Orbiting Vaporizer Joe

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Throughout history (indeed long before it) humans and animals and all of nature prospered in the relatively infrequent periods of global warming. The present Holocene warm period has enabled the rise of civilization -- and the evolution of climate scientists who are allowed to spend gobs of public money on global warming studies.

For millions of years the normal Earth climate has been an ice-age, with brief respites during interglacial periods. The temperatures of the ~100,000 year cold periods have typically been ~5C, while the warm periods of ~10,000 years duration had peak temperatures ~15C. During the cold periods glaciers covered much of the Earth and nature suffered dreadfully. Left to itself, it is hard to see how anything internal to the Earth could ever break the stable grip of the multimillion year ice-age.

Today we are doubly blessed due to the additional warming we are receiving from the solar activity. The important question is: how long will this nice warm period last?

The fragile-Earth theory has been floating around fertilizing research grants since publication of Silent Spring (1962) and The Population Bomb (1968). The Gaia genius (James Lovelock) is back in the news predicting “We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out. A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million.” Never mind that the earth has not been hot enough to be so dangerous for millions of years or that the UN climate guys are only predicting 3C rise over the next century. Never mind that what mankind really needs to fear is ice, not fire.

On the time scale of centuries, the best predictor of the future climate is the past climate. Before Christ was born there was a 500 year period of cold weather (BC700-200) when the Romans wrote of a frozen Tiber River, the Egyptians built dams to deal with the declining level of the Nile and glaciers advanced in Northern Europe. Then during the Roman Warming from 200BC to 600AD, Ptolmey wrote of year round precipitation, North Africa was wet enough to grow vast amounts of grain and central Asia experienced strong population growth. Christ was born, Christianity grew and the Roman Empire flourished. Warm = Good.

A major climate catastrophe ushered in the Dark Ages around AD440. Snow fell during the summer in Southern Europe and the trees stopped growing. John of Ephesus wrote the sun became dark and the darkness lasted for 19 months. In AD800 the Black Sea froze. Savage storms swept the world. Following the climate driven famines, plague devastated Europe. The bubonic plague killed 25 million people. Barbarian tribes from the East attacked Western Europe. Cold = bad.

During the Medieval Warming from AD900 to 1300, the Vikings colonized Greenland, wheat was grown on the Scandinavian Peninsula and wine grapes were grown in England and Newfoundland. Europe’s population grew 50% as food production increased. Overseas trade flourished. Chinese wealth peaked around AD1100 and then declined. Churches and castles were built in Europe by laborers who were not needed on the farms and thousands of temples were built in Southeast Asia. Warm = good.

During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850, the winter temperature variability was as much as 50% more than during the 20th century. The climate was unpredictable. Storm surges drowned 300 thousand people in Holland and Germany. Glaciers advanced into Europe. In 1315, grain failed to ripen across Europe and there was widespread starvation. And then it got worse. Epidemics of typhoid, tuberculosis and diphtheria broke out. The Norse settlements in Greenland died. Food shortages killed millions in Europe and in China. Cold = bad.

Since 1850 we have lived in the warm phase of the 1500 year climate cycle. The global temperature now is about 1C warmer than in 1850 and about 3C warmer than the coldest time of the last cold phase (around 1650). Judging by the oft repeated history, we will warm another degree or so before starting to cool again in a couple hundred years. We need to enjoy the warmth while it lasts.

Increased sunlight and moisture, a longer growing season, and increased CO2 fertilization have meant substantially greater food production that will continue as the warming continues. We will have to export some of the increased Siberian and Canadian wheat crop to sub-Saharan Africa but that is easily doable in a global economy. Severe weather, driven globally by differentials between Polar and Equatorial temperatures, will decline. Storm surges, however, need to be managed better as sea levels rise. Hint to the New Orleans city planners.

Thus, whether you want to believe the IPCC predictions (3C temperature rise and 1-3 feet sea level rise by 2100) or the historical record (1C and 3-6 inches) mankind in the 21st century will benefit greatly from the climate change, with the proviso that we will need to manage food distribution and storm surges better.

Many generations from now the cold will return and those descendents of ours will have to deal with reduced crop yields and more severe weather. By then technology advances will make those challenges tractable. And so it will go, on a 1500 year cycle, until some few thousand years in the future when the ice age returns. Global temperatures will plummet by ~15C, with high latitudes getting ~40C colder. Canada and the Northern US (as well as Northern Europe, Russia, Argentina, etc) will be covered by ice sheets. People and food production will be squeezed closer to the equator. California and the Great plains will suffer centuries-long drought. Keeping warm will be one critical issue, getting enough food and water for 6 billion people to live will be another.

The renewal of ice-age conditions would render a large fraction of the world's major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population. If we hope to avert this icy death, “we must look to a sustained greenhouse effect to maintain the present advantageous world climate. This implies the ability to inject effective greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the opposite of what environmentalists are erroneously advocating.” (Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “On the Cause of Ice-Ages,” 1999)

The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor and we have plenty of water in the oceans. What we need is a mechanism to get the water into the upper atmosphere in vapor form. The picture at the top shows an admittedly simplified solution consisting of a vaporizer in synchronous Earth orbit connected by a longish hose (not shown) to the ocean surface. The Orbiting Vaporizers will need to be equipped with husky pumps to draw the water up to the reservoirs.

Fred Hoyle estimates we will need on the order of 10 to the 17th power kilograms of water in the stratosphere to create a powerful greenhouse effect that would last for many months. Roughly we need to pump that much water vapor over a year in order to delay the ice age. The amount of water per hour per Orbiting Vaporizer is easy to calculate. What do you think about that? (Ps. My Orbiting Vaporizer is called Joe, after the vaporizer we used with the children. Calling it Joe made it kid friendly.)

Summing Up the Junk Science

Let’s start with the facts:

Global temperatures have been changing since the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. The last 90,000 year Ice Age ended around 12,000 year ago. We are nearing the end of the Holocene Interglacial warm period and in the middle of the warming side of a 1500 year cycle that is superimposed on the Interglacial. The Sun is the external source of our warmth, and cyclic motions of the Earth vary the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth and account for the major Ice Ages and Interglacials. The 1500 year cycle that is warming us now is caused by the interaction of solar activity and galactic cosmic rays.

Greenhouse gasses help keep the Earth surface warm by trapping radiated heat. The major greenhouse gasses are water vapor, accounting for 60% of the warming, CO2 adding a 20% effect, with ozone, methane and other gasses contributing the remaining 20%. Water in the atmosphere is the wild card since it has both a heating effect as vapor and a cooling effect as clouds, it is rapidly and significantly variable and it is not well understood or modelled. Water vapor and CO2 are released from the sea when it is warmed by the Sun. Humans generate only about 5% of the atmospheric CO2 by burning fossil fuels, the remaining 95% coming from volcanoes, photosynthesis, outgassing from the sea and other natural causes. Thus humans cause only 1% (5% X 20%) of the greenhouse effect.

NASA scientists have discovered a massive heat vent over the Pacific Ocean that naturally opens in response to sea surface temperature rises, releasing the heated water vapor and CO2. The NASA-MIT team concluded that the Earth is much better at managing temperature forcings than the computer models assume. In fact, the Pacific heat vent released as much heat during the 1980s-1990s as was predicted for the increased CO2 content. It’s no wonder that the sea surface temperatures have berely changed.

Now we turn to the Junk Science:

The United Nations IPCC-2 report (1996) was embarrassingly wrong when it concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a human effect on climate.” The so-called scientific consensus was fudged and called a “major deception on global warming.”

Undeterred, the global warming warriors produced the IPCC-3 report in 2001 that erased the well documented 1000 years of temperature variations preceeding 1900 (the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age) replacing that with a graph showing a hockey-stick-like rise in temperature starting in 1900. Michael Mann’s data contradicted hundreds of historical sources and hundreds of scientific studies, yet another example of the “overwheling scientific consensus.”

Fortunately for science, Canadians Steven McIntyre and Ross McKittrick demonstrated conclusively that Mann’s data was all wet. The Canadian Financial Times reported: “One of the great propaganda icons of the UN climate change machine and the Kyoto process is about to get swept away as a piece of junk science. The icon is the “Hockey Stick”… and it is just plain wrong.” It’s actually worse than wrong. But that did not keep the IPCC’ers from predicting a temperature increase of up to 5 C and sea level rise up to 15 feet by 2100, all due to that nasty CO2 generated by those irresponsible humans.

