New Hope For Global Warming Deniers

WHY WOULD anyone be a global warming denier? What’s the point? You earn the scorn of Al Gore and maybe Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s pre-eminent climate scientist will call for you to be put in jail. Of fossil fuel company CEOs Hansen recently testified to Congress:

In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

If Dr. Hansen turns out to be wrong about climate change should he be tried for high crimes and misdemeanors too? Steve McIntyre and his collaborators at climateaudit.org have already found one big error in Dr. Hansen’s GISS global temperature data series. How many mistakes add up to a felony?

But things are looking up for the global warming skeptics. First of all there is the global temperature. After holding constant since 1998 it has dropped markedly in the last two years. You can see the latest numbers at Dr. Roy Spencer’s home page.

Recently the Germans prudently declared a ten-year hold on non-stop global warming. What with a flip in the Gulf Stream they realized that the numbers weren’t going to look too good for the alarmists in the next few years. “There is a long-periodic oscillation that will probably lead to a lower temperature increase than we would expect from the current trend during the next years,” they wrote. Clearly, more research is needed.

The World Bank in a “secret” report has found most of the recent increase in food prices was due to biofuels production. Writes Aditya Chakrabortty in the lefty Guardian:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

Apparently, according to Chakrabortty, the World Bank refrained from publishing the report to avoid embarrassing President Bush! The US recently issued a report blaming China and India for the food price increases and this new report “emphatically contradicts” it. I say to heck with President Bush and the evil biofuels program that he rammed through Congress with the help of Halliburton in the teeth of opposition from sensitive, caring environmentalists and advocates for the global poor. Let’s teach President Bush a lesson and stop biofuel subsidies now! What do you say, Senator Obama? Here is an opportunity for real change.

But the most fascinating and encouraging news the deniers is from Australian astrophysicists I.R.G. Wilson, B.D. Carter, and I.A. Waite. They have developed a theory that the sunspot cycle and its intensity is driven by the gravitational relationships between the Sun and the Jovian planets Jupiter and Saturn.

The Sun wobbles a bit around the center of the Solar System. Sometimes the center of the Solar System lies outside the surface of the Sun, only 1,000 times heavier than Jupiter and 3,000 times heavier than Saturn. All that wobbling seems to affect the behavior of the Sun.

Here is the nub of the paper, as explained by author Ian Wilson to Andrew Bolt.

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.

Wilson and Co. should talk to the Germans who think that the cooling will only last for 10-15 years and try to come up with a cooling consensus. Either way, it adds up to a comfortable truth for Al Gore who can now feel virtuous about warming up the planet with his mega-mansion and his compulsive jet-travel habit.

It’s all so confusing.

Liberals tell us that we mustn’t develop energy resources because of the impact on the polar bear—even though polar bear numbers are on the increase. We shouldn’t develop oil resources in ANWR because it is a pristine wilderness. We shouldn’t develop offshore oil resources because 40 years ago there was an oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel. Anyway there’s no point in developing oil and gas resources because it won’t make any difference to the price of gasoline. Anyway we are running out of oil and gas so there isn’t any point in developing any more oil and gas resources. We shouldn’t mine coal because coal creates global warming. We shouldn’t develop nuclear power because Jane Fonda once made a scary movie about it. We should develop solar and wind power, “renewables,” even though both are extremely expensive right now. But we shouldn’t build wind farms where Ted Kennedy could see the wind turbines from his window.

And now with a straight face liberals say we’ll have to starve the people in order to save the planet. Now who’s in denial?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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