About a month ago I e-mailed this message to info@gop.com:

I received an e-mail from you asking me to donate to John McCain’s campaign. My position is very simple. Get McCain to change his mind and commit to extracting oil from ANWR and the lower Gulf of Mexico and I will make a very generous donation to his campaign.

This week he stated that he favors letting the states decide if they want to allow oil exploration and extraction off their shores and that he would reconsider his opposition to drilling in ANWR. That’s not quite what I asked for but it’s close enough. I’m not under any pretense that my message alone caused McCain to change his mind but I feel that I should hold up my end of the bargain.

Here’s my next challenge for McCain. Make this announcement in a major speech and I will make a second contribution of double the amount of the first one: 

As President you will oppose the revival of the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill and that you will veto it if it is passed by Congress. You have reconsidered the pros and cons of the bill and you now feel that the cons outweigh the pros. Chief among the cons is the devastating economic effect on the poor working class.

I have e-mailed the text of this post to the GOP.

On a related note, I heard Barack Obama criticizing McCain’s revised stance on oil drilling. He said that drilling offshore and in ANWR won’t lower fuel prices today, tomorrow, next week, next year or even in five years. Well Barack, what about in six years or ten years? Even at my age I think I might need some fuel ten years from now and would like to think I’ll be able to afford it on my fixed retirement income. I thought leadership was about where we’re going, not where we are.

If you’re interested in considering a thoughtful scientific viewpoint on the global warming issue watch the four-part presentation below. The presenter is Professor Bob Carter from James Cook University in Australia. The total length is about 36 minutes.

It irritates me that the global warming alarmists are always trying to deceive those who aren’t paying close attention to what they are saying. A recent article includes a graph that shows that the planet’s surface temperature has risen more than one degree Fahrenheit in 140 years. The graph is reproduced below. It gives the surface temperature in degrees Fahrenheit versus the year it was measured.

That’s a very dramatic ramp-up in the temperature, right? Have you already forgotten that the actual temperature increase is just over one degree? Well, it’s hard to get people stoked over a one degree rise unless you spice it up a bit. This is like examining the texture of your skin using a microscope.

Now look at the chart below, which shows the exact same data.

Global average temperatures didn’t range from zero to 100 degrees over the displayed timeframe, but many of us are quite familiar with this range of highs and lows. The temperature rise doesn’t look so dramatic from this perspective.

A more deceptive aspect of this though is the implication that the reported temperature data were measured accurately and consistently enough to confidently detect a difference of 1.3 degrees. The measuring stations have changed in number and location over the reported timeframe. The stations’ measurements have been shown to be sensitive to their surroundings and their surroundings have not remained constant.

I don’t know about you but a 1.3 degree rise over 140 years doesn’t seem that alarming to me.

I started to lose confidence in government when, about fifty years ago, it came up with its scheme to “save daylight” by cranking the clock ahead by an hour. A wise old man said that was like cutting off one end of a blanket and sewing it onto the other end to make the blanket longer.
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I saw this advertisement on a web page:

“I Got Scammed 27 Times — Avoid Work At Home Online Scams! I Will Show You The ones That Work.”

Just the person you need to help you avoid scams, right?
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US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has strongly criticized China’s government for seeking to contain the riots in Tibet. I wonder what Pelosi’s position would be if the Hispanics in California started rioting violently and demanding independence from the US. The Tibetans may have a stronger case for independence than the California Hispanics, but why should a member of our government be splitting this hair?
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The debate over the science and evidence of global warming may not be over, as Al Gore likes to insist it is, but it seems to me that it has become irrelevant. Those who expect to profit immensely from government (taxpayer) grants and subsidies seem to be driving the runaway train now.

The Associated Press reports that people in Maine are struggling to keep their homes warm this winter. Many of them are having to rely on charitable contributions to buy heating oil at about $3.35 per gallon. I wonder how they feel about Al Gore’s efforts to rein in global warming.

