Update: UK MET office has determined the alarmists cries of rising oceans was were ‘wrong’:

Alarming predictions that global warming could cause sea levels to rise 6ft in the next century are wrong, it has emerged.

The forecast made by the influential 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which would have seen cities around the world submerged by water, now looks ‘unlikely’.

…

The new Government funded study, says the worst case scenario is now a one metre (3.3 ft) rise.

In 2007 the IPCC reported preliminary evidence that the Atlantic conveyor belt that brings warm water north and keeps Britain relatively mild for its latitude during winters was breaking down.

But more recent observations show the currents are stable.

As with all alarmist predictions, the word ‘unlikely’ seems to be a good way to describe all of the end-of-the-world cries we have had to put up with over the last 20 years. – end update

It seems Gaia has decided the global warming alarmists are too full of hot air. Mother nature has been putting on quite a show in the heart of global warming paranoia – specifically the nation that hosts the CRU. The UEA CRU are those folks who cooked Gaia’s books to create the impression of warming from raw data that shows no warming within the precision of the available data. And Gaia is now sending a message:

At least 60 people have died across Europe during the current cold snap, as snow plagued transport in Britain on Friday and serious flooding prompted mass evacuations in the Balkans.

…

Temperatures plunged to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit) in Braemar, Scotland, while Britain struggled to get back to its feet after days of transport chaos.

London’s Gatwick airport reopened on Friday after a two-day shutdown due to snow, but others including London Heathrow and Glasgow warned of more cancellations and delays.

Many trains were cancelled due to snow and travel by road was slow going, and around 2,000 schools remained closed.

This from the nation whose media cockily predicted the end of snow in the UK. Seems Gaia was not pleased with such gall and has been putting on a show to remind humanity of their puny abilities.

The truth is of course less science fiction (or bad science) than simply normal history. Humans have a very tough time, in general, recalling with precision events and conditions ten years back, let alone 50 or 60. We forget that it takes the Earth a long time to recover from ice ages – 100’s of years. We are just as likely to simply be warming back up to Roman and Medieval levels than seeing CO2 cause runaway warming.

Sanity is beginning to return with the colder weather:

Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.

…

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications – not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

…

Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann – for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous ‘hockey stick graph’ showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase – made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ‘ medieval warm period’ around 1000 AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now.

Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour – a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – may account for much of the 20th Century warming.

Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year’s ‘Climategate’ leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a little noticed BBC online interview that there has been ‘no statistically significant warming’ since 1995.

So, no warming in at least 15 years. I am not surprised since I did an analysis of CRU raw data last November and discovered that the current ‘climate’ is not all that different from the 1930’s and early 1940’s. It seems that we really have just been recovering from the cold spell that hit in the 1940’s.

And what of the future? Some strong evidence shows 3 decades of pretty damn cold temperatures is what we may actually see from Gaia:

It was thought that carbon dioxide emissions rather than the sun was the bigger effect on climate change. Now a major re-think is taking place.

The upshot is that Gavin is not alone in predicting we face another 30 frozen years, each getting progressively colder than the last.

Of course, some die hard fanatics are still holding out that AFTER the other forces on our climate are through doing their thing, man-made global warming should appear. Not likely. The fanatics overplayed their imprecise data. They claimed 1998 and 2005 where the warmest on record, when in fact they knew statistically all the data could say is today’s climate is about the same as the 1930’s warm spell:

The admission is found in a tidbit in one email, where GISS admits their standard deviation is 0.47 °C (which begs the question about any warming trend measured at 0.8 °C). What this means is the years, 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939 (the top 10 ‘warmest’ years in America) are all statistically the same ‘warmth’. They all fall within the GISS claimed standard deviation.

Not only has Phil Jones and Michael Mann admitted their wild conclusions do not stand up to their own data, but one of their allies investigating their work admitted the data is so imprecise we have no idea whether today is warmer or colder than previous periods.

