The Cure For Global Warming

Tim Blair has a new column up in the Australian Sunday Telegraph discussing the newest, breathless pronunciation from the Australia Institute. They have, apparently with straight faces, announced that Australia, which according to Blair produces 1.5% of all global warming gasses, must cut their emissions by 95% to save the planet. Which forces one to ask the question: Who stops breathing?

IN A wonderful act of subversion, the Sydney Morning Herald's splendidly-named Stephanie Peatling this week managed to sneak a comic gem past her vigilant editors: "The greenhouse gas cuts Australia must achieve to prevent dangerous climate change may be substantially higher than thought, with modelling to be released today suggesting it should be as much as 95 per cent by 2020."

That modelling was the work of a leftist panic hive called the Australia Institute, presided over by director Clive Hamilton.

I called Clive on Thursday to discuss how we might achieve this reduction, which essentially would require that Australians stop doing everything, including breathing.

I also wanted to know how even a 100 per cent cut in Australia's carbon output could influence the global climate, given that we only generate about 1.5 per cent of all global emissions.

And there's the matter of Chinese economic expansion, which easily counters any local reductions.

Let's say Labor's mighty Kevin Ruddernaut storms to power at the next election and adopts the Australia Institute's plans (not likely, but we're imagining a worst-case scenario here - after all, it's a tactic approved by the environmental Left).

While Australia diligently spends the next 13 years closing down mines, factories, offices, hospitals, roads and anything else capable of killing the planet with carbon, the Chinese will have - if they continue at current rates - built about 670 new coal-fired power plants over the same time. (And lost about 78,000 workers in coal-mining accidents. The one-child policy isn't China's only means of population control.)

Alas, Hamilton wasn't at the institute's Canberra hut. He was on a break to do some writing, a helper told me, so had headed north to get away from Canberra's freezing weather. I hope he took his coat; it's barely any warmer in Sydney and Brisbane airport this week recorded its first sub-zero temperature.

Got that? First ever - in all of recorded history - sub-zero temperature in Brisbane. It's freaking cold down under, folks. It's cold as hell in South Africa and Argentina, too. Happily, there is a solution to all this. If Al Gore and his sycophants will all personally hold their collective breath for twenty minutes, the level of screeching will drop by 95%, thereby saving the planet.

We Have The Scoop

There has been a lot of interest in The New Republic's pseudonymous "Scott Thomas". Whether it is square cartridge cases or changing a Humvee tire in waist deep sewage, something smells about the entire coverage TNR has delivered. (Somewhat worse than aforesaid rivers of sewage.) But others have been on this for a while now, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are late to the party. But that is because we have been combing the interwebby tubes to find the real identity of the TNR source identified by the name of Scott Thomas. We are proud to announce that we have discovered who he is: Scott Thomas is none other than former special forces super secret agent Jessie Macbeth.

Do we get a reward or something?

Funniest Report About Harry Potter Ever

An avid Australian Harry Potter fan, waiting in line (in bitter cold temperatures) for the last book in the series lost his pre-paid receipt into the waters of a lake. He dove it to try to retrieve the paper. When they dragged him out, he was suffering from a severe case of hypothermia. Hospitalization was required, forthwith.

Emergency services in Canberra said a 21-year-old man lost his pre-purchase receipt for "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows" in the capital's Lake Burley Griffin late Friday and dived into the waters to try to retrieve it.

A security guard had to drag him out of the frigid lake before he was taken to hospital for treatment, emergency services said.

The fan failed to find his receipt but it is believed a doctor at the hospital where he was treated contacted a local bookstore to ensure he could secure a cope of J.K. Rowling's seventh Harry Potter book.

It looks like the record cold June is being followed by a record cold July down under. Canberra Airport is currently reporting 1.3° C (34° F). All of which proves only that Australian has weather, but it is still amusing.

Historical Accuracy

I've posted a few times about the Sea Stallion of Glendalough, billed as the largest replica Viking ship ever built. First here, then here and finally here. As promised, the crew of the ship launched its planned invasion of Ireland a while ago. Unfortunately, the winds in the North Sea have been uncooperative, making sailing to Ireland impractical. So they fell back on the historically accurate method that any self-respecting Viking warrior would have used to get over there and start raiding.

They called a tugboat.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The crew of a replica Viking longship dropped plans to sail across the North Sea on Monday because of unfavorable winds and was to be towed to a group of islands north of the Scottish mainland.

