China: Frozen Dumplings, Fridges, and Environmental Impact

Here's a stat for ya: 

In the 12 years between 1995 and 2007, China’s domestic refrigerator-ownership numbers have jumped to 95 percent from just 7 percent of urban families.

Quote of the Day: Green Purges Are Still Purges

It's the desire to purge that should worry us immediately, no?  This news piece just reinforces my conviction that a lot of these Greenie/lefty folks are crypto-tyrants constrained only by the puniness of their actual power:

Imagine if there were a campaign to sack every senior government adviser who didn’t believe in God. There’d be outrage, and rightly so. Purging politicos from power on the basis of their private beliefs, on the grounds of what lurks in their conscience, would be seen as an intolerable assault on freedom of thought. 

Well, the Green Party is proposing just such an assault on senior government advisers – not on the basis of whether they believe in God but on the basis of whether they accept the climate-change consensus.

Greening the Deserts with Carbon Dioxide

Well, whaddyaknow?  Look at this from the American Geophysical Union:

Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.

I now expect professionally apocalyptic eco-zealots to complain that greening the desert will lead to the extinction of the sand worms or something.  The Spice global warming gravy train must flow!

Hey Girl, You're Hotter Than Global Warming

As a rule I'm totally contemptuous of Greenies and celebrity environmentalism, but there are exceptions to every rule.  You go ahead and drive that Prius of yours if that makes you feel better, babe.

Quote of the Day: Science and Experts

Here it is:

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Fascinating!  More here:

"Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience."

LOL: Polar Bear Ice Cubes

Annoy global warming adherents while you enjoy your favorite cold beverage.  

Al Gore and the Great Green Meltdown

Well, I'm glad to see that I'm the only one who's sick and tired of Al Gore and his self-righteously shrill, pseudo-cultic, fraudulent greenie crusade.  Its implosion will be a moment of Schadenfreudtastic glee, not to mention relief for serious people who resist the outright politicization and corruption of science for power and profit (including people like ... oh, I don't know ...  actual scientists).  

Every Time I Google For Recipes and Shoes, Global Warming Kills a Cute Baby Polar Bear

Yadda yadda yadda.  Is there any part of life that the Greenies will not seek to control in their horrendous eco-crusade?  Is there not a single activity of normal life that they do not feel justified in pontificating about, unasked and unwanted?  Killjoy thermomaniac watermelons!  In the name of their implacable pagan deity Gaia, amid lurid visions of greenpocalypse, these frothing fanatics will stop at nothing.  Prius-driving, soy-latte-sipping, humorless little popinjays!  Pathetic, hypocritical neo-hippies with delusions of messianic grandeur and fantasies of power justified by an aggressive sense of moral superiority. What a toxic crew of obsessive miscreants who trade in guilt and misery as the expression of their perverse secular doomsday cult.  GO AWAY.  I don't care if you want to flagellate yourselves over your eco-sins, but I sure as hell mind when you attempt to flagellate me.  Hey!  Can we classify Greenies as an invasive species?

In the meanwhile, I am busy Googling away -- Payless Shoes is having another BOGO sale right now, and MM needs some nice new sassy but cheap sandals for summer!  (Though that too is evil, apparently.)  I'm also doing this while drinking a big vat of non-fair trade, non-organic coffee and frying up some eggs from non-free-range chickens.  Evil!  How many sins can I commit before breakfast?  Heh!  Oh, and Google already put the beatdown on this stupid Internet-search idea back in 2009: "...a typical individual's Google use for an entire year would produce about the same amount of CO2 as just a single load of washing."  Speaking of, I gotta do laundry today -- rack up yet another eco-sin for me, yay!

Geek News: Futurist Ray Kurzweil on Climate Change

And the notable futurist, who famously predicted the role of information technology in collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Internet, and the ability of artificial intelligence to beat humans at chess by 1998, has something to say about fossil fuels, energy problems, and climate change -- "No problem."

Japan Says No to Extending Kyoto Treaty

I didn't bother blogging about the ludicrous Cancun greeniac convention because it's not worth my time.  I'm busy with school!  Besides, the last time the global greeniac elites met in Copenhagen, I slammed it as a convocation of fools and hypocrites, and I haven't changed my mind.  But this latest news is something interesting: Japan refuses to extend the Kyoto Treaty.  Here's a quote:

"Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances."

