The media is once again hyping an allegedly dire consequence of man-made global warming. This time the media is promoting the ice loss of one tiny fraction of the giant ice-covered continent and completely ignoring the current record ice growth on Antarctica. Contrary to media hype, the vast majority of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years and ice coverage has grown to record levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1979, according to peer-reviewed studies and scientists who study the area. (LINK)
Former Weather Channel Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo rejected the hype surrounding the recent Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse in Western Antarctica. “The shattered part of the Wilkins ice sheet was 160 square miles in area, which is just 0.01% of the total current Antarctic ice cover, like an icicle falling from a snow and ice covered roof,” D’Aleo wrote on March 25. (LINK) “We are very likely going to exceed last year’s record [for Southern Hemisphere ice extent]. Yet the world is left with the false impression Antarctica’s ice sheet is also starting to disappear,” D’Aleo added.
Climate scientist Dr. Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona, stated, “It is interesting that all of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) stories concerning Antarctica are always about what's happening around the [western] peninsula, which seems to be the only place on Antarctica that has shown warming. How about the net ‘no change’ or ‘cooling’ over the rest of the continent, which is probably about 95% of the land mass, not to mention the record sea ice coverage recently.”
Former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., presently senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, chastised the media’s Antarctic reporting as “typical of the bias that many journalists have.” Pielke wrote on March 25, “The media has ignored in their reporting the increase in Antarctic sea ice cover in recent years, with, at present, a coverage that is well one million square kilometers above average.” Pielke added, “Unfortunately, it appears that most journalists just parrot the perspective of the first news release on these climate issues, without doing any further investigation. If this is inadvertent, they need to be educated in climate science. If deliberate bias, they are clearly advocates and the reporters should be clearly and publically identified as having such a bias. In either case, the public is being misinformed!” (LINK)
True to form, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein could not allow himself to include any scientists or peer-reviewed studies countering alarm over the allegedly “melting” Antarctic. Borenstein instead hyped alarm by writing on March 27, “Scientists said they are not concerned about a rise in sea level from the latest event, but say it's a sign of worsening global warming.” [Note: Borenstein has a long history of incomplete reporting on global warming. See here and here. Also see related links section below for examples of the media's shoddy environmental reporting. In addition,ABC World News Sunday anchor Dan Harris thisweek produced a low brow smear segment on atmospheric physicist Dr. Fred Singer, a prominent dissenter of man-made climate fears. ABC News violated basic journalistic standards by citing "anonymous" scientists to attack Dr. Singer. See: here, here, here and here. ]
Yet, if only the media would spend a moment to get beyond the hype and alarmism, they would discover that scientists are already thoroughly debunking the media characterization of the “melting” Antarctic. [Note: 2007 and now 2008 are overwhelmingly turning into the “tipping points” for climate alarmism as new peer-reviewed studies continue to debunk rising CO2 fears, a U.S. Senate minority report reveals over 400 scientists dissented from man-made climate fears, and more and more scientists continue in 2008 to declare themselves skeptical of a man-made climate “crisis.” The Earth’s failure to continue warming has also confounded promoters of man-made climate fear. Here is a sampling of inconvenient developments for climate alarmists in 2008 alone: 1) Oceans Cooling! Scientists puzzled by “mystery of global warming's missing heat”- LINK 2) New Data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing “greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”- LINK 3) Former NASA Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer found not one peer-reviewed paper has 'ruled out a natural cause for most of our recent warmth' – LINK 4) UN IPCC in 'Panic Mode' as Earth Fails to Warm, Scientist says – LINK 5) UN IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri “to look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century.”- LINK 6) New scientific analysis shows Sun “could account for as much as 69% of the increase in Earth's average temperature” – LINK & LINK. 7) An International team of scientists released a March 2008 report to counter UN IPCC, declaring: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” – LINK 8) MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen’s new analysis finds the Earth has had “No statistically significant warming since 1995.”- LINK ]
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and discussions with officials at the Department of Education, I have obtained a comprehensive list of gifts originating in foreign countries to American colleges and universities (as reported under Title 20, Section 1011f of the U.S. Code, “Disclosures of foreign gifts”). By law, all disclosure reports filed under Section 1011f are considered public records, and today, National Review Online is making them available to readers, here.
I post this material for two reasons. First, Congress will soon be facing an important decision regarding foreign-gift-disclosure requirements for American colleges and universities. Second, some recent large gifts to American schools originating in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have raised legitimate concerns about foreign influence on American higher education. Given the size of our higher-education system and the variety of potential questions raised by the records I am releasing today, the best way to uncover further problems is to make this material available to mainstream reporters, bloggers, student newspapers, alumni, and concerned citizens throughout the country.
Before discussing the important decision bearing on foreign-gift disclosures facing Congress, some background information on the potential significance of these gift-disclosure reports might prove useful. Any remarks on specific newly released gift reports must be regarded as provisional and speculative. My purpose here is not to reach definitive conclusions about any specific gifts, but simply to point to potentially fertile areas for investigation.
Troubling Gifts To treat all or even most foreign gifts to American colleges or universities as somehow nefarious would be a serious mistake. America’s institutions of higher education — with their superb programs in science, medicine, and engineering — rightly benefit from the largesse of America’s foreign friends and allies, many of whom have benefited directly from the technical expertise developed in these institutions.
