This is a proposed law in New York state:

“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises,” the bill, A.10129, states in part. The legislation, which Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced on March 5, would fine restaurants $1,000 for each violation.

Even the Village Voice thinks that Ortiz has questionable judgment. Do you think that things will get more or less intrusive under the Obama healthcare plan?

So-called “green jobs” are a fraud, according to the Telegraph, and the current administration, which is infatuated with this odd fantasy, has been taking steps to keep this basic fact unclear:

Green jobs are a waste of space, a waste of money, a lie, a chimera. You know that. I know that. We’re familiar with the report by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain which shows that for every “green job” that is created another 2.2 jobs are LOST in the real economy…

After two studies refuted President Barack Obama’s assertions regarding the success of Spain’s and Denmark’s wind energy programs, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies.

Via the FOIA request, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has learned that the Department of Energy — specifically the office headed by Al Gore’s company’s former CEO, Cathy Zoi — turned to George Soros’ Center for American Progress and other wind industry lobbyists to help push Obama’s wind energy proposals.

The FOIA request was not entirely complied with, and CEI just filed an appeal over documents still being withheld. In addition to withholding many internal communications, the administration is withholding communications with these lobbyists and other related communications, claiming they constitute “inter-agency memoranda.” This implies that, according to the DoE, wind industry lobbyists and Soros’s Center for American Progress are — for legal purposes — extensions of the government.

There is no shame in not being able to predict trends in technology, products, markets and innovations. for example, Bill Gates largely missed the internet: “while Gates is an innovator, he is hardly an inventor. For the most part, what he did was improve on already existing products such as DOS which he bought during his early years for a few thousand dollars. Bill Gates has been judged by recent history as the ‘world’s computer genius and innovator of the PC who missed the Internet train’.” If Bill Gates could miss the internet, what credence should be put in the industrial predictions of politicians, many of whom know not one whit about the private sector.

As Michael Crichton said in 2003: “Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?” Predicting “green jobs” because you prefer a world with “green jobs” is a fool’s errand.

By the way, nothing could be more foolish than increasing bureaucratic centralization and decision-making in the incredible industry of medicine, where innovation is amazing at present. Nothing lowers cost or increases the range of choices like the decentralized, entrepreneurial phenomenon that is innovation. HT: Polipundit

It is fascinating to read Jack Cashill’s meditations on the man who perhaps wrote the poem Pop (it’s a disturbing poem, by the way). Whether you credit his ideas or think they are insane is beside the point. What is interesting is just how little we really know about the very peculiar man who currently serves as President. If a man forms the view that it is his mission to remake in his image and likeness a nation of 300 million souls, and indeed the entire planet, what early traumas and misfortunes might he have fallen prey to? And a disturbing question beyond that: what insight does he have into his early formative experiences, what self-awareness does he possess?

From the NYT in June 2009:

the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

From the NYT in November 2009:

A thick file of private emails and unpublished documents generated by an array of climate scientists over 13 years was obtained by a hacker…The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

From the NYT in March 2010:

climate scientists have taken a vicious beating in the media and on the Internet, accused of hiding data, covering up errors and suppressing alternate views. Their response until now has been largely to assert the legitimacy of the vast body of climate science and to mock their critics as cranks and know-nothings.

But the volume of criticism and the depth of doubt have only grown, and many scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence and have to fight back. Tentatively and grudgingly, they are beginning to engage their critics, admit mistakes, open up their data and reshape the way they conduct their work.

The unauthorized release last fall of hundreds of e-mail messages from a major climate research center in England, and more recent revelations of a handful of errors in a supposedly authoritative United Nations report on climate change, have created what a number of top scientists say is a major breach of faith in their research. They say the uproar threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust

Walter Russell Mead observes: “Before you can report an inconvenient truth you have to be able to recognize it; this is the test that the Times‘ coverage of the ‘climategate’ story has failed.”

