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.

Professor Colin Blakemore discusses Copenhagen in the Guardian and modestly suggests that the conference “marks a turning point in human nature”. Yikes!

Copenhagen may mark a turning point in human nature, when the global village acquired a global mind. What we have just witnessed is delegates from 192 countries talking about making sacrifices, slowing their development, constraining their industry, taxing their citizens, in a collective bid to stifle climate change. Those nations included virtually every race, every religion, every style of government -– from monarchy to dictatorship, from constitutional democracy to communism.

For the past 5,000 years, agreements between nations have been determined by military or economic power, by political ideology or religious dogma. What Copenhagen has established, even if the final agreement fudges and procrastinates, is that a new force is at work in international diplomacy. A force that does not speak in terms of faith and conviction, that is not even absolutely certain about what it has to say. That force is science.

Science, eh? Assume just for a moment that the pro-AGW crowd is wrong and that some of the scientists cooked the books for their personal and professional gain. Blakemore’s “science” could easily be replaced by “religion” or “superstition.”

We once observed that “any compulsory irrational belief is incompatible with the modern Western world” and implicitly assumed that in any such contest of paradigms, a modern Western world of logic, reason and skepticism would prevail. We’re not so sure anymore.

This is from the farewell address of President Eisenhower, the so-called “military-industrial complex” speech. Eisenhower warned Americans that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” (He was certainly right about that.) He then went on:

the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity…The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded…in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite…

As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

In 1960, military spending was 9.3% of the $525 billion GDP or about $48 billion — amazingly, this was over half of the entire federal budget of $92 billion. So Ike was properly concerned at the concentration of power this represented. Of course the military has contracted significantly since then. In 2009, even with the US being involved in two wars, military spending is just 17% of federal outlays of $4 trillion, and has shrunk by half as a percent of the US GDP of $14 trillion. So in may ways, the military-industrial complex is a shadow of its former self.

Let’s consider President Eisenhower’s two other warnings. He warned of a “scientifictechnological elite” for whom “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” Who might come to mind in that regard? Perhaps the pro-AGW crowd? Eisenhower’s other warning was “plundering” tomorrow in service of today. He said that we “cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.” Of course that is the rather aggressive course of the current crew in Washington. We are not only consuming our own seed corn, but that of our grandchildren. And the pace doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

President Clinton once said that his administration was being forced by the bond market to govern like Eisenhower Republicans. Ah, the good old days.

Bret Stephens in the WSJ writes of scientists who “have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God”:

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus” — largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes — of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Or, if you like there are other scientists who have gotten some money from oil companies:

ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called — without irony — the climate change “consensus.” To read some of the press accounts of these gifts — amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion — you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age.

It seems to us that the greater dollar amounts and greater nastiness have come from the pro-AGW crowd, but feel free to disagree if you like.

The perhaps inevitable wisdom of Prince Charles, who says that the world only has seven years left before it is too late:

the grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control. As the President of Gabon said at a meeting I hosted last month, “The door to our future is closing…” This, I fear, is not an overstatement. For climate change is a risk-multiplier. It has the potential to take all the other critical issues we face as a global community and transform their severity into a cataclysm…We appear intent upon consuming the planet!

We are highly skeptical of AGW, but of course at the end of the day we may be wrong. However, all this talk of the imminent end of the world as we know it seems like a sort of religious hysteria to us. We agree with Roger Simon that our current age now bears some unfortunate resemblance to medieval times and superstitions.

Patrick Michaels has some scores to settle regarding ClimateGate and the AGW kerfuffle. WSJ:

Messrs. Mann and Wigley…didn’t like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU’s own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” he wrote in one of the emails. “We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn’t toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones’s line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

This happened to me and to the University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.

GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was “in the skeptics camp.” He emailed Michael Mann to say that “if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official…channels to get him ousted.”

Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that “It’s one thing to lose ‘Climate Research.’ We can’t afford to lose GRL.” In this context, “losing” obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.

Soon the suspect editor, Yale’s James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU’s Phil Jones that “the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there.”

It didn’t stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that “If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available — raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations — I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.”

So does Michael Mann. WaPo:

former Alaska governor Sarah Palin…wrote that Alaska’s climate is changing but referred to “thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice” as “natural, cyclical environmental trends.” In fact, such changes are among the effects scientists predicted would occur as greenhouse gas levels increase. Scientific evidence for the reality of human-caused climate change includes independently replicated data documenting the extent of warming; unprecedented melting of glaciers; rises in global sea levels; increasingly widespread continental drought; and models that predict all of these things but only when human impacts are included. Those same models project far more profound and potentially damaging impacts of climate change if we do not take action to stabilize greenhouse gas levels.

Meanwhile, according to the Telegraph: “the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data. The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations.”

