May, 2015, Part 2, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and a Believer in Science: Forecast Model Fails

Every month we revisit the theme, “I am a global warming doubter and a believer in science.” The theme started when I got tired of people like Al Gore and others yelling and slandering anyone who dared to disagree with their view of global warming, since then rebranded as “climate change.” Yelling and demeaning people is no way to win them over to your view, which is what the Al Gores of the world are still doing.

Thus, we set off to explore ALL science, research, and realities relative to global warming, not just the handpicked science that global warming advocates cherry pick. What we have found through the years is that it is very realistic and in tune with the real world to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science.

Much science and research has been shown to debunk Al Gore’s way of thinking and slandering. And we have brought counter evidence to his view of the world every month for years. To access those previous posts, just enter the search term "I am a global warming doubter”in the search box above. 

Our intention is to start an adult, mature, science based conversation based on all available information. That has certainly not been the intention of Al Gore types. They have wanted to browbeat their views into disbelievers heads. And even if they are right about global warming, which we have proven they are quite possibly wrong about, they come up with no plans that would reunite the world around a solution. 

They only want the United States to curtail their carbon footprint, a reduction that would be dwarfed by the increasing carbon footprint of the rest of the world, especially China and India. All they would end up doing is briefly forestalling their end result while crippling the economic growth and vitality of the United States.

With that background, let’s look at what the global warming/climate change hysteria has brought us in the past month or so. Our first post this month can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/05/may-2015-i-am-global-warming-doubter.html

Since then, the following global warming myths have come to light:

1) Al Gore, Barack Obama, and other global warming alarmists are always telling us that almost all scientists agree that man made global warming is growing in intensity, that the “science is settled.” Many times in this blog we have shown that to be an outright lie and now we have another example of a scientist disagreeing with their assertion.

Dr. Phillip Lloyd is a South African based physicist and climate researcher. He conducted a study where he examined so-called ice core-based temperature data going back 8,000 years in an attempt to understand global temperature changes in the past century or so. His finding: global temperature changes over the past hundred years fall well within the natural variability of the past 8,000 years.

Dr. Lloyd does have some serious credibility going for him since he is a former member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), the main international body that has been pushing the man made global warming position for the past few decades. His findings are obviously a direct contradiction of that IPCC effort.

His findings include the calculation that the statistical standard deviation of Earth's temperatures over the past 8,000 years was about .98 degrees Celsius.That is higher than the lower .85 degrees that some climate scientists have estimated the world has warmed in the past hundred years: “This suggests that while some portion of the temperature change observed in the 20th century was probably caused by greenhouse gases, there is a strong likelihood that the major portion was due to natural variations,” Lloyd wrote in his study.

“Natural variations.” Not humanity’s burning of fossil fuels, not the use of coal, natural variations. Seems that Al Gore and others have either overlooked or decided to ignore this little piece of statistical reality. Natural variations. According to Dr. Judith Curry, a climate scientist and expert at Georgia Tech: “The magnitude of natural climate variability over the past 1000 years and even the past 100 years is hotly debated,” Curry added. “Personally, I think the role of natural climate variability has been substantially underestimated in our interpretation of recent climate change.”

This is not to say that man is not contributing to climate change, It does say that 1) the science is not settled, 2) global warming advocates continue to ignore science that is not compatible with their views, and 3) we are not going to have an adult conversation until ALL scientific data and realities are factored into to any future actions.

2) Let’s look at some more science and research that Al Gore types probably do not want us to see. A recent research paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that climate change models hyped by global warming/climate change advocates are infested with “flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis.” Furthermore, these assessment models: “can be misleading and are inappropriate as guides for policy,” argued economist Robert Pindyck. Nonetheless, the government has continued to use them to impose burdensome regulations that negatively affect the economy. 

These models forecast global weather patterns will become more extreme over time with global warming causing more hurricanes and droughts. But this analysis shows that extreme weather is not going to get worse because of global warming, meaning the move to curb global warming by punishing power plants is not going to solve a fictitious problem but severely increase energy costs and hurt economic growth.

These findings were summarized by economist Robert Murphy in an interview with the Daily Caller: “The estimates [from the climate models] keep bouncing around all over the place, and the estimates are driven by very controversial parameter choices, not objective assessments given by physicists and climatologists. In any event, the public should realize just how ‘unsettled’ the economic side of the carbon debate is.”

