A pair of scientist from Europe has researched the effect of solar activity on global climate cycles. They have concluded that solar activity and cosmic radiation is a much much more important driver of warming and cooling trends on earth than CO2. Here is an excerpt:

"It was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds. This has not been taken into account in the models used to work out the effect carbon dioxide has had.”

This development was just reported yesterday. I linked to an article a month or so ago describing the same effect. The idea that the interplay of solar and cosmic radiation may be the main driver of global climate change is in direct conflict with the notion that CO2 (and thus humans) are the primary reason the earth is warming.

Pay attention to this development. I predict that the CO2 based global warming canard will continue to unravel over the coming months and years as more peer reviewed studies and renewed attention to good science regains hold and pushes the highly politicized Chicken Littles to the fringes where they belong.

Some Inconvenient Thoughts on Global Warming

Good morning! I am getting ready to travel to St Louis which is shivering under a dome of unusually frigid arctic air. I returned yesterday from NYC. It was almost frozen to a standstill! The pond outside of my home in NC is frozen. We have lived here 17 years and that has only happened 3 or 4 times. So what do all of these examples of cold and freezing prove? Do they prove that global warming isn’t really happening? Of course not. They don’t prove anything of the sort (and of course neither does a hot month or a warm winter or two prove that global warming is happening due to human actions).

Anyway, I need to get ready to catch my plane so please read this essay by George Will. He offers a few choice facts that should make global warming cheerleaders like Senators. Kerry and Boxer squirm a little bit.

I am preparing for a very busy week of travel and won’t have much to offer this week but by all means please take the time to read this article on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is a little nerdy in terms of numbers but the author lays out some fascinating figures about CO2 presence in the atmosphere that I guarantee will make you think. The author, Dr. S. Fred Singer, is an atmospheric physicist at the University of Virginia. He says:

5. To finish with the math, by calculating the product of the adjusted CO2 contribution to greenhouse gases (3.618%) and % of CO2 concentration from anthropogenic (man-made) sources (3.225%), we see that only (0.03618 X 0.03225) or 0.117% of the greenhouse effect is due to atmospheric CO2 from human activity.

Dr. Singer says human generated CO2 is responsible for one tenth of one percent of the overall greenhouse gas affect on earth. Remember, the cornerstone of the Chicken Little global warming crowd is that CO2 is the CAUSE of earths rising temperatures, melting ice caps, soon to be raising sea levels, and gout! (I made up the part about gout but the rest is true). Read the whole article to get Singers conclusion.

My Disclosure Statement: I love the outdoors, clean water, fresh air, and unpolluted wilderness. I know that if left unrestrained, many corporations and governments will knowingly pollute the environment, like has happened in the past, and thus I support laws to protect our environment to keep such abuses from happening again.

I have given money in the past to organizations promoting the establishment and protection of healthy natural environments and wildlife populations. Furthermore, I support any prudent and thoughtful steps that all governments around the world can take to keep our environment clean, verdant, and able to support life.

I also, think that our nation’s unhealthy reliance on fossil fuels is a potential huge Achilles heel and that we must aggressively move away from fossil fuels and towards alternative energy in order to assure our economic vitality and strengthen our national security. I favor an emphasis on this effort similar to the emphasis we embraced in the 60’s on placing a man on the moon.

I also happen to believe that global warming is “very likely” caused by naturally occurring phenomenon and “very likely” not caused by human generated carbon dioxide emissions. Yes, I know, my beliefs are pretty much the complete opposite of the much hyped UN climate report issued on Friday. 

It is vitally important for every voting citizen of America to evaluate the question: Is the earth warming and if so what is causing it? You should look for and rely on facts and not simplistic or agenda driven media hype to form your opinion. The implications for our economic future are absolutely enormous. If you buy into the notion that humans are causing global warming then it won’t be difficult to buy into the fact that humans can reverse whatever we have been doing (burning fossil fuels) to cause it and thus we can fix the problem.

On the other hand if you conclude that the warming of the earth is simply part of a well known and well documented cycle of cooling and warming periods that are much more highly correlated to certain well known solar cycles for instance, then you would probably not support policies that waste time and finite resources attempting to change the earths climate and instead might focus attention and money on figuring out how to better adapt to earths inevitable changing climatic cycles.

This is very important: huge money is at stake and most of it is targeted to come out of your pocket. The political left wing owns this issue and is already attempting to bludgeon the country into supporting its misguided and enormously expensive fixes. This is why I will continue to offer commentary and posts on this subject.

