WhackyNation

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth produced as opera?  Yep, that’s what La Scala is planning to do for the 2011 season.

I suggest the composer Giorgio Battistelli consider the genre of the Italian farce.  Some sugested arias: “Don’t thinko, just panicko!”  “Passo the Kool-Aid-o”  and “Ignor-o, my ‘D’-o in science-o from Harvard-o.”

Climate Crisis!!!!!! We need international answers!!!! We need a nationalized effort!!!! We need to do more than change light bulbs!!!! We must change the laws!!!!!

Gore’s latest slide show (cut down to 20 minutes) was shot last month and posted on Ted. Notice that references to Kilamanjaro and hurricaines are gone … but now the artic ice cap is going to be gone in five years!

Perhaps the most laughable part of the presentation is an advertisement that will be shown to scare Americans into action. The cartoon setting is a hot, traffic congested city where CO2 emmissions are visualized as falling blue elephants which land on people and cars and crush them.  Subtle, huh?

As I know most of you disagree with Gore’s hype, I think you all sure see the slide show to know what the high priest of climate crisis is up to.

The Goracle is not using the phrase “global warming” so much anymore.

Guess he’s noticed the news that temperatures seem to be cooling.

And “climate change” doesn’t pack the punch.  Hell, we all agree that climate changes.

But now his latest buzzword: “climate crisis!”  Get ready for every copycat liberal blogger to be using that phrase.

By the way, there is no “climate crisis.”

John Coleman also blasted the new ownership of the weather channel for being an outlet to global warming alarmism.

Read the article.

during the summer months.  I’m not making this up.  Al Gore made his preposterous claim today to impress the crowd at Davos.  The Goracle told the international crowd:

“The climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us.”

So what is the “inventor of the internet” up to with his fear mongering?  Does he think the masses are that incredibly stupid?  I don’t see real estate prices for salt water waterfront falling.  Do you?

Meantime climatologist Roy Spencer this morning posted an excellent argument why so many of his peers refuse to endorse Der Fuhrer’s so-called “consensus.”

So, why would a minority of scientists like me dare to disagree with a 56-percent majority? (That is how many of the 530 climate scientists polled agreed that global warming is mostly caused by humans,)

While there are several answers to this question, here I’ll mention only one. Compared to the carbon dioxide that humans produce, Mother Nature routinely transfers 40 times as much CO2, and 24,000 times as much water vapor (Earth’s primary greenhouse gas), back and forth between the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, every day.

Scientists have simply assumed that these natural processes have been in balance for centuries. But, what if there have always been some small — but natural — imbalances in those large up-and-down flows that slowly change over time? In that case, our measured increases in greenhouse gases and global temperatures might well turn out to be more natural than manmade, lost in the noise of natural variability.

Can I prove any of this? No — not yet, anyway. But neither have any scientists produced one single scientific paper showing that Mother Nature isn’t the dominant source of what we are seeing. Mankind is one possible explanation, and our measurements of natural variability in the climate system on time scales of decades to centuries are simply not good enough to find out how many natural sources of variability are also out there.

International Socialists like Gore are creating a false hysteria in order to scare the masses to give up freedom and to submit to more government control, more “international” government control.  Wake up, America!  He who controls energy controls the world.

As Margaret Thatcher put it: global warming is proving to be “a marvelous excuse for international socialism.” 

No doubt, despite his fear that the North Pole ice caps will be totally melted in five years, Gore and his chums all flew to Davos in their private jets.  Any hypocrisy here?

I wish Marcus Cicero were alive today.  He’d see through the Caesarian politics of Gore and his crowd and orate the Republican message.  I’m sure he’d call “global warming” the “new opiate for the masses.”

Americans in general and Republicans in particular had better gird themselves to fight off a Democratic Party assault on one of the most important principles our forefathers built into the United States Constitution — that is, the concept that the final election of Presidents should be determined by the Electoral College.

Maryland Democrats have already approved a compact that would eliminate the power of the Electoral College and deliver its 15 votes to the presidential candidate winning the popular-vote count in Maryland. Now New Jersey is also considering the same action, prompted again by the state’s Democrats.