Michaels targets Mann, Mann targets Palin. Hmmm. And the Russians have begun to weigh in. This reality TV show continues to surprise.

The London Express lists a number of reasons to be skeptical of AGW. Feel free to accept them or reject them as you like:

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940…

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming…

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

Meanwhille, via Reuters: “The Copenhagen climate talks will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output of over half a million Ethiopians.” Now that’s news you can use.

A report from Copenhagen:

I got to Copenhagen’s main Lutheran Cathedral just before the start of a special service designed to mark the conference underway for the next week. It was jammed, but I squeezed into a chair near the corner. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave the sermon; Desmond Tutu read the Psalm. Both were wonderful…

my tears started before anyone said a word. As the service started, dozens choristers from around the world carried three things down the aisle and to the altar: pieces of dead coral bleached by hot ocean temperatures; stones uncovered by retreating glaciers; and small, shriveled ears of corn from drought-stricken parts of Africa. As I watched them go by, all I could think of was…the people living in the valleys where those glaciers are disappearing, and the people downstream who have no backup plan for where their water is going to come from. The people who live on the islands surrounded by that coral, who depend on the reefs for the fish they eat, and to protect their homes from the waves. And the people, on every corner of the world, dealing with drought…

Those damned shriveled ears of corn. I’ve done everything I can think of, and millions of people around the world have joined us at 350.org in the most international campaign there ever was. But I just sat there thinking: It’s not enough. We didn’t do enough. I should have started earlier. People are dying already

As it happens, this fellow apparently has a kindred spirit in the US. We’ll know who was right about these cataclysmic predictions shortly. Can’t wait! (HT: Ace)

AP:

Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years…New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore said Monday at the U.N. climate conference. This new projection, following several years of dramatic retreat by polar sea ice, suggests that the ice cap may nearly vanish in the summer much sooner than the year 2030, as was forecast by a U.S. government agency eight months ago.

One way or another, someone is likely to look pretty foolish shortly.

Iowahawk (yes, that Iowahawk) provides a step-by-step manual for the layman to recreate, or at least understand in some detail, the statistical methodologies involved in gathering climate change data. Very interesting. We’ll skip to the discussion segment:

all that math-y spreadsheet-y stuff above was not meant to perfectly replicate any specific study done by Mann et al.; those specific studies differ by the choice of instrumental temperature data set, the choice of proxy variables, whether series are smoothed with a filter (Fourier transform etc), and so on. My goal was to provide interested people with a hands-on DIY example of the basic statistical methodology underlying temperature reconstruction, at least as practiced by the leading lights of “Climate Science.”

If you’ve followed all this, it should also give you the important glossary terms that should help you decipher the Climategate emails and methodology discussions. For example “instrumental data” means observed temperature; “reconstructions” are the modeled temperatures from the past; “proxy” means the tree ring, ice core, etc. predictors; “PCs” mean the principal components.

Is there anything wrong with this methodology? Not in principle. In fact there’s a lot to recommend it. There’s a strong reason to believe that high resolution proxy variables like tree rings and ice core o-18 are related to temperature. At the very least it’s a more mathematically rigorous approach than the earlier methods for climate reconstruction, which is probably why the hockey stick / AGW conclusion received a lot of endorsements from academic High Society (including the American Statistical Association).

The devil, as they say is in the details. In each of the steps there is some leeway for, shall we say, intervention. The early criticisms of Mann et al.’s analyses were confined to relatively minor points about the presence of autocorrelated errors, linear specification, etc. But a funny thing happened on the way to Copenhagen: a couple of Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, found that when they ran simulations of “red noise” random principle components data into Mann’s reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the same hockey stick pattern. They attributed this to Mann’s method / time frame for selecting of principle components.

To illustrate the nature of that debate through the spreadsheet, try some of the following tests:

Run step 3 through step 7, but only use the proxy data up through 1960 instead of 1980.

Run step 5 through step 7, but only include the first 2 principle components in the regression.

Run step 3 through step 7, but delete the ice core data from the proxy set.

Run step 2 through step 7, but pick out a different proxy data set from NOAA.

Or combinations thereof. What you’ll find is that contrary to Mann’s assertion that the hockey stick is “robust,” you’ll find that the reconstructions tend to be sensitive to the data selection. M&M found, for example, that temperature reconstructions for the 1400s were higher or lower than today, depending on whether bristlecone pine tree rings were included in the proxies.

What the leaked emails reveal, among other things, is some of that bit of principal component sausage making. But more disturbing, they reveal that the actual data going into the reconstruction model — the instrumental temperature data and the proxy variables themselves — were rife for manipulation. In the laughable euphemism of Philip Jones, “value added homogenized data.”