Mr. Jones of East Anglia spoke in response to official criticism:

Giving evidence to a Science and Technology Committee inquiry, the Institute of Physics said: ‘Unless the disclosed emails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research and for the credibility of the scientific method. ‘The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital.’

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled the CRU had broken Freedom of Information rules by refusing to hand over raw data. But yesterday Professor Jones — in his first public appearance since the scandal broke — denied manipulating the figures. Looking pale and clasping his shaking hands in front of him, he told MPs: ‘I have obviously written some pretty awful emails.’

He admitted withholding data about global temperatures but said the information was publicly available from American websites. And he claimed it was not ‘standard practice’ to release data and computer models so other scientists could check and challenge research.

So, is the ‘standard practice’ something like this?

Christopher Booker in the Telegraph:

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all –- the notorious “hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

Al Gore in the NYT:

We can’t wish away climate change…I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

One of these days, something’s probably got to give.

FSM and SDS alumnus and Tikkun Magazine founder Rabbi Michael Lerner has some advice for certain of the President’s 2008 voters:

Many are suffering from post-traumatic Obama abandonment syndrome — an ailment that came from being severely traumatized by Obama’s political moves in the past thirteen months. A palpable sadness, depression, anger and even despair carried by many who had worked for Obama and now felt betrayed by his choices in his first year in office was mixed with compassion and a strong determination to not allow the political Right to use our despair as their ticket to a political revival…

“What do we in the liberal and progressive world do now, if we face three, or hopefully seven, years of an Obama presidency?” The first step toward answering that question was to grieve what we had lost, honestly acknowledging the painful, for many quite humiliating, fact that after having built so many walls of self-protection against allowing ourselves to get sucked into some new moment of idealism, we had allowed those walls to come down as we became energized about Obama, only to find that once again our hopes had been dashed…

What happened in Obama’s first year is that most of those who had allowed themselves to hope began to appear to themselves and others as naïve fools, and the humiliation that they experienced will take some years and psychologically or spiritually sophisticated interventions…

the most important first step for liberals and progressives is to explain to themselves and each other that history is not over, that the Obama years still retain some possibilities, and even though we need to give up our (often unconscious) fantasy that Obama was our messiah who would save us and the world, we can and must still retain our understanding that the suffering in this world through poverty and oppression, the destruction of the environment and the possibility of ending all human and animal life on the planet Earth, and the survival of our own souls and mental health requires that we revive a movement based on love, kindness, generosity, ecological sanity, and caring for each other, including everyone on the planet.

Fortunately the objectives of Rabbi Lerner and his like-minded group have gotten much more limited and practical, as he has discussed at several conferences: “The SF Conference and its follow up in D.C. focused on two first steps in this direction: 1. An Environmental and Ethical Responsibility Amendment to the U.S Constitution and 2. A Global Marshall Plan.” Whew! Thank goodness. No more silly talk of a messiah, just the more prosaic and commonplace tasks of a Constitutional Amendment and a Global Marshall Plan. (HT: BOTW)

A statement from the White House claims that 1/3 of recent Americans will get diabetes due to the previously unknown “national security” threat of being overweight:

One third of all children born in 2000 or later will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives; many others will face chronic obesity-related health problems like heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, and asthma. A recent study put the health care costs of obesity-related diseases at $147 billion per year. This epidemic also impacts the nation’s security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.

“The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake,” said Mrs. Obama. “This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved overnight, but with everyone working together, it can be solved. So, let’s move.”

Three points: (a) the statement that “One third of all children born in 2000 or later will suffer from diabetes” seems a little odd given that the actual incidence of diabetes in America is that only 7.8% of citizens have the affliction, not one third, as Michelle Obama asserted; (b) diabetes does not afflict children at all: less than 1% (0.22%) of persons under 20 years old have diabetes; and (c) the idea that fat kids threaten “national security” is absurd on its face. Can’t this team get better writers so they don’t say such absurd things?

