The Diminishing Growing Myth

It is almost beyond reason to see how the myth of Barack Obama has become so entrenched in the psyche of American politics and media. Over and over again I hear the talking heads on all sides of the political spectrum talking about how popular President Obama is. Before we explore this lets go back and look at a couple of previous Obama myths.

Out of The Shadows

First there were all the associations from his past that show his true background, which I touched upon here.

That is life. People are judged and evaluated by their records, or should be. There is this narrative out there about Barack Obama, but there is also a record. A voting record both in the Senate and the Illinois Legislature, a record of his past positions on certain boards he has served on and what he did, a record of what he did as a community organizer and a civil rights lawyer, a record of his college classes at Harvard, Columbia and Oxidental. There is also the record of his associations and political alliances both in and out of government.None of these have ever been out of bounds as far as a presidential candidate before.

In fact, in 1999 while running for president George Bush’s college transcripts were leaked to the press. He took quite a bit of abuse about being a C student at Yale. Of course after the election it was revealed that Gore was not any better at Harvard and in 2004 we learned that Kerry actually had a lower grade point average at Yale than Bush did. If Barack Obama were applying for a national security clearance, his entire background including associations and financial dealings would be scrutinized and evaluated by the FBI and other organizations. But because he is running for president, we are his security clearance; our votes say that he is a good security risk.

All these associations which as he moved up the political ladder he with adoring media complacency (at minimum) distanced himself from. This myth is the still the most troubling since we now have a President whom most people have no idea who he really is or what he represents. His entire background, both upbringing, associations and record is one of extreme left wing ideology conveniently smoozed over and reinvented into moderate liberal centrist.

Everybody Wants Him

Next we have the myth of the mandate which I wrote about here in which I noted;

It is doubtful that any presidential election since Reagan in "84" was actually a mandate and Regan's election in "80" was probably the only election since Roosevelt in "32" which was a mandate for change. Even the so called Reagan Revolution that started in 1980 was more a post election phenomena, people voted for change in 1980 as much to be rid of Carter as any profound acceptance of Reagan's policies.

In that respect Obama's election is more like Reagan's first victory than his second. Just as Reagan's victory was more the result of a repudiation of Carter, so too is the Obama election more a rejection of Bush than any overwhelming acceptance of Obama policies. After all, the main theme of Obama's campaign was almost exclusively based on tieing McCain to Bush and running against that image rather than any sharp contrast in policies. Americans were given very little depth as to what the change an Obama administration would bring, so the vote was more a vote for style rather than substance, not to mention the historic nature of the Obama candidacy. In 1980 Americans knew that Ronald Reagan's policies fundamentally differed from Carters, with Obama we are not so sure, he is either a pragmatic centrist or a far left liberal he is not well defined. Regan made no secret of where he stood on issues whereas Obama's campaign was sort of an election by subterfuge.

Money Talks

Not only the subterfuge of ever shifting positions, but the subterfuge of financing and money as I discussed here:

In Florida Barack Obama spent a total of $36.7 million to McCain's $8.3 million a staggering $24.4 million dollar advantage or as a per vote basis Obama spent $8.86 for every vote he received while McCain spent $2.11 for each of his votes. That number is even more staggering when you consider that includes almost 205,000 more votes for Obama out of over 8 million cast.

In North Carolina Obama outspent McCain $10.7 to $3.5 million or $5.04 to $1.66 for every vote they each received, basically a 3 to 1 margin to win a state by fewer than 14,000 votes or less than 1% of the votes cast.

In Virginia Obama outspent McCain $23.8 to $7.5 million or $12.15 to $4.35 per vote received.

In Ohio Obama outspent McCain $21.4 to $14.5 million or $7.90 to $5.80 per vote received.

The overwhelming money advantage allowed Obama to go after traditionally Republican states and compete. Take Indiana which borders his home state and where Obama was expected to have a very outside chance. Obama outspent McCain $11,800,000 to $428,895 or $8.63 to $0.32 for every vote received. This 25 to 1 advantage in spending helped Obama eke out a win by fewer than 26,000 votes or less than 1% of votes cast. With that large of an advantage in cash, an advantage that McCain had no chance of matching even if his campaign had been up to the challenge an outside chance at victory became a reality for Obama.

This is not to say that Obama would not have won with everything else this election cycle flowing his way, but it sure did not hurt. One is left to wonder though what would have happened had our next President not broken his promise and taken public financing.

At least the media mentioned it.

The Ever Popular

So here we are with a President who misrepresented who he was, raised and spent money to attain the office in highly unprecedented and perhaps illegal ways to get elected, proclaimed to have a mandate he never received at the polls and now is portrayed as immensely popular which he really is not. In fact he is growing more unpopular as the days pass. let's look at the numbers. First Gallup, as of this writing Obama has a 62% approval rating in the Gallup daily tracking poll with 27%of citizens disapproving. That is a spread of +35 points.

That sounds good 50 days into a Presidency, but has been pointed out it is nothing special historically for such a historic President. It is less popular than Carter was at this point, about the same as George H and George W Bush and slightly above Reagan and Clinton.

It is also exactly the same poll numbers that George W. Bush had after his first 100 days. Bush's negatives were slightly higher 29% compared to Obama's now 27%, but Bush's approval rating in the Gallup polls were steadily increasing from his election whereas Obama's are steadily decreasing.On election day Bush had a 57% whereas Obama's were 68% with 12% disapproval or +56 points.

Since election day Barack Obama favorability has dropped 21 points or a drop of almost 37%. Pundits explain to us that this primarily Republicans, true, but he is their President too I believe. Still a 37% drop in approval in your first 50 days is not exactly what I would call a honeymoon.

Then there is the Rasmussen Report. They actually do it a bit easier to follow by spreading not only the approve and disapprove but the strongly approve and strongly disapprove. On Inauguration Day Obama was 65%-30% approval rating or +35 points, as of this writing he is 56%-43% approval or +12 points. Based on the spread in his first 50 days he has dropped 23 points or about a 65% drop.

In the strongly approve versus strongly disapprove the numbers are equally stark. On his first day in office this historic President had 44% of Americans strongly approving of him and only 16% strongly opposed (I raise my hand here) for a margin of +28. Today the numbers are 37%-31% or +6 a loss of 22 points or a drop of 78% .

As has been the case from the beginning, Barack Obama is a mirage, a mirage that is portrayed to the American public as something he really isn't. He is not the person he campaigned as, he is not the overwhelming choice of the American people and he is not the immensely popular president that we are constantly told he is. Barack Obama is an ever diminishing growing myth courtesy of a corrupt media and an even more corrupt political system and a dumbed down American electorate.

The Library and Free Rides

Sometimes the seemingly most complicated issues are actually very simple, the trick is explaining them in simple parables so that everyone can understand it. One of the great examples of this is Leonard E. Read's essay explaining how the entire market system works by explaining the simplest of everyday items in "I Pencil".

I hope to explain something which is really quite simple at it's core, but seems to get complicated by-emotions. It is also about economics but is seldom portrayed that way, it is about Big Government and I'll attempt explain it in a way that is simple to follow.

The Library

I like libraries, mainly because I love to read and anywhere there are books, I feel comfortable. I believe libraries are very important both for our educational needs and for our society as a whole, they are a critical component to the advancement of a society.

How does a Library get the books to stock it's shelves? Well I'm sure that an employee in the Library procures them, but who pays for them? The Librarian does not reach into their own pocket and buy them. A library, no matter how many overdue books, is not a money making entity. No a library receives it's money to purchase books, in one way or another primarily through one government agency or another. Oh there may be "friends of the library" organizations that help support them, but for the most part libraries exist through the taxes of others.