This very silly article reports on the disappearance of an island in the Bay of Bengal due to rising sea levels. The article notes that global warming is the cause of the submergence of this island however the author dishonestly characterizes it’s disappearance as seemingly precedent setting and sudden. The following paragraph perfectly captures the typically shallow thinking of most traditional media, global warming, street preachers. Trembling fretfulness and embarrassing displays of remedial knowledge of their subject matter tend to characterize their reporting.

“Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.”

There are just a few problems with the author’s characterization of the Atlantis like disappearance of this island. For starters, it is not the “first time” rising ocean levels have submerged land masses, and in tone and implication the article is outrageously misleading. The most recent process of submergence of low elevation land masses began as much as 18,000 years ago and the most dramatic rate of rising sea levels and thus the most dramatic rate of loss of the earth’s dry land, and certainly the island in question, Lohachara Island, occurred a long, long time ago

As almost every geologist and archeologist in the world knows, over the last few hundreds of millions of years, there has been about a 200 meter difference between the high and low water marks of the earth’s sea levels! These endlessly repeating cycles of changing sea levels roughly correspond to the similarly natural cyclical fluctuations in the earth’s climate. At the height of any particular ice age the sea level is generally at it’s lowest because more water is bound up in the form of land based ice caps. At the peak of warming trends that always follow ice ages, like at the present time, sea levels generally are at their highest because ice caps have melted back into the oceans.

The earth’s sea level has been rising for the last 18,000 years. That’s right – 18,000 years! Furthermore, up until about 6000 years ago sea levels were increasing at an average rate of 17.5 millimeters per year or about 1.75 meters each century. To help put that into perspective, 18,000 years ago the sea level of the earth was 120 meters (over 300 vertical feet!) lower than it is right now.

Over the most recent 6000 year period, the rise in the earth’s sea levels has been very slight; it has only risen about 5 to 7 meters in the last 6000 years (comparing apples to apples, the average rise in sea levels over that period of time was 0.1 to 0.3 millimeters a year). However the 6000 years preceding this period, the earths sea levels rose over 100 meters!

We are regularly assaulted with the frenzied warning clucks and chirps of the global warming Chicken Littles, who point out that over the last 100 years the annual rate of rise in the earth’s oceans has increased to 1 to 3 millimeters per year (remember –for the period between 6000 and 12,000 years ago the average annual increase was 17.5 millimeters per year). If you split the difference and assume the projected rate for the next 100 years is 2 millimeters per year then the rise in sea levels in 2100 would end up being in the neighborhood of 20 centimeters, or one fifth of one meter, or about 8 inches.

According to the Al Gore global warming crowd, we are supposed to believe that this purported change in the rate of increase in our oceans levels is primarily due to nefarious human activity including the grandest of sins - using fossil fuels. Once you buy into this hoax, you are then naturally expected to embrace their crazy package of economically self destructive carbon reduction remedies.

To Al and flock, I ask your indulgence while I try to figure a few things out. OK - let me get this straight.

1.For the last 6000 years the earths sea level has hardly increased – only 5 to 7 meters.

2. Ok – and for the 6000 years before that, the earth’s sea levels increased over 100 meters which is 20 to 25 times greater than the most recent 6000 years.

3. Ok – and that extraordinarily fast rate of rise in the earth’s sea level occurred before humankind had basically even invented the wheel – point being that humans had nothing to do with it.

4. Ok – now we have some pretty thin evidence, meaning only 100 years of trended data compared to 18,000 years of trended data, to suggest that the earths sea level might rise at a rate of 1 to 3 millimeters per year which, is a slight increase, but still pales in comparison to the 17.5 millimeter rate that the earth experienced for the period 6000 to 12,000 years ago when human generated CO2 was not at all in the picture.

5. Hmmmm… well Al, it seems to me that the feared trend of sea levels increasing up to a maximum of 3 millimeters per year, is really a drop in the bucket compared to the 17.5 millimeter per year increase that the earth experienced for 6000 years.

6. Finally Al, how do you come to grips with the following scientific consensus?

“However, over most of geologic time, long-term sea level has been higher than today (see graph above). Only at the Permo-Triassic boundary ~250 million years ago was long-term sea level lower than today.”

So, it strikes me as just plain nutty that we humans are talking about experimenting with changing the earths climate to suit our interests, knowing that throughout most of earths history, sea levels have generally been much higher than they are today, and thus can assume that they will once again be so in the future.

