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Posts Made By: Dave Snope

August 24, 2011 08:50 PM Forum: Politics

Michelle Spent $10M/Yr On Personal Vacations

Posted By Dave Snope
“Everyone must sacrifice for the greater good… Everyone must have some skin in the game.”

The Obamas' summer break on Martha's Vineyard has already been branded a PR disaster after the couple arrived four hours apart on separate government jets.
But according to new reports, this is the least of their extravagances.
White House sources today claimed that the First Lady has spent more than $10million in taxpayers' money on her vacations.

Branding her 'disgusting' and 'a vacation junkie', they say the 47-year-old mother-of-two has been indulging in five-star hotels, where she splashes out on expensive massages and alcohol.

The First Lady is believed to have taken 42 days of holiday in the past year, including a $375,000 break in Spain and a four-day ski trip to Vail, Colorado, where she spent $2,000 a night on a suite at the Sebastian hotel.

And the first family's nine-day stay in Martha's Vineyard is also proving costly, with rental of the Blue Heron Farm property alone costing an estimated $50,000 a week.

The source continued: 'Michelle also enjoys drinking expensive booze during her trips. She favours martinis with top-shelf vodka and has a taste for rich sparking wines.
'The vacations are totally Michelle's idea. She's like a junkie. She can't schedule enough getaways, and she lives from one to the next - all the while sticking it to hardworking Americans.'
...
But the situation sparked further anger after he and his wife elected to fly separately to the Massachusetts retreat - despite travelling on the same day.
Mr Obama left the White House aboard Marine One on his way to Andrews Air Force base to hitch a lift aboard Air Force One - along with First Dog Bo.
After landing at Cape Cod Coast Guard Air Station, he then took a final helicopter to his holiday destination to complete the remarkable 500-mile journey.
His wife and daughters, who arrived just four hours earlier, were also travelling from Washington, but took a specially designed military aircraft.
They would also have had their own motorcade from the airport to the vacation residence

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029615/Michelle-Obama-accused-spending-10m-public-money-vacations.html#ixzz1VyupCTSe

August 24, 2011 09:22 PM Forum: My Favorite WIMP.COM or YOUTUBE.COM

Fireman Has Icewater In His Veins

Posted By Dave Snope
Explosion? What explosion?
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=51f_1314192988

August 25, 2011 04:12 PM Forum: Politics

Boys Will Be Boys

Posted By Dave Snope
When looking for future leadership candidates, it is important that the young men have developed a sense of gravitas.

August 26, 2011 05:15 PM Forum: Global Warming - REAL or NOT

The global warmists’ dam breaks

Posted By Dave Snope
Well, I would say the dam broke 5-6 years ago, with a handful of scientists still hanging on to the river banks trying not to get washed away.

The bottom line is: The Sun causes global climate change by modulating cosmic rays that cause clouds. Duh. Ever look at a graph of solar activity vs. earth's temperature? They match exactly. Unlike graphs of CO2 vs earth's temperature, which do not correlate, yet somehow there is still an argument in the warmist's brains about it.

Long-anticipated results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN in Geneva appear in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature (25 August). The Director General of CERN stirred controversy last month, by saying that the CLOUD team’s report should be politically correct about climate change (see my 17 July post below). The implication was that they should on no account endorse the Danish heresy – Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis that most of the global warming of the 20th Century can be explained by the reduction in cosmic rays due to livelier solar activity, resulting in less low cloud cover and warmer surface temperatures.

Willy-nilly the results speak for themselves, and it’s no wonder the Director General was fretful.


Jasper Kirkby

Jasper Kirkby of CERN and his 62 co-authors, from 17 institutes in Europe and the USA, announce big effects of pions from an accelerator, which simulate the cosmic rays and ionize the air in the experimental chamber. The pions strongly promote the formation of clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules – aerosols of the kind that may grow into cloud condensation nuclei on which cloud droplets form. What’s more, there’s a very important clarification of the chemistry involved.

A breach of etiquette

My interest in CLOUD goes back nearly 14 years, to a lecture I gave at CERN about Svensmark’s discovery of the link between cosmic rays and cloudiness. It piqued Kirkby’s curiosity, and both Svensmark and I were among those who helped him to prepare his proposal for CLOUD.