All this leads to quite a show down next year, when the GOP Congress gets to take on the EPA – an out of control agency that has lost its collective mind to global warming madness. As the IPCC’s credibility crumbles and carbon exchanges disappear like so much snake oil seeping into the sand, the GOP should be able to expose the unprofessional and unfounded actions of Obama’s political appointees and their rush to control the planet’s energy options. Even more fascinating, is the method they have at their disposal to take on the EPA – a little used congressional tool left over from the Clinton-Gringrich days:

Senate Republicans may use a different tool in their minority efforts to contain the EPA’s efforts to impose climate-change regulation by fiat, a rarely-used law called the Congressional Review Act. Created in 1996, the law essentially allows Congress to veto regulatory changes created by executive branch agencies, and may become a sledgehammer in battling the Obama administration’s regulatory innovations:

As they say – pass the popcorn, this is going to be good.

Could not help but pass this one on. Sit back and be amazed.

I really, really, really want my tax dollars back so I can spend the money on necessities instead of watching the liberal left fritter it away on complete nonsense. While the economy remains in a heap of trouble and our deficits are soaring, the Democrats are focused like a laser beam on ….

Wait for it ….

A child nutrition bill on its way to President Barack Obama — and championed by the first lady — gives the government power to limit school bake sales and other fundraisers that health advocates say sometimes replace wholesome meals in the lunchroom.

I just cannot fathom why I paid these fools a dime for this madness. We really need to cut government back down to the bare minimum. I have college educations to save up for and these morons are worried about cupcake sales.

DC is so damn incoherent. I mean babbling madman incoherent.

Supposedly, now that the left has our nation running deficits of $1.3 trillion a year (what a normal administration could not produce in a single term, Obama does annually), we are all now supposedly focused like a laser beam on deficits. But liberal ideology is all about pretending and misinforming. Anything to get a socialist, government run solution to any and all problems. When desperate, as they are now in the lame duck Congress, the facade falls away and you glimpse the liberal’s inner madness.

So, in this time of emergency related to sky rocketing deficits, the liberals have come up with a double whammy compromise – some last gasp of insanity to prove to themselves they can still make ‘progress’:

The second-ranking House Democrat said that the House will vote on extending the bulk of tax cuts Thursday, and has considered tying upper-rate extensions to a vote on unemployment insurance.

Hoyer is the consummate DC incompetent. Extend our current tax RATES (‘cuts’ that have been in place almost a decade are no longer ‘cuts’ – unless you are emotionally crippled with Bush Derangement Syndrome), while paying millions to go into their 3rd year of not working – living off those who are working (big deficit spending). So we keep the tax rates where they are (none of those beloved taxes the left salivates over) but fund a third year of unemployment benefits?.

As long as workers make an easier living sitting on the side line there will be no economic growth. But do the liberals care about economics? Hell no, they just want to keep as many people stuck in the government safety net as they can, because holding them there sends money to Democrat pockets.

This is not the only left wing insanity on parade right now. While the left bemoans the religious fervor of the social conservatives (especially during this Christ-mas season) their answer to the teachings of the Bible are a form of draconian insanity to appease their Green God Gaia:

In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.

This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars.

Prof Anderson admitted it “would not be easy” to persuade people to reduce their consumption of goods

He said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last “time of crisis” in the 1930s and 40s.

This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has traveled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.

“The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,” he said.

The poor professor (a physicist, not a biologist or ecologist or the still-to-be-professionalized climatologist) seems to have missed the memos of the last decade. For one, Phil Jone of IPCC alarmist fame has had to admit, under oath, that there has been no measurable warming since 1995. 15 years of massive increases of CO2 in the atmosphere and no warming to be found. In the last ten years there has actually been a distinct cooling. And this nut job wants to stop all economic growth?

I am sure the Obama administration wants to hire him straight off! They too want to stymie all economic growth until the “have not’s” catch up with the “have done’s”.

The other memo the nutty professor has missed is the one where an investigator of CRU admitted – under oath again – there is no way to accurately compare today’s climate to that of 1,000 years ago.

Most of the warming since 1880 happened before 1950 – before the CO2 explosion from the industrialized developed world. That is because all the warming and rising oceans is a result of the end of the Little Ice Age – which has taken a few centuries to complete its thawing. We are more likely experiencing the bitter end of that thaw than on the brink of rampant warming. Sea level rises have slowed since the 1940’s. Temperatures have not changed much since the 1930’s and 1940’s. The alarmists cleverly pulled the alarm bells just as the warming was about to end. This is why climate science has yet to reach the professional quality levels of other established scientific and engineering professions.

So, because a few delusional and misinformed liberals think the end of the world is nigh they want all of us to sacrifice to their insane visions. Nice, eh?

