Somebody Had to Say It

By J. P. Travis

It’s easy, of course, to be right when documented facts are readily available and you do your homework and the subject is mundane—easy for everyone except Jim Acosta, that is—but sometimes documentation is sparse and the subject is abstruse and arriving at the truth requires reasoned application of a valid worldview. Notice the word “valid”—either your paradigm works or it does not, as Robert M. Pirsig would say. This book comprises the opinion columns of J.P. Travis as posted on the website JPAttitude.com from the first one on February 4, 2007, to the last one on March 22, 2016—just over nine years of “interesting times” straight out of a Chinese curse (otherwise known as the Obama candidacy and presidency). Here in the book these opinion columns are arranged into chapters based on subject matter and each chapter is introduced by J.P. himself with background, explanations, and assorted inside dope.

The twenty-two chapter titles: Global Warming, Education, Evolution, War on terror, Judicial system, Hollywood, Media bias, Obama, Healthcare, Democrats, RINOs, Democracy in the United States, Political philosophy, Immigration, Race, Spirituality, Numbers, Leftwing science, Family & personal, Website business, Miscellaneous conjecture, Predictions.

So why publish a book of opinion columns that are already available on the Internet? Some might call such an effort quixotic (and those are the polite people). But there is a reason: this book will serve as a reminder of what, sadly, is already a bygone era, before censorship of the Internet had largely silenced the conservative side of the political debate. This is what the Internet used to look like... only a decade ago. This is what it should be again if we value individual liberty. This is one of the voices that Big Tech censorship efforts eventually drove away, to be replaced by the monolithic, shrill, supercilious, uneducated, morally-blind, propaganda screeches of the mainstream Fake News media—in other words, before we took an ominous step backward, returning to the way it was before the Internet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Travelyn Publishing
• Release date: Jan 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463041192

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SOMEBODY Had To Say It

By J. P. Travis

Published by Travelyn Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright 2019 J. P. Travis and Travelyn Publishing

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Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1—Global Warming

Chapter 2—Education

Chapter 3—Evolution

Chapter 4—War on terror

Chapter 5—Judicial system

Chapter 6—Hollywood

Chapter 7—Media bias

Chapter 8—Obama

Chapter 9—Healthcare

Chapter 10—Democrats

Chapter 11—RINOs

Chapter 12—Democracy in the United States

Chapter 13—Political philosophy

Chapter 14—Immigration

Chapter 15—Race

Chapter 16—Spirituality

Chapter 17—Numbers

Chapter 18—Leftwing science

Chapter 19—Family & personal

Chapter 20—Website business

Chapter 21—Miscellaneous conjecture

Chapter 22—Predictions

About the author

Preface

So why publish a book of opinion columns that are already available on the Internet? Some might call such an effort quixotic (and those are the polite people). Even to me it sounds at least a little bit crazy and I’m the one doing it.

Well, partly it’s because of the unique, exciting, even somewhat revolutionary political period in which these columns were written and from which they draw the objects of their analysis; but also, I confess, it’s because I am so damn proud of them. Call me conceited but I think the writing, political analysis, and cultural awareness of the columns I wrote for JPAttitude.com, as a rank amateur in the realm of journalism and political opinion columns, are consistently a step above what you find anywhere else: both in quality and degree of accuracy.

(Which probably isn’t saying much in an era when The New York Times considers Paul Krugman a valuable columnist—obviously, standards in the field of journalism have either slipped or never existed.)

These columns are good enough, in fact, that various people over the years have encouraged me to gather them together and publish them in book form so they can review and refer to them more easily; which is flattering and, doggone it, I’m a sucker for flattery. (By the way, thank you, Mom, Dad, for the suggestion.)

I’m not delusional in my conceit. While JPAttitude.com was never affiliated with any group and never received the tiniest smidgeon of promotion or advertising, more and more people ended up visiting the website. Eventually the site was getting more than two million hits a month. That must signify something. Okay, it’s not Drudge Report numbers but it’s more than peanuts and at the very least it was independent affirmation of the website’s quality.

Why are these opinion columns worth reading? Well, because, in addition to the occasional crumbs of beautiful prose (he said modestly), I’m uncannily right. By which is meant always right; even though I take some wild detours into areas most columnists wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Darwinism doesn’t add up? I’m all over it (Chapter 3). Impeach Obama? Shortly after he took office, I pointed out why we could not do that (Chapter 8)—six years later, with impeachment warranted and under discussion, people were repeating what I wrote (without attribution of course, the bastards... or maybe they never heard of me). Something seems wrong to you about the electoral process in the United States? I analyzed the failure of U.S. democracy for you in a three-part series (Chapter 12). Later, Barack Obama was followed by Donald Trump as president and who can argue with me after that? Clearly, something is wrong with the system.

There are 276 columns reproduced in this book, posted online over the course of nine years, and there is not one single thing I ever said that was wrong, that I regret, that I was forced to correct, or that subsequent events demonstrated was faulty in either analysis or viewpoint. Think about that—276 opinion columns over 9 years comprising more than 340,000 words and not one thing wrong. It’s godlike—or Rush Limbaugh-like which, if you’re a conservative who remembers when the media spoke with a monolithically liberal voice, is pretty much the same thing.

