Category Archives: Politics

Bad news for the Reverend Mother: global cooling on the way

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I don’t think there’s a bigger freeze baby in the state than my wife. Flannel-lined pants, three or four layers of shirts and sweaters and afghans strategically placed around the house are standard for her between Labor Day and Memorial Day. During this time she’s likely to say that my best feature is the BTUs I put out. This report suggests that our retirement years might be golden but cold.

Scientist predicts ‘mini Ice Age’

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Feb. 7 (UPI) — A Russian astronomer has predicted that Earth will experience a “mini Ice Age” in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory in St. Petersburg said Monday that temperatures will begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak, RIA Novosti reported.

The coldest period will occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline between 2035 and 2045, Abdusamatov said.

Dramatic changes in the earth’s surface temperatures are an ordinary phenomenon, not an anomaly, he said, and result from variations in the sun’s energy output and ultraviolet radiation.

The Northern Hemisphere’s most recent cool-down period occurred between 1645 and 1705. The resulting period, known as the Little Ice Age, left canals in the Netherlands frozen solid and forced people in Greenland to abandon their houses to glaciers, the scientist said.

Man, I hope this won’t interfere with my golf game.

Chris Coleman on right path to reduce St. Paul emissions

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New St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman kept a campaign pledge by signing the U.S. Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement committing the city to align itself with the Kyoto accords. According to an article in the Strib:

The agreement will require the city, by 2012, to reduce pollution from cars and power plants to 1990 levels. What the city must do to get there will be hammered out in the next six months.

“We no longer can pretend this is not a serious issue or one that we don’t need to address,” Coleman said.

Although his predecessor, Randy Kelly, criticized the agreement during the 2005 campaign as “useless symbolism,” Coleman defended it as a way to try to “force leadership on a national level.”

Coleman joined mayors in 200 cities around the country who have signed the agreement, including those in Minneapolis, Apple Valley, Eden Prairie and Duluth.

The agreement challenges cities to meet or beat the conditions of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to address climate change that took effect in February 2005.

People say Coleman will be spectacularly ineffective but I think he can really pull this off. By the time he institutes smoking bans in private businesses and raises taxes to pay for the environmentally friendly initiatives he’ll have so gutted the city that hitting the emissions targets will be a snap. Think of it, no reason to go downtown, so fewer cars — and just think about how nice it will be without all those people exhaling carbon dioxide everywhere! Furthermore with less business and fewer people there’ll be less need for power and therefore fewer nasty power plant emissions!

Another one of the objectives from the agreement is to “reduce sprawl and increase open space.” Done! There will be lots of wide, open space in St. Paul.

Oh well, I suppose I need to be more realistic. Given the “success” that those progressive and green-thinking Europeans have had in meeting (not) their targets (see here) the objectives won’t be reached. Not that the city won’t die trying, though.

If Coleman is really serious about cutting emissions in our capitol city a good start would be cutting the amount of time the state legislature is in session by half. Signing a decree to that effect will have about as much impact as what he signed yesterday.

Grand Old Fatah

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Oh, here’s an interesting political story in the news:

It seems you have an established political party holding onto power for years, telling its supporters that someday soon it was going to deliver on all its promises to bring down the long-hated enemy. Meanwhile its leaders boasted of their power as players while collecting large sums of money and trading favors – all without the party making any progress in its stated goal and, in fact, losing battle after battle against its out-numbered opposition. Then, much to everyone’s surprise, the party gets run out of town overnight by a bunch of wild-eyed bomb-throwers.

So, are we talking about Fatah, or the GOP?

Animal, vegetable or liberal

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As they used to say on the X-files, “the truth is out there.” And with a little surfing around the Web you find … coincidence, or synchronicity?

From The Borowtiz Report:

SEN. BIDEN PRODUCING DANGEROUSLY HIGH LEVELS OF CARBON DIOXIDE
Talkative Lawmaker Creating Environmental Threat, Scientists Fear
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who has dominated this week’s confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito with his seemingly nonstop talking, is producing dangerously high level of carbon dioxide that could pose a serious environmental threat, leading scientists said today.