We know that the earth has experienced repeated cycles of naturally occurring glaciation and warming, and repeated cycles of naturally occurring decreasing and increasing sea levels. Considering the fact that all this has gone on for hundreds of millions of years with absolutely no human footprint what so ever, what on earth makes us think that for this latest cycle when we finally came upon the scene, we either should or can change that pattern?

The radical global warming interventionists personify a typically self important human response. Even though we humans were almost completely absent for the vast history of these changing climatic and sea level cycles, we finally arrived on the geologic scene and promptly pronounced ourselves responsible for global warming and thus, for adversely changing the climate and all that goes with it. Good grief!

The sky is falling! Do something! Who ya gonna call? Call Big Al and the Littles (as in Chicken). But beware of their terms. Their fee is exorbitant, their fix is impractical, their product is theoretical, and worst of all, there is not even a hint of any kind of warranty if their carbon reduction taxes don't produce results.

Don’t believe the intellectually lame compost that the mainstream media shovels at you on this subject (as a matter of fact on a whole lot of subjects!). Do your own homework. Exploit the web. Get the facts!

Yes, we need to move purposefully away from our reliance on fossil fuels. Not because of global warming or rising sea levels; the climate will change regardless of what we may attempt to do about it. We need to move to alternative energy in order to lessen our reliance on oil provided by increasingly hostile nation producers. 

I read this article before I found this web posting (scroll down to the about the 4^th posting or so) that thoroughly deconstructed it. I was preparing to tear it apart myself for the obvious and ridiculous inaccuracy of the headline and the dishonest attempt by AP to make a statement (war no good, surge no good, Bush idea no good) despite the preponderance of statements in the article that obviously contradict the AP’s preconceived point of view.

I am certain I could write about new examples of misleading, agenda driven news articles like this every single day, but the fact of the matter is that there are others out there like Accuracy in Media, Pajamas Media, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, and Pattericos Pontifications (www.patterico.com) who do much better jobs at this than I could ever hope to do.

Once you begin to pay attention to the blatant bias and inaccuracies inherent in the reports of your daily newspapers and mainstream TV news organizations you come to the realization that they think very little of your ability to discern the truth from propaganda. It’s really a very sorry state of affairs and it’s insulting.

I finally finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “A Team of Rivals”. It is the best historical book I have ever read and may be simply the best book, period, that I have ever read.

I was astonished by the amazingly regular discoveries of facts, extraordinary stories, and vivid perspective of historical events contained in this masterpiece. Of course, it is all real, which is what makes reading nonfiction so enthralling and fulfilling. It wasn’t imagined – it happened! Here is an excerpt relating Leo Tolstoy’s encounter with a tribal chieftain from the remote Caucuses region of southern Russia:

In 1908, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was a guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains”. Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as a rock…His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man!”

Abraham Lincoln was truly one of the world’s greatest leaders of all time. Read the book. It is big and long but it is magnificent!

Essential Questions to get Answers to About Global Warming

As you can tell from my most recent posting, I am not inclined to jump on the Al Gore Chicken Little global warming bandwagon anytime soon. Quite frankly I have never been impressed with the typical response a child or adolescent sometimes gives to their parents challenge or admonishment: it goes something like “because everyone is else is doing or wearing it” as the sole rationale justifying a youngsters desires to take a particular action.

Similarly, Gore claims that his position enjoys the strength of “scientific consensuses” and he simply refuses to debate challengers on that basis. He essentially is saying that basically, everyone else believes his global warming position is correct so you should too. In other words, it is conventional wisdom and you are unwise to be out of the mainstream. Just like Einstein, Copernicus, and Newton and thousands of other thinkers, inventers, and entrepreneurs were so admonished when they were agitating for acceptance of their “unconventional” beliefs.

Here are some of the questions that should be answered in your mind before you accept the conclusions generated by the global warming Chicken Littles:

