American Carbon Trading Exchange Dies

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which received start-up funding from the socialist Joyce Foundation on whose board Barack Obama served, announced on 21 October that it was ending its carbon trading mission.  The CCX has provided voluntary, but legally binding, greenhouse gas reduction pledges or offsetting carbon emissions permits.  CCX was an investment of Al Gore's Generation Investment Management and the political clout machine at Goldman Sachs.  While voluntary at first, the CCX was anticipating the massive theft of wealth from Americans upon the Waxman-Markey cap and trade law being passed to make carbon trading mandatory.  Steve Milloy noted on 6 November that the media has completely ignored the failure of the CCX, which they had done so much to promote.

The failure of the Copenhagan meeting to set up a greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitment to follow the Kyoto Protocol which is ending in 2012, the refusal of the U.S. Senate to pass cap and trade legislation, the Great Socialist Recession, ClimateGate, the scientific failure of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, the surge of the Tea Party movement, and the upcoming Republican control of the House of Representatives, a renewed balance in the Senate, and the Republican control of most state governorships and legislatures have finally slowed down the momentum of the wrongheaded crusade against the use of fossil fuels with requirements to substitute unreliable and very expensive so-called "sustainable energy."

GM, Ford, IBM, American Electric Power, Chevron Oil, Intel, Bank of America, GE, BP, Alcoa, Caterpillar, and FP&L are among many companies who have bought carbon offsets or pledged reductions instead of investing in new equipment or keeping long-time employee Joe on during the Great Socialist Recession.  Not to be too cavalier, there are some cases in which energy use reductions actually did make economic sense, though buying carbon emissions credits never did.  Overall, political and environmental pressures certainly did distort the market and did cause many Joe's to be let go and other young David's to never be offered their first job.  GM, American Electric Power, and Chevron were buying trees in Brazil in order to get emissions credits.  Each of these companies has laid people off during the recession, while they played the ruse of being environmentally conscious.  Indeed, there are many claims that two-thirds of the carbon emissions reductions claimed on the exchanges are bogus, but they still cost money to play the game.

The value of Greenhouse Gas Emissions credits traded in the U.S. dropped 47% to $387.4 in 2009.  The volume of trades of CO2 tons fell by 26% to 93.7 million tons, though that was a volume 39% higher than in 2007.  The fact the value of trades fell more than did the volume shows that the value of a ton of CO2 was lower in 2009.  It is now much lower in 2010!  The HSBC climate index follows companies making at least 10% of their total revenues from selling goods and services related to climate change and dropped CCX and Trading Emissions from their index when the value of their market capitalization fell below $400 million as the share prices of these firms fell 37% between 1 September 2009 and 19 March 2010.  The CCX was bought by the IntercontinentalExchange Inc. or ICE, along with the European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange, in April 2010 for about $634.5 million.  The European Climate Exchange is still bolstered by mandatory carbon trading requirements due to the Kyoto Protocol.


While mandatory carbon trading requirements do not have a national basis in the U.S., they are required in some regions of the U.S.  The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states has Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine as members.  This group of masochistic states is committed to the following state economy mass destruction goals for the region:

2009 - 2014, 188,076,976 short tons of CO2 Emissions, 0% growth
2015, 183,375,052 tons, 2.50% reduction, 1 and one-third years of the output of the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, of one many tens of thousands of volcanic vents on land and underwater
2016, 178,673,127 tons, 2.56% reduction
2017, 173,971,203 tons, 2.63% reduction
2018, 169,269,278 tons, 2.70% reduction

Now using energy efficiently is wise, but the entire purpose of the state mandates is to drive companies to make energy use reductions that do not make economic sense.  This Northeast - Middle Atlantic alliance is not the only regional alliance requiring member states or provinces to commit Hari Kari.  The Western Climate Initiative is another.  A wise investor would bet against energy-intensive companies with major operations in either set of states.  Those in the Western Climate Initiative are California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.  These state based requirements are providing business for the European Climate Exchange.

Kristel Dorion who has worked for 10 years on carbon offset projects under the United Nation's Clean Development Mechanisms program says that investors are looking elsewhere than carbon offsets.  It is about time.

EPA Rewrites the Clean Air Act for CO2

The Obama EPA has ruled that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant and is to be regulated under the Clean Air Act of 1970.  This act was not intended to regulate CO2.  It was intended to regulate such gases as SO2 and NO2 and the regulated emissions threshold was set at 250 tons per year as a result.  The 2006 case of Massachusetts v. EPA was decided by the Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision and ruled that the EPA was empowered to make an endangerment decision on CO2, then widely claimed to be the cause of catastrophic man-made global warming due to the use of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil.  The EPA has since declared that CO2 emissions are emissions of a pollutant that it will regulate them under the Clean Air Act.  This ruling has been challenged with many lawsuits, see here and here.

The 250-ton per year pollutant level in the Clean Air Act requires that every establishment emitting that amount of a pollutant be restricted from doing so. If CO2 is such a pollutant, then the 280 Prevention of Significant Deterioration pre-construction permits per year will shoot up to an estimated 41,000 per year. The present 14,700 Title V operating permits per year will become over 6 million! This is why the EPA is trying to use a tailoring rule to change the legislated 250 ton per year requirement of the Clean Air Act to a limit two orders of magnitude larger of 25,000 tons per year for CO2. This is unconstitutional and we can be certain that environmentalists will challenge this to force the EPA to regulate smaller and smaller emitters of CO2.  Opponents of the regulation of CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act should be able to challenge the EPA's change from the clearly legislated and required threshold of 250 tons of emissions per year, to force the EPA to stop claiming the Clean Air Act as their authority for regulating those emissions.

Just as the economic damage and the human carnage of the high energy tax on carbon or the cap and trade legislation has kept the Senate from passing a bill to that purpose, despite the House having passed such a ridiculous bill, the consequences of the EPA enforcing the Clean Air Act for CO2 emissions would be catastrophic.  This is why it is desperately trying to change the CO2 emissions limits, though it does not have the legislative power to do so.  The EPA will have a terrible political backlash on its hands if it tries to regulate CO2 emissions at a 250 ton level.  Apartment buildings, bakeries, restaurants, and many more very moderate sized businesses would then have to deal with the EPA's emissions regulatory paperwork, legal, and expense nightmare.

The False Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis

The continued barrage of claims that man's use of fossil fuels should be curtailed because they generate CO2 emissions has caused me to revise and add to an earlier posting on the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.  The EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant even though it is essential for plant growth and the present levels are less than optimal for plants.  It also has no known toxicological effects upon man unless it were to be at least 20 times more concentrated than it presently is.  Obama and many in Congress want to find ways to further reduce fossil fuel use in order to decrease CO2 emissions, or so they say.

