It's A Climategate Christmas

My all time favorite global warming satirists Minnesotans For Global Warming have a new Christmas song out.



You also need to see If We Had Some Global Warming and Three Below Honey.

And here's last year's Christmas song, The 12 Days of Global Warming.

Armed Response

At a UN press conference in Copenhagen, journalist Phelim McAleer ('Mine Your Own Business', 'Not Evil Just Wrong') asks IPCC Coordinating Lead Author Stephen Schneider a pointed question about the 'Climategate' scandal. McAleer is interrupted twice by Prof Schneider's assistant and then an armed UN security guard is ordered to stop McAleer' camera. At a UN press conference. Watch it here.


 


Back in October, the same sort of thing happened to McAleer at a meeting of the  Society of Environmental Journalists in Wisconsin when he tried to ask Al Gore about proven falsehoods in his global warming movie "An Inconvenient Truth". Journalists protected Gore by turning off McAleer 's microphone.

Presidential. At Last.

Barack Obama went to Norway to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize yesterday and made a very good speech.

First, he rightly admits he didn't deserve the big prize:

...I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.  Compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize -- Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela -- my accomplishments are slight.

Then, acknowledging the irony of being awarded a peace prize when he is a war-time president, Obama stands on the shoulders of John F. Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan and reaffirms the historic role of the United States as the most powerful force for peace in the world.

I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.  For make no mistake:  Evil does exist in the world.  A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies.  Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.  To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause.  And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower.

But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world.  Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this:  The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.  The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.  We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will.  We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.  

Presidential. At Last. If he believes what he says and can keep it up.  Read the whole speech. It is longish but well worth your while.

UPDATE: Or not. David Frum trashes the speech in today's National Post.

Vernon's Antique Toy Shop

It's been a few years since I drove down Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula, so as I passed through Swift Current yesterday on the way to Harbour Mille, Vernon's Antique Toy Shop came as quite a surprise to this life-long car fan.

Vernon Smith owns the shop, a 12,000 square foot museum to his eclectic tastes in two-dozen very expensive vintage automobiles.

This car, for example, is considered by many Pontiac fans to be the Holy Grail of all Pontiacs, the extremely rare 1957 Bonneville fuel injection convertible. And here it sits in Swift Current, Newfoundland.

The Globe and Mail did a profile on the shop and it's creator back in November.

He's one of the wealthiest men in Atlantic Canada. Newfoundland's Vernon Smith made his money in the power-line construction industry, but it's his passion for cars that attracts attention these days.

He has a jaw-dropping collection of classic cars worth millions of dollars. It took him more than two decades to build, but his 12,000-square-foot showroom dubbed “Vernon's Antique Toy Shop” is a hidden gem.

Visit Vernon's Antique Toy Shop's website here. More local persective here at The Packet.

10 Brands That Will Disappear In 2010

In 2009, famous brands like Pontiac and Saturn cars and Gourmet Magazine disappeared. This list compiled by 24/7 Wall Street for 2010 cuts even deeper.

Among the big names to go next year will be Newsweek, Motorola and Kodak. And that is just the short list. Here are the rest.

The Obama Coup D'État And The Protocols Of The Elders Of Norwich

On Monday, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) incredibly declared carbon dioxide - a gas necessary for life - a pollutant, thus opening up a whole slew of regulatory and taxation opportunities for the federal government.

British writer and broadcaster Gerald Warner writes in the Telegraph about how the Obama Whitehouse is using global warming and the EPA to rule by decree.

Who needs tanks on the lawn when you have the Environmental Protection Agency? Barack Obama’s use of the EPA to pressurise the Senate to pass his climate change Nuremberg Decrees shows his dictatorial mentality. He wants to override Congress, which is hostile to his climate gobbledegook because it is representative of the American electorate, and sideline the nation’s elected Senators by ruling by decree, courtesy of the EPA. This is a coup d’état.

And what is the justification for this undemocratic action? The allegedly imminent threat from “Anthropogenic Global Warming”. There is always a supposed threat, when tyrants take the stage. The President of the United States has just reduced his moral authority to the level of any Third World dictator heading a “Government of National Emergency”.

The decision to declare CO2 a "pollutant" was based on the now-discredited work at the University of East Anglia.

Those jokers are the main authority for the extravagant claims in the IPCC report and, by extension, for the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding”. That is the authority that is being invoked to overturn the principles of 1776 in the United States.

The Protocols of the Elders of Norwich are the justification for EPA tyranny.

Secret Copenhagen Agreement Leaked

The Guardian says the leak of a confidential agreement between the US, the UK and Denmark to sideline the UN in any climate change role has caused an uproar at the global warming summit.

Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

"It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.

Warmists Not Walking The Walk

About global warming, Glenn Reynolds has always said: "I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis."

In Copenhagen, 34,000 delegates, 5,000 journalists, 98 world leaders and tens of thousands of demonstrators are arriving for the global warming conference on 140 private jets and countless commercial flights and riding in over 1200 limousines.  Copenhagen airport will be so over capacity the private jets will drop off their passengers then fly off somewhere else to park and then fly back later. The limos have to be driven to Denmark from all over Europe. France alone needs 42. And the hotels. And the food. And the hookers.

From Examiner.com:

So, how much carbon dioxide will this grandiose event produce during the 11 day event? About 41,000 tons. That's roughly equivalent to the same amount produced by a city of about 500,000 people over the same time period.

And what do the Copenhagen summit organizers hope to accomplish? Nothing really. It will produce no binding agreement. No Kyoto-type treaty. Merely a "statement of intent" that holds no one accountable.

And we're supposed to take the global warming alarmists seriously? Please.