On the other hand, there are reasonable grounds to fear that some foreign donations may purchase undue influence over the way in which highly controversial subjects are treated in American lecture halls. For example, Virginia congressman Frank R. Wolf recently sent a letter of concern to Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia regarding a $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal to Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (the second largest gift in Georgetown’s history). A second $20 million gift from Prince Alwaleed to Harvard University has raised additional concerns.
Shortly after 9/11, Prince Alwaleed famously pledged to donate $10 million to the Twin Towers Fund. Yet because the gift was attached to a statement calling on the U.S. to “re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause,” Alwaleed’s gift was spurned by then-mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Harvard and Georgetown have evinced no such reluctance. Alwaleed clearly means his gifts to shape American views on the Middle East, and there are legitimate grounds for asking, as did Rep. Wolf, whether such gifts might compromise the content of scholarship at Harvard and Georgetown. (For more on concerns raised by Alwaleed’s gifts, see “Saudis give big to U.S. colleges.”)
In an earlier piece in this space, “Saudi in the Classroom,” I showed that questions about undue Saudi influence on American education go beyond colleges and universities. Evidence suggests that various Saudi-funded institutions are able to use congressionally mandated university programs of “public outreach” as an unmonitored channel to gain influence over American K-12 education.
Forming Judgments How do we differentiate between questionable foreign influence and legitimate support for that which is best in American higher education? By itself, the information contained in federally mandated foreign-gift disclosures does not allow us to discern the difference. These reports can only raise questions for reporters, students, and other concerned individuals to pursue. To fairly judge individual gifts will require additional information about its stated purpose and how it is actually being used, and this can only be obtained through inquiries at the institutions in question. Personally, I begin with the assumption that most foreign gifts to U.S. universities are benignly intended and do substantial good. On the other hand, since some foreign gifts do indeed raise legitimate concerns, how do we begin to make sense of the records I’m posting today?
They drift along in the worlds' oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres -- more than a mile deep -- constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.
Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through. After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.
These 3,000 yellow sentinels --about the size and shape of a large fence post -- free-float the world's oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.
It's fascinating to watch their progress online. (The URLs are too complex to reproduce here, but Google "Argo Buoy Movement" or "Argo Float Animation," and you will be directed to the links.)
When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before. No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.
So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys' findings? Because in five years, the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters' hypotheses, must be wrong.
In fact, "there has been a very slight cooling," according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.
Dr. Willis insisted the temperature drop was "not anything really significant." And I trust he's right. But can anyone imagine NASA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the UN's climate experts -- shrugging off even a "very slight" warming.
A slight drop in the oceans' temperature over a period of five or six years probably is insignificant, just as a warming over such a short period would be. Yet if there had been a rise of any kind, even of the same slightness, rest assured this would be broadcast far and wide as yet another log on the global warming fire.
Just look how tenaciously some scientists are prepared to cling to the climate change dogma. "It may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming," Dr. Willis told NPR.
Yeah, you know, like when you put your car into reverse you are causing it to enter a period of less rapid forward motion. Or when I gain a few pounds I am in a period of less rapid weight loss.
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them. [Or could it mean "Global Warming" is over hyped??? -- ed.]
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming." [Isn't THAT convenient. The real world doesn't match our obviously flawed model, we'll just dissemble to make it fit. -- ed.]
In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.
That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot. [OK smartasses, what level is the ocean *supposed* to be? For that matter, what is the temperature of earth supposed to be? -- ed.]
Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.
"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.
One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.
But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?
Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet. [Well, duh... -- ed.]
That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.
"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says. [Once again proving GW models are crap. They don't even factor in water vapor. -- ed.]
It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate. [OK, due to Anthropogenic Global Warming, warm water now sinks... For the love of Pete... -- ed.]
"I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board." [As it should, you ponce. -- ed.]
Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.
Compact fluorescent light bulbs, long touted by environmentalists as a more efficient and longer-lasting alternative to the incandescent bulbs that have lighted homes for more than a century, are running into resistance from waste industry officials and some environmental scientists, who warn that the bulbs’ poisonous innards pose a bigger threat to health and the environment than previously thought.
Fluorescents — the squiggly, coiled bulbs that generate light by heating gases in a glass tube — are generally considered to use more than 50 percent less energy and to last several times longer than incandescent bulbs.
When fluorescent bulbs first hit store shelves several years ago, consumers complained about the loud noise they made, their harsh light, their bluish color, their clunky shape and the long time it took for them to warm up.
Since then, the bulbs — known as CFLs — have been revamped, and strict government guidelines have alleviated most of those problems. But while the bulbs are extremely energy-efficient, one problem hasn’t gone away: All CFLs contain mercury, a neurotoxin that can cause kidney and brain damage.
The amount is tiny — about 5 milligrams, or barely enough to cover the tip of a pen — but that is enough to contaminate up to 6,000 gallons of water beyond safe drinking levels, extrapolated from Stanford University research on mercury. Even the latest lamps promoted as “low-mercury” can contaminate more than 1,000 gallons of water beyond safe levels.
There is no disputing that overall, fluorescent bulbs save energy and reduce pollution in general. An average incandescent bulb lasts about 800 to 1,500 hours; a spiral fluorescent bulb can last as long as 10,000 hours. In just more than a year — since the beginning of 2007 — 9 million fluorescent bulbs have been purchased in California, preventing the release of 1.5 billion pounds of carbon dioxide compared with traditional bulbs, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“Using them actually reduces overall emissions to the environment, even though they contain minuscule amounts of mercury in themselves,” said Mark Kohorst, senior manager for environment, health and safety for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association.
