The Past and Future of Climate by Australia's David Archibald

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/Conf2007/Archibald2007.pdf

"The Past and Future of Climate" by Australia's David Archibald predicts global cooling, and is at least as convincing as Al Gore's.

Here's the summary:

1. The Sun drives climate change and it will be colder next decade by 2.0 degrees centigrade.

2. The anthropogenic carbon dioxide effect is real, minuscule, and too small to be measured.

3. Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will boost agricultural production.

4. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is wholly beneficial.

Presumably, Mr. Archibald will not be receiving much in the way of government funding for future studies.

If you have the time, check out the whole article -- it's very readable, takes about 15 minutes, and can be found at:

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/Conf2007/Archibald2007.pdf

NYC Sets Record For Warmest Day: High Of 95 Degrees Ties Warmest August High Set In 1911 -- Global Warming Blamed

What you just read is what the headline would have been if it had been hot in NYC.

Instead, it was cold.

So the actual CBS headline was:

Arctic August: NYC Sets Record For Coldest Day
High Of 59 Degrees Ties Chilliest August High Set In 1911

Remember kids, when it's hot, it's global warming; when it's not, it's climate change.

"11 of the past 12 years were [STILL] the warmest ever recorded." UPDATE

"11 of the past 12 years were the warmest ever recorded."

Julian Lee at Planetair informed me that this statistic is from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment report (February 2007).

He directed me to the following link:

http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/media/4th_spm2feb07.pdf

The reference to the warmest years is found on page 4, under the heading "DIRECT OBSERVATIONS OF RECENT CLIMATE CHANGE". It relates to surface temperatures, not those specific to the US, so there is no need for sites like Planetair to retract the statistic.

My only quibble with the statement at this point is that it does include the relevant qualifier, "since 1850".

Climate Sceptics: Destroyers of Creation

The rhetoric just won't go away. It won't even die down.

Here's Climate Progress citing James Hansen, "the nation’s top climate scientist":

"if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits...."

Unbelievable.

Now we are being called "destroyers of Creation" -- and most of those who embrace the climate change religion are darwinists who don't even believe in a Creator! What possible difference can it make if we destroy what was never intended or designed in the first place?

* "Passing on to our unborn"? The leading crusaders for climate change hysteria are not just darwinists, they are also the ones most likely to shout about a "woman's right to choose" [Hello, Al Gore!]. Surely those who insist the unborn have no right to exist cannot now say that the unborn can nevertheless make demands on the living.

* "Contrarians who work to deny and confuse". This is the criticism we get for pointing out that NASA's data was WRONG.

It is not denial to point out that data is wrong and misleading.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

Pet Peeve: the HBC website

The Hudson's Bay website has some serious problems.

Unlike every other retail site on the planet, there is no place on the home page to do a quick search for merchandise. You spend valuable time looking for it, and then more time more trying to figure out what you have to do to look for merchandise on their website.

Finally I found a little "Online Shopping" tabby-thing. So I clicked on it. For all my effort, I was rewarded with the following message:

"We have detected that your Computer is not accepting Cookies."

Thanks a lot, and no, you haven't.

My Mac is set up to accept Cookies -- what they failed to do was realize I was using Safari as my web browser. Every other retail site on the planet (with the exception of Air Canada) has been designed to show they value a Mac users' business as much as anybody else.

Not HBC.

I switch over to Firefox browser, and re-access the HBC site.

Now for my third beef with the HBC site. It has very poor look-up skills. In response to my inquiry concerning LCD TVs, it comes up with exactly three TVs, and nine "other things", including a radio with an LCD screen and some kids' toys.

Very poor.

It was like this when I last looked at it -- two years ago -- and it's still just as bad.

Which is why I'll be taking my online shopping elsewhere.

I hope they improve.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

More on 900 Ft. Jesus

900 Ft. Jesus, the atheist who ridicules Creationists and stresses her faith in Logic, missed the asterisk in Kate's post over at SDA and went straight on to the next post.

As an evolutionist, she should have known that the lowly asterisk holds the key to language and literary life.

From the asterisk (which spontaneously generated), all letters evolved; from the letters, rudimentary words, and then, over endless generations, the rules of syntax and grammar finally emerged -- unplanned, undesigned -- from which all human thought and speech emanates.

Now that's a scary thought.

*** ****'* *** *** *** **** *******.

A Followup Query to Planetair.ca

I have sent Planetair.ca, the David Suzuki linked Carbon-Credits site the following followup query:

***

"The pollutants we pump into our atmosphere are enhancing its ability to trap heat (the ‘greenhouse gas effect’) and increasing the earth’s temperature. Today's atmosphere contains 32 per cent more carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases, than at the start of the industrial era."

On what grounds do you consider carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring substance, a "pollutant"?

***

Stay tuned for the answer.

