A North Pole expedition…

…,meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.
“Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey,” said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.
[…]
The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft’s 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.

Via Drudge, who has this teaser –

NY TIMES PLANS HIT ON GORE, NEWSROOM SOURCES TELL DRUDGE: ‘Scientists argue that Gore’s warnings are full of exaggerated claims and startling errors’… Reporter William Broad filing the story, ‘A CALL TO COOL THE HYPE’… Developing…

Update: Article is here.

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.
“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.
Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.
“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”
In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.
Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

If you have the time, it’s also worth your while to check out Charles Adler’s show from today for one of the most intellectually vacant dismissals of global warming skepticism I’ve yet heard, from journalist Michael Harris. It’s deserving of transcription, if only to serve as a formal example of the art of cheap shot namecalling as rebuttal.
And for those of you who have left this link (see below) in nearly every comments thread over the past three days – The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Speaking of which: these Blog Policy notes
I don’t link or feature every item that rolls over the blogosphere just because it’s rolling over the blogosphere. Or heading up every newscast. Or the front page of the Globe. There are only so many hours in a day, and more importantly, there are only so many posts readers have time for. If you’ve seen something mentioned two or three times in the comments, and nothing on the main page from me about it – consider it a hint. I either don’t have the interest, I think it’s redundant (which the “Swindle” video is, considering the wealth of detailed posts archived here on that very topic) or its already been beaten to death and I have nothing more to add.
Now, as you were.

As many of you are aware, I recently returned from a 6,000 km trip to dog shows in Arizona. We left Saskatchewan on February 25, drove south through Cheyenne, Denver and Albuquerque, NM to Phoenix, then home via Las Vegas and Salt Lake City to Butte, Montana, turning east on I-94 to North Dakota before heading north to cross back into Canada late on Wednesday night.

It’s my third such extended road trip in the past 12 months. I drove to Charlotte, NC and back last March, while in October another show circuit took me through Montana, Michigan and Philadelphia. That doesn’t include several shorter weekend jaunts. I put 30,000 km on my minivan in the past 10 months and I drove the pickup to North Carolina.

Somewhere in northern New Mexico

Unless you’re a long haul truck driver, it’s unlikely that you’ve seen as much of North America by road as I have – or as frequently. On this latest jaunt, I was reminded of a piece I wrote during the coverage of Hurricane Katrina that I think applies equally to many who are utterly convinced of man’s impact on global warming. It’s titled An Appreciation For Scale, from September 2005.

As someone who has transversed the continent on several occasions by road, I have come to believe that many in politics, government and media fly too much.
Like the “destination oriented” urban business or leisure traveller who generally lives and works within a relatively confined geographical area, their excursions to far flung locales are experienced almost exclusively through airport terminals.
Flying distorts one’s sense of scale. There is an unreality about the little images on the ground and the vast distances they represent. Imagine the experience becoming so routine that the window seat ceases to be your first preference. Imagine not looking down from a cloudless sky to try to identify geographical features and places you once stopped for coffee in. Imagine napping over the vastness of South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa – and awaking a couple of hours later to ready your tray for landing.
Of course, many of you don’t have to imagine anything of the sort. It’s your normal flying experience.
Flying from Saskatoon into Los Angeles for the first time, there is a sense of astonishment at the endlessness of the great, smoggy city and her suburbs. Landing at night, the sense is even greater, as the lights of the city flood out into the Pacific, carried by boats.
Yet, make the same journey by road (ideally, with windows open and air-conditioning off) and the City of Angels appears as a mere oasis at the edge of a dry, rolling ocean of emptiness.
The second perception is accurate and appropriate, while the first is a distortion created by a sudden burst of speed.
So many people have so little appreciation for how large their country is, no realization that their great metropolitan areas are just miniscule dots on the map when placed within the great expanse of the continent. They have little understanding that there are hundreds of thousands of miles of infrastructure that connect us to each other in fragile threads of asphalt and cable and that their very urban lives depend on them.
As capsulized as the world becomes to the habitual air traveller, even more so is that of those who seldom travel at all. I know of Canadians who have never been south of Minot who can tell you with utter authority all about that great country – based on the flickering images that come over their television sets.
Returning to Katrina – some of the unthinking and uninformed criticism by media punditry of relief efforts may be due, in part, to this phenomenon. The size of the area devastated by Katrina and the subsequent flooding, relative to the size of those assets that are struggling to respond, is difficult for them to scale.
And virtually impossible for those whose view is contained within a 36″ screen.