The Sea Stallion of Glendalough, billed as the biggest Viking ship reconstruction to date, will be towed by a support ship to the main town on the Orkney islands before continuing its voyage to Dublin, where it is to arrive on Aug. 14.

"We have a timetable we have to stick to and the winds are not favorable to us," said Mette Busch of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, west of Copenhagen.

The initial plan was to travel non-stop from Roskilde to Dublin using only oars and sails — like Viking warriors did 1,000 years ago — but the weather intervened.

Just days after leaving Roskilde on July 1, the 100-foot-long ship was forced to make stops in Norway to await the right winds to cross the North Sea.

After sailing along the Norwegian coast for nearly two weeks, the crew decided to start the crossing early Monday, but westerly winds made it impossible, Busch said. The ship would need an easterly wind to push it across the North Sea.

"Vikings didn't have deadlines so they could sail whenever the winds permitted. They didn't have a reception committee jumping on the harbor in Dublin as we have," Busch said.

The support ship, Cable One, will tow the Sea Stallion to Kirkwall, the biggest town on Orkney, where it was set to arrive on Tuesday, she said.

We'd just like to point out here that pictures of the Sea Stallion of Glendalough frequently show her with a full complement of oars and she certainly is carrying a good-sized crew. But we fully understand the impulse to call in that historically accurate Viking tugboat. As I understand it, one of my ancestors made a fortune towing raiders to Ireland. Unfortunately, he lost it all in bad investments in Vinland waterfront property. Well, that's the story in the family, anyway.

Eeny, Meeny, Chili Beanie, The Spirits Are About To Speak

Ah, the classics. That line from Bullwinkle is perfect for the title to this post. Because the subject is (cue theremin music) orbs! Yes, orbs. Glowing, weird globs of light that appear in pictures. The Daily Mail asks if this is proof that spirits exist. (Cue theremin).

At first, it seemed no more than a curious coincidence. Professor Klaus Heinemann, a researcher for NASA, the U.S. space agency, was studying a collection of photographs his wife had taken at a gathering of spiritual healers when he noticed that many of them featured the same pale but clearly defined circle of light, like a miniature moon, hovering above some of the subjects.

Like most rational people, he assumed that the pictures were faulty. 'I presumed the circles were due to dust particles, flash anomalies, water particles and so on,' says Prof Heinemann.

'But I was sufficiently intrigued that I returned to the room in which the pictures were taken, in the hope of finding an explanation - like a mirror in the background. None was forthcoming.'

Nor could he find any faults with his wife's camera. And as a scientist with considerable experience in sophisticated microscope techniques - examining matter down to atomic levels of optical resolution - his methods were nothing if not rigorous.

Still puzzled, Heinemann set out to discover what else might have caused the mysterious circles. He and his wife began taking hundreds of digital photographs at random events to see whether they could recreate the mysterious effect.

The answer was that they could make these shimmering 'orbs' appear again, but only - absurd as it may sound - if they 'asked' the apparitions to make themselves visible to the camera. And they found this method worked particularly well when the couple photographed spiritual gatherings.

Why that's just plain eerie, right? Nah, as usual, it is much less than it appears - or is being trumped up to be by a man about to publish a book, as the good professor is. Benjamin Radford smoked the "orb phenomenon" some time ago and has recreated orbs rather easily. As can you.

In a series of experiments, I was able to create orb photos under a wide range of circumstances. Orbs can be found in the most un-spooky of settings, and are actually fairly common in daily, amateur photography. They are usually only noticed when a person is actively looking for them as evidence of ghosts. For example, this photo is one of several images I snapped at a New Year's wedding reception that later revealed odd glowing orbs. Proof of spectral party crashers, or a simple photographic trick of light?

The easiest way to create an orb image is to take a flash photograph outdoors on a rainy night. The flash will reflect off the individual droplets and appear as white, floating orbs (the effect is most pronounced in a light rain, though even a little moisture in the air can create mysterious orbs). As researcher Joe Nickell notes in his book Camera Clues , unnoticed shiny surfaces are also common sources of orbs. (As well, flashes reflecting camera straps can produce other ghostly photo effects.)

As Radford points out, if even true believers admit - as they will - that some of the "mysterious" photographs are caused by natural phenomenon, why in the world would you then accept that some must be caused by spirits? Put another way, why would spirits look exactly like photographic errors? The entire spiritualist movement traces back to the Fox Sisters. Despite the fact that two of them publicly confessed that they were frauds, there is still an active group that believes. (And you should see all the defenses of the Fox Sisters on the interwebby.) James Randi has more on the Fox Sisters.

