The American Spectator

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Too Hot to Handle

8.17.07 @ 12:01AM

ADVANCED DEGREES
Re: Michael Fumento's James Hansen's Hacks:

For all Michael Fumento's hype, his August 16 piece is not about global warming.

The NASA GISS temperature record he discusses is not global -- but national , which is what the N in NASA stands for -- and the correction to it arising from the bad data splice detected by the diligent McIntyre amounts to only a few hundredths of one degree.

The formerly hottest U.S. year, 1998 has gone from being 0.01 degrees warmer than 1934 to being 0.02 degrees cooler. but the rest of the numbers talk, even if Fumento's piece fails to cite the inconvenient fact that 1998 and 2005 remain the warmest years on record globally.

Readers can judge the old and the new data for themselves -- its posted side by side here -- better bring a magnifying glass.
-- Russell Seitz
Cambridge, Massachusetts

I am not a scientist. I read "James Hansen's Hacks" with great interest. I first heard about this on Rush Limbaugh maybe a week ago. I find this global warming stuff astounding.

This isn't the first time these people have been shown to be running around without their pants on. A few years ago they were doing the usual the end of the world is coming routine and at the time the inconvenient truth, and it was pretty awkward, was that the satellite data didn't show any global warming. Somehow this discrepancy was made to go away. I'm not exactly sure how this was done and I've never seen an explanation on how this fact was explained away. A couple years after that somebody was reviewing the data or the methodology for calculating Global Warming and noticed that the mid-ocean weather buoys' data showed the temperature of the oceans to be hotter than it actually is. At first glance, this would seem to be pretty inconvenient for the idea the Earth is melting and we're all doomed. But, I did see where this got explained away. It doesn't seem to really matter. I know it was explained away but I'm not sure just how it was explained away. No, it's not like a major truss fell off or anything. People can still cross the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.

These people seem to have better educations and are better paid than I am. The thing that strikes me the most about them is their narcissism and their self loathing. If you grow up in this country from the time you are very little and from then on you are indoctrinated that everything you have was stolen from someone else and the way you live your life is going to cause the destruction of the world, or at least the environment. The fact that you have means that other people don't and this makes you evil. This is instilled into children in our society.

Looking around then world in a casual non-systematic way it sure seems that most other societies around the world are older than ours and have had a longer time to make decisions and have outcomes. If you prefer thugs for leaders, socialism, or communism or that Allah commands everything in and about life you are much more likely to be poor, oppressed and downtrodden and your environment is much more likely to be fouled by the way you live your life.

Water covers 75 percent of the Earth. Of the remaining 25 percent, half of that is frozen. I strongly suspect that the Earth getting warmer is a good thing. So now it turns out that this heat wave of past decade or so is driven mostly by hot air. Somehow, and realize this is completely unscientific and completely self centered, I remember it being hotter when I was a kid. Speaking of when I was a kid, I wanted to go into space. I would like to go to Mars. I hear there's global warming on Mars. Maybe I should apply for a grant to study the effects of global warming on subterranean microbes in that big hole they found on Mars.

I don't think I'd like to go on the space shuttle, though. These global warming people should put their pants on, or at least their diapers.
-- Mark Murphy

Oh, we of little faith? Hey, the first NASA Mars probe? It failed. Billions were spent. But, as I understand it, one team designed part of the probe in English measurements, feet and inches. The other used metrics; can you say "typical bureaucracy"?

The NASA space program used chimpanzees in some flight experiments -- and later the Air Force has officially "retired" these chimps... at a cost of $37,000 for each chimp? The government not only funds NASA, of course, but also the Hubble telescope (which was initially screwed-up so badly by NASA's guys with the wrong optics, which then needed correcting "up there," right?) and a variety of other astronomy projects. Yet, like so many other space goodies, the comet Hyakytake was discovered by a Japanese amateur?

And, the infamous Hole-in-the-Ozone happened at the end of a long, dark winter (temperatures of Minus 80-C or lower); several happened a few years ago near the South Pole. Finally, after much looking, they found an Ozone hole up by the North Pole -- a reading by NASA on Jan. 20, 1991. There'd been no mentions of readings before or after that one date, and NASA was very, very careful in its wording -- the press-releases caused the scare, just as planned. Ironically, it just so happened to be during Congressional Budget time, when future space allocations are made. Now, NASA is not a "reliable source" because (like any governmental group or bureaucracy) it's only interested in those "facts" which justify more "research" and more taxpayer dollars, to insure their own jobs. So, they "needed" an Ozone hole -- and they looked-and-looked until they found one, even if it was only temporary (and filled itself in within hours). And, sure'nuff, Congress approved a budget...

And we also should remember that the Air Force and CIA denied the existence of UFOs -- and when President Jimmy Carter requested the NASA to make a "comprehensive" study (that word again) of UFO's, NASA uncharacteristically refused the presidential request, because, as I recall, the "scientific community" was convinced there wasn't any "cause." This, incidentally, the same Jimmy Carter who once thought the planet Venus was a UFO.

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