The Sun Is Responsible For Climate Change

Nobel peace prize winner Rajendra Pachauri gives a press conference with his organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Rajendra Pachauri: Media went gaga over greenhouse guru

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger (NJ)
February 28, 2010


At the height of the ’60s silliness, the Beatles flew off to India to seek enlightenment at the feet of a guru named the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Their enchantment didn’t last. After they noticed that this master of the metaphysical had managed to acquire his own helicopter to ferry him around the foothills of the Himalayas, the Beatles bolted. As John Lennon was headed to the airport, he penned a parody titled "Sexy Sadie" about a temptress who "made a fool of everyone."

Too bad Lennon’s not around to write a song about the latest guru to emerge out of India, Rajendra Pachauri. Pachauri is a railway engineer by training, yet somehow he managed to work his way up to the chairmanship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s the group of global-warming alarmists that was recently forced to retract a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035. It turns out the claim had no more basis than the Maharishi’s claim that his followers could levitate.

The London Daily Telegraph reported the other day that a United Nations committee will shortly be announcing that an independent panel will investigate the IPCC’s role in what has come to be known as "Climategate."

Though I consider myself a cynic, I confess even I was shocked when I found out that the global-warming guru is a mere railway engineer. I learned that when I was speaking recently to a scientist skeptical of climate-change alarmism, Princeton physicist William Happer.

"I think the best way to restore the credibility of the IPCC is to have some resignations." said Happer. "Someone has to resign and it has to be Pachauri."

Maybe Pachauri could get a job at NJ Transit overseeing the tracks that lead to within walking distance of the Happer Laboratory of Atomic Physics in Princeton. One of the odder aspects of the media coverage of the climate-change controversy is that such serious scientists as Happer and fellow Princeton physics whiz Freeman Dyson have been treated as some sort of kooks while the alarmists led by Pachauri go unquestioned.

In fact, says Happer, climate science involves some of the most complicated questions of physics and astrophysics imaginable. The science simply can’t be reduced to the simple formulas promulgated by the IPCC, which he termed "an advocacy group for global warming alarmism that masquerades as a scientific organization."

Happer points out that the tiny amount of CO-2 that man has introduced into the atmosphere could create only a correspondingly tiny rise in temperature. The climate-change crowd gets around this by contending that the CO-2 results in an increase in the amount of the most important greenhouse gas, water vapor.

But there are experts in that field as well who disagree. Among the most prominent is Don Easterbrook, a scientist at Western Washington University who is an expert on the "Pacific decadal oscillation". This is the flow of water vapor over the planet’s largest body of water, the Pacific Ocean.

When I called Easterbrook the other day, he said there is evidence that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is decreasing, not increasing. And while the climatologists are dismissing the blizzards that keep hitting us here on the East Coast as anomalies, Easterbrook predicts we’d better get used to them.

"The next decade is going to be colder, no doubt about it," he told me.

Easterbrook based that not just on the Pacific currents but on the possibility that we are entering a "grand solar minimum," a decline in sunspot activity. These seem to come along every 200 years or so, and they create mini ice ages, Easterbrook said. "And it’s global cooling, not global warming, that’s the real killer," he said.

Who’s right, the expert in laying tracks for the Chittagong choo-choo or the expert in the Pacific decadal oscillation? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

As for me, I like to focus on something that we journalists should be focusing on: the question of cui bono. That’s a Latin phrase that translates as "in whose interest?" In whose interest is all this alarmism?

Obviously, there are people like Al Gore who trade in carbon credits. Then there are the environmentalists who want to force their agenda on the world. There’s even the nuclear-power industry, which wants to use the threat of global warming against the aforementioned nuke-hating environmentalists.

And then of course there is that railway engineer from India. He is a follower in a long tradition of producing mantras for the masses. And he has performed his task admirably.

FREEDOM AND THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION

Are The American People Too Dumb To Fail?

Call me a far-right whack-job if you want: I don't care. It is becoming clear that the power of the people will only come, ultimately, from the readiness and willingness to use guns to wrest control of our destiny from the powerful elite. A show of force is the only thing which will cut through the demonic hold of the powerful elites who control Washington. But it will take more than a feel-good tea-party-venting grass-roots revival of American Patriotism. It will take commitment - at the individual level - to act in accordance with conscience. If we allow Washington to take away our guns & ammo, then, ipso facto, we will have lost the battle for freedom. Power comes from a willingness and ability to use force.

Charles Krauthammer - nice name - provides the political background noise which we are up against if we continue to let Washington game us.

The great peasant revolt of 2010

By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post
Friday, February 5, 2010

"I am not an ideologue," protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society -- health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a "jobs bill."

This being a democracy, don't the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don't they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking "in the plain words of plain folks," because the people are "suspicious of complexity." Counseled Blow: "The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, 'Mr. President, we're down here.' "

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are "a nation of dodos" that is "too dumb to thrive."

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself "for not explaining it [health care] more clearly to the American people." The subject, he noted, was "complex." The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people's anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick's masterwork, "Anarchy, State, and Utopia," "proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification." The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda -- which couldn't get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts -- is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush -- from Iraq to Social Security reform -- constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is "one of the truest expressions of patriotism."

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. "They made a decision," explained David Axelrod, "they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed" -- a perfect expression of liberals' conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country's, that their idea of the public good is the public's, that their failure is therefore the nation's.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that "the peasants are revolting" is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It recenters. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.