The Associated Press has reported that the Republican governors of California and Hawaii have vetoed similar legislation. Legislatures in a few other states, also motivated by the Democratic Party, are also considering the compact. The A.P. said “the compact could take effect only if enough states — those with a majority of votes in the Electoral College — agreed to it. A candidate needs 270 of 538 electoral votes to win.”

The campaign to abandon the Electoral College concept is led by the National Popular Vote movement, which is the brainchild of the Democratic Party. It has gained momentum directly as a result of the 2000 national election, in which Al Gore drew a majority of the popular vote nationally but lost in the Electoral College, a decision that was bolstered by the Supreme Court of the United States.

In order for the people and Republicans to recognize the need for action to oppose and discard the aim of the Democrats, they should review the reason the forefathers created the idea of an Electoral College for presidential elections. They realized that a few states with a large share of the population could control presidential elections by their numbers, thus shutting out the influence of the smaller states.

It’s quite clear that the intention of the Democrats is to control all presidential elections, since most of the large cities of America are predominantly Democratic, while the much larger number of cities are Republican or independent. The Electoral College has leveled the playing field politically and given the smaller states an equal voice in elections.

It’s also clear that the Democrats will soon be trying to control gubernatorial and other elections within the states. Along with other observers, I have tried to promote the idea that each state should borrow the national Electoral College plan and invest the state with a similar electoral system.

Washington State provided a perfect example of the reason it should adopt a state Electoral College. In 2004, Senator Dino Rossi won the governorship, won again in a recount, but lost when Democrats in the state’s largest county, King, manipulated a hand recount that declared the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, had won by 129 votes.

If Washington had had an electoral system, Rossi would have won by a large vote, because most of the rest of the state voted Republican. We must not permit the Democrats to solidify their political control forever by permitting them to banish the Electoral College.

As could have been expected, the perpetrators of the colossal global-warming mythology, led by the biggest liar of them all, former Vice President Al Gore, stand to make millions, billions, or even trillions in profits in the products and services they have begun to sell industry, business, and the public in the U.S. and around the world.

Fortune Magazine has blown the lid off the money-making hoax with a report that Gore has joined forces “with a venture capital company that is seeking to profit from the move toward ‘clean technology’ in the $6 trillion global-energy business. Gore is becoming a hands-on partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm where an old friend, John Doerr, is a partner.”

Gore has wasted no time in capitalizing on his receipt of a Nobel Peace Prize, of all things. It was an award the Nobel people should have had more sense than to give to a man who has manufactured a new career based on non-scientific nonsense and misrepresentations of true climate science.

Fortune tells us that in the next few years “more than a third of Kleiner’s latest fund, which totals $600 million, will reportedly be invested in technologies that seek to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.” Those technologies include firms “making microbes to scrub old oil receptacles, build large solar-power farms, develop solid-oxide fuel cells, and design equipment for use in electric-car batteries.”

When are the world’s legitimate scientists — and they are in the distinct majority — going to rise up as one and blow the whistle on Gore and the rest of his global-warming advocates? The scientists’ silence is not only permitting the global warmers to go on fleecing industry and the public; it is allowing Gore and his misguided pals to distort honest science.

Gore has the support of an equally misguided crop of so-called “scientists” in the United Nations, who keep issuing scientifically flawed reports in support of the global-warming hoax and the need for the U.S. and other nations to bankrupt themselves with outlandish schemes to prevent a danger that isn’t there.

President Bush, who has tried half-heartedly to sidetrack the global warmers, should call on the world’s leading climatologists to set the record straight and derail the global-warming movement before it deals severe monetary damage to the U.S. and the world. To do so, all he needs is the report compiled by Oregon’s brilliant scientist, Dr. Arthur Robinson, whose survey a few years ago registered the names of 20,000 honest climatologists who debunked the global-warming myth.