One way or another, the truth looks likely to emerge rather definitively over the next several years about what is known and what is speculation. Good. HT: Ace

Perhaps ClimateGate is a flash in the pan, though we view that as unlikely. It might be that the ardent scientists of East Anglia corrupted data in service of their vision of the world. Or perhaps it is the “deniers” who are in error. In either case there is a conflict of visions. Perhaps thinking back to a previous conflict of visions could add a little enlightenment.

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn, then at Harvard, published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which quickly became one of the seminal books in the history of science. Kuhn argues that radical changes in thought often require, and create, a whole new way of seeing the world. He invented the term “paradigm shift,” to describe the phenomenon. Often, it is only when you have crossed over to the new paradigm do you see reality the way it really is.

One example Kuhn uses to illustrate his point is the Copernican Revolution. In 1500, the accepted view in the Christian world of western Europe was that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth. The astronomer Ptolemy in the second century AD had worked out a set of equations for the movements of the planets and the moon based on the the earth being the center of the universe. Of course the set of equations describing the Ptolemaic universe had terrible problems since they were attempting to describe a universe that doesn’t exist.

In the early sixteenth century, Copernicus developed an alternative view of, and set of equations for, a universe in which the moon alone revolved around the earth, and in which the earth, like the other planets, revolved around the sun. His masterwork, De Revolutionibus, was published after significant delays, due to religious and scientific objections to his work. Copernicus finally received a copy of his book on May 24, 1543, the day he died.

Many people had a lot invested, professionally, culturally, religiously, psychologically, in the notion that the earth and man were the center of all creation, and so there was considerable resistance at first to the Copernican universe. Some scientists and religious leaders of the day were horrified at the universe Copernicus described, and adamantly defended their geocentric, Ptolemaic beliefs, refusing to accept the Copernican paradigm. Kuhn writes:

In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. (p. 150)

The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced….

Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume…, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are shocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine….[B]ut I look with confidence to the future, — to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to look at both sides of the question with impartiality.” And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (p. 151)

We instinctively tended to side with the AGW skeptics because that viewpoint fits with our view of the world. We think government should have modesty and a limited role in man’s life, we are viscerally repelled by grandiose schemes that intend to pick our pocket in the service of a vague threat decades away, and we think that man burning things for 200 years is small beer given the vastness of nature. (BTW, we often dislike conventional wisdom just for the heck of it.) Many on the other side of the argument probably have a different view of the proper role of government. The data often come into play only thereafter, but they can serve as a battering ram — we are thus appalled that anyone could think that an insignificant 100ppm increase in a rare gas (0.3% of global greenhouse gases) that is necessary to life on earth could be calamitous. Those on the other side have their data too.

Final point. ClimateGate may not be the Copernican Revolution. However, it does remind us of some recent events in history. Most of the smart money and praise from the wise has been for the pro-AGW crowd. They represented the superiority of the knowledge of the elite over that of the lumpenproletariat. Not surprisingly there has been to date precious little glasnost about their data, and little perestroika as well. That seems about to change. Things didn’t end well for the incumbents as that situation developed over the succeeding several years. We’ll just have to see which worldview a critical re-evaluation of the data supports.

Willis Eschenbach has been digging into the temperature data from Darwin Airport that indicate radical, accelerating AGW. He believes the books have been cooked and the hockey stick is specious:

Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century…when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C…

People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

One thing seems pretty clear in the ClimateGate debate — the credibility of one side or the other will be seriously impaired at the end of all this. HT’s: Ace, Volokh

We’ve come a long way from the snail darter controversy three decades ago. It is somehow fitting that the imperial overreach of the EPA, as specifically endorsed by the Supreme Court, has been made clear to many Americans in the bizarre declaration of CO2 to be a dangerous pollutant.

The Cato Institute has a critique of the decision that should be required reading. Imagine the audacity of declaring that a gas that is required for plant life to exist on earth, and is the stuff that humans exhale as a result of the respiratory cycle enabling us to live, is a threat to us. Further, the EPA expects us to believe that the “danger” that comes from this gas critical to life exists because of an absolutely trivial increase in the amount of the gas in the atmosphere.

The logical inference of the sweeping CO2 declaration is that there is no aspect of American life that is beyond the regulation of the federal government, for whatever cockeyed reason they choose. Common sense has departed from American life. God save us from fools such as these. HT: Powerline

Telegraph:

the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU’s leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining…

these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of “hockey stick” fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week’s Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

You’d think that such egregious behavior would have been exposed long before this. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period by these fraudsters was in its way a cry for help, one that went mostly unheeded until now.

The AP reports utter nonsense:

It dawned with the warmest winter on record in the United States. And when the sun sets this New Year’s Eve, the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts. Warmer still, scientists say, lies ahead…all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia…

Nasheed’s tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.