And the beat goes on. Last September the IPCC-4 draft report was issued projecting with confidence that the mean global temperature will increase by 3 C and sea level will rise between 14 and 43 cm (1–3 feet) by 2100, if we do nothing. No Kyoto Protocol, no Kyoto 2, 3, 4,…N, nothing at all, and all we need to worry about is 1-3 feet higher seas. And this is if you want to believe those discredited computer models.

Now that the Democrats are back in control of the congress, the US is going to be pressured into enacting silly and costly measures to combat a non-problem. In the next post I will explain why global warming is a good thing, why the world will be a better place in 2100 if we ignore it, and what we should really be concerned about –- the coming Ice Age.

Anthropogenic or Au-Natural?

In a previous post (“Let’s Have a Debate,” 11/18) I posed six questions that should be addressed by thinking people and taxpayers before any major decisions are made to curb global warming. In “Temperature of the Earth” I noted that temperature changes are the most natural things in the world and that we are (1) nearing the end of a long (12,000 year) Interglacial warm period (the Holocene) and (2) in the middle of the slight warming side of a 1500 year periodic cycle that has been happening for at least two million years.

In “Temperature Forcings” I explained that the Sun is the primary source of our warmth and that Earth dynamics accounts for the major Ice Ages and the Interglacials. Greenhouse gasses are important, keeping the Earth surface roughly 35 C higher than it would otherwise be, but increases of atmospheric CO2 have been a product of external warming not the primary source of warming. The 1500 year cycle that is warming us now is caused by the interaction of solar activity and galactic cosmic rays.

But wait! -- What about the human caused (anthropogenic) global warming? Algore says “we are altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe.” Well, maybe locally, like in the Senate building where Teddy pontificates. But the rest of the evidence is iffy, at best.

The global temperature has increased around 0.8 C since 1850, with temperature surges from 1850-1870, from 1920-1940 and from 1975 to 2005. But we had not yet invented cars in 1860, the auto fleet was miniscule in 1930 and when we really did start putting out some CO2 around 1940, the temperature decreased until 1975. Not exactly the best example of cause and effect. So where does this CO2 forcing evidence come from? It comes from models, of course, but not from models that actually work.

This is a great story. The technique adopted by the UN IPCC studies to identify supposed causes of global warming is called “fingerprinting.” The models predict a geographic pattern of warming that is then compared to measurements. Except that the model results only agreed with the data from 1943 to 1970, and then only by introducing a sulfate aerosol cooling effect to account for the embarrassing reversal of warming that was observed. (Later this fudge factor was deleted since the sulfates were preferentially produced in the Northern Hemisphere, which should have cooled the most, while the reverse is what happened.) I said this was interesting. But there’s more.

When the second IPCC report came out in 1996, it contained the phrase that has been repeated a gazillion times in the press: “The balance of evidence suggests a human effect on climate.” The crucial chapter 8 that was supposed to be the compilation of 130 scientific papers actually shows (in Fig. 8.10b) a predicted decrease of temperature during the temperature surge of 1920-1940. Oops!

The editor of chapter 8, a relatively junior scientist named Ben Santor, added this sentence: “The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernable human influence on the global climate.”

To make room for this fiction, Santor had to delete several statements such as these by more senior scientists who were not consulted on the changes:

“None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gasses.”

“While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw conclusions for which there is little justification.”

“When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to that question is, We do not know.”

And so on. This must be the overwhelming scientific consensus we hear so much about.

Well there was hell to pay in the scientific community, although nobody in the main stream media (outside of the Wall Street Journal) heard anything about it.

Frederick Seitz, former president of the American Academy of Sciences, detailed Santor’s illegitimate rewrite of chapter 8 in a scathing commentary titled “Major Deception on Global Warming.” The Journal editorialized, “Coverup in the greenhouse.” Oddly enough, Santor himself co-authored a paper around the time of the 1996 report that contradicted his previous statement: “It will be hard to say with confidence that an anthropogenic climate signal has or has not been detected.” Well, well.

To sum up, the data do not impute human causes of the recent warming, the models are inconsistent at best and the conclusions were fudged and then retracted. Yet the gullible public still thinks it is so. Amazing what a political party with a motive and a willing media accomplice can achieve.

Thank You America

“Being thus arived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.”
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, circa 1620.

Yesterday I wrote about a group of people for whom Bradford’s prayer of thanks would make no sense. Yet I want to thank God for all my friends, including those who cannot thank God themselves. If they are intollerant of my prayer, then they are not my friends. I do not thank God for the gift of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, whose intollerance of Christianity is akin to the intollerance of Islamic radicals, though more feeble.

To my friends of all religions, or no religion, I say Happy Thanksgiving and thank you, America. I think that is a thanksgiving wish in keeping with the Pilgrims gratitude. Any citizen who does not give thanks for being American is no American. Any European, South Korean, Japanese, Afghani, Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Indonesian, … who does not give thanks to America is an ingrate.

The remarkable Mark Steyn has just written a book America Alone that explores once again the American exceptionalism that has been noted since the times of deTocqueville. Steyn’s principle thesis is that American birth rates, our non-socialist government and our self reliance separate us more and more from the rest of the developed world. Europe, Japan and Russia are on a trajectory to go out of business in a couple of generations.

The book publisher writes: “The future, as Steyn notes, belongs to the fecund and the confident. The Islamists are both, while the West -- wedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivion -- is looking more like the ruins of a civilization.”

Here the West refers to Europe and Canada, while the conclusions apply as well to Japan and Russia. As Steyn writes, demographics is a game of last man standing. During the last generation, “Muslims had babies (those self-detonating Islamists are a literal baby boom) while Westerners took all those silly doomsday tomes about overpopulation seriously.”

Note that the UN recently issued the global fertility rate measurement, 1.85 babies per woman that is below the 2.1 replacement rate. World population will begin falling by 2050 if not before. I urge anyone who wants to peek at the likely doomsday future to read Steyn’s book.

I’ll focus here on a few of the points that Steyn makes about the huge debt the world owes America. The biggest American gift turned out to be a mixed blessing. Because America massively funded rebuilding and provided for the defense of Europe and Japan, those countries were able to recover from the war – good – but then they got used to depending on us and put all their eggs into their welfare states. The problem now is that their people have become addicted to government handouts while their falling populations cannot support them. They are defenseless and heading toward bankruptcy, lacking the self reliance to do anything about it.

America supplies much of the world’s critical infrastructure. When the tsunamis hit Sri Lanka and Indonesia it was US carrier groups that galloped to the rescue and saved so many lives. When SARS leapt from China and infected a Toronto hospital, the medical scientists at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta saved the day. When millions of Africans are infected with HIV, America donates $15 billion to fight the disease. When a genocidal war breaks out in Bosnia, America steps up to stop it, while embarrassing the Europeans into helping out. The list is endless.

Millions of Iraqi lives depend on the bravery of one hundred and fifty thousand US troops who willingly risk their lives and limbs to protect them and us. My grandson Johnny wrote today from Talafar, Iraq to say Happy Thanksgiving. He wanted to thank the Las Candalistas for the 20 pounds of cookies they baked for him and his unit. The cookies arrived last Monday and were gone by Tuesday night.

When I think of my debt to America, I remember first all the military men and women who have sacrificed to give us freedom and keep us safe. They are the heroes who embody what it means to be American. God bless them all.

View from the Dark Side

Growing up in an Italian Catholic family I never knew an atheist. The most exotic kids I met were Protestants, but they went to PS43 or John Marshall High while my friends went to Sacred Heart Cathedral School and McQuaid Jesuit (boys) or Our Lady of Mercy (girls) high schools. We played sports against the publics, but never got to know any of the kids. We felt a bit superior, but didn’t understand why; never gave it a thought.

Yet the first time I heard the word atheist is imprinted on my mind. It was sixth grade and we were studying the Crusades. One homework assignment was to draw and color a crusader’s shield. My father had been in Germany with the tank corps and had several German weapons including a military dagger with a cool symbol on it. I copied the symbol prominently on the shield and proudly brought my masterpiece to class. Sister took one look at it, her face turned red, and she said, sternly: “Mr. Lama, take this to the Principal’s office.”

