The long term (and I mean millennium-long term) record is clear. And it completely destroys recently hatched (and I mean in the last 20 years “recent”) unfounded theories by Global Warming Alarmists about the relationship between CO2 levels and Global Temperatures.

No amount of shoddy math, or smeared temperature readings from one site spreading across thousands of square kilometers, or cherry picked temperature sites that ignore contrary nearby data, or sparse historic readings from 100+ years ago with enormous error bars can change this record and these facts. A new view on current temperatures and CO2 levels shows – repeatedly – that CO2 only rises in response to a warming climate. CO2 does NOT drive the warming. End of story
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Tags: CO2 Levels, Global Warming, Ice Cores, IPCC

The victim card played by the left is legendary. Women victims of evil men, resented and oppressed. Minorities the victims of whites, resented and oppressed. The poor victims of the successful, resented and exploited. LGBT the victims of religion, resented and rejected. The freedom fighter victims of our military, resented and killed.

It goes on and on and on, different variations of the same old tired left-wing saw. So this just had me laughing at how pathetic it all sounded:

Her [Michelle Bachman’s] appeal, of course, is concentrated among Christian conservatives and Tea Party activists — voters whose political engagement is already fueled by intense feelings of resentment and victimhood.

bwahahahahahaha …

This is what we call ‘projection’ boys and girls. It is a defensive mechanism used to avoid facing the hard truths about one’s self. In this case, how the resentment conjured by decades of victimhood politics from the left has created a set of liberal leaders and policies who are incompetent and prone to horrific failures. Because they reject all that is required of really successful people – to get over the whining and become somebody.

The Tea Party is not based on feeling like victims or resented. It is based on the fact libertarians are tired of funding stupid liberal policies which are destroying this economy. Victims? Only of stupid liberal tricks.

But that is easily fixed at the voting booth, which will produce a large share of political victims – like it did in 2010. Also known as LOSERS!

The facade continues to fall from the global warming alarmists, proving them to be a combination of greedy, self-righteous, incompetents.

The greedy element is the desire to control the world’s energy flow. It is a well established scientific and economic fact that those who can provide and control energy to the rest of humankind (or any system) have incredible power – to use or abuse. Right now, energy companies are being incredibly responsible in their application of their revenues to new innovations that will reduce humanity’s reliance on their products.

But the alarmists want to play God, and so they create myths of lies about supposed evil abuse and oppression by people who make a living creating energy for others. A pathetic effort from a bunch of immature wannabes.

Which is were the warped self-righteousness comes into play. The marginal, substandard ‘scientists’ that came up with broken, error ridden climate models that cannot come close to producing accurate results of climate and misuse basic statistical and mathematical operations (such as error budgets on estimations) want to be important and pivotal individuals. They want to be super heroes. They are sooo desperate to ‘be somebody’ that they create imaginary evils so they can play savior to them. Check out this quote from a US Senator who happens to be an intellectual clone of Al Gore and the IPCC in general:

“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy. ” – Timothy Wirth quoted in Science Under Siege by Michael Fumento, 1993

Emphasis mine. Let me put this insanity in context. A doctor performs the wrong surgery on a patient, removing the wrong diseased limb. Now he has to go back and take the other one because of his mistaken judgement. Is it OK for the doctor to claim “even though I was wrong, I was doing the right thing“? Of course not!

A mechanic is supposed to fix a problem with your car’s brakes, but instead gives you an oil change. Days later when you are driving your family the brakes fail and you crash, losing one of your children. Is it OK for the mechanic to claim “even though I was wrong, I was doing the right thing“? Of course not!

An engineer or builder uses the wrong materials in a building’s overhang restaurant that arches into the atrium. Years later a young couple is having their wedding reception at the restaurant and the overhang fails, throwing guests and the bride into a pile of rubble – killing the bride and many of the guests. Is it OK for the engineer or builder to claim “even though I was wrong, I was doing the right thing“? Of course not!