Public, agencies ill-informed of risks As long as the mercury is contained in the bulb, CFLs are perfectly safe. But eventually, any bulbs — even CFLs — break or burn out, and most consumers simply throw them out in the trash, said Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the journal Environmental Research.
“This is an enormous amount of mercury that’s going to enter the waste stream at present with no preparation for it,” she said.
Manufacturers and the EPA say broken CFLs should be handled carefully and recycled to limit dangerous vapors and the spread of mercury dust. But guidelines for how to do that can be difficult to find, as Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, discovered.
“It was just a wiggly bulb that I reached up to change,” Bridges said. “When the bulb hit the floor, it shattered.”
When Bridges began calling around to local government agencies to find out what to do, “I was shocked to see how uninformed literally everyone I spoke to was,” she said. “Even our own poison control operator didn’t know what to tell me.”
The state eventually referred her to a private cleanup firm, which quoted a $2,000 estimate to contain the mercury. After Bridges complained publicly about her predicament, state officials changed their recommendation: Simply throw it in the trash, they said.
With Easter just days away, thoughts naturally turn to eggs of the chocolate kind. So here's a question: what's the most valuable egg in Britain?
Forget about the elaborate creations of master chocolatiers. The genetically modified brown eggs produced by a flock of designer hens at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh are the biotechnological equivalent of a Fabergé.
Several generations of Isa Brown hens - a prolific egg-laying French cross between Rhode Island Red and Rhode Island White - have been bred from "founder birds" that were genetically altered by Dr Helen Sang and her team to contain human genes.
Each gene provides the recipe for the production of a corresponding human protein. In the Roslin Institute hens the human protein is found only in their eggs, reducing the risk of harm to the hens themselves.
The egg proteins are rich in expensive drugs that can fight cancer and other diseases, with each egg containing enough medicine to treat a handful of patients each year.
With this technique, Dr Sang's team has created a potential anti-cancer antibody as well as the drug interferon, marking an important advance in "pharming" - the use of farm animals for the production of pharmaceuticals.
Existing methods for making protein drugs, such as the monoclonal antibodies used to treat cancer and arthritis, are expensive and time-consuming.
Producing protein drugs in the eggs or milk of farm animals is potentially cheaper, faster and more efficient, but researchers have, until now, had only limited success in making pharming workable.
Because GM hens can each lay 300 eggs annually and can make faithful copies of human proteins, they could, within a few years, offer the prospect of mass-producing drugs that currently cost £10,000 a year per patient, at a fraction of today's cost.
It could be the end of preparing for a balmy European summer only to be met with rain and freezing temperatures. After years of mystery surrounding the Gulf Stream, researchers have finally worked out how it affects European weather. The key, they say, is a corridor of warm air that rises up from the Gulf Stream into the atmosphere.
Shoshiro Minobe of Hokkaido University in Japan describes the North Atlantic warm current – which is famous for bringing tropical waters to European shores – as a poorly understood "black box".
"It is widely accepted that its heat transport is important for the climate, especially for warm climate in Europe," he explains. "However, it is not known how the Gulf Stream actually influences the atmosphere."
Minobe and colleagues now say they have identified the key influence – a corridor of warm air that rises from the Gulf Stream up to 11 kilometres above the ocean's surface.
This altitude is where planetary waves, also known as "Rossby waves", are triggered by rising warm air. These waves cause changes in the atmosphere over thousands of kilometres via high-altitude westerly winds.
"The waves are efficiently excited by deep [high-altitude] heating of the atmosphere, but not by shallow [low-altitude] heating because, near the surface, the westerly wind jet is weak and friction is strong," says Shan-Ping Xie of the University of Hawaii, US, who collaborated with Minobe.
'Better forecasting'
Together with colleagues, Minobe and Xie used high-resolution satellite data gathered by NASA to show that a narrow rain band frequently hovers directly above the warm, northernmost flank of the Gulf Stream.
In this region, the warm temperatures of the Gulf Stream contrast sharply with the cold waters of the North Atlantic. The resolution of computer models currently used to predict the weather is too low to show this sharp temperature gradient, which extends over just tens of kilometres – current models cannot resolve anything smaller than about 150 kilometres.
Yet, according to Minobe's research, this sharp gradient produces upwelling wind currents that carry the warmth of the Gulf Stream deep into the troposphere.
To test this theory, the team used a higher resolution model. When the temperature gradient was sharp, the computer model was able to reproduce the rain seen in the NASA images. When the researchers smoothed the gradient over larger distances, it could not.
Current predictions are "not a exact science", says Adam Scaife of the Hadley Centre, the UK Met Office's research centre. And, he says it remains to be seen whether the next generation of supercomputers, expected for 2009, can handle the sheer volume of calculations needed to run such high-resolution models frequently. "If this process were properly represented in high-resolution models, we could see a jump in seasonal forecasting skill," he told New Scientist.
One would think that countries that committed to the Kyoto treaty are doing a better job of curtailing carbon emissions. One would also think that the United States, the only country that does not even intend to ratify, keeps on emitting carbon dioxide at growth levels much higher than those who signed.
And one would be wrong.
The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.
Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.
