“Happens all the time.”

Yes.  It can and does.  Frequently.

We blame Global Warming.  Also, Tony Abbott.

Next?

-via @AwkwardMsgs1111

Congrats to ‘Watts Up With That’ – 100,000,000 Page Views and Counting…

W00T to WUWT on their “small milestone”, reached sometime this morning (8am-ish January 7th US Pacific time; the wee hours of the 8th Aussie time).

So wander over, offer your congratulations and thanks to Anthony Watts for his tireless efforts to bring some sanity – and SCIENCE – back to the discussion of nature, weather, technology and global warming climate change, check out Christopher Monckton’s guest post Hurrah for 8 orders of magnitude! and make sure to have a browse through some of the WUWT classics reposted here.

As Tim Blair noted in his recent post PEAK LOVE, “Climate panic is in decline…”  And though the self-inflicted damage of the content of the Climategate emails and many of the stupid hyperbole-ridden ham-handed advertising and “awareness” campaigns by the Warmies themselves (and their Love Media enablers) are partly to credit for the loss of credibility of the Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming’s Gonna Kill Us All®  movement, much credit must really go to the big guns of the bloggy “Deniosphere” such as Anthony Watts, Andrew Bolt, James Delingpole and our own Blogfather Tim Blair.

“Ha ha Warmist losers. For you the war is over.”

Townhall meeting coming to a venue near you

OK, so PM Gillard reckons The Debate We Never Had™ is over, but that doesn’t mean – oh no siree – that folks aren’t standing up to have their say.

A townhall meeting in Brisbane:

Mr Hockey said merchants at a Brisbane market this morning told him they would not be able to pass on the cost of an estimated 10 per cent rise in electricity without sacking staff.

“Time and time again, as we went past every store, all the workers were coming out and saying ‘you have to stop this tax’,” he said.

Read on.

Our Langolier government

Most of you probably remember the book and/or movie, The Langoliers. Those little creatures would gobble up, or destroy if you will, everything – matter, space, time – they came across.

In a sense, the Gillard (and previously, Rudd) government has many similarities. Everything her Langolier eyes set themselves upon, they destroy.

The list is unbelievable.

Read the rest of this entry

Green deceivers

The latest Green commercial states that “storms are more extreme and more frequent”.

This is flat out wrong. In fact, the opposite is true.

Yes. Storm frequency and intensity has actually gone down the past 30 years. Here’s data collected by Dr. Ryan Maue Ph.D at Florida State University.

Continue reading this entry

Agreed, Jill Singer: the nonsense has to stop

Jill Singer supports a carbon (dioxide!) tax. Unfortunately, she shows a complete ignorance of the real science behind the politics.

THE “debate” over a carbon tax in Australia has become high farce.

Indeed it has. The Left seem to think that taxing the bejesus out of a trace gas will somehow save a planet that doesn’t need saving. Jill and her ilk fail to realise CO2 is only a minor greenhouse gas at that. It makes up only 0.04% of our atmosphere. Most of it is natural. The sceptical side has man-made CO2 at 3% or about 0.001% of our atmosphere. The alarmist side puts man-made CO2 at ten times higher. But so what? That means man-made CO2 would occupy 0.01% of our atmosphere.

There’s no way Man’s small contribution to a minor greenhouse trace gas – yet an essential gas, most of it naturally occurring – can be the main driver of climate. That hypothesis is, to use Jill’s words, a “high farce”.

Read more of this post

A request

Currently watching Gasland on youtube. It’s all about how bad fracking is. Even Alan Jones doesn’t seem to like it.

Also watched a reply on youtube from the gas industry saying it’s basically OK.

Hmm. Watching people being able to light their tap water on fire looks pretty bad, to say the least…

A few readers and writers here are involved in the mining industry (right?). Is anyone able to give us a basic run down on whether fracking really is a total disaster the environment or whether it’s the best thing since bourbon whisky was invented… or somewhere in between?

In return, tits!

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE

A hot redhead explains in 6 minutes what an entire night of documentary and lecture watching does.

Angus Dei would be proud.

