North Pole Ice Melting

Saw this article today that scientists are "concerned" about the fact there is a 50/50 chance the ice melts on the North Pole. You can read the entire article for pure enjoyment like I did, but I thought I would cut and past some of my favorite stuff.

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course
to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

They didn't waste any time. This is the first line of the article. Is it me or it quite arrogant to say this is the first time in human history? Really? I know I'm not a genius, but how could they even remotely prove that?

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole
sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and
worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists
say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

I guess I fail to see why this is so worrying. Unless I live on the beach and the sea levels rising a few inches floods my house, this is a non-issue in my book.

"From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the
globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at
the North Pole, not open water," said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and
Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

Similar to the North Pole, catastrophic global warming is just a hoax, "but symbolically its hugely important."

Each summer the sea ice melts before reforming again during the long Arctic
winter but the loss of sea ice last year was so extensive that much of the
Arctic Ocean became open water, with the water-ice boundary coming just 700
miles away from the North Pole.

What?!?! Only 700 miles! That only gives polar bears about a 2 month journey in any direction from the North Pole. How can they live in such cramped quarters? If only they could swim then we wouldn't to worry about them drowning. Of course, its there own fault its so crowded. If they would just stop multiplying they'd have more room to roam.

Drive-Thru's Next Target

It appears the madness over global warming is spreading now to restaurants that offer drive-thru service.

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/293046

Its La Nina's Fault

So I read this article and the general feeling is that the "slight" downturn in global temperatures is due to La Nina. But according to the article, the "overall trend" of temperatures is rising and that La Nina is just a small variation in an upward trend. I'm not an oceanographer or a meteorologist, so maybe I'm overstepping my bounds a bit, but again I think these experts are completely missing the forest for the trees here. I understand that El Nino and La Nina may have some effect on temperatures, but they still would pail in comparison to the effect of the Sun, wouldn't they? I mean, if the Sun disappeared, what do you think would happen to global temperatures? They'd approach absolute zero!!!! Yet no one ever includes the Sun in these discussions. It just totally boggles my mind. Anyway, here's the story:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm

Why Brazil Isn't Ashamed to Exploit Its Oil

http://online.wsj.com/article/the_americas.html

THE AMERICAS
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Why Brazil Isn't Ashamed to Exploit Its Oil
June 16, 2008; Page A13

Petrobras CEO José Sergio Gabrielli was flush with bullish insights when he stopped by the Journal's New York office last week to talk about the Brazilian oil company.

One reason for Mr. Gabrielli's optimism is last year's discovery of the offshore Tupi field, which is said to contain between five billion and eight billion barrels of black gold. Another, equally important reason is that, according to Mr. Gabrielli, neither environmentalists nor Brazilian politicians have raised concerns about exploiting oil in the waters off the Brazilian coast.

That's quite a contrast with attitudes in the U.S., where offshore exploration and development has been all but shut down save in the Gulf of Mexico. One company official explains the difference by saying that Brazilians understand the importance of energy to their future, while Americans do not.

I have another theory. And mine fits the pattern of resource development – or lack thereof – all over the Western Hemisphere. It comes down to this: Where government has the property right, restrictions on development tend to be low. But when the private sector is the owner, environmental concerns blossom.

Exhibit A is Petrobras. Not only did Mr. Gabrielli say there is no appetite for stopping offshore projects in his country. He went further. "Brazil has one of the freest and most investor-oriented regulation in the world. Even freer than the United States of America," he said, referring to the climate for oil exploration.

That may be so, but it would be interesting to know why, given Brazil's prominent embrace of socialism. It could be that the country is changing. After all there is now private-sector competition in the oil industry. Yet it is also worth noting that the Brazilian government has a 58% controlling stake in Petrobras's voting shares and 32% of its total shares. This means that some of Petrobras profits go straight to the government's bottom line, giving the politicians more money to spend on bribing their constituents.

In the U.S., Congress doesn't have nearly such a vested interest in a successful oil industry. What good are corporate profits if they go to shareholders, pensioners and employees? Congress has even been denied the windfall profits tax. For American politicians there is a much greater incentive to respond to the concentrated power of the special interest group known as the "greens."

There are plenty of other examples. In 1995, the British government sold its final remaining shares of British Petroleum, which had been largely privatized throughout the 1980s. In October 1996, a British member of the European Parliament, Socialist Richard Howitt, began harassing BP for alleged environmental and human-rights violations in Colombia. Had the company suddenly gone from being a model citizen to a murderous, contaminating corporation? Or did the Socialists lose their incentive to support the company and discover new reasons to attack it, since left-wing constituents were ideologically allied with the Colombian rebels who were blowing up BP pipelines?

At least Petrobras is a well-run, publicly listed company that has to answer to shareholders. Pemex, Mexico's state-owned oil monopoly, has a history as a notorious polluter yet is seemingly exempt from political pressure to clean up its act.