Once and for all, the American public and the people of all other nations, as well, need to be told the truth about the non-existent danger Gore & Co. have been peddling in books, films, and, now, in awards like the Nobel Peace Prize to undeserving people. At the same time, the Wall Street Journal and the few other existing Conservative news media should start pointing the finger at those college and university Liberals who have joined the global-warming clan in order to protect lucrative grants and other awards.

In case you thought former President Bill Clinton had purely altruistic motives in plugging the global-warming fantasy before the meeting of mayors and others in Seattle this past week, guess again. Or, rather, read the telltale paragraphs from the Seattle Times’ slanted story about the conference, sponsored by another hoax-believing political leader, Seattle’s Mayor Greg Nickels.

Oh, yes, and I almost forgot to mention that the Pied Piper of the global-warming movement, former Vice President Al Gore, was also at the conference. He and Clinton have been leading the parade whose announced incentive is to force governments at all levels to spend billions to fight a threat (global warming) that doesn’t exist.

But to get back to the point of this commentary, one must have suspected a hidden purpose in all the hullabaloo over the non-existent threat. And that hidden purpose was partly glossed over by the Times reporter, Warren Cornwall, who obviously has already been brainwashed by the Gore-Clinton propaganda brigade.

Here’s how Cornwall put it, and note that these paragraphs were buried deep in the continuation of the article on an inside page:

“To help spur the movement, Clinton announced a new program between his private Clinton Foundation and the mayors’ conference to make energy-efficient products more affordable for 1,100 U.S. cities by helping them buy as groups and get volume discounts.

“His Clinton Climate Initiative has already started a similar project with 40 of the world’s largest cities and several major banks that help finance projects to increase energy efficiency. Clinton said energy efficiency programs represent some of the easiest ways to reduce greenhouse gases by conserving energy in inefficient buildings and other infrastructure.”

There you have it! Carefully covered over by the reporter is the fact that Clinton and all his cohorts have some kind of a product — or perhaps two or more products — that will enrich him and them under the guise of being helpful in combating a problem that doesn’t exist!

Is anyone going to come forward to challenge Clinton and the rest of the global-warming contingent for their willingness to use a hoax to fatten their personal bank accounts — or their private foundations, as Clinton put it? We can be assured that the Seattle Times and other newspapers who have bought into the global-warming hoax won’t do it.

Maybe the bloggers of America — the Conservative ones, that is — will see through Clinton’s skullduggery, as well as Gore’s, and tell the public what the newspapers and other Liberal elements in the news media have neglected or purposely forgotten to report?

It’s truly a sad day for the nation when a danger that isn’t there is perpetuated by a bunch of third-rate politicians, who have a financial motive they have been hiding — and a danger that is promoted by America’s print and broadcast news media. Furthermore, these two entities are proposing that we spend ourselves into bankruptcy to combat a phantom problem!

The citizens of Seattle, King County, and Washington State should be considering a rebellion against many of their political leaders for their espousal of a national and international hoax that goes by the insidious and unscientific name of global warming.

These misled leaders are, in fact, attending and even presiding over a conference in Seattle featuring those two disciples of the global-warming fantasy, former Vice President Al Gore and former President Bill Clinton. Also prominent in the conference are equally misinformed Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle and King County Executive Ron Sims, both of them devotees of the global-warming myth.

Added to the lineup of the global-warming advocates are both Seattle newspapers, the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, whose publishers, editors, and science reporters should have known better. Both newspapers are equally guilty, mainly because they have neglected or refused to present the other side — the honest, scientifically accurate side — of the global-warming debate.

The voting public in the city, county, and state can no longer go on trusting these one-sided leaders and journalists who have consistently refused to listen to the views of the world’s leading — and honest — climatologists. These climatologists, who greatly outnumber the hoax-believing individuals who call themselves scientists, have done their research on the issue for years and they deplore the false notions of impending doom by the global warmers.

While the Gores and Clintons of this world, as well as their pseudo-scientist global warmers, have been blaming the human race for contaminating the atmosphere and bringing on the threat of global warming, the honest scientists of the world have been trying to get their message through. It is substantially this:

Yes, the planet’s atmosphere has warmed occasionally, but that is something that has been happening since the earth was born several billion years ago. And, most important, they have trying to tell us after years of research that mankind has had nothing to do with the occasional warming periods.

