10 Years without Global Warming and Counting

In 2001 Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University presented a paper in Boston at the national Geological Society of America meeting Saying that we were going into a 30 year cooling cycle.

Dr Easterbrook said,

"You should have seen the stunned look on people’s faces. We’d just had the 1998 warm peak and people were astonished. I said, look at the data and forget CO2."

His paper correlated 30 year warming and cooling cycles with solar activity and was confident that upcoming cooling cycle is inevitable. Read an interview with him here.

Dr. Easterbrook clarifies this chart as follows,

“The projected warming from ~2040 to ~2070 is NOT driven by CO2, it’s merely a continuation of warm/cool cycles over the past 500 years, long before man-made CO2 could have been a factor. We’ve been warming up from the Little Ice Age at rate of about 1 degree or so per century and the 2040-70 projection is simply a continuation of non-AGW cycles.

An interesting question is the similarity between what we are seeing now with sun spots and global temperature and the drop into the Little Ice Age from the Medieval Warm Period. Could we be about to repeat that? Only time will tell–We might see a more pronounced cool period like the 1880 to 1910 cool cycle (when many temp records were set) or a milder cooling like the 1945-1977 cool cycle. In any case, the setting up of the cool phase of the PDO seems to suggest cooler times ahead, not the catastrophic warming predicted by IPCC and Al Gore.”

Dr. Easterbrook further notes that NASA says the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) had shifted to its cool phase (Fig. Below) and is right on schedule as predicted by past climate and PDO changes. He emphasizes that this PDO change

"is not an oddity superimposed upon and masking the predicted severe warming by the IPCC."

This PDO cooling phase could last 20-30 years and just reinforces his solar cycle cooling phase.

Now scientists from Germany are saying in Nature (supplemental info) that global warming could take a break in the next decade thanks to a natural shift in ocean circulations.

From AFP - They base the prediction on what they believe is an impending change in the Gulf Stream -- the conveyor belt that transports warm surface water from the tropical Atlantic to the northern Atlantic and returns cold water southwards at depth.

The Gulf Stream will temporarily weaken over the next decade, in line with what has happened regularly in the past, the researchers say.

This will lead to slightly cooler temperatures in the North Atlantic and in North America and Europe, and also help the temperatures in the tropical Pacific to remain stable, they suggest.

Just to be clear the authors state the following,

"We are not stating that anthropogenic [man-made] climate change won't be as bad as previously thought," said Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, northern Germany.

"What we are saying is that on top of the warming trend, there is a long-periodic oscillation that will probably lead to a lower temperature increase than we would expect from the current trend during the next years."

They didn't discuss if their model accounts for the fact that there has been no warming for the last 10 years.

So if Dr. Eastbrook's solar cycle theory is correct and the PDO lasts as long as 20-30 years we will have cooling. Now add to that the Atlantic conveyor weakening and this could be a cooling as deep as 1880-1910. We'll know soon enough.

(Article and supplement via Watts Up With That)

Barack Obama's Credibility Problem

Obama this week threw his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, under the bus just like his grandmother in his speech on race. Why did Barack wait until this past weekend to dropkick Rev. Wright? The Pastor didn't say anything different then in his previous sermons.

Don't get me wrong I think Pastor Wright does a disservice to those he preaches to spreading this theology of victim hood and instilling further hate in the young growing up in his church.

So why did Barack feign shock now? Does he still think we're stupid? Does he think we believe that he didn't know that his pastor had this side to him? Everyone else in the church knew their pastor. Everyone in Chicago knew the good and bad about Jeremiah Wright. But Barack Obama, legal scholar, was clueless?

No, No, No, No! Barack wasn't clueless. He knows full well what his preacher is about and still he brings his little girls to learn the theology of victim hood.

The only thing new that Pastor Wright said was a little known truth. What was this truth? What truth is so shocking that Barack Obama had to toss his Pastor aside?

Pastor Wright bottom-lined the whole thing when he said that Barack said what he had to say in the speech, distancing himself a little from the Pastor, because Barack is just a "politician" that says what he thinks the people want to hear.

Of course the pastor and Barack talked last year about this dance that is occurring between Wright and Obama. In April of 2007 in a New York Times article: Pastor Wright is quoted as saying,

“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”

This well choreographed dance is too slick for even "Slick Willie." The entire concept that Barack didn't know his pastor just doesn't pass the smell test. It just isn't credible.

Obama Too Good for Small Town America

Barack again revealed his true disdain for "ordinary Americans."

