http://www.michaelmoore.com/…

Goodbye, GM …by Michael Moore

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war — a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn’t give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true — that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
Read More…

http://climateandcapitalism.com/…

The Age of Stupid is a 90-minute film about climate change, set in the future, which will have its world premiere in London on March 15 and then be released in UK cinemas on March 20, followed by other countries.

• “Every single person in the country should be forcibly made to watch this film.” Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London
• “I defy anyone to come out and not feel like they’ve got to make a difference.” Caroline Lucas, Leader of the UK Green Party
• “It is not a film to make you happy. It’s a film to make you sit back and think ‘What is my role on this planet?’“ Ashok Sinha, Director of Stop Climate Chaos coalition
• “The most powerful piece of cultural discourse on climate change ever produced.” Mark Lynas, author of “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet”
• “It is a captivating and constantly surprising film: the first successful dramatisation of climate change to reach the big screen.” George Monbiot, journalist & author

Sorry to lob an ad-hominem comment but… I’m not going to trust anything at face value that the likes of those listed above rave about. They don’t exactly have the most neutral background on the global warming / climate change topic. I don’t see anything in the trailer that implies this is anything more than a stereotypical eco-statist / leftist diatribe attempting to appeal to emotions rather than truth.

The Age of Stupid? Rather harsh. History will show who was ignorant, close minded, and/or short sighted. For all our sake I hope its those who made and agree with the premise of this film. I fear the outcome of the proposed statist solutions far more than the actual outcome of any global warming. Anthropogenic or otherwise.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

As some of our readers have already noticed, there was a significant problem with the daily sea ice data images on February 16. The problem arose from a malfunction of the satellite sensor we use for our daily sea ice products. Upon further investigation, we discovered that starting around early January, an error known as sensor drift caused a slowly growing underestimation of Arctic sea ice extent. The underestimation reached approximately 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February. Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality control measures prior to archiving the data. See below for more details.

We have removed the most recent data and are investigating alternative data sources that will provide correct results. It is not clear when we will have data back online, but we are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Sensor drift is a perfect but unfortunate example of the problems encountered in near-real-time analysis. We stress, however, that this error in no way changes the scientific conclusions about the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice, which is based on the the consistent, quality-controlled data archive discussed above.

Some people might ask why we don’t simply switch to the EOS AMSR-E sensor. AMSR-E is a newer and more accurate passive microwave sensor. However, we do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data. Thus, while AMSR-E gives us greater accuracy and more confidence on current sea ice conditions, it actually provides less accuracy on the long-term changes over the past thirty years. There is a balance between being as accurate as possible at any given moment and being as consistent as possible through long time periods.

I fully understand the issues with calibration, drift, real-time data collection, etc. I agree that it can and will happen. Ignoring for a moment their statement about consistency for a moment I’d have say I have no problems with events like this. Shit happens. The problem is with the religious fanaticism of the eco-statists. Just as a news paper correction is almost always lost and forgotten relative to the original headline… data like this has more often than I’d like been used as legitimate. “Skeptics” who doubt the data are often lumped into the “deniers” group with flat-earthers and Holocaust deniers. Hyperbolic and ad-hominem statements incongruous with real science.

About real science and consistency. Perhaps its just the way they explained it but they seem to be advocating using potentially inaccurate data for the sake of consistency. As if they have their conclusion set and they want the closest data set available to match it. That’s not science. If historical data does not match current and supposedly more accurate data they need to find out why the historical data is off or why explain why the supposedly more accurate data isn’t.

It is the far too regular fuck ups, slight of hand, outright lies and political influences which make the whole global warming global climate change topic so controversial and people like myself so skeptical.

http://www.businesspundit.com/…

picked up from http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

I don’t usually associate natural disaster, or any other misfortune for that matter, with, but maybe that’s a mistake. Last week I lived through an ice storm that caused some water damage to my home. As you can imagine I was in a hurry to get everything dry and prevent further impact. When my water damage restoration service provider finally told me the rates for all the magical drying equipment that now filled my home, I uttered the all too familiar:

I’m in the wrong business.

The Rise of Water Damage Restoration

If you’ve got the money to invest, I’m betting water damage restoration is an excellent business to get into. Aside from getting paid in large part by the insurance companies, consider the factors coming together at this particular moment in time to create such a favorable business environment:

• Shoddy Construction
  I lived in a sixty year old house in Seattle where it almost never stopped raining. Yeah, we had water in the walls, so what? That place was solid. A bit of wet insulation in today’s construction and half your house melts away.
• Global Warming
  I don’t know if it’s man made or not, but you can’t deny we have more natural disasters now than fifty years ago. More disaster equals more money for the disaster relief specialists!
• Mold Phobia
  With a paranoia surrounding mold that borders on hysteria, homeowners and insurance companies companies alike will do almost anything to prevent a potential mold ‘infestation’.
• Ignorance & Fear
  It’s not that we don’t want to know how our homes are constructed and how to take care of them ourselves, it’s that the world and western society have pushed us away from this knowledge and into more and more complex roles away from home. So when someone tells us our wall is full of water and we have to do this, that, and the other to rescue our largest investment, we take them at face value. What else can we do?

Two problems.

1. Broken window fallacy.
2. His claim that “you can’t deny we have more natural disasters now than fifty years ago.” Yes you can.
   • Error 7
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… but not enough to be cold in the Oval Office.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Anthony, apart from the compulsive-addictive Emperor Worship that suffuses every syllable of this typically wretched Times piece (when is that statist dinosaur going to die?), I’m struck by the unabashed hypocrisy we find in the first two paragraphs:

“The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

`He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?’ said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. `He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.’”

But what of the overpopulated, overheated globe you promised to heal, O Exalted One? What about your carbon footprint? What happened to the austerity you famously promised to impose on the rest of us, whom you rebuked for eating too much and consuming too many resources?

We who compose the hoi polloi have creature comfort needs as well. Should we obey your dictates, or follow your (presumably infallible) example?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs – run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph – GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic – in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

When it comes down to it… the climate changes regardless of humanity. The human caused global warming alarmists are losing credibility constantly yet they many have more faith in their predictions then Jesus. Numbers fudged, data point biases ignored, all contrary data dismissed without serious consideration and the shutting up of all those who speak out, and perhaps worse… ignoring the economic realities of the situation and instead of making practical plans to deal with the possible warming and seeing if it would actually be a negative they preach doom.