The 4,000-square-foot house is a model of environmental rectitude.
Geothermal heat pumps located in a central closet circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground where the temperature is a constant 67 degrees; the water heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. Systems such as the one in this “eco-friendly” dwelling use about 25% of the electricity that traditional heating and cooling systems utilize.
A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof runs; wastewater from sinks, toilets and showers goes into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is used to irrigate the landscaping surrounding the four-bedroom home. Plants and flowers native to the high prairie area blend the structure into the surrounding ecosystem.
No, this is not the home of some eccentrically wealthy eco-freak trying to shame his fellow citizens into following the pristineness of his self-righteous example. And no, it is not the wilderness retreat of the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council, a haven where tree-huggers plot political strategy.
This is President George W. Bush’s “Texas White House” outside the small town of Crawford.

Originally published April 29, 2001, Chicago Tribune.
A few candid shots of Al Gore’s “carbon neutral” home in Nashville. (He owns three others.)
Mark Steyn has the punchline;

Al buys his carbon offsets from Generation Investment Management LLP, which is “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 and with offices in London and Washington, D.C.,” that, for a fee, will invest your money in “high-quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns.” Generation is a tax-exempt U.S. 501(c)3. And who’s the chairman and founding partner? Al Gore.
So Al can buy his carbon offsets from himself. Better yet, he can buy them with the money he gets from his long-time relationship with Occidental Petroleum. See how easy it is to be carbon-neutral? All you have do is own a gazillion stocks in Big Oil, start an eco-stockbroking firm to make eco-friendly investments, use a small portion of your oil company’s profits to buy some tax-deductible carbon offsets from your own investment firm, and you too can save the planet while making money and leaving a carbon footprint roughly the size of Godzilla’s at the start of the movie when they’re all standing around in the little toe wondering what the strange depression in the landscape is.

Via Right Thinking

“There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically…”

On January 4th, the UK’s Met Office predicted 2007 to be the warmest ever, due to an El Niño weather event in the Pacific:

An extended warming period, resulting from an El Niño weather event in the Pacific Ocean, will probably push up global temperatures, experts forecast.

Februrary 28th, less than 60 days later, NOAA Climate Prediction Center center says:

as the 2006-2007 El Niño faded, surface and subsurface ocean temperatures have rapidly decreased. Recently, cooler-than-normal water temperatures have developed at the surface in the east-central equatorial Pacific, indicating a possible transition to La Niña conditions.

50 and 100 year projections remain unchanged, with no decrease in confidence. Thou shalt not question the climate models. The science is SETTLED.
In other news, the Suzuki effect makes its appearance. There is a broad consensus in the widely known and powerful Gore effect, but the Suzuki effect has been less thoroughly studied. But as Suzuki wraps up his Flakes on a Plane Tour he will be greeted in the capital with a heavy snow warning, bringing snow, freezing rain, ice pellets, strong gusting winds and near zero visibility.
We’ll have to study this effect further. This would be a fine topic for a PhD thesis, I think.

We’ve had a bunch of Y2Kyoto posts recently, so just as a refresher let’s dredge up what some of the experts were saying as Y2K approached. Lot’s of these have attempted to erase this history and replace it with post-apocalypse spin, but fortunately we have the Wayback machine.
Here’s TimeBomb2000 Author Ed Yourdon in A Year of Disruptions, A Decade of Depression:

But I believe that we will begin seeing Y2K problems that do cause noticeable disruptions in our day to day lives; I believe we’ll start seeing them by this summer, and I believe they’ll continue for at least a year. As many people are now aware, 46 states (along with Australia and New Zealand) will begin their 1999-2000 fiscal year on July 1, 1999; New York (and Canada) will already have gone through their Y2K fiscal rollover on April 1, and the remaining three states begin their new fiscal year on August 1, September 1, and October 1. We also have the GPS rollover problem to look forward to on August 22nd, as well as the Federal government’s new fiscal year on October 1st. There is, of course, some finite probability that all of these rollover events will occur without any problems; but there’s also a finite probability that pigs will learn to fly.

Continue reading →

The benefits of global warming just keep piling up. Not only will rising oceans shorten your drive to the beach and make those Canadian waters warmer, now you’ll get evening entertainment, too. So pull up a chair, open a beer, and watch those methane fireballs:

+6.4°: Most of life is exterminated
Warming seas lead to the possible release of methane hydrates trapped in sub-oceanic sediments: methane fireballs tear across the sky, causing further warming. The oceans lose their oxygen and turn stagnant, releasing poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas and destroying the ozone layer. Deserts extend almost to the Arctic. “Hypercanes” (hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity) circumnavigate the globe, causing flash floods which strip the land of soil. Humanity reduced to a few survivors eking out a living in polar refuges. Most of life on Earth has been snuffed out, as temperatures rise higher than for hundreds of millions of years.

