It’s nice to have a little fun at the expense of a topic which has created much controversy.

We’ve heard a lot about global warming and the arguments for and against. The current head of the Weather Channel stated anyone who didn’t believe in global warming should be fired.

Here’s the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, telling what he thinks should happen to those who are making a profit from selling carbon credits.

I wish this ruling had been made in an American court.

Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore’s controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.

The move follows a High Court action by a father who accused the Government of ‘brainwashing’ children with propaganda by showing it in the classroom.

Stewart Dimmock said the former U.S. Vice-President’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and ’sentimental mush’.

He wants the video banned after it was distributed with four other short films to 3,500 schools in February.

Mr Justice Burton is due to deliver a ruling on the case next week, but yesterday he said he would be saying that Gore’s Oscar-winning film does promote ‘partisan political views’.

This means that teachers will have to warn pupils that there are other opinions on global warming and they should not necessarily accept the views of the film.

It is my belief that children should be exposed to a variety of topics and opinions. However, when you try to sell something in an educational setting laden with political bias, I have difficulty swallowing that it is in the best interest of the students.

As a matter of fact, I agree with Mr. Dimmock:

Mr Dimmock, a lorry driver from Dover with children aged 11 and 14, said at the outset of the hearing: ‘I wish my children to have the best education possible, free from bias and political spin, and Mr Gore’s film falls far short of the standard required.’

Guss has done all the heavy lifting today so I thought I’d search for things on the lighter side.

Via Instapundit we find another take on global warming.

Bacteria in a moose’s stomach create methane gas which is considered even more destructive to the environment than carbon dioxide gas. Cows pose the same problem (more…).

It’s nice to see a bit of humor (I don’t think Norway feels that way) added to a topic which has been such a hot issue.

Let’s just say this, if I see a moose in the near future I think I’ll steer clear.

Here is a different take on global warming from WorldNetDaily.

A major new scientific study concludes the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on worldwide temperatures is largely irrelevant, prompting one veteran meteorologist to quip, “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.”

That comment comes from Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, who said the temperature of the earth is increasing, but that it’s got nothing to do with what man is doing.

“Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Ian Wilson after reviewing the newest study, now accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research.

The project, called “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National lab scientist Stephen Schwartz.

Story

Seems to be working just fine.

Standing on the south bank of the Fraser River a stone’s throw from the Vancouver International Airport, Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi motions toward the frenetic activity at the Olympic speed skating oval construction site. “This exercise is about as valuable an experiment as I could have done in my academic career,” he says, pulling his Lee Valley Tools baseball cap tight to his black wire rim glasses to ward off the late June sunshine.

The project he’s describing, built as part of the oval site, is the Richmond Thermal Energy Network. Using the waste heat from the creation of ice at the Olympic venue, it’s one of the region’s biggest alternative energy projects.

“Ordinarily you build an ice rink, and to make the ice you have to reject a lot of heat,” explains the affable, Iranian-born UBC professor who’s also associate director of the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “Just like the back of your refrigerator. Cool inside the icebox, warm outside the icebox.”

The reflected heat that would otherwise be lost will be pumped to new apartments to be built around the oval. The Offsetters Carbon Neutral Society, a two-year-old Vancouver-based non-profit that Dr. Dowlatabadi co-founded, is instrumental in the project’s development. And the society’s involvement with the oval project is being paid for partly by people who want to cancel out the considerable carbon pollution they put into the atmosphere every time they step on an airplane. It’s a model scheme that typifies the new, but exploding, industry built on the concept of carbon offsets.

A carbon offset is a monetary investment in a project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to the measured amount of a polluting activity. Individuals wanting to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle pay a fee to an offsetting company, which in turn invests that money in projects that either remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or result in less greenhouse gas expelled at source. For industry it often makes economic sense to purchase offsets rather than reduce emissions because it is immediately possible and often the cheapest alternative. Proponents of carbon offsetting argue it signals the beginning of assigning a monetary value to the environment. Any sort of acknowledgement of the impact of individual and corporate greenhouse gas emissions is invaluable, they say, as we move toward an uncertain future of global warming

Story

Presidential candidate John Edwards’ wife Elizabeth is giving up tangerines to do her part to help global warming.

