Amazing. A skeptic of global warming at Huffpo. Harold Ambler, "Mr. Gore, Apology Accepted":

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that "the science is in." Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

This caught my eye.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

My antenna went up immediately. I've done some implementation research on servers precisely to discover what I could expect in the way of performance and power consumption, and the number appeared grossly inflated.

All the servers in the U.S. consumed about 1.2% of the generated electricity in 2005--about the same as for the nation's color televisions. That's a cost of about 2.7 billion a year. Approximately half of that figure is for environmental support (air conditioning). While server use is expected to increased substantially over the next few years, its not a straight line extrapolation of power consumption as new servers are considerably more efficient and require far less cooling (in some cases, data centers are doing away with climate control altogether...)

So what does that mean on a user transaction basis? There are no absolute figures because there are so many different types of servers with different configurations, running different software (which also has an effect on power consumption). Microsoft and Fujitsu came out with a white paper calculating that its volume server (that type of server represents 95% of the market at this point) performs 2.3 to 7.7 million transactions per kWh. That's about 63 transaction per joule at the low end, and 214 transactions per joule at the high-end.

Its takes 260 kilojoules to boil 100 grams of water at sea level.

So let's multiple 260,000 joules (260 kilojoules) by the lower figure. You get 16.38 million server transactions for the same energy it takes to boil 100 grams of water. A cup of tea is roughly double 100 grams, but nationally, server power consumption is matched by the climate control load, so they cancel out and you still get 16.38 million Google searches at the low end.

the lie is so outrageous, I can afford to be generous and halve that figure because the laptop making the request is consuming electricity as well. No wait, let's factor in four or five switches as well. What the hell--increase the power consumption per transaction by a factor of 10.

Still 1.638 million transactions.

A couple of days ago I pointed out that the left and its fellow travelers have long understood the value of making unreasonable statements. Make them often enough, and have them made by people with ostensible authority, and people actually start to believe them. A wonderful phenomenon--who came up with that? Oh yeah--Joseph Goebbels-->

The reality is that Google and other internet businesses that serve content are among the most efficient consumers of electricity in the context of value delivered that there has ever been on the face of the earth. If you really want to save energy--stop printing newspapers.

H/T RWN

The Dutch canals are frozen over--a rare event that portends to become common again.

In the 19th century, when Hans Brinker, the hero of the novel in which he tries to win a pair of silver skates, coasted along Holland's ice, the canals froze almost every year. But water pollution and climate change have made this so rare that today a boy of 15, Brinker's age, may never have seen a frozen canal, or at least remember one. Until, that is, this year.

In Montreal, Canada, a city where I've spent considerable time, underground water mains that have been intact for more than a century are bursting and creating ice lakes in the middle of the downtown.

The break at Peel and St-Jacques was the 19th in as many days in Montreal.

Aging pipes have been giving way as temperatures drop to lows between –20 C and –35 C, levels Montrealers rarely see even in the coldest of winter months.

"The temperature we are experiencing is exceptional for us," said Sammy Forcillo, the city's executive committee member in charge of infrastructure.

Notably, none of these stories makes any reference to global warming. I've been around long enough to know the signs of a walk-back in the media on a political issue. After the consensus comes the silence. Next comes the retribution.

It will be interesting to see how the evidence of our goosebumps affects the political agenda of Democrats, who judging from recent reports, are still on track to push global warming initiatives.

Via Drudge:

Al Gore is scheduled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning to once again testify on the 'urgent need' to combat global warming.

But Mother Nature seems ready to freeze the proceedings.

A 'Winter Storm Watch' has been posted for the nation's capitol and there is a potential for significant snow... sleet... or ice accumulations.

"I can't imagine the Democrats would want to showcase Mr. Gore and his new findings on global warming as a winter storm rages outside," a Republican lawmaker emailed the DRUDGE REPORT. "And if the ice really piles up, it will not be safe to travel."

A spokesman for Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the committee, was not immediately available to comment on contingency plans.

This isn't even a unique situation. Gore has publicly harangued the public about the imminent danger of global warming in so many snow storms and otherwise freezing weather that its become a running joke.

Ruh Roh...

NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

Just in time for Gore's urbi et orbi to the Democrats in Congress.