Man clearly makes a contribution to global warming because there is a strong local warming effect in urban areas.  However, the contributions of man to warming on the global scale are still too small to even measure.  The anthropogenic global warming catastrophe hypothesis makes the following claims:

• Man's use of fossil fuels results in CO2 emissions in significant amount.
• The CO2 added by man to the atmosphere lingers there a long time, often said to be 100 years.
• The greenhouse gas warming caused by these additions of CO2 is itself significant.
• The warming caused by man's CO2 additions to the atmosphere causes a much stronger warming due to increased water vapor and its greenhouse effect.
• The great increase in water vapor at 8 to 12 km altitude over the equator and the lower latitudes results in a hot zone in the atmosphere, which warms the entire globe.
• The resulting warming causes catastrophic effects, such as droughts, heavy rains, low snowfall, heavy snowfall, increased numbers and severity of hurricanes and typhoons, increased malaria, increased parasites, a greater mortality of older people, the extinction of species, and a great rise in sea level.

This is all so much hogwash and bunkum.  Let us consider some of the reasons why CO2 emitted by man is not causing significant global warming:

1) The rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1850 to the level of 2008 made almost no difference in the infra-red radiation absorbed since almost all of the infra-red radiation was already being absorbed that CO2 can absorb in 1850.  The temperature increase due to the CO2 increase since 1850 is about 0.12C.  This is based upon the usual atmospheric CO2 concentration plot, but like the temperature hockey stick plot, this plot is now known to have been manipulated to make the rise of CO2 since the end of the Little Ice Age and the start of the Industrial Revolution look more dramatic than it really has been.

2) The residence time of man's CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is about 5 years when introduced high in the atmosphere (as in nuclear blasts or some volcanic eruptions [not caused by man despite the claims of certain Iranian clerics, but useful for studies of CO2 atmospheric dwell times]), not the 50 to 200 years claimed in one part of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, but in agreement with another part of the same report.  Other studies of the low altitude introduction of CO2, where man's use of fossil fuels introduces the vast majority of it, show the half life in the atmosphere to be about 1 year.

3) The portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere due to man is estimated to be about 1.2% to maybe a couple of % based on other reasonable assumptions.  The seas and plants are the dominant factors determining the atmospheric concentration of CO2.  Warming seas increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2.  Increased CO2 causes more plant growth which uses more CO2.  Ocean animals with shells also use large amounts of CO2.  Higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 also cause land minerals to react with more CO2 and bind it up.  Thus, plants and land minerals provide some negative feedback to increased atmospheric CO2.

4)  The hot spot from about 8 to 12 km altitude near the equator that should be found if CO2 is acting as strongly as a greenhouse gas and enhancing the greenhouse gas effect of water vapor as is claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report has been searched for. The hot spot in the atmosphere is not present.  This is definitive proof that the UN IPCC computer models are wrong about the role of CO2.  This reason alone is not only an adequate reason to reject the man-made CO2 contribution to global warming being as large as that claimed by the UN IPCC report, but it requires a scientist to reject this hypothesis.  A theory cannot make so necessary a prediction and fail, and nonetheless still be claimed to be true.

5)  The temperatures on other planets and moons in our solar system are also rising, which is consistent with measurements of the solar cycle.

6)  Much of the claimed rise in land surface temperatures is due to the urban heat island effect, which has increased the reported temperatures in recent decades due to the closing down of more accurate rural weather stations around the world.  Few station sites follow the rules for good siting.  Urban stations should be entirely excluded when recording temperatures for global warming or cooling effects or assessing the effects of greenhouse gases such as CO2.  Instead, low altitude and urban stations have been given fallaciously high weight in the ground temperature records by extrapolating data taken from such warmer stations onto areas far from them but in higher altitude or more remote locations.  For instance, the temperature officially used for high altitudes in the Andes of Boliva are based on data from cities on the Pacific Ocean and hot jungles of the Amazon basin.  The cool Andes Mountains lie between these areas and are much cooler.  This trick has been used over and over around the world.

7)  Much raw temperature data has recently been pried loose from national temperature archives, often thanks to dogged requests under Freedom of Information Acts.  The rural stations in the U.S., Russia, Northern Europe, northern Australia, New Zealand, China, and some areas of Canada, Latin America, and Africa whose data has been examined carefully show little to no late 20th Century temperature increase.  The data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 was heavily manipulated, in ways that make no scientific sense, to enhance a rapid rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century.

8)  There is much evidence that the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warming, the Minoan Warming, and the Halocene Warmings b and a and other warmings were warmer than the present time.

9) The rate of the temperature increase at the start of the Medieval Warm Period was similar to that we had in the late 20th Century using even the inflated and manipulated temperature data.  There was also a warming period around 1700 in which the temperature rose 2.2C in just 36 years, compared to the 0.7C temperature increase of the 20th Century.

10) The sea surface temperature data, the balloon data, and the satellite temperature data for the late 20th Century show much smaller temperature increases than does the manipulated land surface data used by the alarmists.  The oceans cover 70% of the Earth and the satellites read temperatures over the entire Earth.

11)  The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 follow temperature increases rather than preceding them, consistent with dissolved CO2 being emitted upon the warming of the oceans or dissolved when the oceans cool.  The solubility of CO2 increases greatly with lower temperature and higher pressure.  Due to high pressure and cold temperatures, the deep ocean waters hold huge amounts of CO2, but it takes a long time to warm those waters in response to solar irradiance changes due to the huge amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of water, the low amount of heat energy in the gaseous atmosphere, the huge volume of water, and the depth of most of the oceans.  Consequently, the rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will lag general warming events by long times, though there is observable response to warming El Nino events and cooling La Nina events.

12)  Despite a continued CO2 concentration increase in the atmosphere since 1998, the temperatures have not risen, which was noted as an embarrassment in the dumped CRU e-mails.  The much-touted computer models are baffled by this.

13)  Solar wind and solar electromagnetic fields are now known to have major effects upon the cosmic ray flux on the Earth and other planets in the solar system.  When solar sunspot activity increases, solar irradiance increases, but so also does the solar wind and the range and strength of the solar electromagnetic field.  This shields the Earth from cosmic rays and the reduced flux of cosmic rays causes less lower atmosphere (below 3.2 km) nucleation and growth of clouds.  The Earth's temperature decreases sensitively to the amount of cloud cover in the lower atmosphere, so when the sun is less active, there are more cosmic rays and they generate more lower atmosphere clouds, which has a strong cooling effect.  Contrary to the frequent claims of the global warming alarmists, solar activity has stronger effects upon the Earth's temperature than just that caused by the changes in solar irradiance.

14)  The predicted catastrophic changes due to warming do not seem to have materialized.  The failure here is widespread and should not be a surprise given that these calamities did not happen during the earlier warm periods such as the Medieval Warm Period given in 8) above.  The historical record indicates that man generally benefited from these warmer periods.

The case for the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is so poor, that it is clear that the real reason so many support this false hypothesis does not lie in the science.  There are ulterior political and unethical business motives for the constant claims that man's use of fossil fuels is going to be responsible for a global climate catastrophe.  Those who want reasons to increase the control of our use of energy, flock to this false theory.  Those who want to add further high taxes love the idea of something like cap and trade taxes.  Those who wish to subject the United States to more international control, say the United Nations, love this false theory.  Those who stand to make money from the trade of carbon credits love it.  Those who are pushing federal investment and mandates to create the smart grid love it.  Those who are working on electric cars, wind generation of electricity, solar power generation of electricity, nuclear power, thermal insulation, higher efficiency light sources, light materials for transportation, products made from recycled materials, and many others who stand to make money from throttling fossil fuel use very often support this false alarmist idea.