In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto. Below are the growth rates of carbon dioxide emissions, from 1997 to 2004, for a few selected countries, all Kyoto signers. (Remember, the comparative number for the U.S. is 6.6%.)
Maldives, 252%.
Sudan, 142%.
China, 55%.
Luxembourg, 43%
Iran, 39%.
Iceland, 29%.
Norway, 24%.
Russia, 16%.
Italy, 16%.
Finland, 15%.
Mexico, 11%.
Japan, 11%.
Canada, 8.8%.
World and U.S. opinion seems to revolve around who signed Kyoto rather than actual carbon dioxide emissions. Once again, stated intent trumps actual results. Can even the global warming believers possibly believe this treaty has anything to do with it?
Update: In response to a reader request, here is a link to the table showing increases in absolute numbers, not percentages.
For forty years critics have attacked Western culture in general and its American brand in particular for an assortment of perceived sins. Minority groups have alleged America was singularly racist. Radical feminist have charged that it is sexist and male-dominated. Gays have complained about homophobia. Hard-core Leftists argued that the United States is exploitive and in thrall to a few elite capitalists.
All these critiques shared a common philosophy and a shared purpose—other than trying to achieve cosmic victim status as recompense for individual disappointment.
First, the charge was that our culture was inordinately dominated by white, heterosexual Christian men, who had systematically oppressed others to maintain their own privilege. Second, the solution was to enact affirmative action, change attitudes, pay fines, create new government programs to remedy the sin, and, in general, to begin ensuring that race, gender, and class “matter” more in American life.
But one doctrine united them all—multiculturalis m. It preached that America is not a melting bowl of different races that are to be assimilated, integrated, and intermarried under a common culture, whose traditions, government, science, and laws derived from a singular Western civilization—one that began with the ancient Greeks and Romans and gave the individual far more freedom and security than did other indigenous cultures in Asia, the Americas, and Africa.
Instead, multiculturalism insisted that Western culture was the culprit for global inequality and the cosmic unhappiness of the individual. We all are to embrace distinct and different cultures, none of them inferior to any other, all meriting equal consideration and worth. No one dare suggest a foreign practice inferior, another country less successful than our own—especially given our supposed history of assorted sins. All, however, always flew on Western jets, took Western medicines, and used Western appurtenances from the Internet to cell phones.
Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury admitted that imposition of Sharia Law in Britain was unavoidable. Does that mean that should some British citizens choose to kill their daughters out of “honor”, or circumcise their female infants, it is just “different” and therefore immune from criticism? I thought feminism tried to ensure equal protection of all women under the tradition of Western secular jurisprudence.
Harvard University just announced that in defense to Islamic students it would segregate its all-use gym so that Muslim women would not have to exercise with men. Will Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists have similar demands? I thought that the woman’s movement was supposed to bar just that sort of discrimination—forc ed segregation on the basis of gender?
California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and UC Berkeley have begun arranging joint engineering program with Saudi Arabian counterparts, among them King Abdullah University. But some complained that meant they would be a party to the exclusion of Jewish students and faculty, and the segregation of women. Wasn’t the university supposed to be the bastion of equal protection, in its loud denunciation of racism and sexism as it had in the past when it led the boycotting and embargoing of apartheid South Africa?
In 2006 Palestinians in their state-run newspapers published a series of odious racist cartoons of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Such primordial bias drew almost no media attention—at least far less than what met the Danish cartoonists, of a private newspaper and without official sanction, whose caricature of Mohammed as a terrorist led to riots across the Muslim world, and Western censorship and apologies.
The truth is that multiculturalism trumps all else. If Islamists, or people of the Middle East, express racist, or sexist, or homophobic sentiments, they usually get a pass from the West. So ingrained is the notion among our elite that there are no absolute standards of ethics and morality, that we have lost the ability to apply abstract moral judgment without exception.
There is irony to all this—other than the obvious fact that Western trash-talkers themselves rarely leave the protection of their Western embryos. Aggrieved racial groups, feminists, and gays in the West have made their appeals for equity on the principles of freedom and rationalism. Western society is self-reflective and self-critical, and embraces reason not superstition.
Therefore when a law, custom, or received wisdom can be shown to be illogical and biased, reason dictates that it should change. How odd, then, that these Western pressure groups have suspended criticism of anti-Semitism, misogyny, racism, and homophobia under the guise that such offenders from other cultures abroad are apparently different and thus not subject to the same standards they have used to indict their own.
The truth is that in the world today, if a young girl is murdered in Britain by her family for lost “honor”, if an Israeli professor is discouraged to participate in a joint American academic program abroad, if university facilities are to be cordoned off out of religious and gender considerations, if a black woman is to be portrayed as an ape in a cartoon, don’t expect Westerners to complain. You see, the offender is of a different race, culture and religion than our own in the West, and therefore either can’t be an offender like we are, or is to be given an exemption in deference to our far greater past sins.
In short, Lord Multiculturalism trumps every left-wing critique, every –ism and –ology.
Tidbits Spitzer suggestions
1. Please no more dutiful wives on television. Is the point to mitigate the shame? If so, it doesn’t work, but suggests instead that his career is a sort of shared investment, both financial and status-wise, and the two, Clinton-like, will not endanger their joint venture. He can face the music alone, just as he was caught alone.