1. Is the earth in a warming trend, or a cooling trend?
2. Is the answer to #1 due to naturally occurring repetitive cycles (10 in the last million years – roughly 90,000 years of cold and glaciation punctuated by roughly 10,000 years of warming and melting) or is it due to human causation?
3. If you contend it is due to human causation, how can you separate the human caused effect from the naturally occurring effect that is certainly occurring?
4. With less than 150 years of global temperature data collected from thermometers, how can scientist make strong statements that the last century has been the warmest on record for the last 1000 years when we have less than 2 centuries of such data?
5. Knowing that scientists rely on tree ring analysis, ice and sediment core samples to piece together estimates of global temperature prior to the 1800’s, how accurate are these temperature extrapolations compared to actual thermometer derived temperatures over the last 150 years.
6. Geologist know through fossil records and core samples, that at times in prehistory, Siberia and Alaska supported tropical like plant life, sea levels were over 60 meters higher than they are now, and that the earths climate has experienced drastic swings between periods of extreme glaciation and extreme warmth. Geologists and other scientist know that the earths climate last began warming up and glaciers began melting roughly 15,000 years ago at the end of the most recent ice age – way way before any human caused carbon footprint. Questions: Is the current warming trend simply a continuation of this most recent warming trend or has human activity somehow altered and worsened it?
7. If the current warming trend is not related to human activity but instead is simply the result of natural phenomenon, should humans still attempt to alter the climate of the earth to suit their desires or wishes?
8. If the current warming trend is related to human activity, what is the rationale for attempting to alter our climate? What is the desired end point or objective we would be striving to accomplish? (Average mean temp of? sea level increases limited to no more than 1 meter? A polar bear on every ice floe? What?)
9. Knowing that earths clouds comprises 96% of all greenhouses gases, and that cloud formation is highly correlate to cyclical solar activity and galactic radiation, and that a 1% increase in cloud cover would totally neutralize even a doubling of the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide, doesn’t if make sense to better study and model these phenomenon before launching into economy crippling and totally unproven carbon reduction measures?
10. How much should each of the world’s citizens be willing to pay to alter the climate?
11. Instead of paying to alter the climate, should we instead pay to be better able to adapt to the results of global warming? (levees, flood walls, irrigation systems, etc). In other words, where will we get the most useful benefits from our payments? Attempting to change the climate of the earth (never done before) or building better means to adapt to changing climate conditions (like we have successfully done throughout history up to this point in time)?
12. Why did the Clinton/Gore White House, refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol? Why did the US Senate unanimously pass a resolution (95-0) in 1999 urging non passage of the Kyoto Protocols?
13. Considering the fact that enormously costly carbon reduction policies would be put into place and be totally reliant on predictions generated from computer generated models, how are these models validated and rated in terms of their reliability and accuracy?
14. Finally, how can we be sure that carbon is the primary cause of global warming and not the well known scientifically accepted cyclical patterns of cooling and warming that the earth has experienced almost forever?

These are a few questions that one should ponder and require answers to before getting behind ridiculously expensive (and totally unproven in terms of altering the climate) carbon reduction policies and interventions.

I close with my mantra: The USA needs to aggressively and rapidly run towards alternative energy and away from fossil fuels but not because of the junk that Al Gore and others peddle. We need to do so to escape the clutches of unfriendly oil producing nations that threaten our long term national interests.

Global Warming: Politics and Conflict of Interest Obscure the Facts

As you read in my recent posting on this subject, I point out that the earth has been warming and cooling seemingly forever. To assume that this time around it’s different and that the warming trend is due to the greed and rapacious capitalist sins of industrialized, fossil fuel burning Westerners is simply irrational.

Enemies of the West, ecozealots, radical environmentalists, and the sort, regularly employ computer modeled worst case scenarios and irrational thinking to drive their anti-America political agendas. But shouting out misinformation repeatedly, over and over and over, and getting Americas newspapers to act as megaphones to parrot such tripe, doesn’t make it true. It just makes it highly visible but it doesn’t make it true.

Why, one might ask, do our enemies and detractors want America to behave according to Kyoto Protocol standards? The simple answer is that adherence to the Kyoto Protocol requirements would damage our economy and ultimately weaken our nation. And to what purpose or end would America and the rest of the world (except for India and China which is about 1/3 of the rest of the world that is exempt!) willingly subject itself to the controls and economic constraints inherent in the treaty?

Get this! If all of the carbon reduction targets identified in the Kyoto Protocol were actually met, the overall reduction in average global temperature would be 0.2 degrees C! Or, said another way, the temperature change that we would have experienced in 2094 would instead be experienced in 2100. We get 6 years of delayed impact!

By the way, aren’t you just a little skeptical when so called global climate experts piously justify the establishment of carbon reduction public policy decisions on the basis of computer generated models purporting to show deleterious climatic changes 100 years from now but, the weather 30 days from now remains notoriously inaccurately forecasted? This is essentially the same body of experts who spectacularly wrongly predicted that 2006 was going to be the “mother of all hurricane years” in the US. In reality it was one of the quietest hurricane seasons in many decades. For crying out loud! Will someone please explain to me how we are to believe that this crowd of scientists can accurately and confidently model global climatic changes 100 years out but somehow an accurate and dependable 30 day forecast remains an elusive and mystifying challenge?