(edited)

Gavin Atkins and the Search for the 50 Million Missing ‘Climate Refugees’

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.

Gavin Atkins has been doing a series over at Asian Correspondent trying to track down these 50 million missing climate refugees and I thought I’d keep a list of his articles on the subject here, for ease of reference.

What happened to the climate refugees? (April 11, 2011)

Cover up: UN tries to erase failed climate refugee prediction (April 16, 2011)

50m climate refugee claims: It’s all about money for the UN (April 19, 2011)

Reaction to the 50 million climate refugee prediction (April 22, 2011)

The origins of the 50 million climate refugees prediction (April 23, 2011)

50m climate refugees? New Scientist can’t find them either (May 5, 2011)

50 million climate refugees – the search continues (May 9, 2011)

The Alaskan climate refugees who never left (June 14, 2011)

Asian Correspondent makes it to the Beeb:  Gavin Atkins talks to Hannah Barnes from BBC radio 4 about the missing 50 million climate refugees story  (June 16, 2011)

I’ll try to keep this list updated as the hunt continues.

…as I told him after his May 9 article was published, “Mate, you’re gonna need a bigger milk carton” 🙂
Anyone with Photoshop skills out there want to step up..?

Human Achievement Hour 2011 [Open Thread]

Enlightenment or endarkenment? Earth Hour or Hour of Power?  South Korea or North Korea (go ask James Board aka bingbing about how that’s working out)…?

Consider this an #EarthHour #HourOfPower #HumanAchievementHour open thread.  Feel free to add any links, pics or videos in comments, and other Tizona peeps with editing privileges should fee free to add them to this post.  Let’s recognise and celebrate the incredible accomplishments of the human race, and offer our cheers to those who keep the lights on and produce the energy that makes human achievement possible!

UPDATE 1:   Earth Hour enthusiast Ben Cubby asks:  Where will you be when lights go out? Your answers go here.

UPDATE 2:  West Australian folk-rock group The Waifs – Lighthouse

UPDATE 3:  Western Australia – Even Our Warmies Are Smarter… “The Chairman of Western Australia’s largest sustainability program says Earth Hour is tokenistic and a waste of time.”

UPDATE 4:  Nice essay by Julie Kirsten Novak at CatallaxyFiles on Human Achievement Hour & the Neo-Primitives (H/T Bolta)

UPDATE 5:  Ben-Peter Terpstra (@WKNDLibertarian):  Turn on your lights and celebrate ‘Human Achievement Hour’ [American Thinker]

UPDATE 6:   Tim Blair rounds up some Earth Hour winners & losers.

UPDATE 7:  More ideas on how to celebrate Human Achievement Hour

Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste: Earthquake? Tsunami? Global Warming!!!

We all knew this was going to happen – it was just a matter of “when”.  As it turns out, it didn’t take very long at all.

Hours after a massive earthquake rattled Japan, environmental advocates connected the natural disaster to global warming.  The president of the European Economic and Social Committee, Staffan Nilsson, issued a statement calling for solidarity in tackling the global warming problem.

“Some islands affected by climate change have been hit,” said Nilsson. “Has not the time come to demonstrate on solidarity – not least solidarity in combating and adapting to climate change and global warming?”

“Mother Nature has again given us a sign that that is what we need to do,” he added.

Lee Doren of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has been collecting some of the highlights – er, lowlights – via Twitter.  See them here at The Daily Caller.

UPDATE:  “Global warming alarmists are to natural disasters what the Westboro Baptist Church is to military funerals.” Just so.

UPDATE 2:  Tim Blair on Anthropogenic Tectonic Warming®.  You know it makes sense!

h/t @LDoren, @JTlol, @DailyCaller

Counterintuitive

I’ve carefully analyzed this video in search of greater meaning and I’ve noticed what Victoria’s Secret thinks sells : a limited color scheme, girls throwing things, girls sniffing things and girls biting things.

Also, there are flowers to subconsciously make people think of “pollination.” Well, the commercial made me think of pollination.

