DEAR COMRADE

The STATE has accepted your new provisions on membership in the Great Proletariat of the Future! You along with all your peers have been approved for accelerated entry into the 14th Century diaspora as envisioned by YOU and YOUR PEERS! CONGRATULATIONS!

As a result of your dedicated advocacy of living a frugal and carbon free existence from now until the end of the world, you have been selected by your friends and neighbors as one of the dullumati and as such are entitled to rent and utility free living in a cave in the nearest gorge to your house! You must move yourself and all your belongings sans truck or any vehicle with an internal combustion engine or anything not directly powered by wind or solar power. (No horses need apply, they're hayburners and as such, fossil fueled).

Move as expeditiously as you want. No hurry. You have 24 hours to complete your move to the cave and after that, all your material possessions will be recycled by the people that actually bought them for you.

With this enviable rent/utility free living credit come a few minor inconveniences that you probably didn't really think applied to people like you.

1. No more electricity unless you make it yourself
2. No more travel unless you really like walking
3. No more air travel.
4. No more internet. (fossil fueled servers are the avatars of the new darkness, you say)
5. No more hot baths or showers (hot water is a scarce commodity in the land of no power)
6. It necessarily follows that you'll wear fur or homespun from now until you die.
7. No more TV.

But, the STATE thanks you for advocating the end to civilization. Keep up the good work! We can't end civilization as we know it without YOUR SUPPORT!

GROUND HOG DAY 2116 AD EARTH

In the vast snowy desolate waste of central Florida, Laurentide, the last robochuck probe, scouts the biting cold arctic air to sense the onset of Spring. Electronic hopes dashed, the probe sinks back below the snow and ice and returns to the burrow 10,000 feet below. Spring will not come, again.

REAL SCIENCE

Science is pretty cool. Near real time wind speed and direction all over the earth.

THE COLD HALF OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

I drove out to the FarmMetroPark to drop off something warm and came home in the deepening lake effect snow I've been hearing about but seldom see. It is really cold and snowy out there on this side of the solar system.

READINESS AS A STATE OF BEING

Are you Ready Now?

Destroyer Division 8 response to RN in WWI, "We are ready now"

Do you find it interesting that we remember this date every year but we never 'stand to' for it like we do for each anniversary of 9/11? The country is still at war even if the president and Congress no longer are. We have come to expect that the State will do nothing to prevent further attacks except engage in painful and absurdly useless theater.

In war there should be no surprises. No unexpected dawn attacks. No ordinary day.

The link at the top contains an interesting report on the damage and loss of many of the United States Navy's destroyers during World War II. Tough little ships.

The front of the ship is about a mile away, straight down.

Not that long ago, the duty section of any US Navy warship was expected to be able to get the ship underway and proceed out to sea immediately. It might take time to get steam up but the fires could be lit and the ship underway with six hours notice. A diesel or gas turbine ship could get underway in under an hour. I doubt that any duty section today could get the ship underway.

The unspoken corollary was never spoken of. It was never even mentioned. Could any duty section get the ship's main battery into action to repel an armed attack? Would you like to see the effect of small arms and machine gun fire on a ship? Below is the ex USS O'BANNON DD 987 after being hit with Harpoon missiles and 5 inch gunfire. It is now being fired at with the weapons warships use for self defense against terrorists.

Readiness is not just a state of being, it is a state of mind.

UPDATE:

This was released today and shows that forces were available for instant deployment to Benghazi on the anniversary date of 9/11. This is no surprise since we spooled up every year for a number of anniversaries that our adversaries believed should be celebrated by flooding the streets with American blood. This was sent from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff and 2 other high level drones at State Department then being mismanaged to death by Hillary Clinton. You can see the date and the time below.

The following is wikipedia entry on Jeremy Bash. Some Harvard Law grads don't 'test' as well as others....

TO FIX THE FIXERS

Glenn Reynolds has a modest tax proposal.

It’s already too late to stop global warming, say scientists. No matter what we do, sea levels willrise. Some climate activists have even released an interactive map that will let you see how much of, say Washington, DC, will be under water in the next century, with the flooded zones depicted in blue. (Not all of it, alas).

