Warming Down, or Chilling Up?

Do we need to increase our footprints and warm up globally, to prevent record cold temps from arriving even faster?

Twenty years ago today, James E. Hansen testified before the Senate Energy Committee — in a room kept intentionally warm by committee staff — that the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests was already perceptibly influencing Earth’s climate.

Then, as now, Dr. Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was pushing beyond what many of his colleagues in climatology were willing to say — at least publicly.

His critics show few signs of ever accommodating the ideas he now presses, which include a prompt moratorium on new coal-burning power plants until they can capture and store carbon dioxide and a rising tax on fuels contributing greenhouse-gas emissions, with the revenue passed back directly to citizens, avoiding the complexities of “cap and trade” bills. Andrew C. Revkin NYTimes Science

Climate realists around the world have contended for years that the real goal of alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his followers is to use the fear of man-made global warming to redistribute wealth.

On Monday, one of Gore's leading scientific resources, Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief James Hansen, sent a letter to Barack and Michelle Obama specifically urging the president-elect to enact a tax on carbon emissions that would take money from higher-income Americans and distribute the proceeds to the less fortunate. Noel Sheppard (Bio) NewsBusters

The "inconvenient truth" Al Gore wanted us to believe, which some people still believe, in spite of the mounting evidence of record low temps, and in spite of science that says those carbons and other pollutants in the atmosphere are keeping out the sun rather than trapping it inside, must be his worst nightmare: the hell he predicted is not going to burn us after all. It may freeze some of us. We may be in a minor ice age even as you read this.

"Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age," says the website Winningreen. "What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended."

This is a map of the "Ocean thermohaline conveyor system that transports warm, salty waters into the North Atlantic, tempering the climate of Northern Europe. If the conveyor should collapse on its return loop near Greenland and Iceland, Britain's climate could resemble Labrador." The next paragraph shows how that might happen.

"Now that the 1998 El Nino is disappearing off the 10 year scale, things are looking a bit different," says the website Alex Jones' Prison Planet. "Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades." [emphasis added]

Both sides say the sky is falling. How can both sides be right? "[S]cientists and officials involved in the intensifying international debate on how to deal with global warming say it has taken the United States far too long to put the issue front and center..." But which side is the "issue"? As President Obama put it in his innaugation speech, "science will be restored to its right place" and will be evidence-supported.

Who is to determine which side has the backing of the evidence since it seems to be politically "correct" for the left to claim we are undergoing "global warming", yet other evidence which is not compiled by politically correct scientists says North America is cooling fast enough to put us into the next ice before I die.

If we follow the politics of Al Gore and James Hansen, we risk, if they are wrong, bringing on the next ice age even sooner. This current winter season and the season of '07-'08 set records for low temperatures and snowfall.

What if the act of increasing our carbon footprints staves off the ice age until we can put scientific evidence that is not contradictory to proper use?

China, which has increased its footprint 1000 fold over the last decade has record winters. The U.S. which has reduced slightly its own footprint, has also had record winters, and the average annual temperatures here have been measured as dropping. So do we need to decrease our footprints and warm up globally, or increase our footprints to prevent those record cold temps from coming even faster?

Or, are the choices actually to do the contrary of one of those actions: decrease our footprints and chill down (since the left claims we are warming); or increase our footprints to chill down since the other scientists claim the carbons are keeping the heat out?

"Evidence driven" scientific policies are not made in a vacuum. The policies are specifically metaphysical in nature. And metaphysical policies of the government are political. Whoever wins this "evidence driven" policy debate will probably never know which side is correct.

If we are actually experiencing global warming while at the same time experiencing the onset of the next ice age, everything we do to prevent warming will cause us to freeze that much faster.

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Evidence-Driven Policies Remain Political

And look at this winter, already--will you?
Which way will you let the "evidence" lead you?

The American Thinker today published this, about the Obama Administration's push for energy independence:

"According to Reuters, President-Elect Barack Obama has asked Congress "to act without delay" to pass legislation that includes doubling alternative energy production in the next three years and building a new electricity "smart grid." He said he also planned to modernize 75 percent of federal buildings and improve energy efficiency in 2 million homes to save consumers billions of dollars on energy bills.