I sat outside the office for several days, or so it seemed, before Sister Mary Joseph, the Principal, called me inside. She took a long look at the shield and turned toward me with a sad look on her face. “Mr. Lama,” she said, “don’t you know that this is a Nazi symbol? The Nazis were atheists!!”

At that point I didn't know about Nazis or atheists, but concluded that both were really bad.

Anyway, aside from the nightmares from that one incident, I did not think a whit about atheists for a very long time. In college I learned that Karl Marx was an atheist and so was Joseph Stalin, but that their real sins were the murders of millions of innocent Europeans and Russians. I knew that “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in order to distinguish us from the Godless Commies. I heard that Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey were atheists but never made any connections. I read some of the Beat Generation authors and knew they were Buddhists, but that’s not exactly atheism, I thought.

Then I went to work and forgot all about it for over 30 years. In retirement I joined the Omnilore study group and met a large number of interesting people, including some actual atheists.

I joined an email DL and began receiving articles and commentary on science and religion. I was amazed!!

It started with a review in the latimes by Robert Lee Hotz of three new books on science vs. religion: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris and The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth by E.O. Wilson. Hotz begins: “What a problem religious faith poses for learned men of empirical mind. How it baffles, angers, frightens them, prompts them to domesticate it or uproot it, leaf and bough.”

He described Dawkins’ “artful jeremiad” as designed not to persuade by means of reason and rationality but “rather to enrage believers of any sort, in order to bolster atheist pride.” Sam Harris, “also takes dead aim at the Christian right” in order to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.”

Only Wilson is able to gracefully bridge the divide between secular science and revealed religion. “For you, the glory of an unseen divinity,” Wilson writes, addressing a Southern Baptist pastor. “For me, the glory of the universe revealed at last. For you, the belief in God made flesh to save mankind; for me, the belief in Promethean fire seized to set men free. You have found your final truth; I am still searching. I may be wrong, you may be wrong. We may both be partly right.”

Summing up, I found hatred (Dawkins), arrogance (Harris) and tolerance (Wilson).

But an Omnilorian writes of Dawkins and Harris: “Their anti-religious bent is simply explained: Either you accept the existence of supernatural forces, or you don't. If you accept supernaturalism, then the discussion is ended -- everything can be explained by ‘the will of God’ or a similar agency. If you don't accept it, then let science proceed. In these debates over science vs. religion, I am inclined to deny the religionists a place at the table.”

I responded: The “anti-religious bent” displayed by Dawkins and Harris is outright hatred, as the quotes in the review show so well: “I am attacking God”; “Faith is evil”; “Jesus is a milksop”; religious upbringing of any sort is a “ludicrous obscenity” -- These guys have no concept of religious tolerance. Their beliefs are fundamentally anti-American.

He continues the argument: “You want the atheists to concede the possibility of a god, but you do not allow that the religious should admit the possibility of no god. This un-level playing field is fundamentally anti-American.”

I respond again: Atheists don't need to admit the possibility of God any more than believers need to admit the possibility of no God. Where did that enter the Constitution? But intolerance of religion or no religion is anti-American. Dawkins is a hateful Brit and Harris is an un-American Yank. Shame on both of them.

Another member of the atheist’s club then speaks up: “The last thing we need is for true believers to put more Faith in science. They'll soon give us a periodic table of the elements with enough asterisked alternative values to explain the chemistry of changing water into wine by means of nothing more than left over spiritual waves that were propagated when the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes no longer violates a similarly asterisked new Law of the Conservation of Mass and Energy.”

A third member sent us an article called “A Free-for-All on Science and Religion.” In it, Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg warns that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief.” Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute called for the establishment of an alternative church: “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

Richard Dawkins was exasperated: “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we are brainwashed into bestowing on religion.”

Sam Harris felt atheists needed to speak out: “By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous.”

Writing in the November 13 issue of Newsweek about the “untold damage to our politics” done by religion, Harris railed against a religious straw man: “Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen — and many who themselves get elected — believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah’s Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.”

David Klinghoffer (“Beyond the Grasp of Arrogant Atheism”) describes it as “a pathetic simplification of a grand tradition possessing depths far beyond anything in Harris’s telling,… much like Shakespeare has been picked apart savagely by critics who deny anything that exceeds their grasp.”

My first extended experience with atheism and atheists has not been entirely rewarding.

Temperature Forcings

“The Sun right now is probably the most active it's been in 400 years.”-- Sallie Baliunas, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

“We are altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe.” -- Al Gore

Every school kid knows that the source of the Earth’s heat and life is our magnificent Sun, never mind “the rest of the universe.” The Sun is HOT, with a surface temperature of 5785 K, and it delivers radiation power to the Earth of about 1370 Watts per square meter. If the Sun were to suddenly go out, the Earth would cool eventually to the temperature of outer space, 3 degrees Kelvin. [Question: How long would it take?]

In the last post I discussed the dynamics of the Earth’s motion that determine the variation of solar radiation hitting the Earth. The following graph is a compilation of that data, also showing the major Ice Ages.




The other major forcing factor for the temperature of the Earth is the Greenhouse Effect, the trapping of reflected heat by greenhouse gases (CO2, NO2, Methane) in the atmosphere, as influenced by continental drift, ocean currents, the carbon cycle and the silicate-carbonate cycle. Without the Greenhouse Effect the Earth would cool by about 15 C to the freezing point of water.

Over the life of the Earth the Sun’s power has increased about 30% while the Earth’s temperature has decreased due to a large decrease of the concentration of greenhouse gasses. For example, the C02 density has decreased by 95% from its peak. It’s understandable that the recent increase of CO2 has convinced many that it has caused the recent temperature increase.

There is, however, contrary evidence: Most of the 20th century warming occurred before 1940, when the CO2 concentration was much lower. Then when the human-caused CO2 increased strongly from 1940 to 1975, the global temperature actually decreased. In fact, ice cores have shown that for the last 240,000 years, the CO2 increase has come around 800 years after the temperature increase. The rising temperature heats the oceans which outgas CO2.

But there is another solar forcing that nicely accounts for the last 20 temperature oscillations during the Holocene Warming. Looking at the sun photo above, we see a large white spot on the face of the sun called “Sunspot 822.” When the photo was taken in Nov. 2005, 822’s length was 87,000 miles, about the size of Jupiter. Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, said: “The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.” The Martian South polar ice cap shrinking has been accelerating since 1999 at a prodigious rate, according to Michael Malin, Principal Investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera. There is no anthropomorphic CO2 generation on Mars.

The details of a 1500 year solar forcing cycle have been known since the research of Gerard Bond of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Bond and his colleagues reported that the climate of the North Atlantic has warmed and cooled nine times in the past 12,000 years in step with the waxing and waning of the sun. The process works like this.

The solar wind (charged particles) of a brighter and more active sun magnetically fends off energetic cosmic rays from space that would otherwise hit the Earth's atmosphere, ionizing air molecules that act as nuclei for cloud droplets that reflect solar radiation and cool the earth. Thus a more active sun sweeps away the cosmic rays and fewer clouds are formed. The Earth heats up. In addition, the active Sun produces more far-UV radiation which splits oxygen molecules generating ozone in the stratosphere that in turn absorbs near-UV that heats the atmosphere.

The active Sun is a double whammy. The details of the 1500 year solar cycle and the measured global temperatures are convincingly explained in a new book by S. Singer and Dennis Avery.

References

G. Bond, "Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene," Science 294, 2001.

Singer and Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years

Ward and Brownlee, The Life and Death of Planet Earth

Temperature of the Earth

To begin the global warming debate it seems reasonable to start with what we know about the Earthly temperature. The most important fact is that the global temperature is continuously changing and has been for over 4.5 billion years. The new Earth was VERY HOT (about 80 deg. C or 176 deg. F) and it stayed that way for ~ 0.7 billion years due to the continuous, violent meteor bombardment that heated the Earth. When the bombardment slowed about 3.8 billion years ago the Earth cooled sufficiently for cellular life to be born.