Mining provides an even better window on this contradiction. Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba all boast aggressive, state-owned mining operations. Yet neither the nongovernmental enviro-movement nor the political class utters a peep to object.

Wherever the private sector is proposing mineral exploration, the story is flipped on its head. In February, I visited a rural town in El Salvador, where Pacific Rim Mining Corp. is trying to reopen the El Dorado gold mine. The company spent a year building the designs for the mine, in a process that included more than 20 public meetings with the local community. It says that the final design exceeds international standards. The government of President Tony Saca acknowledges this by telling the company that there is no technical problem with the mine, only political ones.

Those political problems come from the left-wing FMLN political party, and the NGOs that share the FMLN's antiprivate-sector ideology. They have raised an environmental stink about the mine, though none of it has been substantiated. Even so, the Saca government has responded by sitting on Pacific Rim's permits for four years, sending a signal to investors that El Salvador is not open for business.

The local mayor told me that the community wants the project, which will directly create 600 new jobs and could produce as many as 3,000 indirect jobs. The real problem is that since the government isn't the owner, El Dorado doesn't inspire politicians in San Salvador the way Petrobras inspires Brasilia.

Drill! Drill! Drill!

http://online.wsj.com/article/wonder_land.html

WONDER LAND
By DANIEL HENNINGER

Drill! Drill! Drill!
June 12, 2008; Page A15
Charles de Gaulle once wrote off the nation of Brazil in six words: "Brazil is not a serious country." How much time is left before someone says the same of the United States?

One thing Brazil and the U.S. have in common is the price of oil: It is priced in dollars, and everyone in the world now knows what the price is. Another commonality is that each country has vast oil reserves in waters off their coastlines.

Here we may draw a line in the waves between the serious and the unserious.

Brazil discovered only yesterday (November) that billions of barrels of oil sit in difficult water beneath a swath of the Santos Basin, 180 miles offshore from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The U.S. has known for decades that at least 8.5 billion proven barrels of oil sit off its Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with the Interior Department estimating 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources.

When Brazil made this find last November, did its legislature announce that, for fear of oil spills hitting Rio's beaches or altering the climate, it would forgo exploiting these fields?

Of course it didn't. Guilherme Estrella, director of exploration and production for the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, said, "It's an extraordinary position for Brazil to be in." Indeed it is.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

California won't drill for the estimated 1.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil off its coast because of bad memories of the Santa Barbara oil spill – in 1969.

We won't drill for the estimated 5.6 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil in the moonscape known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) because of – the caribou.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush, calling himself "the environmental president," signed an order putting virtually all the U.S. outer continental shelf's oil and gas reserves in the deep freeze. Bill Clinton extended that lockup until 2013. A Clinton veto also threw away the key to ANWR's oil 13 years ago.

Our waters may hold 60 trillion untapped cubic feet of natural gas. As in Brazil, these are surely conservative estimates.

While Brazilians proudly embrace Petrobras, yelling "We're Going to Be No. 1," the U.S.'s Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, promises to impose an "excess profits tax" on American oil producers.

We live in a world in which Russia's Vladimir Putin and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez use their vast oil and gas reserves as instruments of state power. Here, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid use their control of Congress to spend a week debating a "climate-change" bill. This they did fresh off their subsidized (and bipartisan) ethanol fiasco.

One may assume that Mr. Putin and the Chinese have noticed the policy obsessions of our political class. While other nations use their oil reserves to attain world status, we give ours up. Why shouldn't they conclude that, long term, these people can be taken? Nikita Khrushchev said, "We will bury you." Forget that. We'll do it ourselves.

Putin intimidates Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states and Poland with oil and gas cutoffs, while Chávez uses petrodollars to bankroll Colombian terrorists. Cuba plans to exploit its Caribbean oil fields within a long tee shot of the Florida Keys with help from India, Spain, Venezuela, Canada, Norway, Malaysia, even Vietnam. But America won't drill. Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said just last month he's afraid of an oil spill. Katrina wrecked the oil rigs in the Gulf with no significant damage from leaking oil.

Some portion of the current $4-per-gallon gasoline may be attributable to the Federal Reserve's inflationary monetary policy or even speculators. But we can wave goodbye to the $1.25/gallon gasoline that in 1990 allowed a President Bush to airily lock away the nation's oil and gas jewels. This isn't your father's world of energy. New world powers are coming online fast, and they need energy. We need to get back in the game.

The goal shouldn't be "energy independence," a ridiculous notion in an economically integrated world. It's about admitting the need to strike a balance between the energy and security realities of the here-and-now and the potentialities of the future. Some of our best and brightest want to pursue alternative energy technologies, and they should be encouraged to do so, inside market disciplines. But let's at least stop pretending the rest of the world is going to play along with our environmentalist moralisms.