2. The god of all politicians should be Nemesis, an all-seeing deity whose eye sees all, and metes out justice in kind and amount commensurate with the perpetrator’s hubris.
3. The age of the prostitute—22 years—seems under-emphasized. Besides the issues of criminality, lying, misuse of funds, et al, there seems something especially disturbing about a middle-age male paying some 22-year old for sex, to such a degree that she must discourage the mature governor by reminding him that his proclivities are “dangerous.” Class is of interest as well. She was once a 17-year-old runaway and high-school drop-out. Wouldn’t the humane, the liberal Democratic thing have been, when learning of her circumstances, to say something like, “Wait, you don’t need to do this, here’s a better deal: I will pay you not for dangerous sex, but to finish high school?”
More Suicide Bombers in Baghdad
Islamic human cruise-missiles went off in Pakistan and Iraq this week, and not long ago in Algeria and Israel. Suicide bombers have been able to do what the most sophisticated Western weapons cannot—navigate through crowds undetected and blow up targeted groups and individuals. The human brain is more sophisticated than a computer, and, given the sick realities of the Middle East, a young Muslim represents less material investment than a $1 million missile. The more we turn to drones and robots, the more the primordial Islamists turn their propaganda to young, sexually frustrated, angry males, who have been taught to hate and blame all of the failures of their societies and themselves on a Western other, to be fixed by a sexual reward in Paradise. They more cheaply and more efficiently can trump Western technology, since built into their guidance system is a powerful directive that still baffles the West, we are willing on occasion to risk dying in order to live; the suicide bomber is living to die, a much stronger impulse, at least in the short term. Ode to an Orchard
I watched yesterday a 20-acre nectarine orchard—already pruned and cultivated—yanked out by a bulldozer in north Fresno, ostensibly for more tract development. As I drove by, the news reported $108 a barrel oil, and the French Foreign Minister suggested that the magic of America was over. All this comes as a consequence of a pathetic dollar, huge foreign debt, mounting national debt, sizable annual deficits, and a mortgage crisis.
At some point as I watched the trees fall, I thought have we Americans forgotten we must eat and need fossil fuels still to live? Here in California we are tearing out some of the world’s best farmland—with ideal weather, good loam soils, gravity-fed Sierra Nevada water, skilled farm managers—to build houses that could otherwise either be put on marginal soils, or in greater density to discourage the paving over our national assets, and a time when food grows scarce and expensive.
In terms of energy, we continue to delay coal plants despite our vast reserves, we dither on nuclear power, we won’t drill off the California coast or in tiny parcels in a vast Alaska, while we talk grandly of wind and solar and hydrogen and all the other solutions that are decades away from contributing in major ways to our energy needs—while our enemies in the Middle East are building trillion dollar reserves that will find their way into the hands of those who want to kill us. Do we think Nigeria or Russia is easier on the environment than we are when drilling oil, or that the Chinese have cleaner coal plants? If we really live on planet Earth, then isn’t it incumbent on us to exploit our own resources safely to ensure others less careful do less damage to our shared globe?
Can’t we find a single Presidential candidate who says: ‘Hang on. We are going to get serious. We our going to build coal, nuclear, more hydro-electric plants. We want as many Americans as possible to buy a second electric plug-in car for urban driving; we want more efficient gas and diesel engines; we are going to cut spending, radically so, to balance the budget, pay down the debt, pay off our foreign debt, and raise the value of our currency. Tighten your belts: federal spending is frozen for five years; we are going to raise the Social Security retirement age and reform the system. The borders are going to close, and citizenship is going to mean something again.’
Should McCain say that, it would trump ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and the 1960s tired old agenda, adopted by both parties, that got us in the mess we’re in.
ONE year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to “upgrade”?
...Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.
Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”
Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.
It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.
ScienceDaily (Mar. 11, 2008) — Eco-minded drivers in drought-prone states take note: A new study concludes that producing electricity for hybrid and fully electric vehicles could sharply increase water consumption in the United States.
In the study, Carey W. King and Michael E. Webber note that policy makers often neglect the impact that fleets of hybrid and electric vehicles could have on already-scarce water resources. They calculated water usage, consumption, and withdrawal during petroleum refining and electricity generation in the United States.
Each mile driven with electricity consumes about three times more water (0.32 versus 0.07-0.14 gallons per mile) than with gasoline, the study found.
"This is not to say that the negative impacts on water resources make such a shift undesirable," King and Webber emphasized. "Rather this increase in water usage presents a significant potential impact on regional water resources and should be considered when planning for a plugged-in automotive economy."
The article, "The Water Intensity of the Plugged-In Automotive Economy" is scheduled for the June 1 issue of Environmental Science & Technology.
When True Believers begin to harbor doubts, they don't immediately give up the faith. It's too scary; too much pride and money has been invested; too many jobs and reputations are on the line; and they need to find a new reason to live. So they always try to add on new wrinkles and qualifications to their crumbling story.
Today that's happening with the global warming cult.
"Human-caused global warming" has now officially been re-named "climate change" to explain the inconvenient truth that the winter of 2007-8 was the coldest in a century, in spite of all those tons of "greenhouse gas" being spewed into the air from all the new factories in China and India. Worldwide temps dropped 0.6 of a degree C in one year. That may not sound like a lot, but it's more than all the ballyhooed warming in the preceding century.
