Climaquiddick: The Next Shoe

clipped from www.kusi.com It has been revealed that a "sleight of hand" was used in the computer program that rated 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” Skeptical climate researchers have discovered extensive manipulation of the data within the U.S. Government's two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. These centers are being accused of creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based. The two investigators say the system has been distorted in other ways as well. They have documented their findings in great detail in a scientific report that has been posted online.

Click below to watch each segment of the KUSI Special Report, Global Warming: The Other Side

With A Cherry On Top

clipped from www.moonbattery.com It appears that the Federal Government (surprise surprise) is up to it's armpits in another climate data scandal. From John Coleman at TV station KUSI in San Diego: PRIMARY UNITED STATES CLIMATE CENTERS NOW CAUGHT IN DATA MANIPULATION NEW REVELATIONS HEADLINED ON TV CLIMATE SPECIAL It has been revealed that a "sleight of hand" was used in the computer program that rated 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD." Skeptical climate researchers have discovered extensive manipulation of the data within the U.S. Government's two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. These centers are being accused of creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based.

Precipice

clipped from hotair.com “For the most part, that’s just the ratchet effect of Big Government, growing, expanding, remorselessly, under cover of darkness. What happened this past year is that Obama and the Democratic Congress made it explicit, and did it in daylight. And, while Barack may be cool and stellar if you’re as gullible as ‘the educated class,’ Nancy Pelosi and Ben Nelson most certainly aren’t “‘The educated class’ is apparently too educated to grasp this insufficiently nuanced point… “As Michael Barone observed, ‘the educated class’ was dazzled by style, the knuckledragging morons are talking about substance. They grasp that another year of 2,000-page, trillion-dollar government-growing bills offers America only the certainty of decline. Just before the Senate’s health care vote, Obama, the silver-tongued orator, declared that we were ‘on the precipice’ of historic reform. Indeed. On Tuesday, we’ll find out whether even Massachusetts is willing to follow him off the cliff.”

Remind Me To Buy More Popcorn

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com This email was sent out earlier from the Scott Brown Campaign: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CONTACT: Felix Browne January 16, 2010 MEDIA ADVISORY FOR TODAY Dan Winslow, counsel for the Scott Brown for U.S. Senate campaign, will hold a media availability to announce the filing of a criminal complaint against the Massachusetts Democratic Party regarding a recent mailing paid for and sent by the Massachusetts Democratic Party. Winslow will make a statement and take reporters’ questions at MassGOP Headquarters in Boston TODAY at 4:00 PM. Massachusetts GOP Headquarters 85 Merrimac Street, 4th Floor Boston. Oh My! It involves the SEIU!!! The SEIU did not immediately return a call for comment.

In The Meantime

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Don’t worry, the University of Wyoming in Cheyenne, where the new NCAR supercomputing center will be, is already on top of the situation. This is from their press release May 26th, 2008: The University of Wyoming is ready to research clean coal and wants proposals from both academic and industry organizations. With the help of the Wyoming state government, they’ve arranged for up to $4.5 million in research funds — which can be matched by non-state funds. And, Wyoming already has their hand out to Presdient Obama: From CBS in Denver: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming Seek Clean Coal Funding DENVER (AP) ― The governors of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming are asking President Barack Obama to fund the development of clean-coal technologies in the West. Yup, clean coal will power that new NCAR supercomputer any day now, and we’ll be paying for it. In the meantime: I’m sure NCAR will let us know how those wind turbines work out for that other 10% of the power.

From $200 To $150K All The Way Up To Jail Time

clipped from legalinsurrection.blogspot.com Martha Coakley flopping gaffe of the day, as reported by the Boston Herald: Shipping giant UPS isn’t amused by a Democratic Party campaign pamphlet attacking Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown that plays off the company’s slogan “What can Brown do for you?” Atlanta-based United Parcel Service, known for its ubiquitous brown trucks, demanded yesterday that the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which is listed as paying for the pamphlet, stop distributing it. The mailer asks “What can Brown do to you?” It shows Scott Brown dressed up as a UPS driver and says, “He can reward corporations that ship your job overseas just like George W. Bush.” Here is an image of one of the actual mailers:

That's the the option range for what Coakley owes UPS.

Call Your Sister

clipped from www.moonbattery.com At least Croakley is a solid candidate when it comes to foreign policy:

Who's Missing?

clipped from pajamasmedia.com WHO’S MISSING HERE? “President Barack Obama joined his two predecessors at the White House on Saturday to kick off a relief drive for earthquake-stricken Haiti.” His two predecessors? Where’s #39? Is somebody at the White House trying to avoid unfortunate comparisons? But wait, this isn’t an isolated incident: The Cook County Democratic party sent out a direct mail piece this week touting endorsed candidates centered on the theme that “throughout history, Democrats have led us to prosperity.” Pictured is the roll of Democratic presidents of the past seven decades in chronological order, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and favorite son president Barack Obama. Oops. Where’s Jimmy Carter? Still “history’s greatest monster,” I guess . . . .