What about airline mechanics, policeman, nursing home aids, etc? If they make a massive blunder, do they get to fall back on their superhero fantasies as some lame excuse?

The above cartoon by Josh summarizes the waywardness of the current global warming alarmist cult. It is destroying our environment with the pointless drive to use ‘renewable’ (which is just another word for unreliable) energy sources.

We aren’t paving over paradise, we are populating it with useless and doomed windmills. All the while the alarmists demand trillions in fees to save us from their fictional demons.

When I see crap like this being peddled as hard science, a product I would not give a passing grade to an undergraduate student for, I realize our scientific ignorance has left us vulnerable to charlatans and con artists of various motivations.

We need to protect our environment from all the by products of human society that cause real harm – and CO2 just is not one of those items. If we divert our resources and energy away from the real threats because some incompetent PhDs produces dodgy models and can’t manage an error budget through calculations, then we INCREASE the chance those real threats will do real damage.

If you really are for a clean environment, then you must demand high quality, indisputable and validated science as the basis for making decisions on how to apply limited funds to keeping our world clean and our biosphere alive and vibrant. Because otherwise we are not being responsible and we are throwing away those resources at the risk of life on Earth.

This is not a subject for amateurs and half-ass methods. This is serious and requires the same rigor we apply to medicine, cosmetics, transportation engineering, architectural engineering, etc. It has real implications, and can’t just be made up because someone sees themselves as the next Jesus Christ or something.

So many chickens coming to roost. Today is turning out to be a damning news day for the left, as all their fantasy beliefs crash into harsh reality. Their simpleton take on life is now being thrashed by the complex forces that are reality.

First up – Unemployment continues to ravage the land, pointing towards a horrible unemployment report coming out the week of July 4th. Check out the staggering increase in the unemployment rolls in just one week (click to enlarge):

While the first time claims rose to by 9,000 to 429,000 new claims a week, the unemployment rolls across all categories rose by over 137,000 in that same week. That equals about a 2% increase, which better not be a long term trend over the summer. 7.5 million Americans are on unemployment of one kind or another, and that does not count the 2+ million who simply dropped out of the ever shrinking workforce.

Obamanomics continues to spread its pain and change. And what does this mean for the President and Democrats in 2012? Nothing good, that is for sure. Let us begin with the President’s election chances, given the mood of independents, as measured by Gallup (click to enlarge):

The big take away from this poll is where the independents are heading – away from Obama in droves (42% GOP – 32% Obama). In the previous monthly poll from Gallup Obama was keeping his own with Indies (37%-37%). That 10% slide indicates another historic drubbing like 2010.

In 2008, during his otherwise-solid election victory, Obama lost the white working class vote by 18 points. In 2010, however, things got much worse: Congressional Democrats’ experienced a catastrophic 30 point deficit among the same group. While the first number is a figure Obama could live with repeating, the second could very well prove fatal.

But it is not just white centrists Obama and the Dems are losing – its across the board and it has to do with the horrible economy:

* Fifty-five percent of Americans think that spending cuts and tax cuts will give businesses more confidence to hire. Only 17 percent think government should spend more to stimulate the economy, and only another 17 percent think we should maintain current spending levels.

* Sixty-five percent say that a major reason for the economy remaining in the toilet is because the large federal deficit makes the economy “unstable.”

* Fifty-two percent think a major reason for our economic doldrums is that “uncertainty” created by government regulations and taxes is harming hiring.

* Only 35 percent think a major reason for the economic doldrums is that spending cuts hurts jobs.

On the Global Warming debacle to Obamacare to out of control government spending, liberalism is taking a beating. The most powerful weapon against an ideology like liberalism is reality. Because reality exposes the leftist mythology for what it is: naive, wishful thinking. And once this becomes exposed, all credibility is destroyed. No sane person will let liberals ever again experiment on Americans as they have recently. Not when the result is the loss of a life’s worth of savings, the loss of value in our homes, the loss of good jobs and careers, the loss of an ever growing standard of living and the loss of confidence in the American dream.