As I learned long ago, the legitimate scientists of the world shy away from making statements to the press and to political leaders and organizations. I wish they would be bolder in their attitudes and that they would decide as individuals or as groups to tell the public the truth so that the Gores, Clintons, and other alarmists — as well as the news media — would be prevented from frightening the populace.

Most important of all, I wish the legitimate scientists would periodically address the citizens of America with the truth about such significant subjects. There is nothing more reprehensible nor dangerous than to have a Nickels, Sims, Gore, or Clinton sounding a loud alarm over a danger that does not exist.

The best way to get rid of such alarmists, of course, is to vote them out of office at the earliest opportunity. >As for the misguided news media, what is profoundly needed is for the public to put the owners and publishers on notice that such mismanagement of the news will eventually cause citizens to stop buying the newspapers and listening to the offending broadcasters.

Here’s a story you won’t see in tomorrow’s Seattle’s dailies:

The Atlantic hurricaine activity is the lowest since 1977.

You won’t see it because the editors are embaassed that their zealous embracement of Al Gore’s junk science was misplaced.

For it was the doomsdaying environmentalist who predicted that global waming was causing bad hurricaines.

Guess his predictions and science were junk.  And if his predictions were misplaced, maybe the rest of his global warming hype was mispalced as well.

When ABC’s 20/20 reporter John Stossel says “Gimme a break” about Al Gore’s global warming hysteria on network television, maybe the rest of the drive-by media will start reporting both sides of the issue.

It’s a joy to watch this report, and see the other side of the story finally start to be reported by the mainstream media.

My prediction: other mainstream media will start reporting similar stories and eventually the global warming hysteria story will gradually disappear … but without holding the socialist Democrats in this country accountable for one of the biggest lies ever told.

Two very relevant pieces about global warming alarmism and the danger it poses for humanity.

First, an article reminding us that Al Gore nearly flunked two science courses while at Harvard, a fact the drive-by media conveniently forgets.  No wonder Gore doesn’t want to debate climate change.

Second, an article I highly recommend that you click this link and read.  Eloquently written by Jay Ambrose, the author begins his article:

Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize for his error-filled, shrill campaign to instigate responses to global warming is not just a kind of ideological fraud worthy of a chuckle or two, but quite possibly, a very real danger, a precursor to devastation.

The prize still carries some prestige, after all, because the Nobel awards for scientific discovery remain politically neutral. They are legit, and this brush of legitimacy, this sense of the Nobel being noble despite leftist excursions, can do what the prize to Gore was intended to do: make his ballyhoo seem reasonable and give impetus to his cause.

That’s a frightening possibility because global warming alarmism just may pose a far greater threat to humanity than global warming itself, and Gore is an alarmist if there ever was one, an overly exercised prophet of doom telling us that greenhouse gases pose the single worst problem we face, a planetary emergency requiring immediate as well as long-term action.

He gets to his conclusions by fraud. The author Christopher Horner reminds us in a Human Events piece that a London court discerned at least nine false claims in his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which will be shown in English secondary schools by governmental fiat. Examples of truths the movie got wrong: Global warming isn’t what’s making Mount Kilimanjaro’s snows melt; you can’t definitely say warming gave us hurricane Katrina; a cited study that supposedly said warming was killing polar bears said no such thing; warming will not cause a European ice age by keeping the Gulf Stream from its streaming ways.

People need to know about this hooey. They need to know that Gore has a record of environmental extremism.

Ambrose goes on to correctly assert that solving problems of world poverty, hunger and disease would be terribly impacted by the energy restrictions that Gore and his fanatical followers are trying to force on the world.  Just as these socialists have condemned nearly a hundred million human deaths (of mostly Africans) by foolishly banning DDT on flimsy science, the next generation of socialists want to condemn hundreds of millions of more human deaths through starvation, poverty and war by hurting industrial economies.