However, unlike a roast beef that you take from the oven and let cool on the counter, the Earth experienced repeated reheatings when the oceans would boil and repeated freezings when the entire planet was covered with ice. The “Snowball Earth” episodes happened about 2.3 billion years ago and again around 700, 400 and 300 million years ago. In between those severe glaciations the Earth was warm and sometimes quite hot. Around 100 million years ago the whole Earth was a tropical paradise and the dinosours roamed.

Over the last 2 million years the Earth has settled into a temperature oscillation between Ice Ages and warm Interglacial periods on roughly a hundred-thousand-year time scale. These cycles are due to the Earth's orbit around the Sun that changes from nearly circular (warmer) to a pronounced elipse (colder) with that period. The Ice Ages tend to be long (~90-100 thousand years) while the Interglacials are shorter (~10-20 thousand years). The energy received by the Earth can vary by as much as 30% over this entire cycle. Presently the Earth orbit is close to circular and the energy received varies by only 6% from January to June.

The temperature swings are extreme and the change can occur over a relatively short time. For example, the temperature increase during the transition from an Ice Age to a warm Interglacial period ranges from 5 to 15 degrees C, and half of the increase can occur in only 100 years. The last few Interglacials occurred about 420,000 years ago, then again 330,000 and 240,000 and 120,000 (the “Eemian”) and the one we are living in (the “Holocene”) starting around 11,500 years ago. These cycles are just what we expect from the Earth's orbital motion.

In addition to the 100 thousand year temperature oscillations, there are also more rapid, less severe, oscillations caused by variation of the tilt of the Earth's axis on a 41,000 year cycle and the Earth's precession about its axis on a 23,000 year cycle. Each dynamic factor influences how much sunlight strikes the Earth and changes the global temperature. Thus the last Ice Age that began about 110,000 years ago was interrupted by a warming about 55,000 years ago, then reached it’s coldest point around 20,000 years ago. The sea levels at that time were 400 feet lower than today.

The last eight Interglacial periods have each lasted for about half of the 23,000 year precessional cycle, or 11,500 years. On that basis our current warm period is about due to end. I’ll look at the implications of the looming Ice Age in a future post.

So for about 11,500 years we have been in a warming period. The “Climate Optimum” occurred between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago when the Earth was both warmer and wetter than it is today. Biodiversity bloomed, life was good.

But the story is still more complicated and more interesting. The last Ice Age actually ended about 14,000 years ago, when global temperatures rose to nearly the present level (~ 15 C). Then about 1500 years later the Earth was plunged back into a mini Ice Age that lasted for 1000 years before the present Holocene warm period began (with half the warming happening in tens of years). About 750 years later it got cold again and about 750 years later it was warm again, and on and on.

These temperature oscillations of 1500 (+/- 500) years are called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles after their discoverers. They have been happening like clockwork over at least a million years, through Ice Ages and Interglacials. Their mean temperature change has been 4 C, peak to trough. The recent D-O periods have included the following:

Pre-Christ cooling from 600 to 200 BC
Roman Warming from 200 BC to 600 AD
Dark Ages cold period from 600 to 900 AD
Medieval Warming from 900 to 1300 AD
Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 AD
Modern Warming from 1850 to present

Based on the record the Modern Warming temperature should increase another 1-2 C, and the next little icy period should begin in 100-300 years.

In the next post I’ll look more closely at the causes of the temperature changes (the forcings) including the greenhouse effect.

Reference

W. Dansgaard et al, “North Atlantis Climatic Oscillations Revealed by Deep Greenland Ice Cores,” in Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity (1984).

Let’s Have a Debate

An iceberg in the Ilulissat fjord, on Greenland's western coast.

The hysteria at the UN Climate Change conference in Nairobi, Kenya continues following Kofi Annon’s warning that global warming is as dangerous as weapons of mass destruction. British newspaper The Independent published a series of headlines “we will all be reading in reality if nothing is done to prevent climate change.”

2030: RIP -- Arctic polar bear breathes its last

2040: Life-giving rainforests now a wasteland

2050: The last drops of rain fall to earth

2060: Tsunami horror hits Britain

Holy Toledo!!!

Media reports and telecasts are filled with this kind of agenda-driven pseudoscientific nonsense.

Here is another: “Global warming presents humankind with the most important social, political and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. At stake is the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.”

This statement is from the bestseller The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can we Survive it? written in 1975 by Lowell Ponte.

Sorry, I fooled you; the italicized word in Ponte’s statement was supposed to be cooling, not warming. The same hysteria we hear today, but the temperature was going in the opposite direction back in 1975.

The Independent article reported yesterday that 20,000 protesters, ranging from the Women's Institute to Friends of the Earth, and the Ramblers' Association to members of the rock band Razorlight, rallied outside the US embassy in London against the environmental policies of the Bush administration.

"Everyone is waiting for the United States. I think the whole process will be on ice until 2009," when Bush's second term expires, said Paal Prestrud, head of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

After two weeks of talks, 70 environment ministers in Nairobi agreed to a review of Kyoto in 2008 as a possible prelude to deeper emission cuts by rich nations beyond 2012 and steps by developing countries to brake rising emissions. Sounds like another meeting to me.

Solemn UN pronouncements, media hysteria and environmental craziness are the orders of the day in the enlightened European Union.

I think it is past time for some common-sense talk. The public needs to have an honest debate on the global warming issue, starting with the real data.

The debate should address questions such as these:

1. How often do global warmings occur due to natural causes, and what is the usual temperature rise?

2. What are the temperature forcings and is atmospheric CO2 the dominant forcing, or is something else?

3. How much is the human contribution to the temperature forcing?

4. On balance, is warming good or bad for humanity?

5. What is the most likely geothermal environment in 2100?

6. When is the next ice age expected, and what problems will it bring?

Only when the technical answers are in hand should we begin debating the global warming mitigation measures and their costs. Those who say “the science is settled” are pulling on your leg.

I have partially addressed these questions in previous posts. (See, for example, Junk Science, 4/10/06, You Say Warming, I Say Cooling, 6/6, Be Very Scared, 6/16, Global Warming Warriors, 6/18, Last Word on Global Warming, 6/20, Afterword, 6/23, Show me the Beef, 7/8, Bad Ideas, 7/9, Good Ideas, 7/10, Catastrophe!, 10/21.)

I think it’s worth more of my time and effort because of newly found references and a new group of scientific friends from Omnilore. I’ll look at the first question tomorrow.

Hysteria

At the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Nairobi, UN chief Kofi (oil-for-food) Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did wars and curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Annan declared: “The message is clear. Global climate change must take its place alongside those threats -- conflict, poverty, the proliferation of deadly weapons -- that have traditionally monopolized political attention.”

“Climate change is also a threat to peace and security,” he warned. “Changing patterns of rainfall, for example, can heighten competition for resources.”

At the Framework conference the United States is being scrutinized for any gesture towards the Kyoto pact after last week's US elections.

Former US veep Algore described the US and Australia as the “Bonnie and Clyde” of the global climate crisis for failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Australian Prime Minister John Howard who had seen Algore’s movie “An inconvenient truth” said it smacked of a “peeved politician” sniping at the Bush administration.

Mr. Howard urged Australians to think more positively about nuclear power which is expected to become more economical as the cost of reducing CO2 emissions makes coal-fired electricity more expensive. Australia's huge uranium deposits are the world's largest. Environmental activists hate nuclear power even more than global warming.

Back in Washington, there's a new environmental boss in town who scowls a lot, and two of her favorite phrases are “global warming” and “extensive hearings.” Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, is set to take over leadership of the important Environment and Public Works Committee from Sen. James Inhofe.

Inhofe, R-OK, rejects the consensus that human use of fossil fuels is largely responsible for climate change, calling it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” But Boxer said that her priority will be to begin “a very long process of extensive hearings” on global warming.

Boxer wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to fight global warming by putting mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. She cited California's legislation requiring automakers to reduce emissions as “an excellent role model.”

Meanwhile, back at the Nairobi conference, air pollution might be just the thing to fight global warming according to climate scientist Paul J. Crutzen of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. The Nobel laureate said a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere could act as a “shade” from the sun's rays and help cool the planet.