The politics of global warming got very concrete, and oddly difficult, in a meeting with local environmentalists in the coastal town of McClellanville today, where Elizabeth Edwards raised in passing the importance of relying on locally-grown fruit.

“We’ve been moving back to ‘buy local,’” Mrs. Edwards said, outlining a trade policy that “acknowledges the carbon footprint” of transporting fruit.

“I live in North Carolina. I’ll probably never eat a tangerine again,” she said, speaking of a time when the fruit is reaches the price that it “needs” to be.

What about other citrus fruits, a good source of vitamin C which is the only vitamin our bodies can’t store?

I live in S.C. and I know I can’t buy citrus here, so I’ll take the trucked-in variety of fruit or I’ll drive to Florida to buy it.

Then I’ll plant a tree to erase my carbon footprint.

Seriously, this global warming trend is becoming a religion to some people.

I’ll still be buying orange juice and citrus fruits from the market and I won’t worry about it at all.

I hesitated posting this because I heard the squabble that’s gone on for the past week.
It’s, I know, another study but the more information the better. Right?

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.
It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun’s effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.

Story

Were Republican senators vindictive enough to block the concert after he testified? I don’t know.
It seems like it’s going to go on anyway and amazingly enough with the help of a Native American.

Al Gore announced Friday a surprise Live Earth concert in Washington, foiling Senate Republicans who blocked Gore’s attempt to bring his global warming extravaganza to the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.
The former vice president said the all-day “Mother Earth” concert would be held on the National Mall at the National Museum of the American Indian—about two blocks from the Capitol—as part of Saturday’s concert series focused on climate change. The headliners are Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.

“Global warming naysayers in the political world have not been able to have their way, because this will—despite their best efforts—be held on the Mall,” Gore told The Associated Press.

The “Mother Earth” show had been previously planned, but Gore announced Friday that it would be part of the Live Earth series. The concert will also feature films, music, dancing and guest speakers, including scientists and cultural leaders from the American Indian community.

“There is no more important matter before us than the question of how to live sustainably on the Earth,” said Tim Johnson, acting director of the American Indian museum and a descendant of the Mohawk tribe.

There are eight other Live Earth concerts scheduled Saturday, starting in Australia and continuing to London, New Jersey, Japan, China, South Africa, Brazil and Germany.

Earlier this year, Republican leaders in the Senate refused Gore’s request to host one of the concerts on the Capitol grounds facing the Washington Monument. The denial came after Gore testified before House and Senate panels in March about what he calls a “true planetary emergency.”

Story

A few days ago there was some question as to whether a growing majority of scientists agree that there such a thing as global warming, and that humans are contributing to it (ergo, this round of global warming is not like past cycles).

If you’ve already decided that you don’t believe scientists or polls or any news that comes from mainstream media, then just ignore this posting.

One example of this growing consensus is found in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is a sort of clearing house for peer reviewed research and writing on global warming; it synthesizes all this material and comes up with recommendations.

Here’s how one scientist describes the IPCC method of deliberations:

Q: The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report isn’t an original document. It’s a political document, a consensus of many, many studies that’s edited by politicians, is it not?

A: Dessler: Well, no. The Summary for Policymakers is gone over in a plenary session, line by line, and you have scientists in the room and then country representatives can object to various statements. But the document ultimately is written by scientists, and they can walk out. It’s a compromise of something the scientists can live with and the governments can live with. And generally, that almost always involves watering down the science, not the other way around. So to the extent there is political interference in the Summary for Policymakers, it’s to make the science less alarming than the scientists actually wanted. And there’s a reason the IPCC does this, and the reason is, they want buy-in from all the member governments. That way, the government can’t turn around and say they don’t believe this, because that government has agreed to every line in the summary. That’s why the IPCC allows the summary to have some interference from governments, so governments cannot distance themselves from it.