Excuse Me?

clipped from online.wsj.com Mr. Beck's answer: "I believe the conspiracies, quote-unquote, that are happening now are happening all out in the open. All you have to do is track their actions. Their actions speak louder than their words. It's easy to throw out, 'Well, he's a conspiracy theorist.' Why do you say that? 'Well, because they say they're not doing that.' But their actions show that they are. "TARP, stimulus—a stimulus package that makes no sense whatsoever. No sense whatsoever! TARP, stimulus, health care that is behind closed doors, where they're giving Medicaid free to states, where they're saying, 'We're going to pay for it by reducing the cost of Medicare while we expand Medicare.' As an example, Mr. Beck notes that Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, last month described the Senate health-care bill as a "starter home." Mr. Beck continues: "Excuse me? That's everything that I've been saying you're going to do, and you've been denying it."

Brrrr!

clipped from math.ucr.edu This shows the Earth's temperature since the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago - the end of the Mesozoic and beginning of the Cenozoic. At first the Earth warmed up, reaching its warmest 50 million years ago: the "Eocene Optimum". The spike before that labelled "PETM" is a fascinating event called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. At the end of the Eocene the Earth cooled rapidly and the Antarctic acquired year-round ice. After a warming spell near the end of the Oligocene, further cooling and an increasingly jittery climate led ultimately to the current age of rapid glacial cycles - "ice ages". The amount of ice is estimated by the amount of oxygen-18. In these charts up means "cold"!

Missing

clipped from newsbusters.org So, you think today's temperatures are out of the ordinary? Nobel Laureate Al Gore does, and strongly made the case in his schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" with all kinds of neat slides and graphs. Of course, despite incessant claims of a consensus concerning this premise, not everyone agrees. In fact, climatologist Cliff Harris and meteorologist Randy Mann, who, amongst other things, run a website called Long Range Weather, have created an absolutely marvelous long-term global temperature chart that wasn't in Gore's movie, and every climate alarmist in the media desperately hopes you never see it: Unfortunately, to configure the picture in the space available, the text inside is a tad illegible. Those interested in viewing a larger more readable image should go here. Mann and Harris went on to discuss the heat island effect in a fashion that very much confirms the work of Anthony Watts previously reported by NewsBusters.

Don't Say I Didn't Give You The Option To Learn Something Today

clipped from www.scotese.com This animation shows the changing location of the Earth's  climatic belts through time.  The legend to the left of the maps illustrates the position and width of the modern climatic belts. Notice how the climatic belts are more or less fixed.  The continents move through the different belts. In the past, the width of the climatic belts has changed. When the Earth is in an  Ice House phase, the Polar and Cool Temperate belts  expand ( 0, 300, 630 million years ago).  During Hot House times, the Arid and Warm Temperate belts expand  (100, 200, & 400 million years ago). When the continents are gathered together in a Pangea, the wet tropical belt sometimes disappears.

Click through to scotese.com, left click on the map and drag your cursor right and left. Pretty interesting when you can watch it happen at your direction, huh?

Unprecedented Warmth?

clipped from www.scotese.com During the last 2 billion years the Earth's climate has alternated between a frigid "Ice House", like today's world, and a steaming "Hot House", like the world of the dinosaurs. This chart shows how global climate has changed through time.

Today's Samizdata Update

clipped from www.biomind.de This website documents my latest research on the history of carbon dioxide gas analysis. My work had been published by several journals and had been presented at national and international meetings. In literature we can find more than 200 000 directly measured CO2 data since 1800 from which I have estimated the annual CO2 background averages since 1826 to 1960, the end of the measurements by chemical methods. IPCC prefers ice core reconstructions. This new data set reveals remarkable coherence with other geophysical timeseries. Please feel free to check data, methods, stations and historical literature. Comments are welcome.

The Farce In The Icehouse

clipped from www.geocraft.com Since the climate has always been changing and will likely continue of its own accord to change in the future, instead of crippling the U.S. economy in order to achieve small reductions in global warming effects due to manmade additions to atmospheric carbon dioxide, our resources may be better spent making preparations to adapt to global cooling and global warming, and the inevitable consequences of fluctuating ocean levels, temperatures, and precipitation that accompany climatic change. Supporting this view is British scientist Jane Francis, who maintains: " What we are seeing really is just another interglacial phase within our big icehouse climate." Dismissing political calls for a global effort to reverse climate change, she said, " It's really farcical because the climate has been changing constantly... What we should do is be more aware of the fact that it is changing and that we should be ready to adapt to the change."