Instead of the people sacrificing to the liberal gods of Government and Green Gaia, the people want runaway government trimmed back to its minimum:

To ease surging budget deficits, Americans prefer cutting federal services to raising taxes by nearly 2-1 in a new poll. Yet there is little consensus on specific, meaningful steps – and a wariness about touching two gargantuan programs, Social Security and Medicare.

There is no consensus to simple minded liberal media questions (except they are always simple minded). But if the Congress decided to assess what government programs and services the nation could survive without, that individuals and states be responsible for dealing with (like feeding their kids a breakfast instead of buying a fancy TV or car), then I am sure the nation would back (by majority, not consensus) a lot of cut backs. We want government down to its barest necessity.

Let’s have the debate. Are we going to waste anymore money at the feet of the liberal Gods of Government and Green Gaia? Or are we going to let the people keep their money and watch in wonder as they blaze the path for our future. Of course I am biased. Government lives off the innovation, sweat and energy of those creative and bold enough to discover new products and services. Government is a drag on innovation – not the source. So I know where I want my money.

Well, we knew Obama’s egomaniac personality would be a horrible fit as leader of America. But now we are seeing how he is going to respond to the drubbing he took in November. He is going to go full steam ahead into liberal madness, beginning with stopping the flow of cheap energy to the US:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday afternoon that the Obama administration will not allow offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as part of the next five-year drilling plan, reversing two key policy changes President Obama announced in late March.

…

In March–less than a month before the BP oil spill–Obama and Salazar said they would open up the eastern Gulf and parts of the Atlantic, including off the coast of Virginia, to offshore oil and gas exploration. On both of those new areas, the administration said it would start scoping to see if oil and gas drilling would be suitable. The eastern Gulf remains closed to drilling under a congressional moratorium, but the White House indicated it would press to lift the moratorium if necessary.

Wednesday’s announcement is sure to please environmentalists while angering oil and gas companies as well as some lawmakers from both parties who have pressed for continued offshore energy exploration in the wake of massive Gulf of Mexico spill.

Emperor Obama has decided what is best, and us poor servants should be awed and grateful for his incoherent and inconsistent directives. After all, he is the change we have all been waiting for! Poor Democrats, they never really understood how badly they self-destructed when they let the need for power over rule the need for sound judgment.

Update: Ed Morrissey has a more measured response to the news.

This is just nuts. We are running $1.3 trillion dollar deficits each year now, thanks to out of control liberal spending, and we are supposed to bail out Europe and their bloated, socialist, cradle to grave subsidies?

The United States would be ready to support the extension of the European Financial Stability Facility via an extra commitment of money from the International Monetary Fund, a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday.

“There are a lot of people talking about that. I think the European Commission has talked about that,” said the U.S. official, commenting on enlarging the 750 billion euro ($980 billion) EU/IMF European stability fund. “It is up to the Europeans. We will certainly support using the IMF in these circumstances.”

Is this why I work 50-60 hours a week 48 weeks out of the year? Hell no!

I work to pay my fair share, but mostly to reap the rewards of my efforts and pass something down to MY children – not some lazy EU citizen working 32 hours a week and taking off August to lounge around some more.

Obama is nuts. Absolutely nuts. When Europe stops paying people to sit on their arses and raise their noses at us rube Americans, then maybe we can discuss financial help. But these people are rioting because they have to work full time for a full life? Let them reap the results of their efforts.

Good lord, you’d think the GOP would have a clue about simple, basic messaging. OUR current tax rates have been in place for 9 years. They are OUR tax rates and any increase to them should be called what they are – Democrat-Obama Tax Hikes!

How hard is this?

While we experience Wikileaks’ form of ‘transparent government’, it is a good time to also consider what has not been told to the traveling public regarding the new, lame TSA infringements on individual freedoms. Everyone after 9-11 was more than happy to have their luggage groped and their bodies scanned for weapons. That seemed reasonable at the time and without undue infringement. In fact, for some of us, that was actually a bad assumption as they became the targets of unfair searches and wasted resources diverted from to stopping terrorist attacks.

So claims a TSA agent:

But some at TSA question if the new rules are making anyone safer.

“I myself would be just as confident flying before these new procedures took place as I would be flying right now.”

The irony is that the person most likely subjected to an enhanced pat-down is not someone acting suspiciously.