Mark Steyn reviews the history of the melting glaciers:

“We’re facing the risk of extreme runoff, with water running straight into the Bay of Bengal and taking a lot of topsoil with it. A few hundred square miles of the Himalayas are the source for all the major rivers of Asia — the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze — where three billion people live. That’s almost half the world’s population.” And NASA agrees, and so does the UN Environment Programme, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the World Wildlife Fund, and the respected magazine the New Scientist. The evidence is, like, way disproportionate.

But where did all these experts get the data from? Well, NASA’s assertion that Himalayan glaciers “may disappear altogether” by 2030 rests on one footnote, citing the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.

In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report suggests 2035 as the likely arrival of Armageddon, but what’s half a decade between scaremongers? They rate the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing as “very high” — i.e., more than 90 per cent. And the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that report, so it must be kosher, right? Well, yes, its Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”

WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scientific evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in” — for political reasons.

But wait. AGW is an established fact — except for the facts that aren’t so well established.

D’Aleo and Watts have produced a 110 page paper on problems with the measurement of surface temperature in the matter of AGW. It makes for interesting reading. There is also an amusing piece in the China Daily that refers to the ancient Chinese wisdom that two errors can be discounted but the third error constitutes a tipping point — the IPCC has at least three errors of significance, and a whole lot more if you take into account the work of the gentlemen above. It would seem that it’s only a matter of time now. HT’s: Powerline, AT

Who knows what is the Left and what is the Right anymore? Here’s an excerpt from an audiotape of that renowned fighter against global warming, Mr. Osama bin Laden:

Noam Chomsky was right when he pointed out that there is a similarity between the policies of America and those of mafia gangs. They are the true terrorists…

The talk about climate change is not an intellectual indulgence. Rather, it is a reality. All of the industrialized countries, and especially the large ones, bear the responsibility for the crisis of the greenhouse effect. Most of them, though, rallied around the Kyoto accords, and agreed to limits on emissions of harmful gases. However Bush Jr., and Congress before him, rejected this accord in order to please the large corporations, which are themselves the ones responsible for speculation, monopolies, and the rise in the cost of living. And they are behind globalization and its tragic consequences.

Meanwhile, former Marxist, J.D. Salinger stalker, and crack-cocaine experimenter (its in the book) Roger Simon had this to say about a recent Scientific American article:

their boneheaded article Negating “Climategate“: Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy now reads as if it were written by David Biello somewhere around 1993. Oh, well, back when this nonsense was written (December?) some people still believed the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear, not to mention the Amazonian rainforests. Nor did we know that not just the East Anglia CRU, but also our own NASA had been playing fast and loose with AGW temperature facts…The poor editors of SA are taking a drubbing in the comments, which they richly deserve.

One of these fellows is wrong, but whom? Let’s go poll a faculty lounge at UC Berkeley and get the answer.

Apple iPad Hands On from PopSci.com on Vimeo.

Via Popular Science.

Bloomberg presents a list of politicians and others who perhaps should be retired, since their dreary and inaccurate beliefs are so out-of-date, not to mention expensive:

Senators trying to salvage climate-change legislation this year are circulating a scaled-back plan to reduce emissions in a bid to win over more lawmakers. Among proposals being discussed to achieve President Barack Obama’s goal of capping carbon-dioxide pollution is a “hybrid” approach combining a tax on carbon emissions from refineries and emissions limits for other industries, according to Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. “We’re looking at everything,” Senator John Kerry told reporters on Capitol Hill yesterday. The Massachusetts Democrat is working with Graham and Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, to craft bipartisan energy and climate legislation. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a so-called cap-and-trade bill last year with support from Obama and companies such as General Electric Co.

Opponents, including billionaire Warren Buffett, said the emissions-trading program aimed at curbing greenhouse gases would amount to a burdensome tax on consumers. Comparable legislation stalled in the Senate.