 Well, if it’s too late to stop global warming, I have a modest proposal instead: Tax the blue zones. That is, minimize the damage that will occur from flooding many decades in the future by reducing development now.

 Climate activists say that between 20 million and 31 million Americans live in places that will be at risk of flooding from global warming by the end of the century. Just to be safe, I think we should aim to reduce the number of people living in these areas by 25% within 25 years, 50% within 50 years and, naturally, 100% by the end of the century.

I'm going to be all broken up if Alexandria floods and we have an east coast Venice in America. And so far as sinking Florida, "oh my God, the manatees, the manatees!"

I'm sure the fixers never saw that coming.

OUT OF THE DARK

I sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans a lot. I flew over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans more times than I can recall. I saw first hand how large the world is and that's down near the bottom of the atmosphere and along the top few yards of the seas. It's a very big place and it's all an enormous heat sink that our piddly efforts will not trouble at all. That is largely why I never believed in the global warming hysteria whipped into life by Al Gore and the Climategate scammers.

I stopped by Watts Up With That that tonight and found an interesting essay that was linked on the site. It was written by a warmist who looked at and examined all the facts without flailing his arms and legs about, jamming his fingers in his ears and screaming witlessly for hours. You might find it interesting. He has now seen the light.

THE ONE-MINUTE CLIMATE SURVEY

1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves. 

2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural. 

3 There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved. 

4 New research shows that fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, at both long and short time scales.
5 CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much. 

6 There is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today. 

7 Sea level will probably continue to rise, naturally and slowly. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level. 

8 The Arctic experiences natural variation as well, with some years warmer earlier than others. Polar bear numbers are up, not down. They have more to do with hunting permits than CO2*. 

9 No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people who eat them. 

10 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface*.

It's nothing really new, but he found his way into the light of reason just from examining the facts. As all facts unite to demonstrate, the arguments in favor of man-made climate change are nothing but pathetic stories told to frighten the stupid into parting with their wealth and freedom. The essay is well worth reading.

Something else to keep in mind. The people who want to steal the world's wealth to fight an enemy only they can fight are also fighting to keep billions of people in the darkness. That's not right.

THE VW CUTTERS

I hate whiners who deliberately use their influence with the people's elected and unelected commissars to make the free market the sick and twisted un-level playing field that it has become in the hands of government and regulators. A sad case in point is the way Leonid Bershidsky, a writer at Bloomberg View moans about how VW and others influenced the unelected ruling class in Europe in order to push their advantage in automotive diesel engines. Leonid says that they should be punished for using their influence.

The Volkswagen emissions scandal has broader implications than the potential damage it can do to Europe's biggest carmaker. It's the result of Europe backing the wrong emissions-reducing technology on a regulatory level. There is now an opportunity to reverse that error and force the continent's сar manufacturers to concentrate on hybrid and electric vehicles. They've got the technology and resources to reshape the market. 

The scandal is about VW's bad business decision to cheat testing equipment so it could rush new engine models to market in the U.S. It is also about a failure of regulatory oversight and testing technology. Most of all, however, it's about diesel engines: They were the ones performing so badly on the tests that VW engineers had to look for a workaround so marketers could trumpet the advent of "clean" diesel.  

VW had an advantage in diesel technology, which it wanted to leverage in the U.S., for a reason. In the mid-1990s, the European Commission and European Union member countries' governments started a campaign of massive intervention to stimulate the use of diesel engines in cars. At the beginning of that decade, Europe and Japan had about 10 percent of diesel automobiles on the road.

It's funny how the whiners always object to 'other' people using their influence on the government but see no harm, no foul when they do it themselves.

THE PSEUDO MEDIA NEEDS HELP

Somehow I ended up on the email distribution list for the DeSmog reality dodgers. They sent me this plea:

I think they're laughably insane. They actually refer to themselves as "independent" journalists and cite their very own research data base which, I wonder where they got that since most of the climate doomfrauds have carefully maintained that they lost all their records of observations and data adjustments, not to mention the algorithms used to infest their climate models and so all they can offer now are conclusions based on vapor since none of their data survived contact with their alt reality.