It’s America’s seniors that are most often the targets of a pat-down, says this local TSA officer.

“These are your mother, your father, your grandparents. They’re the ones who have to put up with this every time they fly.”

And it breaks the heart of some local TSA officers.

“Just the looks on their faces, some of them, the fear.”

I know this to be a fact from personal experience. Both from the side of my parents now in their late 80’s and my mother sporting more hardware than Batman. But I also know it from our son, who before he was a Marine was a TSA agent. The people tripping this so called security net are those least likely to be a terrorist.

Proof in fact – every terrorist we have caught or who succeeded on 9-11 got through TSA security. And what TSA does find is due to ignorant passenger who still don’t get the fact you cannot carry a gun or knife on a plane (though the latter would never be capable of taking over a plane these days). They are stopping tons of dumb people who apparently live in blessed isolation from the real world.

They are not stopping terrorists:

The ones who are least likely to be terrorists, the elderly, are the most likely to get the pat downs?” KDKA’s Jon Delano asked a local TSA officer.

“Correct. And that’s the big problem with this system.”

…

“It goes back to, ‘Do upon others as you would wish others to do upon you.’ And I would not want that done to me, or my family, or my mother, or my grandmother.”

Because the current plan is ineffective and targets the wrong people for harassment, it is NOT ‘undue’ searching. It is degrading and abusive and ignorant. Which seems to be the moniker this administration is going to wear in the annals of history.

The Wikileaks diplomatic dump is going to roil the western world for a while, but remember – all the world’s leaders know much of this already. It is the public which has been kept in the dark (as well as some enemy states). What struck me, though, was this gem of an article from Politico that came out right before the dump:

The Pentagon on Sunday announced new approaches for how it would safeguard information in the wake of the leak of documents from WikiLeaks, amid allegations that the Obama administration went too far in improving information-sharing across the government.

Was a bout of liberal naivete at the root of the Wikileaks debacle? Was President Obama’s knee-jerk plan for transparency (everywhere but in Congress) the reason low level people were able to collect so much data in such a short time frame?

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said that in the post 9/11 push to “connect the dots” and expand information-sharing between agencies – the administration went too far.

“What we did is we created an environment that enabled this stuff to be stolen by putting it all in one place,” Hoekstra told POLITICO. “You have to ask yourself a question, why would a private first class, sitting in Baghdad, have access to this kind of information?”

A fair question worthy of Congressional Hearings.

Update: Ed Morrisse has more on the ‘how’ of Wikileaks:

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” He said that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.

Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format … It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

And it happened on someone’s watch.

Wikileaks is a liberal nutcase gone mad. The folks behind it believe by exposing classified material the US is going to veer dramatically leftward politically. It is another clear example of left wing incompetence. All that is happening from Wikileaks is:

• Confirmation that our enemies are real and very dangerous (here and here)
• Confirmation the Obama administration is incompetent (here).

What we have learned is Iran is so dangerous the Saudis are supportive of a preventative strike and Europe understand it is more at risk than the US. While the Wikileaks head thinks he may be stopping an attack on Iran, the opposite is probably more likely. Now that the full scope of Iran’s threat can be seen (along wiht North Korea’s current and mindless provocative military actions) I can envision a gelling of world opinion behind unified action.

Nuclear weapons are frightening devices in the hands of peace loving first world countries. But in the hands of suicidal, religious fanatics they represent death and carnage on a scale the world has never before seen except in extinction level events. Iran itself is just not worth the risk.

Watch the Wikileaks backfire – big time.

Update: I think the revelation about Iran’s missile capabilities is most disturbing:

Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year. The cable is a detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation led by Vann H. Van Diepen, an official with the State Department’s nonproliferation division who, as a national intelligence officer several years ago, played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity.

The missiles could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow, and American officials warned that their advanced propulsion could speed Iran’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Iran has no civilian need for these kinds of weapons. These are not defensive (clearly, they have been able to defend themselves so far without them). And the US can dwarf this fire power with a single submarine (let alone a naval task force). Forget about what we can do with all our assets.

So this weapon is for the infidels. What if Iran’s lunatic leaders believe their immortal salvation will come through statewide suicide? What if their path to God is through annihilation of the non believers?

Bush was right – we cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear power. The cost would be too high.