The stimulus in perspective

A Trillion Here, a Trillion There. This nice graphical illustration of the size of the stimulus comes from Suitably Flip.

Adjusted for inflation and in 2008 dollars, the stimulus is roughly 5 times the entire cost of the race to the moon. Or 5 times the cost of the Louisiana Purchase.

Click image for the full story.

h/t

Inconvenient Debt

Fox News guy Glenn Beck calls it Economic Apocalypse. And he uses a presentation style reminiscent of the Goracle to present it. Hockey stick and all. I call it madness.



Bonus video: Hypocrisy with Penn Jillette.

Stimulus plan meets global warming

Leftist heaven...

President Barack Obama’s trillion dollar stimulus plan, has morphed into an appropriations bill devoid of debate. The process forgoes any pretense of targeting unemployed people and resources.

For instance, the bill reads “Provided further, That not less than $140,000,000 shall be available for climate data modeling.” This raises the question of how many unemployed climate modelers are out there pounding the pavement.

When presented with that question, last Friday, Pat Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists stated “I don’t know one unemployed modeler.”

Whether or not another $140,000,000 for climate data modeling is a good idea, it is hard to see an immediate, economy-stimulating impact from this item.

What’s the rush? Maybe they need to get all their modeling done before another cool year highlights how bad the models are.

They don't even have a word for it...

in the United Arab Emirates:

RAS AL KHAIMAH // Snow covered the Jebel Jais area for only the second time in recorded history yesterday.

So rare was the event that one lifelong resident said the local dialect had no word for it.

More here.

Monckton: Temperature Change and CO2 Change – A Scientific Briefing

Christopher Moncton's latest report comes to us via the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE) -- The Earth has shown an under-reported cooling trend for eight straight years, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the UN’s climate projections, since not one of the computer models on which it relies had predicted so long and steep a cooling, says a new review paper -- Temperature Change and CO2 Change – A Scientific Briefing --from the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The paper posits that “The chief reason for scepticism at the official position on “global warming” is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic “global warming”; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.


“In short,” writes Monckton, “science is being artfully manipulated to the point of what are in essence political and not scientific conclusions – a conclusion that is congenial to powerful factions whose ambition is not to identify scientific truth but rather to advance the special vested interests with which they identify themselves.

The paper demonstrates that if CO2 concentration continues to rise more slowly than the IPCC had predicted, and if climate sensitivity to CO2 concentration is in any event well below the IPCC’s projected range, the likelihood of any “global warming” >2 °C/century to 2100 is vanishingly small.

Monckton also demonstrates that official sources have:
• relied upon questionable and occasionally downright dishonest methods to inflate the observed rate of temperature increase
• created the false impression that the rate of increase is itself rising when an identical argument can be used to demonstrate that it is falling
• diminished earlier and warmer temperatures in this century
• abolished the mediaeval warm period
• diverted attention away from the fact that throughout almost all of the Holocene, and throughout all four previous interglacial periods, surface temperatures were considerably warmer than they are today.

Says SPPI president, Robert Ferguson, “When the climate science is wrong, the policies are wrong, and then both people and the environment are harmed. It is past time that the media and elected officials stop treating “man-made global warming” as a religion and started asking some serious and pointed questions. This paper lays the ground work for that.”

Emphasis added by moi.

Atlas shrugged

As much as their proponents want us to believe, the fact is that government bailouts are not the fix for our current economic troubles.

In one of the finest inaugural addresses ever, this new President explained it simply and concisely, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem".



h/t

Update: related and relevant

WaPo: Are scientists overselling climate models?

Via the Washington Post:

To what extent should we accept these projections at face value? How certain is the stated range of uncertainty? Can today's climate models provide credible predictions of the regional impacts of climate change (e.g., on the scale of U.S. states or most European countries)?

These questions are addressed in a series of recent articles and exchange of comments in New Scientist.

It's hard to make data where none exist

Unless of course, you are trying to convince the world that Antarctica is warming.

