Cancun 100 Year Record Low of 54 Degrees, For Global Warming Summit!

The story is here.

Global Warming? Better Luck Next Year. Britain 2010 The Coolest Since 1996.

As reported here by The UK Daily Mail:

[A] remarkable climbdown that has huge implications . . . for debate over climate change as a whole[:] for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

Global Warming Freezes Lake Erie For First Time in 14 Years

Accuweather.com has the story:

Following a cold snap in the Northeast, Lake Erie's surface is virtually frozen over for the first time in about 14 years.

The ice ranges in thickness between paper thin along the northern shore and several inches along the southern shore, where many people are ice skating.

GoErie.com reports that the lake hasn't completely frozen since the winter of 1995-1996. ...

Lake Erie, with an average depth of 62 feet, is the most shallow of the five Great Lakes, which is why it is the only one that completely freezes over.

There's more at the link.

Professor Phil Jones Retreats on Climate Change

An op-ed from The UK Daily Mail:

The professor’s amazing climate change retreat

13th February 2010

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits.

Countless gallons of aviation fuel have been consumed carrying experts, lobbyists and politicians to apocalyptic conferences on global warming.

Every government on Earth has changed its policy, hundreds of academic institutions, entire school curricula and the priorities of broadcasters and newspapers all over the world have been altered – all to serve the new doctrine that man is overheating the planet and must undertake heroic and costly changes to save the world from drowning as the icecaps melt.

You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent.

But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

Interviewed by the highly sympathetic BBC, which still insists on describing the leaked emails as ‘stolen’, Professor Jones has conceded that he ‘did not do a thorough job’ of keeping track of his own records.

His colleagues recall that his office was ‘often surrounded by jumbled piles of papers’.

Even more strikingly, he also sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory, admitting that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accepting that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.

He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.

This is an amazing retreat, since if it was both global and warmer, the green movement’s argument that our current position is ‘unprecedented’ would collapse.

It is quite reasonable to suggest that human activity may have had some effect on climate.

There is no doubt that careless and greedy exploitation has done much damage to the planet.

But in the light of the ‘Climategate’ revelations, it is time for governments, academics and their media cheerleaders to be more modest in their claims and to treat sceptics with far more courtesy.

The question is not settled.

Time to Pasture-ize John McCain

Good stuff from Michelle Malkin on McCain Regression Syndrome:

With all due respect to McCain’s past noble war service, it’s time to head to the pasture. As the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, he was wrong on the constitutionality of the free-speech-stifling McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulations. He was wrong to side with the junk-science global warming activists in pushing onerous carbon caps on America. He was on the wrong side of every Chicken Little-driven bailout. He was wrong in opposing enhanced CIA interrogation methods that have saved countless American lives and averted jihadi plots. And he was spectacularly wrong in teaming with the open-borders lobby to push a dangerous illegal alien amnesty.

Tea Party activists are rightly outraged by Sarah Palin’s decision to campaign for McCain, whose entrenched incumbency and progressive views are anathema to the movement. At least she has an excuse: She’s caught between a loyalty rock and a partisan hard place. The conservative base has no such obligations – and it is imperative that they get in the game (as they did in Massachusetts) before it’s too late. The movement to restore limited government in Washington has come too far, against all odds, to succumb to McCain Regression Syndrome now.

Go here to read the rest.

"As They Say In The Glacier Business, Ice Work If You Can Get It"

It's only the morning after talking, but Mark Steyn makes us think Elmer Fudd pronounces "WTF" "WWF":

[T]he IPCC['s] Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”

WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scientific evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons.

Go here for more.

The Pyramids of John Maynard Keynes

Caroline Baum notices that President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget contains money for everything, it seems, except pyramid building:

No longer will President Barack Obama be content to cite specious numbers about “jobs saved or created” as a result of last year’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus. Now he’s proposing $100 billion of new spending to “jumpstart job creation,” according to White House Budget Director Peter Orszag. It’s part of a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, unveiled Monday, that projects a $1.3 trillion deficit next year, following a $1.6 trillion deficit this year.

Spend money to save money. Spending dressed up as a jump- starter is still spending by another name.

The only thing missing from the energy-cleansing, rural- community-assisting, climate-change-mitigating, health-food- promoting blueprint is money for pyramid building. In Chapter 10, Section VI of “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” John Maynard Keynes advocated building pyramids as a cure for unemployment.

In fact, “Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one,” he wrote in his 1936 treatise.

The reason Obama avoids mentioning pyramid building, however, has to do with the fact that Obama has political power, whereas Keynes did not have political power and did not therefore feel constrained.

"What's that?" you say. "What does that have to do with it?"

Because of what Aristotle said:

It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants. The Pyramids of Egypt are a proof of this, and the votive edifices of the Cyposelidse, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, built by the Pisistratidae, and the works of Polycrates at Samos; for all these produced one end, the keeping the people poor.