Now an economist is not trained to do climate science. But an economist is trained to build, use, and assess statistical models and this economic entity found those climate models, the models that global warming advocates base their hysteria on, to be faulty and near useless.

3) One big component of global warming advocates view of the world is that the ice caps are melting because of man made global warming and that eventually, if enough of the ice caps melt, there will be devastating flooding of coastal regions around the world. In fact, Al Gore predicted that there was a reasonably good chance that the entire North Pole ice cap could melt by the year 2014, another forecast that failed miserably.

Additionally, the UK’s Guardian newspaper recently reported that fifty scientists held a meeting in Tasmania to brainstorm ideas on how to better predict the size of the Antarctic ice cap. They held the meeting since there has been such a build up in the size of the ice cap, researchers cannot get close to the South Pole to do their own direct measurements. The Guardian reported that in 2014 ships “couldn’t get anywhere near” the Australian Antarctic Division’s research site on Antarctica. 

In addition, the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy got stuck in ice on Christmas Eve, 2013 on its way to show how global warming was impacting Antarctica. After being stuck on the ice for a week , an Australian icebreaker was sent to rescue them….and then it became temporarily stuck itself in the expanding Antarctic ice pack.

This past April, the Antarctic sea ice reached record levels for the month, 116,000 square miles higher than the previous record set in 2014.

So in summary, the one thing we definitely learned to today is the “science is NOT settled.” Whether it is a past member of the global warming center at the U.N. speaking out against the U.N.’s flawed position or economists debunking forecast models or the reality of growing ice caps that are at odds with the forecast models predictions, the science is not settled. And it is okay and actually quite prudent to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science….despite what Al Gore says.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Government Gone Wild, Part 7 - Government Spying Success Stories That Are Not Success Stories

This is the seventh in a series of “government gone wild” posts regarding the unprecedented spying on Americans by the Federal government that has come to light over the past few weeks. This effort has resulted in gross violations of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights and intrusion into the privacy of every American citizen.

This scandal has drawn realistic comparisons to the Big Brother entity in George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” which is not a good thing. Big Brother was the symbol of an all-encompassing dictatorial regime that squashed every citizens’ freedom. With recent disclosure that the Obama administration was using the assets and information of the IRS to destroy, harass, and hinder the First Amendment rights of those political opponents who dared to have a difference of opinion with his polices, this Orwell analogy takes on even greater validity.

Which gets us today’s two questions of discussion:

1. Given that this widespread snooping and invasion of privacy was immoral and unconstitutional, was it even effective?
2. What could would-be terrorists do to avoid this massive data snatch?

1) The website, Liberty Update did an article on June 11, 2013 that listed several ways that an American could minimize the intrusion and snooping by the government into one’s electronic communications:

• To keep one’s internet browsing history private, a person could go into private mode on their Web browsers, most of which have the ability to allow you to search privately, without cookies being used to track your movements; you could also use browser extensions like Ghostery, Abine’s Do Not Track and AVG’s Do Not Track that prevent “invisible” entities from tracking searches as well. You can hide your IP address at a higher level of security by hiding your computer’s IP address entirely using several commercially available services such as, Hot Spot Shield, which is a VPN (virtual private network) software, and the search engine StartPage. The website says you can go hard core with ‘Tor’ which is free software that enables not only browsing that is anonymous but it encrypts data transport and doesn’t reveal a user’s location or how long they were browsing.
• To keep one’s files secure, the website suggests not using cloud computing resources.
• To secure your mobile phone information from snooping you can use a technology such as TrustChip, which is placed into the micro SD slot of your mobile phone device for mobile phone activity encryption.
• According to the article, the Washington Post recently pointed to online telephone service Silent Circle, a Skype-like service, which has been proven to have end-to-end encryption of information without any backdoors for wiretapping.
• To avoid having you movements tracked by tracing your cell phone locations, simply leaving your cell phone home will disguise where you have physically been.

I am not going to execute any of these steps since I believe that as an American, I should not have to shield my electronic communications from the government. However, if this type of encryption and disguising information is so readily available online, do we really think that potential terrorists are not already taking these steps to hide their intentions from the NSA?