Disclaimer:  My laboratory works on projects for oil companies, solar power companies, wind generator companies, nuclear power plants, suppliers to the coal industry, low-weight materials for transportation companies, efficient light sources, improved thermal insulation materials, materials made from recycled materials, and energy from recycled materials.  My laboratory will prosper better with a strong private sector, a strongly growing economy, a limited government, and with widespread respect for science and what it can do for us to make our lives better.  Bad science and the disrespect for science that it will generate is bad for the future of my laboratory.

Gore The Bore Resurfaces on Climate Change

Al Gore, the pontificater, the bore, the Yale elitist with the gentleman C grades in easy courses, has risen from the dead with an Op-Ed to the New York Times on 28 February 2010. It had seemed he was keeping a low profile due to the many revelations of bad science and outright fraud being the real source of the claims for the catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions alarm. While he is about to make many assertions that man needs to take action to prevent global warming, there are some very interesting evasions of offering any evidence that global warming is occurring or that it is in fact caused by man's use of fossil fuels. He also hedges his bets on the reality of man-made catastrophic global warming in effect by saying that we must

deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

Let us examine this energy and alternative energy job claim for a moment and then I will move on the global warming issues.  He complains that we have a growing dependence on oil from the most unstable region of the world.  Well, Iraq is embarking on an ambitious program to expand its oil production to exceed that of Saudi Arabia [The Economist, 20-26 Feb 2010].  It may not accomplish this quickly, but if it even comes close to matching the output of Saudi Arabia, the cost of oil will remain very reasonable for many years to come and the alternative energy companies Al Gore has invested heavily in will not be able to compete, even with much larger government subsidies than our government drowning in debt can provide.  OK, yes, Iraq is still in this volatile region, but every additional supply of oil adds to our energy security.  Of course, one can also ask Gore why he and his Progressive friends who care so much about energy security and who do not want to pay for oil abroad will not allow us to explore, drill, and develop oil fields in our own off-shore waters and in the ridiculously innumerable acres of government-held land in the U.S.  Neither does he explain why taxing the oil companies more heavily will help them to find more oil in the U.S. and abroad.  Neither does he explain why sending money abroad to buy oil is somehow worse than sending money abroad to buy any other goods, services, or resources.  We live in a global economy, which he seems to disparage with his fear of depending upon a global oil market, which in fact is a great advantage to us in stabilizing the price of oil and assuring its availability.

Next he makes the outrageous claim that we trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy.  I really do not know what he is basing these claims on.  It is true that China is rapidly increasing its output of cheap, inefficient solar panels largely for sales to countries with mandates requiring that they generate power with expensive solar power plants.  The technology is more advanced in the U.S., but our costs of production are rather high.  Perhaps Al Gore should call for a steep reduction in our absurdly high corporate income tax which makes it very difficult for American companies to compete in the global markets Al so fears.  After all, the U.S. and Japan, whose economy has not been able to get out of the starting blocks for the last 15 years, have the highest corporate taxes in the world today and Obama wants to make them higher!  Of course, Al would probably want a tax reduction only for his solar power companies, being a crony capitalist.  Then he also claims that he has enumerated the most important sources of jobs for the 21st Century.  What do you suppose the track record Teddy Roosevelt would have had for predicting the main sources of jobs in the 20th Century in 1910?  Or, you may substitute the name of any politician of that time you might prefer.

Al Gore goes on to say:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

 I have dealt enough with the scientific scandal of the claims made by the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists that I will not lay out the magnitude of the problems here again, though I will continue to discuss those problems in other posts.  I am just going to say that this attempt to minimize the scientific problems of the global warming alarmists has not held up in Australia or now in the United Kingdom and is beginning to collapse on the heads of such alarmists in the U.S. also.  Many comedians are now picking up on this fraud and that is usually the end of any theory being taken seriously!  So, Al Gore shows himself here as an ostrich with his head in the sand.  Perhaps this is a delaying tactic, so he will have time to unload his alternative energy stocks on other Progressive suckers.

By the way, when I tried to warn other alumni of Brown University and Case Western Reserve University of how the scientific argument for man-made global warming had fallen apart and that the alternative energy companies were going to have a very hard time of it as a result a couple of months ago, I was called rude, trailer trash, a flat-earther, and many other names by a great many alumni.  Some of them had invested in alternative energy, one planned to work for such a company when he finished his graduate studies, one was an associate professor whose research grants depended upon the scare, and many others were just being good religious Progressives.

Al goes on to say:

the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

The record of the UN IPCC reports has been to consistently overestimate the sea level rise and there is no reason known to me to think that more recently they have underestimated sea level rise to come.  The Arctic ice cap expands and contracts mostly due to winds and not due to melting, so it is rather insensitive to any modest warming, such as that since the end of the Little Ice Age.  In any case, if sea ice melts, it does not change the sea level!  The ice on Baffin Island and on Greenland can cause the sea level to rise, but there is no reason to think all that ice is going to melt either.  This is just more groundless alarmism perhaps issued to help his stocks hold value until he can unload them.  As for Antarctica, most of the continent has been experiencing ice expansion, not contraction, in recent times and again there is no reason for alarm.  Furthermore, there is no link to man's CO2 emissions here.

Then he makes the claim that

January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

And this is almost certainly nonsense also.  The official NOAA land surface temperature data has been so badly manipulated to make it seem as though the world has been warming that we now know that data is useless for establishing whether a given month or year is one of the warmer months or years in the last 130 years.  Absolutely a meaningless claim.  This is the word of an inveterate liar, so that everything such a liar has to say must be taken as meaningless.  How naive does Gore think the American People are?

Now let us examine a perfectly illogical statement Al made:

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

Prof. Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia and a stalwart alarmist, recently stated that there has been no significant global warming since 1995.  Since 2001, there has been a slight cooling, if anything, though this may also be regarded as insignificant.  Now, if there was warming from 1990 to 1995 and then the warming stopped, the decade from 2000 to 2010 would be the warmest decade in recent history, even though no warming had occurred since 1995.  But, Al wants us to believe that the claim that the last decade was the warmest means that warming has not stopped.  This does not logically follow Al.  You should have taken a philosophy course in remedial logic at Yale, Al.  The claim that the last decade has been the hottest since modern records have been kept is also based on the warming manipulated surface temperature records, which disagree with the satellite temperature records which are more accurate and have not been tampered with to try to create an exaggerated warming.

Al goes on to make the argument that the recent heavy snowfalls are the result of global warming causing an increase in winter humidity.  I have already debunked this argument in an earlier post.