By an unpleasant irony, the only Svensmark contribution acknowledged in the Nature report is the 1997 paper (Svensmark and Friis-Christensen) on which I based my CERN lecture. There’s no mention of the successful experiments in ion chemistry and molecular cluster formation by the Danish team in Copenhagen, Boulby and latterly in Aarhus where they beat CLOUD to the first results obtained using a particle beam (instead of gamma rays and natural cosmic rays) to ionize the air in the experimental chamber – see http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/accelerator-results-on-cloud-nucleation-2/

What will historians of science make of this breach of scientific etiquette? That Kirkby was cross because Svensmark, losing patience with the long delay in getting approval and funding for CLOUD, took matters into his own hands? Or because Svensmark’s candour about cosmic rays casting doubt on catastrophic man-made global warming frightened the national funding agencies? Or was Kirkby simply doing his best (despite the results) to obey his Director General by slighting all things Danish?

Personal rivalries aside, the important question is what the new CLOUD paper means for the Svensmark hypothesis. Pick your way through the cautious prose and you’ll find this:

“Ion-induced nucleation [cosmic ray action] will manifest itself as a steady production of new particles [molecular clusters] that is difficult to isolate in atmospheric observations because of other sources of variability but is nevertheless taking place and could be quite large when averaged globally over the troposphere [the lower atmosphere].”

It’s so transparently favourable to what the Danes have said all along that I’m surprised the warmists’ house magazine Nature is able to publish it, even omitting the telltale graph shown at the start of this post. Added to the already favourable Danish experimental findings, the more detailed CERN result is excellent. Thanks a million, Jasper.

How the warmists built their dam

Shifting from my insider’s perspective on the CLOUD experiment, to see it on the broader canvas of the politicized climate science of the early 21st Century, the chief reaction becomes a weary sigh of relief. Although they never said so, the High Priests of the Inconvenient Truth – in such temples as NASA-GISS, Penn State and the University of East Anglia – always knew that Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis was the principal threat to their sketchy and poorly modelled notions of self-amplifying action of greenhouse gases.

In telling how the obviously large influences of the Sun in previous centuries and millennia could be explained, and in applying the same mechanism to the 20th warming, Svensmark put the alarmist predictions at risk – and with them the billions of dollars flowing from anxious governments into the global warming enterprise.

For the dam that was meant to ward off a growing stream of discoveries coming from the spring in Copenhagen, the foundation was laid on the day after the Danes first announced the link between cosmic rays and clouds at a space conference in Birmingham, England, in 1996. “Scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible,” Bert Bolin declared, as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

As several journalists misbehaved by reporting the story from Birmingham, the top priority was to tame the media. The first courses of masonry ensured that anything that Svensmark and his colleagues might say would be ignored or, failing that, be promptly rubbished by a warmist scientist. Posh papers like The Times of London and the New York Times, and posh TV channels like the BBC’s, readily fell into line. Enthusiastically warmist magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American needed no coaching.

Similarly the journals Nature and Science, which in my youth prided themselves on reports that challenged prevailing paradigms, gladly provided cement for higher masonry, to hold the wicked hypothesis in check at the scientific level. Starve Svensmark of funding. Reject his scientific papers but give free rein to anyone who criticizes him. Trivialize the findings in the Holy Writ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. None of this is paranoia on my part, but a matter of close personal observation since 1996.

“It’s the Sun, stupid!” The story isn’t really about a bunch of naughty Danish physicists. They are just spokesmen for the most luminous agent of climate change. As the Sun was what the warmists really wanted to tame with their dam, they couldn’t do it. And coming to the Danes’ aid, by briefly blasting away many cosmic rays with great puffs of gas, the Sun enabled the team to trace in detail the consequent reduction in cloud seeding and liquid water in clouds. See my post http://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/do-clouds-disappear/ By the way, that research also disposes of a morsel of doubt in the new CLOUD paper, about whether the small specks made by cosmic rays really grow sufficiently to seed cloud droplets.

As knowledge accumulated behind their dam and threatened to overtop it, the warmists had one last course to lay. Paradoxically it was CLOUD. Long delays with this experiment to explore the microchemical mechanism of the Svensmark effect became the chief excuse for deferring any re-evaluation of the Sun’s role in climate change. When the microchemical mechanism was revealed prematurely by the SKY experiment in Copenhagen and published in 2006, the warmists said, “No particle accelerator? That won’t do! Wait for CLOUD.” When the experiment in Aarhus confirmed the mechanism using a particle accelerator they said, “Oh that’s just the Danes again! Wait for CLOUD.”

Well they’ve waited and their dam has failed them.

Hall of Shame

Retracing those 14 years, what if physics had functioned as it is supposed to do? What if CLOUD, quickly approved and funded, had verified the Svensmark effect with all the authority of CERN, in the early 2000s. What if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had done a responsible job, acknowledging the role of the Sun and curtailing the prophecies of catastrophic warming?