"It is important to understand that these pronouncements promoting energy efficiency and alternative energy are not propositions that have anything directly to do with the controversy over regulations of carbon dioxide or about the "global warming" that CO2 allegedly causes. The promoted activities address two separate and, I think, very worthwhile policy imperatives: 1) the nation's energy security, and 2) the need for efficient alternative and conventional energy sources and delivery systems. The global warming question is separate, and, if mishandled, it can lead to costly and ill-conceived interference with the two mentioned imperatives, and waste trillions of dollars.

"On global warming, and man's role in it, my friends who were devoted to the election of Senator Obama as President, some very close to him, have assured me in terms like: "Obama's administration will be evidence-driven" and, "Anti-intellectualism in presidential politics is on its way out." Supporters like these are "confident that the new administration will be very thoughtful about using scientific evidence in making policy decisions, including [carbon control]". "Senate Republicans Need to Demand Re-Examination on Global Warming" By Harvey M. Sheldon

I agree the nation's energy grid, and our dependence on foreign oil, must be protected. Everything Sheldon said, I agree with.

But "evidence driven" scientific policies are not made in a vacuum. The policies are specifically metaphysical in nature. And policies of the government are still political.

Scientific naturalism as supported by such varied authors as Susan Blackmore, Paul Bloom, Paul Broks, Daniel Dennett, Sheldon Drobny, Owen Flanagan, Ursula Goodenough, Joseph Hilbe, Nicholas Humphrey, Brian Leiter, Thomas Metzinger, Tamler Sommers, John Symons, Tom Clark, and many others apply the metaphysics of determinism to scientific discoveries.

(Determinism is the doctrine that every fact in the universe is guided entirely by law; that all the facts in the physical universe, and hence also in human history, are absolutely dependent upon and conditioned by their causes. In psychology this is the doctrine that the will is not free but determined by mental states and at the same time by physical conditions, since the former cannot exist without the latter. Syn. with fatalism, necessitarianism, destiny. (adapted from the Dictionary of Philosophy: Runes 1942))

In this way, the metaphysics of each of us determines which way the evidence we validate is "driven." Some Christians, for example, will validate the "evidence" of God's existence from the fact of existence itself, and from the existence of the Bible will conclude that He made the world in six days. That is the power of metaphysics, and is a proper power. It is simply the way the mind works in the area of philosophy.

So telling us that a President Obama will set policy based on scientific evidence means nothing. Just last Friday, I published scientific conclusions that say "those carbons and other pollutants in the atmosphere are keeping out the sun rather than trapping it inside."

"Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age," says the website Winningreen.

"Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades." [emphasis added] Alex Jones' Prison Planet

El Nino has an 11 year cycle. The solar flares have an 11 year cycle, and the two don't seem to correspond, unless as with all bodies of water it simply takes that long between the ebbing of a solar cycle for the El Nino cycle to ebb.

Sub-zero temps and wind-chill factors up to -35F from a Canadian Clipper will push cool air all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico today.

"Meanwhile, a developing storm offshore of the Carolinas will race northeastward overnight, but remain offshore," says The Weather Channel. It concludes by saying, "If nothing else, the storm will leave a legacy of howling northwest winds and biting wind chills over New England tomorrow morning."

And I follow that up, with my metaphysics leading the way with "evidence driven" information, to tell you that this is a map of the "Ocean thermohaline conveyor system that transports warm, salty waters into the North Atlantic," a conveyor that runs right along the American eastern seaboard turning northward near Florida and rising all the way north to the Arctic Circle, "tempering the climate of Northern Europe. If the conveyor should collapse on its return loop near Greenland and Iceland, Britain's climate could resemble Labrador." http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=643

I believe I have demonstrated what "evidence driven" facts mean. Specifically they mean whatever the user can make them mean. What the user makes them mean must be reasonable. If one company can use scientific facts one way to their advantage, and another company can use the same factual evidence to drive their business in a different direction, they will do so. It is only when the ends do not demonstrate the rationality of the metaphysics used that the "evidence driven actions" will appear foolish--or worse.

When those actions that fail are in the arena of government policy, and those policies affect every American and his wallet, the policies will make the policy maker look awfully stupid.