If you want to see cult therapy at work, read John Tierney in The New York Times. Tierney is a skeptic who now conducts recovery therapy for the faithful on his Tierney Lab page. It looks like someone at the NYT has finally caught on to the hoax but won't admit it. So they hired Tierney to break it to the True Believers as gently as possible. Watch how the readers' blogs are resisting his gentle skepticism; it scares them. They are just Obama suckers who would have fallen for Bill Clinton, when he still had his magic mojo.
In the 1960s social psychologists studied a doomsday cult which made the big mistake of predicting the day of Armageddon. When that day came and went without crisping the world, the cult leaders didn't admit they were wrong. Instead, they discovered reasons why doomsday had been postponed. It was a triumph of faith over facts. That's how stock market bubbles and busts work. It's how the jihadi Armageddon cult of Tehran will crumble, if we're all very lucky.
How can this super-cold winter happen? It's got all the faithful a little worried. Climate modeling teams all over the world are sweating 24/7 to deal with it. They are producing epicycles for their models, to hang on the warming story.
"Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles. When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted -- after the fact.
The Polish astronomer Nicholas Koepernick -- called Copernicus -- pointed out that a sun-centered planetary model could get rid of all those epicycles with elegant simplicity. You only had to assume that the planets are going around the sun, not the earth. Suddenly all those cycle-on-cycle orbits simplified into near-circular ellipses. But he only saw the page proofs of his book De Revolutionibus on his death bed. He didn't want to share the fate of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, or Galileo Galilei, who was put under house arrest by Pope Urban VIII and forbidden to publish in the last years of his life. Because mobs of True Believers can get pretty nasty before they give up.
Today we see a spate of new computer models showing up in science journals, each one attempting to rescue some piece of the ecological goose that laid the golden egg. These are often not called "models." With utter dishonesty, they are labeled "new studies of the climate." But they are not empirical studies at all. They are little math models with new epicycles, but still based on the same gross oversimplifications. To reassure the True Believers, they always end with the same punch line: Yes, Virginia, there really is a global warming faerie, and all the doom-sayers are right.
How good are the assumptions in these models? Well consider the fate of Ferenc M. Miskolczi (pronounced Ferens MISkolshee), a first-rate Hungarian mathematician, who has published a proof that "greenhouse warming" may be mathematically impossible. His proof involves long equations, but the bottom line is that the warming models assume that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. Why? Because it simplifies the math. If on the other hand, you assume the atmosphere is about 100 km thick (about 65 miles) -- which has the big advantage of being true -- the greenhouse effect disappears! No more global warming.
Miskolczi once worked for NASA, but resigned in disgust when they would not allow him to publish his work. (It appeared in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal Weather, and looks legit). So it's the global warming faithful of NASA Goddard Space Center, notably True Believer Godfather James Hansen -- who are always complaining to the media about Bush Administration censorship -- but who have ended up censoring their own scientific skeptic. Cosmic justice for NASA, you might say.
Censoring skeptics is an admission of weakness. That's why Pope had to shut up Galileo -- he couldn't win on the facts. The science establishment is now going after the Galileos of our time for the same reason, because orthodox scientists are pretty frail human beings and don't really like to be wrong. Reasoned skepticism is not something our papacy of politicized science wants to hear. Off with their heads!
That's the real global warming tragedy -- a speculative bubble in science, which happens all the time, has now been protected by the politicians, and allowed into an ugly and expanding volcanic pressure point. It is threatening to erupt and engulf climate modeling around the world. Scientists are pretty ruthless with open failure.
Politicized science is a far bigger disaster than NASA's Challenger tragedy. Americans understood the Challenger tragedy as a technical mistake at the leading edge of space exploration. What we cannot understand or forgive is corruption of scientific inquiry to push a money agenda.
When this farce is finally exposed, heads must roll. Not for being wrong about the global warming hoax, because anybody can be wrong -- but for politicizing normal scientific debate. Politicized science kills science. This is one festering boil that has to be lanced.
There's nothing wrong with scrutinizing the motives of people engaged in a dicey debate. The subjectivity arises from scrutinizing only one side and always with a preconceived notion of what you are going to find.
Such bias is typical, though, of the climate debate, and not just among reporters and editors.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column that was provocatively titled, "Forget global warming:Welcome to the New Ice Age." In it, I explained that, far from being warming activists, some solar scientists see the recent downturn in solar activity as harbinger of a coming Ice Age.
I wondered how come we don't hear about that in equal measure with the claims of an impending meltdown?
I received over 1,800 e-mails, most of them complimentary. A large number, though, were as hysterical and vicious as any I have received on any subject in almost two decades in journalism.
How could I not believe? Was I being dishonest or just stupid? How much had EXXON paid me? Until I could write in favour of the warming theorists, I should "go back into your oil company-funded bubble. You @*!/x-ing hack."
And that was from a climate scientist at a major university.
At last week's Manhattan climate conference, delegate after delegate related stories about how they had been denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research, their conclusions disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy of the Climate Change Pharisees. They spoke, too, of colleagues too afraid for their jobs even to turn up at the conference.
I don't believe we are headed for an ice age any more than we're hurtling towards a meltdown. But we are in the midst of overwhelming bias in favour of the meltdown side.
The small liberal arts college says it has discovered a cleaner and cheaper method of making biodiesel.
By THOMAS LEE, Star Tribune Last update: March 7, 2008 - 10:59 PM
The setting was modest but the rhetoric was anything but.