It’s easy, of course, to be right when documented facts are readily available and you do your homework and the subject is mundane—easy for everyone except Jim Acosta, that is—but sometimes documentation is sparse and the subject is abstruse and arriving at the truth requires reasoned application of a valid worldview. Notice the word valid—either your paradigm works or it does not, as Robert M. Pirsig would say. Once you’ve got a paradigm that works in the real world—and many people spend their whole lives trying to reach that elusive goal—you can reason out the truth and sometimes even predict the future. That’s the final chapter in this book, Chapter 22, Predictions. There’s only three columns comprising about half-a-dozen predictions but, hey, they were spot-on. If I felt like I was supposed to be in the prediction business, there would have been more of them... but I’ve read the Bible, I know how God feels about people who set themselves up as prophets without His permission.

These columns were naturally posted on JPAttitude in chronological order, from the first one on February 4, 2007, to the last one on March 22, 2016—just over nine years of interesting times straight out of a Chinese curse (otherwise known as the Obama candidacy and presidency)—but here in the book they are clumped into categories and each clump safely nestled into its appropriately-labeled chapter based on subject matter. And each chapter-clump is introduced by me with background, explanations, and assorted inside dope.

By the way, here’s the insidest dope of all: the reason I quit writing these columns in spite of the growing readership is because I grew tired of the constant attempts by the left to censor and silence me. At the end, I was spending as much time battling censorship efforts as I was actually maintaining the website. For a one-man website, it was too much. I don’t know what the answer is for this problem. I wish it was as easy as praying that the wealthy entrepreneurs of Big Tech would acquire a modicum of wisdom—yes, I’ve actually prayed that prayer—but that doesn’t seem to be happening. If anything, judging by their appearances before Congress, they get stupider all the time. Since I stopped writing columns, the problem has gotten even worse. Now (2018), they are even canceling the Facebook pages and YouTube channels of sitting Republican congressmen! Apparently, these little perverts in Silicon Valley do not think elected Republicans should be allowed to communicate with the electorate! Maybe you never thought you would see such a thing in America but that’s why Chapter 12 exists. Go read it. There is a problem with the democratic process in this country and the situation is deteriorating.

(And there won’t be any solution for this problem coming from Congress. I write this the very day after Google’s CEO was called before the House Judiciary Committee to testify for the first time. Every time I think our sitting congresscritters cannot possibly get any dumber, they surprise me as they did yesterday. The leading Democrat on the committee announced preemptively it was cool with him if Google was censoring conservatives and the Republicans on the committee kept asking whether Google was tracking the location of their iPhones. Sigh. It was like watching monkeys interview a banana.)

Comments submitted to the website are not included here in the book—to see what kind of response a column elicited, you’ll have to visit JPAttitude.com online. Yes, it’s still there and always will be as long as I live (or until Big Tech vanishes it) because I’m always pondering whether to become an active pundit again. Maybe... if I regain my hope for the future... and if I can figure out how to circumvent Big Tech’s persistent, dastardly, undemocratic, tyrannical, dunder-headed, censorship efforts. (Seriously, do they really think that’s good for business? You couldn’t get me on Twitter right now with a million-dollar bribe and if I venture into Facebook to look at photographs of grandchildren I feel like I need a shower afterward.)

Most of the illustrations that accompanied the columns on the website are not included here in the book because I simply could not imagine trying to obtain copyright permission for all of them, but there are fifty nine illustrations which I created myself and either considered necessary for the understanding of the column—things like charts for example—or I thought were especially funny.

The reader will notice that a number of columns end with the words, "That’s... today’s dose of common sense. Those are columns I wrote and recorded for the radio, which I eventually titled J.P.’s Moments of Common Sense. The first few don’t have either the title or the clever final line—I experimented for a while, trying to come up with something memorable like Paul Harvey’s And now you know the rest of the story!"—but, whatever tag line they have, the radio spots all have an accompanying sound file on the website if you would rather listen to me stutter and fail to enunciate my way through a column instead of just reading the doggone thing like an educated literate person. (Trust me, I’m a better writer than speaker.) Even some of the early columns, long before Lady Jay invited me on her radio show in Reno, have sound files which I recorded retroactively when I started to get a big head about my radio talent.

If you enjoy entertaining political diatribes, maddening philosophical fulminations, and borderline-bizarre scientific arguments—all of them well-researched and sprinkled with hefty doses of passion and humor—you’ve got the perfect book in your hands. You’ll laugh, you’ll scream, you might even consider writing your congressman about banning people like me from the Internet...

...but no, I don’t really think you will do that because in the end you will enjoy yourself too much. And maybe, even if you disagree with me politically and philosophically, you’ll decide, Hey, this sort of shit is exactly what the Internet was designed for!

And right after you decide that, I hope you sit down and write letters to Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., and also to whatever retarded reprobate is your current congresscritter, demanding they stop Big Tech’s evil, ill-considered, self-destructive censorship—it’s bad for them, it’s bad for the Internet, it’s bad for the nation, it’s bad for the world, it’s bad for the democratic process which protects mankind from tyranny. It’s just simply bad.