Al's specious claims continue:

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

The global warming pollutant is primarily CO2 and it is not a pollutant any more than water vapor is.  By far the most ice is in the Antarctic and it is not melting as claimed.  Other ice-covered areas are growing and contracting from year to year as they usually do, but perhaps with a very slight tendency to melt due to the recent end of the Little Ice Age.  But, the seas are actually rising at a very slow rate compared to the average rise since the end of the last major Ice Age.  While some have rashly predicted that hurricanes will become stronger, there is no evidence in history to support this and the likelihood is disputed by the best experts on violent storms.  Last I knew, there was also no reason to believe that flooding and drought were significantly worse than at other times in history.  I have no idea where Gore got that claim.  As for the seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures, these go through cycles historically and there is no link to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Where does Al get all of this nonsense?  Probably from his day dreams, which he spent so much time doing when he got a D in the course of the global warming advocating professor he now claims was so important to him when he was at Yale.

Gore now ramps up the scale of human misery to be caused by global warming:

the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

If the world were to become slightly warmer, life in most of the world would become easier, not harder.  There might be some civil unrest in Florida and Arizona, since fewer people from New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would choose to move there upon retirement!  Any slight extension to the growing season would be welcomed, not feared, in those cooler places which the greatest warming has been occurring, if you could actually believe the claims that it has, which you cannot.  The increase in deadly diseases idea does not hold water either.  For instance, it is claimed malaria will spread north.  Nonsense, malaria was widely in the north in the 1800s when it was colder than now.  It moved south mostly because swamps and marshes in the north were drained and because DDT was widely used there in earlier decades.

Next Al Gore informs us about his political, ethical, and human race assessments.  This is interesting.  He bemoans the fact that the economy is now largely global, that the industrial countries do not want to lose their jobs, and that the emerging economies have rising expectations.  He goes on:

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

Apparently, he thinks the world should be bipolar and that communism somehow made it more properly bipolar.  He thinks a strong belief in market economics is hubris.  He claims that government is the democracy sphere and that it is in opposition to the market sphere.  This is really weird.  Government, even when largely democratic, does not allow everyone the freedom to buy whatever goods and services they choose individually or allow them to start their own business or allow them to work freely for anyone who wishes to hire them.  Government, even so-called democratic government, always tends to interfere with these personal decisions.  There is no more democratic way for a free People to live than in a free market economy.  Yet, Gore tries to make us think that the one-size-fits-all-decrees of government make for a more democratic society than does a free market society.  Hogwash.

Next, Gore sets out on a tirade against television:

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

This is a bit strange too.  The heyday of television for the news was prior to the recent period when Gore wanted carbon cap and trade and restrictions on energy use.  Pretty much all but one news network (Fox) have been touting the Progressive line on global warming and the nefarious role of the industrialized humans, anyway.  One would think he might be railing against the Internet, which he invented, for its role in helping to expand opposition to the Democrats cap and trade schemes, disseminating the evidence that the catastrophic global warming claims were false, enlarging the Tea Party revolt, and getting out the information in the Democrat bills they did not want the People to know about until after they became law.  Oh, but of course, he cannot rail against the Internet, because he invented it!  Then, it is curious that he talks about exploitation of the ignorant and easily victimized People in the same sentence in which he tells us that calling the Progressive program "socialist" is unfair.  I still find the very words exploitation and solidarity sickening after decades of hearing them pour out of the mouths of socialists, Marxists, and communists!

Now the elitist Progressive comes forth strongly again:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Yes, of course, we cannot allow the People to make their own choices in the free market, because we must use the force of government to redeem these sorry sinners.  We, the elitist Progressives, must use the force of government to enforce myriad laws to make the People do what they will not choose to do individually in their own lives.  Of course, many of them are not college educated and many who are did not go to Ivy League quality universities, so we brilliant and well-studied elite will so manipulate the government that these unwashed peasants will do as we tell them to, while we all pretend this was democratically decided.  The People will not make the right personal choices, so we will deceive them into thinking they made the very laws which they would not obey except for the fact that the government will force them to do so.  Government must constrain the private sector to redeem the sinning People.  Government is the Messiah or the elitists who manipulate its levers are the Messiahs.

This sort of manipulation has been going on for a long time.  For most of this time, this caused many people simply to feel disenfranchised.  But, finally, the people became angry about it and they decided they had to do something about being taken advantage of by those who manipulated the levers of government in order to redeem them from the things and actions they loved.  The People have responded with the Tea Party movement.  It is now clear that very many of the People have seen through the Al Gores, John Kerrys, Obamas, Pelosis, Reids, Waxmans, and their ilk.

Perhaps the day of big government redeeming the People will finally come to an end and the People will finally redeem their government.  To do that, they must force it to obey the Constitution, which will take some doing.  But once you see through the obscurantism of the Gores, this becomes a lot easier.  The man behind the curtain has finally been seen and he is not impressive at all.

The Collapsing Carbon Market

The Kyoto Protocol required developed countries which did not meet their carbon reduction quotas to purchase credits from clean energy projects in the developing world.  This created a carbon trading market, which meant that many people, including Al Gore, were able to make a great deal of money from the alarm caused by the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  Those making such money became a powerful lobby with a strong incentive to further feed the man-made global warming frenzy.

The Guardian of the UK has now reported that the carbon market is no longer growing and may soon collapse.  The failure of the Copenhagen Conference to set new emissions standards to take effect when the Kyoto Protocol reduction schedule ends in 2012, is causing many banks to stop lending money for carbon-emissions offset projects.  These banks are not expanding their workforce on the carbon desks as anticipated and some people are already being released.  The financiers backing one large clean energy project in the developing world backed out this month.  The recession also contributed to there being lower emissions and hence less overshoot on quotas needing to be offset.  The price of carbon offsets has fallen, especially in the U.S. and Australia where attempts to pass carbon cap and trade legislation have failed.

The weakness of the carbon trading market, combined with the realization by many that the science behind the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming was fraudulent, is and will further result in a great weakening of the forces pushing for catastrophic energy use restrictions and the attendant destruction of the economies of the nations of the developed world. 

NOAA is Fountainhead of Exaggerated Temperature Data

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina.  This center produces the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), which is a land surface temperature record from around the world.  This data set is not just raw temperature data, but is temperature station temperature measurements averaged in a grid across the Earth.  This data is supplied to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University, which performs further data manipulations upon the data.  The data was also supplied to the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where their temperature data sets were examined more closely following the dump of many documents that occurred in late November.  The fourth most significant set of temperatures comes from Japan, but their database is also based upon the NOAA GHCN temperature database.  Despite the use of the same basic set of manipulated data by NOAA, NASA, and the CRU, they used to and often still do pretend that each fully manipulated data set came to very similar conclusions independently.

Recent analysis by computer expert E. Mike Smith and the certified consulting meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo has shown manipulations of the GHCN which have had the effect of greatly exaggerating the rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century, as well as in the first decade of the present century.  The analysis was so blatantly designed for that purpose, that it is unavoidable to say that an agency of our government was knowingly lying to the American People and abusing the good name of the United States throughout the world.  How was this perfidy performed?  I have discussed a number of aspects of this huge effort to distort the temperature data to support a theory of sudden highly unusual temperature rise in the late 20th Century and a sustained high in the first decade of this century in a number of posts in November and December.  I will add to that story here.