There’s an amusing little anecdote in one of my old breed books about a crafty old Doberman bitch who would confront neighborhood children and bark in their faces until they dropped their ice cream.
In today’s world, they’ve locked up the dogs – and let loose the snakes.

Across Australia, the “wet nappy cooling effect” is no longer effective in protecting babies from dangerous overheating;

The two-year study at a major children’s hospital showed that for every five-degree rise in temperature two more children under six years old were admitted with fever to that hospital.
The University of Sydney research is the first to make a solid link between climate changes and childhood illness.
“And now global warming is becoming more apparent, it is highly likely an increasing number of young children will be turning up at hospital departments with these kinds of common illnesses,” said researcher Lawrence Lam, a paediatrics specialist.
“It really demonstrates the urgent need for a more thorough investigation into how exactly climate change will affect health in childhood.”
Dr Lam said the results, collated from The Children’s Hospital at Westmead admissions, back up beliefs that children are less able to regulate their bodies against climate change than adults.
The brain’s thermal regulation mechanism is not as well developed in children, making them more susceptible to “overheating” and at risk of developing illness, he said.
“They’re particularly at risk of extreme changes, much more than other people.”

This of course, is why mothers in Canada careless enough to expose children under 4 to sub-zero winter air always warm them slowly in the refrigerator or a cool basement before exposing them to the artificially high temperatures of homes with central heating – to keep them from bursting into goddamn flame.
Another drop kick for science through the goal posts of crazy.

David Suzuki, on the John Oakley show:

I’m not getting any money from my foundation. I’m getting my money, the foundation gets its money, from ordinary people. We don’t take government money, corporations have not been interested in funding us. We get it from ordinary Canadians across the country. 40,000 thousand of them and we get some foundations in both Canada and the United States. So that’s my agenda. We speak on behalf of the people that fund us.

(To hear the audio clip click here.)
Joseph C. Ben-Ami;

Corporations uninterested? Is it possible that the Great Suzuki has failed to attract a single corporate donation to his feel-good campaign to save the earth? Not one?
Actually, the David Suzuki Foundation’s annual report for 2005/2006 lists at least 52 corporate donors including: Bell Canada, Toyota, IBM, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Microsoft, Scotia Capital, Warner Brothers, RBC, Canon and Bank of Montreal.
The David Suzuki Foundation also received donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta’s principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including the OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees’ and Pensioners’ Charity Trust. OPG is one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the world operating 5 fossil fuel-burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants… which begs the question – is Suzuki now pro-nuclear power?
If I were less generous I might be tempted to accuse Suzuki of hypocrisy for accepting donations from corporations that he must believe contribute significantly to the production of greenhouse gases, but that would miss the point entirely. The real issue is that, contrary to his clear assertion, the David Suzuki Foundation does receive funding from corporations.

Via Lisa at DMB.
Related: Steve Janke;

You might remember John Duffy from the last election. He was the Liberal mouthpiece who threatened CTV’s Mike Duffy off the air, then was chewed out by the Duffster on national television (see the video of that encounter). Robert Asselin was a colleague of John Duffy’s in StrategyCorp and formerly a special advisor to Paul Martin.
Robert Asselin was a lobbyist for BSEF throughout 2005.
John Duffy was a lobbyist for BSEF from 2004 until January 2007, just a few weeks ago.
What did these two Liberals do for the BSEF? They fought tooth and nail against the definition of bromines as toxic…

Joe Carter crunches the carbon footprint numbers on Al Gore’s globe-trotting global warming concert tour;

* The concert will produce more CO2 in one day than Zimbabwe produced in any month in 2003.
* The concert will produce more CO2 in one day than the total daily fossil fuel emissions for Austria, Chile, Finland, Greece, Iraq, Kuwait, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Sweden, the Virgin Islands, and a dozen other countries combined.
* The concert will produce more CO2 in one day than the entire nation of Afghanistan produces in a year.

Upon reviewing the calculations, however, it’s important to note that one important variable has not been included. With the Gore Effect factored in, one can anticipate at least half of the planned events will be cancelled due to cold.