2) On June 14, 2013, the Associated Press ran a similar article that showed the various ways to hide your electronic activities from the government:

• For emails, the article recommends using PGP, which is an abbreviation for “Pretty Good Privacy.” PGP is so good that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, stating that the software was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.
• The article also recommends using TOR or leaving your cell phone behind to disguise activities.
• Another suggestion is to not use credit cards, paying with cash instead, since the cards’ usage is easily tracked and various news stories have asserted that the Federal government has already been tracking credit card purchase patterns.
• The AP writers suggest not storing your computer data within the United States since it might be subjected to U.S. laws and warrants, with Iceland being a suggested place to park you information.

Again, if the Associated Press knows about these methods to concealing one’s electronic activity, is the Federal government so naïve to think potential terrorists do not also know about these safeguards? And given that many of these terrorists are sponsored by rogue nations, e.g. Iran, these nations might have provided even more sophisticated methods to hiding one’s electronic tracks.

3) According to an extensive investigative article in the U.K. Guardian newspaper on June 12, 2013, the Obama administration’s assertion that the NSA snooping program called PRISM was a major reason why authorities were led to the arrest and convict would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks India.

Two Washington politicians, Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, and her equivalent in the House, Mike Rogers, have been the Washington political class cheerleaders of this premise. According to the article Rogers made his assertion of how vlauable he NSA PRISM data spying program was on an ABC news show this past weekend and that other administration officials have been planting the same seed behind closed doors.

However, the Guardian’s investigation uncovered the exact opposite, i.e. the PRISM contribution to the arrests and convictions were a minor part, if that, in the whole operation to prevent terrorism. Their extensive work can be accessed at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/nsa-surveillance-data-terror-attack?guni=Network+front%3Anetwork-front+aux-1+top-stories-1%3ABento+box+8+col%3APosition1%3Asublinks


As usual, the mainstream press in the U.S. is not following up on this story and doing the good, solid journalism work that the Guardian and other british newspapers have been doing int his area. Rather than review their extensive work here. I will pull out a few conclusions and quotes from the Guardian and allow you peruse the entire article on your own:

• “But court documents lodged in the US and UK, as well as interviews with involved parties, suggest that data-mining through Prism and other NSA programs played a relatively minor role in the interception of the two plots.”
• “Conventional surveillance techniques, in both cases including old-fashioned tip-offs from intelligence services in Britain, appear to have initiated the investigations.“
• “But the lawyer said he was skeptical that mass data sweeps could explain what led law enforcement to Zazi.”
• "The government says that it does not monitor content of these communications in its data collection. So I find it hard to believe that this would have uncovered Zazi's contacts with a known terrorist in Pakistan," Dowling said.
• ‘An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. "That's nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That's not the way it happened at all," he said.'
• “The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.”
• “Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA's data sweeps behind his arrest.”

You get the idea, and you can get the full details at the site listed above. If you believe the Guardian’s investigation, the NSA snooping had little to do with serving justice in these two cases, it was basically traditional, street level, intelligence gathering, informant creating work that broke these two cases, not massive anonymous NSA data sweeps. If these are the BEST examples that this administration can come up with to justify the destruction of the Fourth Amendment, then I would say they have a very weak case.

4) And finally ask yourself this: if this program is so good, how come it did not detect the two young Chechnyans that blew up the finish line at the Boston Marathon, even though foreign intelligence services had already told the U.S. intelligence community to be on the lookout for them?

If this program is so good, how come it did not identify the Fort Hood shooter ahead of time, before he killed about a dozen soldiers and citizens and wounded dozens of others, even though this terrorist was in electronic contact with a known terrorist leader in Yemen?

If this program is so good, how come it did not prevent David Headley and his cohorts from pulling off the massive terror attack in Mumbai? Why claim success with him, like the administration is doing, when success did not result in the loss of life and destruction of property in the Mumbai attacks?

I keep going back to the quote we showed in this series from a former head of the Israeli intelligence service. He said in the war on terror, you can win all the battles and still lose the war. If we allow these types of government electronic communications intrusions and the destruction of our privacy to continue, we will still lose the war since we ourselves would have destroyed our freedom and liberty from within, even if the supposed outcome of the Big Brother snooping was effective, which apparently it is not.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w