This is what liberalism has wrought, and it will be decades before the memory of these debacles recede enough to give the left another chance.

Update: The completely expected “unexpected” weekly report is once again highlighted at Hot Air

Naive ignorance.

Seems redundant until one tries to quantify the depth of the economic incompetence we have experienced since Reid, Pelosi and Obama implemented their government-trickle down stimulus debacle. I have said many times that the unemployment that has resulted from the misguided deficit spending, mountains of generational debt and endless regulation put in place since President Obama took the helm of this country (see here, here and here) was much, much worse than reported.

Now Mortimer B Zuckerman has basically made the exact same points in terms of how bad this economy really is:

In the face of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies in our history, we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000. From the moment the Obama administration came into office, there have been no net increases in full-time jobs, only in part-time jobs. This is contrary to all previous recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.
Click here to find out more!

The real job losses are greater than the estimate of 7.5 million. They are closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work. Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America’s greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million.

The most recent statistics are unsettling and dismaying, despite the increase of 54,000 jobs in the May numbers. Nonagricultural full-time employment actually fell by 142,000, on top of the 291,000 decline the preceding month. Half of the new jobs created are in temporary help agencies, as firms resist hiring full-time workers.

Government cannot create jobs or economic growth. It can strangle job creation and growth though – which is exactly what has happened in response to the massive deficits, massive new regulations and massive take over of our Health Care system with the broken Obamacare.

If we do not clean house in DC in 2012, there will be no ‘change’ to the current mess, and more than one generation of Americans will see the American dream ripped from them. From the seniors who will lose the safety nets of Medicare and Social Security, to the middle class who lost their savings and home value, to the new grads who cannot get their careers started and lose maybe a decade of career training, the ignorant policies of the left will continue to destroy our economy until we have the will to dismantle the cancer of run away government.

Scientists and Engineers have no idea about the nuances and precedence of law – which is why they make poor lawyers.

But sadly the reverse is also true. Lawyers and judges are notoriously weak in the basic of math and science. Trust me, I know a lot of top notch legal minds, and they don’t get math and science even at an advanced HS level. It is one reason I tutored so many kids in my life.

So when the Supreme Court decides to make a determination on what is within the boundaries of the EPA, it makes a huge blunder – based completely on the dept of their ignorance:

The Supreme Court blocked a federal lawsuit Monday by states and conservation groups trying to force cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The court said that the authority to seek reductions in emissions rests with the Environmental Protection Agency, not the courts. The ruling was 8-0.

CO2 as an emission? I guess this makes all Aerobic life now the largest polluters on the planet:

good example would be the oxidation of glucose (a monosaccharide) in aerobic respiration.

C6H12O6 + 6 O2 + 38 ADP + 38 phosphate ? 6 CO2 + 6 H2O + 38 ATP

Note the ’emission’ of life are two of the top Green House Gases (CO2 and water). When compared to this biomass, human industrial output is a tiny, irrelevant fraction.

Almost all animals, most fungi, and several bacteria are obligate aerobes.

Human biomass is tiny compared just to plankton, let alone all other sources of CO2 emission:

Humans comprise about 100 million tonnes of the Earth’s dry biomass,[26] domesticated animals about 700 million tonnes, and crops about 2 billion tonnes.[citation needed] The most successful animal species, in terms of biomass, is probably Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, with a fresh biomass approaching 500 million tonnes.[23][27][28] However, as a group, the small aquatic crustaceans called copepods may form the largest animal biomass on earth.[29] A 2009 paper in Science estimates, for the first time, the total world fish biomass as somewhere between 0.8 and 2.0 billion tonnes.[30][31]

The Supreme scientific ignorance on display with this decision is another reason why we need to dismantle the federal bureaucracy before it destroys modern civilization. EPA does not have a mandate to control the biomass, which means it cannot control CO2 emissions. We The People, however, do have the power to dismantle this out control edifice to human incompetence we call the Federal Government. And it is well past time to exercise that power.