While many observers have found Sen. Biden’s interminable orating tedious and wearisome, few suspected that the lawmaker was producing gases that could threaten the ecological balance of the planet.

But at a conference in Oslo, Norway devoted to the environmental challenges posed by Sen. Biden’s endless nattering, scientists today said that the Delaware Democrat was producing levels of carbon dioxide that could prove harmful to many of the earth’s species.

“Carbon dioxide is a necessary part of the photosynthetic process that allows plants to grow,” said the University of Tokyo’s Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke. “But the massive amounts of carbon dioxide produced by Joe Biden could prove to be too much for even the hardiest vegetation to process.”

Ha-ha, good parody of Biden and global warming news stories. Or maybe it isn’t a parody after seeing this real story from Yahoo News (HT: Psycmeistr’s Ice Palace):

New source of global warming gas found: plants
LONDON (Reuters) – German scientists have discovered a new source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is second only to carbon dioxide in its impact on climate change

The culprits are plants.

They produce about 10 to 30 percent of the annual methane found in the atmosphere, according to researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany.

The scientists measured the amount of methane released by plants in controlled experiments. They found it increases with rising temperatures and exposure to sunlight.

“Significant methane emissions from both intact plants and detached leaves were observed … in the laboratory and in the field,” Dr Frank Keppler and his team said in a report in the journal Nature.

Methane, which is produced by city rubbish dumps, coal mining, flatulent animals, rice cultivation and peat bogs, is one of the most potent greenhouse gases in terms of its ability to trap heat.

Concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere have almost tripled in the last 150 years. About 600 million tonnes worldwide are produced annually.

The scientists said their finding is important for understanding the link between global warming and a rise in greenhouse gases.

The evidence is conclusive; Sen. Joe Biden is a vegetable (further testing will need to be done, but I’m guessing he’s either lima bean or rutabaga.) He must be stopped if the world is to be saved!

Where did everybody go?

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When the Judiciary Committee finished slanderingquestioning Justice Alito it convened for an executive session and then returned to hear testimony from other witnesses – many of them fellow judges significantly more liberal than Sam Alito – testify on behalf of their colleague. At least, some of the Committee returned. Diane Feinstein was the only Democrat in attendance once the cameras were pointed toward the witnesses. Given the time her missing cohorts spent regurgitating MoveOn and NARAL accusations (see post below), one might surmise that the Democratic senators were tidying up in the Senate washroom, or visiting the dry-cleaners. Or perhaps trying to figure out how they were going to explain this fiasco to George Soros.

You’d think, however, as John Hinderaker at Powerline pointed out, that they’d take advantage or their last, best opportunity to really find out what kind of judge Alito might be.

This is truly extraordinary. Extraordinary that Judge Alito’s colleagues have turned out to defend him against the Democrats’ smears; extraordinary that the Democrats themselves couldn’t be bothered to stick around to hear what this distinguished group of judges had to say. After all, if the Democrats were actually interested in what kind of judge Sam Alito is, these are precisely the witnesses who could tell them. If the Democrats really thought that Alito’s judicial opinions reflect poorly on him, these are exactly the people who could answer their questions, and, if they are correct, confirm their fears. But the Democrats apparently knew that wasn’t going to happen. The only conclusion one can draw is that the Democrats knew they were smearing a fine man and a fine judge. But the fact that they didn’t even have the decency or respect to stay and listen to Alito’s colleagues is disgusting.

Call me paranoid, but I’m struck by the fact that none of the news services seem to have taken a picture of the Senate panel, denuded of Democrats during the judges’ testimony. When Alito was testifying, there were countless shots of Kennedy, Schumer, Leahy, et al.; now, mysteriously, there are no pictures of the Senators.

On a related note, Sisyphus at Nihilist in Golf Pants has his final verbosity index scorecard, compiled from hearing transcripts published in the Washington Post, showing how many words each Committee member used in “questioning” Justice Alito and comparing it to the number of words the nominee used to respond. Check it out.