Well, well, well.  Bonus: the forthrightness of the Japanese announcement reportedly surprised the other delegates.  Anyway, check out the news video at the link above.  There are more quotables in it, including the statement of the truth -- that Kyoto is useless and stupid.  

Nerd News: Hal Lewis Resigns from the American Physical Society

This is pretty important in nerd terms: Lewis of UC-Santa Barbara is a very prominent physicist, and he has quit the world's second largest physics society after 67 years of membership.  His decision is based on the issue of global warming and ClimateGate.  Read his resignation letter here.  Along with a number of other physicists (such as Robert Austin and William Happer, both of Princeton), Lewis has long voiced his objection to the politicization of science in the name of global warming.   (OK, I'm a nerd and I can't help giving you citations.  Here are no fewer than 800 academic papers and articles calling for skepticism on climate alarmism.)  Anyway, I give you a bit of Professor Lewis' public letter of resignation:

Climate Change Skepticism and Elitism

Read this!  It's a thoughtful, intelligent essay of a type that is all too rare now.

ClimateGate Revisited: Nullius In Verba

Read this.  Plus some Latin you can use: Nullius in verba!

Nerd News: What Fresh Hell Is This? Blacklisting Scientists

Not just ANY scientists, mind you.  Scientists who are climate change skeptics.  The list by the National Academy of Sciences has almost 500 names so far.  Nevertheless, the fact that there are 500 scientists who are skeptics and critics of an idea is a fact that IN ITSELF should say something.  Now I seem to remember all those hysterical lefty accusations a while back about evil old Bush's war on science.  How now, brown cow?

Public Service Announcement: the National Academy of Sciences has nuked the fridge and made itself a laughingstock, as far as I'm concerned.

What Fresh Hell Is This? NOAA Claims Temperature Accuracy Doesn't Matter

A veteran meteorologist disassembles the spin from the NOAA, via Watts Up With That, whose commentary is worth a look too.

But this isn't really surprising, is it? What matters is the willful massaging of data (and defense of such corrupted data) in order to fit a predetermined narrative in which too many people have sunk all their social, political, and professional capital for the purposes for gaining still more. It's called ClimateGate, people, and the turning point came, I think we'll agree eventually, in November 2009.

RELATED POST:

~"The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Christy was specifically talking about weather measurement stations.

Secular Blasphemy + Quote of the Day

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day, by University of Exeter philosopher Edward Skidelsky:

"the extension of the 'denier' tag to group after group is a development that should alarm all liberal-minded people."

Well, DUH. Of course, a whole swathe of self-proclaimed liberal-minded people are busy demonizing with the most reductive terms possible everybody whom they don't like and marginalizing them as morons. Under the idea of "actions speak louder than words," I submit that such folks are not at all classic liberals in the slightest.

As for blasphemy, didn't I just post about how political zealotry itself is a kind of secular religion? Maybe I should eventually post about the impulse to worship mingled with the impulse to persecute. And all excused under the idea of moral superiority.

Well, At Least He's Honest: Eco-Fascism on Display!

Oh, for goodness sake.

Satire Alert: "The Charge of the Heat Brigade"

Iowahawk has some competition! Check out Dignified Rant showing off his mad literary satire skillz. I'm impressed!

*throws roses*

ClimateGate: Game Over?

The wheels are falling off fast:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Apparently some scientists have remembered that science means not forcing data to match an agenda.

The killjoy thermomaniac watermelons' increasing panic and dismay is just ... DELICIOUS. Meanwhile I want my incandescent light bulbs back!

The IPCC is going down in history as a collection of scientifically illiterate scoundrels who feathered their own nests with the lucrative benefits of being global warming alarmists.

I want to grab a stake and stab it right into the slimy green heart of cap-and-trade.

UPDATE 1: The IPCC admits it's not a scientific organization. Heh!

UPDATE 2: Skulduggery-mania! Here's a handy summary. The wheels are coming off so fast that I can't even keep count. Meanwhile, I bask in sweet, sweet vindication of my rejection of all the alarmism and its calls for "Give us all your money and freedoms or Gaia's going to burn." It sounded like bad science and corrupt politics. I was called evil. Turns out I was RIGHT. So there!

Schadenfreude Alert: the Netherlands Versus IPCC

For the IPCC, it's all gone horribly pear-shaped as the Dutch call them out:

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

. . . The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

Mwahahahaha!

SERIOUSLY, if these people can't get their numbers right on something that can be verified, do they really expect me to trust their fantasy numbers spun out of thin air, computer models, and ever-increasingly discredited pseudo-research?