As summer begins to slip into full gear, I find me interest in politics waning. How many more ways can this neophyte administration screw up? How many more ways can it flaunt the law and replace it with naive and simpleton policies (Libya, Gunrunner, Obamacare, etc come to mind). The country is not going to pull out of this mess until it replaces the leaders in DC with one charter – cut government down to the bare minimum.

So in place of an in depth analysis of the ‘news’ of the day, I decided a Fly By was in order. First order of business – hope everyone had a good Father’s Day. Mine was, as usual, packed with sports for the kids. We did a 3.5 hour swim meet and three all-star soccer games over the weekend (barely missing out on a 4th). But not to worry, I also got a quick breakfast in bed as well as a 14 mile and 21 mile bike ride in.

All in all, a great Father’s Day.

But now to the less fun stuff. While there is a lot of hand-wringing on the right about holding to the War Powers Act, I am all for enforcing it – especially since every GOP President has followed its guidance since Ronald Reagan. Moreover, we do need to expose NATO as a paper tiger, so people understand “NATO” is just another acronym which means putting US military personnel in harms way. So I am 100% behind defunding the Libyan War effort. Especially given the fact President Obama ignored legal advice from his own administration. Advice that supports the position the UN and US acted illegally and outside their charters and rules.

Update: Hugh Hewitt notes that it is time for administration lawyers to decide whether they represent the interest of a wayward and ego maniacal President or the United States of America. I know where their oath of office points. – end update

On a more positive note, I have to hand it to Texas Governor Perry for his straight talk, and how to win the middle of America in 2012:

“We need to stop apologizing for celebrating life,” the Republican Texas governor bellowed at the Republican Leadership Conference in a finger-pointing, finger-wagging and, at times, bombastic, speech.

“Stop apologizing” for wanting to stem the tide of the “entitlement mindset,” he boasted.

“Our opponents on the left are never going to like us, so let’s stop trying to curry favor with them,” he said, before imploring the crowd to “stand up. Let’s speak with pride about our values. Let’s stop this American downward spiral.”

Not surprisingly, this will work for the centrist voters. You can honestly be pro life, but also realize their are limits on what can be legislated. To win the pro-life debate means to trust Americans to learn and appreciate life – not to brow beat them with laws.

But moreover, on the economic side of things Obama, Reid and Pelosi have been berating anyone and everyone who does not agree with their far left liberal policies. We are evil if we don’t see Obamacare as anything but a economic disaster that will gut out health care system. We are evil if we want to save Medicare from bankruptcy and provide a new, modern and sustainable version for the future generation (under 55). We are evil if we determine the government is bloated, wasteful, corrupt and inept.

All the berating the left does against common sense alternatives – especially from the Libertarian core of Tea Party – actually bleeds over to the centrists who agree in principle. It is time to not only stop cowering, it is long past time to stop insulting and complaining about centrists who would be more than happy to dump the Dems for a moderate conservative approach. And I don’t mean lefties talking conservative, I mean reasonable sized steps in the conservative direction.

There is no need to cower down because we find common ground right of center, and way short of the right fringe. The right needs to realize the country desires neither a leftward or rightward activist government.

Do you have breast cancer? Better not live in the UK and have lived a long and productive life. Because if you do, the UK NHS death panels have determined there is no point to investing in saving your worthless life:

Elderly women are being denied life-saving breast cancer surgery that is routinely given to younger patients, alarming research reveals.

Some doctors look at a patient’s age in their notes – and decide on a treatment plan before they have even met them, experts warn.

Their study, which provides evidence of ageism in the Health Service, found that 90 per cent of breast cancer patients aged 30-50 are offered surgery to remove tumours, compared with 70 per cent of those in their seventies.

Even women in their 50s are less likely than younger patients to have an operation.