For a start there would have no surprise about the “travesty” that global warming has stopped since the mid-1990s, with the Sun becoming sulky. Vast sums might have been saved on misdirected research and technology, and on climate change fests and wheezes of every kind. The world’s poor and their fragile living environment could have had far more useful help than precautions against warming.

And there would have been less time for so many eminent folk from science, politics, industry, finance, the media and the arts to be taken in by man-made climate catastrophe. (In London, for example, from the Royal Society to the National Theatre.) Sadly for them, in the past ten years they’ve crowded with their warmist badges into a Hall of Shame, like bankers before the crash.


http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-ray-action/

August 26, 2011 08:48 PM Forum: Politics

Obama Wakes Up Thinks Jobs, Closes Gibson Guitars

Posted By Dave Snope
How ridiculous. A total abuse of power. They legally bought wood from India that wasn't finished by Indian labor, a problem only in India, so Obummer and Holder shut them down and put hundreds of workers out of work. Chances are that, having received $200M in foreign campaign donations, Obama owes more favors to India than to Gibson workers. Or, is it that union thing again? Either way, Obama IS fighting for jobs ... for India.

Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitars, Inc. was on The Dana Loesch Show this afternoon. Gibson is under attack by the the Obama Justice Department for accusations that the company broke Indian laws. Juszkiewiz said the government suggested that the company’s use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. The Holder Justice department raided at least two Gibson manufacturing plants this week forcing hundreds of workers off their jobs. Juszkiewiz says the company lost a million dollars this week.

Finally, Henry Juszkiewicz told Dana, “The Obama Justice Department wants us to just shut our doors and go away.” He says he will continue to fight for the Gibson company and its workers.

The Obama Justice Department confiscated over $500,000 in materials back in 2009. Gibson is going to court on Monday to discuss a previous request for the government to return the property.

August 27, 2011 04:10 PM Forum: Global Warming - REAL or NOT

Hansen: Obama A Hopeless Addict

Posted By Dave Snope
The father of global warming, and probably the most decorated scientist in modern history, continues to embarass himself with his emotional, inflammatory rhetoric. The qualities of a leading scientist should include being rational, systematic, logical, skeptical, intellectually honest, and free of bias. How did Hansen get to the top of the heap? That's an easy one for the reader to think about.

From Climatewire:



NASA scientist James Hansen, who galvanized the environmental movement decades ago with his congressional testimony about the dangers of climate change, said yesterday that President Obama has a rare opportunity to show he is not a “hopeless addict.”

The climatologist, who will appear at the National Press Club on Monday before joining protests at the White House, where he expects to be arrested, told ClimateWire in an email interview that the Keystone XL pipeline awaiting approval from the president is like a dirty needle from a fellow oil addict, Canada.

The pipeline, if built, would run 1,700 miles from Canada to Texas and bring in a form of crude to the United States that releases more carbon dioxide emissions in the production process than traditional oil.

“If Obama chooses the dirty needle it will confirm that Obama was just greenwashing all along, like the other well-oiled coal-fired politicians, with no real intention of solving the addiction,” Hansen said…

August 28, 2011 05:39 PM Forum: Politics

Newspaper Editor Declares War on Perry

Posted By Dave Snope
I would call it "business as usual" for the MSM, a continuation of a decades long campaign of smear and innuendo against top republicans. But after many campaigns, Perry already knows that if he does something as innocuous as Sen. Frist and hands out unsharpened pencils in a minority neighborhood, the NY Times will label him a racist. You can spend your summers in charity giving free surgery to needy africans, but hand out unsharpened pencils at a black march against crime in TN and the NYT raises the race card.

Left And Right Going Nuclear On Rick Perry

By DOUGLAS MACKINNON Posted 08/25/2011 07:01 PM ET


When you hear every single liberal media outlet in the country say, "We will know more about Rick Perry after we vet his 11 years in office," you need to understand that what they vindictively mean is: "President Obama and his followers will be proud of us after we are done with the mother of all smearing campaigns against the conservative governor of Texas."

Not since Ronald Reagan has a Republican candidate for president evoked such outright fear and loathing from the mainstream media and the far-left.

They are flat-out petrified of Perry and are desperately trying to kill off his candidacy before it can take hold. Why?

Simple. As they suspiciously heap praise on the likes of Jon Huntsman and even Mitt Romney, they increasingly worry that Perry has the best chance to defeat their handpicked socialist messiah now occupying the Oval Office.

With exactly that mission in mind, an editor of a major newspaper told me: "We plan to declare war on Rick Perry and do all in our power to crush him."