It’s good to be back after more than two weeks in Hawaii.  Good break.  Got to meet Donald Rumsfeld and hear him speak to a small group.  In person, he is an incredibly gentile, humble human being, a great public servant. There was horseback riding on Lanai as well as snorkling off a catamaran and the beaches near Kona.  A house on the beach in Maui.  And dinner with close friends in Oahu. 

But now it’s back to WhackyNation.

Of course, while away I thought I’d attempt to update the WordPress software to 2.3 when there was a warning that my favorite theme, Tiga, had some incompatibility issues that a patch was supposed to fix.  Did the update, uploaded the patch, and voila, the site blows up.  I allowed myself to stay on vacation and not stress through a debug.

Thanks to Lou for keeping the site current and for suffering through the broken site.  You’re a great colleague, Lou.

I kept reading the posts of my fellow Northwest bloggers, but I didn’t post myself.

And, oh, yes, I am not surprised that Goracle won the Nobel or that Danny Westneat loves rail or that Postman hasn’t held Darcy Burner accountable for her tight association with MoveOn.org.

Give me a few more days to catch my breath and I will be back to giving them hell.  It’s good to be back.

What a travesty! A Nobel Peace Prize for Al Gore! Norway’s Nobel Peace Prize Committee has made another whopping error in judgment in awarding its prize to a man whose book, movie, and speeches constitute the worst collection of misjudgments and outright lies the world has witnessed in a long time.

Gore can now take his place among a long list of other noted renegades who have received the Nobel Peace Prize — renegades like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Yasser Arafat, and countless other world villains, who have deserved international scorn and ridicule, not a peace prize.

Worst of all, the Nobel Prize has given Gore a decided lift in the political arena and enhanced his potential as a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the presidential race. He hasn’t agreed to run yet, but many Democrats are already beating the drums for him.

In the meantime, the global-warming myth, the springboard for Gore’s new lease on political life, continues to spread, thanks not only to the former vice president but to the gullible print and broadcast news media. Gore’s book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is in itself the most inconvenient truth yet foisted on Americans and foreigners.

The world’s great majority of honest, dedicated atmospheric scientists and climatologists have said repeatedly that warming exists in the atmosphere, but that it has existed from the time the earth was born — and that it comes and goes from time to time without endangering the planet. In fact, some scientists have said that the occasional warming periods have benefited the earth by enhancing the growth of trees and plants.

A few years ago, Dr. Arthur Robinson, a reputable Oregon scientist, sent a petition to the world’s best known climatologists asking them for their opinions. More than 18,000 of them replied with the assertion that global warming was not a threat to the earth, that it had never been a threat, and that it would not be a future threat.

The scientists also agreed on one point that directly contradicts Gore’s entire position in his book, movie, and speeches. It’s this: The occasional warming recorded has never resulted from U.S. and worldwide industry, from vehicles, nor from any other activity of man.

The trouble is that the world’s honest scientists, who are in the great majority, don’t want to become embroiled in petty politics and, thus, don’t rise up to set things straight. It’s time they did so — and put an end to Gore’s inaccurate and dangerous ramblings about a threat that doesn’t exist.

If you want to read the best piece on the global-warming fantasy and the scientific truths Gore has ignored, get a copy of the book, Environmental Overkill, which I co-authored with the late, great scientist, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray. You’ll find it in Chapter 2. Now, that’s a convenient truth!

Hat tip to AndrewsDad.

In 1979 Georgie Anne Geyer wrote in the LA Times: 

It was when ‘reporters’ became ‘journalists’ and when ‘objectivity’ gave way to ’searching for the truth,’ that an aura of distrust and fear arose around the New Journalist.”

Reporter activists are now more the rule than the exception in the mainstream media.  That’s a major flip since Walter Cronkite ruled the airwaves in the 1960’s.

The flip is no more evident than in Newsweek’s cover story “Global Warming is a Hoax.*”  The asterisk is witness to the reporters ”searching for the truth;” except the “truth” in this case is a one-sided smear against credible scientists who do not subscribe to the group think that manmade greenhouse gases are causing the destruction of the earth.

The asterisk footnote at the bottom of the cover says: “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change.”

