Instapundit forwards a link to one of the silliest articles on "global warming" ever. I especially enjoyed his assertion on the timeline of the catastrophe.

The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

It may well occur within the lifetime of his two cats, but not, perhaps, before his mother finally gives up and makes him move out of the basement.

The great Instapundit offers a story about the promise of another type of heavenly light that may bring hope to mankind:

In September, American entrepreneur Kevin Reed proposed at the 58th International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad, India, that Palau's uninhabited Helen Island would be an ideal spot for a small demonstration project, a 260-foot-diameter "rectifying antenna," or rectenna, to take in 1 megawatt of power transmitted earthward by a satellite orbiting 300 miles above Earth.

That's enough electricity to power 1,000 homes, but on that empty island the project would "be intended to show its safety for everywhere else," Reed said in a telephone interview from California.

"The climate change implications are pretty clear. You can get basically unlimited carbon-free power from this," said Mark Hopkins, senior vice president of the National Space Society in Washington. . . . Some seem to hear the call. The European Space Agency has scheduled a conference on space-based solar power for next Feb. 29. Space Island Group, another entrepreneurial U.S. endeavor, reports "very positive" discussions with a European utility and the Indian government about buying future power from satellite systems.

I'm sure that Jerry Pournelle will be pleased. He's been an advocate of solar power from stationary satellites for years.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day site offers some of the most beautiful images available on the Internet. The photo for today, Christmas Day, 2007 is both beautiful and inspirational:




Merry Christmas to all, especially to our troops stationed around the world who are protecting our cherished freedoms.






The caption for the image explains its majesty:
Welcome to The World At Night. Sharing the night sky seen around the world, this view from Monument Valley, USA includes a picturesque foreground of famous buttes. Buttes are composed of hard volcanic rock left behind after water eroded away the surrounding soft rock. The two buttes on the image left are known as the Mittens, while Merrick Butte is on the right. Recorded just last week, planet Mars is at the left of the skyscape, a glowing beacon of orange that is the brightest object in the frame. To the right of Mars lies the constellation of Orion. Betelgeuse is the reddish star near the center and the Belt of Orion and the Orion Nebula are farther right. Finally, the bright blue star Rigel appears above Merrick Butte in this stunning view of The World At Night.

The post at Commentary magazine entitled, " Who Owns the Vietnam War? " tells some uncomfortable truths that the left doesn't want to hear.

Can it really be true? Over at the American Enterprise Institute site, Reuel Marc Gerecht explains Why the Worst Is Probably Over in Iraq.

Big Lizards describes the nihilistic malaise infecting Japan, and to a greater extent, Europe, in an excellent post that IMO applies equally to the elites in the U.S. If a nation outsources its national defenses because you don't think that anything is worth fighting for, sooner or later, those who do your fighting for you might change their minds.

College football's season of chaos is complete. There's no prospect for a playoff system for the major college football any time soon. The hard-shelled traditionalists must be thrilled as the rest of us despair for the unrealized potential that continues to be wasted. Oh well, there's still the NFL...

The Eleventh Hour, of the Eleventh Day, of the Eleventh Month. The moment when the guns of World War I fell silent, and the armistace that was hoped to end the "war to end all wars" began.

Of course, we now know that wars did not end on that fateful day, and that the seeds of future wars are sown at the ends of wars as well as during times of peace. Let us never forget that since its creation, America has sent its sons (and daughters too) at creat cost, including the ultimate sacrifice, in the cause of preservation of peace, of our nation and of our way of life. We honor all Veterans today.

I remember and honor my father, Army soldier, veteran of World War II and survivor of the first wave of tiny boats to land our men on Normany beach over 63 years ago. God bless you Dad. I love you and I miss you. Thank you for all you did for our nation, our family, and for me.

Powerline reports on a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House for a remarkable SEAL who is survived by remarkable parents and a comrade in arms turned publicist for his memory.