The Democrats' climate-change bill collapsed last week under the weight of brutal cost realities. It was a wake-up call. This is the year Americans joined the real world of energy costs. Now someone needs to explain to them why we – and we alone – are sitting on an ocean of energy but won't drill for it.

You'd think the "national security" nominee, John McCain, would get this. He's clueless – a don't-drill zombie. We may mark this down as the year the U.S. tired of being a serious country.

PC Strikes Again

Textbook council accuses publisher of being politically correct on Islam
Jun 7, 2008 7:21 AM (4 days ago) by Leah Fabel, The Examiner

Washington, D.C.

A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history.

"Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade," wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for "adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths."

Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin's popular middle school text, "Across the Centuries," which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines "jihad" as a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

"But that is, literally, the translation of jihad," said Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and acclaimed author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam." Aslan explained that the definition does not preclude a militant interpretation.

"How you interpret [jihad] is based on whatever your particular ideology, or world viewpoint, or even prejudice is," Aslan said. "But how you define jihad is set in stone."

A statement from Montgomery County Public Schools said that all text used by teachers had been properly vetted and were appropriate for classroom uses.

Aslan said groups like Sewall's are often more concerned about advancing their own interpretation of Islam than they are about defining its parts and then allowing interpretation to happen at the classroom level.

Sewall's report blames publishing companies for allowing the influence of groups like the California-based Council on Islamic Education to serve throughout the editorial process as "screeners" for textbooks, softening or deleting potentially unflattering topics within the faith.

"Fundamentally I'm worried about dumbing down textbooks," he said, "by groups that come to state education officials saying we want this and that - and publishers need to find a happy medium."

Maryland state delegate Saqib Ali refrained from joining the fray. "The job of assigning curriculum is best left to educators and the school board, and I trust their judgment," he said.

Our Age and Our Prosperity

I read this transcript of Chuck Colson's Breakpoint ministry this morning. I thought it provided an interesting take and a new look at how our ability to reproduce and create "new consumers" is vital to the ongoing prosperity of any country.

Demographics and Prosperity
Demographic Winter and the Economy
June 10, 2008

If you follow the financial news, you have probably heard the phrase, "Stocks were up (or down) on news that . . ." The "news" that is referred to is always something having to do with some government economic report, or the market's reaction to an interest-rate cut.

This makes sense—buying stocks is essentially betting on the future of the economy, and the best guide to that future is the actions of policymakers and financial markets. Correct?

Well, not necessarily. There is another—arguably more reliable—predictor of economic health: demographics.

Specifically, it is looking at the age of a population: the ratio of older people to younger people. That is one of the points explored in the brilliant documentary Demographic Winter. In it, a financial consultant tells a story about two charts on his desk. The first graphed the performance of the S&P 500 during the past few decades.

The second graphed the number of births during the "Baby Boom." When he compared them, allowing for a 45- to 50-year lag representing people's peak spending years, he found that the S&P's performance and the number of births tracked almost perfectly. In other words, future prosperity is determined, to a significant degree, by the number of children being born today.

In hindsight, this ought to be obvious: Consumer spending drives the economy. The more people you have in their peak spending years, the more spending you have on everything from housing, to travel, and taxes paid. As a population ages, it spends less.

This is also true of the rest of the world. The most famous example is Japan, which did not experience a post-war baby boom. This, combined with the low Japanese birthrate, caused its population to age sooner than the rest of its competitors.

When the post-war Japanese economic "miracle" came to a sudden halt in the '80s, economic explanations abounded: bad loans, inflated real estate prices, government policies. No one mentioned the aging of the Japanese population. And that is still true today, even as the economy still staggers.

It is as if those experts are wearing glasses that will not let them see the connection between demographics and prosperity.

In fact, they are wearing such lenses—their worldviews. Thirty-plus years of "population bomb" rhetoric has caused most people to think that "overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe." In fact, as Philip Longman, the author of The Empty Cradle, points out, "the opposite is true."

As Longman notes in Demographic Winter, no society has both a shrinking population and a growing economy. The two are incompatible. Yet our culture denies the problem.

It could hardly do otherwise: As Demographic Winter documents, the "birth dearth" is largely the product of our values. Clearly, our
society believes that individual self-satisfaction—measured in terms of material prosperity—is more important than the creation and welfare of future generations. The irony here is that our material prosperity depends on those future generations.

To solve the problem, we have got to ask ourselves, as I titled my book
some years ago, "How now shall we live?" What is the biblical worldview? We need to see the world through new glasses—through God's eyes.

Canadian Scientists Want to Study the Sun

http://ibdeditorial.com/ibdarticles.aspx?id=287279412587175

The Sun Also Sets
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity. Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle.

But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet." Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures. A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."

But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.