First, the GHCN was based on a few tens of reporting stations until about 1870, then the number grew rapidly until about 1920 when it was more than 1300 stations.  There was another growth in the number in the late 1940s with more than 1700 stations reporting temperatures.  About 1970 the numbers started to drop, but remained above 1500 until about 1990.  In the late 1990s, the number of temperature readings entered into the GHCN database dropped precipitously to a few hundred, though the number of stations still reporting data did not drop anywhere near so rapidly.  E. Mike Smith and Joseph D'Aleo show that the high altitude and high latitude station data was preferentially dropped from the data set, as was rural data.  The weight of the reported data stations moved south in the northern hemisphere as well.  More coastal and more airport (hardly ever close to cities, right?) station data was included.  Colder stations were systematically not entered into the data set.  To make up for the missing data in many grids around the world, temperature values were made up for those grids based on stations as far as 1200 km away.  Thus mountain data might be based on the data of two cities with large urban heat island effects.  See the story as told by Joseph D'Aleo here and by E. Mike Smith here.

The GHCN data shows warming in only a fraction of the reported grid areas and they are mostly in the higher latitudes and in mountainous regions.  I earlier discussed the effect on Russia.  D'Aleo notes that:

In Canada the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above 3000 feet were reduced in half. Canada’s semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING. Just 1 thermometer remains for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic. Winters are frigid but summers are slightly warmer than at other places in the Canadian Arctic.

China had 100 stations in 1950, over 400 in 1960 then only 35 by 1990. Temperatures reflected these station distribution changes. CRU’s own Phil Jones showed in 2008 peer review paper that contamination by urbanization in China was 1.8F per century. Neither NOAA nor CRU adjusts for this contamination. NASA to their credit, makes an attempt to adjust for urbanization, but outside the United States, the lack of updated population data has NASA adjusting cities with data from other cities with about as many stations warming as cooling.

High elevation stations have disappeared from the data base. Stations in the Andes and Bolivia have vanished. Temperatures for these areas are now determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon.

Of course, other adjustments have been applied to the measured temperature data, with the data shown to the public being only this data.  These adjustments are often times made frequently and are undocumented.  I previously discussed a comparison of so-called unadjusted data for Central Park and data which was said to be adjusted, but it turns out that even unadjusted data is not raw temperature data.  From D'Aleo,

The older temperatures were adjusted downward, as though fewer people were on Manhattan Island and less energy was used in earlier times than now!  Similar adjustments were made to some so-called rural stations also.  Here is the result for Davis, California, the nearest "rural" station to San Francisco, though it is a town of more than 60,000 people and is a suburb of Sacramento.  The recent drop of reported stations has resulted in only 4 stations for the entire state of California.  Three of those stations are along the coast in the Los Angeles area and the Davis station is the only one left in the mid-latitudes of the state.  So, what has NOAA done to the only reported station in the recent record outside of the coastal LA area?

The pre-1960 data was adjusted downward to change a net cooling after about 1908 into a net warming.  This would possibly make sense if the population of Davis and nearby Sacramento had been much larger in 1880 and then they had shrunk in size drastically until 1960, when the population became stable.  But, that certainly did not happen, now did it?  Now, if you are going to represent the large state of California with only 4 station temperature histories in recent times and you want to tell everyone that there has been no cooling since 1998, this is a great way to do it.  Drop all the station readings in the mountains of CA and drop those from the northern third of the state entirely only for those pesky recent times when the catastrophic AGW theory says temperatures must remain high.  Keep the many cooler station temperature inputs, of course, for earlier times so that the temperature record will have a recent rise.  Having stations which are really in urban areas is the way to go and the manipulations are time consuming enough that you do not want to have to do them on too many station's temperature data, so just keep a few urban results.

There is a huge pattern of falsifying the temperature record performed by our own government for the purpose of misleading the American People and the people of the rest of the world.  This is a blatant power grab by the government to tax, regulate, and limit the use of energy.  This data provides the justification for the EPA to condemn CO2 as a pollutant and to heavily regulate all energy users.  It is an excuse to offer subsidies and mandates to favor certain alternative energy industries and certain so-called green companies.  These industries and companies can be counted upon to offer frequent bribes, called campaign contributions, to the politicians who gain this power.  This data is also the basis for an increase in effective world governance of Americans by a UN dominated by governments which do not hold the rights of the individual as sovereign or even worthy of respect.  This fraud has been perpetrated for the purpose of advancing socialism and world government.

The scalawags and scoundrels of NOAA and NASA must be kicked out of the government for fraud and denied their pensions and benefits.  The EPA administrators who claimed CO2 was a pollutant based on their data showed sufficiently bad judgment that they should be demoted to GS9 level positions.  Those in the House of Representatives who voted for carbon cap and trade should all be turned out of office in the 2010 election for their awful judgment.  Any Congressman who was willing to do so much damage to the American economy and to destroy so many jobs on the basis of such flim-flam artistry has no business making our critical national legislation.  Those Senators who have supported the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as being correct, should also be retired.  Such fools should never be permitted such power.

Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900

Using data downloaded from NASA GISS and picking rural sites near, but not too near, to urban sites, a comparison has been made of the temperature trend over time of the rural sites compared to those of the urban sites.  28 pairs of sites across the U.S. were compared.  The paired rural site is from 31 to 91 km from the urban site in each pair.  The result is that urban and rural sites were similar in 1900, with the urban sites slightly higher.  The urban sites have shown an increase in temperatures since then.  The rural sites show no such temperature increase and appear to be generally unchanging with only ups and downs localized in time.  Over a 111 year time span, the urban sites temperatures have risen to be about 1.5C warmer than the rural sites.  So, the much touted rising temperatures in the U.S. are due to the urban heat island effect and not due to a global warming such as has been proposed to be caused by human emissions of CO2 due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

You should find this video very interesting:



I find myself wondering how the scientists at NASA GISS have been such proponents of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis given this temperature data.  It sure seems insane that the EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant, which it will suppress vigorously with command and control tactics.  It is clear that there is no problem caused by CO2 emissions to be addressed.  Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade type bills and EPA regulations on CO2 as a pollutant are nothing but the politics of Mass Destruction leveled upon American industries and households by the party of massive power lust, the Socialist Democrat Party.

As the fable of man-made global warming due to man's CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels continues to unravel, the American People are going to become ever more untrusting of the Democrats, the print and non-cable media, and, unfortunately, scientists.  Those who have failed to earn our trust generally have some common characteristics.  They are elitists, socialists, and man-hating environmentalists.  When these same people propose to overhaul our health care system, to regulate the financial industry, increase the minimum wage rate, promote labor unions, increase deficit spending, and increase taxes, we should be sure to remember how unreliable their judgment was on the issue of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  Not only is there no looming catastrophe, but there is no such problem at all!  They have created a phantom problem to justify a huge power grab.

There is a dirty secret behind the scientific side of this scandal.  As the universities have become more and more hotbeds of socialism and political correctness, the scientists who receive federal funding for their research at those socialist/environmentalist/elitist/political correctness hotbeds have not wanted to be left out.  Once, they were more objective and more scientific than the so-called social scientists and the humanities faculty.  Most of this difference has now disappeared because we have so long allowed the lunatic left to run our universities and our government funding agencies.  The scientists are now about as engaged in the cause of advancing socialism/elitism/radical environmentalism/political correctness as is the rest of the faculty at our universities and our government-run laboratories and institutions.