J.P. Travis—December 2018

Chapter 1–Global Warming

Very first JPAttitude.com column: The IPCC and global warming—February 4, 2007

Copenhagen pigeon drop—December 16, 2009

Copenhagen redux—December 19, 2009

Global warming thought experiment—February 22, 2010

Polar bear attack—October 11, 2010

Another crack-up—November 5, 2011

This really is Penn State—November 23, 2011

Spring global warming prayer: No más, Lord, no más—March 20, 2013

John Kerry and Global Warming consensus—February 22, 2014

The primary instigation for my starting a website was the Global Warming scam—21st-century-humanity’s version of Piltdown Man—so you would think columns about climate would end up dominating the subject matter at JPAttitude.com, but not so. When I was done designing the website and pondering the various things I wanted to write about, Global Warming was merely one of twenty issues important enough to have their own separate heading. And, as it turned out, one of the least often addressed: only nine times in nine years. For anyone bad with numbers—that would be you, liberals—that’s an average of only once a year.

What can I say? I'm a busy guy with lots of important shit to talk about. Check out Chapter 8—the Obama chapter. I wrote about that jackass a lot: forty times altogether.

Nevertheless, the very first column on the website was about Global Warming so it’s appropriate to start this book there. As I re-read it years later, it doesn’t seem like Pulitzer-level stuff but keep in mind I had to research the subject, figure out how to design, format, and upload a new website using nothing but HTML, introduce the new website, and then opine elegantly upon the subject, all at the same time; while addressing myself in an appropriately friendly and appealing manner to my various and sundry readers... both of them.

The next two Global Warming columns, written more than two years later—that’s how long it took for me to return to the subject—show a little more flair. I knew what I was doing by then. In fact, Copenhagen pigeon drop was my first hit. It was very exciting to see the giant jump in visitors.

About a year later, October 11, 2010, I wrote a column titled Polar bear attack that was my first real breakthrough as a website creator. Thousands of people read it, thousands of people sent the link to their friends to read, and thousands of people are still reading it seven years later. Maybe it was just the title that attracted them, maybe it was the cute picture of a polar bear at the top, I don’t know—but I prefer thinking it was the great writing and wise analysis.

This chapter, if nothing else, showcases my development as a writer and website owner. It also skewers the Global Warmist cult pretty good. Which reminds me: notice how I capitalize those two words, Global Warming. That’s my subtle way of reminding people this is a religious cult more than a legitimate scientific theory.

Very first JPAttitude.com column: The IPCC and global warming—February 4, 2007

The creation of this website was inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policy-Makers, released two days ago in Paris, France. Anybody with a dash of common sense could see this release was not about science. It was pure propaganda and made me angry.

First, the phony dog-and-pony show in Paris made me angry. Then, learning that the phony dog-and-pony show cost billions of dollars to produce made me angrier. And finally, hearing that these faceless U.N. bureaucrats were going to hold back the actual science behind the dog-and-pony show so nobody could see the man behind the curtain… well, that was the final straw.

It’s time to fight back. Reason has been cast aside on issue after issue, with the issue of Global Warming (I distinguish global warming, the legitimate scientific subject, from Global Warming the religion and scam) being just one example. Our usual sources of information have been co-opted by billionaire speculators, silver-spoon heirs to newspapers, and journalists who are the product of a dysfunctional educational system—which is simply a nice way of saying they can’t understand the stories they are trying to report.

It’s difficult finding the lonely voices of reason on many topics in today’s world so my way of fighting back is to gather all those lonely voices in one website. If The New York Times refuses to report a story that casts doubt on the religion of Global Warming, well, maybe some smaller newspaper will, or maybe an Internet site will.

The intent of this website is to gather such sources in one place so that people looking for ammunition to fight back can find it.

By way of example, here are a few facts about our climate that you didn’t hear in Paris, in spite of the 500 scientists flown in for the ceremony.

1) There is no indisputable evidence that our planet is warming beyond normal variations, let alone that it is warming because of man-made carbon release.

2) Our whole solar system shows signs of being in the midst of climate change, which should lead to the reasonable thought that the change is being caused by the sun.

3) Building on number 2 above, there is an almost perfect correlation between solar activity and global temperatures.

4) Scientists who are skeptical about the Global Warming show are systematically attacked, censored, and intimidated. Does that sound like science?

5) Carbon and warmth are both net benefits to life, allowing increased food production, easier survival, and lower energy use by humans.

6) Global Warming science is now a multi-billion dollar industry annually, with all of the attendant manifestations of greed, dishonesty, and bribery that this much government money will naturally produce.

7) The whole basis of the Global Warming scam is computer modeling and anecdotal evidence from biologists in isolated disciplines.

All of these facts are supported by links—collated, prioritized, and listed—on this brand new website’s Global Warming page, just one of many categories of information under construction.

(If you’re a Global Warming true-believer and you’re reading this and rolling your eyes, ask yourself one simple question: why was a scientific report released with a ceremony but no science?)

Copenhagen pigeon drop—December 16, 2009

The pigeon drop is a scam in which two confidence men—the catch and the accomplice—persuade a victim—the pigeon—to believe they found some money in a bag and the three of them can split it and keep it. With disarmingly rational arguments they convince the victim that everybody should contribute money from their own pocket as collateral until they can spend their newfound treasure.