According to Naomi Oreskes of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members’ expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.” The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: “The IPCC’s conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue.”

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.

The left-wing Guardian (London) worries that the effort to build consensus may water the science too much while the right-leaning Weekly Standard (London) criticizes The Guardian’s reporting and argues that the debate over climate change has been so politicized as to be untrustworthy. The Weekly Standard apparently believes there’s a growing consensus, too, but one that it distrusts and dislikes.

There’s evidence that until recently, the Bush Administration had suppressed climate change findings that contradicted its position against the Kyoto accords (see this report by the Union of Concerned Scientists). So it’s a bit surprising that President Bush, shortly after the release of the latest IPCC report, announced a change of heart, apparently acknowledging this growing scientific consensus. Most of the main newspaper dailies and networks covered this (including the Weekly Standard; I imagine the Washington Times did too, but I can’t access its archives).

According to the New York Times

President Bush, fending off international accusations that he was ignoring climate change, proposed for the first time on Thursday to set ”a long-term global goal” for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and he called on other high-polluting nations to join the United States in negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement by the end of next year.

If carried through, such an agreement would be the first in which the United States, the world’s biggest source of the emissions that scientists say are warming the planet, has committed itself to a specific target for cutting them.

It would be a major shift for Mr. Bush, who has resisted such absolute goals in part for economic reasons. The president has also steadfastly rejected the so-called Kyoto Protocol, which limits greenhouse gas emissions, on the grounds that two other major polluters — China and India — are not bound by the accord in the same way as the United States would be if it joined. The proposal, delivered in a speech at the United States Agency for International Development here, reflects the difficulties the Bush administration is facing in grappling with climate change as the scientific consensus has continued to build in favor of action to control the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

Oreskes makes this sensible point:

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

I’m not a scientist and don’t pretend to be so I’m not saying this is global warming or anything else.
I only posted this because it’s interesting.

Scientists in Chile have blamed climate change for the sudden disappearance of a lake in the south of the country.
Park rangers who patrolled the area in the Magallanes region in March reported that the two-hectare (five-acre) glacial lake was its normal size.

But two months later they found a huge dry crater and stranded chunks of ice that previously floated on the water.

Experts now say melting glaciers put pressure on an ice wall that acted as a dam, causing it to give way.

Story

According to this story we are in for a big storm season this year.

The U.S. government will issue its official forecast for the forthcoming hurricane season Tuesday, but already two leading storm experts have predicted that it will be busy.

After the battering by storms Katrina and Rita in 2005 there were widespread fears last summer of another powerful storm, but the unexpected development of the El Nino climate phenomenon helped dampen conditions.

The El Nino has ended, however, leaving the potential for more tropical storms threatening the Gulf and East coasts.

El Nino is a warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that occurs every few years. The warm water affects wind patterns that guide weather movement, and its effects can be seen worldwide. In El Nino years, there tend to be fewer summer hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

Earlier this month Philip Klotzbach, a research associate at Colorado State University, and Joe Bastardi, the chief hurricane forecaster for AccuWeather Inc., said they anticipate a more active storm cycle this year.

And, almost as if to underscore their comments, a subtropical storm formed off the southeast coast and became Andrea, the first named storm of the year, well before the June 1 official beginning of hurricane season.

Hurricane season ends Nov. 30, but the strange season of 2005 ran over into late December, as well as using up all the planned alphabetical names, forcing storm watchers to switch to the Greek alphabet to continue naming storms.

You know what I heard? I heard Bush is secretely planning all these storms to take the heat off the immigration debate. It’s pretty amazing the powers he has.

Michael Barone has written an interesting column for Real Clear Politics with the same title as the one on this post.

He’s asking what is more important in the immediate future: Social Security reform or Global Warming:

Sometimes politicians get things upside down. They ignore problems that are plainly staring them in the face, while they focus on dangers that are at best speculative.