 At Deceiver.com they're calling it Carbonhagen:

These guys don’t really believe what they’re saying — that we’re on the verge of a global apocalypse because of anthropogenic global warming, or man-made climate change, or whatever they’re calling it this week — or else they’d never burn another ounce of fuel in their lives. They’d never go anywhere that can’t be reached on foot, and even then, they’d try to find a way to lower their CO2 emissions.

These global warmists are simply not acting like it's a crisis.

Enduring The Bullies And Criminals Of Science

Last Friday I linked to an article by Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page called Science Is Dying.

The article was harshly critical of scientists who allowed the culture of Climategate to develop in their professions.

Christopher Essex, a leading Canadian applied mathematician and award-winning author, has written to Henninger:

Governments leaders wanted something where they could absolve themselves of the responsibility for making informed decisions. They would have to read science stuff otherwise. They ordered up a kind of unnatural scientist that would tell them precisely what they wanted to hear.

But they gave the puppeteers clubs to deal with those of us who remained true. And the perps of Climategate are what they got. All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.

You should understand that (real) scientists have had to pay the heaviest price for the creation of these monsters for decades. And they were not created by us.

The Stink Of Intellectual Corruption

Because Rex Murphy requires careful attention, I re-watched his December 3rd  Climategate editorial for CBC's The National. I was rewarded yet again. He mentioned the name of Clive Crook, a writer for Atlantic Magazine. On Climategate, Murphy quoted Crook: "The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering."

This quote came from an article by Crook in the Atlantic a week ago. The substance of the article stands. Read the whole thing.

Better Late Than Never

The Globe and Mail finally ran a front page story on Climategate in yesterday's edition. Only three weeks late there, guys. Oh well, after your own columnist Rex Murphy's blistering editorial on CBC the other night, perhaps you had no choice. But it turns out to be a fairly well researched and balanced piece.

Even better than the article though, are the comments. Here's one that made me laugh out loud:

The deniers of AGW/Manmade Climate Change have been slagged and slandered for a very long time. We tried to tell you Gore was not a scientist but a lawyer and a politician with skin in the carbon credit game. We tried to tell you $$ and power were behind this. But oh what did we know, the knuckle dragging, tar sand loving red necks. Well lefty's (sic) your church and priest just got busted for diddling the whole world.

McIntyre And McKitrick - The Canadian Heroes Of Climategate

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick are the two Canadian researchers whose doggedness and scientific ethics revealed the whole Climategate scam to the light of day. The Ottawa Citizen profiles these two unlikely heroes who have utterly changed the global warming debate.

Although little-known in Canada, McIntyre and McKitrick -- or M and M as they're called in climate change circles -- have since 2003 put forward evidence of faulty calculations in some of the key scientific studies behind the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Their work has drawn attention from the U.S. Congress, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Wall Street Journal, which last month called them "the climate change gang's most dangerous apostates."

It's these guys who should get the Nobel Prize.

What Is In The Copenhagen Agreement?

From the Wall Street Journal, here is an overview of the draft Copenhagen Agreement on global warming and the redistribution of global wealth.

If world leaders actually manage to wring out an agreement based on the current draft text of the Copenhagen climate-change treaty, the world is in for some nasty surprises.

Such as: a trans-national "government"; international taxation on industrialized countries, which include among others the U.S., Australia, Britain and Canada; massive economic damage, loss of constitutional sovereignty, and on it goes.

The aim is to give a new as yet unnamed U.N. body the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.

Hack Or Leak?

If you are on the side of the believers in AGW you will also likely believe that the Climategate emails (and the far more important computer data files) were "stolen" or "hacked" by criminals, possibly professional Russian hackers, possibly hired by some combination of Big Oil conspirators.

But over at Watts Up With That there is a likely much simpler explanation:

First, few people know that there was already a previous leak last July. It turned out the "leaked" data was actually left on an open FTP server by none other than CRU Head Phil Jones himself.

Second, CRU had pending Freedom of Information requests for the very data that was leaked. It makes sense that the data for this request would be placed in one file pending the FOI approval process. It would take far too long, far too much insider knowledge and way too much access for hackers to assemble over 3,000 emails and 20,000 lines of computer code. Far more likely is that these data were assembled "in-house" at CRU and were awaiting a decision on the FOI request.

A few people inside CRU possessed the archive of documents being held in reserve in case the FOI appeal decision was made in favor of Steve McIntyre. They shared it with others by putting it in an FTP directory which was on the same CPU as the external webserver, or even worse, was an on a shared drive somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available. Then, along comes our “hackers” who happened to find it, download it, and the rest is history unfolding before our eyes. So much for the cries of sophisticated hacking and victimization noted above.

There’s an old adage: never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity or incompetence.

If You Read Nothing Else About Global Warming, Read This

Scientists, politicians and the media are jetting into Copenhagen for tomorrow's opening of the UN Climate Change Conference. Those who believe in anthropogenic global warming are hoping for a major international treaty that will transfer literally trillions of dollars out of developed western economies via the UN.

Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph that the AGW faithful will tell you that thousands of climate scientists have reached a consensus that the planet is warming dangerously, carbon must be controlled, humans are to blame and we must pay a heavy price for our sins against the planet.

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.

The truth is that the grand theory of AGW, the "consensus" of thousands of climatologists, all comes down to British scientist Keith Briffa and his data from one tree in Yamal, Siberia. Yes, one scientist, one tree.

Be sure to read the whole thing, and the comments are worth your while too.

How Blue Box Recycling Hurts The Environment

The National Post takes a break from the enviropolitical fiasco that is Climategate to remind us of another green boondoggle - the myth that curbside recycling has any benefit. They must just love hearing hippies howl.

While a blue bin out front makes us feel we're helping the planet, recycling most household materials has either minimal environmental impact, or even a negative one.