Chairman (2004), New England Section of APS

Richard Lindzen
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences, AGU, AAAS, and AMS
Member Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
Member National Academy of Sciences

Think this'll mean a damned thing to the Settled Scientists masquerading as has-been and current politicians?

Hell. No.

Truth doesn't matter.  The Watermelon Agenda (green on the outside, red on the inside) matters.  And that Agenda is marching on.

Settled scientific suppression

This from CBS News no less:

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward... and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency -- and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels."

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to "have any direct communication" with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

"I was told for probably the first time in I don't know how many years exactly what I was to work on," said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. "And it was not to work on climate change." One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.

For its part, the EPA sent CBSNews.com an e-mailed statement saying: "Claims that this individual’s opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This Administration and this EPA Administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency and science-based decision making. These principles were reflected throughout the development of the proposed endangerment finding, a process in which a broad array of voices were heard and an inter-agency review was conducted."

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide)," he said. "There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."

Cooking the books and then lying about that cooking.

Hope and change.

I've got yer settled science right here (UPDATED)

Kim Strassel:

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

I'm of the opinion that you should do what you need to do to ensure that your skeptical and denying voice is heard in Congress... and before they shovel a load of crap right down our throats:

The legislation, totaling about 1,200 pages, would require the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and about 80 percent by the next century.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are rising at about 1 percent a year and are predicted to continue increasing without mandatory caps.

Under the bill, the government would limit heat-trapping pollution from factories, refineries and power plants. It would distribute pollution allowances that could be bought and sold, depending on whether a facility exceeds the cap or makes greater pollution cuts than are required.

Obama on Thursday called it "a vote of historic proportions ... that will open the door to a clean energy economy" and green jobs. "It will create millions of new jobs," Pelosi insisted.

Both Obama and Pelosi preferred to focus on the economic issues rather than on what environmentalists view as the urgency of reducing carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

The Rust Belt coal-state Democrats who have been sitting on the fence worry about how to explain their vote for higher energy prices to people back home—and how the vote might play out in elections next year.

Republicans have been quick to exploit those concerns.

"Democratic leaders are poised to march many moderate Democrats over a cliff ... by forcing them to vote for a national energy tax that is unpopular throughout the heartland," Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said.

Have you called yet?

UPDATE: I couldn't get through initially but kept trying and I'm enthused to hear that my Congressman will be voting against HR 2454.

It's time to eat at Burger King

At least those owned by Mirabile Investment Corporation:

A row between the fast food giant Burger King and one of its major franchise owners has erupted over roadside signs proclaiming "global warming is baloney".

The franchisee, a Memphis-based company called the Mirabile Investment Corporation (MIC) that owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, has described Burger King as acting "kinda like cockroaches" over the controversy. MIC says it does not believe Burger King has the authority to make it take the signs down.

The dispute began to sizzle last week, when a local newspaper reporter in Memphis, Tennessee, noticed the signs outside two restaurants in the city and contacted the corporation to establish if the message represented its official viewpoint. Burger King's headquarters in Miami said it did not, adding that it had ordered MIC to take the signs down.

But a few days later readers of the Memphis paper said they had seen about a dozen Burger King restaurants across the state displaying the signs and that some had yet to be taken down. Media attempts to contact MIC to establish why it was taking an apparently defiant stance were rebuffed, but the Guardian managed to grill MIC's marketing president, John McNelis.

"I would think [Burger King] would run from any form of controversy kinda like cockroaches when the lights get turned on," said Mr McNelis. "I'm not aware of any direction that they gave the franchisee and I don't think they have the authority to do it."

McNelis added: "The [restaurant] management team can put the message up there if they want to. It is private property and here in the US we do have some rights. Notwithstanding a franchise agreement, I could load a Brinks vehicle with [rights] I've got so many of them. By the time the Burger King lawyers work out how to make that stick we'd be in the year 2020."

He continued: "Burger King can bluster all they want about what they can tell the franchisee to do, but we have free-speech rights in this country so I don't think there's any concerns."

I'm pulling for the MIC folks.

Busting 10 global warming myths

Via Andrew Bolt at Australia's Herald Sun:

MYTH 1

THE WORLD IS WARMING

Wrong. It is true the world did warm between 1975 and 1998, but even Professor David Karoly, one of our leading alarmists, admitted this week "temperatures have dropped" since - "both in surface temperatures and in atmospheric temperatures measured from satellites". In fact, the fall in temperatures from just 2002 has already wiped out half the warming our planet experienced last century. (Check data from Britain's Hadley Centre, NASA's Aqua satellite and the US National Climatic Data Centre.)