Then they give the victim the bag of money to hold—making him feel secure—and leave. Eventually the victim gets curious, peeks into the bag, and discovers nothing but newspaper scraps, whereupon the realization finally dawns that he has been fleeced by con men.

You are the pigeon in this story so pay attention.

Almost three years ago I started this website because I was angered by the lies and shenanigans of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). My first column, on February 4, 2007, was about the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report which was obviously—to me anyway—dishonest political propaganda masquerading as science.

In the years since then I have never written on the subject again, which seems kind of odd even to me since it was the website’s instigating issue. There are two reasons I haven’t written another column about Global Warming:

Number one, everything I said three years ago has been proven correct and I thought maybe I could be the Rocky Marciano of climate change, retiring undefeated.

Seriously, there isn’t much about this subject that’s new, and there isn’t much that doesn’t sound elementary and obvious. How many ways are there to say, The climate isn’t getting warmer, if it was that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad or abnormal thing, carbon has very little to do with it anyway, and oh by the way the Global Warming scientists are lying through their teeth? If you honestly study the subject with an open mind—and have an IQ above 50—you reach the inevitable conclusion that Global Warming is a giant scam initiated and promulgated by people with political, not scientific, agendas.

Number two, there are people tackling the issue every day who are in better positions to address the issue than me. First on that list is Steve McIntyre with his Climate Audit website. If there was any justice in the world, or any common sense on the Nobel Prize Committees, it would be Steve McIntyre who owns a Nobel medal, not Al Moron Gore. The world owes Mr. McIntyre a great debt because the Global Warming scam was well on its way to fruition when this polite retired mathematician said, Hold on a second, something about this doesn’t make sense, and started a website where people could discuss climate statistics. Climate Audit has repeatedly exposed the Global Warming crowd and much of that exposure has revealed fraud and/or incompetence.

(So which is it, fraud or incompetence? You be the judge. Last year, James St. James the Muzzled Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said it was a mistake that Siberia’s temperatures for September were entered into the NASA database as the temperatures for October. Siberia comprises the largest land area in the database, and September’s temperatures are much warmer than October’s, and the mistake—like all of Hansen’s mistakes—warped the planet’s apparent climate toward the warm side. Internet sleuths like McIntyre found the error and forced NASA to make corrections. Is it reasonable to assume that Hansen, a man whose professional career revolves around temperature data, would fail to notice that October’s numbers were exactly the same as September’s?)

On JPAttitude’s Global warming page you can find a list of other websites like McIntyre’s plus my own collection of links to various articles, papers, and resources. But if all that seems too much, I beg you to look at just one thing, this series of graphs of temperatures from ice cores:

Please, look at them. It won’t take more than a minute and this is the easiest way to get a feel for the climate issue. I don’t think anybody can look at these graphs (which plot raw unadjusted temperature data, not the massaged and corrected crap used by Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, and the rest of the IPCC clique) without realizing that Global Warming is no threat to the planet. On the contrary, you will probably come away worried about global cooling—a much more rational worry if you lean toward Chicken Little millennium-scale doomsday scenarios as a hobby.

Hey, to each his own.

Four weeks ago, computer hackers posted on the Internet 60 megabytes of emails and 100 megabytes of other information from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), the primary repository for actual temperature readings in the world. The emails reveal fraud in temperature records, attempts to hide cooling trends, censorship of papers which contradict Global Warming theory, and collusion with other climate centers around the world to fudge the data and control the IPCC. Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has been forced to step down while East Anglia investigates, Michael Mann is being investigated at Penn State, and the scandal has spread to climate centers around the world. Even NASA is under fire.

To top it off, we also learned that the CRU threw away a century and half of actual temperature data, leaving us with only their corrected temperatures. Gee, that’s not suspicious, is it?

This worldwide scandal—predictably named Climategate (what else?)—thoroughly indicts the Global Warming theory.

I’m curious: have you even heard about Climategate? It’s a huge story, bigger than Tiger Woods’ infidelity, but if you rely upon the American mainstream media for information you know nothing about it because the Big 3 television networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—as well as CNN and the big newspapers like the New York Times, refuse to cover it. Absolutely refuse. They don’t want you to know about Climategate because their political agenda is sympathetic to the Global Warming agenda, and you—you, the taxpayer of any industrialized first-world western nation—are the pigeon in the gargantuan con being perpetrated this week in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Ah yes, Copenhagen...

Copenhagen is where the 15th United Nations Climate Conference has been underway since last Monday. Over 15,000 participants from almost 200 countries have flown into Denmark—many of them on private jets—to enjoy free hookers and discuss reducing yours and my carbon footprint.

(Personally, I don’t have a carbon footprint unless I step in dog poop accidentally, and I wrote a strongly-worded letter to that effect and mailed it to Denmark, but so far no response. Hopefully I didn’t offend anybody. Ever since Hamlet the Danes have been ultra-sensitive to comments about stuff that smells.)

The participants in Copenhagen and Global Warming cultists worldwide are making a concerted effort to pretend that Climategate doesn’t matter. It’s downright creepy to watch, sort of like watching Stepford wives tell you how happy they are.