I wonder how Al Gore feels about all the reports coming out now that say the global warming trend ended around 1998 and that we are now well into a cooling trend. Oh, I know what he’s thinking: “I did it!”

Right now the Midwest and Northeast could use some of Gore’s hot air. Even in Florida I’m sitting by a fire looking at 29 degrees and frost outside. But it’s been said that global warming works in mysterious ways.

It should be clear now why Gore and his cohorts held the big climate conference in Bali instead of, say, Buffalo. He caught a lot of criticism for the amount of carbon the conference generated, but can you imagine how much the participants’ enthusiasm might have been dimmed by sub-zero temperatures. If not, consider the negative image of parka-clad television reporters standing in knee-deep snow.

There has been a lot of ink this past summer about how the arctic ice is melting more than usual. One fear is that the melting sea ice is threatening the polar bears. But I don’t see any concern for the seals. It seems to me that the seals would be happy to see fewer polar bears lurking around their habitat.

The glowarm alarmists are pressing forward with their efforts to impose economy threatening restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions despite substantial evidence that the global warming trend ended in 1998. It’s interesting to note that the glowarmers are trying to change the name of their movement (religion?) from “global warming” to “climate change.” Perhaps they are aware of the recent cooling trend but don’t want to acknowledge it directly.

In today’s alarm sounded by the glowarmists,* they try to raise concern that some of our historic sites could be swamped by rising sea levels. They say that the seas are going to rise about a meter, but they don’t know how long it will take. Some say 50 years, others say 100 years, and still others say 150 years.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I’m most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We’re going to get a meter and there’s nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It’s going to happen no matter what – the question is when."

Why is Santer so concerned about it if there’s nothing he can do about it. Perhaps he’s just a worrier. Or, perhaps he just disagrees with Weaver. Anyway, if there is so much disagreement amongst all these experts, why should we be concerned about it?

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

Williams says it’s "not unreasonable at all" to expect that much in 100 years. "We’ve had a third of a meter in the last century."

In other words, the sea has been rising since way before you were born and since before most of your ancestors were born. But now the glowarmists want you to lose sleep over it.

Here’s a simple test to determine if you should be concerned enough to give this more than passing interest. Is your home or other property that you own sitting less than one meter above the current sea level? If so, you should start worrying about rising sea levels within about 30 years. If not, don’t waste your time or energy. Most likely you have more important things to worry about than helping to maintain the flow of research dollars to climate scientists.
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*global warming alarmist

A few days ago I questioned the accuracy of the climate models being used as the basis for most of the alarm about global warming. Today I found a letter to the editor of the local paper that very closely echos my point of view. The writer appears to have a similar background to mine, but if our paths have ever crossed I don’t remember it. I’m taking the liberty of republishing his letter here because I couldn’t find a link to it at NWFDailyNews.com:

During the past 20 years, computer models have improved short-term weather forecasting in many ways. However, weather and climate models have also been misused by people who do not fully understand how computer models work.

As a developer and user of scientific computer models, I was always aware that my modeling results were limited in validity and accuracy by the detail, accuracy and validity of the modeling software and the input data I used. Realistically, I could have obtained almost any result I desired if I made appropriate assumptions in my modeling program design and/or my input data.

Examples of misuses of weather/climate computer models are the annual forecasts of numbers and severity of hurricanes, and the ongoing issue of global climate change.

Critical weather and climate factors such as the unpredictable dynamic physics of cloud formation, variations in atmospheric gases and variations of ocean currents are not well documented or understood. Such natural phenomena are important determinants of weather and climate. This should be recognized as a serious problem with these long-term forecast models.

Even when well-known statistical techniques are used to increase the level of confidence in any modeling, the end results are still impacted by the validity and accuracy of the programming science and assumptions, parametric data accuracy, and any data omissions.