That is why we have not seen much of Al Gore these days. His inconvenient theory of global warming is proving to be just the opposite. From China to Colorado the winter of '07-'08 was the hardest on record. Lower temperatures had never been recorded in China; snow was still on the mountain peaks of Colorado in June. Fires in California, at an all-time high, are fanned by hurricane-strength Santa Anna winds. http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/11/tuesday.html

And look at this winter, already--will you?

Which way will you let the "evidence" lead you?

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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The Inconvenient Truth Freezes Up

What the Earth naturally does every 10,000 interglacial years is not up to us...

At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades.

CONSENSUS STATEMENT OF THE SOLAR CYCLE 24 PREDICTION PANEL
March 20, 2007
The Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel anticipates the solar minimum marking the onset of Cycle 24 will occur in March, 2008 (±6 months).

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/Statement_01.html

The "new" cycle was predicated on the "low ebb," meaning the upswing was predicted to be coming. But it seems it was not to be, not then, anyway:

"Cycle 24 remains late. There was one sunspot of high latitude and reversed magnetic polarity on January 4th, 2008, but none have been seen since." http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/27/new-sunspot-but-still-a-solar-cycle-23-spot/

The previous solar cycle, Solar Cycle 23, peaked in 2000-2002 with many furious solar storms. That cycle decayed as usual to the present quiet leaving solar physicists little to do other than wonder, when would the next cycle begin? http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/10jan_solarcycle24.htm

It actually started four months later than (+6 months):
Jan. 10, 2008: Hang on to your cell phone, a new solar cycle has just begun. Solar activity waxes and wanes in 11-year cycles. Lately, we've been experiencing the low ebb, "very few flares, sunspots, or activity of any kind," says Hathaway. "Solar minimum is upon us."

Solar minimum means colder temperatures, generally, but as we are about to experience, something else will be worse than a late solar cycle.

On National Public Radio International, I heard an "environmental artist" say--correctly--that we don't have global warming, that, instead, some places are warming, some are getting colder. Some places are getting hotter, and some are becoming wetter, some dryer. The Arctic may be melting, but recorded Antarctica had 17 inches more ice than at any time since that continent's discovery, and there may be more since I read that report.

From China to Colorado the winter of '07-'08 was the hardest on record. Lower temperatures had never been recorded in China; snow was still on the mountain peaks of Colorado in June. Fires in California, at an all-time high, are fanned by hurricane-strength Santa Anna winds.

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/11/tuesday.html

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the European Union's current president, has called global warming a "myth" and Al Gore an "apostle of arrogance." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/11/naturalism.html

And now, the winter of 2008/09 has already turned out to be the coldest in more than a decade, and record amounts of snow are piling up in the Pacific Northwest. Parts of Washington, which normally see an average of 16 inches of snow all winter, have already had more than 73 inches.

The "inconvenient truth" Al Gore wanted us to believe, which some people still believe, in spite of the mounting evidence of record low temps, and in spite of science that says those carbons and other pollutants in the atmosphere are keeping out the sun rather than trapping it inside, must be his worst nightmare: the hell he predicted is not going to burn us after all. It may freeze some of us. We may be in a minor ice age even as I write.

"Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age," says the website Winningreen. "What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended."

While many more of us may be inundated by record low temps and record amounts of snow, and while all of this is leading to unprecetended flooding in places that otherwise would not see flooding so severely--or at all--the fact is that weather patterns are shifting.

This is a map of the "Ocean thermohaline conveyor system that transports warm, salty waters into the North Atlantic, tempering the climate of Northern Europe. If the conveyor should collapse on its return loop near Greenland and Iceland, Britain's climate could resemble Labrador."

"Now that the 1998 El Nino is disappearing off the 10 year scale, things are looking a bit different," says the website Alex Jones' Prison Planet. "Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades." [emphasis added]

This blog essay is not intended to frighten anyone. What the Earth naturally does every 10,000 is not up to us until we learn to control the Earth to that degree. Al Gore did intend to frighten us, but with the rapidly falling rate of some pollutants even man is not doing enough to harm the environment to the point that he could cause a new global ice age.

El Nino has an 11 year cycle. The solar flares have an 11 year cycle, and the two don't seem to correspond, unless as with all bodies of water it simply takes that long between the ebbing of a solar cycle for the El Nino cycle to ebb.