Being a bit of a philistine, I might have thought the way to sell lingerie would be to make a commercial with girls taking their clothes off. Apparently, Victoria’s Secret disagrees; one of the girls was pulling her stockings on. It seems, the professional way to sell lingerie is by having girls put clothes on. Weird.

POLL: Does Australia Need A Climate Commissar?

The Australia is running a poll: Is Tim Flannery the right person to be Australia’s climate commissioner?

They assume that Australia needs a “Climate Commissioner” in the first place.

We encourage readers to vote early and often.

Ref: See this, this, this and this via Mean Ol’ Meany Tim Blair for background.

Cool thing makes gun laws useless?

This is possibly the coolest “toy” Ive ever seen.

Its a printer.

Its a 3D printer

Its a 3D printer that makes almost any object it has a design template for….

Its a MakerBot “Thing-O-Matic”

The daily mail has a reasonable write up on the machine, including this picture of geek lust in action…

Morton wondered if there were plans for a lady sized model any time soon....

 

However a little section in the write up got me thinking…

“But its creators say future models could combine plastic with metals – allowing them to make electronic gadgets at the push of a button.”

Id give it about 1 week after the metals model was introduced before the first pistols/pistol parts are available for sale. So how would gun control work after you can produce your own?

Al Gore vs the Unabomber

Who said what? Take the quiz!

*cross-posted

V2G: close but no cigar

OK, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but last night on Discovery HD World, after the main show, there was a little 10 minute clip on a mini program called e-nnovations (*groan*), or, apparently, Discovery Tech over in the US.

Anyway, the segment was about a new type of electric car that uses Vehicle-to-Grid or V2G technology. At first, perhaps, this sounds like a pretty neat concept. Charge your car off the grid in off-peak times then sell the electricity back to the grid during peak times.

But check out the nitty gritty, and it’s not such a sweet deal. And odd, too, that in 10 web pages I looked up (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10), all of them espouse the wonderful benefits, but none of them mentioned the cost.

Only the video did.

For starters, these V2G units cost about $70,000. So effectively, you will be paying four times more for your average car. Dr Willet Kempton, at the University of Delaware, who’s the bloke plugging this type of car, also acknowledges that if most of your electricity comes from coal (which it does), then the CO2 emissions end up being about the same as a regular car.

So far, we’re at four times the cost for pretty much no benefit.

Then he notes that if we use renewables like wind and solar energy, then, of course (?) the CO2 emissions will go down. But that means the cost will go up, not to mention that wind and solar baseload power is, at present, completely unreliable.

Maybe if we switched to nuclear power…

And how’s this? It seems to be that in the video, the doctor charges up his car at the university, then takes it home to power his house… and a few neighbours’ houses.

How convenient.

So overall, it seems like a neat idea on the surface, and may well work after quite a few more years of R&D, but at present it is at best a gimmick, and at worst a fraud.

PS They don’t exactly go for 500-odd kilometres, either.

*cross-posted at bing’s

Climategate hits NASA

According to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, three out of the four main temperature data sets in the world are irrevocably corrupted or even fabricated. And NASA’s data set can’t really be used because they took their data from CRU (East Anglia), where this whole Climategate mess began. Not only that, there has been significant collusion between climate scientists and reporters to keep the alarmist message on track.

Heck, it’s being argued that NASA themselves knew their data was poor, but did they tell us that?

Pajamas has a few good articles on this. We also see Lord Monckton having a go at the Nature editorial staff, too.

The once-respected science journal Nature recently published a whining editorial to the effect that climate scientists are not criminals, really; that attacks on them by increasingly-skeptical news media are soooo unfair; and that the fundamental science showing that the planet is doomed unless the economies of the West are shut down at once is unchallengeable.

No doubt most climate scientists are not criminals. However, some are. Many of the two dozen Climategate emailers, who have for years driven the IPCC process, tampered with peer review in the learned journals, and fabricated, altered, concealed, or destroyed scientific data are criminals. Whether they or Nature like it or not, they will eventually stand trial, and deservedly so.

Here’s a neat video, too.

Even some who bought the man-made global warming line must surely be having doubts as to whether to rush in gigantic climate taxes.