When are they gonna come down?
Take me back off the land?
You should have stayed off my farm
It didn’t go according to plan
You know I can’t feed you forever
(I didn’t RoundUp for you)
Won’t be present when the market opens
No future growing organics for you
So goodbye greenie dirt road
Where the dogs of Kyoto now howl
You can’t plant that in your greenhouse
We’re back to the pesticides now
Back to the clones in the factory barns
Genetically modified grain
Oh they’ve finally decided your dinner plate lies
Beyond the greenie dirt road
*

Stays mainly in the made-up world of computer models;

The just-released Summary for Policymakers of the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (AR4) states that “The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas, consistent with warming and observed increases of atmopsheric water content” and “is very likely” that “heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent” during the 21st century. The last we checked our atlas, Portugal and Spain are certainly land areas. When we saw the title of the article “Changes in frequency and intensity of daily precipitation over the Iberian Peninsula,” we took a hard look…

Canadian Blue Lemons on the Suzuki machine’s attack on science;

In a previous post I brought to CBL readers’ attention how the Suzuki Foundation’s PR firm is running a blog (www.desmogblog.com) that is dedicated to smearing the reputations of scientists who disagree with the fantasy-based strategies of Suzuki and his ilk.
This smear campaign is being run by Hoggan Public Relations, whose principal, interestingly enough, wrote this article slamming PR firms for doing work for organizations that he refers to as skeptic-scammers (SS). I guess in his world, only one side of a debate (his) can ever be represented by his profession. Hypocrite, because their side of the debate certainly is calling upon PR pros to manipulate public opinion (as revealed by Ranting Stan).
The duplicitous nature of this exercise is fascinating. They impugn the credentials of every person who draws a different conclusion from available data and go so far as to try and destroy lives for their nevarious cause.

I wonder – just what kind of ethical contortions were necessary within Suzuki Foundation walls to come up with an honorary board membership for the director of a company mining uranium in Argentina?

The Globe and Mail is late to the game and a few megatonnes short, but finally providing a few facts beyond those pulled from CBC Fruit Fly Guy press releases;

The opposition parties, led by the Liberals, have pushed legislation through the House of Commons to force the government to meet Canada’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. No responsible government could come even close to reaching those targets without bankrupting the treasury. But in an effort to score political points, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has stubbornly plodded ahead, smearing the gloss of virtue on this economic and political folly.
[…]
It’s the impossible nightmare. Last May, after years of Liberal inaction, the Conservative government conceded that the level of emissions in 2004 was 34.6 per cent above Canada’s Kyoto target of an average of 563 million tonnes annually between 2008 and 2012. Canada’s emissions have since sailed even higher, probably reaching 780 million tonnes a year.
Suppose Alberta eliminated all tar-sands development. That’s a saving of 30 million tonnes a year. Suppose Ontario shut down all of its coal-fired power plants. That’s 24 million tonnes. To cover the shortfall, Canada would have to go abroad to buy emission credits or sponsor carbon-reduction initiatives in other countries. Most experts put the price tag for that splurge at a minimum of $10-billion. It could go far higher as the market gets tighter, squeezing federal funds for everything from health care to retraining programs.

It’s a start. One wonders though, how much the informative quality of their editorials might improve if the G&M yanked a few of those parliamentary press gallery foot soldiers from the “green beat” in Ottawa and assigned them to Google.

If current trends continue…

A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.
This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth’s climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.
It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.
David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco.

Nearer the end of the article, the researcher explains that while incomplete data combined with poorly understood “competing effects” of circumpolar westerlies, ozone depetion and ocean mixing may negate the predictions of computer models for specific regions – that should not lead one to discount the ability of these same models to predict outcomes on the global scale.

Bromwich said the disagreement between climate model predictions and the snowfall and temperature records doesn’t necessarily mean that the models are wrong.
“It isn’t surprising that these models are not doing as well in these remote parts of the world. These are global models and shouldn’t be expected to be equally exact for all locations,”

In the same way that accuracy on the gun range can be expected to improve as distance from the target increases, or that small errors in interest charged disappear when the sums they are applied to go over the million dollar mark.
Yowza.

An article recently published in “Scientific America” makes the important announcement that the climate of the North American continent is gradually getting warmer notwithstanding the influence of certain “Sun Spots”. There would appear to be some foundaiton for such a belief, for only lately the Guardian carried an item calling attention to the fact that in Alaska the flowers are now in bloom and the farmers there are breaking the soil for this season’s crop. Similar news has appeared in other journals corroborating the truth of this important discovery.

The rest at Pumpkin Watch.
UPDATE – “You will SUBMIT or I will crush your scientific dissent like a petulant fruit fly between my nails…” (link fixed)
Dr. Mugabe would be so proud.

Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, former Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University and internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes.