Like Today

clipped from www.geocraft.com As long as the continent of Antarctica exists at the southern pole of our planet we probably will be repeatedly pulled back into glacial ice ages. This occurs because ice caps, which cannot attain great thickness over open ocean, can and do achieve great thickness over a polar continent-- like Antarctica. Antarctica used to be located near the equator, but over geologic time has moved by continental drift to its present location at the south pole. Once established, continental polar ice caps act like huge cold sinks, taking over the climate and growing bigger during periods of reduced solar output. Part of the problem with shaking off the effects of an ice age is once ice caps are established, they cause solar radiation to be reflected back into space, which acts to perpetuate global cooling. Continental polar ice caps seem to play a particularly important role in ice ages when the arrangement of continental land masses restrict the free global circulation of equatorial ocean currents

Still Unfolding

clipped from news.cnet.com Elinor Mills explains what happened to Google, how it happened, who did it, and who else was affected.

Go watch the video.

O W

clipped from campaignspot.nationalreview.com MSNBC just reported news that surprised me. President Obama will go to Massachusetts to campaign with Martha Coakley UPDATE: The sort of thing you miss if you're not following me on Twitter: "After meeting Saturday with George W. Bush on Haiti, Obama goes to Boston Sunday, arguing that Scott Brown is as bad as George W. Bush."

This is about as craven as you can get. O Duce campaigned day and night about how W messed up Katrina. Now he wants him in the middle of Haiti so he can blame him some more when things go badly.

What a nasty jack*ss.

O Jurisdiction

clipped from www.qando.net Suppose I told you that there is an organization which claims to have worldwide jurisdiction (literally, “where the law speaks”) over all matters of criminal law and justice, regardless of who a person is? No I’m not referring to the ICC, but instead to the Obama administration. The Obama administration is considering a criminal trial in Washington for the Guantanamo Bay detainee suspected of masterminding the bombing of a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people, a plan that would bring one of the world’s most notorious terrorism suspects just steps from the U.S. Capitol, The Associated Press has learned. It’s not readily apparent what charges would be brought against Hambali, but a real question exists as to exactly what power our civil judicial system would have over him. In order to pass judgment on anyone, a court must have personal jurisdiction over the defendant, which essentially means that he has some nexus with the place where his trial takes place.

A Trillion Here...

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

The Perfect Freaking Storm

clipped from ace.mu.nu Let me ask a question. Are Democrats trying to throw this election? This woman and everyone around her is a moron. Even when people try and help her, they klll her. As I said in a comment late last night in one of the threads... If for one second I believed in conspiracy theories and that the Republicans had the smarts to pull one off, I'd swear Coakley is a plant. It's like a bunch of drunk and/or stoned poli-sci students sitting around their dorm at 3am and thought, "what kind of idiot would the Democrats have to run to lose Teddy Kennedy's seat 3 months after his death?" She's the perfect freaking storm of stupidity. Yeah, I'm quoting myself now. If POTUS can do it, so can I.

Do-Over

clipped from ace.mu.nu So he's gotta go all in and that means telling people the stakes. In Washington, I’m fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care. I’m fighting for financial reforms to stop Wall Street from playing havoc with our economy. I’m fighting to create a new clean energy economy and it’s clear now that the outcome of these and other fights will probably rest on one vote in the United States Senate. So it's an exercise in turnout. By announcing that this election is a referendum on his policies, he's made it possible for thousands of frustrated people in Massachusetts to absolve themselves of their mistake in November 2008. There are two groups of energized people in this race. Republicans are one, for obvious reasons. The second group are people who feel like they were misled by Candidate Obama in 2008. Obama just gave that group of people a do-over.

STEMing The Cool Culture -- Good Luck With That

clipped from www.wired.com Sure, we’re all plugged in and online 24/7. But fewer American kids are growing up to be bona fide computer geeks. And that poses a serious security risk for the country, according to the Defense Department. The Pentagon’s far-out research arm Darpa is soliciting proposals for initiatives that would attract teens to careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with an emphasis on computing. According to the Computer Research Association, computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006. Darpa’s worried that America’s “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”

Of course it's worse than just this. Once you are a geek Du'O's tax policies will make sure your job is located in China.

Even with that said, there is a great program that does exactly what they're asking for and I've been running it at my local middle school. It's called First Lego League and it rocks. Thank Dean Kamen.

What Is Going On?

clipped from www.redstate.com

From The Horses *ss

clipped from hotair.com Tossing this out there for the people who decided to give this tool a small part of their weekly paycheck. He’s not against the troops, of course, just the corrupt bastards who send them off to die under “false pretenses.” But he rejected comments by critics that the film is un-American even if it is an allegory for American military forays. I personally believe were sent there under false pretenses, so I hope this will be part of opening our eyes.” Again, I haven’t seen it, but Gregg Easterbrook has. Here’s his take on Cameron’s highly nuanced, highly sympathetic vision of the American soldier sent to be cannon fodder under false pretenses: If I were a military man or woman, I would find “Avatar” insulting. With one exception, the helicopter pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez — her character is twice referred to as a Marine, suggesting the military personnel are regular military, not mercenaries — all the people in fatigues are brainless sadists.