Al Gore testifies to the Senate yet again,"The scientists are practically screaming from the rooftops,", but even Dana Milbank is cracking up as The Goracle breaks into a sweat:

Once Al Gore was a mere vice president, but now he is a Nobel laureate and climate-change prophet. He repeats phrases such as "unified national smart grid" the way he once did "no controlling legal authority" -- and the ridicule has been replaced by worship, even by his political foes. [snip]

The Goracle's powers seem to come from his ability to scare the bejesus out of people. "We must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilization," he said. And: "This is the most serious challenge the world has ever faced." And: It "could completely end human civilization, and it is rushing at us with such speed and force."

In 1991 British Rail was paralysed by a light dusting of snow. The immortal explanation was that it was "the wrong kind of snow." Last night's once in a millennium hell-storm dumped a stupefying 3 inches or more and London's shut down, at least the public sector, with one brave exception; His Excellency, BoJo, the Mayor of London, cycled into City Hall to announce

"This is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities. I have never seen anything like it."

Why doesn't the silliness of this proposal surprise me in the least?

President Obama's energy adviser has suggested all the world's roofs should be painted white as part of efforts to slow global warming.

Professor Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, said the unusual proposal would mean homes in hot countries would save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.

More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by reflecting heaKjt into space rather than allowing it to be absorbed by dark surfaces where it is trapped by greenhouse gases and increases temperatures.

This is Obama's science guy. Woe is us.

While every school child knows that light colors reflect light energy while dark colors absorb it, color itself is only a single factor, and not every a terribly important one, when it comes to heat absorption. The reality is that "black" asphalt doesn't have significantly different specific heat capacity than say granite, which isn't all that surprising since 90% of asphalt is mineral content--rock.

Are we going to paint all the rock white too?

The specific heat of asphalt is .92 Kj/Kg K (kiloJoules per Kilogram in Kelvins). Different types of asphalt have slightly different values. That's the same as clay, but less than brick (.100) and substantially less than dirt (1.26) and wet soil (1.5). Why is wet soil such a good heat sink? Because water is one of the best heat sinks we have, with a 4.187 specific heat value.

Now about how much of the earth's surface is covered by water?

Yeah.

An administration committed to policy informed by pseudo-science.

Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, "What is two plus two?" The first two candidates answer, "Four." They don't get the job. The third responds, "What do you want it to be?" He gets hired.

Popular Technology: 450 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming.

I had to admire the chutzpah of IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri who finally, after more than a week of flailing for a response to the leaked emails by climate researchers, could only manage a plea for trust in the very system that has been so badly compromised.

Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered.

"The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report," he said.

"Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening."

The IPCC, which was set up by the UN in 1988, is the world's leading authority on climate change. It advises governments on the science behind the problem and was awarded the Nobel peace prize along with Al Gore in 2007.

The intense political dynamic around climate change science should evoke skeptism in any educated person, but its far simpler than that--we simply don't have the tools to determine the impact of anthropogenic gases on global temperatures. Let's be clear--we can't reliably predict the weather beyond 72 hours because we don't have enough data points--sensor data from ocean buoys.

Obviously the Guardian has a wicked sense of humor--slyly pointing out that the IPCC shared Al Gore's "Peace Prize".

Its been interesting to read the apologia by various climate change proponents, and recognize the same rhetoric repeated over and over again--"we're the good guys, trust us..." Take George Monbiot's column, which couches his genuine concern about the damage the emails have done and will continue to do, with this characterization.

The greatest tragedy here is that despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad. By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow. Hoggan and Littlemore have shown how fossil fuel industries have employed "experts" to lie, cheat and manipulate on their behalf. The revelations in their book (as well as in Heat and in Ross Gelbspan's book The Heat Is On) are 100 times graver than anything contained in these emails.

You can almost hear his voice going up a few octaves as he was writing this--the panic is obvious and properly anticipated.

The entire global warming hoax is based on the public's generally good opinion of science and scientists and the power of 'scientific consensus' in this context. I can't help but compare this with a similar dynamic for the Iraq invasion. The public's esteem of the military was used to sell the justification for invasion, in fact, the administration sent Colin Powell who while Secretary of State during the Bush administration's first term, is better known as the general who 'won' the Gulf war along with Norman Schwartzkopf.

It was the "trust me" gambit, no different really than what we've been seeing with the global warming hoax. Ironically, the worm may be turning on climate change for the very same reasons the public turned against the Iraq war.