Consider two long-range issues that are not pressing matters this year but pose, or are said to pose, threats a generation or two away. One of them you don’t hear much about: Social Security. The other you hear about all the time: global warming. Yet this gets things upside down. We have an unusually precise knowledge of the problems that Social Security will cause in the future. But we don’t know with anything like precision what a continuation of the current mild increase in temperatures will mean.

He then goes on to show us what we already know: Social Security in its current form cannot support itself much beyond 2017. (more…)

We’ve probably all heard of the dust-up between Sheryl Crow and Laurie David, producer of former Vice President Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth.

From the Washington Post we get this version, which is the shortened version of what was posted on the Huffington Post.

Global warming was the talking point last night at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner when singer Sheryl Crow and “Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David walked over to Table 92 at the Hilton Washington to chat with Karl Rove — and the resulting exchange was suitably heated.

“I am floored by what I just experienced with Karl Rove,” David reports. “I went over to him and said, ‘I urge you to take a new look at global warming.’ He went zero to 100 with me. . . . I’ve never had anyone be so rude.”

Rove’s version: “She came over to insult me and she succeeded.”

Things got so hot that Crow stepped in to defuse the situation and then got into it with Rove herself. “You work for me,” she told the presidential adviser, according to singed bystanders. “No,” was his response. “I work for the American people.”

News of the dust-up filtered quickly through the room. Some witnesses said David was very aggressive with Rove; a shaken Crow later said that Rove was “combative and unresponsive.”

From the NRO Corner we get this version:

Karl Rove, Laurie David, and Sheryl Crow — The Real Story [Byron York]

I just got an eyewitness account of the Karl Rove-Laurie David-Sheryl Crow encounter at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night, and it suggests that David and Crow were a bit more confrontational than they portrayed themselves in their own account of the incident, published in the Huffington Post. In their story, David and Crow write, “The ‘highlight’ of the evening had to be when we were introduced to Karl Rove. How excited were we to have our first opportunity ever to talk directly to the Bush Administration about global warming.”

The eyewitness says the person who introduced David to Rove was the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. I want you to meet Laurie David, Dowd said to Rove. (These are all approximate recollections, so no quotation marks.) Dowd said David would like to say hello.

According to David and Crow, the encounter began with a polite request. “We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming,” they write. “Much to our dismay, he immediately got combative. And it went downhill from there.”

The eyewitness remembers it a bit differently. Immediately after Dowd’s introduction, the witness says, David began lecturing Rove about global warming. This administration has done nothing on the issue, she told Rove. We face a crisis. The time to act is now. This administration has done nothing…

At that point, Rove broke in to say, Well, actually we have done something. Rove mentioned global climate research, at which point David broke in herself to say, You just don’t understand. All these questions have been answered. That’s worthless. That’s useless.

In their account, David and Crow write, “We reminded the senior White House advisor that the U.S. leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it. Anger flaring, Mr. Rove immediately regurgitated the official Administration position on global warming which is that the US spends more on researching the causes than any other country.”

The eyewitness says Rove asked David if she had read the IPCC report, referring to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which, while confirming a human role in climate change, substantially undermines some of the most catastrophic charges made in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” which David produced. David said she had read the report. “We felt compelled to remind him that the research is done and the results [the IPCC report] are in,” David and Crow write. “Mr. Rove exploded with even more venom. Like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, Mr. Rove launched into a series of illogical arguments regarding China not doing enough thus neither should we. (Since when do we follow China’s lead?)”

In the eyewitness’ version, again, David and Crow are a bit more aggressive than their own story suggests. The eyewitness says David told Rove, You need to bring in new people to tell you the truth. Rove mentioned Dr. John Marburger, the White House science advisor. At that point, according to the eyewitness, Crow began poking Rove’s chest with her finger, demanding to know what corporations were underwriting Marburger’s work. Rove said Marburger had been in academia most of his career.