Global warming was dead last among 2010 Americans’ priorities, according to a Pew poll, and no wonder, since it is undoubtedly the greatest scientific scam and scandal of at least the last century. Why look to Washington for leadership when these fellows are so far behind the times and really haven’t caught up with the Open Source world we increasingly inhabit?

The AGW scam was all good fun while it lasted, and profitable too. The Indian head of the UN climate change panel, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has been living it up on the dime of the taxpayers of the US and the West, and his IPCC didn’t even bother to cover up its ineptitude. Times:

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”. But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated”…

Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist erroneously quoted as making the 2035 prediction…and other leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.

It says the total area of Himalyan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas. A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate. An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources.

Who cares? The people are so gullible that they don’t care if you defraud them and steal their money with utterly bogus “scientific” claims — but apparently they start caring when money gets too short to fund such nutty extravagances. In other news, there is apparently no reliably accurate statistical data supporting meaningful warming in the US over the past century. But party on if you like.

(Extra bonus good fun: Hasnain works for a Pachauri company, and the now-disowned claim about the glaciers helped that company land a big contract and grant. Suckers! HT: Roger Simon)

The WSJ covers some of the same ground as this piece.

The AP reports on a new deadly threat to mankind, the ancient practice of sitting:

a new warning from health experts: Sitting is deadly. Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health. And it doesn’t matter where the sitting takes place — at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV — just the overall number of hours it occurs…Figures from a U.S. survey in 2003-2004 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting

And all this time we thought that cow and sheep parping was the deadliest thing going.

TNR suggests an electoral strategy for Democrats and a certain species of Republican:

it’s hardly a shock to hear that some Dems would prefer to set aside tackling climate change–especially so soon after a grueling health care fight. “We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,” Indiana Senator Evan Bayh recently groused, “but I think it’s very difficult in the economic circumstances we have right now.”

Difficult, but maybe less so than Bayh thinks. The House has already passed its own climate bill, complete with a cap on heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and, in the Senate, Democrats have begun to get some welcome support from the other side of the aisle. Susan Collins is co-sponsoring a cap-and-dividend bill, which would essentially tax carbon dioxide at the source and refund most of the proceeds to households, while a few Republicans (like Lisa Murkowski) had positive things to say about last month’s Copenhagen accord, which put key developing countries on a path to curtailing their own emissions.

\Interestingly, one of the most forceful advocates for a Senate climate bill in recent weeks has been Republican Lindsey Graham. “All the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day-in and day-out, you’ll never convince me that’s a good thing for your children and the future of the planet,” he told a crowd in South Carolina, the day after being censured by Charleston County’s GOP for working with Democrats on the issue. “Whatever political pushback I get,” he added, “I’m willing to accept, because I know what I’m trying to do makes sense to me.” Lately, he’s been huddling with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman on a “tripartisan” bill to reduce emissions.

Some have argued that Congress would be crazy to take on an issue as divisive as climate change in an election year, but the Senate, with only one-third of its members up for reelection, is less susceptible to that calculus than the House. And election-year timidity may be more an invention of pundits than historical fact.

To us these people seem out of their minds. We’re in a crisis and these bozos are in cloud-cuckoo-land. (a) When 20$ of American men do are not employed, the number 1, number 2, and number 3 issue is jobs, jobs, jobs — good, private sector jobs. Which means government needs to help and get out of the way at the same time. Furthermore, even if we weren’t in a time of pronounced global cooling, why fiddle around with nonsense like this when it is perfectly clear that countries like China and India aren’t going to play along (except to go to conferecnes where they laugh at us behind our backs). Washington: fools and damned fools.