The Sun, Stupid

clipped from www.americanthinker.com With such convincing evidence, the Soon and Baliunas paper became the target of a great deal of criticism from the gang led by the now-discredited Dr. Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in Britain. The recently uncovered e-mails from him and his collaborators show an orchestrated effort to discredit the work of these two scholars. What is also notable is that Soon's and Baliunas's references were the very same data that the Jones Gang had reviewed and suppressed. The data in question is known as proxy data. Proxy data is data compiled from tree rings, sediments, and ice cores, as well as other indirectly measured estimates of temperature. Correlating an accurate timeline for these data sets across the globe is supremely difficult, but these proxy data sources were beginning to indicate a cycle or signal which might expedite the process. This signal was thought by some in the Jones Gang to be a solar cycle.

Open Secrecy

clipped from latimesblogs.latimes.com Announcing everyone the VP meets with, including sessions with unidentified senior staff, which consume much of the vice president's listed time, and what subjects they talk about would have been a stark contrast to George W. Bush's administration, whose notoriously secretive ways drew such criticism from Democrats in Congress during eight long years of really failed policies. Instead, in the apparent interests of bipartisanship, the Delaware Democrat has adopted much the same sort of undetailed schedule as his Republican predecessor, Dick Cheney, who was not in the Senate when Obama was only 11 years old. In fact, today's Biden schedule highlight is a meeting with the chief of transparency for economic recovery. But, unfortunately, the transparency meeting is non-transparent, closed to the press. (See his full schedule below.) Which makes it -- what? -- secret openness? Open secrecy?

Transparency

clipped from www.moonbattery.com The dishonesty of the Obama Administration and the willful irresponsibility of the mainstream media that installed it have gotten so bad, we are now learning about their shenanigans from of all people hard left blogger Jane Hamsher. Jonathan Gruber was paid $392,000 of our money by the White House to spin ObamaCare as something that could conceivably work. In turn, the liberal establishment media has promoted Gruber's propaganda, carefully concealing that he is a political hack.

Cloudy

clipped from www.tnr.com In this context, the “highly sophisticated” assault that Google says originated from China—it stopped short of blaming the Chinese government, though it said that the effort appeared to be aimed at discovering information about dissidents—threatens the very heart of the company’s business. Google admitted that certain of its customers’ Gmail accounts were compromised, a breach that, if expanded or repeated, would very quickly make all of us think twice before sharing personal information over the Web. However important the Chinese market may be to Google, in either the short or the long term, it is less important than maintaining the integrity of the Net as a popular medium for information exchange. Like many other Western companies, Google has shown that it is willing to compromise its ideals in order to reach Chinese consumers. What it’s not willing to compromise is the security of the cloud, on which its entire business rests.

Crickets Today

clipped from pajamasmedia.com HOW THE MEDIA ARE COVERING that disastrous Head Start study. “A day after it was released, here’s a roundup of how the mainstream media are covering the HHS study showing that America’s $100 billion plus investment in Head Start is a failure: [...crickets...] Nada. Zilch. Rien du tout, mes amis.”

Drunken Sobriety

clipped from biggovernment.com One cannot drink oneself into sobriety. Yet that is precisely what Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration have attempted with our economy for the past year with predictable and painful results. Unemployment continues to stand at an official 10% for the third month in a row, the worst joblessness in 27 years.  The real unemployment rate is far worse.  Included in the December economic figures was a shocker – the percentage of adult men who are working has fallen to the lowest level in recorded U.S. history at just 80%.  That means that one in five men in this country between 18 and 54 are neither working nor claiming unemployment.  They have fallen completely out of the workforce. Economists estimate our true jobless rate as high as 17%, and that could grow in coming months as more Americans exhaust their unemployment benefits and lose homes to foreclosure.

Cloudy

clipped from www.drroyspencer.com Last year I posted an analysis of satellite observations of the 2007-08 global cooling event, showing evidence that it was due to a natural increase in low cloud cover. What we will find is evidence consistent with natural cloud variations being the dominant source of climate variability since 2000. CERES Observations of Global Energy Budget Changes The following graph shows the variations in the Earth’s global-average radiative energy balance as measured by the CERES instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. These are variations in the imbalance between absorbed sunlight and emitted infrared radiation, the most fundamental quantity associated with global warming or global cooling. Also show (in red) are theoretically calculated changes in radiative forcing from increasing carbon dioxide as measured at Mauna Loa.