Speaking for the White House, climate czar Carol Browner said, I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.

2,500 scientists? She means the 2,500 scientists who, according to legend, were signatories to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Not to confuse our great climate czar with facts, but only 51 actually signed the stupid thing, many of the scientists counted as part of the 2,500 never supported the report’s overall conclusions in the first place, and some of them have completely reversed course since 2007, gone over to the Dark Side, and are now Global Warming skeptics.

And oh, by the way Ms. Browner, I can show you 31,000 scientists who adamantly deny that Global Warming is valid science, and over 700 skeptics actively involved in climate-related fields. But who’s counting?

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, I think scientists are clear on the science. I think many on Capitol Hill are clear on the science. I think that this notion that there is some debate on the science is kind of silly.

Silly? Since when is debate on any scientific theory silly? But hey, as long as the geniuses on Capitol Hill are clear on the science, what else matters, right?

The head of the IPCC itself, Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, said The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report.

An author or two? Are you kidding? The CRU emails reveal an international conspiracy and the conspirators are the very men who wrote the IPCC report! For God’s sake, how dare this two-bit U.N bureaucrat use the word inclusive when the emails show the fraudsters working to ostracize and marginalize any scientist who dared to express skepticism.

(I hate to be mean, but doggone it I have a serious question: is Pachauri the Geiko caveman?)

Boy genius Al Gore, being a former senator, has no formal allegiance to the truth, so he waded right into the fray with blatant lies. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus, he said in an interview with Slate.

Never mind that many of the emails are specifically about the lack of consensus, and the conspirators attempts to hide that lack of consensus. Never mind that. His most blatant lie is that the most recent email is ten years old. The most recent email was sent November 12th.

Gee, wouldn’t you think the inventor of the Internet would realize that emails have dates on them? So lying about how old they are is futile?

Ed Begley, Jr., possibly the only human in the world who can make Al Gore look smart, obviously knew what the damage control talking points were. You can watch him on Fox News screeching over and over—eight times, actually—that peer reviewed papers are all that matters!

Okay, Ed, calm down, grab a breath, and listen: the Climategate emails show the Global Warming conspirators preventing skeptical papers from being published, preventing skeptical papers from being included in the IPCC report, threatening publications with boycott if they published skeptical papers, and then pressuring publications which published skeptical papers anyway to fire their editors. So your hissy fit about peer reviewed papers is, well, stupid.

By the way, in spite of the cacophony of voices hysterically claiming otherwise, there are plenty of peer-reviewed papers which call into question the theory of Global Warming. I already have six of them listed on my GW webpage and that was only the ones I could understand. And I just started the list five minutes ago.

Here’s what they want to do in Copenhagen this week. They want to lower your standard of living which will force your carbon emissions to decrease. They will do this by taxing the living shit out of any person, company, or industry that uses carbon in any way, shape, or form. This won’t make a gnat’s ass worth of difference to the climate (they freely admit this) but it will require unprecedented and rigorous control of your life—something socialists and communists lust after like normal men lust after Halle Berry—and it will result in truly massive transfers of wealth to shadowy carbon trading markets.

Liberals like Obama and Global Warming scientists like James Hansen are playing the catch role in this con game. The lures they dangle are green jobs and a healthier fossil-fuel-free economy and a cleaner environment somewhere down the line… and the polar bears won’t drown. That’s the bag of money they found, and just like any good con man playing the accomplice in a pigeon drop, the United Nations is pretending to offer expert advice, telling you the bag of money is yours to spend if your national leaders sign a global climate treaty. That’s all. After that everybody is supposed to sit back and wait the necessary amount of time.

All they need is a little collateral from everybody—mostly from the United States, of course, the U.S. being the primary pigeon in this con game—to make sure everybody stays honest. That’s the Cap ‘n’ Tax that Obama and the Democrats want to impose. Much of that money they will simply spend, because that’s what politicians do, but much of it will be transferred into the afore-mentioned shadowy Bizarro-World carbon trading markets where the switch will take place.

Did I mention that part? There’s always a switch in a pigeon drop. That’s how the pigeon ends up holding a bag with no money in it. Duh.

Oh, they’ll make you feel good about the whole thing. After all, New York is the investment trading capital of the world, so most of the carbon trading will be right here within your reach, where you can see it and touch it. You’ll feel like you are the one holding the bag of collateral, so you’ll feel secure.

Remember, that’s part of the con. Let the pigeon hold the bag.

Twenty or thirty years down the road, when you get curious, when you finally take a peek into the bag of goodies you were promised, after we’ve dumped a few trillion dollars of collateral into this con game, I can promise you without a shred of doubt what you will find in the bag you’ve been holding with eager anticipation.

Nothing but newspaper clippings.

Copenhagen redux—December 19, 2009

As the U.N.’s climate conference stumbles to its ignoble end with world leaders scrambling to put a happy face on failure and the world’s climate good-doobies saying goodbye to their favorite hookers and boarding their private jets, I have three lingering thoughts.

1: Climategate is not going away

The participants in Denmark did their best to downplay and ignore the scandal at East Anglia, but as the conference progressed the scandal grew and spread around the world.