Crutzen’s solution is a man-made version of the huge volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 that poured so much sulfurous debris into the stratosphere that it cooled the Earth by 0.5 degrees Centigrade for about a year. A massive dissemination of sulfurous pollutants would be needed every year or two, as the sulfates precipitate from the atmosphere in acid rain. Wait, I thought we hated acid rain, and largely eliminated it.

This weekend at Moffett Field, California, NASA's Ames Research Center hosts a high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other “geo-engineering” ideas for fending off climate change.

I’ve got an idea.

Los Angeles water officials yesterday announced an agreement to expand its dust control effort on dry Owens Lake. The project would construct dust control berms on an additional 12.7 square miles of lake bed by 2010, and result in an overall price tag of about $520 million.

STOP!! Don’t sign the check, LA, until we find out if the dust will serve as the sun shade without the nasty acid rain. The environmental activists will be conflicted, to be sure, but it’s about time they put up or shut up.

Nancy versus Steny

The House Democratic Caucus is scheduled to select its majority leader Thursday and the Dems are jockeying over the spoils of victory.

Presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed Iraq war critic Rep. John Murtha to be majority leader (her second-in-command) over Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the current minority whip.

Amazingly, the left-tilting Washington Post today endorsed Hoyer as “by far the better choice for the job. He is a moderate and highly capable legislator whose selection would reinforce Ms. Pelosi's announced commitment to govern from the center.”

“Murtha's candidacy is troubling for several reasons,” said the Wash Post, “beginning with his position on the war in Iraq.” While crediting Murtha for sounding an alarm about the deteriorating war, the Post categorized his descriptions of the stakes as “consistently unrealistic,” and his solutions as “irresponsible.”

HOLY COW!!!

Last week Murtha denied that the United States was fighting terrorism in Iraq, while Pelosi said it was not a war to win but a situation to be managed. Those two deserve each other.

According to the Post, Murtha claimed that “stability in the Middle East, stability in Iraq,” would come from an abrupt withdrawal, when, in fact, “virtually all Iraqi and Middle Eastern leaders have said that it would lead to a greatly escalated conflict that could spread through the region.”

In addition to his war fantasies, “John Murtha is not the right poster child for a message that stresses ethics,” said Thomas Mann, a Brookings Inst. expert on the Congress.

During the Abscam congressional bribery investigation in 1980, Murtha was videotaped discussing a bribe with an undercover FBI agent. Murtha has opposed stronger ethics and lobbying rules. He has been an avid participant in the orgy of earmarking, including numerous projects sought by a lobbying firm that employed his brother.

Pelosi is about to blow another divisive decision when she chooses the new leader of the Intelligence Committee. She has decided to dump Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the panel, in favor of Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), an African American who was impeached as a federal judge in the 1980s. Pelosi voted for his impeachment.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D), leader of the conservative Blue Dog Democratic coalition in the House, supports Hoyer. Cardoza warned that Democrats would suffer if the liberals in line to head many of the House's key committees don't listen to the conservatives.

In fact, Steny Hoyer may have enough votes to win the job of Speaker of the House himself. Just imagine if the Blue Dog Dems join with all the House Republicans to select a conservative Democrat, say Cardoza, as Speaker. The Republicans in Conn. did just that, voting to retain Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman.

Nancy P will pull out the rest of her eyebrows.

Pork Barrel Politics

Many thanks to good friend Winston Marshall for the porker on the capitol.

Congressman Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901) once said “The Democrat Party is like a mule. It has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.” After the last elections, Donnelly must be turning over in his grave.

Someone else called the GOP “the stupid party.” He may be right.

The GOP swept back into control of the House of Representatives in 1994 after 40 years in the wilderness under the banner of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” The “Contract” promised and delivered tax cuts, welfare reform and balanced budgets (but failed on strengthening the US military and intelligence capabilities).

George Bush became president in 2000 promising smaller government. Then came the massive expansion of Medicare, the Department of Education regulating K-12 schools and spending bills that contained over 15,000 “earmarks” worth hundreds of $Billions in pork barrel spending.

The favorite tool used by the spending profligates is called “earmarks” - the business of demanding that Federal agencies spend our tax dollars to placate favored friends, businesses, donors and lobbyists, approved by the “Cardinals” – the heads of the appropriations committees. Add to this corrupt practice the trips paid for by lobbyists, the hiring of family members at high salaries, steering consulting business to former staffers or outright bribery, and it is little wonder that the American voters decided that “Republicans are no longer good stewards of the US Congress and threw them out.” We expected more of the inheritors of the Gingrich Revolution.

What we need now is a new “21st Century Contract with America.” (Newt Gingrich, Winning the Future, 2005) It starts with leadership. In the House, Speaker Dennis Hastert is out but current Majority Leader John Boehner and Majority Whip Roy Blunt are looking to retain their leadership roles.

Last week Blunt went to the Heritage Foundation to campaign for his retention as whip. He delivered a defense of “earmarking” saying the elimination of earmarks would do “nothing but shift funding decisions from one side of Pennsylvania Ave. to the other.” Boehner and Blunt won’t do if we hope to get our mojo back.

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who heads the conservative Republican Study Committee, is challenging Boehner to become House minority leader. Arizona Republican John Shadegg, another member of the RSC, is running for party whip against Blunt.

Pence and Shadegg contend Republicans lost the election because they abandoned the party's commitment to limited government. “We didn't just lose our majority, I believe we lost our way,” said Pence. “Only by making a dramatic turn in the direction of the agenda of the Republican revolution can we hope to attain the majority status again.”

We need to root for Pence and Shadegg.

We Live in Interesting Times

Foreigners are voicing opinions about our congressional elections as related to the global war against Islamic terrorists.

TEHRAN: Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the US congressional elections a victory for Iran. “With the scandalous defeat of America's policies in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan, America's threats are empty threats on an international scale,” the Supreme Leader said.

BAGHDAD: Al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri claimed in a new audio tape Friday to be winning the war faster than expected in Iraq. “The al-Qaida army has 12,000 fighters in Iraq, and they have vowed to die for God's sake,” Abu said. “We haven't had enough of your blood yet,” he told the US, and “we will not rest from our Jihad until we have blown up the filthiest house _ which is called the White House.”

Iraqi Minister Ali al-Shemari repeated the government's demands for a speedier US transfer of authority to Iraqi forces and the withdrawal of US troops to their bases, away from Iraq's cities and towns. “The army of America didn't do its job. ... They tie the hands of my government,” al-Shemari said. He apparently approves of the Zakaria-Lama plan.

LONDON: British authorities are tracking 30 terrorist plots involving 1,600 people in 200 terror cells. MI5 head, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller warned that young British Muslims are at risk of being radicalized by extremists and predicted the fight against terrorism would last a generation.

Manningham-Buller warned future threats would come from “chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology.” Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the threat from international terrorism “is serious, is growing, and will, I believe, be with us for a generation.”

BERLIN: Legal documents to be filed next week in Germany will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior US officials, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The plaintiffs in the case include Mohammad al-Qahtani who is identified as the “20th hijacker” and a would-be participant in the 9/11 attacks. Time magazine reported that Qahtani underwent a “special interrogation plan” at Gitmo that included sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation and watching The View every morning. (Oh, no, not more Rosie, he was heard to say.)

Also in Germany, investigations are under way in parliament concerning cooperation between the CIA and German intelligence. The leftist Center for Constitutional Rights, a US organization, is helping to bring the legal action in Germany. The US has rejected submission to the International Criminal Court on grounds that it could be used to unjustly prosecute US citizens for political reasons. I’d say it is time to bring our troops home from Germany.

Now that the Democrats have taken control of both houses of congress, they will have a leading role in dealing with these and other serious issues. The voters have to wonder how they will do.

Will the Dems follow the lead of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, who said his committee will investigate the Bush administration's running of the government and that there are so many areas of possible wrong doing, his biggest problem will be deciding which ones to pursue. Among the issues that should have been investigated, Waxman contended, was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Attention Berlin!

Or will the Dems follow the lead of Sen. Evan Bayh, D-IN, who said: “It's up to us to prove that we're something better than just a mirror image of the people they voted against. And if we serve up a highly partisan, ideologically extreme, Democratic version of what they just voted against, we're not going to do very well. And the country won't do very well.”

Yes, we live in interesting times.