Scientist like Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D, Ph. D.Sc., believe that global warming is caused by fluctuations in solar activity, other solar phenomenon associated with changes in the earths tilt that occur over tens of thousands of year cycles, and variations in cloud cover (water vapor is 96% of all earths greenhouse gases) caused by cosmic radiation from far away galaxies. This article is long but it is fascinating, factual, and really lays out the entire issue for the uninitiated or the person who would like to get up to speed quickly and through a trustworthy source.

Consider the fact that water vapor comprises anywhere from 96% to 99% of all greenhouse gases thus leaving “public enemy #1”,carbon dioxide, a measly 3% at most. Consider the fact that of that 3%, human caused carbon emissions account for no more than 0.5% at most. One article stated that a 1% increase in earths cloud cover would completely overwhelm any possible greenhouse warming effect up to even a doubling of the earths current carbon dioxide greenhouse gases.

There is nothing worse in business than to have observed a problem and then, in the rush to solve the problem, employ a costly, resource draining fix only to discover that it was not really the cause of the problem. Time and money is wasted on the wrong thing and to add salt to the wound, the problem still exists! Quality Improvement experts see this all the time and thus have developed specific disciplines and structures to avoid this particular, and often time’s, fatal mistake.

We seem to be lurching in a lemming like trance, toward the devouring abyss of feel good (save the planet!), wrongheaded thinking. Leading the way to the precipice are traditional media megaphones, political buffoons like Al Gore and certain politically correct, and financially conflicted academicians ($5 billion in research grants to loose) who have locked arms in a collective pied piper like, self delusional embrace.

If their thinking and policies are empowered through legislation and treaty, a large part of the world will find themselves to be involuntarily enrolled in their foolish but damaging experiment to manage the earth’s climate, only to find that the ever changing climate of the globe is subject to far greater and more powerful initial conditions than fossil fuel emissions. And by then, say in 2100 or so, we might very well be back on the Music Man like bandwagon of the 1970’s global cooling wannabe Nostradamus’s, singing through clenched and shivering jaws “we got trouble, yes we got trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for COLD with a whole lot of ice coming at us”.

Beware the carbon stoked rage of ecozeolet Chicken Littles that torment us now with their incessantly shrill warnings of impending climatic cataclysm. The Dr. Kevorkian like cure they have in mind for our global economy is deadly serious business. Pay attention to the debate and pray for reason to prevail.

Climate Change Baloney

Man, I wish I had written this article. This has been on my mind for years and Mr. Kohlmayer absolutely hits the nail on the head.

Like Kohlmayer, I have never bought into all of this junk talk about humankind being the most significant cause for the latest cycle of global climate change.  I learned about the precession of the earth’s axis many years ago and have known about ice ages since I was a child, as I’m sure most of you have.

Wait a minute! I just wrote the phrase ice ages using the plural ages. That’s because there have been 10 periods of massive glaciations on the earth over the last 1 million years or so (and many more before that stretching back for eons of time). That means of course, that over the same time period there have been 10 periods of global warming on the earth as well. And everyone knows that humankinds carbon footprint has only left it’s historical impression over the last few thousand years. Giving the “Al Gore” alarmist the benefit of the doubt by assuming humans have something to do with this last warming period, how does one explain all of the preceding warming periods where humans were essentially completely uninvolved? Hmmmmm…

We once lived in a town in Minnesota where you could easily see the results of where the edge of one of the last ice age glaciers had been. The line of hills and string of lakes were like a roadmap tracing the outline of the ice sheet edge. It just so happens that the edge of this last ice sheet, or moraine, is thousands of miles south of the current polar ice sheets southern edge. It makes you realize that earth must have been warming and melting ice for a long time for the last glacier to have retreated that far! Actually scientists think the last global warming trend began about 15,000 years ago. Hmmmmm….

The current hysteria over global warming is now reaching the realm of the absurd. Al Gore and his like minded ecozealots personify perhaps humankind’s most bizarre and extreme manifestation of conceit and hubris ever seen in history. What they talk about doing makes the Tower of Babel look like child’s play.

Now, certain humans immodestly believe that they can change the weather of the entire earth to suit our wishes and desires! How do they say we do that? It’s simple. Stop burning fossil fuel; meaning, stop driving, flying, heating, making, producing, developing, competing, etc. This cure seems to be outrageously impractical at best and just plain nutty at worst?