The 10,000 year cycle of the interglacial period may end within our lifetimes. Civiliations in the northern hemispheres could be pushed into migration toward warmer climates. Africans were pushed back from Europe three times by glacial periods before they finally managed to populate that northern continent.

Al Gore did actually say he "invented" the Internet; but we all knew that what he meant was that he created the legislation that allowed civilians to use it. He did not invent the scare-mongering tactics that led to his Academy Award and his Nobel Prize.

I think "the apostle of arragance" should give them both back, and start looking for "green" methods of saving the planet from nature's coming ice age.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

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Al Gore and Coercion in the Free Market

Al Gore co-authored this with David Blood in The Wall Street Journal

"When greeting old friends after a period of absence, Ralph Waldo Emerson used to ask: 'What has become clear to you since we last met?'

"What is clear to us and many others is that market capitalism has arrived at a critical juncture. Even beyond the bailouts and recent volatility, the challenges of the climate crisis, water scarcity, income disparity, extreme poverty and disease must command our urgent attention.

"The financial crisis has reinforced our view that sustainable development will be the primary driver of economic and industrial change over the next 25 years. As a result, old patterns and assumptions are now being re-examined in an effort to find new ways to use the strengths of capitalism to address this reality. Indeed, at the Harvard Business School Centennial Global Business Summit held earlier this month, the future of market capitalism was one of the principal themes discussed."

What is very clear in Al Gore's mind is that market capitalism is engineered capitalism and has nothing to do with profit capitalists providing what the market--consumers--want. Rather, it has to do with what political engineers want. It is also very clear that the political engineering comes from the economic engineers who don't know laissez faire from socialism, men such as Henry Paulson and Allen Greenspan.

What form of oligarchy is this? It isn't the form of a democratic-republic, as our Founders invisioned, not when the majority of Americans demand that no bailout be contrived for the mortage industry yet our republic ignores the democratic wishes of free people who wish to remain free and contrive the bailout, anyway.

What form of psychological spin is Gore putting into our heads? Since when did capitalism need to be called market capitalism, and what other form is there, except the managed, mixed-economy we are now prisoners of?

Well, if by market capitalism Gore mean a market economy, he is way off base. A market economy cannot be politically engineered. It is "engineered" by the offerings of the producers in a relationship with consumers, who decide which produced offerings they will give their money to.

"A socialist economy, in contrast [to a market economy], is characterized by [ ] central planning. [G]overnment often is asked to intervene in the economy to correct situations in which the price system does not work. It regulates 'natural monopolies,' for example, and it uses antitrust laws to control or break up other business combinations..." [emphasis added] About.Com

"A 'natural monopoly' is defined in economics as an industry where the fixed cost of the capital goods is so high that it is not profitable for a second firm to enter and compete. There is a 'natural' reason for this industry being a monopoly, namely that the economies of scale require one, rather than several, firms. Small-scale ownership would be less efficient." http://www.progress.org/fold74.htm

"The great evil in economics is not communism, not socialism, not capitalism, not landlords or bosses, not unions, not feudalism or industrialization or automation, not progress or lack of it, and not any scarcity of natural resources. No, the great evil in economics is coercive monopoly." Fred E. Foldvary

But natural monopolies are not coercive. Communism and socialism and feudalism are coercive, and Gore's "market" capitalism is not capitalism because capitalism demands the admission that capital is property of its owner, not of the state. Only capitalists can create capital; government cannot. Gore and Obama treat capital as if it was a coercive monopoly, when in fact anyone can be a capitalist, and three quarters of all the business in this country is conducted by small business, not by natural monopolies nor by coercive monopolies such as first class mail deliverable only by the United States Postal Service.

Once again Gore gets it wrong when he may have valuable contributions to make. He does make people think, and that is a contribution; but he makes them think using the wrong terminology.

On National Public Radio International, I heard an "environmental artist" say--correctly--that we don't have global warming, that, instead, some places are warming, some are getting colder. Some places are getting hotter, and some are becoming wetter, some dryer. The Arctic may be melting, but Antarctica has 17 inches more ice than at any time since that continent's discovery, and from China to Colorado the winter of '07-'08 was the hardest on record. Lower temperatures had never been recorded in China; snow was still on the mountain peaks of Colorado in June. Fires in California, at an all-time high, are fanned by hurricane-strength Santa Anna winds.

