The Necropolitan Sentinel

Well, at least they admit they are only “script kiddies.” What a disgusting, appalling prank–there’s nothing funny about assassination jokes, no matter which party holds the White House or what mismanagement is taking place within it.

” . . . Now can we have our economy back, please?”

James Delingpole of The Telegraph lays it on the line:

There has been no global warming since 1998

The headline of this post really shouldn’t be controversial. It chimes perfectly with what Kevin “null hypothesis” Trenberth wrote in that notorious 2009 Climategate email to Michael Mann:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

And it’s what Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview when he said that there had been no “statistically significant” warming since 1995.

Why then am I mentioning it now? W-e-l-l, because just as ze war is to the Germans, Chappaquiddick is to the Kennedy family and that Portland masseuse incident is to Al Gore, so the recent lack of warming is to the, er, Warmists. They hate it. It’s an affront to everything they believe in. Damn it, if the world isn’t warming with the alacrity they’d prefer, how are they going to keep the funding gravy train going, and how are they going to persuade an increasingly sceptical populace that the “science” is “settled”, the debate over and the time for action is now? That’s why they can’t be reminded of the truth often enough. It’s like salting the slugs that are ruining your garden: necessary, but also kind of fun too.

Consider their latest desperate effort in fudge, denial, and duplicity. It concerns a new report which – if you believe the Guardian and Michael Mann – confirms that man-made global warming is even more man-made and more happening and more dangerous than at any time ever.

Michael E Mann, at Pennsylvania State University and not part of the research team, said the study was “a very solid, careful statistical analysis” which reinforces research showing “there is a clear impact of human activity on ongoing warming of our climate”. It demonstrated, Mann said, that “the claim that ‘global warming has stopped’ is simply false.”

Actually the paper Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 [PDF] by a team led by Robert Kaufmann at the Department of Geography at Boston University demonstrates no such thing. What it shows – yet again and in excelsis – is the chutzpah and threadbare desperation of the “scientists” involved in the Great Global Warming Boondoggle. Rather than admit that their Ponzi scheme is dead in the water, they try to dazzle us with new imaginative theories which prove that, even though they’re wrong they are in fact right.

No global warming since 1998? Simple. All you’ve got to do – as Kaufmann et al have done – is apply the Even Though We’re Wrong We’re Right Panacea Get-Out Formula. In this instance the ETWWWRPGOF (as it’s snappily known) involves Blaming The Chinese. Yep, it turns out all that pollution that Chinese are pumping into the air thanks to their unhealthy obsession with economic growth and giving better lives to their children is actually counteracting the effects of Man Made Global Warming.

“Results indicate that net anthropogenic forcing rises slower than previous decades because the cooling effects of sulfur emissions grow in tandem with the warming effects greenhouse gas concentrations. This slow-down, along with declining solar insolation and a change from El Nino to La Nina conditions, enables the model to simulate the lack of warming after 1998,” the team explains.

In other words Man Made Global Cooling is cancelling out Man Made Global Warming.

Judith Curry is unimpressed:

Their argument is totally unconvincing to me. However, the link between flat/cooling global temperature and increased coal burning in China is certainly an interesting argument from a political perspective. The scientific motivation for this article seems to be that that scientists understand the evolution of global temperature forcing and that the answer is forced variability (not natural internal variability), and this explanation of the recent lack of warming supports a similar argument for the cooling between 1940 and 1970. The political consequence of this article seems to be that the simplest solution to global warming is for the Chinese to burn more coal, which they intend to do anyways.

As is David Whitehouse at the GWPF:

Tweaking computer models like this proves nothing. The real test is in the real world data. The temperature hasn’t increased for over a decade. For there to be any faith in the underlying scientific assumptions the world has to start warming soon, at an enhanced rate to compensate for it being held back for a decade.

Despite what the authors of this paper state after their tinkering with an out-of-date climate computer model, there is as yet no convincing explanation for the global temperature standstill of the past decade.

As indeed might you and I be. For years the Warmists have been telling us that they’re so sure of their computer models that they know, they just know, that CO2 has a forcing effect on global temperatures and that combined with positive feedbacks this is going to cause catastrophic warming. And now they’re saying, without a blush, “Well all right, some of those feedbacks might actually be negative and, er, completely cancel out the terrifying thing we were telling you to worry about. But don’t stop worrying, for God’s sake. Whatever is happening is still worrying, very worrying. And if you give us a bit more time we’ll come up with a paper explaining just why it’s worrying.”

Read the whole thing, since he starts taking delicious shots at the IPCC right after the segment I quoted.

If you really want to be prepared for the next natural (or unnatural) disaster, start getting to know the people next door.

Because of his own experience in Katrina, Aldrich started thinking about how neighbors help one another during disasters. He decided to visit disaster sites around the world, looking for data.

Aldrich’s findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during — and recover after — a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful — in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example — government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.

When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren’t those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people — the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals. . . .

Governments and big nongovernmental organizations — which are keenly aware of the big picture — are often blind to neighborhood dynamics.

In Southeast Asia, Aldrich found that well-intentioned NGOs actually hurt the fishing communities they were trying to help. They saw the damage caused by the tsunami in fishing villages and started giving new boats to all the fishermen.

“Fishing is a very social activity. It is organized, really, not in a hierarchy but in a network,” Aldrich said. “So you have someone who drives the boat, the person who steers, you have two people fishing in the water, some person who carries the net and some person who goes — takes the fish to market. Once every person is given their own boat, you’ve gone from five people working together to each individual working by themselves.”

Fishermen who used to work together now became competitors. Trust broke down. Fights broke out.

“Some of the local activists I talked to called this ‘the second tsunami,’ ” Aldrich said.

The problem isn’t that experts are dumb. It’s that communities are not the sum of their roads, schools and malls. They are the sum of their relationships.

The Japanese government seems to get this. The government there actually funds block parties to bring communities together.

That might never happen in America, but Aldrich thinks each of us can do something on our own: Instead of practicing earthquake drills and building bunkers, we could reach out and make more friends among our co-workers and neighbors.

Or, we could do both.

Via Insty, who is very good about helping us figure out what we need to do to become more prepared.

I have to admit that I’m uncertain whether my balcony garden will ever save me enough money to be worth it. What it does do is make my household–and therefore my neighborhood–more resilient in the event of a longstanding food-supply disruption.

Every little bit helps.