Some experts, such as Karoly, claim this proves nothing and the world will soon start warming again. Others, such as Professor Ian Plimer of Adelaide University, point out that so many years of cooling already contradict the theory that man's rapidly increasing gases must drive up temperatures ever faster.

But that's all theory. The question I've asked is: What signs can you actually see of the man-made warming that the alarmists predicted?

MYTH 2

THE POLAR CAPS ARE MELTING

Wrong. The British Antarctic Survey, working with NASA, last week confirmed ice around Antarctica has grown 100,000 sq km each decade for the past 30 years.

Long-term monitoring by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports the same: southern hemisphere ice has been expanding for decades.

As for the Arctic, wrong again.

The Arctic ice cap shrank badly two summers ago after years of steady decline, but has since largely recovered. Satellite data from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre this week shows the Arctic hasn't had this much April ice for at least seven years.

Norway's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre says the ice is now within the standard deviation range for 1979 to 2007.

MYTH 3

WE'VE NEVER HAD SUCH A BAD DROUGHT

Wrong. A study released this month by the University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre confirms not only that we've had worse droughts, but this Big Dry is not caused by "global warming", whether man-made or not.

As the university's press release says: "The causes of southeastern Australia's longest, most severe and damaging droughts have been discovered, with the surprise finding that they originate far away in the Indian Ocean.

"A team of Australian scientists has detailed for the first time how a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole - a variable and irregular cycle of warming and cooling of ocean water - dictates whether moisture-bearing winds are carried across the southern half of Australia."

MYTH 4

OUR CITIES HAVE NEVER BEEN HOTTER

Wrong. The alleged "record" temperature Melbourne set in January - 46.4 degrees - was in fact topped by the 47.2 degrees the city recorded in 1851. (See the Argus newspaper of February 8, 1851.)

And here's another curious thing: Despite all this warming we're alleged to have caused, Victoria's highest temperature on record remains the 50.7 degrees that hit Mildura 103 years ago.

South Australia's hottest day is still the 50.7 degrees Oodnadatta suffered 37 years ago. NSW's high is still the 50 degrees recorded 70 years ago.

What's more, not one of the world's seven continents has set a record high temperature since 1974. Europe's high remains the 50 degrees measured in Spain 128 years ago, before the invention of the first true car.

MYTH 5

THE SEAS ARE GETTING HOTTER

Wrong. If anything, the seas are getting colder. For five years, a network of 3175 automated bathythermographs has been deployed in the oceans by the Argo program, a collaboration between 50 agencies from 26 countries.

Warming believer Josh Willis, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reluctantly concluded: "There has been a very slight cooling . . ."

He's got 5 more, all of them worthy... do pass them on.

And props to Donald Sensing for bringing this to our attention.

Argos monitoring systems must be burned at the stake

Damned little heretical machines just aren't lying like humans want them to:

They drift along in the worlds' oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres -- more than a mile down -- constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.

Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface, gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through.

These 3,000 yellow sentinels -- about the size and shape of a large fencepost -- free-float the world's oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.

...

When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.

No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys' findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters' hypotheses, must be wrong.

Facts are an itch-bay aren't they?

Via Mike at Cold Fury who opines:

It’s all bullsh*t of the rankest sort, of course. But what else could anyone expect from shameless liars of Al Gore’s ilk?

Hmm... sound familiar?

It was supposed to be a shining example of the green movement...

... and it is:

Seven months ago, officials gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the $900,000 house owned by the city of Troy that was to be used as an educational tool and meeting spot.

But it never opened to the public. And it remains closed.

Frozen pipes during the winter caused $16,000 in damage to floors, and city officials aren't sure when the house at the Troy Community Center will open.

"It's not safe right now, and there's no estimated opening time because it depends on when we can get funding," said Carol Anderson, director of the city's Parks and Recreation Department.

That surprised the Oakland County Planning and Economic Development Department, which advertised tours of the house for its Tuesday Oakland County Green Summit.

"No, I didn't know anything about it," said Steve Huber, spokesman for county planning.

Bret Rasegnan, planning supervisor for the department, said the solar tours have been removed from the finalized agenda for the summit.

"It is disappointing that we can't tour, but the summit will still be of great value. I don't think it's reflective of the technology."

No... it's reflective of the joke that the green movement has become.  A shell of a home, ugly as hell, incredibly expensive and unlivable to boot.