Level Heads

The man behind the The Great Global Warming Swindle, Martin Durkin, has a piece in The Australian that addresses the outright hostility from zealots at the Australian Broadcasting Company following the airing of his film on that network. And guess what? The average Australians are offering words of support for Durkin and his film and condemning the ABC talking heads who went on a vitriolic rampage against him.

WHEN I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head.

So I wasn't shocked that the film was attacked on the same night it was broadcast on ABC television last week, although I was impressed at the vehemence of the attack. I was more surprised, and delighted, by the response of the Australian public.

The ABC studio assault, led by Tony Jones, was so vitriolic it appears to have backfired. We have been inundated with messages of support, and the ABC, I am told, has been flooded with complaints. I have been trying to understand why.

First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are told the global warming theory is robust. They say you'd have to be off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it's definitely true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish documentary-maker - who clearly must be as mad as a snake - who steps out of line?

Durkin goes on to point out a few really, really inconvenient truths that the zealots want you not to notice:

But why are the supporters of global warming so defensive? After all, the middle classes are usually confident, bordering on smug.

As I found when I examined the basic data, they have plenty to be defensive about. Billions of dollars of public money have been thrown at global warming, yet the hypothesis is crumbling around their ears.

To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.

Then there's the ice-core data, the jewel in the crown of global warming theory. It shows there's a connection between carbon dioxide and temperature: see Al Gore's movie. But what Gore forgets to mention is that the connection is the wrong way around; temperature leads, CO2 follows.

Then there's the precious "hockey stick". This was the famous graph that purported to show global temperature flat-lining for 1000 years, then rising during the 19th and 20th centuries. It magicked away the Medieval warm period and made the recent warming look alarming, instead of just part of the general toing and froing of the Earth's climate.

But then researchers took the computer program that produced the hockey stick graph and fed it random data. Bingo, out popped hockey stick shapes every time. (See the report by Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Virginia and others.)

In a humiliating climb down, the IPCC has had to drop the hockey stick from its reports, though it can still be seen in Gore's movie.

And finally, there are those pesky satellites. If greenhouse gases were the cause of warming, then the rate of warming should have been greater, higher up in the Earth's atmosphere (the bit known as the troposphere). But all the satellite and balloon data says the exact opposite. In other words, the best observational data we have flatly contradicts the whole bally idea of man-made climate change.

I'd also point out another interesting fact. NASA reported yesterday that Spirit and Opportunity, the two little rovers that have been providing incomparable data about mars for three years now, are in serious danger of failing because of a dust storm. Not just any dust storm, one that is almost global in scope, covering a vast area of Mars. Here's a hint: a storm of that magnitude - indeed any storm - requires enormous energy to generate. There is only one source of energy on Mars: the sun.

It would seem that the average Australian has a more level head than the zealots and the media elite who have so much personally invested in the political theory of global warming.

Harry Reid’s Bitter Partisan Hackery

Gee, that post title looks positively Greenwaldian. But it certainly fits for a post that addresses the Washington Post's issuing an editorial that positively hammers Harry Reid for his bitter and irresponsible partisan posturing. And boy, this editorial lays Reid out.

The decision of Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to deny rather than nourish a bipartisan agreement is, of course, irresponsible. But so was Mr. Reid's answer when he was asked by the Los Angeles Times how the United States should manage the explosion of violence that the U.S. intelligence community agrees would follow a rapid pullout. "That's a hypothetical. I'm not going to get into it," the paper quoted the Democratic leader as saying.

For now Mr. Reid's cynical politicking and willful blindness to the stakes in Iraq don't matter so much. The result of his maneuvering was to postpone congressional debate until September, when Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will report on results of the surge — in other words, just the outcome the White House was hoping for. But then, as now, the country will desperately need a strategy for Iraq that can count on broad bipartisan support, one aimed at carrying the U.S. mission through the end of the Bush administration and beyond. There are serious issues still to resolve, such as whether a drawdown should begin this fall or next year, how closely it should be tied to Iraqi progress, how fast it can proceed and how the remaining forces should be deployed.

The editorial points out that Reid's pandering to the anti-war left is making compromise almost impossible - and endangering the interests of the United States for a long time to come. They also, to their credit, admit that Iraq and Iraqis will be in serious trouble if Reid continues his antics.