"11 of the past 12 years were the warmest ever recorded."

"11 of the past 12 years were the warmest ever recorded."

I found the above piece of information at www.planetair.ca -- a David-Suzuki promoted Carbon Credits site.

(A carbon credits site is a site where money changes hands -- for added certainty, let me clarify: the money goes from you, to them. For the money sent, you get to live a profligate carbon lifecyle -- jet all your friends in from all over the world for your wedding, pay the carbon-offsets, and, presto!, you're in the clear.)

Back to "the fact".

I googled the phrase "11 of the past 12 years were the warmest ever recorded", and found that it cropped up all over the place; it has entered our culture as a truism, one of those beyond-dispute factoids that educators are eager to impress upon our children on Mother Earth Day.

Just one problem.

The "fact" is false. It is based on data that has, like the hockey stick, been demonstrated (by climate change skeptics, not David Suzuki) to be inaccurate. NASA has admitted the error and updated its data. It turns out that the 1934 was the hottest year and the 1930s contain 4 of the hottest 10 years.

So, "11 of the past 12 years were the warmest ever recorded" bites the globally-warmed dust.

I have sent an email to www.planetair.ca querying their quote. They state on their website that part of their mandate is to educate people about climate change, so I am assuming that accurate information is a priority for them.

The question is, how many days will we have to wait until they update their website with corrected information?

Let's call this "Day one".

Let the count begin.

Update -- The "fact" is intact. See post dated August 18th, 2007.

Without God, Atheism Would Be Impossible

There's a blogger out there on the left who goes by the name of 900 ft. Jesus. [This may be an allusion to a vision Oral Roberts claimed to have of Jesus.]

In a recent post she professed faith in evolution and logic and mocked creationists and those who believe religious texts instead of trusting in logic. Here's my response.

If she believes in darwinian evolution, then she believes her brain is the result of scrapyard DNA thrown together without purpose or design. Why she would trust anything that came out of it is beyond me.

She also claims to believe in logic, but, without God, it is absurd that immaterial logic should exist or, if it did somehow exist, that it should be trustworthy -- the universe is cold, unfeeling, uncaring, meaningless and senseless; there is no intelligence behind it, so there should not be intelligence mechanisms (such as reason, logic, and abstract thought) "out there" for us to discover and employ.

Simply put, without God, atheism would be impossible.

Without God creating human minds capable of abstract thought, without God creating our brains to be (relatively) trustworthy reality-processors, without God creating reason and logic, and opening up the worlds of reason and logic to us, atheism would be nothing more than illogical babblings of undesigned, purposeless brains.

God makes atheism possible.

She should at least thank him for that.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

A New Low in American TV

I've been gobsmacked twice in the past year or so by the CBC website. The first was the ad for Little Mosque on the Prairies; the second was the waist-up-nude photo of David Suzuki holding up the world. Both times I thought I had been re-routed to a CBC satire site, that this couldn't be real.

Well, it just happened again, but this time it was an American TV network.

A&E just aired an ad for a new TV series called Californication.

I couldn't believe that American culture has sunk so low that fornication would be dismissed as a clever joke.

Fornication is at best a short-term pleasure that leads to sexual diseases, emotional impoverishment, and bars one from an inheritance in the kingdom of God. It is not a term that is used in popular culture; it is a term that comes from the Bible, one which echoes biblcal morality.

So the fact that the creators of this new show would choose to use it is telling.

Apparently, there no "fear of God" in the eyes of pop American culture.

If God judges America (or Canada), who could blame him? He is holy; we are not. This is his world, not ours. It's not as if, for those who know the term and where it comes from, we haven't been warned.

As Bob Dylan put it,

"When ya gonna wake up -- strengthen the things that remain."

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

George Bush Responsible for Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

I know you suspected it.

Now it's confirmed.

By a site called ClimateProgress (I can't even begin to imagine what is meant by this term).

Here's extracts from "Did Climate Change Contribute To The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse?"

"We are all facing far more extreme heat waves, floods, wildfires, rainstorms, droughts and hurricanes...

"Consider what a meteorologist who worked in the city for years blogged: You have to wonder if the bridge buckled.

"... As noted, the NTSB itself has not ruled out the weather as a contributing factor.

"Melissa Hortman of the Minnesota House of Representatives “said “You wonder if this bridge was built to withstand the massive heat we have had this summer.” [Note the term "massive heat"]

'My brother also wonders if the low level of the Mississippi played a role...

And then, the punchline:

"The Bush administration has blocked research into the impact of climate change on this country and muzzled climate scientists...

Just as we suspected.

It's all George Bush's fault.

And it's even worse than you might think.

God controls the weather. George Bush talks to God. God is following George Bush's advice.

It's all George Bush's fault.

Scientific American - 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

I came across an article with this title while surfing the net today.