During a fundraiser of fellow elitist, wealthy donors in San Francisco that was closed to the press Barack said the following in an answer to a question about whether he was having trouble courting working-class voters

""You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them, and they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." "

So for 25 years small town America has clung to guns and religion and antipathy... whooaaa! Let me say this in small town American language,

It's not surprising then they've chose to be angry, gun toting, bible thumping, bigoted, anti-immigrant, protectionists as a way to explain their frustrations.

This is just another example of Barack and his wife's elitist attitude. They have refined an incredibly leftist socialist outlook on how things should be.

Electric Cars Move Over

How would you feel about a car that gets over 100 miles per gallon, seats six, has a 35 cubic foot trunk and a top speed of 96mph. Not good enough for all you greens out there? How about the fact that it emits less then 1/4 the total emissions of the Toyota Prius. Of course if it is going under 35 miles per hour there are no emissions but cold pure clean filtered air.

What powers this car? Air. You heard it, compressed air. An onboard compressor allows the tanks to be recharged in 2-4 hours but once air stations are on line the tanks should be able to be charged up in 3 minutes. This Air Car has a supplemental energy source to kick in north of 35 mph, ZPM says. A custom heating chamber heats the air in a process officials refused to elaborate upon, though they insisted it would increase volume and thus the car’s range and speed. 8 gallons of fuel will get you 800 plus miles.

What's the catch? As always it must be too expensive. Not in this case, ZPM expects to sell the cars for $17,800 starting in early 2010.

So to sum it up:

ZPM said it plans to produce a six-seat, four-door family-sized version of its compressed air vehicle to the U.S. market. this model will achieve over 100 mpg, over 90 mph capability, have zero to low CO2 emissions, offer plenty of space for luggage, meet all safety requirements, and cost no more than an average midsize car. The first compressed air car is expected to roll off the production line for US purchase in 2010 and cost around US$18,000.

Obama Doesn't question

"white-hating, anti-American" Sentiment

I was updating my blogroll and checked out Prestopundit for the first time in years and he has the following quote at the top of his page.

"Questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with [a white-hating, anti-American follower of Louis Farrakhan]." -- Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father

Not having read the book I am ignorant of the context but I am curious if the "white-hating, anti-American follower of Louis Farrakhan" is his pastor or an old college pal? Whether or not this was his pastor that he quarreled with it appears that Obama agreed with the "white-hating, anti-American" sentiment. He just didn't think that was a very effective public stand.

Obama's Consultant, CEO of Passport Gate

CNN reports that the latest employee to breach passport security works for a company whose CEO consults for Obama. Interesting that this employee is the only one of the three not to have been fired. Just when the campaign desperately needed to change the subject from Pastor Wright.

Coincidence? Most likely, but curious non the less.

The CEO of a company whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates is a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, a source said Saturday.

John O. Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp., advises the Illinois Democrat on foreign policy and intelligence issues, the source said.

Brennan briefed the media on behalf of the campaign this month.

The executive is a former senior CIA official and former interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

He contributed $2,300 to the Obama campaign in January.

When asked about the contribution, a State Department official told CNN's Zain Verjee, "We ethically awarded contracts. Political affiliation is not one of the factors that we check."

Read the rest of the article

Al Gore's Religion is Based on Flawed Doctrine

Geoff Metcalf reports on a Washington Times commentary.

It turns out the latest underreported bad news for disciples of the gospel according to Al Gore is that reports by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are "flawed and cannot be supported."

Commentary By H. Sterling Burnett

In a 2001 report, the IPCC published an image commonly referred to as the "hockey stick." This graph showed relatively stable temperatures from A.D. 1000 to 1900, with temperatures rising steeply from 1900 to 2000. The IPCC and public figures, such as former Vice President Al Gore, have used the hockey stick to support the conclusion that human energy use over the last 100 years has caused unprecedented rise global warming.

However, several studies cast doubt on the accuracy of the hockey stick, and in 2006 Congress requested an independent analysis of it. A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC's peer review process. For example, the researchers who created the hockey stick used the wrong time scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded temperatures of the last century. Because the mean temperature was low, the recent temperature rise seemed unusual and dramatic. This error was not discovered in part because statisticians were never consulted.

Furthermore, the community of specialists in ancient climates from which the peer reviewers were drawn was small and many of them had ties to the original authors - 43 paleoclimatologists had previously coauthored papers with the lead researcher who constructed the hockey stick.

These problems led Mr. Wegman's team to conclude that the idea that the planet is experiencing unprecedented global warming "cannot be supported."

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