The Librarian for all their worth to society generates no income to the enterprise for which they labor. They produce nothing that can be bought or sold, they generate no profit, in fact if a librarian is let go, it saves their employer (the taxpayer) money. A Librarian like all Americans pays taxes, but the truth is if the librarian was paid less the amount of their tax burden the net affect would be the same because a Librarian's taxes are only being recycled back to them self, while the rest of their salary is being paid for by others. A Librarian is a public servant.


If a library is shut down, it saves everyone in the community it serves money. Every book, DVD, magazine-every shelf, card catalogue, computer -the building, the maintenance and its upkeep are not there as in the private sector to generate revenue but rather it takes revenue from others. From a purely economic standpoint, a library is a luxury to society, it is a drain on it's resources.

The people who work in public service such a librarian work as hard I guess as those in the private sector, but they are paid by the labor of those in the private sector and not the other way around. They are public servants.

A factory that builds meaningless widgets for sale to the public, generates profits that can be taxed, creates jobs which provide a tax base for luxuries like librarians or even teachers, policeman and firemen. The more libraries, the more drain on society so the greater the need for the private sector to generate wealth to support it.

Free Ride

In our current economic troubles, the only segment of society that is creating job growth is government. Government neither generates revenue nor creates wealth. All government does to obtain money is tax, government creates nothing to generate profits. Governments can build libraries and hire librarians which cost the private sector even more money. Government can build roads by hiring private contractors, but since profit is not their motive efficiency is secondary-if that. Normally government institutions have the goal of spending all their money so as to insure further budgetary funding, further wasting money which must be taxed from a shrinking private sector.

As government grows, it sucks the lifeblood, money, out of society. Since government has no profit motive like you or I or any buisness, it must compensate by generating something else taxes and regulation. Taxes to fund itself and regulation to control society to perpetuate and protect itself.

Usually in the past, when we have gone through severe economic down turns, we cut back on the luxuries-libraries until things turned around. When we have not sacrificed luxuries for productive (profitable) enterprise we have prolonged our pain, this is what happened in the Great Depression, we attempted to fix the economy with government and it drug on and on until a war pulled us out of it. We are not only doing the same thing now, we are amplifying it through some misguided idea that we can just generate debt to avoid the pain.

Unless something changes soon, we are looking at not only massive government, less liberty but generations of economic pain. We are selling future generations of Americans into slavery, including your children and grandchildren, because despite what you are being told and may believe- you can not spend your way out of debt. You know this, I know this, we know this-there is no free ride.

To Tell the Truth

If an honest man is wrong, after demonstrating that he is wrong, he either stops being wrong or he stops being honest.

- Anon

Have you ever made a mistake? Of course you have, we all have -many for most of us. For some people it is easy to admit a mistake once identified, for others it is more difficult. "To ere is human" they say but pride or even arrogance can certainly get in the way of admitting an error, even an innocent one. There are several ways you can deal with a mistake, believe me, I have tried them all.

First and best, as we all know, is to admit it and move on. Second you can deny it and move on, not as good obviously but it is a solution. The other is to lie about it and try to move on. The problem with this approach is that once you lie about a mistake, depending on the mistake, you could spend a great deal of time defending, covering up and even lying to cover up the original lie and mistake. Sort of that "tangled web we weave" theory. We can weave that web so thoroughly that we lose site of the original reality and in our attempt to justify it, as inevitably must happen in order to live with ones self we believe our lie.

Lies, as we all know, come in assorted forms, not necessarily just the telling or representation of a falsehood, but it can also be the neglect to correct a known falsehood, that old lie of omission rather than commission. We can also lie by just ignoring that which does not fit into our new accepted reality, the reality that was caused by our mistake, which we lie about in order to live with our self.

The famous American Geographer T.C. Chamberlain wrote:

"The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence, and as the explanation grows into a definite theory his parental affections cluster about his offspring and it grows more dear to him...As this parental affection takes possession of the mind, there is a rapid passage to the adoption of the theory. There is an unconscious selection and magnifying of phenomena that fall into harmony with the theory and support it, and an unconscious neglect of those that fail of coincidence...

When these biasing tendencies set in, the mind rapidly degenerates into the partiality of paternalism. The search for facts, the observation of phenomena and their interpretation, are all dominated by affection for the favored theory until it appears to its author or its advocate to have been overwhelmingly established. The theory then rapidly rises to the ruling position, and investigation, observation, and interpretation are controlled and directed by it. From an unduly favored child, it readily becomes master, and leads its author whithersoever it will...

When the last stage has been reached, unless the theory happens, perchance, to be the true one, all hope of the best results is gone."

A very good explanation of scientific pride. Make no mistake, a large portion of the scientific world and a majority of the climate science world is now heavily invested "parental affection" of man made global warming belief structure. There is no doubt that the entire climate science community has not only been extensively financed but it's very meaning defined by the global warming theory. Take this comment of one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, the first woman to receive a PhD. Dr. Joanne Simpson:

Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor
receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical...The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system."

Consider that quite apart from what she said about climate models, the fact that she was affiliated with an institution , a government institution no less NOAA, that received funding based upon climate change science, restricted her from speaking frankly about her true thoughts about global warming. She is now able to speak frankly about a subject which she is a renowned world expert, but felt constrained from so doing prior to her retirement.

Over and over again prominent scientist retire or get close to retirement from their various institutions or agencies and then they feel comfortable about expressing their true opinions. Here is another example, retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon had this to say.

"My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy."

Granted Dr. Theon has been retired from NASA for many years but the fact that his now so adamantly expressing them is striking. Dr Roy Spencer another former NASA scientist gives a possible explanation, on his web site he writes:

And now my old boss when I was at NASA (as well as James Hansen’s old boss), John Theon, has stated very clearly that he doesn’t believe global warming is manmade…and adding “climate models are useless” for good measure. Even I wouldn’t go quite that far, since I use simple ones in my published research. I remember the old days at NASA, when even John Theon was singing the same tune as most people at NASA were. Manmade global warming was a potentially serious threat, and NASA wanted Congress to fund new satellites to study the problem. It was a team effort to get that accomplished.

Global warming research was a relatively new field back then. Was Theon always skeptical, and just being a team player at the time? I don’t know. It could be that Dr. Theon, after watching 15 years of climate research go by, decided that he was no longer convinced that mankind was at fault for warming.

We all know that government agencies as well as most institutional entities do no willingly cut their own budgets. In fact it is a well know practice to spend every last dime of budgeted money so as not to lose funding the next year and to justify budget increases, it is one of many reasons why governments are so inefficient.

A scientist who is employed by an institution whose funding is directly tied to a particular outcome is wont to find fault in that outcome, particularly when it may jeopardize his/her own career and financial security. As Upton Sinclair once noted"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

Lest we think that scientist simply because they are scientist are beyond such mortal sins as manipulation and deceit for prestige and money consider what a current atmospheric scientist recently observed:

“Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are.”-Petr Chylek

Not that all scientist in the climate and related fields are unscrupulous or even deceitful, they don't need to be. The belief in the Global Warming mantra is so prevalent that it is just a matter of accepting the dogma and not being a critical or skeptical observer which is the true mission of a scientist. This would be a lie of omission, failure to take due diligence to insure accuracy. As old T.C. so eloquently if pointedly observed "The search for facts, the observation of phenomena and their interpretation, are all dominated by affection for the favored theory until it appears to its author or its advocate to have been overwhelmingly established." Obviously this is not a new phenomena in the scientific community.

Even a casual observation of the science of global warming shows the bias towards predetermined outcomes and the tendency to make "things bigger and more dangerous than they really are."