Many say this catastrophic man-made global warming conspiracy could not possibly happen, but they greatly underestimate the power of the socialist control of our once proud institutions of objective learning and study.  They are massively corrupt now.  When we clean house of the politicians in Washington and most of our state capitals, we also need to find a way to clean house in our universities and government laboratories and institutions.  We need real scientists, not socialist pretenders.

Postscript added on 29 January 2010:

Some people have assumed that I made the video above.  This is not the case.  I was impressed by the effort and I thought it was most likely a science fair project which was unlikely to be blemished by artifices and was probably a fairly straightforward treatment of readily available data, so others could readily check up on these results.  It was a challenge to others to see if they could show the same thing as was claimed in this video.  I wish I could tell everyone who did make this video.  They deserve credit for it.

My own assessment of the bad science backing the theory of catastrophic global warming due to man's emissions of CO2 is very broad-based and is not dependent upon the reproducibility of the results in this video.  However, analyses of temperature data from many other areas of the world are showing similar results and I am more inclined to believe than not that if unbiased scientists examine the data as this father and son did, they will find that any increase in U.S. temperatures in rural areas is much less than the alarming results claimed by the advocates of catastrophic AGW.  The urban heat island effect is large and most of the data in the U.S. database is heavily affected by that.  I live and work between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where the temperature is higher due to the urban heat island effect.  Nonetheless, the temperatures recorded at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and at Reagan Washington National Airport are commonly 2 or 3 degrees Fahenheit higher than those at my laboratory or home.

UN IPCC Head Makes Big Money from Global Warming Fears

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri was a railway engineer, who earned a Ph.D. in economics and became the director of the Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi, India in 1981.  This institute was set up in 1974 by India's largest privately owned business, the Tata Group.  He headed the UN IPCC as its chairman when the AR4 report of 2007 was produced and claimed that catastrophic man-made global warming was a certainty.  As is the case with Al Gore, Dr. Pachauri is making many millions of dollars a year off of his status as a leading catastrophic anthropogenic global warming "expert."  He sits on dozens of company boards of directors or acts as an adviser to them.  He advises carbon traders and industries with an interest in sustainability or being perceived as "green."

When people oppose the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming, they are often said to be in the employ of oil and coal firms, whether they are or are not.  Conservatives and libertarians are aware that Al Gore is making money from his advocacy of man-made global warming, but they have said little about Dr. Pachauri making many millions per year from his advocacy.

Obama's Job Creation Summit

This is really a funny event.  Obama has gathered together some executives from large companies, government Labor and Commerce Department people, and his ever popular labor union leaders for a jobs creation conference.  After taxing small business owners to death and wanting to tax them still more beyond the grave, after threatening everyone with energy restrictions under the ridiculous claim that CO2 is a pollutant causing catastrophic man-made global warming, after telling businessmen in industry after industry that he has a Marxist hatred for them, after threatening to saddle companies with new health care expenses, after a Stimulus Package that creates no private sector jobs, after threatening business contracts and property, and after making all investment decisions a roll of the dice, Obama is having a job creation conference.  Is he admitting finally that he who sits at the feet of every Marxist professor he can find in college has no idea how the economy works?

Indeed, he does not.  Including labor union leaders in such a meeting flies in the face of its purpose: job creation.  Labor union leaders are experts in one thing related to jobs: killing them.  This is why private sector employees have been avoiding labor unions now for decades.  They have come to understand this.  This is also why the labor union bosses so badly need card check.  Without intimidation, they cannot force private sector employees to join the unions.

The executives of large businesses are not really interested in spurring job creation either.  The large businesses do not hire many people.  It is small businesses that hire most people.  So, if a large business executive were to spur more jobs in the economy in general, he is doing more to grow his competition, the lean and mean small companies who are always trying to make inroads in his product and service areas.  The big businessman usually fears small business.  The last thing he wants to do is to help them grow.

With 15.7 million Americans unemployed, this jobs summit should have an easy job creating new jobs.  There are plenty of sufficiently skilled and interested potential employees available for hire.  All we need is for large numbers of small business owners to gain the means and the confidence to hire them.  Within a framework of Marxist theory, there is no way to motivate the small businessmen to hire.  No, it would require Capitalist theory to understand what government actions and inactions are needed to spur job creation.  The answers are tried and true.  Most small businessmen can tell you what is needed.  They just need these very simple encouragements:

• No new payroll taxes.
• No threats to take down their businesses when they die with a death tax.
• Lower individual income taxes for higher income brackets.  Finally come to understand that the net government revenues increase with lower upper bracket income tax rates than those we presently have, while encouraging growth of the economy.  The onlyreason for higher rates is to punish the rich.
• Remove the minimum wage laws or at least lower the minimum wage.
• Stop increasing unemployment insurance rates.
• Control Workmen's Compensation Insurance costs with tort reform.
• Do not raise the cost of health insurance as ObamaCare will certainly do.
• Do not increase energy costs and lower energy reliability as carbon cap and trade or the EPA's plan to declare CO2 a pollutant will do.
• Do not threaten businesses with union takeovers as card check will do.
• Cut back on government spending so investment capital is available for the private sector.
• Lower corporate income taxes, so American companies can compete with companies abroad, almost all of which now have lower taxes than do American corporations.
• Reduce barriers to trade.  Simplify both import and export laws and regulations.
• Understand that Medicare and Social Security will both be turning in their IOUs in just a very few years and that increasing payroll taxes on them at that time will kill many jobs.
• Reduce the burdens of government regulations, instead of constantly increasing them.
• End subsidies that distort the markets into inefficient activities.
• Allow the drilling of oil and gas fields in the US and its offshore waters.
• Sell off much of the federal lands which are not being used productively, so that private owners can use them productively.  Use the income to reduce government tax rates.
  
• Encourage the states to stop business discouraging activities, such as those common in California, New York, Michigan, and Ohio to name a few.

OK, so if we saw Obama and the Democrat Congress doing these things, rather than the opposite in every case, we small businessmen would be hiring people instead of firing them.  As long as Obama and his cadres of comrades refuse to recognize these basic factors in the economy, there is simply no justification for companies to hire.  It is all very simple, if you are not a childish, Marxist blockhead.

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Evidence Was Not Even Evidence

The primary evidence offered in the UN IPCC reports of 2001 and 2007 for the catastrophic effect of man's carbon dioxide emissions was that there was no natural force that could explain the rapid rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century, so it must have been due to the increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.  This is a dangerous kind of argument to make in any case, since the science of the way in which CO2 itself might be making such a rapid temperature increase as was claimed was itself weak and because the list of understood natural effects on climate was known to be quite incomplete.  But, this was nonetheless the argument that convinced many scientists, most of the media, most politicians, and many of the People that catastrophic AGW was a very good reason for drastically changing the way we live, even if it meant a massive economic slowdown, a huge loss of jobs, unreliable and much more expensive energy, and maybe even cold buildings in winters and hot buildings in the summers.