Anatomy of da’ Feet

A GOPUSA article by Bobby Earle dissects the congressional losses and concludes that the elections were not a referendum on conservatism.

“Liberals run and hide and try to distance themselves from that label because they know the American people have rejected the policies of big government (programs and regulation), tax-and-spend, weak on defense liberalism.”

Conservatives, on the other hand, are proud of their bedrock principles including small government, minimum regulations, low taxes and the strongest military on Earth.

So, how does one explain the election results that President Bush called a real drubbing? That requires understanding the relationship of liberalism to the Democratic Party and conservatism to the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party is in synch with liberal principles of government-run social programs, government control of business, and the taxes needed to pay for it all. Only the minority Blue Dog Democrats embrace conservative principles.

Republicans, unfortunately, are not sure which feet they stand upon. Reagan Republicans were and still are conservatives. Bush 43 is a social conservative and a strong military conservative but a big government liberal. In these elections, Americans abandoned Republicans because Republicans abandoned conservatism.

Earmarks and pork-laden budgets were embraced by both Parties, and never vetoed by the Republican president. The Republicans in congress introduced the multi-trillion-dollar yet unfunded prescription drug benefit and were derided by Democrats for being too cheap. Lesson: Never try to outspend a Democrat. Instead of dismantling the Department of Education, the Republicans introduced “No Child Left Behind” - a worthy concept but used by Democrats to mobilize teachers and unions. Lesson: Never try to out-regulate a Democrat.

Most of all, the election was a referendum on the conduct of the Iraq war. Most Americans supported the invasion and the strategy up through the Iraqi elections. Now, however, most see a need for a change in strategy.

The US military won remarkable victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. When Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” on the aircraft carrier, he was literally correct and he should have said so. But it has been clear to most Americans for a while that the conflicts in both countries are now more like police actions than wars. The enemy insurgents are indistinguishable from the general population, use terror as their primary weapon and target civilians. This is not a fight that plays to the strengths of our magnificent military.

Now that the Iraqi military has been built up to 300,000 men, they and the Iraqi police must take over the fighting. In the 11/6/06 issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria writes about the way forward. According to Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki, if the Iraqi troops were left to their own devices they would establish order in six months. The Sunni Baathists would be crushed and that would be that.

Zakaria notes that 61 percent of Iraqis now support attacks on US troops. The Sunnis all hate us for deposing Saddam and the Shia resent our protection of the Sunnis. Thus the American troops need to get out of the way and focus, instead, on strategic interests such as the oil fields, Kurdish autonomy and security of the border with Iran and Syria. Zakaria suggest that these critical security tasks could be accomplished by a US force of about 60,000 (down from 145,000) at a cost of $30 Billion per year (down from $90 Billion).

Some such policy change must be made before the American people demand a withdrawal. Yesterday President Bush appointed Bob Gates to replace Rummy as SecDef. Gates is a “realist” who most likely does not share the president’s idealistic faith in a truly democratic solution in Iraq. He was also a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton that is reviewing U.S. options in Iraq. I hope that something like the above will be part of the ISG message.

I’m convinced that such a change will be regarded by most Americans as real progress and will be supported by a large majority of the congress. Many Democrats have been calling for a redeployment of US troops for some time and new congressmen like Democrat Jim Webb (VA) a former marine should support it.

It’s just too bad that the President did not make such a change six months ago when it could have made a difference in the recent election. But, hey, now he has the opportunity to deal with Nancy Pelosi on a regular basis. Lucky guy! I wonder if he’ll like this blog. (Thanks, Dori, for the pic of Bush)

Happy Days Are Here Again

I have been accused of being overly optimistic. While conceding the optimistic part, I reject the overly description as an impossibility. But that’s just me. I have to admit that my optimism ebbed for a few hours last night as the election returns rolled in, to be replaced this morning by some disappointment, but with renewed optimism. Spending the evening with like-minded friends reminded me that friendships are truly priceless, and God is in control. (Thanks, Karen, Dave, ...)

The primary source of my disappointment was the strong antipathy to President Bush that was voiced in the exit polls. I believe he is a good and courageous man, and find it sad that most Americans don’t seem to see him that way. I worry more about our troops in the war and our safety here at home.

That’s about as much negativism as I can gin up, so now I’ll look at the silver lining, beginning with the Pelosi economy. For several years since the Clinton recession, our surging economy (Dow 12,000+, full employment, real after tax income up sharply) has been denied by the media and the Democrats. But now, if only the Dems don’t do something stupid, the continued economic growth will be touted. Happy days are here again!

I was particularly happy about Joe Lieberman’s Senate victory over the anti-war Dem candidate. My joy will be complete if Joe decides to switch to the GOP.

Several states approved ballot measures restricting government use of eminent domain and bans on same-sex marriage, thus supporting important conservative principles.

And among the Dem congressional winners were several who should be considered Blue Dog Democrats, who are social and economic conservatives, pro-life and strong supporters of gun rights. Several also have military backgrounds. The Dem newcomers join the 37 Blue Dogs in the House and Lieberman in the Senate. (Freshman Blue Dogs in the House are known as "Blue Pups.") In 2005, the members of the Blue Dog Coalition voted 32 to 3 in favor of the bill to limit access to bankruptcy protection. These guys are not Pelosi-Reed Democrats.

Aside from the socialist strongholds, politicians who espouse conservative positions win a lot more than they lose. A recent CNN poll found that 54 percent of Americans believe government is doing too much while only 37 percent want government to do more.

On the state level I am happy about Arnie’s re-election. He is a semi-RINO but immensely better that the Dem loser.

I am also pleased that the electorate rejected the oil tax (Prop 87) in spite of strong support for it by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Julia Roberts.

But most important was the strong support of Jessica’s law (Prop 83) that was approved with 71% of the vote. I was infuriated by opposition to it by a local city councilman who warned that all the pedophiles were going to move to Palos Verdes and by the la times that opposed lifetime GPS monitoring of child sex predators (too harsh for the now fired editor Dean Baquet).

Finally it is important to note that last night was not a defeat for conservatism; it was a defeat for Republicanism, the party of the Bridge to Nowhere. Senator Tom Coburn (R –OK) said it well:

“One of the great paradoxes in politics is that governing to maintain power is the surest way to lose it. Republicans have the ideas to solve our greatest challenges. If we focus on ideas, our majority status will take care of itself.”

Democrats Meet Their Little Bighorn

On June 25–26, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River, a U.S. cavalry unit commanded by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer was annihilated by the combined Lakota - Cheyenne Indian tribes. Tommorrow the Democrats meet their own Little Bighorn, or Battle of the Greasy Grass in Indian parlance.

A month ago the main-stream media were saying that this election would be a Dem landslide due to discontent over the Iraq war. They were convinced that George Bush would stay away from the congressional races at the request of Republican candidates. But look what has happened. President Bush has barnstormed the country for the last two weeks appearing before huge enthusiastic crowds and talking about the war.

Meanwhile, the generic opinion polls have narrowed from initial large Dem leads and the Dem Party leaders are in hiding. It’s a shame. (LOL)

On the national level there are at least 10 darn good reasons to vote for the GOP (from NewsMax magazine).

Reason #1. The economy is kicking butt. In the 36 months since the Bush tax cuts ended the Clinton recession, the economy has experienced astonishing growth. Over the first half of this year, our economy grew at a strong 4.1 percent annual rate, faster than any other major industrialized nation.

Reason #2. Unemployment is almost nil for a major economy (4.4%), and is verging on full employment.

Reason #3. The Dow is hitting record highs, above 12,000, thus increasing the value of countless pension and 401(k) that Americans rely on for their retirement years.

Reason #4. Wages have risen dramatically. Over the first half of 2006, employee compensation per hour grew at a 6.3 percent annual rate adjusted for inflation. Real after-tax income has risen a whopping 15 percent since January 2001.

Reason #5. Gas prices have plunged to $2.21 a gallon on average for regular grade 40 cents lower than a year ago.

Reason #6. Since 9/11, no terrorist attacks have occurred on U.S. soil thanks to programs such as monitoring communications between al-Qaida operatives overseas and their agents in the U.S. and following the movement of terrorist funds -- both measures bitterly opposed by Democrats.