Lt. Murphy's story is amazing, but in a way, typically American. We are all called upon to be worthy of his sacrifice in the defense of our nation, and our way of life.

Democrat party pols and environmental politics are discussed in this post in The Corner on National Review Online. Would they embrace an Al Gore presidential candidacy? Would they really take up and pass the Kyoto treaty? It's not Gore Agonistes; he'd have to give up his "Father Theresa" demigod status with the gaia movement to descend to the level of a mere President of the United States.

Not to mention having to move to poorer living quarters than this.

In Chill Out, Bjorn Lomborg repeats his eminently logical argument that the prudent course to take in addressing global warming is not to attempt to reverse a process that may or may not be the cause of climate change. Instead, he writes
"We must accept that climate change is real and that we've helped cause it. There is no hoax. But neither is there a looming apocalypse.
To some people, cutting carbon emissions has become the answer, regardless of the question. Cutting emissions is said to be our "generational mission." But don't we want to implement the most efficient policies first?
Combating the real climate challenges facing the planet -- malaria, more heat deaths, declining polar bear populations -- often requires simpler, less glamorous policies than carbon cuts. We also need to remember that the 21st century will hold many other challenges, for which we need low-cost, durable solutions.
I formed the Copenhagen Consensus in 2004 so that some of the world's top economists could come together to ask not only where we can do good, but at what cost, and to rank the best things for the world to do first. The top priorities they've come up with are dealing with infectious diseases, malnutrition, agricultural research and first-world access to third-world agriculture. For less than a fifth of Kyoto's price tag, we could tackle all these issues.
Obviously we should also work on a long-term solution to climate change. Solving it will take the better part of a century and will require a political will spanning political parties, continents and generations. If we invest in research and development, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today.
But embracing the best response to global warming is difficult in the midst of bitter fighting that shuts out sensible dialogue. So first, we really need to cool our debate."

Well said.

I love this. It describes so many activities in life that involves groups that aren't naturally...grouped.

The Belmont Club discusses signs that the environmental movement is becoming more and more of a religion in Terraforming on Terra.

Wizbang points to a rare admission by scientists that climate change isn't only about global warming and cooling, but large scale effects of wind and current are at work as well.
An Overdue Dose of Humility in the Global Warming Debate?

In ADAMANT: Another Day, Another Cosmology, Russell Seitz writes "Astrophysicists Liang Gao and Tom Theuns have floated an alternative to the theory of primordial matter condensing into star-forming clouds withing clumps of cold dark matter that does not interact with radiation. In their computer model, dark matter can emit radiation,and radiation pressure would resist clumping forces and cause elongation of dark matter concentrations instead."

"Their paper in Science suggests such warm dark matter would stretch out into million solar mass filaments kiloparsecs long , attracting primordial hydrogen and helium gas to form the first stars and nucleate supermassive black holes in galactic centers."

Very interesting, and worth a read.

James Lewis writes in American Thinker: NASA's Hansen Reaches Escape Velocity

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago."
In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes
"If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose."For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. "Several meters" is only about 9-15 feet. That's the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen's predictions come to pass.

The amazing Aerogel: insulator, filter, armor enhancer.
Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world - Times Online

Interesting conclusion to Little Ice Age (Regional - Asia: China) – Summary:

"In light of these several observations, it is clear that the Little Ice Age was manifest in China as a cold node of the millennial-scale oscillation of climate that brought this vast region, as well as most of the rest of the world, the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Modern Warm Period, which suggests there is nothing unusual about the planet's current state of warmth and, therefore, that there is no need to invoke the historical increase in the air's CO2 content as its cause."

Steve McIntyre of Toronto operates http://www.climateaudit.org/ as a hobby, essentially. I discovered the site accidentally a few years ago. Steve has waged an often lonely campaign to examine the accuracy of the data and methods behind the "consensus" view of climate change.