Why is it so difficult to make precipitation forecasts fifty years into the future? Most precipitation in the middle latitudes is associated with low-pressure systems, which move along storm tracks carved out by the jet stream. The ever-shifting meanders in the jet stream occur at the edge of the slab of cold air over the poles. The specialists call this slab the Polar Vortex, and have christened the meandering behavior of the jet stream in the Northern hemisphere the Arctic Oscillation. Thirty years ago I worked with Mike (John M.) Wallace and his PhD student N.C. Lau at the University of Washington in Seattle on problems concerning eddy-flux maintenance in the North Atlantic storm track. It is evident to all turbulence specialists that the dynamics of very slowly evolving states is different from the dynamics of instantaneous states. So the moment one asks what keeps the jet stream going, one encounters the kind of problem that is at the core of all turbulence research. But the mainstream of dynamic meteorology refuses to study the slow evolution of the general circulation. It has become so easy to run General Circulation Models on supercomputers that most atmospheric scientists shy away from matters like a thorough study of the interaction between the Polar Vortex and the Arctic Oscillation. Mike Wallace mailed me a year ago, saying that there is not a beginning of consensus on a theory of the Arctic Oscillation. This was one of the highlights in an advanced senior-citizens’ class on climate change I taught a year ago. It was announced as “A Storm in the Greenhouse”, referring primarily to the increasingly bitter debates of the past fifteen years.
How does this problem affect climate forecasts? If there is not even a rudimentary theory of the Polar Vortex, much less an established relation between rising greenhouse gas concentrations and systematic changes in the Arctic Oscillation, one cannot possibly make inferences about changes in precipitation patterns. We do not know, and for the time being cannot know anything about changing patterns of clouds, storms and rain. Holland’s national weather service KNMI circumvented this impasse last year by issuing climate change scenarios with and without changes in the position of the North Atlantic storm track. It did not occur to the KNMI spokesmen that they should have been forthright about their lack of knowledge. They should have said: we know nothing of possible changes in the storm track, so we cannot say anything about precipitation. But it is entirely consistent with the IPCC tradition to weasel around such issues. One of my contacts at KNMI recently explained to me that their choice was based on the increasing agreement between simulations run with different GCM’s. I had to answer that the IPCC spirit of consensus apparently was invading their supercomputers as well. It is bad enough that computer simulations cannot be checked against observations until after the fact. In the absence of a robust stochastic-dynamic theory of the general circulation, one cannot even check climate simulations against fundamental insights.
[…]
I want to lobby for decency, modesty, honesty, integrity and balance in climate research. I hope and pray we lose our obsession with climate forecasting. Climate simulations are best seen as sensitivity experiments, not as tools for policy makers.

Read the whole thing.

The “Global Warming Deniers” are beginning to speak up.
The chilling effect on free speech;

Earlier this year, when a correspondent for the American current affairs show 60 Minutes was asked why his various feature programmes on global warming did not include the views of global warming sceptics, he replied: ‘If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’ Here, climate change deniers are explicitly painted as the bad guys. He also argued that, ‘This isn’t about politics…this is about sound science’, and went so far as to claim that it would be problematic even to air the views of climate change sceptics: ‘There comes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible.’

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist – “An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change”

So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

Tom Brodbeck on “pack journalism”;

It’s not because there aren’t qualified scientists out there who are skeptical about the findings or who reject them entirely. There are plenty. I’ve heard from them before. But for some reason, reporters and editors chose not to tell that side of the story.

Is environmentalism the new religion?

“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate,” Dr. Orrell said in an interview. After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate.

And public response? Watch not what they say. Watch what they drive.
That’s just a small sampling of what I’ve seen and received. Use the comments for your own on-topic links.

It appears Czech President Vaclav Klaus has a lukewarm view of the global warming hysteria:

Q: IPCC has released its report and you say that the global warming is a false myth. How did you get this idea, Mr President?
A: It’s not my idea. Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is unfair to refer to the U.N. panel. It’s not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a kind of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it’s an undignified slapstick that people don’t wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond in such a serious way to the summary for policymakers where all the “but’s” are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. …
Environmentalism and green ideology is something very different from climate science. Various findings and screams of scientists are abused by this ideology.…
Q: Don’t you believe that we’re ruining our planet?
A: I will pretend that I haven’t heard you. Perhaps only Mr. Al Gore may be saying such a thing: a sane person can’t.

Professor Klaus doesn’t seem to have much respect for the politically correct fashionable doomsaying sweeping the rest of Europe. The rest of the interview is well worth the read.