An American Problem

The Lebanon Daily Star is carrying an op-ed by Michael Young that should be required reading for American politicians. Young points out, correctly, that the world sees the situation in Iraq not as a partisan, internal political problem of the United States, but as an American problem. One that will have devastating consequences for whoever wins the White House in 2008. The Democrats leading the anti-war charge had better think hard about the mess they would be handing their candidate should she or he win. Because even the holiest of holies in the "internationalist" wing of the Democratic party, the UN, is warning of dire consequences of an American withdrawal. (You haven't really seen news of that in the American media, have you?)

So alarming are the implications of an American debacle in Iraq, that the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, felt the urge to intervene last Monday and warn: "Great caution should be taken for the sake of [the] Iraqi people. The international community cannot and should not abandon them. Any abrupt withdrawal or decision may lead to a further deterioration of the situation in Iraq." An Iraqi tribal leader fighting Al-Qaeda who was recently interviewed by the BBC Arabic service said more or less the same thing. If the United States withdrew from Iraq, he warned, his men would find it difficult to defeat their adversaries. 

That Iraq is an American mess is an understatement. However, like many messes, it is a metastasizing one. American politicians are panicking, and in so doing are making many more mistakes than they need to make - so that already we can spread the blame across the political spectrum.

President George W. Bush has the right instincts in believing that the only way to prevail in a place like Iraq is to make an open-ended commitment, with no talk of withdrawal. There are no quick fixes in Iraq, and no obvious slow ones either. But that's hardly enough. Bush seems to have no real clue about what to do next and is going through the same flawed thought processes as those of Richard Nixon in 1969, when he sought to engineer "peace with honor" in Vietnam, while facing a public mostly focused on the "peace" part of the equation. Like Nixon, Bush is fiddling with the switches, even if he, correctly, sees any talk of withdrawal at home as weakening his bargaining hand in Iraq. The military is preparing a plan to cut troop levels in quieter northern Iraq by half in the next 12 to 18 months. Nixon did much the same thing during his first year in office, mainly to reduce domestic political resentment; but this did not alter his desire to pursue, even escalate, the Vietnamese conflict. ……

……The Democrats are in no better a moral posture. Seeing Bush trapped, they are hammering him, hoping this will carry them to victory in next year's presidential and congressional elections. The Republicans sense a looming rout, which is why they, too, are hitting Bush harder than ever. However, the Democrats have no more an effective plan for Iraq than the administration does, and would be just as vulnerable to the misfortunes following from a withdrawal as the Republicans. It may be justifiable to condemn an administration that has been unable to point to an Iraqi upturn for four years, but acrimony only makes the situation worse for everyone, because Iraq is not about partisan American politics.

The Democrats will not be seen as heroes to the rest of the world: they will be seen as part of the American failure in Iraq. And if they get their fondest wish and take the White House in 2008, they will have hamstrung their candidate and crippled American foreign policy for decades to come. The bloodbath that follows the withdrawal of American troops will not be blamed on George Bush, regardless of the fantasies of the left. It will be blamed on America as a whole, the left included. And the blood will be on the hands of those who forced the withdrawal.

Outfoxed

While it is quite common to go to a steakhouse for a bite, it isn't generally the patron or the staff that is the bitee. Not so at Chef Fred's Chesapeake Steakhouse, Bar & Grill in Salisbury, Maryland. One of their managers was bitten by an unusual patron: a fox.

The attack happened near closing time Thursday, when customers encountered a wild fox in the parking lot. Feeling threatened, they ran inside the slow-release door at Chef Fred's Chesapeake Steakhouse, Bar & Grill. The fox followed them inside.

"It was a bizarre thing," said Sara Hall, a manager at Chef Fred's Chesapeake Steakhouse, Bar & Grill. "I've never been so scared in my life."

Once inside the building, the fox scampered into the dining room area, into the bar area and back to the dining area, causing employees and patrons to take cover. Several jumped onto tables or chairs.

Hall told The (Salisbury) Daily Times that she went to discover what was causing the ruckus, when the fox lunged at her and bit her hand.

"One of the bouncers at the bar starts to choke the fox, and it still wouldn't let go," Hall said.

Employees eventually got the fox outside, where it ran off.

Obviously an act by the Animal Uprising™. They're trying to shake down restaurant owners for protection money. Nice steakhouse you got there, squire. Police later caught up the unsuccessful extortionist and killed him. The employee received rabies treatments.

UPDATE: Thanks to Shawn from The Sky Is Red for pointing out that there is video of the fox frolicking through the frolickers.