Wednesday evening, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) announced that British climatologists probably tampered with Russian climate data to produce the report they submitted to the Copenhagen conference. According to the Russians, the Brits used a pick ‘n’ choose method when it came to Russian temperatures, picking the ones that showed warmer temps and choosing to ignore the ones that did not.

The result was to overestimate warming in Russia by up to 0.64C between the 1870s and 1990s.

If you remember my column from Wednesday, I mentioned that NASA’s James Hansen was also caught screwing up Russian temperature data last year to manufacture apparent warming. As the IEA points out (and as I pointed out Wednesday), since Russia is the world’s largest country, any shenanigans played out with Russian temperature data will have an outsize impact on global climate statistics.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research—New Zealand’s version of the East Anglia CRU—has also been caught red-handed altering temperature data to show warming which raw temperature data does not show. Since water is in their name, I’m guessing they measure water temperatures in the Pacific, which means the Global Warming crowd has been caught manipulating temperature data for the world’s largest country and for the world’s largest ocean.

Give them credit for concentrating their skullduggery where it will have the most effect.

In the U.S. the NASA climate complex is under attack for not sharing information. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), where Hansen works, has refused for two years to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the data upon which it bases its Global Warming claims, and in the wake of Climategate congress has taken notice and wants answers. Republicans are demanding an investigation into Climategate and also sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson telling her to withdraw any rules relating to climate until the science can be substantiated.

One of the names that showed up in the Climategate emails about manipulating data was Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). So David Harsanyi, a columnist, promptly filed a FOIA request for all of Trenberth’s emails. The NCAR’s attorney responded that NCAR is not a federal agency and therefore doesn’t honor FOIA requests.

Trenberth was the lead author of the U.N.’s 1995, 2001, and 2007 climate assessments, and NCAR gets 95% of its funding from the federal government, but they feel no moral obligation to share information with the public. How does that make you feel as a taxpayer?

And why are all these Global Warming scientists so damned secretive and sneaky?

2: Democrats have no respect for the Constitution

President Obama sent Hillary Clinton to Copenhagen on Wednesday to promise $100 billion for poor countries to deal with Global Warming. Obama followed that up by reiterating the pledge yesterday. It’s unclear how much of that is supposed to come from the United States, but what should be clear to a man who taught constitutional law is that he has no authority to allocate one dime of our money.

This is not Venezuela or Zimbabwe—yet—and he did not win an election to be dictator-for-life. The president of the United States has no right to make treaties or spend money that has not been specifically allocated by congress.

Congress controls the national wallet and congress ratifies the treaties. He can look it up… but why a man who taught constitutional law would need to look up something so basic is a mystery.

This isn’t the only violation of constitutional law by Obama and the Democrats. It’s scary the way politicians in Washington are ignoring the law and doing whatever they want. How many czars does the White House have working for it now? These so-called czars are, in practical terms, miniature dictators because they bypass the constitutional advice and consent authority of the senate and therefore answer to nobody but the president.

In other words, they represent exactly the kind of abuse of executive power that the founders wrote the advice and consent rules to prevent.

The only strident voice on the floor of the senate objecting to this usurpation of power by the president has been Democrat Senator Robert Byrd. Trouble is, Byrd is so damn old he gets strident just trying to empty his bladder so nobody listening to him speechify can be sure whether he’s serious about the Constitution or just passing a stone.

Meanwhile, on the budget front, you know how congress always has to pass emergency legislation to prevent the government from shutting down because they’ve butted up against the debt limit? This year they didn’t pass it in time so the federal government went over the debt limit. No big deal, I guess. Nothing shut down. The government kept spending money and doing business as normal.

Makes you wonder why they were always in such a hurry to raise the debt limit, when ignoring it seems so much easier.

The worst end-around of the Constitution is the EPA’s decision this week to declare greenhouse gases a danger to human health, giving unelected bureaucrats at the EPA, who are answerable to nobody, the power to regulate everything that emits carbon dioxide. Naturally, they made this decision in the middle of the Copenhagen conference, proving that it was all about science, not politics... yes, that was sarcasm.

In case you skipped science class, happen to be a liberal, or are otherwise handicapped by ignorance of natural law, you emit carbon dioxide. So do your children and your grandchildren, which means your whole family is a danger to human health according to the EPA. As is your car, your house, your dryer, your snowblower, and your dog. As of Monday, thanks to the Obama Administration, your entire existence is susceptible to being micromanaged by the same kind of people who wait on you at the DMV.

It’s frightening, but these people just don’t take the Constitution seriously anymore.

3: Al Gore is still hard selling Climate Doomsday

Al Gore contributed to the climate conference by trumpeting a brand new report that shows the Arctic’s ice melting faster than expected. Funny how they had reports all set to be released during the conference, eh? One would almost think they were used-car salesmen the way they invent, gyrate, and hype to make us buy what they’re selling.

Anyway, in Gore’s confused mind he somehow leapt to the conclusion that melting Arctic ice somehow raises sea levels, which it does not. (This is an example of the mindless quagmire educated folk find themselves mired in when they try to debate Global Warming science. Our opponents are basically idiots.) He was the big news Monday, talking about island nations that would disappear and the millions of people who would be displaced.