The weather is changing, but you wouldn't get that simple message from Gore. And from his lips, and Obama's, to yours ears, you will never get the message that government intervention creates coercive markets, weighting down one part of it so that another must be offset by "redistributive" taxes, which then creates another anomoly in what ought to be a self-correcting market economy, but which has instead become a government-managed capitalism, masked by the word "market."

Government-managed capitalism is a contradiction of terms of the highest order; but to the degree that Marxists and other collectivists can get away with it, they can convince the economically illiterate that government controls are necessary.

And keeping people economically--and politically--illiterate is what the Fairness doctrine is all about, limiting free speech made by opponents of the left. Every Rush Limbaugh would necessarily, by law, be required to be followed by a Gore or an Allen Colmes.

And that would not be natural.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®
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"WE Demand", Bad Science, and Socialism Disguised as "Political Will"

When consumers demand, they do it with their money. When demands are demanded without money, it must then be political. I am talking about "We Can Solve It," publicly seen as the "We Demand" advertising campaign.

I wrote the first sentence before I pulled up the "We Demand" website, and the site proves me correct. It is political, not economic. How do I know? Because this is what the site says:

"The We Campaign is a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection -- a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore. The goal of the Alliance is to build a movement that creates the political will to solve the climate crisis."

I did not know Al Gore was behind it. But our nation's troubling crises are getting deeper because of too much government intervention and not enough economic/consumer intervention. The "political will" that "We" talks of is exactly the will to create a monument to bureaucracy that can stop at nothing less than actual socialism, where the "means of production" is privately owned, but the goals are set by anyone who is not the owners.

"Anyone" who is not the owners is anyone who can create "the political will," where "will" translates into "power," and "power" being political is an agenda, and the agenda is to rip the power from the owners. True will is the power to "demand" with dollars. T. Boone Pickens is absolutely correct when he says not enough Americans are doing their part.

"In the Texas panhandle, just north of Sweetwater, is the town of Pampa, where T. Boone Pickens' Mesa Power is currently building the largest wind farm in the world. In addition to creating new construction and maintenance jobs, thousands of Americans will be employed to manufacture the turbines and blades. These are high skill jobs that pay on a scale comparable to aerospace jobs. Plus, wind turbines don't interfere with farming and grazing, so they don't threaten food production or existing local economies." http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/

Forget that Gore might be right--and recognize that I said might be--about climate change. It cannot be proved. I have just as much proof that the clear-cutting of the Amazon rain forest is responsible for the shifting of much of the climate change. Gore says the North Pole has melted? The South Pole has seventeen more inches of ice this year than in any year since man first set foot on it. The climate may be shifting, but it is not cooling.

The climate "crisis," if it is a crisis, is one of shifting weather patterns. There is scientific evidence that the very late arrival of the 11-year-cycle of the solar storms is responsible for some of the change. "The previous solar cycle, Solar Cycle 23, peaked in 2000-2002 with many furious solar storms. That cycle decayed as usual to the present quiet leaving solar physicists little to do other than wonder, when would the next cycle begin? The answer is now [January, 2008.]" http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/10jan_solarcycle24.htm

Solar Cycle 24 http://solarcycle24.com/ was more than a year late in coming, meaning China had the coldest winter in over a hundred years (07'-08'), and among other world-wide anomalies, Colorado and Washington had mountain peaks covered with snow in June. That same scientific evidence of change pointed to a cooling of the earth of barely more than a degree, but "NASA and several university studies show that the earth is cooling and that we have at least 20 years, and perhaps as much as 30 years, of colder than normal temperatures ahead of us." http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/print.php?extend.68.1

But forget all of that. It doesn't matter which way the science points, the politics points to more collectivism, more socialism, more government interference, more bureaucracy, more taxes, more legislation, more court cases--and oh yes, quite possibly uncorrected scientific beliefs being used to back it all up with.

And it means that capitalists like Pickens are not using political power, but the power of money. As consumers, we need to put our money where the capitalists put theirs, not where the government allows politics to put it.

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