Dr John Everett on his excellent web site make the following observation:

When reviewing impact assessments, look for bias. Often the authors think only of negative changes. This is not necessarily because of personal agendas (such as to assist animals, clean the air, or reduce the birth rate), but is primarily due to human nature. To guard against having a biased report, one should look for balance. Does the material articulate that things will be different and that there are pluses and minuses? There may well be more of one than another. Sometimes balance is reflected in the amount of text, or graphics made to illustrate impacts and often it is reflected in the number of negative versus positive impacts....

He then goes on to give examples and explain how they are being treated. I'll let the reader decide if the current state of scientific discourse on global warming has given us a balanced or even a fair representation of the risk versus rewards of the affects of global warming.

I fear that the process is so far down the road, that the interest of the scientific community is so vested in maintaining the current dogma, to demonizing opposing views and even stifling contrary research findings, the general public has little chance of receiving a fair airing of the truth.

Worse yet the policies being implemented by governments around the world based on shoddy and sometimes corrupted sciences will inevidably lead to civil unrest once the truth is ultimately exposed, which it ultimately will be. Because one thing we all learn about lies is that they are always ultimately exposed. That is a law of God or nature depending on your belief structure, that has been proven for longer than the denial of the cookie jare theft.

But until then we must take what is fed us from the scientist with a sceptisism that the science community is currently unable or unwilling to impose on itself.

"Basically, the problem is that the research community has gone so far along the path of frightening the life out of the man in the street that to recant publicly even part of the story would massively damage the reputation and political clout of science in general. And so, like corpuscles in the blood, researchers all over the world now rush in overwhelming numbers to repel infection by any idea that threatens the carefully cultivated belief in climatic disaster. "

Garth Paltridge

Lessons Learned ?

The world always has faced problems, some seemingly beyond the human capacity to solve, yet we always eventually do and eventually we move forward. Over the long haul mankind advances but not without periods of serious retraction.

The Dark Ages were called dark for a reason, mankind regressed into a funk that lasted not just decades but centuries. Sure there were advances but all in all that period can not be considered a great step forward for the human species here on the blue planet. There have been others too, the history of the advancement of mankind is more an object lesson in fits and starts than some rolling tide of progress.

The main reason for this is that mankind is comprised of well ...humans and humans have not changed all that much really. Oh we have evolved through technology and advancement in education, but some of our basic characteristics remain pretty much as they were in the beginning, wherever you choose to start that beginning from.


Just a couple of quick examples here to make the point. Are humans less likely to be susceptible to greed today than they were in lets say Caesar's time? I doubt it but even if we are, greed is still very much with us.

The same can be said for evil, Hitler and Stalin were by no means the last in the long line of evil characters that have populated the human experience since that unknown beginning of the human race. How about the not quite evil propensity of the power hungry personality? You might even know a few of those characters in your own life.

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human
events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that
they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the
same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

Machiavelli

The wonderful aspect of looking at the human experience over the historical scale rather than through just the lifetime experience, you are able to see the good and inspiring alongside the evil and destructive without emotional attachment to the here and now. But the most important aspect of the historical context, is we are allowed to see what works and what does not.

Although in the long run I believe that all things ultimately work for the good, after all the Dark Ages beget the Renaissance. The more we look to the past the less likely we are to make the mistakes of the past if we are willing to learn from it. The problem of course is that too few learn and others think that this time it will be different.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

The other night I was watching television and suddenly I was awe struck by the commercials. There was nothing unusual, the typical luxury car, cell phone, delivery service, fast food fare one typically experiences on an evening television viewing. What struck me was how amazing it was that all this stuff was part of the human experience today.

Just for a second put yourself at the turn of the twentieth century and what your life would consist of compared to today. The advancement of human achievement boggles the mind in a mere century of time. In two generations, actually less we went from the horse and buggy to the moon and from the telegraph to the world wide web.

We can argue the good and the bad of any or all of these advancements on the human experience but one thing we can not argue is the tremendous accomplishments of it all. I tend to believe that technological advancements ultimately work to the good of mankind. But here is the point, at least one of them.

What was responsible for this tremendous advancement? Was it socialism? Next time you pick up your cell phone to make a call, ask yourself, did socialism create this? Of course it didn't, nor the automobile you drive, the computer you read this on , the countless necessities and luxuries we enjoy and use on a daily basis are not the product of socialism or communism, they are undeniably the product of capitalism, pure and simple.

Ask yourself, what great technological, engineering, medical or any other significant accomplishment can be directly attributed to a socialist system of government? It is true that when a socialist form of government reaches the stage of totalitarian as they must ultimately do to continue, brute force can mandate certain accomplishments. After all Hitler gave us the foundation for the space program and his was a quasi-socialist society.

Yet here we are in America of all place flirting with socialism, heck we are beyond the flirtation stage, we are into serious foreplay. We have watched over the decades as socialism in almost every form has shown itself to be totally inadequate to meet the needs of a society.

Everyone knows why this is, socialism does not account for one of man's most basic instincts, the need to achieve. It actually deprives men of that basic desire and stifles it. If a person is not responsible for his or her success or failure, if this is a product of the collective whole, then to be blunt why bother?

Why bother with the extra hours, the extra effort, when all your work is to be divided equally among your so called peers by authorities who determine what is best for society, as if they were some how divinely inspired to make such judgements.

“You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright; but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you; we’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev

The Soviet system collapsed because in the end any system based upon socialism can not sustain itself. However the lure of socialism and those who naively believe that you can eat its forbidden fruit without being poisoned by it persist. The poison of Socialism is simply this, "I am not responsible for myself." It is the path of the lazy.


Much was made of George Bush and his infringement on civil liberties with the Patriot Act which by the way passed the congress with overwhelming bi-partisan support. Often quoted by leftist know it all were the words of Benjamin Franklin.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety

In truth, the path that we are being led down is far more in keeping with those words than any threat we face from previous external or internal forces. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus to save the Union, Woodrow Wilson jailed literally thousands of persons who opposed the "Great War" and of course Franklin Roosevelt interned an entire population of Japanese Americans in the name of National Security all without Congressional approval, yet we learned and vowed to watch for such abuses in the future.

Yet here we are willingly giving over our most precious gift as Americans, our liberty, piece by ever larger piece for the promise of safety, economic safety. When a person an institution or a business is not held accountable for its failure, but is rather absorbed or rescued by the collective whole as is the process which we are increasingly engaged in, we will neither end up with safety or liberty.

Our founding fathers went to great pains to insure that this would not happen. The very essence of our Constitution is to protect the individual from the encroachment of a monolithic government. They warned over and over again in their writings that the power of government was not a good thing but as Thomas Paine cautioned:

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

The path that we are following is leading from the necessary evil to the intolerable for any person who considers liberty to be the divine right of man, which is not a religious proposition but a historic and political reality.

Recently I was accused of not keeping up with the times, that somehow my views were outdated. As is the case with much of the liberal nonsense espoused as being enlightened, it is the opposite. I do not wish to hold onto the past out of some traditional reverence, I want to protect the future for further generations. The idea that giving up a bit of personal freedom for a larger good is not enlightened, it is oppressive and ultimately destructive.

We will overcome these times, human history is one of advancement, the only question is will we take a step back into the dark in order to more clearly see the light.

By Jer

*Starving In The Cold

Winter,
Corrado Giaquinto c. 1740/1750

Updated-Original post 2-24-2008

Recently Rosa Compagnucci along with several other Argentine scientist came out in opposition to the alarmist view of anthropological global warming as promoted by the IPCC. Who is Rosa Compagnucci and why is this important? She is the leading researcher at CONICET and a professor in the Department of Atmosphere Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, as well as a specialist on the "El Niño" phenomenon. Dr. Compagnucci was also a member and author of the IPCC Working Group II on Latin America.

The fact that Dr Compagnucci now disagrees with the IPCC’s conclusions is not unique, a number of scientist involved with the IPCC have been critical of the agency. What caught my attention was a statement she made while explaining her reasons.