It is interesting that science pretends to be objective and dispassionate and yet shows a passionate bias against the possibility of God's existence. Of the 15 arguments I read, I found none to be persuasive. The writer was open to the possibility that aliens from outer space may have introduced life on earth -- that would be OK -- but not God.

Why?

Because modern science works within a closed system or box called naturalism. All that is and came to be exists through natural (as opposed to supernatural) means.

Here's an extract from the article:

"Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved."

Note the phrase very carefully: "those forces must be natural".

Why?

Because we are scientists, and natural means are the only things we are capable of checking.

Fine. But by saying this, they are saying, "we are closed-minded". It is important to note what they do not say. They do not say, "God may well exist, and it is good to believe in him, but he is beyond the scope of scientific investigation". No, rather, they say, "God cannot exist, and it is foolish to believe in him, because he is beyond the scope of scientific investigation." Do you see the difference? "We do not believe in God because it is an impossibility or even an improbability that he may exist, we do not believe in him because we cannot put him under our microscopes and verify his existence. We cannot control him, therefore, he cannot exist". It's like scientists in a primitive society saying, "radio waves cannot exist because we cannot detect or measure them".

I wonder what scientists think of love. Can its existence be scientifically proven? Can it be detected, measured? No, but I suspect that there are few scientists who would deny that it exists. The point is, there is more than one way to know something, and scientists overstretch their bounds with their unverifiable, unproven assumption that science is a sufficient means for knowing all things.

Back to God.

It is understandable that scientists have a personal, subjective interest in the non-existence of God. If there is a God, he de-thrones scientists from their present god-like status as arbiters of reality, and they would have to bow before His infinite wisdom and power and acknowledge that He is Lord, they are not, and their brains, as brilliant as they may be (created in his image!) are as ants in his sight.

Much preferable to "be as gods".

As for me, I enjoy beholding God with the eyes of faith, and contemplating his wonderful attributes. As a human being, I have made my choice. I am a worshipper of the Most High God.

Like love, this cannot be proven, but it is just as real.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

Canaries sing, Fat Ladies sing, the Canadian Media don't sing

Like all meetings of its kind, last night's Conservative Party meeting on the Charlottetown waterfront began with the singing of the national anthem. The national anthem is not a Liberal anthem or a Conservative anthem, it is the anthem of Canada, for all Canadians.

Everyone in the room rose and sang, with one apparent exception: the Canadian media.

I didn't notice this directly as I was busy singing, but we were seated right beside the media area, and the person next to me did notice and told me about it afterwards, saying she felt like asking them if they didn't know the words.

I had noticed something. When the national anthem was announced, one of the young women in the media group broke into the first line of the American national anthem. At the time I dismissed this as a juvenile attempt at being clever, but, given the media's left-wing bias and working assumption that Stephen Harper is a puppet of E. A. (Evil American) George Bush, I suspect she was making an in-joke for her media brothers and sisters that she knew would be well received.

In defense of the media, I suppose they consider themselves "not there" as participants in the event; they are there as outsiders, as objective observers. But if that is so, the fact that one of them broke the media oath of silence and sang the American anthem when the Canadian national anthem was announced is a stain on their claims to journalistic integrity.

Or, maybe they just can't sing.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

I Shake Hands With the Prime Minister

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Charlottetown yesterday, so we took the opportunity to attend the Conservative Party's shin-dig down at the waterfront. We went early and got front-row seats, right beside the media scrum who were directly in front of centre stage. We were close enough to reach out and touch them. In fact, when I stood up, one of them was brushing into me with his side-bag. The Toronto Star's Jim Travers and CTV's Jane Tabor were there, but Keith Boag of the CBC was nowhere to be seen.

After the speeches we got a chance to have our picture taken with the PM. I gave him a copy of my new CD -- Love Lifted Me, and told him I hoped his family enjoyed it. After the photo they gave me a business card with the photo number written on it. To get my photo, I email them, quote the number, and they email it to me. Pretty slick.

I'll do it after I finish my morning coffee and this post.

"Stray cat explosion joins list of evils blamed on global warming"

Global Warming gets blamed for everything -- from an increase in the snake population in the US to the human conflict in Darfur, to an increase in polar bears seeking psychological counselling (OK, I made that last one up).

So naturally I was not too surprised by the following headline in the National Post:

"Stray cat explosion joins list of evils blamed on global warming"

I thought it was referring to a particular stray cat that exploded, perhaps because of heat exhaustion or over-heating or something.

Turns out they're talking about the stray cat population, and an explosion of another kind.

Apparently global warming works like this: if an animal population diminishes, it's because of global warming and it's a bad thing; if an animal population increases it's because of global warming and it's a bad thing.

I had no idea that prior to global warming the Earth existed in such a perfect equilibrium.

Oh, for a return to the golden era we once knew.

Al Gore, can you take us there?