…

Only last week, a report by The King’s Fund think-tank warned that elderly cancer patients in Britain were being diagnosed later than those in other European countries and were less likely to be referred for operations.

Previous estimates claim that 15,000 elderly die prematurely every year because cancer care on the NHS is not as good as that provided elsewhere in Europe and the U.S.

It’s all about money. Money that free medical care does not have to spend, and never will. Why are UK patients delayed? Long queues. Queues created by lack of money.

Free health care is as real as the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny. Grow up people.

For decades now the left wing has been experiencing self-inflicted debacles of truly epic proportions. They have not been just screwing up normally. They have been screwing up in a way that has hurt millions and millions of people over decades of time.

The common thread in all these mishaps is a tragic combination of simpleton concepts born to White-Knight need-to-bes (as opposed to wannabes) who embody a large dose of ignorance and arrogance. Each concept was originally intended to save humanity, but it was never thought through, tested or managed to make sure it was not doing more harm than good. It is the result of lazy liberal thinking, where you just jump from the need to ‘do good’ to the ‘obvious solutions’ any 3rd grader could see (hint – that kind of leap in logic is 99% of the time wrong) – without the skills or intention to test the idea and thus bypassing the sanity check. Over the years, this kind of unique liberal ineptness has produced some spectacular screw ups.

One of the more tragic of these was the instantiation of the permanent welfare state. This gross injustice was finally torn down in the mid 1990’s with the combined efforts of a GOP Congress and a left-of-center Democrat President – but not before generations of Americans were born into wasted lives spent on the government dole. Until time limits were established along with some semblance of a life time cap, generations were trapped in this vicious cage.

The trigger seemed to be that many people latch onto one of what must be an infinite number of reasons to avoid personal responsibility. Growing up and standing on your own is a thrilling and daunting proposition when you are young. The life time welfare net was a perfect way out of forcing one’s self to push past the anxiety and get out and work. It is breaking through that hesitation to ‘leave the nest’ which forces us to discover our potential and realize living is not as scary as we were taught (or in the case of the welfare industrial complex, are constantly told). But if you can avoid that step and eek out a living, it seems a lot of people will take the path of least effort.

The lifetime welfare trap was the genius of like minded liberals who don’t want to have to grow up. They would prefer to avoid the challenges of obtaining education, learning a craft and spending a life time becoming an artisan of that craft. It devastated the African-American family, who were already leery of the racist society that was rooted in slavery and the race tensions of the 1950’s and 1960’s. To be cool meant to avoid society and take from it what you could. Those who took on society, used the system to gain their individual freedom and independence succeeded, the others hid out on the dole.

That was one of the greatest royal screw ups I ever experienced in my life time. But it was not the last.

The current economic devastation was the result of another combination of simpleton thinking, arrogance and incompetence. This brilliant idea was formed around the belief that if we hand out houses, we can elevate people to the middle class. Dumb as that sounds now, that is the essence of the left wing policies that ended in the financial ruin of millions of hard working Americans in the middle class. When the left loosened the requirements on home loans to simply require a fog on a mirror, they created a boon to lenders needing new victims (i.e., first time home owners) to line their pockets. The faux increase demand for homes lit a speculation explosion which inflated home prices while undermining the financial basis of the housing market.

The result was the real estate bubble bursting on all that rotten paper in 2008 – which in turn wiped out billions (if not trillions) in home values. The dominoes began falling once that mistake came home to roost, and soon the stock market crashed and completed the destruction of savings for just about all the middle class in America. Between your stocks and your property, you have little else in the way of a nest egg. And if you made the mistake of raiding your home equity prior to the market crash, you ended up owing more than you owned. We are still paying for this royal screw up from the left.

Since then we have seen the liberal screw up of deficit spending – clearly not the way to grow an economy. We are now almost $5 trillion more in debt since Obama, Reid and Pelosi started showing their stuff, and the economy is in worst shape for it. We have Obamacare already wiping out good solid health plans and bankrupting Medicare. The list goes on and on.