*cross-posted at James Board

Finally, a Hybrid Automobile I Wouldn’t Be Embarrassed to Drive

Read it and smile.

“Porsche lifted the sheet on the 918 Spyder on the eve of the Geneva Motor Show and made some huge claims. A few things got our attention right off the bat — 500 horsepower, mid-engine V-8 and two electric motors. Oh … and 78.4 mpg.

Lots more pretty pictures at the source.

I’ll continue to be scarce until sometime in April. Weird stuff; some good, some not.

More Laser Awe: Laser Mosquito Zapper

Living in south central Texas as I do, my back yard needs one of these.

Beautiful.

Airborne Laser Destroys Ballistic Missile in Test

This is freaking awesome:

This is a test tracking, yesterday the real deal shot down an actual ballistic missile in the boost phase. I’m guessing it looked similar to the above test, but with a big explosion at the end. Can’t wait to see that one.

More here.

“Futuristic airborne energy weapons have officially arrived, so mark your calendars. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency said that its airborne laser weapon successfully shot down a ballistic missile during a test late last night, according to Reuters.

The lethal intercept followed up on a demo last August that showed how the airborne laser could paint a target missile in-flight. We showcased the video of the earlier test that showed the laser from the modified 747 jumbo jet tracking the dummy rocket, which took place near San Nicolas Island off the California coast. Yesterday’s shoot-down occurred at Point Mugu’s Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range off Ventura in central California.”

No word yet on the photon torpedoes.

Dinosaur in Living Technicolor

This is way cooler than Avatar.

“A team of paleontologists at Yale University say they’ve been able to determine the actual colors of an extinct species of dinosaur.

While many of the illustrations of dinosaurs we see in movies and books are striking, the truth is that much of the way we depict our jurassic friends is based on educated guesswork. But a few teams of scientists now say they have been able to determine a dinosaur’s coloring with more precision. And one dino, in particular, has been color-mapped from head plume to toe.

Anchiornis huxleyi was a four-winged, feathered dinosaur that lived during the late Jurassic period in China. And, according to researchers, it had a mostly gray body with black and white striped wings and a sweet orange mohawk atop its beaked (and toothy) head.

The team, led by Yale professor Richard Prum, analyzed melanosomes (the melanin-containing part of a cell that gives an animal its pigmentation) present in the entire fossil of one animal. That allowed them to determine color variations throughout the body–down to individual feathers.”

Probably tasted like chicken, judging from the looks of it.

I Want a Puffin!

Check out the new NASA personal aircraft concept.

“Don’t let the cuddly name fool you; as far as specs are concerned the Puffin is no slouch. Its 12-feet height and 13.5-feet wingspan mean it’s big, but of manageable stature. In theory it can cruise at 150 miles per hour and sprint at more like 300 miles per hour. Since the craft is electrically propelled it doesn’t need air intake, so thinning air is not a limitation, meaning it can reach — again, in theory — 30,000 feet before limitations on battery power force it to descend (clearly the pilot would need a pressurized cabin or oxygen tanks at that altitude, but we’re just talking raw physical capability here).
The Puffin’s range would be the most limiting characteristic, at just 50 miles, but that’s simply a matter of battery density. Batteries are growing more dense by the day, so in coming years that range could be drastically improved.”

No, I didn’t mean this puffin.

But there is a family resemblance, no?

H/T Glenn Reynolds

More Proof that God Hates Al Gore: Mini Ice Age Coming

Well, I’m convinced by things lik this that God hates all the eco-tard Warministas.

“The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.”

Too funny. Here in the northern hemisphere, England has been frozen solid, Florida is having it’s coldest temperatures since the ’80’s, and even here in south Texas the lows are in the teens (F).

UPDATES:

1] The Pope is a Climo-Tard

“VATICAN CITY (AP) – Pope Benedict XVI has denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty by saying world peace depends on the responsible safeguarding of God’s creation.
Benedict issued the admonition in a speech Monday to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican.”

2] Florida Suffers Apocalyptic Freezing

More on Bing’s tip.