After the invasion, we found no stockpiles of WMD, and in spite of the quite reasonable explanations that Saddam had everything he needed to reconstitute his program at anytime, the public heard only--NO WMD found! The dichotomy between the expressed pretext for the war and the lack of WMD is quite similar to the claims of global warming and the fact that Al Gore is always talking about them when there is a snow storm outside--people's experience with the climate is that things are getting colder, not warmer. Like WMD, the absence of public confirmation led to jokes (even by President Bush...), but it set up an environment where skepticism was if not embraced, accepted as a reasonable position.

The turning point for public opinion on the Iraq war came during President Bush's State of the Union address, in which he claimed that Saddam was sourcing nuclear materials from Africa. Yet again, in spite of later confirmation that there were indeed attempts to buy yellowcake from Niger and possibly other sources in Africa, alleged forged materials used by British intelligence destroyed the credibility of the claim, and with it the administration's goodwill with the American public.

Judging by the shear panic of IPCC officials and their media accomplices, I'd say the global warming hoaxers just had their "seven little words" moment.

And it's still your fault:

In the film, "The Day After Tomorrow," the world gets gripped in ice within the span of just a few weeks. Now research now suggests an eerily similar event might indeed have occurred in the past.

Looking ahead to the future, there is no reason why such a freeze shouldn't happen again — and in ironic fashion it could be precipitated if ongoing changes in climate force the Greenland ice sheet to suddenly melt, scientists say. Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger Dryas and nicknamed the"Big Freeze," geological evidence suggests it was brought on when a vast pulse of fresh water — a greater volume than all of North America's Great Lakes combined — poured into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

This abrupt influx, caused when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks, diluted the circulation of warmer water in the North Atlantic, bringing this "conveyer belt" to a halt. Without this warming influence, evidence shows that temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere plummeted.

...This kind of scenario would not discount evidence pointing toward global warming — after all, it leans on the Greenland ice sheet melting.

"We could say that global warming could lead to a dramatic cooling," Patterson told LiveScience. "This should serve as a further warning rather than a pass."

A pass on what? Kyoto, "Cap and Trade", Copenhagen?. If only cavemen had climate scientists they could have been warned about the dangers of cooking meat.

What a racket. Our modern soothsayers have now predicted our SUV's will lead to Global Cooling or Global Warming - whichever comes first. Send more money and remember, when the future happens - they predicted it.

Addendum: If you are worried about the ice sheets of Greenland melting, read this to see what passes for science among the Anthropormorphic Global Warming crowd.

Anthropogenic Global Scamming - a simple model:

Hmmm...for "honest" read "culpably gullible and intellectually disgraced."

Here's a haiku for the Telegraph's Al Gore Poetry Prize:

Fake data buries
Science, settled like the snow
Outside my window.

An interesting article purporting to list 100 reasons to dismiss the idea that global warming is an anthropogenic (man-made) dynamic.

Some of the items are stated a bit simplistically. One can have huge arguments about the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, requiring an ever more detailed understanding of the physics of radiation absorption.

I don't get caught up in this kind of argument because its largely irrelevant. Global warming alarmism is a political, not scientific phenomena. Consensus is a political, not scientific concept. Calls to drastically restructure the world's economy to achieve exactly the same aims the left has been trying to win by other means, is pretty much a dead giveaway. Scientist simply don't have the tools to support the kind of crisis talk we've been hearing for a decade or more.

The political methodologies of environmental extremists are quite well documented in the excellent "Skeptical Environmentalist" by Prof Bjorn Lomberg, a Danish statistician and former Greenpeacer who was voted of of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. The people who hate this book invariably haven't read it. Those who have will recognize the pattern of hair-on-fire serial exaggeration designed to drive a political agenda.

There is a god and he has a sense of humour. As the Cold, the Bad and the Ugly riot outside the Copenhagen Global Warming summit, some vignettes:

- Danish police are merrily clubbing the eco-socialist mob, probably grateful for some action to ward off the chill and snow.
- Gordon Brown is trapped at the conference centre by the protestors.
- Happy-clappy Warmist enviro-journalists are freezing to death in the queues to get in out of the cold.
- The Global Scamming Association of backward African kleptocracies has almost given up posturing for "Climate Justice" in the form of squillions of Western taxpayers' money as reparations for, well, everything. Their walkouts are just pissing everyone off.
- The global murmuring against the whoring of science grows louder like a train bearing down on a car stuck on a railroad crossing. The Warmist nomenklatura are in that car, probably a stretch limo.
- And Obama, the hero of Chicago's Round 1 elimination from the Olympics on his last visit to Copenhagen, will jet in as a deus ex machina. We may confidently expect his flight to be diverted by blizzards.