Washington, DC: A new study on Antarctic temperatures – which is contrary to the findings of multiple previous studies - claims "that since 1957, the annual temperature for the entire continent of Antarctica has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, but still is 50 degrees below zero.”

Despite the fact that the study was immediately viewed with major skepticism by scientists who are not skeptical of anthropogenic global warming claims, many in the media pounced on the study as a chance to attack those skeptical of man-made climate doom. According to the release of the study, “The researchers devised a statistical technique that uses data from satellites and from Antarctic weather stations to make a new estimate of temperature trends. […]

The scientists found temperature measurements from weather stations corresponded closely with satellite data for overlapping time periods. That allowed them to use the satellite data as a guide to deduce temperatures in areas of the continent without weather stations.” (emphasis added)

Few media outlets noted that in 2007 Antarctic “sea ice coverage has grown to record levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1979, according to peer-reviewed studies and scientists who study the area.” [See also other factors impacting Antarctica: “Volcano, Not Global Warming Effects, May be Melting an Antarctic Glacier & The Antarctic deep sea gets COLDER – April 21, 2008 & A January 12, 2008, peer-reviewed paper in AGU (American Geophysical Union) found “A doubling in snow accumulation in the western Antarctic Peninsula since 1850.” Map of Volcanoes - See comprehensive data round up below]

The new Antarctic study was published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature and the lead author of the study was Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and Space Sciences. Other co-authors include: David Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, a former student of Steig's; Scott Rutherford of Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI; and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.

UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, who is not in any way a climate change skeptic, said of the study, "I remain somewhat skeptical… It is hard to make data where none exist.” Echoing Trenberth’s analysis were several other scientists.

Be sure to read the rest of this post by Marc Morano at Senator Jim Inhofe's EPW Press Blog.

Here's another review from Roger Pielke Sr.

And at the Heliogenic Climate Change blog they're a little more blunt about this in a couple of related posts: Scientist adjusts data -- presto, Antarctic cooling disappears and Rewriting History.

Carter: Facts Debunk Global Warming Alarmism

Bob Carter is an adjunct professor of geology at James Cook University. He writes:

THE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that October in the US was marked by 63 record snowfalls and 115 lowest-ever temperatures.

Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism. Yet individual weather events or spells, whether warmings or coolings, tell us nothing necessarily about true climate change.

Nonetheless, by coincidence, growing recognition of a threat of climatic cooling is correct, because since the turn of the 21st century all real world, long-term climate indicators have turned downwards. Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?

Can you say computer models?

Inauguration Day Cold

If it seems unusually cold today in Washington, DC it may just be following a trend, reports Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters:

In fact, it's normally almost 7 1/2 degrees warmer when a Republican is sworn in on a January Inauguration Day than when a Democrat raises his right hand.

So said a 2001 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

• Average Noon Temperature when a Republican President is sworn in is 40.4 F.

• Average Noon Temperature when a Democratic President is sworn in is 33.0 F.

Imagine what how cold it would have been if Al Gore had won!

Skepticism in the far north

Fairbanks has invited Al Gore to come up and debate global warming. And the invite comes in the form of a 5-ton ice sculpture of a “shivering” Gore.

The good folks in Fairbanks think that the ice sculpture should last until March. It will be long gone before the Goracle responds to their invitation.

Progress

Looks like there's no consensus amongst ordinary folk either. American Voters Losing Faith in Theory of Global Warming:

The poll asked 1,000 likely voters whether global warming was “caused primarily by human activity or by long term planetary trends.” Only 41 percent said it was human activity, while 44 percent said it was long-term planetary trends. Seven percent said it was “some other reason,” and nine percent said they were not sure.

This is a significant shift from a poll conducted last April in which 47 percent said human activity caused global warming and only 34 percent said long term planetary trends caused it.

Another sign that maybe, just maybe 2008 was the year that man-made global warming was disproved for the majority of us.