And here’s what makes it even nuttier – there is no firm evidence to prove that the cure will do anything at all to change the warming and cooling cycles induced by the fluctuations in the tilt of the earths axis that have been a part of the earths history forever! The theoretical, and computer modeled cure, is likely to kill the patient, the worldwide global economy, and then what? The earth will eventually get real cold and ice up as it has always done and then it will get real warm and flood as it has always done and then… it will happen again.

Now, make no mistake about it. I am a strong believer in moving aggressively away from our current reliance on fossil fuels and toward embracing alternative energy. But my attitude has nothing at all to do with global warming and everything to do with concerns for the geopolitical strength and security of the nation. The sooner we stop transferring wealth to despotic Middle Eastern nations that finance and support our Islamic Fascist enemies, the better off our noble nation will be.  

By virtue of the recent elections and the constant alarmist propaganda from the global warming chicken littles, we have unleashed aggressively foolish political simpletons like Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, to push legislation intended to protect us from ourselves (that’s what Democrats like to do, protect us from ourselves!). Just as medieval Europeans prayed to God for protection from the ravages of the feared Mongol Hordes, I think it is now about time to begin asking for Gods protection from the stridently wrongheaded plans of the global warming nuts.  

Get educated on the facts. The people driving the global warming hysterics have highly politicized agendas that, by and large, are not friendly to the West or of practical help to the world. Despite Al Gore’s claim to the contrary, the question is not settled and scores of prominent dissident scientists are publishing works that debunk many of the global warming crowds’ basic assumptions. Google search, global warming or climate change or precession of the axis for starters and educate yourself.

The stakes are enormous because if the global warming ecozealots gain the upper hand in the legislative arena we are in for big trouble. What will add salt to the wound is that the earth will still get cold and warm up like it has always done. Our modern day “Tower of Babel”, the looming global warming cure, will be manifested in shattered economies and result in the retreat of civilization.

Humans have, through history, convincingly demonstrated their profound abilities to adapt to the inevitable and inexorable fluctuations in global climate. However, our history of escaping the clutches of irrational and corrupt thinking (communism, fascism, Nazism, monarchism, Islamic fascism, and socialism) is quite dismal. Don’t let it happen. Push back and educate yourself.

American Military: A Few Facts

The next time you hear Al Sharpton, John Kerry, or others make misleading claims about the American Military remember just a few facts. 1. The American Military is an all volunteer force that is consistently meeting its recruiting goals in terms of numbers of new recruits. 2. Reenlistment remains extraordinarily high. 3. Despite fabrications from the antimilitary types, the fact is that military recruiting numbers are disproportionately higher from the wealthier component of American society and disproportionately lower from the least wealthy component of our society – exactly the opposite of what people like Sharpton claim.

Read this well researched article by Russell Beland and Curtis Gilroy. An Excerpt is below.

Far from being concentrated among the poorly educated and economically disadvantaged, military recruits, the data show, represent the best of America's youth. More than 90 percent of recruits have high school diplomas, compared with 80 percent of American youth overall. About two-thirds of today's recruits score in the upper half of standardized aptitude tests. Military recruits are also more physically fit than American youth in general, and they are subject to strict character screening.

Peak Oil and Shells Deep Water Drilling Decision

Yesterday Shell Oil announced that it would spend 4 Billion dollars in the effort to tap the Gulf of Mexico deep water oil reserves. Shell stated that they expected the field to produce up to 130,000 barrels a day for 20 years. To put that in to perspective consider the following hard facts. In September of 2006, The US imported 14 Million barrels of oil a day. In addition, the US domestically produced roughly 5 Million of barrels of oil a day for a total daily oil usage of 19 million barrels a day. At its peak, the Shell Gulf of Mexico effort represents 0.7% of current daily US oil consumption needs and 0.15% of daily worldwide production which is 86 million barrels a day. A drop, or maybe two, in the bucket.

A few months ago I completed my own amateur research on the question of whether or not the world was fast approaching or perhaps currently experiencing the occurrence of worldwide peak oil production. I came to the conclusion that the “imminent peak oil” prognosticators seemed closer to reality than those who believed the opposite, that oil was now and would remain plentiful for there next 50 to 100 years.