How accruate are long-term climate forecasts when models such as those just described are used? Accurate enough to believe widely accepted disaster scenarios derived from some global-warming modeling forecasts? I don’t think so. Also, don’t bother with those annual hurricane forecasts for the same reasons.

JOE COBB
Valparaiso FL

The global warming alarmists would have us believe that mathematical climate models can accurately predict global temperatures in the year 2100. The several versions of GCMs (Global Climate Models) are predicting average temperature increases from about 2 to about 5 degrees Centigrade. Based on these predictions they want governments around the world to take drastic actions to decrease the production of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. These drastic actions could have significant negative effects on the world economies. All this because they think the globe might warm by as little as 2 degrees?

Notice that their models disagree by more than the smallest predicted temperature increase. If the models they used show a spread from 2 to 5, what is the chance that additional models would widen that spread? Perhaps one might even predict a temperature decrease. Based on my own experience with mathematical models I have little confidence in any model’s ability to accurately predict 93 years into the future.

During most of my career I developed and used mathematical models to estimate weapon system performance for the Air Force. The models I worked with did not operate on a global scale but they were quite complex and took hours to run on high-speed computers. Nevertheless I, and my colleagues, never pretended that our models could accurately predict future outcomes. That is, although the models estimated future outcomes, we knew that the outcomes were based completely on the system and environmental data that is input to the model, and we knew that data was never perfect. We understood that there is no way that we could know either the precise environmental conditions at the time the weapon might be used in actual combat or the precise system parameters for the specific weapon fired in actual combat. The models were primarily used to perform system design trade-off studies and to produce probability of success charts to guide the pilots in employing the weapons.

No model of a physical process can reliably predict an outcome very far into the realm of the unknown. Models are constructed based on what we know today about how a physical process works. Models are run using data that we have collected to date — or data that someone makes up for the future. So models essentially only model the past or the present. When their users move beyond the present they are just guessing. The only way the GCMs can be used to predict 93 years into the future is to make up 93 years worth of input data, including the levels of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. The models then are subject to not only the errors in the physical model itself but also the errors in the input data.

If you are still not convinced that the glowarm alarmists can’t know, with any real confidence, that average global temperatures are going to be 2 to 5 degrees warmer in 2100, consider the five-day weather forecast. Although it’s called a five-day forecast it often changes every day — and I don’t mean by just adding a new fifth day. Today’s fourth day forecast is often different from yesterday’s fifth day forecast despite the fact that they represent the same day. This is because — with the passing of one day — the forecasters have new and better data that allows them to make a more accurate forecast. It will be interesting to see how much the predicted average global temperature for the year 2100 has changed next year and five years from now.

Understand that I’m not arguing that climatologists should not use the GCMs in their global climate research. I’m confident that they understand the limitations of their models better than I do. I’m trying to make an argument against putting too much stock in the crusades of devious egomaniacs like Al Gore, who are prone to misinterpret the model results.

The Associated Press reports:

The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say.

The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded. Their findings were being published online Sunday by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

An official at the National Hurricane Center called the research “sloppy science” and said technological improvements in observing storms accounted for the increase.

In other words, the NHC thinks the storms were always there but they just didn’t have the means to detect them. They didn’t use aircraft to check out storms until 1944 nor have satellites up there looking for storms until 1970, so it seems reasonable to me that some of them could have been missed.

But Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the increases in the number of storms occurred in 1930 and 1995, which is inconsistent with the 1944 and 1970 upgrades in storm detection capability. What Emanuel doesn’t emphasize, though, is that neither can the incremental increases in the number of storms be tied directly to climate change. I’m unaware of any sudden significant increases in the earth’s temperature occurring in 1930 and 1995. In fact, as late as the 70s scientists believed the earth was cooling.

It seems that now any observed change in the earth’s climate is attributed to global warming — whether or not there exists any tangible evidence to support that conclusion. I read that even the trouble in Darfur has been blamed on global warming. Do you think the fact that I can’t keep the grass in my yard cut as well as I used to is due to glowarm?