The recent massive release of documents from the most respected of the pro-AGW climate research centers, that of the CRU of the University of East Anglia, showed that there was what can only be called a conspiracy among the small group of climate scientists who played the biggest role in promoting the idea of catastrophic AGW.  The major American and Canadian scientists were closely involved along with many of the major scientists in the United Kingdom and others of the European Union.  I have earlier discussed some of the problems already discovered with the Michael Mann land temperature proxy and some aspects of the Briffa land data series of proxy temperatures.  These two series of reconstructed temperatures from earlier times both produced hockey stick temperature records in which the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) (900 to 1300 AD) was minimized to appear to be much less than that of the late 20th Century despite considerable evidence from other sources that the MWP was actually warmer than the recent period.  These series also tended to minimize the decrease in temperatures of the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850) and moderate the temperature increase prior to 1940.  From about 1940 to 1976 there was cooling and then the land instrumental temperature record kept by the CRU and by the NASA GISS took off with very rapid temperature increases from 1976 to 1998.  This land instrumental record was doctored and affected by heat island effects to make global temperatures seem to rise at a faster rate in this period than they actually did.

It was long known that the catastrophic AGW scientists wanted to hide the warm temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) due to statements one of the in-group made to a scientist he thought was one of them, but who had too much integrity and spoke publicly about the wish to minimize the historical evidence of the MWP.  The recent release of documents has brought forth many more issues of unscientific tampering with the temperature measurement record.  The most famous such issue of the moment is the "Hide the Decline" issue relating to a temperature proxy series by Briffa, one of the most cited and influential AGW scientists.  His proxy temperature data set from tree ring studies used the tree ring data set up to 1960 and then spliced in the instrumental temperature data set from then on.  The decline being hidden was not the decline in temperatures since about 1998, but was a substantial decline in temperatures inferred from the tree ring data over the period from 1960 to the end of the 20th Century, which left the temperatures in the latter part of the 20th Century, as inferred from the tree ring data, well below those of the 1930s!  The full Briffa tree ring data set is shown below in red, while the portion used as input for the UN IPCC reports is shown in black.

There are a number of interesting things to note here about this data.  We know that the late 20th Century was not so much colder than the 1930s as this implies.  Another is that the late 20th Century shows a dip in temperatures severe enough to imply that it was as cold as most of the latter part of the Little Ice Age.  Well, we know that is not true.  This data would also imply that early in the period of temperature decline into the Little Ice Age, it was still warmer than in a few decades of the late 20th Century, which would be consistent with the slightly earlier MWP having been warmer, a fact the AGW scientists wanted to suppress.   

But the bottom line here is that the tree ring proxy data appears clearly to be unreliable.  The correlation of the tree rings with known temperature data in the late 20th Century is clearly wrong, even though we know the instrumental land data to have been bumped upward artificially, we do know the temperatures really were warmer than those from the tree ring data.  There are many factors that affect tree ring growth in addition to temperature, including sunlight available to the tree, which may be shaded by other trees, soil quality, water supply, and disease or bug attacks.  Yet this data was a cornerstone piece of evidence for AGW, along with other discredited bristlecone data by Mann.

The trick used to hide this Briffa tree ring problem in the recent 20th Century, which anyone could see was both wrong and inconsistent with the AGW claims, was to terminate the use of the tree ring data set in 1960 and splice in the instrumental temperature record from that time on.  Thus, the AGWs could use a tree ring data set that rather flattened the whole temperature record from 1400 to 1960, which had a good low temperature at the end of that series, and could have the stretched out, tampered with land instrumental temperature record added on from that time on.   This created wonderful hockey stick data such as that used in the UN IPCC reports.  The data from the UN IPCC report of 2001 is shown below.

Whereas the Briffa tree ring temperature proxy data set showed a dip in temperatures after the 1930s that is as much as 0.5 degree Centigrade cooler, this UN IPCC data set shows a dip in the second half of the 20th Century which is a small fraction of that and it is followed by a steep rise to temperatures which have not been matched in the last thousand years.  WELL, this is all complete NONSENSE.  This is a huge scientific FRAUD.  Note the names cited for the temperature curves used in this UN IPCC figure.  They are Mann, Jones (head of CRU), and Briffa, all co-conspirators in the catastrophic AGW scandal.

I have earlier discussed other problems relating to the Briffa proxy temperature data sets revealed by Steve McIntyre relating to the Yamal tree ring data from Siberia.  Steve McIntyre had much earlier been able to obtain enough of Michael Mann's data to figure out how it had been used to generate false hockey stick temperature data.

Note that the instrumental land temperature record goes back to 1881, but these scientists preferred to use the tree ring data up to 1960, rather than splicing in the instrumental data back in 1881, or anytime earlier in the 20th Century.  The tree ring data interpretation gave them lots of room to get the results they wanted or maybe it just happened to give them the result they wanted.  If the instrumental record had offered as low a baseline or stick for their hockey stick, they would no doubt have spliced it in earlier at some advantageous time.  As I noted earlier, the recent release of CRU documents has also made the very sorry state of the documentation of the original data sets and the adjustments made on them over the years at CRU impossible to reconstruct.  The unscientific and sorry state of this data made it impossible for CRU to release this data to Freedom of Information Act requests without huge embarrassment.   Their own scientists could not reconstruct results scientists at CRU had published earlier.  The released documents clearly show scientists pulling their hair out and going stark raving mad trying to deal with the mess.  This being the case, destroying the data, as Jones threatened to do, would have appeared to be the best thing to do!

This conspiracy of scientists claiming catastrophic AGW turned climate science from a little funded scientific backwater into a field funded with literally billions of dollars.  It made the few scientists deep in the conspiracy very famous and made them heads of various research centers.  It was a very successful fraud for a surprisingly long time.  But, the fraud was doomed to be revealed.  Because this research had many public policy implications worldwide, it was certain to attract the attention of other scientists and even historians who knew something of the past.  More and more, these scientists, just as I did, saw that some very bad science was being done and rewarded heavily by governments looking for another crisis to justify their exercise of more power over the People and to do so worldwide.

Frankly, the claims were fairly obviously bogus and could be readily seen as such by anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history and with a scientifically trained mind.  This being the case, we should judge very harshly those scientists who have not spoken out against this fraud, as well as those government bureaucrats in agencies such as NASA, NOAA, EPA, and the State Department here in the US who have been involved with the assessment of AGW issues, and the politicians who have advocated taking drastic actions to curtail and tax the use of cheap and reliable fossil fuel energy without getting good scientific advice.  In fact, many of these people were very vociferous advocates that the science was decided and any doubters were foos and even traitors.

I am going to call out the two universities I studied at in particular for having disappointed me by not having a single scientist who argued against this AGW fraud publicly.  In fact, both Case Western Reserve University and Brown University promoted the AGW fraud as politically correct on campus and in the school newspapers and the alumni magazines.  Shame on you, Brown University and Case Western Reserve University!  As in so many other issues, you have both made your bias toward socialism obvious by favoring its appetite over reality.

I also believe that those major companies that jumped on the AGW and alternative energy subsidy bandwagon should be scolded severely.  Among these companies are GE, GM, Ford, Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, and many others who have been claiming to be reducing CO2 emissions in order to save the Earth from a man-made greenhouse gas-induced warming catastrophe.  They had a civic duty to declare AGW nonsense and not to seek subsidies and other benefits from the AGW frenzy.

