The Squeaking Wheel

The squeaking wheel doesn't always get the grease. Sometimes it gets replaced.

Vic Gold


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Frederick the Great

Frederick the Great, annoyed with the great sums of money going to foreign coffee merchants, issued the following declaration in 1777:

It is disgusting to note the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects and the amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. If possible this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer. And so were his officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer; and the king does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended upon to endure hardships or to beat his enemies in case of the occurrence of another war.

Technorati Tags: beer, coffee

It’s just Disney

Finally a good Op-Ed column from the New York Times:

Op-Ed Columnist - Playing Innocent Abroad - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Hat tip: Camillo

Technorati Tags: Obama, Berlin, Disney

Holiday!!!

I Get High With a Little Help from my Friends
Originally uploaded by Jayneblonde

I'm officially on vacation! I doubt I'm going to jump like this but I'll try to have fun!

The Audacity of Vanity

Charles Krauthammer, more brilliant and more documented than the rest. He's one of the few real journalist I still enjoy fully:

Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast — a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins — would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall” liquidation. When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush the elder — who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap — called “a Europe whole and free”?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Brandeburg Gate, Charles Krauthammer

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Here we are again with news from "Down Under". I just stumbled upon this "spot on" article by David Evans:

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot. If you believe that you'd believe anything.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion.

Until now the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

Technorati Tags: Global Warming, Australian, David Evans, Al Gore, Australian Greenhouse Office

Tom Nelson's Allegorical Rundown about Environmentalism

This is going to keep you smiling for a while.

Technorati Tags: Environmentalism, Tom Nelson

IT Guy Vs Dumb Employees

This made me laugh so much!!!


IT Guy Vs Dumb Employees - Watch more free videos

Check it out on their website

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Betancourt and other 14 hostages freed from FARC

It is most certainly the news of the day. A perfect rescue operation against the oldest terrorist organization on the planet: FARC.

The Colombian Army tricked the FARC militants into freeing the hostages.

FARC seems now seriously damaged even though Hugo Chavez keeps pumping money into a terrorist group its public goal is to control Colombia, it doesn't look fine on Venezuela being it right next to Colombia.

Details of the military operation have recently been released by Col. Luís Gomes one of the main figures behind the entire operation that was meticulously planned for 4 months, a long time considering that it lasted just 5 minutes.

This is undoubtedly yet another big success in Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's fight against the FARC, probably a decisive one. Today the day seems to shine on President Uribe whose father was killed by the FARC and who made the group's defeat the cornerstone of his presidency.

In the meantime Venezuela's president, who shares an affinity with the leftist FARC, released no comments about the whole operation.

Technorati Tags: FARC, Betancourt, Hugo Chavez, Álvaro Uribe, Luís Gomes

Schengen Monument

The more I look at it the more it seems to me like a Red Army monument, like those ones I saw in Warsaw in 1986.

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Tommy, tommy.....

And so after Al Gore unpresentable electric bill here we go again with one of his good friends, Tommy Lee Jones that apparently don't exactly practises what he preaches.

Tommy Lee Jones sure can pass a lot of water. No continence for old men!

According to the water cops down in San Antonio, Jones was the eighth-biggest water user in the city, gushing out 128,139 gallons per month in the last seven months — that's more than $300 per month on H20 alone! Folks in San Antone are on year-round water restrictions, and an average homeowner uses about eight or nine thousand gallons a month.

So get this — the water police tell us they're going down to Tommy's house tomorrow to work out better water usage.

Source: TMZ.com

Technorati Tags: Al Gore, Tommy Lee Jones, water bill