With Crow jabbing him in the chest, Rove turned to take his seat. Then, the witness says, Crow grabbed his arm. A few more words were exchanged, and it was over. At the Huffington Post, David and Crow described the ending this way: “In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, ‘Don’t touch me.’ How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, ‘You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.’ Karl then quipped, ‘I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.’ To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, ‘We are the American people.’”

In light of the eyewitness’ account, another way of saying it might be, How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be jabbed in the chest by Sheryl Crow.

We report, you decide.

Yesterday I read this article in the New York Times titled A Year Without Toilet Paper.

It’s the story of a successful New York City couple who have gone green to the extreme. They make their own food from food grown within a 250 mile radius of New York City because that’s how far a farmer can go round-trip in a day.

They have a small child and have determined to not purchase anything, but did give in to get the baby a birthday gift at a second-hand store for $1.

They make compost from any waste they create and the article states it smells a bit sour in their home. There was a photo that showed their garbage has worms in it to process it.

They still have a maid but they finally made her give up her vacuum cleaner. They do still go to the basement of their apartment building and use the laundry facilities, but they refuse to take the elevator.

Here’s the explanation:

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

To each his own. But here’s the kicker:

Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.

As my daughter would say, TMI.

In a way I admire this couple for doing what they believe. They are walking the walk and not just talking the talk, but I wonder how they will manage in the summer when the humidity gets high and the temperatures soar.

We had a hurricane blow through here unexpectedly about 20 years ago. I live in the muggy South. We were without power for two weeks at the end of September.

Living by candlelight was fun for the first night and then we had to start taking cold showers, cook our food on the gas grill, and finally heat our water on the gas grill to pour into the bathtub to get a lukewarm bath.

I was unable to vacuum the floors and when the power did come back on I was amazed at all the soot that had accumulated on the side of the tub from placing that heavy pan of water on the edge of the tub. This even though I had scrubbed the tub, but couldn’t see everything as it was mostly done at night since I was still working. We did buy a small generator (large ones were unavailable) and could plug in the refrigerator and a lamp or the microwave and lamp, but not anything big with the refrigerator. Even though I did vacuum the floors with the assistance of the generator I was amazed at how not clean they were when the power came back on.

I did not do well living that way. Other people at work had their power back in a short time but I was still without it. My husband worked at a nuclear power plant and was able to shower at work, but all I could do was take lukewarm baths.

My daughter went to her best friend’s house to bathe and basically spent a lot of time with them, while my son was in college.

So I wonder if they can survive a hot, humid summer in NY while trying to live green for a year. And if they do, will anyone want to stand near them?

As I said, to each his own.

Are you as sick of hearing about Global Warming when it’s freezing outside as I am? Thirty years ago all we heard about was Global Cooling, and now it’s the opposite.

The following is a quote from what I consider to be a very funny article.

The latest point of emphasis in the global warming movement is that cattle farming endangers the planet by producing too much methane. So now, steaks and hamburgers are classified as instruments of destruction, along with large vehicles, lawn mowers, and charcoal grills. It can’t be much longer before cowboy movies, cigars and hockey are held to be enemies of the earth as well.

This has got to be the most blatant assault on guyhood since ABC moved Coach to the same night as Roseanne, and turned Hayden Fox into Phil Donahue. It’s a wonder that liberals don’t cut to the chase, by simply claiming that global warming is caused by testosterone. Then, they could make public school nurses siphon the offending fluid from the boys during health class.

Many environmentalists believe that the earth is a living organism, personified by the Greek goddess Gaia. Conveniently, it turns out that Gaia is a shrew, who demands that her men be reduced to henpecked, metrosexual noodles. Manliness makes Gaia angry, and we wouldn’t like her when she’s angry, because she’ll turn into a green monster and start smashing everything to bits. Hell hath no fury like an earth goddess exposed to excessive cattle-produced methane emissions.

Go here to read the whole thing.

Note: Testing track back feature to The Anchoress, Sister Toldjah and Musing Minds.

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