OK, Let's Have Some Fun

For so long, Al Gore and other Anthropogenic Global Warming Alarmists have been trying to scare us all to death and back to the caves in penance for our awful planet destruction due to using fossil fuels.  They have tried to terrify our children.

So, let's have some relief and perhaps a bit of revenge.  Let us enjoy ourselves and rejoice in our deliverance, at least assuming that Obama can no longer get away with further destruction of the economy with his vow to use Chicago enforcement against the AGW doubters and worse yet the deniers, such as me.

Have some fun:

EPA Energy Restrictions and Copenhagen

The Democrat Senate has put off carbon cap and trade legislation, according to Harry Reid, until the Spring.  This is too late for Obama to make a splash at Copenhagen.  So, he will have the EPA claim that CO2 is a pollutant and have the EPA put severe restrictions on the use of energy in the US.  This is the "operationally significant" energy use restriction Obama has been talking about.  He has made some kind of agreement with China, it appears to some, and he and China will announce some restrictions at Copenhagen.

Will we all have to prepare for rolling blackouts?  Or, will we be denied the use of our cars on Saturdays?  Or will we simply throw more people into the ranks of the unemployed as those businesses which Obama does not like are shutdown?  Don't you just love this change and the transformation of America, People?  It is coming.  If Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their cadres of comrades have their way, this will not be America for long.  After all, if CO2 is a pollutant, why should the sovereign rights of the individual be of any significance at all?

Of course, the socialists will push ahead with all of this despite the unraveling of the claimed scientific evidence for catastrophic man-made global warming.  This will only prove that the need for the mandate to control the People by controlling their energy use drove the so-called "science,", not the other way around.  How revealing!

Probable Massive Exposure of Global Warming Alarmist Fraud

A 62 megabytes zipped file which unpacks to yield about 156 megabytes of e-mail correspondence and computer code from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in East Anglia, the UK, whose data was the primary basis for the UN IPCC reports, including the last one of 2007, has been made public by a hacker or a whistleblower.  This information appears to be shedding a lot of light on a conspiracy to mislead other scientists and the public into believing in man-made catastrophic global warming.  The e-mail correspondence discusses withholding the original data from review by skeptics and destroying it if need be to do so, control over editors at major scientific journals so only global warming alarmists would be published, cabal control over manuscript reviewers, celebration of the death of a global warming skeptic, and how to skew data to make the warming of the late 20th Century look more alarming and to minimize the lack of warming in this century.

This data is being discussed at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That and many other websites.  I have long claimed the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming was bad.  The mystery was always how had such bad science managed to hijack so many scientific journals, public policy, and the media.  The answer appeared to be that it was always mostly about meeting the socialist and internationalist agendas for power and broad control of all of the People of this Earth.  This correspondence seems to make it clear that these "scientists" really did have an agenda they held more important than science.

There are at least two major effects to be expected from this.  First, it should prove much more difficult for the Democrat Congress to pass the carbon cap and trade legislation in the Senate and for the two houses to come to agreement on a final bill.  It should be harder for the EPA to move forward with its stupid claim that CO2 is a pollutant and invoke the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to restrict its emission.  Corollary to these, it should be much harder for the US to submit to any treaty or agreement at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, though I expect Obama will try still to find every way he can to restrict fossil fuel use in America.  This will help tremendously in averting a disaster to our economy, many lost jobs, minimize the arguments for green energy subsidies, and the need to make major changes in our lifestyles.

The second major effect is that science itself will be given a very black eye, despite the heroic efforts of some scientists to combat this bad science and reveal it for the nonsense it was.  The People will be less likely to listen to scientists in the future and will not accept their authority so readily.  This is both good and bad.  I used to think it was principally bad, but now I am seeing this as much more of a mixed bag.  The scientific method is still as important as always and I want the People to understand that.  These scientists were evil because they subverted scientific thinking.  They are to be condemned because they claimed an unwarranted authority and argued from authority to browbeat the public into believing them and following them.  It is very important that the People understand that it is always dangerous to submit their minds to simply accepting the word of authorities.  There is no real option but to think and think very hard yourself, unless you wish always or more often than not, to be hoodwinked.

There is nothing really different about science than politics with respect to the unwary being hoodwinked if they do not use their own minds to critically evaluate for themselves the truth of everything they are told.  There is no substitute for thinking for yourself.  It may be more common for politicians to take advantage of those who do not think for themselves than it is for scientists to do so, but we should learn here that there are plenty of people in any profession who will argue from authority to scam the gullible.

Senator Boxer Notes the CO2 Emissions Benefit of Recession

The recession has led to less energy use, which has caught the approving attention of Senator Boxer (Democrat, CA).  Given her backing of carbon cap and trade legislation, perhaps we have an explanation here for the Democrats being so interested in taking over the health care industry and pushing fossil fuel energy restrictions and taxes, even as the highest unemployment rate in 26 years ravages the USA.  

The longer they fiddle while the private sector burns under higher government taxes, more regulations, higher health care costs, higher energy costs, increased labor union threats, loss of creditor standing, dictated management compensations, automotive design mandates, added financial system controls, and anti-business demagoguery, the less energy we use.  After all, there is a direct correlation between the amount of energy used and the growth of the economy.  This same correlation says that carbon cap and trade will decrease the growth of the economy and will mean there will be fewer jobs.  I guess we might as well get used to more than 10% unemployment.  It may be around as long as the Democrats control the presidency and Congress.  It is such a great way to reduce our energy use and we know how important that is to them.

Obama hides true costs of carbon cap and trade

The Competitive Enterprise Institute used the Freedom of Information Act to force the Treasury Department to release a number of memos about the real costs of carbon cap and trade legislation.  It proved difficult to get the Obama administration to give up these memos and reports and they were heavily censored.  Censoring of Defense Department documents I understand, but censoring Treasury Department documents is generally much less understandable.  It must be an elitist thing.  Those dumb taxpayer dolts have no need to know and they would not understand anyway.

Gary Jason gives a rundown on what was found and summarizes some previous estimates of the effect of carbon cap and trade on jobs and costs here.  He points out that the CRA think tank estimated that carbon cap-and-trade will cause the loss of 3.2 million jobs in America over 15 years.  The Obama Energy Department says that the cap-and-trade bill will increase electricity costs by 20% over 20 years.  I think this a terrible underestimate, but Obama did not want this out anyway.

The CEI released memos of the Treasury Department revealed that:

• Judson Jaffe of the Office of Environment and Energy estimated the new taxes of the Obama plan will be between $100 and $200 billion a year, which is higher than Obama publicly estimated them to be.  The upper end tax cost is an increase of $1761 per family.
  
• An Obama transition memo said that the Obama environmental plan will double the cost to the economy of environmental regulations.
• One memo thought the carbon cap-and-trade cost would be $300 billion a year.
• A memo said the Obama environmental policies will cost as much as corporate income taxes.
• A memo says cap-and-trade will ruin energy-intensive industries, such as manufacturing.