The Dems and the great technicolor yawn

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Laura Ingraham was asking callers this morning to offer one-word descriptions of the performance of the Judiciary Committee Democrats during the Alito hearings. “Atrocious,” “disgusting” and “vile” were offered, along with a word that I thought was particularly apt, though Laura wasn’t sure what it meant: execrable.

The word that popped into my head, however, was “bulimic”. Sure, “vomitous” would work nearly as well, but bulimic is the choice because all of the wretched retching by Teddy “Mr. Creosote” Kennedy, Up-Chuck Schumer, Blow Biden, et al, was entirely self-induced. Gorged by the cheers (and money) of their far-left masters, bloated by the rhetoric and war chants leading up to the hearings predicting a beating for the nominee, burping the emetic threat of a fili-gut-buster, they sought to poke a finger in the eye of the Bush administration and ended up sticking it down their own throats instead.

Not only that, but they threw everything they had at Justice Alito and it had all the stopping power of a blueberry thrown against a locomotive. Yeah, it will leave a stain, but mostly on their own shoes. This was supposed to be the battle to show the administration that it couldn’t get a conservative, white male, pro-life nominee past the Watchdogs of (In)Decency and it failed. It does make you wonder what they can possibly do if there’s another SCOTUS vacancy in the next year and a conservative, pro-life black woman is nominated. You’d like to think that an important lesson has been learned, but you also know how it is with dogs returning to their vomit.

Hijinks and drinking games at the Alito confirmation

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Reading and listening to the speechifying, as opposed to actual questioning, being conducted by Senators Kennedy, Biden, Durbin, Leahy, Feinstein, Feingold and others — and Justice Alito’s largely stoic response — puts me in mind of some of the (regrettable) drinking games from my college days.

The point of games like Buzzz, Indian and Cardinal Puff were to give the contestants an apparently easy task to do or repeat, but complicate it with innumerable distractions or bizarre behavior in order to cause a slip. That has to be the explanation for the embarrassing behavior of these senators as they ramble, ramble, drone, hem and haw their way through their “questions” as if this was billable time for them. They’re apparently hoping to so benumb the nominee that he might lose his focus and slip with a comment (such as “are you on drugs?”) that they can exploit. It’s a desperate strategy that shows how weak their position must be; certainly if they had a valid legal point or argument they’d have brought it to the fore by now — if not to dismantle the nominee, at least for the sake of their own credibility.

Instead of a debate this has turned into a test of endurance which Justice Alito should be able to weather as long as his ears don’t begin to bleed. Meanwhile the Kenneday, et al, are coming across like lubricated frat boys trying to outdo each other in coming up with hazing tactics. Meanwhile Sam Alito, the supposed right wing freak, is looking as sober as — well, as a judge.

A real paper chase

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The National Center for Public Policy Research is attending the UN Climate Change Conferences in Montreal and distributing “emissions credits” — printed on toilet paper.

I’m guessing that there are more than a few flushed faces around the table as a result.

Policy Group Distributes Toilet Paper ‘Emissions Credits’ at U.N. Global Warming Conference

Montreal, Canada – The National Center for Public Policy Research is handing out “emissions credits” printed on toilet paper at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal today, to symbolize the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and the futility of emissions trading schemes.

Under the European Union’s “CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme,” companies are allotted credits that allow them to emit a fixed amount of carbon dioxide. Companies that reduce their carbon dioxide output, and thus don’t use all of their credits, can sell them to companies who are exceeding their C02 allotments.

As the flawed Kyoto treaty is all but dead, emissions credits aren’t likely to be of any value in the future.

“Emissions credits aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on,” said David Ridenour, Vice President of The National Center, “Unless, of course, that paper happens to be toilet paper.”

Read the whole story and see a picture here.

Filings: What can we glean from social justice?

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My wife accepted an invitation from a friend of ours and has attended a couple of Social Justice Bible Studies. The invite came out of a conversation she and this friend, a Christian, had about his Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker and his belief that conservative Christians who criticize the federal welfare program aren’t concerned about the poor. To our friend’s way of thinking, this behavior is breaking faith with a fundamental premise of Christianity (and don’t we consider ourselves fundamentalists?).