Trouble is, sea levels don’t really seem to be rising. There are disparate studies, but since Climategate taught us that we cannot trust studies done by most of the people who hold themselves out as experts, well, I decided to provide visual evidence that sea level is not rising: [Website has link to photograph taken in 2004 by John L. Daly of mean sea level marked on a Tasmanian ocean-side cliff in 1841, showing that sea level is seemingly unchanged in 163 years.]

4: God’s presence

Okay, so I meant four lingering thoughts.

I’m grateful that the Copenhagen climate conference was a failure. I don’t know who released the Climategate emails and data, or how they did it, but whoever and however are irrelevant to my firm conviction that it was God’s work. His Christmas present to the world. The last two days of the conference exposed conference participants for what they are: not environmentalists, but rather communists and thugs intent upon raking in some dough and damaging the United States in the process.

Hugo Chavez got standing ovations for saying, The destructive model of Capitalism is eradicating life, and Our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell….let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.

Bolivian president Evo Morales railed against the United States: The United States—how much does the United States spend to export terrorism to Afghanistan, to export terrorism to Iraq, and to export military bases to South America? They don’t only spend millions, but billions and trillions.

(Millions, billions, trillions, what’s the difference when you’re basically stupid?)

Then they let Robert Mugabe give a speech about climate. At that point, it was either start crying in frustration or try to see the humor in this absurd and farcical gathering of nitwits.

Clearly, the Good Lord has a sense of humor: Nancy Pelosi’s congressional contingent in attendance at the Global Warming conference was told Friday afternoon that they had to leave Copenhagen early to fly home so they could beat the giant snowstorm expected to dump two feet of snow on Washington.

Global warming thought experiment—February 22, 2010

As the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) disintegrates under a barrage of scientific fraud, bureaucratic stupidity, political ham-handedness, and greed, it might be the perfect time to step back and try for fresh perspective with a thought experiment.

Pretend that your name is Isaac Galileo Buster Einstein and you are the most famous scientist in the world, winner of Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine, as well as the Peace Prize simply because they ran out of other Nobel medals to give you. That’s how smart you are.

As you are gardening behind your home on the campus of MIT one day, growing four-foot-tall cabbages for starving Somalis, the president of the university stops by and says, Hey Buster, the world needs your help.

Again? you respond.

Don’t get a big head, Buster, says the president, looking at your garden.

So what does the world need this time?

Well, here’s the deal: turns out the scientists in charge of climate studies are all nincompoops. Economists spouting off about physics, astronomers pretending to be statisticians, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry getting doctorates in ‘Climatology’ and then pretending they know how to forecast the future with computer code. The United Nation’s climate change chief got his degree in social work, for God’s sake! The whole field is a mess.

I know.

You know?

I’m the smartest man in the world, remember? And I saw a story about it on Fox News last night.

"Oh. Anyway, we want you to settle the issue of Earth’s temperature. Then tell us whether global warming is a problem. Capiche?"

Okay, how long do I have?

Take as much time as you need. Call me this afternoon with the answers.

So where do you begin? A stupid man with little grasp of basic science—somebody like Al Gore, say—might rush out to the driveway, hang a thermometer from a tree, and shout, Voila! But you’re too smart for that. You know that the temperature in your driveway doesn’t necessarily represent the whole planet.

While that should be glaringly obvious to anybody with common sense, the concept is surprisingly foreign to the field of climatology as practiced by the in-crowd—that exclusive clique of scientists who write reports for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The in-crowd—people like James Hansen and Michael Mann in the United States, the disgraced and suicidal Phil Jones in England, and others of that ilk—rush around placing thermometers randomly here and there, moving them without conscience, ignoring them or adjusting them when they give politically incorrect readings, and generally acting like a ten-year-old with a new magic trick. "Pick a card, Daddy, any card! No, not that one!"

While the U.N.’s Copenhagen Climate Conference was underway in December, the Russians complained about the in-crowd ignoring more and more of the temperature readings from Russia. Big surprise, turns out they’re ignoring the ones in Siberia, where it’s cold. Same thing in China—they’re ignoring temperature readings from cold places. Worldwide, they reduced the number of weather stations they use from 7,000 to 3,000 between 1975 and 2000.

Suspicious, eh? It’s almost like the grant money these guys get is dependent upon there being a Global Warming problem.

Big and disparate as the world is, you’d think the more temperature readings the better. If fewer is better, why not use one thermometer, put it in Al Gore’s driveway, and tell him to read it once a day at noon—make him earn his ridiculous Peace Prize?

You think about that for a second and dismiss the idea; partly because it’s stupid, partly because you lack faith in Gore’s ability to read a thermometer.

You also conclude that starting with a database of temperature readings with hundreds of readings from Siberia and then gradually removing those readings from the database over the course of thirty years will probably manufacture a database which shows warming, whether in fact the planet is warming or not.

In other words, current temperature databases are worthless. No wonder the world needs your help.

