PM Harper makes the TV circuit in the US

Following the visit on President Obama to Canada, our PM Stephen Harper is staying in the limelight by speaking out on the US networks.




With Larry Kudlow on CNBC.






And also with Alexis Glick on Fox Business Network


click images to play videos




Harper's comments on oil production, the Oil Sands and carbon emissions are interesting. His position seems to be that Canada will move to reduce carbon emissions and he welcomes the fact that the US under Obama will do the same, thus leveling the playing field.

The rest of the conversations center on the economy and economic stimulus.

Mr. Global Warming

The unauthorized biography, courtesy Celestial Junk.

h/t

Will history repeat itself?

Avner Mandelman asks (Report on Business)if the stimulus mania currently possessing western politicians is just a case of history repeating itself.

Imagine this: A group of community organizers, aided by mesmerizing rhetoric and calls for equality, fraternity and hope, remove the privileged from power. But the government they inherit is heavily in debt to the tune of a third of the GDP. The debt comes due, the government can't pay, so the economy tanks.

What to do? Taxes are out - the taxpayers have fled (or are broke). The ingenious solution: Print more money as a stimulus package! What about interest on the printed stimulus? Piffle. Just print it also!

This is not the United States in 2009 - at least not yet. It is France, 1789, right after the French Revolution.

Why mention this history?

Well, because the results weren't very pretty.

Maine cold breaks 84 year record

Just because you won't see this in the main stream media:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Geological Survey and Maine State Climate Office announced today that a minus-50 reading in northwestern Maine held up to scientific scrutiny.

That beats Maine's old record of 48 below zero set in 1925 in Van Buren, and ties the record for coldest temperature recorded in New England. That reading was made in 1933 in Bloomfield, Vt.

The record on New Hampshire's Mount Washington is minus-47.

Maine's minus-50 reading was made on Jan. 16 at a remote site along the Big Black River near the Quebec border as the region was in the grip of a blast of arctic air.

Wilson acts on CO2

...by banning the local broadcast of British government ads on climate change and denounced their energy-saving message as "insidious propaganda."

The hard-line Protestant, a leading light in the Democratic Unionist Party, argues that global weather patterns are naturally cooling, not warming — and humanity should invest in coping with God-driven climate change, not trying to slow down a man-made problem.

His latest fight is against the central government in London, which funds an "Act on CO2" campaign encouraging the public to reduce their use of electricity and fossil fuels.

Previously.

Mr. Wilson represents something extremely rare in a politician - he is one who is unafraid to speak the truth. Bravo Sammy. I wish we had more like ye!

h/t

Ball: On Pravda’s New Ice Age Story

Dr. Tim Ball's latest post On Pravda’s New Ice Age Story starts off by taking aim at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the premise of human induced (anthropogenic) global warming from the emissions of carbon dioxide:

I have said the IPCC focus on CO2 is akin to saying my car is not running well and I am going to determine the cause by ignoring the engine (sun), the transmission (water vapor), and most other mechanical parts and focus on one nut (CO2) on the right rear wheel. Worse, they only look at one thread of the nut, the human portion of CO2. The ease with which they have achieved this degree of focus is frightening, but understandable because it was premeditated.

But that's just the prelude. The main focus of Dr. Ball's post is a recent article in the Russian newspaper Pravda titled Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age which states:

“The Earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science.”

To put this into perspective and avoid confusion with the recent short term period of global cooling, Dr. Ball offers this explanation over a much larger time frame:

This is the fact that the Earth over the last 10,000 years has emerged from one segment of the most recent Ice Age (Pleistocene). We are currently in an interglacial (Holocene) and scientists anticipate it will end as we slide into another Ice Age. A diagram of global temperatures over the last 400,000 years derived from Antarctic ice cores shows the pattern during the Pleistocene.

The blue line shows the temperature with current temperatures on the right. Notice there are four previous interglacials, two of them with higher temperatures than today. The intervening periods are the ice ages when massive glaciers formed on the land. Also note how the temperature declines after the interglacial peak; that is the cooling the Pravda article is discussing.

It is generally agreed that changes in the sun/earth relationship are the major mechanism driving long-term climate patterns. These are collectively known as the Milankovitch Effect and include; changes in the Earth’s orbit caused primarily by the gravitational pull of Jupiter with a 100,000-year cycle; changes in the tilt of the Earth of undetermined cause, with a 40,000- year cycle; and a shift in the date of equinox with a 19,000-year cycle. Although Milankovitch’s work was initially accepted it lost favor when his results conflicted with some radiocarbon data. I recall conferences in the 1980s when reference to Milankovitch brought vigorous protest. However, by the 1990s he was back in favor.

Another important point about the Pravda article is the observation that supporters of the human caused global warming (AGW) only consider a short time frame. “ The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past 1,000 years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years--evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology.” It is true that the now discredited “hockey stick” examined climate of the last thousand years, but this was only to try and eliminate the Medieval Warm Period. In fact, the focus is at most the temperature of the last 140 years.

Read the full story at FCPP Publications. (h/t)

Related: The IPCC under the Microscope. (h/t)

Which is more?

Stimulate the economy. A Trillion here - a Trillion there.
But which is more? a Trillion dollars? or
One Million dollars every single day since the birth of Christ?
(that's a bit over 2,008 years)



h/t

Nuge: Kill This Porkosaurus

Rocker Ted Nugent is famous for his hard hitting music, i.e. songs like "Cat Scratch Fever" - one of my all-time faves, btw (but what else would you expect from an old dog like me?). But the Nuge also has some pretty hard hitting political beliefs, is an avid hunter and pro-gun advocate. And a family man.

Ted weighs in at Human Events.com on the current stimulus hyperactivity with this article titled Kill This Porkosaurus and even offers a few ideas on how we can save ourselves from this folly.

I’m a hunter, and proud of it. Most of my best hours are spent in the field, sometimes chasing dangerous game. I’m on the track of one, a bigger more dangerous critter than I’ve ever hunted before: the Obama-Pelosi Porkosaurus.

(...)

In a crisis, hysterical, wrongheaded, ignorant people will squall and holler to "do something." Reasonable people with a modicum of intellect know that throwing a cinder block to a drowning person qualifies as "something", but surely it is the wrong something.

(...)

President Obama and Nancy Pelosi's trillion-dollar Porkosaurus bill will fail miserably at creating new jobs and reversing our economic kamikaze swan dive. The bill is weighed down by irresponsible, ineffective, wasteful spending which is the status quo in Washington DC.

(...)

But now President Obama is in charge of feeding Fedzilla and he has wasted no time in advocating a trillion-dollar pork dinner for The Beast. The menu of spending items is the most irresponsible pile of pork in the history of our country.

And my favourite part...

$400 million more of our tax dollars are scheduled to be wasted on the global-warming scam of the century. Here's how we save this cash: We agree the earth warms and cools. We admit that warming and cooling is a naturally occurring cycle that has to do with the sun and that there is nothing we can do about it. We admit Al Gore is a fraud and a global warming Ponzi-schemer. Then we take back Al's Grammy and documentary award.

RTWT