There you have it. No pretense of integrity, professionalism or of unbiased news-gathering. This particular newspaper plans to use its very considerable resources to destroy the Perry campaign before it gains momentum. Period.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=582833&p=1

August 28, 2011 07:14 PM Forum: Politics

BHO's Illegal Uncle Omar Arrested, Asks To Call WH

Posted By Dave Snope
... and asks to call the White House.


A number of media outlets have already reported that an illegal immigrant from Kenya by the name of Onyango Obama, 67, was arrested last week on Wednesday after he rammed his SUV into a police car in Framingham, Massachusetts.

He was later charged with DUI among other violations. I spoke to Framingham Public Information Officer Lieutenant Delaney who told me that when Onyango Obama was asked at booking if he wanted to make a telephone call to arrange for bail, the Kenyan immigrant replied: "I think I will call the White House."
...

Obama failed several field sobriety tests and was arrested. At the police station, Obama failed a Breathalyzer test, registering .14. The state legal limit is .08.

Obama was charged with driving under the influence of liquor and driving to endanger. He was also cited for not using a turn signal.

According to article, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement has warrant for his arrest and ICE previously ordered him to be deported back to Kenya. In the meantime, a judge has not set bail on the driving charges but ordered that he be held on the ICE warrant.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2011/aug/28/picket-obamas-illegal-uncle-arrested-uncle-omar-hi/

September 1, 2011 04:03 AM Forum: Global Warming - REAL or NOT

Latest Data: Global Warming Leads To Sea Level

Posted By Dave Snope
Drop.

Well it leads to cat infertility, sea level rise, so why not sea level drop too?

It wasn’t long ago a PNAS study led by Stefan Rahmstorf had come out claiming sea level rise is “accelerating”. This of course was followed by the mainstream media jumping on the global warming bandwagon and trumpeting doom and gloom would strike sooner than we ever thought, maybe even before we die.
Unfortunately, the acceleration has been in the opposite direction, thus making the authors of the PNAS study look just a bit foolish.

The latest NASA satellite data show that sea levels have dropped 6 mm over the last year – the biggest drop ever recorded since satellite data has been taken. This is hardly the kind of acceleration Rahmstorf had in mind. You’d think the media would be falling all over themselves to report this good news. They have not. Only a tiny few German media outlets have reported the plummeting sea level news.

It’s due to a ”weather shift”!

Der Spiegel rolled out a report called: Weather Shift Drops Global Sea Level, authored by Axel Bojanowski, hat-tip Dirk Maxeiner here. Caution: don’t be fooled into thinking Der Spiegel writers have become sceptical. To the contrary, they are cleverly, indirectly, blaming global warming for the “peculiar” sea level drop.

Global warming, you see, leads to strange weather shifts, which is now the cause of the unexpected sea level drop, i.e. warming leads to weather shifts, which leads to sea level drop. Of course Der Spiegel will never admit this is what they are claiming, but they do indeed want you to believe it’s all because of “unusual freak weather” (which started when humans started driving SUVs).
http://notrickszone.com/2011/08/31/der-spiegel-global-warming-now-causes-sea-level-drop-through-weather-shifts/

September 1, 2011 10:46 PM Forum: Global Warming - REAL or NOT

Fisking of Krugman's NYT Opinion Piece

Posted By Dave Snope
Somebody had to take a turn on Krugman's latest junk. This time it was Rich Trzupek. Primarily he reiterates the fallacy of the old "concensus" poll where 75 out of 10,000 scientists was called a concensus. Rich Trzupek is a chemist and veteran environmental consultant with over twenty-five years of experience in the field. Hopefully Rich doesn't ever have to waste his valuable time on the fool again.

Economist Paul Krugman took to the pages of The New York Times on Sunday in order to regurgitate Sierra Club talking points regarding global warming and to castigate the Republican Party for being “anti-science.” As Roger Simon noted, like just about everybody else writing about the issue, Krugman doesn’t bother to explain or understand the science or the nature of the robust scientific debate that has been going on for some time. Instead, he relies on the Left’s preferred method for analyzing scientific issues: a moistened finger held up to the wind.

Krugman’s central thesis is that theory that mankind is causing catastrophic climate change has to be true, because “97 to 98 per cent of scientists” agree that it’s true. You’ll see the “97 to 98 per cent” number appearing quite often now. It’s become a key talking point of the alarmist crowd, as they struggle to regain relevance in a world that has a harder and harder time taking them seriously. But where does that amazing number come from? It arises from a 2009 survey that two University of Illinois researchers conducted. 10,257 Earth scientists responded and, much to the U of I professors’ chagrin, the results were far from satisfying to the alarmist crowd.