A bleeding heart reports on global warming and Copenhagen in the first paragraph and Roger Simon responds in the second:

In Copenhagen, Brazil, South Africa and India decided that their status as developing nations was more important than their status as democracies. Like the Chinese, they argued that it is fundamentally unjust to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of poor countries at a lower level than the emissions of the US or the European Union; all the more so since the industrialised west is responsible for the great bulk of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

Wait a minute. Stop right there. Could it be that Singh, Wen Jiabao, etc., just knew the whole thing was nonsense? I don’t know whether Mr. Rachman was in Copenhagen, but I was. I didn’t speak to Singh or Wen or anybody quite that august, but I did speak to a number of third world delegates and it was commonplace among them to admit the AGW was hooey, therefore acknowledging the obvious – that they were there for the money. In fact, I was stunned at how easily they admitted it.

It is of course both expensive and dangerous to run the United States like a faculty lounge at a community college. But even worse than that is the thought of the nations in the developing world laughing at us behind our backs (or to our faces) as they pick our pockets.

Alexander Cockburn discusses AGW and compares Copenhagen to the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, when Arianism was the controversy of the day:

landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom Wigley: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are no where close to knowing” how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering — such as carbon mitigation — is “hopeless.”

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that “greenhouse” theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner’s “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics,” updated in January 2009.)

Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.

Roger Simon points out a new and intriguing possibility from a scientist at the University of Waterloo, that CFCs had a warming effect which has stopped and reversed: “’Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000,’ Lu said. ‘Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate.’ In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years.” Stay tuned and stay warm.

Nigel Lawson describes any number of reasons that Copenhagen and its progeny will fail. Here’s number one. WSJ:

The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world’s economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.

The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future.

Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world (although I see no present evidence of this). But in the developing world, including the rapidly developing nations such as China and India, there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease and premature death.

The overriding priority for the developing world has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available source of energy: carbon energy.

Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today.

There’s no way on earth that China and India are going to let their people languish in poverty to fulfill the dreams of the decadent and complacent governments of Europe and North America. And yet the charade will continue, as George Will notes:

Copenhagen will beget Mexico City next November. Before then, Congress will give “the international community” other reasons to pout. Congress will refuse to burden the economy with cap-and-trade carbon-reduction requirements, and will spurn calls for sending billions in “climate reparations” to China and other countries. Representatives of those nations, when they did not have their hands out in Copenhagen grasping for America’s wealth, clapped their hands in ovations for Hugo Chavez and other kleptocrats who denounced capitalism while clamoring for its fruits.

The New York Times reported from Copenhagen that Barack Obama “burst into a meeting of the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders, according to senior administration officials. Mr. Obama said he did not want them negotiating in secret.” Naughty them. Those three nations will be even less pliable in Mexico City.

As well they should be. Someone should run for office on the platform (a) private sector jobs for America; and (b) we will stop the nonsense of spending money we don’t have on programs that don’t work. Maybe someone has and we missed it.

Howard Dean does not like the Senate healthcare bill:

If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform…the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company…

Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.

From the very beginning of this debate, progressives have argued that a public option or a Medicare buy-in would restore competition and hold the private health insurance industry accountable. Progressives understood that a public plan would give Americans real choices about what kind of system they wanted to be in and how they wanted to spend their money. Yet Washington has decided…Your money goes to insurers, whether or not you want it to…

I have worked for health-care reform all my political life. In my home state of Vermont, we have accomplished universal health care…I know health reform when I see it, and there isn’t much left in the Senate bill. I reluctantly conclude that, as it stands, this bill would do more harm than good to the future of America.

Various voices do not like what happened in Copenhagen:

Obama may become known as “the man who killed Copenhagen,” said Greenpeace US head Phil Radford, one of many activists to rap the president for the flimsy agreement with India, South Africa, Brazil and China, which thwarted the president throughout the conference…

“The president has wrecked the UN and he’s wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming,” said Bill McKibbon of the progressive group 350.org…Friends of the Earth tore into the pact as well. “Climate negotiations in Copenhagen have yielded a sham agreement with no real requirements for any countries,” the group said in a statement. “This is not a strong deal or a just one — it isn’t even a real one.”

Apparently it’s tough to be a man of the Left these days.