There are certainly a lot of places where you can begin in taking on that argument, but my wife decided to start by going to the Bible study to hear what they were talking about, in part because she was really curious about what the group meant by “social justice.”

The group’s focus, as I’ve said, is on helping the poor and what we need to do as a nation to rectify this injustice. After my wife’s last visit I was curious as to what scriptures the group was using to support their position that this is the government’s responsibility and not that of the church or of Christians as individuals. The leader that time had cited either Leviticus 19:10 (“And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather [every] grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I [am] the LORD your God.”) or Deuteronomy 24:21 (“When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean [it] afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.”)

Well that’s pretty clear direction, but where the leader was missing it, in my opinion, was making the leap that the if people weren’t following that instruction then it became the government’s responsibility — ostensibly from a desire to do good — to pass a law requiring it. Oh, the peril of good intentions (and unintended consequences)!

It’s my take that when you’re trying to determine the nature or intent of God you should look for where the relationship is. Whether with the first Adam or the second, and through all the prophets in between and the apostles that came after, God has shown he is interested in establishing relationships, both between himself and people, and people to people. Now, in the case of the social justice bunch, it may seem like a natural step for God-fearing people to reflect this desire by delegating to their government the authority to act for this good. To me, though, that is also the first step leading to replacing a relationship between God and man with a relationship between man and the other big G – government.

Let’s play out the example of the gleaners. Man, or the church, through hardness of heart, is not leaving the gleanings for the poor. In an effort to be righteous (and concern that others aren’t being righteous enough), people get together and direct the government to pass a law requiring that gleanings be left. Then, if the poor aren’t doing a good enough job of picking up the gleanings (or if the more motivated ones are out-hustling the infirm or indolent) someone gets the bright idea that maybe they should put some of the poor to work collecting the gleanings and bringing the second harvest in where it can be distributed more equitably. If the people hired to do this were among the more ambitious ones mentioned earlier, they soon see that they get the same share no matter how much effort they put in to picking up the food.

Now, before the law was passed a poor man might pray and ask God to help him find the means to feed his family. Coming upon a field just harvested, he might thank God for bringing him to that place and giving him the strength and ability to collect the food his family needed. Maybe even a landowner passes by at that time and sees the man is diligent and offers him a job. After a time of living under the government’s rule, however, that man (or his now grown children) starts to see the law, not God, as his source and the excess harvest as something he’s entitled to; not because he’s a child of God, but simply because he’s poor. Furthermore, bitterness might start to set in and he starts to wonder why the owner of the field gets to have first pick, and why, instead of just leaving what falls during the harvest and what collects in the corners of the field, he can’t start also leaving every third row unharvested for the poor as well. Of course then the government has to hire more people to collect the additional food. The poor man’s belly might be full, but what is in his heart and his spirit? What was the result of all those good intentions?

And what benefit does the landowner get by doing it God’s way in the first place rather than being hard-hearted and subjected to government fiat? Well, certainly less interference in his life on a business level, but he also gains favor with God by following his commands and escapes judgment as well. As I’ve written before, when I stand before God and he asks if I helped the poor I’m not going to get very far saying, “Well, I paid my taxes!” Perhaps the most insidious harm from the welfare state isn’t the trap it creates for those who live from it, but that it disconnects everyone else from realizing their responsibility to get directly involved.

It’s a lesson that bears repeating even for those who are receptive, and I know that I don’t always get high marks on this test. Yet my family has at times taken people into our home, helped other people move into homes, and bought groceries or medical care for those who needed these things. Where possible we’ve also tried to disciple others so they could learn they can trust God and also avoid behaviors that might put them back in the same place. When the time comes when these people have no longer needed direct help from us or our church, we’ve been genuinely happy for their success and progress. If, however, it was my job as a government employee to distribute these things then I’d have to worry that if I was too successful I’d be out of a job myself!