With all the emphasis on preparing for global warming, she warned, this could leave man unprepared to deal with the possibility of a new ice age. She noted that South America's Southern Cone just went through a brutal, record-breaking winter, which could be repeated in North America. These concerns were expressed this past December 2nd, prior to the onset of this current brutal winter in much of the Northern Hemisphere.

It is interesting to note that a climate scientist unfettered by the need to defend a political position can make such a prophetic observation based solely on her judgment and intuition of current conditions. As regards to a coming ice age she did explain that this could be hundreds of years in the future, but she did expect a downward temperature swing by 2012.

She is not alone in this concern however, several scientist particularly astrophysicists and astronomers such as Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory have been warning that solar irradiance has begun to fall, which will cause a protracted cooling period beginning in 2012 to 2015. The decline in solar irradiance he projects will last well into mid century and beyond putting Earth into an ever increasing deep freeze into the next century.

Since I originally wrote this many more scientist have expressed concerns about a cooling world. Dr. Pal Brekke a senior advisor to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo put it this way

"We could be in for a surprise," he cautions. "It's possible that the sun
plays an even more central role in global warming than we have suspected. Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a
fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our
time."

and he added:

There is much evidence that the sun's high-activity cycle is levelling off or abating. If it is true that the sun's activity is of great significance in determining the earth's climate, this reduced solar activity could work in the opposite direction to climate change caused by humans. In that case," contends Dr Brekke, "we could find the temperature levelling off or actually falling in the course of a 50-year period" - an assertion that provokes many climate researchers

.
Obviously if this is true and there really is a danger of man made global warming then the sun's reduced activity counteracting it should be welcomed. But as you can tell from the article any mention of the sun having an impact on the climate is frowned upon by the so called mainstream climate community. This is because they do not recognize the sun having anything but a marginal impact on our climate variations. Anything that does not point to greenhouse gasses as the primary driver of the climate is considered sacrilegious. I'll let the reader decide if given millions of years of Earth's existence this makes sense, considering the short history of the automobile industry.

You might also consider that according to these same mainstream climate gurus the warmest year in the industrial age was 1998, and 2008 is the coolest year since then despite atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increasing at an "alarming rate". So why has it cooled? "There is much evidence that the sun's high-activity cycle is levelling off or abating."

In addition to the sun, as if that wasn't big enough, in April it was announced that we transitioned from a warm PDO phase to a cold phase. What does that mean? Well according to Professor Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University :

The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.

I could point to quite a few scientist in several fields who are either predicting or speculating that this will happen, even scientist who agree with the AGW theory. Since I originally wrote this (prior to the PDO shift) more and more scientist are expressing concern and weighing in on the subject. However that is not the main point I wish to make here.

So often in the Global Warming discussion you hear comments like “What difference does it make if the scientist are wrong, it will be good for the world to cut back on CO2 emissions.”

Believe me when I say I’m all for cutting our dependence on and use of fossil fuels for many reasons, but scientist being wrong about man made global warming is not one of them. Let’s look at just one reason why we should not be in favor of taking actions based on possible faulty conclusions.

First, let us suppose that Dr. Abdussamatov is correct and we begin a prolonged period of global cooling sometime next decade. In point of fact we may have already started, since the globe has shown no warming since 1998, let me say that again in case you did not know. 1998 was the warmest year in the past decade, that means there has been no warming since then, 2008 in case you haven’t noticed doesn’t look like it’s going to threaten the trend, but we will see.

Back to Dr. A, if he is correct, how are you going to feel about climate scientist come the end of next decade? The winters will get worse, food prices will rise even more because growing seasons will shorten rather than lengthen as would happen with global warming. Energy prices will skyrocket even more than now because it cost more to heat than to cool. There will be more deaths because cold related deaths exceed heat related. Believe me when I say everyone will be wishing the scientist were right about global warming because global cooling will be far worse for our world.

But it’s worse than just being upset at the scientist and them loosing credibility. Speaking of which my twenty-two year old daughter has lived her entire life under this ever increasing alarm and threat from global warming. What is it going to do to her generations trust in science if we begin… excuse me continue to cool? But as I said it’s worse than that.

Have you ever been on a trip and gotten on a highway going in the opposite direction than you intended. Suddenly you realize it twenty miles down the road. The worst part is not just the miles you went, it’s also the gas you used and the time you lost and that’s still not all. You have to spend just as much time, go just as many miles and use just as much gas again to get back to where you started. In affect you have lost the equivalent of not the twenty miles but sixty, the twenty gone wrong the twenty return and the twenty more you should have been and you can never get the time and gas back, they are lost.

Let’s look at another way in which this whole global warming hysteria has us going in a direction that could be very painful to return from. First, many countries, the United States now included, are mandating that a percentage of there energy use be replaced by bio-fuels. This is already having a dramatic affect on world food prices and stockpiles. So in the coming years we will be increasingly burning our food supply. As the world population and the demand for agricultural products grow we will be using those needed commodities for fuel instead of for sustenance. If we continue this policy which calls for ever increasing ethanol production it will only exacerbate the problem considerably in a colder world with shorter growing seasons.

It is easy to say that we would just switch back to using the crops for food but the real world does not work that way. Despite the fact that global temperatures have leveled over the past decade, the constant drum beat of climate change has been unrelenting causing world wide changes in energy policies, scientific research, economic planning and priorities.

Do you really believe that the scientist, environmental groups and politicians that have invested so much of their credibility on this theory are suddenly going to say “Oh Gee, we got it wrong, never mind” ? Not to mention that tremendous amounts of capital is being invested in research, development and infrastructures to accommodate this growing industry. I would assume that bio-fuel plants are not cheap. There is also the economic, availability and psychological affect if we are suddenly faced with switching back to using more fossil fuel in order to keep the world from starving. Think about that one for a while.

Like going the wrong way and having to turn around on a trip, tremendous resources are being expended in the wrong direction. Will we really give a hoot about wind farms if we are suffering through -50 degF winters as they just did in Maine, a new record low for all of New England.

While new coal plants are being taken off the table and drilling for oil and natural gas has become anathema to the power elite that control our country, how foolish will we look when we are burning forest and buildings for heat?

If some scientists say that the world is going to heat up and others say it is going to cool down what do you do? Perhaps the best course is to watch and see instead of running in the opposite direction from where you need to go. Making policies and taking steps that will only exacerbate future conditions seems to be a bit extreme. Personally I hope the AGW proponents are correct, the benefits of a warmer world out weigh the negatives, though you seldom hear this side of the discussion.


Dr. Habibullo I. Abdussamatov: Russian Academy of Scientists.Comment: RIA Novosti, August 25, 2006:

“Khabibullo Abdusamatov said he and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century – when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland – could start in 2012-2105 and reach its peak in 2055-2060….He said he believed the future climate change would have very serious consequences and that authorities should start preparing for them today….”

January 16,2009

And he is getting more and more support for his view because it would be a real shame if we left our children and grandchildren starving in the cold.

By Jer

Near The Peak

Imagine you are in an airplane flying over a mountain range. You look out your window and see a lone figure slightly below the mountain's peak looking towards the top. "Ah" you think "the man is headed towards the summit. However as you continue to observe, you notice that there are tracks in the snow leading down from the peak.

Your entire frame of reference is changed and your first assumption was wrong. The mountain climber is not ascending he is descending and is looking back at where he has been rather than where he is going. Just because someone or something is near the peak does not necessarily mean that the only way to go is up, it could also mean it is on its way down.