I'm also in the market for your donations and I too need your help so that I can tear myself away from my vital research and spend a couple of unflinching weeks in Paris during the next ClimateScam summit. I also have UNcredentials so don't hold back. Send your donation today!

All donations gratefully accepted and each donation over $50,000 will save a genuine unicorn!

WHERE HAVE ALL THE EAGLES GONE

H/T theo,

THE SCIENCE OF APOCALYPSE

Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor writes a damning indictment of global warmingology.

Man made climate change is in the same situation except that there are no lab experiments; but their models do no predict the past, so why should we believe they will predict the future? We know it has been warmer (in Viking times, and probably in Roman times), and rather than ex[plain that they adjust the data. I don’t know how to measure the temperature of my city block to a tenth of a degree; when they can do that reliably I will believe they know the Earth temperature to that accuracy. When you can take the conditions of 1950 as input to a model and run it and it gives today’s conditions, I will take the model seriously; but I cannot see any reason to spend billions of dollars on measures there is no real evidence to show we need. I like Los Angeles without smog. I don’t worry a lot about CO2 “pollution”. But then I don’t invest in green technology.

As I read the news about witchfinders in climate science I am struck by the hysteria with which the warmists approach the apocalypse they alone predict. They are not people I would trust with a gun because I have no doubt they would use it to compel all the rest of us to obey the hysterical nonsense they spout.

NATIONAL REVIEW SLINKS INTO DISGRACE

I took a look at the current state of Michael Mann's lawsuit against Mark Steyn, National Review, et al and left with great contempt for National Review. Steyn puts it best.

There are times when I wish I had the same kind of co-defendants I had in my free-speech wars in Canada: Maclean's, unlike National Review, is a dentist's waiting-room mag not an ideological mission, but they and I were as one in our fight not just against the Canadian Islamic Congress but against the now repealed Section 13. By contrast, National Review, for whom I wrote for a decade and a half, are offering the curious and fainthearted defense that they were never my publisher but merely an "interactive computer service provider" to which I had the access code (see page 49 of their most recent brief). They're a court filing or two from claiming they're Lufthansa and I'm Andreas Lubitz - just some crazy guy who locked himself in the NR cockpit. 

Oh, well. For all that, I've never felt more optimistic about how this case is going. If there is a "97 per cent consensus" on the science, all 97 per cent decided to steer well clear of Michael E Mann: Last fall, not a single amicus brief was filed on his behalf, not one. He claims he's "taking a stand for science", but evidently science is disinclined to take a stand for him.

On the other hand, and somewhat to my surprise, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters Committee for Press Freedom, the American Society of News Editors, the Association of American Publishers, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (The Village Voice et al), NBC Universal, Bloomberg News, the publishers of USA Today, Time, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Seattle Times, The Arizona Republic and The Bergen County Record have all filed amici briefs against his attempted shredding of the First Amendment. They're in no way fans of mine, but they recognize that this is the most consequential free-speech case before the US courts since New York Times vs Sullivan, and if Mann wins it would be a catastrophic defeat for the First Amendment. That said, on global warming and "climate change", they largely agree with him. But I've also been heartened to learn how many scientists across the spectrum want nothing to do with Mann (scroll down here), and regard a defeat for him in court as a victory for genuine science.

It's funny how the science of man made global warming is collapsing all around except in the dim-witted minds of alarmists and governments hell bent on screwing the tax payer out of more money in order to fix a global climate scare that all rational beings admit simply cannot be fixed. All they talk about is slowing the rate of increase by forcing the first world to join the third world in grinding poverty and starvation but there is never any talk about reversing the global effects of solar infall variation that has, over the eons, caused the world to warm and cool. Their insane shrieks of doom fall on ears increasingly deaf to people who so obviously manipulate the data and then lie about it.

They make laughing stocks of real scientists and researchers and have thoroughly trashed the time honored process of peer review. They have also, with the help of its own lawyers, destroyed the reputation of National Review.

CLOUDS

Because,

we go to this place a lot. It is a dive but it is our kind of dive. It currently sports the name of the American Tavern, prior to that it was the Blue Star and, oddly enough, before that it was the American Tavern. The staff always remains and the peppercorn bacon cheeseburgers and steak quesadillas are awesome. One can dine and watch basketball or baseball or football. Yeah, it's one of those places that eschewed cable and decided to go with 27 satellite dishes on the roof.