I read some fascinating books on the subject including Beyond Oil: the View From Hubberds Peak, The Oil Factor, Twilight in the Desert, and The End of Oil. All of the authors of these books believe that worldwide peak oil production is close on the horizon or in fact upon us. The authors state that one indicator of this scenario is the dearth of super or mega oil fields now known about, much less being exploited, compared to what has occurred up to now. One author states that the last mega field developed in the world was the North Sea Oil Field which was fist tapped 30 years ago and is now in a state of significant decline.

The granddaddy of all mega oil fields is the Ghwar field in Saudi Arabia that produced 5,000,000 barrels a day in 1994 and although in decline, is still producing at astounding daily rates compared to all the other great oil fields in the world. Common sense tells me that oil business leaders would prioritize their investment decision and go first to where they can get the biggest bang for their buck. In the past, billions of dollars were invested in oil fields that produced in the high hundreds of thousands and in a few cases the millions of barrels a day.

Now, it appears that our best shot at getting oil out of the ground and our top priority is to go where we have never gone before, 8000 feet deep in the ocean, for maximum production of no more than 130,000 barrels a day for 20 years. Keep in mind that US oil production peaked in 1970 and has been declining every year since then. I think the “peak oil” message is one to pay attention to. The implication of an imminent peak oil reality is that commitment to funding alternative energy research must become a priority perhaps as high as the war on Islamic Fascism.

Newspaper Business in Decline; My Adios to the N&R

The above linked article got my attention today and reminded me of the exchange of correspondences I had recently with my local newspaper. About a year ago I was on a tear trading email messages with the Editor of the Greensboro News and Record over repeated examples of what I considered to be biased reporting. The story that really set me off was the reporting of the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson hoax and how they steadfastly refused to print truthful accounts of that situation.

An excellent investigative reporter for the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes, single handedly and devastatingly debunked the entire MSM story line and agenda regarding this story, yet months after his writing was published and posted on the web, the Greensboro N&R kept printing false and amateurishly incomplete information.

Fed up, I dashed off the following email to the Editor:

“I think it is really bad business strategy for a newspaper to alienate and ultimately cut itself off from 1/2 of its revenue stream by taking sides (any side!). The N&R has much to do to convince me that they haven't taken sides and unless they take aggressive steps to demonstrate that they are not trying to drive a pro Democratic Party anti Bush agenda then I will soon bypass the N&R daily newspaper altogether and go straight to the Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, RealClearPolitics.com, and Powerline (to name a few) for news and perspective.”

“In a democracy it is not the role of newspapers to drive agendas - it is the role of newspapers to report the facts about others in society who choose to drive agendas. Many in the newspaper business have crossed the line and this is perhaps the greatest collective dereliction of duty and abuse of privilege that has occurred in this country in recent history and is a sad and highly troubling development.”

“By taking sides and driving an agenda you cease to be trustworthy and move towards becoming propagandists. Your reporting of the Wilson Plame affair is one of many proofs I would offer up. If you honestly evaluated what you have reported and compared that to the facts and reams of available documents on this matter you would be embarrassed at the number of corrections and retractions that would be required to set the record straight.”

I got the usual lame denial of bias and followed that non-response up with the letter below but in case you don’t have time to read the whole thing this is the key point:

“Cone fails to point out the fact that roughly half of most newspapers paying customer base (non liberal readers) is being driven away by what is perceived to be an agenda driven, pro liberal bias in coverage and reporting.”

“In almost any business situation, the shareholders and board of directors would demand accountability from the management team if they were pursuing a personal or political agenda that alienated and automatically cut the company off from ½ of its potential customer base and revenue stream. As a matter of fact, such wrongheadedness would be grounds for dismissal.”

All of this was to no avail. A few weeks ago I simply dropped my subscription altogether. The primary reason is that the N&R is both obsolete and inaccurate. I found myself not even taking the paper out of the bag on most days because on the web I had already read every bit of national news days prior to it appearing in the paper.

Furthermore, I simply couldn’t get over the fact that the N&R has a pro liberal and pro Democratic Party agenda and therefore purposefully presents a slanted and inaccurate version of the news. They are certainly not unique in that regard but it occurred to me that this was the only slanted news source that I was actually paying for! However, no longer is that the case.

Read the full letter below.

Dear Mr. Robinson,

Edward Cones article titled “Newspapers needed a wake up call” was interesting but glaringly incomplete in describing what ails today’s newspapers. Mr. Cone missed perhaps the most fundamental and obvious of all the factors that are contributing to declining subscriptions. Cone fails to point out the fact that roughly half of most newspapers paying customer base (non liberal readers) is being driven away by what is perceived to be an agenda driven, pro liberal bias in coverage and reporting. Although newspaper editors and other liberal pundits are loath to admit that such a bias exists, the fact remains that a huge percentage of your potential customers believe that it does exist. The big difference today, compared to 20 years ago, is that those readers now have options to get accurate information through the internet that simply never existed before.