Inside a drab third-floor chemistry lab at Augsburg College, a group of scientists on Friday unveiled a technology they claim could "revolutionize" energy production and free the United States from its dependence on foreign oil.
That's a tall order for a small liberal arts college in Minneapolis that, at least until now, was not particularly known for its energy acumen.
Nevertheless, Augsburg President Paul Pribbenow suggested the technology, which makes cleaner and cheaper biodiesel fuel, could be "one of modern day's greatest discoveries." ("Miracle," "history making" and "dream" were also liberally tossed about during the 30-minute news conference.)
Dubbed the "Mcgyan Process," the technology, inspired by the work of Augsburg undergraduate Brian Krohn, converts most feedstocks into biodiesel fuel without using much water or producing lots of waste.
Ever Cat Fuels, a start-up co-founded by Augsburg alumnus Clayton McNeff, is building a $5 million plant in Isanti that eventually will produce 3 million gallons of biodiesel fuel a year.
Normally, companies make biodiesel fuel by mixing soybean oil with a sodium hydroxide "catalyst" in a tank that's heated at a high temperature. But this "batch" process takes hours to complete and produces waste. The catalyst itself must be neutralized with either hydrochloric or sulfuric acid, two toxic chemicals.
The Mcgyan method employs a metal oxide catalyst that converts a mixture of alcohol and feedstock oils in a tubelike reactor to biodiesel fuel. This continuous or "flow" process makes it more efficient because it takes seconds to complete and produces little waste, McNeff said. Patents on the process are pending.
One of the feedstock oils can be algae oil, which can be produced in great quantities from wastewater. Xcel Energy Inc. has invested $4.5 million toward algae and other alternative energy work through the University of Minnesota's Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment.
The timing for Friday's announcement could not have been better. Oil prices reached record highs this week, twice breaking $105 a barrel. That's higher than the previous peak in April 1980, when oil topped $101, after adjusting for inflation.
No one has the right to call you a 'climate denier' for expressing your views on climate change
If your neighbour is a charter member of the Al Gore Nation, today would probably be a bad time to ask him how he's been enjoying shovelling all that "global warming" out of his driveway this winter.
Trust me, climate hysterics (anyone who accuses others of being "climate deniers") do not like being mocked.
For example, last week's otherwise largely favourable response to my March 2 column "The carbon cops are coming, When anyone says 'polluters will pay' to reduce greenhouse gases, they mean you and me," included this reply from "William."
"My apologies for not responding to your diatribe against the Suzuki Foundation's proposal for a Carbon Tax, Sunday March 2, 2008, but I've been busy. Your argument ... should be backed up by a simple but effective test of your own about C02 emissions. Park your vehicle in your garage, close the garage door, roll down the car windows, and sit in it with the motor idling for about an hour or more. Then come out and give us all a full and highly detailed report on your findings."
Poor "William." He wants to save the world, but he doesn't know the difference between deadly carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2), the latter of which, while toxic in very high concentrations, is also essential to all life on Earth, as well as being a naturally occurring greenhouse gas.
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Then again, what can we expect in the current climate of intolerance, when even a revered environmentalist like David Suzuki, [First of all, I *like* Dr. Suzuki. However, his degree is in Zoology, this does not make him an expert on "Climate Change." His willful suspension of belief of the Scientific Method makes him suspect in my eyes... --ed.] while not suggesting the self-inflicted gassing of anyone, urges university students to find ways to jail politicians who don't meet his standards for fighting climate change? (A spokesman for his charitable foundation says he wasn't being literal.) [Yeah, right. --ed.]
In any event, climate hysterics tend to be sensitive when you poke fun at them about this year's cold, snowy winter being counter-intuitive to global warming.
HEAD GASKET
Before they blow a head gasket, "weather" isn't "climate." One cold winter doesn't disprove man-made global warming. The theory doesn't argue all parts of the world will get warmer, or that it will get warmer every year. Some parts will actually get colder.
Then again, we weren't the ones hysterically declaring last year's mild early winter was a sign of global warming -- total nonsense -- or predicting that last year would be the hottest on record. It wasn't.
The scientific "consensus" on climate change is simply that man-made greenhouse gas emissions, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas), are causing warming beyond what naturally occurs because of the greenhouse effect.
While the impact on climate, and thus on us, will be significant over time, there are substantial disagreements, and great unknowns, about what the precise impacts will be, how severe, where, when and most important, what we should do about it.
And on that issue no one -- no one -- has the right to silence debate -- no scientist, no environmentalist, no politician -- by dismissing anyone who disagrees with them as a "climate denier."
Because what to do about it isn't a scientific issue, it's a political one that will involve huge expenditures of public money. Our money. And we all get to decide that.
Yes, you can question the current orthodoxies about global warming and still care about the environment.
Yes, you have a right to ask whether the solutions being proposed -- for example, Kyoto -- make any sense.
HELPING THE ENVIRONMENT
Finally, there are many things we can all do to help the environment and lower our reliance on fossil fuels, good ideas regardless of your views on global warming.
Don't buy a bigger house than you need. Don't drive a more powerful car (or buy more cars) than you need. Cut down on flying. Vacation closer to home. Take public transit more often. When possible, buy domestic instead of foreign produce and manufactured goods. Eat less meat, more fruits and vegetables. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
But the choice between, say, nuclear or wind and solar power as we head into the future?
