harmonicminer

The University of Tennessee has announced it is going to award Al Gore an Honorary Doctor of Laws and Humane Letters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology because according to University Chancellor, Jimmy Cheek, “Vice President Gore’s career has been marked by visionary leadership, and his work has quite literally changed our planet for the better”.

In keeping with the spirit in which this degree will be awarded I’d like to propose some additional honorary degree candidates:

The Culinary Institute of America should nominate Hannibal Lechter for an Honorary Doctorate in the Culinary Arts for his “passionate dedication to exploring new culinary possibilities combining fava beans, chianti and human organs”.

The Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government should nominate Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for an Honorary Doctorate in International Development for their “unswerving commitment to world peace through open international trade and free exchange of technology”.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts should nominate Larry Flynt for an Honorary Doctorate in Film & Television Production for his “body of work celebrating group copulatory interpretive movement”.

The Cleveland Institute of Art should nominate Charles Manson for the Sharon Tate Honorary Doctorate in Biomedical Art/Interior Design for his “bold, fresh and daring integrated use of human blood as both interior design element, artistic-political statement, and Beatles tribute.”

Fuller Theological Seminary should nominate Madelyn Murray O’Hair for an Honorary Doctorate in Practical Theology for her “lifelong activism related to the subject of the theological equivalent of the unified field theory”.

The Claremont Graduate University, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management should nominate Bernie Madoff for the P.T. Barnum Honorary Doctoral degree in Financial Engineering for his “proven commitment to wealth redistribution and contributions to the Obama model of economic justice”.

As for the University of Tennessee I only wish they had their tongues firmly planted in the esteemed Chancellor Cheek.  In light of recent disclosures concerning the reliability of anthropogenic global warming data the truth of this latest accolade for Al Gore is more bizarre than anything that could be imagined.

A recent group of headlines from the Drudge Report:

If I were a cartoonist I’d draw Al Gore giving a speech on global warming somewhere outdoors.  In every frame of the cartoon he’d have to pause his speech and put on another layer of clothing as the weather worsened and the temperature dropped.  The last frame would show him so bundled up that he could neither be seen or heard.

…..Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

UPDATE: I was taken to task over this original post.  Here is an example of one critical comment. There are others.

But your claim that a cold winter is “evidence” against global warming is downright foolish, and shows either a) an interest in misleading people, or b) a blatant misunderstanding of climate change research.

Now watch this archival footage showing a series of Democrat politicians claiming that a warm winter and lack of snow was concrete evidence of global warming.   Which just further underlines the fact that a) a double standard exists, and b) those who think anthropogenic global warming exists do so as a matter of belief rather than of fact.  It’s almost a climate religion.

Powerline has a nice summary of the latest attempt of the political “scientists” to convince us that every single weather phenomenon is caused by “climate change”, the meaningless term whose usage has replaced “global warming” in many quarters, due to the inconvenient truth that the warmest year of the last 100 was 1934, and the second warmest was 1998.

Here’s more information on the very serious and eminent scientists who demur to the group think, politically inspired conclusions of the eco-panic Left.

As always, you have to read the fine print in the studies to learn the truth, and you have to ignore the summary and conclusions that make it into the press.  Powerline has a nice deconstruction of the latest.

Here is a new book that exposes the really, really inconvenient truth behind eco-panic myths about the environment, and what the real effect of many “environmental policies” has been.

Who is the inspiration behind the single biggest human caused environmental catastrophe, causing the most preventable death, of the 20th Century? Al Gore’s heroine, Rachel Carson, with her crusade against DDT, the use of which would have saved tens of millions of lives taken by malaria, but which was banned due to her efforts, and a sycophantic crowd of Gore’s predecessors in the eco-panic movement.

Yep: Al’s in fine company.

This book is a needed corrective for the total collapse of the media’s reporting in the area.

An interesting article on Finnish tree ring studies which have been reconstructed to provide a 7000 year baseline of temperature changes, given the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature variation. The whole article is worth scanning, but the money quote is:

…a case for recent warming can be made based on the tree-ring record, but the recent warming is paled by many past events including many red-hot summers in Finland 7,000 years ago. If nothing else comes from their figure, be keenly aware that climate always changes – flat line periods simply do not exist!

In other words, sure, the climate is changing… again. It always has. But those changes have had nothing to do with human inputs, and current changes (which are overblown according to many experts) probably don’t have much to do with humans, either.

hat tip: chaos manor

David Evans, consultant and scientist with the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, says no evidence of carbon dioxide based greenhouse effect

since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Continue reading “Yet another major scientist defects from the global warming religion”

Reason Magazine – Will Humanity Survive the 21st Century?

“The good news is that no existential catastrophe has happened,”

They’re having a conference on whether they’ll be around next century.

My biggest fear is this. I already see the signs…..

JustOneMinute: How Green Was My Scientific Consensus?

From Daily Tech:

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.

Wow. From the APS editors comments (emphasis added):

With this issue of Physics & Society, we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, together with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion.

UPDATE: lots more conversation about trying to stop the conversation here

Oh… my.

They’re going to make an opera about Al Gore’s chicken little book that tries to terrify the world. First there was the book. Then there was a slide show. Then there was a movie about Al Gore narrating a slide show. So: is the opera going to be about Al Gore accepting the Oscar for the movie of him narrating his slide show about his book? This will, I take it, be a comic opera. Or maybe just a parody mass. Or just massively parodied? The Rev. Dr. Professor Gore is looking pretty massive these days. I think the lead role should be sung by a Basso Buffoondo.

They should have renamed the Oscar just for him: it should have been called the OhScare.

After the quote below, I’ve created some new song titles for the opera….

Continue reading “Someone to Watch Over My Carbon Credits”