Finally, I give the social justice group credit for wanting to do God’s work. I wonder, however, if they are as quick in desiring that the government enforce by law other scriptural commands such as those dealing with adultery and homosexuality. Perhaps my wife will raise this question at a future meeting. She finds the meetings pretty interesting and the conversation polite even though there are significant differences of interpretation and doctrine between her and a couple of the group leaders. She feels she is getting something out of it by hearing other perspectives, and hopes that the others are also benefiting. She plans to keep going back as long as they’ll have her.

It is, after all, all about relationships.

Update:

Similar thoughts are in this post from Stones Cry Out.

Reason, facts gone with the wind?

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The Missing Link isn’t just bedeviling evolutionary theory, but could be a problem for those trying to connect increased hurricane activity with global warming. As this National Center article by David Ridenour describes, the global warming/hurricane link may just be hot air:

An August article in the San Francisco Chronicle warned, “As the United States experiences more… out-of-season hurricanes like this summer’s, more Americans will recognize what the rest of the world has long accepted: Global warming is here, it will get worse…”1

This analysis has a critical flaw: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says the hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30.2

That would make summer hurricanes in-season, wouldn’t it?

And there’s another little problem with the Chronicle warning: Much of the global warming that occurred during the last century occurred from 1900-1940, followed by a cooling period that lasted from about 1940 to 1975.

A comparison of hurricane severity against the warming/cooling trends finds that we had an above average number of hurricanes in the 50s and 60s – when the Earth was cooling.

Hurricane severity is governed by a natural Atlantic Ocean temperature cycle that lasts decades. Following the identified pattern, Atlantic hurricanes were especially prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, were less so from about 1970 to 1994, and, since 1995, have been prevalent again.3

Talk of a link between global warming and increased incidence of hurricanes is just hot air, nothing more.

As Christopher W. Landsea, a scientist with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, has noted, “It is highly unlikely that global warming has (or will) contribute to a drastic change in the number and intensity of hurricanes.”

Landsea found that the number of intense hurricanes (those reaching Saffir-Simpson scale ratings of 3, 4, or 5) actually decreased in the Atlantic during the 1970s and 1980s.4 And from 1991 to 1994, the Atlantic had fewer hurricanes than any four-year period on record, with an average of less than four hurricanes per year.5

The article shows that while there has been more activity the last couple of years, the most severe storms have been in the past. The most intense hurricanes according to barometric pressure were the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 and Hurricane Camille in 1969 (Katrina is third). If you go by wind speed at landfall, Camille, Andrew (1992) and the 1935 hurricane were the worst. In terms of lives lost, the Galveston Hurricane (1900) and Okeechobee Hurricane (1928) were more more devastating than Katrina (it could be argued on this count that there was less warning in the 1900 and 1928 hurricanes which may have contributed to higher death tolls; as Katrina showed, however, having plenty of warning may be of limited value).

There is also evidence that warmer weather may actually reduce hurricane activity.

Even if the planet does eventually warm, it’s not clear that either the incidence or intensity of hurricanes would increase.

Patrick Michaels, a research professor in environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, has noted, “Atlantic hurricanes are much more delicate than their destruction suggests. One thing they cannot tolerate is a west wind blowing into them because it wrecks their symmetry. As a result, their maximum winds decline.”9

These are precisely the conditions that exist during El Ninos – weather phenomena that some scientists believe increase with rising global temperatures.

If they are right, this would mean that global warming might be expected to result in less severe hurricanes.

Other studies suggest that higher global temperatures would also result in fewer hurricanes.

A 1990 study of temperature data by Drs. Robert Balling, Sherwood Idso and Randall Cerveny spanning 41 years found that the warmest years had fewer hurricane days, on average, than the coldest years.

These findings are consistent with the earlier historical record. The most severe storms in the North Sea, for example, occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, after the onset of the Little Ice Age.10

Nature, not man-made global warming, causes hurricanes.

My father has been known to describe certain people as being “Windier than a sackful of…” well, I won’t use that kind of language on this blog. The description may be more than apt in describing the warming-mongers who may be more interested in “cause and elect” than “cause and effect.”

Follow the link and read the entire article (HT: Amy Ridenour). An interesting and humorous historical analysis can also be found here.