On October 19, 2007 the Dow Jones Average was at 13522 slightly below its historic height of 14093 set on October 12th. In the next couple of weeks it went a bit higher than on the nineteenth, but the general trend was down and of course we know that despite ups and downs, a year later the Dow would drop nearly 5000 points from its historic high of October 12 2007. For the most part back in October 2007 investors and experts were giddy at the dazzling heights of the stock markets and despite the warnings of some skeptics, most felt there was nowhere to go but up. They were convinced that the peak had not yet been reached.

Much is being written and opined about the year 2008 and the probable final global temperature when it is calculated. Depending on whom you believe it will be between the ninth and fifteenth warmest year on record. This sounds impressive and it is an obvious attempt to make it sound frightening, but which way are they looking at the peak? The fact is that they are looking back up the mountain to where we have been from where we are now.The fact is we are looking a full decade into the past to find the peak.

Much can be made of Global Warming and they do, but reality is that no matter who you believe if you believe anyone at all and there are justifiable reasons not to, the warmest year on record was 1998 it has been down hill ever since. Despite some ups and downs, based on the truth of observations we have reached our peak and begun a descent, the tracks lead down the mountain and no amount of spin can change that reality.



This Graph was done by Dr. John Christy. Dr. John R. Christy is the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville where he began studying global climate issues in 1987. Since November 2000 he has been Alabama's State Climatologist. In 1989 Dr. Roy W. Spencer (then a NASA/Marshall scientist and now a Principle Research Scientist at UAH) and Christy developed a global temperature data set from microwave data observed from satellites beginning in 1979. For this achievement, the Spencer-Christy team was awarded NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991. In 1996, they were selected to receive a Special Award by the American Meteorological Society "for developing a global, precise record of earth's temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate." In January 2002 Christy was inducted as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

Both Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer are notorious skeptics.

The Chart (above) is simply this chart (below) which comes directly from The IPCC AR 4 report with the actual UAH (satellite) and HadCrut (land-ocean) temps over laid. The fuzzy areas in the original below are error margins for each scenario. The bottom most line (yellow above) is what was projected to happen if we maintained CO2 concentrations at their level of 2000, obviously they have risen since then.




















Figure 1. Projected increases in 21st century global average temperature assuming different CO2 emissions futures (described below). These projections are from the 4AR Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), and appear in Figure SPM-5 of the Working Group I “Summary for Policymakers”.11 The zero level was set to the average temperature between 1980–1999, which is why most of the 20th century shows negative values.


Obviously temperatures have not followed the program.

Soon ?

9/22/2008

This has been one of the most fascinating past months I can remember in a long time. There has been so much going on it is almost information overload. The presidential races, with the conventions, hurricane Gustav then hurricane Ike and the financial melt down, all have occurred in less than a month. And this all occurred just after the Russian invasion of Georgia during the Olympics on August 8th!

Each of these are what you would consider major news stories, with all sorts of intertwining sub-stories many of which have been major in their own right, first African American nominee, Palin, evacuation of NOLA, destruction of Galveston, on and on it has gone. To show how truly active our world has become lately, I will point out a story that is almost overlooked in all the flood of other stories.

This story is much like the financial melt down story that happened this week. For all those that were paying attention it was pretty much inevitable only drastic actions, which nobody expected to be taken because nobody wanted to make things worse, would have forestalled or prevented it, it was just a matter of time. So to is this, it has been building for years, the writing has been on the wall and nobody is quite sure how to stop the inevitable, lest they make things worse.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Iran, Israel on 'collision course'

TEHRAN -- Iran's highest authority lashed out against Israel on Friday with some of his harshest comments in recent memory about the Jewish state.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is Iran's top political and military figure, said his country's hostility to Israel extended beyond the government to the Israeli people as well. In saying so, he was brushing aside recent overtures by top Iranian officials to the Israeli public.
Khamenei said Iran and Israel were on a "collision course," a statement that could further increase tensions in a Middle East already fearful of a conflict between the two countries....

Please do read the entire article. The reason I point this out is we should have learned to take religious fanatics at their word, but I doubt we have. I am sure the Bush administration does, but I doubt the American people do. It is almost inevitable that before this year is out, Israel will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities and there could be war in the Middle East. Why do I say that?

Column One: It is time to act


Iran is just a heartbeat away from the A-bomb.Last Friday the Daily Telegraph reported Teheran has surreptitiously removed a sufficient amount of uranium from its nuclear production facility in Isfahan to produce six nuclear bombs. Given Iran's already acknowledged uranium enrichment capabilities, the Telegraph's report indicates that the Islamic Republic is now in the late stages of assembling nuclear bombs.

It would be a simple matter for Iran to assemble those bombs without anyone noticing. US spy satellites recently discovered what the US believes are covert nuclear facilities in Iran. The mullocracy has not disclosed these sites to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, which is charged with inspecting Iran's nuclear sites.

As to the IAEA, this week it presented its latest report on Teheran's nuclear program to its board members in Vienna. The IAEA's report claimed that Iran has taken steps to enable its Shihab-3 ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads. With their range of 1,300 kilometers, Shihab-3 missiles are capable of reaching Israel and other countries throughout the region.

In support of its swiftly progressing nuclear program, Iran has escalated both its conventional military and terroristic adventurism. It has also ratcheted up its diplomatic assault on the US. This week, Teheran conducted a countrywide air defense exercise. Gen. Khatim al-Anbiaa, the commander of Iran's Air Defense Corps, explained that the exercise was aimed at defending against both electronic jamming systems and actual bombing strikes....

AND

...IN LIGHT of Iran's unrelenting and rapid progress toward the nuclear finish line, it is clear today that while positive in their own rights, none of the actions the West is taking will succeed in blocking its path to the atomic bomb.

For that matter, the one option short of war that might have put an end to the mullahs' race to the bomb three years ago - namely supporting the Iranian people in their wish to overthrow their regime - cannot be adopted fast enough to prevent the likes of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad from pushing the button now.

Today, there is only one way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Israel must bomb Iran's nuclear installations. Such a strike will not end Iran's nuclear program. It will not overthrow the regime. It will not cripple Iran's economy. It will not end Iran's active support for international terrorist groups...

Please do read the entire article. I will not even get into how are own presidential elections play into this, some would call that unfair, I would call it realism, but they do.

A couple of recent developments may forestall the inevitable for a while longer; there is a new leader of the ruling party in Israel the current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. In order to form a government she will probably have to join up with the left parties. If so there will be less of a chance of Israel taking action. However Israel has always done what they saw was necessary to survive, regardless of the political parties in power. They will not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons whatever the consequences.

For a variety of reasons, this is coming to a head rather quickly and people should pay attention if for no other reason than $4.00 a gallon gas will look like a luxury if Iran cuts off or even attempts to cut off the Strait of Hormuz.

My Idea of Patriotism

07/04/2008

Patriotism is love and loyalty to ones country. There are many ways to express patriotism both symbolically, such as flying a flag, or the more meaningful manifestation through service.

Patriotism does not mean that you must agree with everything your country does or even everything that your country condones or legitimizes. Patriots need not blindly follow the policies of any current government. Indeed our history is filled with examples of true patriots whose greatest acts of patriotism were to oppose the legal status quo in order to “Make a more perfect Union”. Martin Luther King Jr. and Susan B. Anthony being two prime examples of this type of true patriots.

Patriotism is not mere jingoism of waving the flag and pounding the chest and daring any one to mess with the USA, but patriotism is being proud to be a citizen of the USA, even when the USA may do things you may not be proud of.

Patriots want what is best for their country, wanting it to be better, stronger and yes happier. A Patriots criticisms are constructive which are meant to improve their country not meant to belittle or demean.

*************

I do not believe you can call yourself a patriot and not love your country.

I do not believe you can call yourself a patriot and not be willing to defend your country.

I do not think you can call yourself a patriot and not be proud of your country

I do not believe you can call yourself a patriot and not want to improve your country.

