Nopenhagen

Barack Obama has postponed his speech at Copenhagen to the very last day of the conference. He believes his presence will convince everyone to come on board at the last minute.

By switching his visit from Dec. 9 to Dec. 18 [he picks up the Nobel on Dec. 10], Obama appears to be betting that his presence can - as he has expressed hope for several times in the past - push the negotiations "over the top" toward an agreement.

Hmm. Bogus Nobel, no Chicago Olympics and now the Copenhagen house of cards... it's really just about him, eh?

Exploding cigars anyone?

WSJ: Science Is Dying

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, writes that Climategate is killing science.

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

Rex Murphy On Climategate

This is Rex's take on Climategate on CBC's The National last night.



UPDATE: Extensive commentary and heartfelt praise for my fellow Newfoundlander Rex Murphy at Andrew Watts' climate news emporium Watts Up With That.

21st Century Propaganda

If you have not seen the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, you need to see it now.

All the more so if you have already seen An Inconvenient Truth. Watch both and make your own decision. But know that what you are seeing in both of these films is state-of-the-art 21st century propaganda.

If you've spent any time here at all you probably know which movie I'd stand with.

UPDATE: The CBC is going to re-run An Inconvenient Truth again this Sunday night. If you feel, as I do, that Canada's state-run broadcaster has no business broadcasting Al Gore's discredited propaganda, write to them here. I did.

Gore's "Great Annoyance"

Al Gore has canceled a speaking engagement at the coming Copenhagen global warming convention. From the Washington Times:

Berlingkse Media, a Danish group coordinating ticket sales and publicity for the event, said that "great annoyance" was a factor in the cancellation, along with unforeseen changes in Gore's program for the climate summit. The decision affected 3,000 ticket holders.

Ticket holders who paid $1200 a pop for a speech, a lunch and a photo op with the Goracle himself.

The Copenhagen anthropogenic global warming festival is - how shall we say it - hosed. Sinking ship anyone?

This Is Me On Google Street View

This is one of the snaps the Google Street View car took of me driving eastbound on Portugal Cove Road out by Windsor Lake, St. John's, on August 31 this year. The Nissan seems to be split between two of the camera lenses.

Google Street View Newfoundland Update

Google Street View went online as of last night in the northeast Avalon Newfoundland communities of St. John's, Mount Pearl and Conception Bay South.

You can now view almost every street in the rectangle bounded by Torbay to Portugal Cove to Upper Gullies to Petty Harbour.

Lots of new 3D Buildings have been added to the St. John's images in the latest update too.

Google has more info:

Google launched Street View imagery for nine additional cities in Canada, bringing the number of Canadian cities available in the service to more than 20. The new cities are: Victoria, Nanaimo, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Sudbury, London, Sherbrooke, and St. John's.

Street View imagery has also launched today for Singapore, more cities in France and Japan, and special sites including Stonehenge, Pompei, the Palace of Versailles, and SeaWorld San Diego and Orlando.

Canada's Hockey Team

Canadiens? Nope. Canucks even? Nuh uh. Flames? Wrong again. Senators? You're kidding, right?

Canada's hockey team is the Toronto Maple Leafs, of course. Duh! How foolish of me not to know. They even have a song out.



From the National Post comments:

To be considered "Canada's Team", wouldn't the aforementioned team have had to actually won something in the past...oh...um, say, HALF CENTURY? Just sayin'.......

Who Peer-Reviewed The Climate Models? Nobody.

There have been plenty of attempts to explain away Climategate by calling for the arrest of those who "hacked" the CRU emails, or by excusing the intemperate language in the emails as a kind of collegiality, but always concentrating on the emails.

Almost no one on the warmist side is talking about the software and data files that also leaked. But as Shannon Love writes at Chicago Boyz, that is changing.

Now, Programmers all over the world have begun wading through the code and they have been stunned by how bad it is. It’s quite clearly amateurish and nothing but an accumulation of seat-of-the-pants hacks and patches. 

And it is this amateur code that the UN IPCC is basing it's call for trillions of dollars in taxes on western economies.

Shannon Love:

As far as I can tell, none of the software on which the entire concept of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) is based has been examined, reviewed or tested by anyone save the people who wrote the code in the first place. This is a staggering omission of scientific oversight and correction. Nothing like it has happened in the history of science.

For now, we can safely say all the data produced by this CRU code is highly suspect. By the ancient and proven rule in computing of “Garbage in, Garbage Out” this means that all the climate simulations by other teams that make predictions using this dubious data are likewise corrupted.

Given that literally hundreds of millions of lives over the next century will depend on getting the climate models correct, we have to start all our climate modeling over from scratch.

Democracy Wins In Honduras

Following yesterday's successful elections in Honduras, Latin American specialist Mary O'Grady writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution. Yesterday's elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle.

Ahem. Ha ha ha! Point point point!

Jim Treacher has a friendly chat with the global warming evangelist who lives in his head:

Hello, hyperventilating zealot.

Greetings, denialist scum.

Now that we've dispensed with the formalities, please allow me to point and laugh at you. Ahem. Ha ha ha! Point point point!

Shut up.

The, er, conversation continues here.

Another Climategate Bombshell

In the Times Online this morning the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in Norwich admits it has destroyed all the original data upon which its scientists had based their theories of global warming.

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible. 

Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

In one of the published emails, Phil Jones, the Director of the CRU states

[They] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

UPDATE: Drudge is quoting a Telegraph report that CRU will release all of its data. This is old news that came out before the Telegraph's subsequent story quoted above that all the original data has been destroyed. Note the time stamps on each Telegraph article.