“MIAMI — Freakish cold weather continued to grip the southern United States, with snow flurries spotted around Orlando and a record low set for Miami, and forecasters said Sunday that more of the same was expected…

On Saturday night, a temperature of 35 degrees set a record that had stood since 1970, said Joel Rothfuss with the National Weather Service in Miami.

He said a record low of 37 degrees on Monday, which was set in 1927, could also be broken, with the forecast saying it would drop to 35 degrees again.

For the first time in at least 30 years, Miami Metrozoo shut its doors because it was too cold. Atlanta’s zoo was closed because the trails were iced over, officials said. Temperatures in Atlanta stayed around freezing over the weekend. The average high for Atlanta is in the 50 degrees (around 10 Celsius) with lows in the 30s (around 0 Celsius).”

It would be funny, but it’s a real disaster.

“Breen said his Florida town, which raises everything from tropical birds and fish to organic produce and palm trees, was holding on to the little that was left from the cold.

“Everybody is just wiped out. It’s that bad,” he said.”

OK, now can we get back to our gasoline and coal powered lives, please?

If there’s bn cc for 4b years, why ru against it now?

With thanks to Lucanas. Greenie PWND.

Even the Fake Hockey Stick Wouldn’t be Bad if True

This is a very simple but highly effective video presentation that demonstrates just how silly the – fake, manufactured, bogus, bullshit: pick a pejorative adjective – “hockey stick” really is. In a nutshell, even if the “hockey stick” wasn’t a lie concocted by climate pseudo-scientists hiding political and financial agendas, it doesn’t even amount to a significant statistical blip when viewed in the context of the earth’s climate history, which had many much warmer periods before the advent of human civilization.

I don’t call the warm-mongers “climo-tards” for nothing: They are utterly ignorant and vacuous tools, lead by a lying shyster who has a larger personal “carbon footprint” than many undeveloped nations, and who has made himself nearly a billionaire peddling these lies to the gullible brainless. Global warming isn’t a religion – I hate it when people say it is – rather, it is a superstition akin to believing, “if you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.”

Climate-gators at Copenhagen

Well, not surprising the skeptics aren’t getting a good hearing at COP15. After all, this is more a gathering of the faithful than an honest discussion, especially in light of Climategate. At least (and whoulda thunkit?) CNN is finally, belatedly asking some questions.

Yet Oppenheimer’s distortions are jaw dropping in that interview. Nowhere near all glaciers have been studied, sea levels are barely rising, the Arctic ice isn’t melting but has been increasing the past few years, there aren’t 2500 scientists all agreeing, but rather a handful as Climategate proves. Yes, take out CRU and there are other institutions. Hmm, that would include hockey stick Mann at Penn State, who’s stick has been debunked (Mann is being investigated by PSU), and NASAs Goddard Institute whose director James Hansen can’t be trusted. And for any worries about the oceans, just take a look at the observed data compared to the models.

And as for Earth being a closed system and our piddly amount of CO2 (5% of a gas that takes up less than 0.4% of the atmosphere) not letting heat escape from the planet? Bullshit. Again with those models. The red lines are the models, the green lines are the observed data. Anyway, it probably doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for long anyway.

Preaching to the converted here (pardon the pun), but those links are for any folks, and there’s many, still duped by this climate change scam.

NewsBusters has a pretty good piece on that interview and CNN’s coverage.

But back to Copenhagen, and despite a very critical opening few paragraphs, The Financial Times, finally sensing a whiff, gives Monckton et. al. a run.

It was not all political bombast. Several serious scientists, with long paper trails of academic work behind them, delivered power point presentations filled with data and diagrams attempting to show why the mainstream consensus was wrong.

Not really much good or bad news to report so far. Tom Wilson has a short clip covering the rabble that was day two.

If being a sceptic means not being friends with those nutjobs at the start of that video… good.

To be honest, I had more fun today replying to a few brain dead commenters over at Unleashed who were in support of Clive Hamilton, in what has to be one of the most rubbish, condescending, puerile posts ever read.

UPDATE

With thanks to lucanas in comments in another post, some Copenhagen piccies.