Steve has uncovered a whopper of an error, one that calls the "consensus" into question and the diligence of all those so-called scientists who shared the consensus. True scientific progress relies upon open sharing of experimental data--the inputs, the data, the environment, etc.--and the scientist's proposed theory is only considered proven if the experiment can be repeated successfully by any other scientist acting independently. Steve has fought to obtain the data and methods used by "the team", the scientists who Crazy Al relies on most to bolster his claim that we only have 10 years left to act. "The team" admitted an error that invalidated their claim for a hockey stick in Congressional testimony this year. Now NASA and their famed muzzled scientist (who's been muzzled into giving perhaps hundreds of tiresome interviews) admit a key error that calls more of the "consensus" view into question.

Al Gore's Global Warming Hysteria the Result of a NASA Programming Error (Wizbang)

Crazy Al takes his Taft impression to Singapore, the land where conviction on a charge of committing an "outrage of modesty" is a caning offense, and unintentionally makes a true statement in his increasingly shrill defense of the indefensible.

My Way News - Gore: Polluters Manipulate Climate Info

Al is quoted as saying, "They're trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools." I agree as long as the "they" he refers to is the climate change alarmist group, and the "us" are the rest of us who simply live our lives and notice that short term weather models are laughably wrong every day.

As for examples of manipulation of the data, there's this, this indictment of the quality of measurement data in many cases, this on the hurricane count flap, and this summary of presentations by scientists who apparently didn't get the memo that the debate is over.

The argument that scientific consensus means that the facts are in and the debate is over for climate change is laughable if you focus on what science and the scientific method actually mean.

The definition of the scientific method at Wikipedia contains the following: "Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process must be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so it is available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called "full disclosure", also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established."

We have seen attempts to keep data and methods away from skeptics on numerous occasions. Who's afraid of legitimate inquiry that would either confirm or question their work? Politicians--scientists with a policy or other non-scientific axe to grind.

More inconvenient research reported in ScienceDaily: Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts

Excerpt:

"In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere.

After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated.

To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation.

By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.

Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then. a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability.

The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century. "

Brendan Miniter writes in OpinionJournal's DE GUSTIBUS column about a great American's quest to help protect his fellow soldiers fighting Islamofascism. Click to read, "On His Armor: A refugee to our shores finds a way to protect our soldiers."

The great Instapundit.com catches the UK Guardian engaging in a bit of time travel when it associates the Bush Administration with CIA interrogation and torture policy established in...1998.

As they say, you can't make this stuff up.

Hat tip to the OpFor blog for the link to this photo from the USAF Academy site. The caption, "An Air Force Cadet encounters mud. This will, in all likelihood, never occur again." is, in a word, perfect.

Aim High.

Congratulations to the the Iraqi team, improbable winners of the Asian Cup.

Here are two excerpts from the Reuters article:

"Iraq were forced to train and play their qualifiers in neutral countries and their coach, Brazilian coach Jorvan Vieira, who said he planned to quit after the match, only had two months to mould a team that included Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish players."

and

"FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who was at the Gelora Bung National Stadium for the final, said Iraq's achievement had inspired millions and was proof of sport's unique power to unite people in the most desperate circumstances."

As the man says, read the whole thing: Iraq defy odds to complete Asian Cup fairytale Sports Reuters

The President gave an excellent speech on the situation in Iraq and the characteristics of the enemy that we are fighting there. An excellent analysis coupled with the text of the speech is posted here: The Belmont Club: The Charleston AFB Speech

I haven't posted to this blog since last February--just too much to do lately. My Google Reader links blog is updated numerous times daily. The five most recent posts in my links blog appear in the left hand column of this page.

In "Trial in Error," Victoria Toensing "indicts others who were not indicted by a grand jury, but could have been.

Now that the "Libby trial about process not outing an agent" is over, what will the media write about the outcome? Libby would seem to be the loser either way due to the massive costs of his defense.

In "Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists," Astrophysicist Nir Shariv describes his passage from man-made climate change believer to his present opinion. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. "In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

The article continues: Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Two takes on the politicization of science here and here.