Obama wouldn't want to put any strange ideas in anyone's mind, now, would he?

CPUSA Openly Aligns Itself With President Obama

President Obama, speaking to the House Republicans, on Friday, January 29, 2010, about the healthcare legislation debate:

"Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and, certainly you don't agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that's not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. No, I mean, that's how you guys -- (applause) -- that's how you guys presented it."

But the Bolsheviks aren't "plotting." They're openly applauding.

From The American Thinker:

July 20, 2009

Obama and the CPUSA

Randall Hoven

I encourage you to read the latest words from Sam Webb, National Chair of the Communist Party USA. As is the wont of communists, Mr. Webb is rather long-winded; I provide only a few interesting excerpts:

Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation, and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.

In this legislative session, we can envision winning a Medicare-like public option and then going further in the years ahead.

We can visualize passing tough regulatory reforms on the financial industry, which brought the economy to ruin.

In the current political climate, the expansion of union rights becomes a real possibility.

Much the same can be said about winning a second stimulus bill, and we sure need one, given the still-rising rate, and likely long term persistence, of unemployment.

Isn't it possible in the Obama era to create millions of green jobs in manufacturing and other sectors of the economy in tandem with an attack on global warming?

The new conditions of struggle are possible only - and I want to emphasize only - because we elected President Obama and a Congress with pronounced progressive and center currents.

Yes, socialism is our objective and, according to recent public opinion polls, it is increasingly attractive to the American people. But clearly it is not on the immediate political agenda.

As for our radicalism, we should be as radical as reality itself. And reality strongly suggests that our main task is to bring the weight of the working class and other democratic forces to bear on the reform process with the aim of deepening its anti-corporate content and direction.

Let's be aware that he [Obama] has to keep a coalition together for his long-term as well as immediate legislative agenda. Let's give President Obama some space to change and to respond to pressures from below.

The Right Wing, the American Medical Association, the pharmaceutical and insurance companies have drawn a line in the sand on health care.

The core of this struggle, whether we like it or not, turns on the inclusion of a public option in a health care bill.

Months ago it was said that the downturn could be "L-shaped" rather than "V-shaped." In other words, the crisis begins with a steep decline in economic activity followed by long period of economic stagnation.

I suspect that this is what will happen, thus making sustained government and people's intervention an imperative. In my view this should take at least three forms:

First, more economic stimulus: the economy is underperforming and nearly 30 million workers are unemployed or underemployed and that number hasn't peaked yet.

Second, restructuring is imperative. The old economic model that rested on bubble economics, cheap labor, financial manipulation and speculation, deregulation, capital outsourcing, environmental degradation, and so forth, has to be replaced by a new model that expands and restructures the productive base and is "people and nature" friendly.

Finally, the economy has to be democratized. The wizards of Wall Street and inside the Beltway failed miserably, in fact, so miserably those economic decisions that affect the welfare of millions shouldn't rest in their hands.

In the meantime, the struggle for immediate public sector jobs and relief should command our attention.

President Obama ... has expressed a readiness to engage with countries that during the Bush years were considered mortal enemies - Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and others.

In Iraq, the U.S. withdrawal plan is proceeding, with the first stage being withdrawal from Iraqi cities by July. President Obama has reiterated his intention to stick with the pullout deadlines. Even with the caveats about what U.S. forces might remain, this is a major victory for the peace movement.

If not already painfully obvious to you, let me point out a few things:

(1) Obama's policy agenda and that of the CPUSA are in perfect alignment: more stimuli; green jobs; global warming; public sector jobs; more regulation and, in fact, restructuring of the entire economy; eventual single-payer health care, with the public option being critical to any immediate plan; union-friendly legislation; cutting defense spending; engaging and normalizing relations with the US's mortal enemies like Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and the reigning mullahs of Iran; claiming victory in Iraq as their own.

(2) Obama's political approach is also in perfect harmony with that of the CPUSA's. The method is gradualism. Overall, Obama is doing pretty well at achieving CPUSA's goals under the current political circumstances. The Left should not expect immediate and radical changes. And of all things, the Left should not "define the current struggle as one that arrays the people against President Obama. That's not Marxism; it's plain stupid."

(3) Mr. Webb expects a lousy economy to continue. Specifically, he expects the "L-shaped" recovery. But this "long period of economic stagnation" will be an excuse for continued government intervention. As Lenin supposedly said, "the worse the better."

(4) Socialism is the objective.

In my view, this duck has a bill, webbed feet and feathers; quacks, walks, flies and swims; and has DNA that matches that of a duck. I'm willing to call it a duck.

The really striking thing about all this, though, is that the CPUSA can openly align itself with the President of the US, right under our noses, and it will have zero effect on public sentiment because the lapdog media studiously averts its gaze.