Reason #7. Productivity is surging and has grown by a strong 2.5 percent over the past four quarters, well ahead of the average productivity growth in the last 30 years.

Reason #8. The Prescription Drug Program is working. Over 75 percent of those on Medicare have enrolled, and the overwhelming majority say they are happy with the program.

Reason #9. Bush has kept his promise of naming conservative judges including Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

Reason #10. The deficit has been cut in half three years ahead of the president's 2009 goal, with the 2006 fiscal year budget deficit down to $248 billion. The tax cuts have stimulated the economy and are working.

Personally, I would have numbered the reasons differently, in order of importance, with #6 first (no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil) and #9 second (conservative judges). For those reasons alone it is imperative that we elect Republicans tomorrow. The economic reasons are just icing on the cake.

And what you get if the Dems take over is frivolity: “The only way to get Democrats to focus on terrorists would be to convince them that the terrorists are interfering with a woman's right to choose or that commercial jetliners exploding in midair are a threat to America's wetlands.” (thanks Ann Coulter)

Tomorrow when you go to the polls, think like an Indian; put an arrow into the chestless Democrats.

"D" Stands for "Defeat"

I watched the Obsession documentary last night. The most compelling message was not the deadly seriousness of the Islamic madmen, or the huge number of those who are making war on the West, or that they hate Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and moderate Muslims also, and intend to conquer the world. No, the most compelling message is that almost nobody knows this.

The main-stream media don’t want us to know (It’s why Obsession was turned down by all the alphabet networks) and politicians on both sides of the aisle are afraid of the implications. Democrats don’t want to believe it while Republicans worry that taking aggressive action will be political suicide since most Americans prefer not to believe it either. The horrifying thought is that it will take another magnified 9/11 to rouse the majority of Americans from their ostrich-like refuge.

At TIADaily.com, Robert Tracinski cautioned that a vote for any Democratic candidate is a vote for Democratic leadership in Congress, with the power to control the war budget. The head of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee will be Jack Murtha, an advocate of immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, if the Democrats gain control of the House.

“To be sure,” writes Tracinski, “Democrats are divided on how they would prefer to lose the war. Some want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, while others want a phased withdrawal. Even worse, many Democrats have climbed aboard a campaign advocating negotiations with Iran and Syria--the two main sponsors of the insurgency in Iraq--over what these dictatorships would do to stabilize Iraq after we leave.

This, then, is the Democrats' strategy in Iraq: declare defeat, and negotiate with Iran over the terms of our surrender.”

Tracinski warns, ominously, that this disaster will not be limited to Iraq. “Flush with confidence and confirmed in the assumption that the Americans, for all of their technological superiority, don't have the moral fortitude to fight a war, where would they go next? A lot of them would go to Pakistan and Afghanistan and launch an even bigger war against us there. But don't worry. Maybe Pakistan's new Islamist rulers wouldn't go after us first. Maybe they would start a nuclear war with India, instead. And a retreat from Iraq would be a green light to Iran to develop nuclear weapons--or to buy them from the North Koreans.”

Summing up, Tracinski writes that “the Democratic plan, if it is enacted, would deliver America into a period of retreat, humiliation, and uncertainty that we haven't seen since the end of the Vietnam War--while giving our enemies a glorious victory that would be seen as a historical vindication of the Islamist cause.”

This is what is at stake on Tuesday.

Before closing, I’d like to draw attention to another charming behavior trait that is prevalent in Muslim societies, but was not covered in the Obsession documentary. In a piece called Uncovered meat and short skirts, Kira Cochrane writes about a bizarre but all too common sermon by a Muslim cleric.

“On hearing Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali's comments about rape, my first thought was that the sheikh, Australia's leading Muslim cleric, must be Sacha Baron Cohen's latest alter ego. After all, some views are so extreme that you can only hope they're satirical.

In a Ramadan sermon, Sheikh al-Hilali compared women to uncovered meat and quoted approvingly from a scholar called al-Rafihi: If I came across a rape crime - kidnap and violation of honour - I would discipline the man and order that the woman be arrested and jailed for life.

This punishment was because women -- skin-baring temptresses that we be -- are, in Sheikh al-Hilali's view, ultimately responsible for rape. If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street . . . and the cats eat it, he then said, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.”

Hello, women of the West: These are the madmen that we are fighting. Beware what you ask for on Tuesday.

Obsession

After the last post, one of my Canadian readers emailed to say that she did not understand the hate. I replied that the Muslim fanatics dearly want to kill us all, Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Indians, Russians ... Read their words. It would not surprise me if their next massive attack occurred in Paris or Toronto or Tokyo, because another attack on America will result in Armageddon in the Muslim Middle East.

Yet there are many in America who do not or refuse to comprehend the threat. To those I recommend the documentary movie Obsession that will be aired on the Fox News Channel tonight at 8 p.m. PST and then again at 1:00 a.m.

From the Obsession web site is the following description of the movie.

Almost 70 years ago, Europe found itself at war with one of the most sinister figures in modern history: Adolf Hitler. When the last bullet of World War II was fired, over 50 million people were dead, and countless countries were both physically and economically devastated. Hitler’s bloody struggle sought to forge the world anew, in the crucible of Nazi values. How could such a disaster occur? How could the West have overlooked the evil staring it in the face, for so long, before standing forcefully against it? Today, we find ourselves confronted by a new enemy, also engaged in a violent struggle to transform our world. As we sleep in the comfort of our homes, a new evil rises against us. A new menace is threatening with all the means at its disposal to bow Western Civilization under the yoke of its values. That enemy is Radical Islam. Using images from Arab TV, rarely seen in the West, Obsession reveals an ‘insider's view' of the hatred the Radicals are teaching, their incitement of global jihad, and their goal of world domination. With the help of experts, including first-hand accounts from a former PLO terrorist, a Nazi youth commander, and the daughter of a martyred guerilla leader, the film shows, clearly, that the threat is real. A peaceful religion is being hijacked by a dangerous foe, who seeks to destroy the shared values we stand for. The world should be very concerned.

On the Obsession web site check out the terror time line starting in 1977

Many who I respect a lot have praised the movie:

Obsession is one of the most powerful, expertly crafted and undeniably important films I've seen this year. This courageous, utterly gripping expose' deserves the attention of every American -- and merits serious consideration for the Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary.
Michael Medved

Obsession is both scary and riveting! Each and every one of us should feel obligated to show Obsession to as many people as we can. Obsession should serve as a wake-up call to the free world to confront the threat now, before it is too late."
Joel Surnow, Executive Producer “24”

Obsession demonstrates in the clearest possible terms that we must stand up and defend our way of life.
Mary Matalin, Former Assistant to the President

Viewing this documentary should hereafter be considered a prerequisite for participating in the debate about the national security challenges we face, and what must be done to address them.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Center for Security Policy

Obsession tells it like it is---or rather, allows the radical jihadists to tell it like it is without Western media editing. Anyone watching this film can conclude that Islamic terrorism is the main threat of our day...
Larry Schweikart, Professor of History, University of Dayton

The root of virtually all evil is lies. If the Germans were not told lies, there would not have been a Holocaust. The Islamic world is today also steeped in lies about the West. And that is the major source of the evils emanating from that world. Now, finally, thanks to Obsession , the West can see and hear those lies.
Dennis Prager

Dear friend Karen emailed to remind me of the showing tonight, attaching the following note from her friend Nancy:

It has been our Lord's doing to get this show (a documentary) into the United States because the liberal leftists and Muslim organizations have pulled out all the stops to keep it out, so that none of us can see the TRUTH about Islam and Islamists.

Thank God for Fox News Channel, because none of the "alphabet" channels will air it as they think like John Kerry thinks. Someone had to provide extraordinary funding in order for us to be able to view it. Thank God for whomever that is, too! Apparently, it's a mind-blower; please plan to record it if you can't watch at one of those 4 times. And please circulate this email to all the people you know, both for their sakes and America's.

My prayer now is that the Lord will remind you to watch or record "OBSESSION", plus alert others!

May God bless America, in spite of ourselves.

