Cool News About Global Warming

A recent press release from "The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works" detailed how many former "pro global warming" scientists have changed their minds, and are now skeptics.

Dr. David Evans, a mathematician and engineer who formerly did carbon counting for the Australian government, gave a credible, logical reason for his conversion:

“I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog.

“But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote.

“As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’”

The List

Other experts quoted in the article include Dr. Claude Allegre, a top French geophysicist; geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta; Dr. Nir Shaviv, a top Israeli scientist; Dr. Tad Murty, former Science Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada; Dr. David Bellamy, UK botanist; Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist at the University of Auckland, NZ; meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson; Hans H.J. Labohm, global warming author and economist; paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson of Carlton University in Ottawa; physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw; paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa; environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of Ottawa...

You get the idea. There's a lot of 'em, and they have very impressive credentials.

The Worst Drivers

How many times have I heard out-of-towners, especially those from larger Texas towns, badmouth Lubbock drivers.

Well, Men's Health magazine recently came out with its Metrograde ranking of drivers in 100 American cities. The worst drivers in the country were in Columbia, SC, #100. Of interest to me were drivers in Corpus Christi (#91, Grade D-); Dallas (#86, Grade D); #75 San Antonio (Grade D+); #64 Fort Worth (Grade C-); #59 Austin (Grade C-); #48 Arlington (Grade C); and #54 Houston (Grade C).

Lubbock came in at #36, with a B-. Of large Texas cities, only El Paso (#25, B) had better drivers. All the rest were worse.

So all you "Lubbock drivers are the worst" proclaimers can kiss my rear bumper.

Sometimes I Say Smart Stuff, Too

ABC News has a report today with the headline "Gingrich Says There Is a 'Great Possibility' He Will Run for President".

When I wrote this post back in August of last year, who would have thought the situation would follow my predictions so precisely? George Allen disintegrated quicker than I thought he would; Mitt Romney has taken up the "conservative" mantle (or tried to); and Fred Thompson is a wild card I didn't foresee.

Not bad for a hick from the sticks, huh?

Would You Believe Five Days?

An interview with Dr. Reid A. Bryson* in the Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News (WECN) revealed what a prominent climatologist thinks about manmade climate change.
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(Note: "Outward heat radiation" is the amount of heat from the sun which is either absorbed or reflected back.)
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“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”
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WECN: There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.
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We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference.
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WECN: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

Reid: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

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Researchers run widely publicized mathematical models through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future.

Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, Dr. Reid replies: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

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* Dr. Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Soldiers Coming Home

Just to prove to yourself that you still have a heart.