I do not believe you can call yourself a patriot and not want what is best for your country.
**************
If you do not agree with my ideas about patriotism, let me explain it a bit more clearly.

Replace the word patriot with parent and the word country with child, because my idea of patriotism is that patriots feel responsible for their country, not that their country is responsible for them.


Happy Independence Day
and God Bless the USA

Energy 2

7/12/2008

Energy Use -Where we are today



Electicity
Typically when we talk about energy it centers around the price of gas at the pump. This is what gets not only most of the media attention, it is what gets our attention and our goat. But the fact is that gasoline to drive our cars is only a portion of our country and indeed the worlds use of energy. As a matter of fact with the exception of a couple of Mid East countries the United States uses far more gasoline per capita than any country in the world. Obviously this is not the only use for energy in our country another major aspect of the energy situation is electricity.



Figure 1: Net Generation Shares by Energy Source: Total (All Sectors), Year-to-Date through January, 2008 source

As you can see just under 29% of all electric generated in the United States comes from non fossil fuel sources. The remaining 71% is generated from fossil fuels, predominately coal. There is a reason that coal is the largest source of electric generation.



Larger View source

As you can see the United States is awash in coal. In fact the United States has 28% of known global coal reserves the most by far of any country. The US is the Saudi Arabia of coal. Not only is 50% of the United States electricity generated by coal, 40% of the worlds electricity comes from coal. So the switch to alternatives, away from coal is not a simple matter.

The good news for the United States is that the potential for alternative electric generation is there. Putting aside the nuclear option for the time being, the United State has several regions where alternatives can be effectively exploited.

The wind option being promoted strongly by Boone Pickens is very promising in the Great Plains region. Best estimates are that wind power could provide around 20% of the United States electricity needs by 2030. Currently wind generated electricity cost between 4-8 cents per kwh to generate. The big drawback is it requires backup, which adds to the cost. More on wind power

The South West United States is ideal for Solar Power



Larger View

Entire US

Solar Power may have the greatest potential, but probably has the furthest to go. It is still far too expensive to produce, between 30-40 cents per kwh and has some large obstacles to overcome, such as a shortage of silicon needed to make solar modules, conversion of solars DC to AC power and of course there is nightfall. However a tremendous amount of research is being devoted to solar energy and it is beginning to have results and it is not unreasonable to expect that in the not too distant future we will be able to utilize this permanent source of energy more widely. But for now it exists because of government subsidies and can not be counted on as a solution to our energy needs...yet.

Geothermal is one of the seldom mentioned but more attractive alternatives. From a short term utilization standpoint geothermal electric is ready when we are. Much of the west has tremendous geothermal potential. Although there are geothermal electric generation plants in five states only California has begun to seriously exploit the potential. About 5% of California's electricity (14,379 GWh) is generated by geothermal, more than any country in the world. Geothermal has the potential to supply significant portion of domestic electricity. One big advantage of geothermal besides the environmental ones, is the technology is already in place. In addition the future of geothermal is basically limitless.

" Today's technology produces electricity from hydrothermal (hot water/steam) resources. In the future, we may be able to use the heat of the deep, hot, dry rock formations of Earth's crust, and possibly the even deeper, almost unlimited energy in Earth's magma."

Geothermal electric generation runs between 4-6 cents per kwh which is comparable with any fossil fuel energy source. If there is any alternative to fossil fuels that meets the criteria for a "Manhattan Project" type investment IMO, it is probably geothermal even more so than nuclear. The environmental impacts are negligible, the technology is in place, the cost are reasonable, it can be plugged into the existing electric grid, and there is the potential of technological breakthroughs that could make it even more profitable and accessible.
Here is some more on geothermal electricity and here

There are of course other alternative sources hydroelectric which is obviously very clean but has some environmental concerns plus there are only so many places that you can build a dam. Biomass which I am not a big fan of due to food concerns. However there is potentially a lot of other source materials that could limit the affects, I doubt this will ever be much more than a limited source of energy generation, but who knows. There are also some promising new technologies beginning to gain interest such as Tidal Power




All of these and other sources of electric generation are presently being pursued as never before, both by private investment since 2003 venture capital invested in alternative energy sources has quadrupled. This does not include government research and subsidies.

Can We wait for Alternatives?

The question is how long until we can develop them and put them on line. Nobody knows for sure in fact various alternative sources are coming on line all the time, but we are a growing nation when it comes to electric use.

North American Electricity Demand Continues to Outpace Resource Growth; Reliability Concerns Remain

"Capacity margins — Peak demand for electricity in the United States is forecasted to increase
by almost 18 percent (135,000 MW) in the next 10 years — enough energy to power more than
100 million homes on an average day. Meanwhile, committed resources to meet demand,
including demand response programs, are projected to increase by only roughly 8.5 percent
(77,000 MW). Counting uncommitted resources, total resources would increase by 123,000 MW
or 12.7 percent. California, the Rocky Mountain states, New England, Texas, the Southwest and
the Midwest could fall below their target capacity margins within two or three years if additional
supply-side and demand-side resources are not brought into service"

This is not just a United states problem, it is global. Everyone will be using more electric and therefore increasingly using more resources to produce it.

We are not alone


IMO
Based on everything we know about the current state of alternative energy sources to produce electricity, it is not reasonable to assume that they can meet an ever increasing demand for the next thirty or so years. Even with severe conservation measures and technological breakthroughs it is unrealistic to assume that they will. I have not mentioned nuclear, planning on a future blog on that, but nuclear power plants would definitely help the electric situation. To me the question is not should we continue building clean coal and natural gas power generation plants, the question is are we as a country willing to sacrifice our current standard of living and economic growth by not doing so?

Here is an interesting site to see the renewable resources potentials in different regions of the country.

Through a Microscope

05/19/2008

It is difficult to have a long-term outlook on anything; most of us look at life through the prism of our lifetime, which is only natural. Even those that have a grasp of history tend to look at events in relationship to their times and must make a concentrated effort to try to evaluate the past by understanding the times, the attitudes or even the technology that existed prior to their time here on this beautiful blue orb. Even in a single lifetime events and technologies can change the world so drastically that a person will leave a far different world than the one he first came into.

A small example would be my mother who was born in the height of the Great Depression before the television. Now she can watch HDTV via satellite, which, there were none of when I was born though my son was born to late to experience a moon landing and my daughter was born after the first Space Shuttle took flight and my grandchildren will never have known life without a DVD player. To put that in some kind of perspective, think of everything you can conjure in your mind about a small little girl in the 1930’s Depression era... got it? Now imagine this girl plugging in a DVD and watching Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks on a 52” HDTV with surround sound, it doesn’t compute does it? Oh yeah computers, oh well you get the idea.

When we talk about weather and climate today we are talking about it with the benefit of tools and technologies to observe phenomena that just a few short years ago were only observed with the human eye and analyzed with not much more than the human mind. On the WU we study nearly real time satellite images of tropical waves off the coast of Africa from the comfort of our dens and living rooms, but less than 50 years ago the only knowledge of that wave might be a note of a squall in some ship captain’s log. In the 20th century and for sure in the 19th it is possible indeed likely that monster F-4 tornadoes formed in the great empty expanses of the Great Plains and South West then died off without ever being seen by a human or at least reported, and to whom would some remote rancher in Texas report it, if he were so inclined?

Of course today any tornado, hurricane or any other weather event is not going to be missed by the modern eyes of satellites and the probing of Doppler radar. This does not take into account the population increase which make weather events far less likely to escape unnoticed and be broadcast 24/7 on cable news.