Many of the respondents indicated that they believe that natural forces are much more important than mankind’s paltry contributions to climate trends. Some questioned the validity of the models that have been used to predict massive forcing attributable to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. All in all, it wasn’t the kind of response that the researchers were looking for when they were trying to prove consensus. So, the professors decided that 10,180 of the scientists who responded weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, “overwhelming consensus” was demonstrated once again. See Laurence Solomon’s marvelous analysis of the survey for more details.

This attempt to silence dissent across scientific disciplines is a sad and troubling feature of the global warming alarmist movement. As a scientist and a skeptic, I often hear alarmists tell me that I’m not qualified to opine on global warming because I’m merely a chemist. I’m not a climatologist, so my vote should not count. Now, having specialized in air quality work for the past thirty years, having run many dispersion models (related to, but not the same as, climate models) and knowing a fair bit about thermodynamics, I’ll flatter myself to think that I know a whole lot more about the issue than 99% of the people writing about it in the mainstream media. And yet, people like Krugman feel no shame when they speak authoritatively about an issue they don’t understand in the slightest. I’ll make Mr. Krugman a deal: I won’t write about exchange rate instability if he will take a pass on atmospheric science.

There is no question that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” play a role in the complex climate system that is planet earth. No scientist denies that. But the stupefyingly oversimplification that leftists like Krugman cling to – that global warming is wholly and directly caused by our use of fossil fuels – is about as idiotic as saying that unemployment rates in Arkansas determine growth in national GDP. The global warming question is, in fact, five distinct questions:

1. Is the planet’s climate changing?

2. If so, is the rate of change cause for concern?

3. If so, can human activities contribute to the rate of change?

4. If so, is the degree to which human activities contribute to the rate of change significant compared to other forces?

5. If so, is it wiser to attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that it is to adapt to the changing climate?

Only if one answers all five questions in the affirmative can one justify further reductions in fossil fuel use. When one considers how scientists answer those questions, we find that the number who would answer every one with an unqualified “yes” hardly represents any sort of consensus at all. See the Heartland Institute’s detailed analysis, “You Call This Consensus,” for more.

Ironically, while leftists like Krugman rave on and on because conservatives like Rick Perry​ have the courage to question the supposed “consensus,” they appear to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that the United States has been and will continue to do exactly what they want: make massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s assume for a moment that Krugman is right and that I and the thousands – and there are thousands – of other scientists that disagree with the alarmists are wrong. Let’s say that it is indeed vitally important for the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What else do you want us to do? The fact is – and I am shocked that as clever a fellow as Krugman couldn’t be bothered to do a little research to figure this out – the United States has made massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and will continue to do so because of all of the programs that are already in place.

A simple check of EPA data shows that greenhouse gas emissions in America have dropped fourteen percent over the course of the last decade. China and India have more than made up for that reduction with increased emissions of course, but to perpetuate the myth that the United States isn’t doing its part is ludicrous. Is some of our reduction due to the great recession? Sure. But the fact is that regulatory initiatives already in place guarantee that greenhouse gas emissions in the United States will continue to drop for decades to come. Before they trot out the tired old idea that Republicans are “anti-science,” it would be nice if mainstream journalists spent some time understanding and reporting on what’s in place. For example:

• Thirty-three states have Renewable Portfolio Standards in place. These programs massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing states to use less and less fossil fuel each year.

• Northeastern states banded together to put a regional cap and trade program in place that has been up and running since 2009, and consortia of Midwest and western states are working on their own cap and trade programs.

• The USEPA is going to start regulating all large greenhouse gas emissions sources under the Clean Air Act, and its permit program starting on July 1, 2011.

• By passing new, incredibly draconian ambient air standards and new regulations affecting power plants, Obama’s EPA has ensured that no new large coal-fired power plants will be built in the United States again, and that a significant portion of the existing fleet will shut down in the next decade or two.

• New CAFE standards will continue to drive down oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

In spite of this, in spite of the massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that we have seen over the course of a decade, and in spite of the incredible reductions in air pollution emissions we have accomplished over the last forty years, it’s never enough for the environmental crowd. Of course it’s not. They have to keep moving the goal posts farther and farther back to keep themselves relevant. It’s the same old Sierra Clubs “the sky is falling” rhetoric. The fact is that Republicans like Perry are not anti-environment, they are rather sensible enough to recognize that the American people are sick and tired of signing off on every crackpot initiative that liberals expect us to accept just because they wrap a green bow around it.

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