This is fast becoming Obama's role on the world stage: managing disappointment.

What a hoot!

As the Politico tells it, Copenhagen is in total disarray. The question is, why would anyone be surprised?

It all bears a more than passing resemblance to the original Star Trek series. Take away the boots, horses, six-shooters and cowboy hats and replace them with star ships, shuttle craft, phasers and tricorders. Replace hostile Indian tribes with hostile aliens. Trade the western frontier for the final frontier. Same old story with new sets.

We call them "developing" nations, although they've never developed anything in my life time except billion dollar Swiss bank balances from pilfered foreign aid. They want what they've always wanted--the next pay-off. Whether you call it a subsidy to help with carbon mitigation or not is up to you--we know what it really is.

The Europeans are willing to make that payment, for the same reasons they always been willing to make the payments--buying influence in the former colonies and access to the natural resources of Africa and Asia.

Economically productive countries want to stay economically productive, so they aren't going to do anything that would threaten their positions atop the heap. They go to these things to have people kiss their rings and see who they can buy off.

All politics, whether local or not, always boils down to robbing somebody...

But it ain't my soothsaying:

Obama, the hero of Chicago's Round 1 elimination from the Olympics on his last visit to Copenhagen, will jet in as a deus ex machina. We may confidently expect his flight to be diverted by blizzards.

Guess what:

World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”.......Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI’s definition, and only had seven last century

UPDATE, FURTHER TRAVEL ADVISORY FOR THE PRESIDENT:

Washington Snowstorm May Snarl Weekend Holiday Shopping, Travel

Thousands gather to protest global warming.

You can download a decent resolution file of this from http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/
Keywords 'snow across Great Britain'
Select 1 pixel = 250m
I just printed it at A3+ and I’m thrilled.

I rented this product for a week last year and thought it was wonderful.

The forecast is continuous snow until Al Gore cries "uncle". Oh dear, I'm booked to fly from Newark to London tomorrow.

I still find it completely maddening that possibly the biggest conspiracy in world history gets virtually no coverage here in the U.S. New revelations about the depth and breath of the fraud perpetrated against humanity involve institutions both national and international and had financial and politically backing from the highest levels of government.

People should hang for this.

James Hansen of NASA, should be among the first. It is inconceivable that this guy is still employed by NASA when he should be in jail.

Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.

Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.

The reporter never published it.

Effectively, this means that three of the four data sets have been compromised. Why am I not surprised.

Frankly, my skepticism about global warming always stemmed from my incredulity about a computer model that simply could not have ever had the kind of large, consistent dataset required to make any meaningful predictions about climate. We can only predict weather with any reasonable accuracy, two or three days in advance for the same reason--there simply aren't enough data points available from the sparse system of weather buoys distributed throughout the Pacific ocean. Yet we were expected to accept arctic climate models that had no actual data points at all!

Our collective scientific ignorance will be the death of us all...

Paul Krugman is not an idiot, although he plays one regularly in the pages of the New York Times. What he is is an intensely partisan flack for what Rush Limbaugh calls "the Ruling Class".

You would think that a smart guy like Krugman might have some talent for polemics but you'd never be able to tell from the flailing, Hillaryesque claims of a vast right-wing conspiracy concerning climate-gate.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior<. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Notice the absolutism. EVERY claim was exposed as a fraud, and the climate scientists where TOTALLY innocent and the opponents of climate action the dastardly VILLAINS. In fact, the emails where acknowledged to be authentic by everyone, and no allegations of fraud or manipulation where made during even the subsequent incestuous investigations.

The apologia relied on the tried and true methodology of the entire climate change hoax with fallacious appeals to authority. University administrators at East Anglia, the UK government and Penn State University--all institutions with their reputations and credibility at risk, absolved the email authors albeit damning them with faint praise as it concerned their methods, use of statistics and 'unhelpfulness' to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Climate change evaporated as a public issue almost over night as conspirators worked to flush everything down the memory hole.

Apparently Krugman didn't get the memo.

This is how the Left manages to perpetuate their various myths into perpetuity--holding candle-light vigils for executed spies Ethel and Julius Rosenbery, even after Soviet-era documents confirmed they were everything that they were accused of being.

On the other hand, clumsy rhetoric like this is bound to alienate all but the most rabidly ideological readers. You go Paul!