Obama on Sunday at a fundraiser, attacking Rick Perry: “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”
Here is another example of a politician making a fool of himself. The wildfires in Texas have nothing to do with climate change. And if Obama thinks they do, he immediately shows himself to be completely ignorant of the science behind the Earth’s climate.
The EPA — after admitted in court papers submitted September 16 that regulating CO2 is “impossible to administer” and “absurd” — will go ahead anyway.
Note also that the Clean Air Act did not give the EPA the power to regulate carbon dioxide.
Can neutrinos travel faster than light? After three years of gathering data, an experiment at CERN says they do, though by only a tiny amount.
[Physicist Antonio] Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists’ way of saying it is certainly correct.
You can download and read a preprint of their paper here.
What I find intriguing about this result, other than its exciting groundbreaking possibilities, is how it illustrates sharply the contrast between normal and healthy science, and the sad and sick state of the field of climate science.
» Read more
We’re here to help you! Obama’s EPA plans to shut down 20% of all coal power plants in 2012.
The Times Atlas has backed down on its false claim of a 15% loss to the Greenland icecap due to global warming and has issued an apology.
With the Kyoto climate treaty expiring in 2012 and with almost no chance of a new treaty being agreed to this December at the next climate meeting in Durban, South Africa, Australia and Norway have proposed extending Kyoto until 2015.
The Australia-Norway submission calls for a new timetable to finalize an international treaty that would extend the Kyoto Protocol until 2015. Kyoto, which requires nearly 40 developed nations to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 5.2 percent less than 1990 levels by 2020 during the years 2008-12, is scheduled to expire in 2012. . . . The 2015 timetable is intended to “scale-up” international efforts on climate change to attain a global goal of limiting temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius, the Australia-Norway proposal said.
What this tells me is that the chances of a new treaty are getting slimmer and slimmer. And I think that is good news, as we really have no idea what the climate is really doing, therefore making it very premature to write any treaty that limits human freedom. For all we know, the sun might be going quiet, which in turn could lead to global cooling.
But then, we don’t really know yet, do we? And without knowing a new climate treaty might do more harm than good.
When faith trumps data: The most recent edition of the Times Atlas incorrectly shows large areas of Greenland free of ice, claiming this was caused by global warming, even though those areas remain ice-covered. More here.
The Scott Polar group, which includes director Julian Dowdeswell, says the claim of a 15% loss in just 12 years is wrong. “Recent satellite images of Greenland make it clear that there are in fact still numerous glaciers and permanent ice cover where the new Times Atlas shows ice-free conditions and the emergence of new lands,” they say in a letter that has been sent to the Times. “We do not know why this error has occurred, but it is regrettable that the claimed drastic reduction in the extent of ice in Greenland has created headline news around the world. There is to our knowledge no support for this claim in the published scientific literature.“
A Nobel prize winner has bluntly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) because of its unquestioning support of global warming.
Dr. Giaever wrote to Kirby of APS: “Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I cannot live with the (APS) statement below (on global warming): APS: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’
Giaever announced his resignation from APS was due to the group’s belief in man-made global warming fears. Giaever explained in his email to APS: “In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.” [emphasis in original]
Madness: The EPA is using taxpayer money to encourage environmentalist groups to sue the EPA.
The Left has fought the spread of genetically modified (GM) foods with every weapon in its arsenal. Leftists did this in the name of combating a long list of “potential risks” that never materialized. They have been permitted to overlook the fact that their assaults on GM food were not cost free. For instance, they have greatly delayed and in some places stopped cold the use of rice modified to increase vitamin A content. For the Left this is cause for celebration. In fact, widespread use of this “golden rice” would have prevented a half-million cases of child blindness a year. So the next time someone talks to you about the evils of genetically modified foods, remind him of the millions of poor children this crusade has condemned to a lifetime of blindness. How do folks prepared to allow millions to needlessly go blind still command the respect of any truly moral person?
And that’s only the start. Read the whole thing.
Obscure editor resigns from minor journal: why you should care.
We have sadly reached that stage in the climate debate where the Alarmist establishment isn’t even going to bother trying to make its case through force of argument. And the scary part is that it senses – probably correctly – that it doesn’t need to. The junk-science establishment – from the UEA to the Royal Society to NASA GISS to the National Academy of Sciences – has done so well out of its whitewash enquiries, its FOI breaches, its appeals to authority, its craven, unquestioning support from the MSM and the political class, its silencing of critics, that it has lost all sense of shame. It is out of control, unaccountable, yet directly responsible for a large chunk of the costly regulation, taxation and environmentally disastrous schemes from biofuels to wind farms which are helping to destroy the global economy. The great global warming scam is the biggest scandal of our age. It is time someone took it seriously.