Amen, Nancy

Democratic Party Supporters

I just finished deleting six comments on my last post about john kerry’s disgraceful behavior. What fun! The tolerant lefties are inflamed over the revelation that Ted Haggard, a leading evangelist and outspoken opponent of gay marriage, has been accused of trysts with a gay prostitute. It’s funny how when a gay liberal is exposed he is revered as a saint while exposure of a gay right winger is cause for burning at the stake. That’s because the right wing guy is a hypocrite – lib’s really hate them – rather than a sinner – lib’s don’t believe in sin.

Conservatives realize that we all sin and that some sins are worse than others – like if a president had sex with an intern in the Oval Office – like that could ever happen. So, Mr. Haggard has resigned from his post as president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals while a church panel investigates allegations. He resigned like Mark Foley did, but Barney Frank did not. I wonder what political party Barney belonged to.

But enough of inconsequential matters! That critical election is coming next Tuesday and foreigners are voicing opinions.

“Americans should vote Democrat,” said Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.

“This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because it is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud.”

Senior terrorist leaders interviewed by WorldNetDaily say they hope that Democrats sweep into power because of the party's position on withdrawing from Iraq. A Democratic victory would prove to them Americans are tired, ensuring a victory for the worldwide Islamic resistance.

This is NOT A JOKE.

But speaking of jokes, nancy pelosi was recently interviewed on 60 Minutes. Pelosi demonstrated that she does not understand the global nature of the threat when she stated flatly “the war on terror is the war in Afghanistan.”

Al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, seems to have a different opinion: “Victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in Iraq, the heart of the Islamic world.”

The House Minority Leader continued: “The jihadists are in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. They'll stay there as long as we're there.”

Unfortunately, terror leaders unanimously rejected nancy’s contention that American withdrawal would end the insurgency. Islamic Jihad's Saadi, laughing, stated, “There is no chance that the resistance will stop but would compel jihadists to continue fighting until America is destroyed.”

Jihad Jaara said an American withdrawal would “mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (America).”

He called both Democrats and Republicans “agents of the Zionist lobby in the U.S.” Oh-oh, they don’t much like dem’s either. I wonder what they think of gays.

Maybe pelosi can tell us how giving al Qaeda what they want in Iraq will keep Americans safe and secure from Islamic terrorism in the future. Or, maybe not.

Disgraceful Behavior

After thirty-five years of disgraceful behavior this man has finally done in himself and his political party. During a run for Congress three decades ago, john kerry said he opposed a volunteer Army because it would be dominated by the underprivileged (“an army of the poor and the black and the brown’), be less accountable and be more prone to “the perpetuation of war crimes.”

Any democrat or media pundit (Hillary, Keith Olbermann) who tells you that Kerry’s latest slander of the military was just a gaffe should look at his 35 year record of slander.

But most important, with the election next week, is to remember that kerry provides a view into the sick soul of American liberalism and the democratic party. He simply reflects a deep set antipathy that finds expression in michael moore movies and at visits abroad by democratic political figures (jimmy carter) and liberal intellectuals (noam chomsky). A perfect example of this contemptuous anti-American behavior was provided by The New Yorker magazine reporter seymour hersh at McGill University in Montreal.

“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” hersh said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.” He claims to have seen a video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer. It reminds me of Kerry’s “cut off ears”… diatribe.

I guess it is a strength of the American democracy that we don’t take guys like Kerry and Hersh out and shoot them.

The evil sickness pervades so much of our elite society. Take the University of Pennsylvania president amy gutmann.

Democracy Project describes the Halloween costume party at gutman's home Tuesday night. “Among the guests was Saad Saadi, who came dressed as a suicide bomber, complete with plastic dynamite strapped to his chest and a toy automatic rifle. Worse, Gutmann posed with Saadi!”

“An obvious question: would Gutmann have posed with a guest--or even allowed him into her house--if he'd dressed as Adolf Hitler or a Nazi SS officer? A KKK member? But in modern liberal circles, posing as a Palestinian suicide bomber is just fine. After all, he mainly tries to kill innocent Jews.”

Melange a Lurch

Yesterday:
Let me make it crystal clear, as crystal clear as I know how: I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and of his broken policy.

Today:
As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about and never intended to refer to any troop. I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform and I personally apologize to any service member, family member or American who was offended.

In the brief statement on his web site, Lurch Kerry also attacked President Bush for a “failed security policy.”

Earlier in the day on “Imus in the Morning,” Lurch said he was “sorry about a botched joke” about President Bush who “owes America an apology for this disaster in Iraq.”

Well don’t you feel better now that we know he is sorry? ... I don't think so.

Following is a mélange of statements from actual intelligent people who wrote to the GOPUSA web site and the Hugh Hewitt site. All the words are theirs.

I was the Air Force combat medic who called you yesterday seething with rage over the esteemed senator's comment as I had just returned from Iraq a little over three weeks ago. (from my second tour of duty) As I see it, Mr. Kerry has effectively "non" apologised. He did not say these words in public but released them via his web site...frankly, thats a chicken**** way to go about it. It also arrives 24 hours too late, smacking of the aftershock of a phone call from Bill Clinton basically telling Kerry to get on the bus or be thrown under it.

Kerry's implication that military service is something "smart" people should avoid is downright elitist, and reminiscent of prevailing attitudes from the Vietnam era. His "botched joke" was disrespectful to everyone who has ever served in the U.S. military. We are not a bunch of slack-jawed Gomer Pyles or Forrest Gumps who had no other option but to join the military, as many would have you believe. Today's all-volunteer force is much more highly educated than their predecessors, or even their contemporary civilian counterparts: 99 percent of all service members have at least a high school diploma, and 98 percent of the officers have a bachelor's degree or higher. (Smash, the Indepundit)

He (Kerry) was for the joke before he was against it. What a stupid, stupid man!!

The megalomaniacal failed Presidential Candidate and treasonous John F’n Kerry was lying about his military service and he’s lying now with his unwarranted attacks against all brave Americans serving in our military defending our way-of-life. Shame on him! and on all DemocRats who refer to the self confessed war criminal as a war hero.

Kerry showed the nation what he is: an arrogant, lying, condescending, vicious ideologue who thinks he's better than us ordinary folk. Keep it up Lurch, but watch your back. We, the GOP, love what you're doing, the damage is to your own party, and bad things happen to people who jeapordize the power mad Democratic Party.

I am very disturbed. I am very insulted and very sad that he doesn't understand how highly educated and well trained our military men and women are. (Debra Booth, whose son was killed in Iraq)

Kerry doesn't know because he never spent enough time around them. Remember, he went to Vietnam to injure himself to qualify for 3 purple hearts. As soon as he got his medals, he got out and started his anti military rant. Democrats have sunk very low in the last few generations, but Kerry is their bottom feeder.

I would like to request a new web icon for John Kerry. We need a snake, with a lily livered slimy belly, and a big mouth.

Thank you, John Kerry, for reminding me and the rest of America what an evil alternative you and your party represent for this country.

If you talk to Democrats of the middle-class and upper-middle-class and (in John Heinz Kerry’s case) the neo-Gulf-emir-class, you’ll have heard the same thing a thousand times: these poor fellows in Iraq, they’re only there because they’re too poverty-stricken and ill-educated so they couldn’t become Senators and New York Times reporters and tenured Queer Studies professors like normal Americans do.

That is, in fact, what they mean by the claim that they “support our troops”: they want to bring them home and retrain them so they’re not forced into taking jobs as Bush’s torturers and thugs. It’s part of the same condescension as describing soldiers as “our children”. If a 22-year old intern wants to drop to the Oval Office broadloom, she’s a grown woman exercising her freedom of choice. But, if a 28-year old guy wants to serve in Iraq, he’s a poor wee misguided Grade Six drop-out who doesn’t know any better. John Kerry’s soundbite is interesting not because it’s the umpteenth self-inflicted wound by Mister Nuance but because it gets right to the heart of the Democrats’ “support” for the troops. (Mark Steyn)

God will take care of him in his own time.

Finally, the last word is from my son-in-law:

I'm pissed! I can't believe John F'n Kerry has gone out and denigrated our troops again! This elitist ass is a serial troop defamer. Lt Gen Tom McInerney (ret) said this morning that Kerry owes the troops not an apology, but his resignation. I wholeheartedly agree.

This Veteran will not stand idly by and allow that lying snob to steal the heroism of another generation of Veterans.

Ray Rose, Gulf War Vet