“These should not be so sacred and sacrosanct that we don’t ask the hard questions when our nation’s security is at risk,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said, referring to gun records, saying law enforcement officials should have the ability to access the records to track the weapons of potential terrorists.

http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/

In 2008, Democrats picked a senile old guy to run against their completely unqualified community organizer. Republican sheeple allowed this happen, being easily brainwashed by the left-wing media.

The 2012 race is starting out the same way, with Republicans seemingly determined to select a moderate candidate who can’t win. They wouldn’t want to offend Tina Fey after all.

I had a Palin 2012 sticker on my car before the 2008 election. I’d love to see a couple of tough Republican women on the ticket, since most of the male Republican leadership appears to be emasculated.

Another possibility is Paul Ryan, who is very articulate, smart – and appears to have an active supply of testosterone. And unlike the current occupant of the White House, he actually wants America to survive.

http://www.vxec.com/2011/05/paul-ryan-this-is-not-the-time-to-go-wobbly/

Freedom of information laws are being misused to harass scientists and should be re-examined by the government, according to the president of the Royal Society.

Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse told the Guardian that some climate scientists were being targeted by organised campaigns of requests for data and other research materials, aimed at intimidating them and slowing down research. He said the behaviour was turning freedom of information laws into a way to intimidate some scientists.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

It turns out that Katrina was the first hurricane!

Climate roulette

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

“It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

Dr. Kevin Trenberth

Bill McKibben, who wrote The (prescient) End of Nature in 1989 and originated 350.org, just wrote a nice piece about “A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!”

I recall when Katrina hit New Orleans, thinking this was just the beginning, that this was just the first (and certainly not the worst) of an endless array of climate calamities we would suffer through this century. When Pakistan was flooded last year, I recall hearing a speaker describe it as the worst flood we are ever likely to see, and I thought “hardly.” Our war on the climate has been waged since the dawn of the industrial revolution but now the climate is fighting back.

And it is climate roulette. All of us who rely on fossil fuels for energy and transportation are playing but (for now) not all of us are paying. In time we all will, but by then it could be too late to do anything about it.

http://blogs.redding.com/

Had this guy been born 400 years ago, he would have burned witches. Had he lived 100 years ago, he would have been one of Lenin’s useful idiots.

Reader Jim explains that the lack of hurricane strikes in the US is due to luck. This may be true, but one thing we know for sure is that the high hurricane count during 2005 was definitely due to global warming.

According to Nobel Prize winning molester Al Gore, there were four major hurricanes at the same time – including one so powerful it wiped Costa Rica and Panama off the map.

http://papundits.wordpress.com/

We conclude that most climate models mix heat too efficiently into the deep ocean and as a result underestimate the negative forcing by human-made aerosols.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.1140

Hansen’s climate forecasts have been an unmitigated disaster, but it isn’t his fault. It is the fault of the evil humans who not only are destroying the planet with CO2, but are also hiding the disaster behind their other pollution.

Evil, those humans are.

How many times in the last year has Romm written – “worst (flood/storm/tornado etc.) since (some year before the 1970-2000 warming)”

An intelligent person will take that information and recognize that climate is cyclical. A mental midget will take that some information and conclude that climate is linear or exponential.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwLrX1hu1ss]

Living life on the safe side of 350 ppm.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCuGqIhUaJE]

The Senate’s top watchdog on government waste, in a new report Thursday, said taxpayer money has gone to fund such programs as Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole, testing shrimp’s exercise ability on a treadmill and a laundry-folding robot, all funded by the National Science Foundation.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said he identified more than $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF, ranging from questionable studies to exorbitant operating costs, and in some cases duplication by the science agency of operations performed by other agencies.

At a time when the federal government is struggling with record deficits and bumping up against its borrowing limit, Mr. Coburn said the agency is a prime example of the kinds of spending taxpayers should no longer tolerate.

“There is little, if any, obvious scientific benefit to some NSF projects, such as a YouTube rap video, a review of event ticket prices on stubhub.com, a ‘robot hoedown and rodeo,’ or a virtual recreation of the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair,” Mr. Coburn said in a letter to taxpayers he wrote introducing the 73-page report, documented by more than 350 footnotes.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/