Symbolic.

The Democrat assault on free speech

Posted here and at The Borg Conspiracy by guest blogger Locutisprime.

Democrats Refuse to Allow Skeptic to Testify

If anyone wants to see what the liberal socialist version of freedom of speech actually looks like in practice, have a look at what happened to the UK's Lord Christopher Monckton this week in Washington.

Monckton flew to Washington for the express purpose of testifying as an expert witness before the US congress on the issues of purported global warming. His purpose was ostensibly to add counter balance of opinion to the planned testimony of Al Gore who is the former US vice president, poster boy advocate of the climate change myth and recent star of stage and film and recipient of the Nobel prize for popularity amongst the committed leftist of the world.

But Monckton's debate with Gore was not to be, as truth spoken in Washington these days is truth denied.

“The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”

I have to agree with Lord Monckton's summation. However, I must point out that his descriptive analysis of American democrats, leaves wanting the other most recognizable identifier of them and their traits as a class IMO. That of being liars and purveyors of purposeful propaganda and misinformation. Everything designed to squash any and all debate on any issue that they oppose is their stock and trade since once again assuming the majority.

“The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech under the US Constitution. Congress Henry Waxman's (D-CA) refusal to expose Al Gore's sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked fear,” Monckton said from the airport Thursday evening.

“Waxman knows there has been no 'global warming' for at least a decade. Waxman knows there has been seven and a half years' global cooling. Waxman knows that, in the words of the UK High Court judge who condemned Gore's mawkish movie as materially, seriously, serially inaccurate, 'the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view,'” Monckton explained.

Therefore, absent the ability to produce one of the premiere voices of opposition (Lord Monckton) to challenge more of the Al Gore fantasy climate change road show, the GOP hastily called former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich before the hearings to attempt to have their opposition opinion heard and on the record at the least.

Which only further serves to verify the present reality of a Washington sickened with democrat control of both houses and the White House IMO. This rogues gallery of the cobbled together dregs of 1960's hippies and their communist environMENTALIST friends of the earth and their other committed leftist brethren of this nation and the world, are going to run full tilt toward anything that they see as damaging to America. And right now, the global warming myth is their holy grail epoch.

Be it cap and trade, Kyoto, carbon credits hustled by the UN or any other policy (official or otherwise) that they see as damaging to the overall viability and survivability of America period. That is what they want and that is what they are after, make no mistake.

And of greater importance to me, is the reality of what they are presently engaging in and being allowed to get away with in the public arena of speech. Which is a full scale frontal assault on freedom of speech in America and their ability to control the media to camouflage and conceal their real designs on policy and law via manipulation of both speech and the press while formulating both policy and law.

What better example of a denial of freedom of speech and a collusive media partaking, than the Lord Monckton affair of this week before congress. What better example of a liberal house of representatives drunk with power and capable of openly attacking the first amendment of the constitution in broad daylight and getting away with it.

And not one peep from the very media that the first amendment was created to also protect.

And these actions are but one more example of the catharsis of democratic thinking and their mentally aberrant reasoning, as it applies to any delineation between what they consider free speech and what they brand as hate speech for the purposes of their own political demonization of all opposition.

There is no freedom of speech in the world view of any socialist analysis of freedom that clashes with their own desires of attaining totalitarian rule. And that includes the supposed freedom and right of speech on any level that they don't approve of.  The citizens of America and elsewhere around the world who love freedom,  had better wake up and see what is afoot in the Obama world view of change and they had better see it soon.

The lies of global warming have been continually and soundly defeated and shown for the heresy that they are, since before AL Gore ever starred in his made for TV spectacular of convenient lies. Yet both he and those who idolize him on the liberal left, continue to run with this tattered bag of lies and half truths, as if their realities of earth and nature sprang from the very lips of Moses.

As an American, I am ashamed of what those in congress did this week. What they contrived and allowed to pass as reasonable discourse and discussion this week on the people's behalf, was nothing less than an abomination of the democratic process. These interlopers aren't serving me or the people of America and worse, they aren't serving the purposes of truth and freedom for which they were elected to public office. The time has come to throw these bums out and the 2010 midterms cannot arrive soon enough IMO.

Lunacy reigns

Mind-boggling stupidity:

The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.
 
John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table."

Holdren outlined several "tipping points" involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.

Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

Assuming it was true, and it isn't, why in hell would we want a blind man driving that car?

Ridiculous.