But today I am pleased to report Fate may have dealt the boobs on the left a Cosmic-Sized slap upside the head. For this week it has become scientifically evident that the biggest measured (not theoretical) threat to our global climate (and thus our food source and economic strength) is not global warming, but another Little Ice Age:

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

This Cosmic-Sized inconvenient truth stands in stark contrast to the two decades long fantasy of man-made, CO2-driven, global warming. That mythology, it turns out, was based on horribly sloppy math and a cover up of contrary data. When you exclude certain dodgy tree ring data sets we discover today’s climate is no different from the 1930-40 period, the Medieval Warm Period or the Roman Warm period. In fact, once you replace the tree ring data that was covered up to ‘hide the decline’ so infamously documented in the Climategate emails, you discover tree rings can’t detect temperature at all.

Once you take the dodgy CRU, GISS and IPCC data out of the picture you see from ice cores and other proxies that CO2 does not drive temperature, but follows it by a couple hundred years. Which, just coincidentally, is the time since the last Little Ice Age and probably why CO2 levels are rising once again – right on schedule – as they have for millions of years.

I mean, we have all these lame Chicken Littles running around claiming we need to give them trillions of dollars to save the planet, and then the Sun goes into one of its well documented quiescent periods and literally splashes cold water on the whole con. Is Fate fun or what?

If we had followed the left wing off onto another one of their epic screw ups, we would have driven the entirety of human civilization into an economic mess, which always results in war, bloodshed and mass suffering. Heck, the green misconception about ethanol has already begun starving the poor as cars compete for basic food with hungry children. What moron thought that was a good idea??

So this time we have an opportunity to avoid another round of left wing screw ups. That is as long as we don’t follow fools like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who share the same lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance on the matter of climate as one Al Gore. None of these people have the science or math background to determine which side is full of BS and which is actually standing on solid scientific ground. I and many others who quietly work in related (or the same) fields do have those skills and experience. And that is why many of us have spent endless hours translating science (or in the case of the alarmists – scientific sounding propaganda) back into laymen terms with clear descriptions on why the science is not pointing to man-made global warming.

The preponderance of evidence has and still does point to natural cycles on scales most humans cannot grasp, let alone measure and predict. I am not surprised that nature once again is not bowing down to the arrogance of humanity. I am just astounded as to how that arrogance continues to do more harm and on ever larger scales. Will we ever learn?

The sound path right now is to reject the certainty of the fanatics, keep expanding our knowledge of the universe and ignore any politician who thinks they can grasp the infinite complexities we face. Just because they become deluded, does not mean the rest of us need to follow.

Major Update: The IPCC has been caught peddling pure fiction so blatant even the warmists are up in arms. Dumb, dumber and dumbest.

Update: WUWT has a great rundown on the actual news behind the announcement of a possible new Little Ice Age.

Update: 30 years ago someone predicted a serious cooling off after an end-of-decade warming. Spot on!

Don’t look for the unions to be able to save the Democrats at the voting booths anymore, because they lost a huge court decision in Wisconsin this week:

Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial plan to end most collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.

The court found that a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily approved the collective bargaining measure in March and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had halted the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.

The liberal media focuses on the collective bargaining restrictions (which are in line with federal worker unions and probably half the rest of the states of the union). But the real killer in the bill is the fact that the government is out of the business of collecting dues automatically from state worker paychecks, and have to solicit these funds on their own with their own resources.

This will have two immediate effects. The WI unions will now have to spend money to get their dues, and many workers will opt out of paying those dues since they need the money at home. As this new arrangement spreads across the country, the unions will lose a good portion of their funds, and thus their resources to help Dems limp over the election line.

This one item, lost in the news media discussion, will reverberate for decades to come.

Update: Here is the decision

Update: Lots of good comments over at Hot Air on this one!