The warming seas were growing more acid, too, from absorbing carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas in an overloaded atmosphere. Together, warmer waters and acidity will kill coral reefs and imperil other marine life — from plankton at the bottom of the food chain, to starfish and crabs, mussels and sea urchins.

Over the decade’s first nine years, global temperatures averaged 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees F) higher than the 1951-1980 average, NASA reported. And temperatures rose faster in the far north than anyplace else on Earth.

The decade’s final three summers melted Arctic sea ice more than ever before in modern times. Greenland’s gargantuan ice cap was pouring 3 percent more meltwater into the sea each year. Every summer’s thaw reached deeper into the Arctic permafrost, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a global-warming gas…More methane escaping the tundra meant more warming, more thawing, more methane released.

At the bottom of the world, late in the decade, International Polar Year research found that Antarctica, too, was warming. Floating ice shelves fringing its coast weakened, some breaking away, allowing the glaciers behind them to push ice faster into the rising oceans.

On six continents the glaciers retreated through the 2000s, shrinking future water sources for countless millions of Indians, Chinese, South Americans. The great lakes of Africa were shrinking, too, from higher temperatures, evaporation and drought. Across the temperate zones, flowers bloomed earlier, lakes froze later, bark beetles bored their destructive way northward through warmer forests. In the Arctic, surprised Eskimos spotted the red breasts of southern robins. In the 2000s, all this was happening faster than anticipated

The only problem with the article is that everyone now knows that since 1998 there has been no warming at all.

The AP reports that the sponsors of Copenhagen are hoping to pick your pocket. Meanwhile, the head of the IPCC provides some comic relief:

At stake is a deal that aims to wean the world away from fossil fuels and other pollutants to greener sources of energy, and to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from rich to poor countries every year over decades to help them adapt to climate change.

Scientists say without such an agreement, the Earth will face the consequences of ever-rising temperatures, leading to the extinction of plant and animal species, the flooding of coastal cities, more extreme weather events, drought and the spread of diseases.

“The evidence is now overwhelming” that the world needs early action to combat global warming, said Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an U.N. expert panel.

He defended climate research in the face of a controversy over e-mails pilfered from a British university, which global warming skeptics say show scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence that doesn’t fit their theories.

“The recent incident of stealing the e-mails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC,” he told the conference.

Meanwhile: “the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier…”We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.” And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five”…The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets.

The C students of the world have united around Copenhagen, as 56 newspapers declare that we have ‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’ (they’re right about that of course, but not for the reason they think):

Meanwhile, their counterparts in the US are at it as well. WSJ:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will…officially declare carbon dioxide a public danger…Such an “endangerment” decision is necessary for the EPA to move ahead early next year with new emission standards for cars…The announcement would also give President Barack Obama and his climate envoy negotiating leverage at a global climate summit starting next week in Copenhagen, Denmark and increase pressure on Congress to pass a climate bill…The EPA, meanwhile, says it would regulate in a sensible way.

We live in an Age of Foolishness, and it seems to get worse every day.

We agree that if the chart above is accurate, some anomalous warming has been taking place on earth recently. Certainly the hockey stick is alarming. But perhaps what should have been more alarming is the disappearance of the Medieval Warm Period from roughly 900-1300, when temperatures were several dregrees warmer than they are today. For example, it was warm enough and the seas were sufficiently ice-free in about 1000 AD that Leif Eriksson was able to sail to Newfoundland, which later became impossible again. Marc Sheppard has much more on this and related topics in the American Thinker.

The news from Copenhagen via AP:

Global temperatures are rising by 0.19 degrees Celsius (0.34 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade and twice as fast in the far north, melting Arctic sea ice at record rates. In the Copenhagen talks’ final days, the World Meteorological Organization is expected to confirm this was the warmest decade on record.

Oceans, expanding from warmth and melting glaciers, are rising faster than predicted. The world’s power plants, automobiles, burning forests and other sources are producing 29 percent more carbon dioxide than in 2000. Not in 2 million years has so much CO2 built up in the atmosphere, says the Global Carbon Project, an international research group.

That emissions path could drive temperatures by 2060 to at least 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) higher than preindustrial levels, scientists say. That would push the world deeper into a time of climate disruption, unusual droughts and powerful storms, species die-offs, spreading tropical diseases, coastal flooding and other, unpredictable consequences…

An analysis Thursday by European research organizations found the industrialized nations’ targets together amount to only 8 to 12 percent below 1990 levels, far short of what scientists urge. This track would produce global warming of well over 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) by 2100, it said.

The AP wrote a 1368 word story. What did it forget to mention? (They finally got around to it.)

“Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very internet you invented.” Stewart makes fun of Senator Inhofe as well, but most of the ridicule is in one direction. (And of course there’s Hide the Decline“.)