That's a political issue. We all get a say on that.
Imagine, dear friends, for a moment, the following scenario. Picture a Christian man walking into a Hindu school and opening fire on students as they were learning their holy books. Then imagine that, not only had he murdered eight young students and wounded more than 30, but just try to visualize groups of Christians breaking out in song and dance to celebrate this “brave victory.
Yes, it is utterly impossible to do so in the civilized world. But this is exactly what occurred in the recent terrorist attack in Jerusalem. The act itself was not only horrific and cowardly, but what took place afterwards in much of Gaza and in many parts of the Arabic world was downright revolting.
Thousands came out into the streets to rejoice at their “brave Arabic martyr” who had the guts to shoot unarmed students as they were sitting and studying. Adults in Gaza passed out candies to the children and to passers-by who were honking their car horns in mad support. This display of the absolute lowest levels of inhumanity was frightening to some, but it was also enlightening, for it shows their true colors for everyone to see.
So let’s call a spade a spade here, folks, before this thing comes to haunt all of us across Mother Earth. Despite the calls from so-called “moderate” Muslims, Islam has proven itself to be anything but a religion of peace. One needs only to look at nearly every hot spot on the planet to see that somehow, in some way, and usually very directly, the Muslims are there making chaos, destroying, killing - all in the name of their “holy” beliefs. Whether it’s in Russia or Indonesia or Africa or the Middle East or Europe or the good ol’ USA, a militant form of Islam is preparing to take over.
Make no mistake about this. Israel is not the only country that they have their sights on. No way. They are taught that the Koran will rule over everyone and everything, and that if it happens by peaceful means that’s all well and good. But what happens if Jews are happy being Jews? And Christians want to practice their faith? And Hindus aren’t really interested in embracing Islam? Then, as the Muslims themselves have shown time and time again, it’s by any means necessary to rid the world of lower class “infidels.”
Let’s ask another very valid question here. Just what has Islam contributed to humankind? Many of the Arab countries are loaded to the gills with money - we’re talking billions upon billions, folks. One would think that perhaps some of this would go to educating, to training the future generations in ways to save the environment, in computer technology, in medicine, etc.
Gaza and the so-called Palestinians are a good case in point. Despite receiving millions in foreign aid - they are very good at taking - they end up spending a very high percentage of this generous aid on other important matters; like buying weapons, bombs, rockets, missiles, and training their young ones to hate and kill Jews, Israelis and other “infidels.” The civilized world is waiting for this great “religion of peace” to prove itself and give something positive back. Seems like we’re in for a long, long wait on this one.
Unfortunately, the only language the terrorists understand and can relate to is one of force. I say that it’s high time for the entire civilized world to unite and confront the evil of militant Islam that threatens to engulf us all. Enough making excuses for their violent and anti-civilization behaviors. Enough of sending any foreign assistance to those who want to kill us. Enough of the United Nations and all its Arab oil influence. It’s time to unite and defeat, by strong military action, Hamas, Hizbullah, Fatah, Iran’s nuclear program (Yikes! The list is getting bigger all the time.) and those who behave like they’re still in the Dark Ages.
Nearly all the major religions of the world have grown up. No one is out there forcing people to choose between conversion or death anymore. No one except the crazed, militant Muslims who teach their children to celebrate the horrific deaths of others.
As my compadre TL mentioned last week on this blog, a change in DST(Daylight Savings Time) for the nation has resulted in the need for an update of timezone data for all servers within our network. While for most machines, this can be resolved with a simple vendor-supplied patch, users supporting their own OSes that are no longer covered by vendor support (IE, Windows 2000) appear to be left out in the cold regarding this change. Fortunately, by using commonly available tools, Windows 2000 users are able to modify the timezone data on their local machine to reflect this new change. Read on for more information!
With the upcoming DST switch, OS vendors have been very proactive in providing patches for their Operating Systems that allow them to follow the new rules passed by Congress regarding DST for American timezones.
However, persons still operating legacy servers such as Windows 2000 were dismayed to learn that Microsoft was sticking to its guns regarding their Windows 2000 EOL(End of Life). Hotfixes were made available for Windows XP and Server 2003, but the Windows 2000 hotfix (which does exist) has not seen public release. In order to obtain it, one must order it from their Microsoft Account Manager. I believe the current list price is $4000 for a site license to use the hotfix - a large sum for a systems administrator looking to update a small amount of servers.
Fortunately, a tool released back at the beginning days of Windows 95 as part of the Kernel Tools package allows an administrator to hand-edit the Windows Timezone files in order to reflect the new DST settings.
After downloading, run the file, and extract the tzedit program somewhere on your server (The default of Program Files\TZedit is usually fine)
Run the extracted program - by default, the current timezone is already highlighted for you, so go ahead and click "Edit"
Now, enter the new date settings in DST portion of the timezone: Starts 2nd Sunday of March at 2:00 AM Ends 1st Sunday of November at 2:00 AM
That should be the only change you need to make - Click "OK", then "Close".
In order to make the server re-read the zone file - you will need to do one of two things: Reboot the server or Double-click the clock to pull up time and date settings, and under the Time Zone tab, pick a different timezone and hit Apply, and then re-select your real timezone and hit apply again.
You're done! Your server has been updated with the new DST rules, and will change its clock at the appropriate date.
Could we get rid of this DST stupidity please? It doesn't SAVE anything...