I was born in 1955, not so long ago unless you are five. In 1955 the U.S. Population was 165,931,202 it is currently 304,077,089 the world population was 2.8 billion currently it is 6.6 billion. So there are a whole bunch more people, actually more than twice as many in the world than just over 50 years ago. Obviously with more people there is a greater chance that people will be affected by weather events, it does not necessarily mean the weather events have changed drastically only that our ability to observe them and that they will affect humans has increased dramatically. Add to that the fact that a major typhoon slamming into China in the 30’s might eventually be mentioned on a radio news broadcast. Whereas today it is breaking news on CNN, in living color, an event we have been watching unfold on the Weather Channel or our computers as it made its way across the Pacific for two weeks.

Compared to just a few decades ago we watch our globe, its weather and its climate indicators through a microscope. I often joke that the reason I don’t go to the doctor is that if I did he would find something wrong. Obviously not a wise philosophy for personal health but it brings up a point. The more we are able to dissect the workings of our world, the more likely we are going to find things that were unobservable and unknown not that long ago. A simple example is the claims last year that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest levels in recorded history, this of course is true, it is also true that recorded history in this case only goes back to 1979 when they began measuring it with satellites. Now for my 7-year-old granddaughter who fears for the Polar Bears, this is an ancient historical record, for me it is a reminder of my first marriage and for my mother, well, to her, it is just like yesterday.

Speaking of 1979, here are the annual global mean temperatures from then until now:

1979 - 57.283
1980 - 57.328
1981 - 57.398
1982 - 57.229
1983 - 57.508
1984 - 57.166
1985 - 57.133
1986 - 57.261
1987 - 57.520
1988 - 57.513
1989 - 57.396
1990 - 57.645
1991 - 57.565
1992 - 57.326
1993 - 57.387
1994 - 57.504
1995 - 57.686
1996 - 57.448
1997 - 57.825
1998 - 58.147
1999 - 57.744
2000 - 57.699
2001 - 57.931
2002 - 58.019
2003 - 58.037
2004 - 57.999
2005 - 58.055
2006 - 57.960
2007 - 57.913

This is from Had Crut the official temperature keeper for WMO and therefore the IPCC. I converted the anomaly from centigrade to Fahrenheit. they use a 1961-1990 baseline which means they averaged the temperatures in those years and compare all temperatures in their data based on that mean average, which is 14 degC or 57.2 degF. I just thought it might be important to show what we are talking about when we are talking about global warming. We are not talking about dramatic shifts in temperature, we are talking about tenths and hundredths of degrees. Below is a graph of the above temperatures.



click for larger image

Not terribly frightening is it? To put it in perspective the year 1854 the temperature was 56.662 and in 1878 it was 57.168 which you might notice was warmer than 1985.

Please note in the above chart and data that according to the official record, no year since has been warmer than 1998. Does this mean that global warming has stopped? Nobody knows, but when you look at time and the world through a microscope and see this


You certainly would think the world was coming to an end.

You must remember to look at the numbers; they are not nearly as scary as the graph. The official increase in temperatures for the century ending in 2005 is .76 degC or 1.37 degF. Has the earth been warming? Obviously


click here for larger image

The temperature in 1850, first year of above graph was 56.410 and the temperature for 2007 was 57.193 a difference 0f 1.5 degF.

How much is natural and how much is caused by man, nobody knows, but when you look at the world and time through a microscope, you miss the big picture.



Oops :)

Seeing Red, or how Obama hurt himself

4/20/2008

First off let me say that I am a registered Independent. When I did have a party affiliation it was as a Democrat until the 90's when I felt that the Democratic Party was heading further to the left than I wanted to go or support. This is somewhat ironic being as I grew up in the tumultuous Viet Nam era and I really had no major problems with Clinton's policies, though I had and have no respect for him as a person. I come from a very politically informed family and have always been a very interested in politics but I am just a layperson like most.

One biographical note that helps me view politics with a bit of objectivity, is that I have lived in diverse places with varying cultural, economic, and political traditions. Oregon, Miami, Lafayette La, Rural Northern Virginia, Orlando and now Sebastian Florida. All very different in their make up.

I also will say that I support John McCain for president. I feel he is the most qualified of the remaining candidates and in my opinion the most likely candidate to bring about real change and healing.

My header speaks for itself, now I'll explain.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is the final Electoral College Map for the 2000 election which Bush won 271-266 with 1 abstaining.




The reason I used 2000 rather than 2004 is that it was a much closer race. In order to win Obama needs to keep all those blues and take a red state from McCain. It really is that simple, the obvious one is New Hampshire, the lone red in that sea of blue up in the North East. Doing that would swing the race to him 270-268, however to do that he would need to receive a large majority of Independent voters, since Republicans outnumber Democrats in New Hampshire.
(Thanks to Sully in post #10, due to reapportioning, the above statement is not accurate. It would actually take more than NH for Obama to win election, Thanks Sully)

Obama must also hold onto New Mexico which Kerry could not in 2004. You would think that would be easy given Bill Richards' (the Governor) much publicized endorsement. However polls don't show that as a matter of fact on March 20th Obama had a 6 point lead on McCain in New Mexico, he now trails McCain by 6 points, but obviously things can change.

Of the battleground states the only red states that are competitive between Obama and McCain are Virginia which has recently moved onto the McCain side and Ohio which McCain has a very narrow lead in. What is also telling is that in many of the key battleground states New Mexico and Ohio for example, Clinton polls better against McCain than Obama. In fact Clinton leads McCain in Ohio but Obama trails him.

Why is all this important? It is important because as we learned in 2000, in a close race it is not as important that you win but where you win. Florida is probably not going to be in play, McCain has a pretty sizable lead, so states like Ohio, Virginia, New Mexico and maybe New Hampshire and even Colorado are the likely keys to the election come November. It is very doubtful that Obama can take any of the solid red states from McCain particularly in the south anymore than McCain can take any of the solid blue states such as California, New York or Michigan.

So what is Obama’s big mistake? Offending and alienating some of the very voters he needs in November in order to win the general election. Obama will get the African American vote, the urban centers and those who identify themselves as liberal including a possible larger than normal youth vote. But he needs more to win, especially in the swing states, he needs some white moderates. The Jeremiah Wright debacle coupled with the ‘cling to religion and guns” statement are going to cost him dearly, not amongst his supporters or even Democrats in general but in the middle with moderates of both parties and moderate independents. Even though Obama will easily carry Urban America, ultimately a candidate needs a substantial number of small town and rural Americans to win the election. If you are a Democrat and have a weak heart, do not look at this map



As you can clearly see there is a large and obvious difference between urban and rural America, in 2004 it was even larger. Look at even the states that Gore won, such as NY,CA,IL,PA the difference between rural and urban is drastic.

Obama for all his eloquence and the overwhelming support of an urban centered media, needs what can only be described as rural America to win. He has done little to endear himself to that vast red area, in fact he has alienated many, with his lectures instead of apologies for statements of his and those close to him, which have deeply offended many who he will need in order to win.

The following is an excerpt from an old but a great article by David Brooks in the Atlantic Magazine that explains the chasm which divides our country.

One Nation, Slightly Divisible

Sixty-five miles from where I am writing this sentence is a place with no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble. No blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways on Sunday mornings. In this place people don't complain that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny. In this place you can go to a year's worth of dinner parties without hearing anyone quote an aperçu he first heard on Charlie Rose. The people here don't buy those little rear-window stickers when they go to a summer-vacation spot so that they can drive around with "MV" decals the rest of the year; for the most part they don't even go to Martha's Vineyard.

The place I'm talking about goes by different names. Some call it America. Others call it Middle America. It has also come to be known as Red America, in reference to the maps that were produced on the night of the 2000 presidential election. People in Blue America, which is my part of America, tend to live around big cities on the coasts. People in Red America tend to live on farms or in small towns or small cities far away from the coasts. Things are different there.

Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors. We sail; they powerboat. We cross-country ski; they snowmobile. We hike; they drive ATVs. We have vineyard tours; they have tractor pulls. When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens.

Different sorts of institutions dominate life in these two places. In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing. In Red America the Wal-Marts are massive, with parking lots the size of state parks. In Blue America the stores are small but the markups are big. You'll rarely see a Christmas store in Blue America, but in Red America, even in July, you'll come upon stores selling fake Christmas trees, wreath-decorated napkins, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer collectible thimbles and spoons, and little snow-covered villages….

I highly recommend anybody interested in the two Americas read the entire article.

The problem is that Obama is not reconciling himself to the people he most needs the votes from and I seriously doubt he has the credibility left to do so. Many people, especially that giant urban media machine that dominates much of what we hear and see, assume that Iraq and the 2006 election have somehow changed red America blue. Personally, I don’t think so. I actually believe that the enthusiasm for Obama has created an echo chamber of ever increasing hype drowning out some very deep and growing anger in Red America. This will continue until the very moment that the votes are actually counted at which time I suspect blue will be seeing red again. The advantage I have, is I will support the president regardless, I trust America red and blue, it's nice to be purple:)

"Man Made" Global Warming Part 1

3/22/2008

One of the most overlooked aspects of climate change is land use changes. In my last blog I talked about rain forests and how their destruction adversely affected our climate. Deforestation is just one aspect of land use change that contributes to climate change, there are many more that also have an under-appreciated influence on climate. With all the miss-guided focus on CO2 as the big boogey man, many other man made influences are ignored or given far too little attention. Probably the most well known of all land use changes on global warming is the Urban Heat Island, (UHI).

UHI is relatively easy for anyone to understand and grasp. When you build a town, city or metropolis on land, which once were prairie, swamp, forest or some other natural landscape, it is bound to change the local and surrounding environment including the climate. Mostly we see it as temperature changes, obviously pavement and buildings not to mention car and industrial exhaust are going to generate more heat than grassland, trees and antelope. The EPA explains it very simply

>Heat islands form as vegetation is replaced by asphalt and concrete for roads, buildings, and other structures necessary to accommodate growing populations. These surfaces absorb - rather than reflect - the sun's heat, causing surface temperatures and overall ambient temperatures to rise.

There are other affects of the UHI, studies have shown that monthly rainfall is about 28% greater between 20-40 miles downwind of cities, compared with upwind. (Fuchs, Dale 2005)

Although much debated the IPCC states that the UHI actually has a minuscule affect on global temperatures. They say the overall affect of the UHI on global temperatures since 1900 has been .002 degC per decade (Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC 2007: p.244). As I said this is debated the paper, "Should light wind and windy nights have the same temperature trends at individual levels even if the boundary layer averaged heat content change is the same?" as an example.

Regardless it is probable that the UHI has no overall significant impact on global temperatures, remembering that oceans which are not known for urbanization account for 70 % of the earths surface area, and urban areas only account for about 1.5% of the entire earth surface.

Having said all that, when you measure global temperatures, where are the thermometers?



source

The above is a very obvious and easy to see historical representation of the UHI affect on temperature records. Which of these do you believe is a more accurate historical record of temperatures? If you were responsible for determining what the earth's temperature was doing what would you do with the above records?

Much of what my next several blogs are going to be drawn from some excellent web-sites, which I encourage anyone interested to visit. They are Coyote Blog dispatches from a small buisness,-Surface Station.org,-Watts Up With That?,- Climate Audit All of these are excellent sites, very informative and often amusing.

The following is from Coyote Blog



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Let's say you had two compasses to help you find north, but the compasses are reading incorrectly. After some investigation, you find that one of the compasses is located next to a strong magnet, which you have good reason to believe is strongly biasing that compass's readings. In response, would you

1. Average the results of the two compasses and use this mean to guide you, or
2. Ignore the output of the poorly sited compass and rely solely on the other unbiased compass?

Most of us would quite rationally choose #2. However, Steve McIntyre shows us a situation involving two temperature stations in the USHCN network in which government researchers apparently have gone with solution #1. Here is the situation:

He compares the USHCN station at the Grand Canyon (which appears to be a good rural setting) with the Tucson USHCN station I documented here, located in a parking lot in the center of a rapidly growing million person city. Unsurprisingly, the Tucson data shows lots of warming and the Grand Canyon data shows none. So how might you correct Tucson and the Grand Canyon data, assuming they should be seeing about the same amount of warming? Would you average them, effectively adjusting the two temperature readings towards each other, or would you assume the Grand Canyon data is cleaner with fewer biases and adjust Tucson only? Is there anyone who would not choose the second option, as with the compasses?

The GISS data set, created by the Goddard Center of NASA, takes the USHCN data set and somehow uses nearby stations to correct for anomalous stations. I say somehow, because, incredibly, these government scientists, whose research is funded by taxpayers and is being used to make major policy decisions, refuse to release their algorithms or methodology details publicly. They keep it all secret! Their adjustments are a big black box that none of us are allowed to look into (and remember, these adjustments account for the vast majority of reported warming in the last century).

We can, however, reverse engineer some of these adjustments, and McIntyre does. What he finds is that the GISS appears to be averaging the good and bad compass, rather than throwing out or adjusting only the biased reading. You can see this below. First, here are the USHCN data for these two stations with only the Time of Observation adjustment made (more on what these adjustments are in this article).




As I said above, no real surprise - little warming out in undeveloped nature, lots of warming in a large and rapidly growing modern city. Now, here is the same data after the GISS has adjusted it:



You can see that Tucson has been adjusted down a degree or two, but Grand Canyon has been adjusted up a degree or two (with the earlier mid-century spike adjusted down). OK, so it makes sense that Tucson has been adjusted down, though there is a very good argument to be made that it should be been adjusted down more, say by at least 3 degrees**. But why does the Grand Canyon need to be adjusted up by about a degree and a half? What is biasing it colder by 1.5 degrees, which is a lot? The answer: Nothing. The explanation: Obviously, the GISS is doing some sort of averaging, which is bringing the Grand Canyon and Tucson from each end closer to a mean.

This is clearly wrong, like averaging the two compasses. You don't average a measurement known to be of good quality with one known to be biased. The Grand Canyon should be held about the same, and Tucson adjusted down even more toward it, or else thrown out. Lets look at two cases. In one, we will use the GISS approach to combine these two stations-- this adds 1.5 degrees to GC and subtracts 1.5 degrees from Tucson. In the second, we will take an approach that applies all the adjustment to just the biases (Tucson station) -- this would add 0 degrees to GC and subtract 3 degrees from Tucson. The first approach, used by the GISS, results in a mean warming in these two stations that is 1.5 degrees higher than the more logical second approach. No wonder the GISS produces the highest historical global warming estimates of any source!

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Perhaps if you have read this and followed it closely, you can see why skeptics are skeptical, lol. If you were also aware of the fact that the scientist, James Hansen, is in charge of GISS is perhaps the world's strongest proponent of the enhanced greenhouse gas theory, it should raise questions. As many of us believe, man made global warming may be more man made than you think.

"Humanity today, collectively, must face the uncomfortable fact that industrial civilization itself has become the principal driver of global climate. If we stay our present course, using fossil fuels to feed a growing appetite for energy-intensive life styles, we will soon leave the climate of the Holocene, the world of human history. The eventual response to doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 likely would be a nearly ice-free planet.

The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable."

The Reverend...Uh, I mean Dr. James Hansen

Meanwhile in reality


Recently someone commented on the above graph saying that it started at an obvious outlier year of 1998. True so for your viewing pleasure I'll also post these.



and the longer view.

Note graph at top of page is update from Climate Skeptic
Thanks