That’s the first factual error — even before you get to the article.  All “naysayers” accept climate change as a natural, normal flux.  The naysayers just dispute some of the accuracy of the data and the root causes of temperature change — legitimate challenges by scientists.  In fact, just this week NASA recanted key temperature data that Al Gore used to claim 1998 was “the hottest year on record.”  Turns out a Y2K computer error caused errors in the data — and now 1934 is the hottest year on record … long before the 1970’s when environmentalists were calling alarm for “global cooling.”  Guess the naysayers were correct to doubt the data these past few years, weren’t they?

The Newsweek article smears dissenting scientists by saying their integrity and research has been compromised by funding from oil companies.  Would these same Newsweek reporters and editors say their reporting is compromised by the advertising revenue paid by their clients?  Of course not.  It appears Newsweek has a double standard when it comes to separating revenue sources from objective research and reporting.  Why shouldn’t the reporters give respected scientists the same credulity?  The answer is simple.  The scientists don’t support Newsweek’s group think and its promotion of socialist politics.

Apparently, the naysayers — and there are many credible scientists in both universities and government — are frustrating the climate alarmists by successfully communicating their contradicting message: “The debate is far from over.  We hardly understand the complexity of weather and ocean temperatures.  Let’s explore farther before hastily conclude false theories and needlessly squander government spending on incorrectly targetted and nonconsequential programs.”

It seems a significant number of Americans - 42%, according to a poll cited in the article — do not swallow the left’s Kool Aid about climate change.

And that’s frustrating the article’s author, Sharon Begley, who exposes her bias when she bemoans:

As a result of the undermining of the science, all the recent talk about addressing climate change has produced little in the way of actual action.

Begley has little patience for science if it blocks the “actual action” for which she sympathizes.

The socialists, abetted by an ever increasingly liberal media, are using the pretense of a global environmental catastrophe to scare normal people into electing socialists who will increase the role of government over individuals, redistribute wealth on a world-wide basis, and severely throttle-down economic growth and human population.

Begley does not understand that science is not under a deadline.  Science’s role is not to justify political action, but to seek the truth.  Nor is it a game of bullying to force a “consensus.”  A consensus is a political concept and has no room in science.  As chemist Linus Pauling said:

Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.

Respected climate scientists from major universities and the National Hurricaine Center — as chronicled on this blog — have refuted almost all of what Gore claimed as truth in his bogus documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

But Begley does not truthfully and accurately report the positions of the naysayers in her article.  According to Steven Hayward, a scientist interviewed for the article, the Newsweek team was slipshod.  He blogs:

This story had been peddled by Greenpeace to American journalists for months (including the NY Times and major TV network news, who all passed on it when they saw from the full facts how ridiculous it was), which is why Greenpeace ultimately had to peddle the story through British tabloids.  Ken Green and I wrote our side of the story for that Other Conservative Magazine, if anyone wants the full details.  By the way, the frothiest version of the “bribe” story appeared in The (London) Independent; the story was fully retracted—not corrected—but retracted, a week later.

Last summer Newsweek interviewed me at length for a big green cover story by Jerry Adler, and that story quoted me fairly and in an accurate context.  For the story out this week I had two long phone interviews with Sam Stein (not the main bylined writer, Sharon Begley), and this old story of me and AEI trying to “buy” scientists never came up.  Stein struck me as fair minded and serious in our conversations, which made me expect that whatever the slant of the story, I would be treated fairly again as I was last year.  Whatever he may have passed along from me, if anything, ended up on the cutting room floor in the final story.  Still, I have made plain to Stein my unhappiness that Newsweek would perpetuate this silly story. 

Once again the drive-by media, this time Newsweek, promotes its leftist politics by ignoring Walter Cronkite’s journalistic admonition:

“In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.” 

Left-wingers, who would benefit from the socialist remedies for Gore-explained climate change, are too impartial, too unscientific to listen to the contrarian scientists, let alone show these scientists any respect.  Left-wingers are donning the brown shirts and demanding silence of nay-sayers.  In the meantime, they drum up global warming hysteria by practicing the teaching of Lenin:

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.R