In almost any business situation, the shareholders and board of directors would demand accountability from the management team if they were pursuing a personal or political agenda that alienated and automatically cut the company off from ½ of its potential customer base and revenue stream. As a matter of fact, such wrongheadedness would be grounds for dismissal. Yet, by virtue of their inaction, newspaper owners and board members seem to condone politicized and agenda driven presentation of the news. Business managers of newspapers continue to watch their organizations decline while their papers continue to offer readers inaccurate and misleading reporting of important events.

Now, thanks to the internet, news bias and inaccuracies are being exposed and deconstructed on a daily basis by informed web researchers and authors. These authors show, on a point by point basis, where the papers are getting it wrong and they link to proof sources to boot (powerline.com, drudgereport.com, lucianne.com, patterica.com and many more).

Many good web sites differ from newspapers in that they make no haughty pretense of impartiality. Most good web sources declare their biases outright. What maddens me is that newspapers claim to be unbiased and not driven by political agendas when in fact many are blatantly biased (NYT, LA Times, Washington Post). If I were running a newspaper as a for profit endeavor, my business strategy would be to demand adherence to impartiality in order to insure the largest pool of potential customers possible. On the editorial page I would make sure I had a good balance of both liberal and conservative columnists (I think you are doing better here).

It is the job of reporters to convey the facts and it is my job as a citizen to synthesize those facts and come to my own conclusions. I should emphasize that I am making a distinction between news and opinion or editorial writing. It is biased news reporting that I believe is the cause of reader loss. I resent news reporters attempting to manipulate me towards a conclusion. I don’t resent columnist trying to do that because that is what they are supposed to do. I believe that the papers that will thrive in they future will do many of the things that Mr. Cone mentions in his article but first and foremost, if they don’t embrace the reality that the road to success lays in true impartiality, they are doomed to continue to loose readers to more balanced and trustworthy sources.

This letter is probably not in the right format for you to print but at the very least I urge you to circulate it internally and see what reaction you get from your editors and reporters. If there is a visceral and strong across the board denial of liberal bias and disagreement with my thesis, then you may want to take that as a strong sign that you should look a little deeper. At the very least, ask your editors and reporters if they see any bias in today’s AP news story on the 1000^th day of the Iraq war and how the reporter uses that contrived milestone as a way to recite all that is wrong or has gone wrong in the war.

The Greensboro N&R is not as outrageous in its blatant pro liberal agenda as the NYT but in my opinion you are certainly to the left of center if by nothing more than your healthy reliance on routinely slanted AP generated news stories. You are foolishly alienating a huge percentage of your potential customers by presenting a pro liberal version of the news and I think that is simply a very bad business decision. I also happen to think that slanting the news to fit a political agenda is dereliction of duty and irresponsible on a grand scale but the Greensboro N&R is certainly not alone in that regards.

There you have it. Two very good reasons to change your strategy. Either because it is the right thing to do or because it is simply smart business. Take your pick. The net results will be that you can better secure your future and regain a reputation of trust if you boldly stake a claim to impartiality.

Early Voting Fast and Convenient

I just voted in our mid-term elections. It was painless. I arrived about 11:40 am and immediately was checked in and led to a voting machine. The last time I voted was in the Presidential election 2 years ago and I’m sure I waited for at least 1 hour before casting my ballot. For early voting locations and times check out this web site.

Moveon.org Recruiting Active Duty Soldiers for Antiwar Petition

Read this article and consider some of the consequences. Moveon.org (pay attention to their success stories like the one about obstructing the renewal of the Patriot Act) is soliciting active duty soldiers to sign the following petition:

"As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq."

This is in the same league as the Code Pink radicals demonstrating against wounded soldiers outside of Walter Reed Hospital. Moveon.org was behind the lunatic protesters at the WTC site on September 10 and 11 that I wrote about in previous posts. Cindy Sheehan is featured on the front page of their website.

Retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney has this to say:

"I think it is shameful because the timing is so close to the election. They ought to be ashamed of themselves," a retired Air Force lieutenant general, Thomas McInerney, told The New York Sun yesterday by phone from Israel. "The soldiers should be ashamed of themselves for being duped into this. It is to be expected from a MoveOn.org-type group. They have no standards."

“They have no standards”. What do you think?