There is a backside to it but we've never investigated. We are quite happy with the front side.

RESPONSE TO CONGRESSIONAL SCUMBAG

It gives me pleasure to read this man's response to the attack on him by a congressional scumbag.

In recent weeks I have been the target of attacks in the press by various radical environmental and politically motivated groups. This effort should be seen for what it is: a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming.

I am saddened and appalled by this effort, not only because of the personal hurt it causes me and my family and friends, but also because of the damage it does to the integrity of the scientific process. I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.

Let me be clear. I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.

If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors-on all sides of the debate-are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.

I regret deeply that the attacks on me now appear to have spilled over onto other scientists who have dared to question the degree to which human activities might be causing dangerous global warming, a topic that ought rightly be the subject of rigorous open debate, not personal attack. I similarly regret the terrible message this pillorying sends young researchers about the costs of questioning widely accepted “truths.”

Finally, I thank all my many colleagues and friends who have bravely objected to this smear campaign on my behalf and I challenge all parties involved to focus on real scientific issues for the betterment of humanity.

Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

I have nothing but contempt for ranking member Grijalva (Democrat, Arizona)

LET'S CUT TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER ON GLOBAL TEMP

The hell with all this, what do the tree rings tell us? What@the trees!?!

How odd that we no longer reference our long lived brothers in forest who accurately measured the seasons temperatures for decade after decade, century after century and are now set aside as meaningless data. Screw the satellite data, I want tree rings dammit!

Climate data without tree rings is MEANINGLESS!

Sorry, I just thought I'd throw that out there. :)

LAW IN THE WESTERN LANDS

I don't believe that I would like to practice science in the Roman Empire. These are the people that believe in global warming.

But Monday after seeking an appeal, six of the seven Italian earthquake experts have been acquitted of all charges, the Associated Press reported. Stefano Gresta, the head of Italy's geologic institute, told the AP the decision restored "credibility to the entire Italian scientific community."

Europe still believes in witches and warlocks. Sending scientists to jail for failures of 'science' is part and parcel of the new 'science'.

I don't think that restoring credibility to the scientific community is possible. They pissed that away in their peer reviewed pursuit of an agenda.

THINK ABOUT STARS

Attraction. Somehow the wispiest stuff in the universe is attracted to each other and bonds and when enough arrives, fuses. What are the odds of that happening?

Whole molecules of H arrive in a space and then they ignite and burn for billions of years?

How cloudy was the universe to make such an unlikely thing happen not once but a trillion times?

CLIMATE REVELATIONS ON THE DOOM FRONT

It looks like a couple of people have decided that the world's missing heat is hiding in the deep Atlantic where it is lurking under a bushel or something slightly scarier. At any rate, it's just a matter of days now before we'll be buried again under a rain of misery and screams of outright terror as the ignorant followers of the Global Warming Permanent Crisis get reminded of the ocean bottom clathrates that will melt and KILL US ALL!!!!!

So we have that too look forward to. I guess were going to be forced to pave the bottom of the oceans. Just to be safe.

UPDATE: WORLD TURNING INTO ICE!!!!  Well, who are you going to believe, Gore, or your lying satellites taking pictures of the polar ice cap from orbit?

I'm waiting for Gore and the Cult of Warm scammers to start mentioning swarms of Piranha bees or Giant mutant star goats. As I recall, they have already leaped aboard the Ebola train by blaming global warming for its increasing spread.

WHY THE MODEL IS NEVER WRONG

A lovely explanation of why the models are never wrong and why deniers are just a bunch of stupid pathetic losers.

Don't even think about touching the model. Just don't.*

*Many years ago I asked Sondrakistan to reconsider ditching her model. I don't regret it and everybody else chimed in pretty rapidly. Years and years later, she remains.

** I used to use Lex's page to jump to his blogroll and never thought to copy them down and then, his page went dark and I forgot so many of the places that I used to go.

THEY ARE NOT GODS

I think we have shoved our civilization to one side. If one bothers to read this stuff, it reads wrong. very wrong.

Out here? Justice is an open book. When the State closes the book, it is not justice.