Beginning to grasp the extent of the mess in climatology, you walk into your living room, put your feet on the coffee table, fire up your best pipe, and ponder the concept of temperature. Eventually you arrive at three important questions:

1. What is temperature?

2. Can the temperature of Planet Earth be measured?

3. What meaning would such a measurement have for climate?

By definition, temperature is the measure of how hot or cold something is (duh), which in turn results from the motion of particles at the atomic level. Intrinsic to any definition of temperature, however, is the assumption of thermal contact. If you never have thermal contact with something, its temperature is irrelevant. Polar bears might be comfortable, temperature-wise, on Mars (whereas whippets would be miserable), but who cares? The likelihood of polar bears (or whippets) traveling to Mars is small.

If Martian temperatures are irrelevant to polar bears, so are temperatures in the Sahara and temperatures down in the molten core of the planet. The bears seldom have thermal contact with hot deserts or molten lava, and, if they do, they have larger issues than climate change.

Averaging temperatures in a vain effort to create a temperature of the planet doesn’t solve the irrelevancy of temperatures in far apart places. And when it comes to averaging them, well, life forms do not live in an average planetary temperature, no matter how you calculate it. If the temperature around your body is sixty degrees, for example, then that is the temperature with which the laws of thermodynamics demand equilibrium whether you are a polar bear or a redwood tree, and no matter how hot it is in Libya.

So the very concept of temperature requires that you first answer the question: Temperature relative to what? Because Temperature of Planet Earth is an inane and useless concept unless somebody or something is in thermal contact with the whole planet at once.

Even Al Gore’s fat ass doesn’t manage that.

Nevertheless, for the sake of covering all bases, you turn your Nobel-winning mind to the question of whether the temperature of the planet is measureable. And since the in-crowd seems to like actual physical thermometers, the first puzzle is where to put the thermometers.

(Hey, speaking of Al Gore’s fat ass…)

Imagine standing in your driveway with a wheelbarrow full of Kmart Blue Light Special thermometers, trying to decide where to put them. Where would you start?

If you put one in your driveway, how high (or how deep) do you place it? Since temperature changes with altitude, decreasing 3.5 degrees per 1,000 feet of elevation, and increases even faster when you go down into the ground, rising about ten times that fast with every 1,000 feet you burrow, the height (or depth) is rather crucial.

Oh, by the way, most of the planet is covered by water, and there’s temperature change with depth in the water, too. Deep ocean water is much colder than surface water.

And do you place your driveway thermometer in the sun or the shade? If the thermometer is in the shade, it won’t really represent temperatures in the sun, and if it’s in the sun it won’t represent temperatures in the shade. Likewise, if it’s close to the house, which radiates heat, it won’t represent temperatures away from the house.

And how about exposure to the elements? A thermometer that gets wet will be cooled by evaporation and give completely different readings than a thermometer that stays dry, even in a situation where ambient temperature is the same. Ditto with regard to wind exposure. You can’t avoid this issue by sheltering the thermometer from the elements because you’re attempting to measure the temperature of the whole planet, much of which sits out in the wind and gets wet.

The difficulty of picking one temperature to represent everything is why television weathermen give you at least two—the ambient and the wind chill—while trying to describe what it’s like outside.

In a laboratory setting which isolated the driveway from the rest of the world, temperatures would reach thermal equilibrium eventually and you could anticipate that equilibrium by sampling enough of the various driveway temperatures to be able to make a statistical prediction of that eventual equilibrium (although you still need a nearly infinite number of predictions to represent all the possible heights and depths), but in the real world things are changing constantly and the driveway never achieves equilibrium.

Sheesh, what a mess, eh? It’s a conundrum. Upon reflection, you see that a wheelbarrow full of Blue Light Special thermometers is insufficient to measure the temperature of even the tiny portion of the planet covered by your driveway, and the idea that you can measure the temperature of the whole planet with thermometers is absurd.

Never mind that thermometer readings are the basis for Global Warming theory—they came to you, Buster Einstein, because you can think outside the box and are willing to say it out loud when the emperor has no clothes. Clearly, when it comes to measuring temperature, the emperors of Global Warming have no clothes.

In defense of the IPCC crowd, they never actually claim to have a Temperature of Planet Earth. What they do is take their collection of temperature readings from their randomly placed—and frequently stupidly placed—thermometers and apply statistical analysis to them in an effort to coax identifiable trends from them.

This is a junior-high-school-level mathematical mistake. Not all collections of data accede to statistical analysis and there are two very good reasons why the IPCC-crowd’s collection of temperature data does not.

Number one, you cannot use statistics to analyze numbers of unrelated items. A series of temperature readings from 20,000 feet up the north slope of Mount Everest is unrelated to a series of temperature readings from 200 feet below sea level in Death Valley. They are unrelated longitude-wise, altitude-wise, climate-wise, and a bunch of other -wises. You cannot average the two temperature series and create a mathematically meaningful outcome any more than you can average the number of refrigerators and the number of doors in your home and get something mathematically meaningful.

If somebody came to you and said, "I have counted the number of refrigerators and doors and dead flies and grains of salt in your house and the average number of things in your house is five thousand three hundred and twelve," and then tried to convince you this was the best estimate for the number of beds in your home, you’d assume he was crazy. But that’s exactly what the IPCC promoters of AGW have been doing for three decades.

The second reason why IPCC temperature data does not accede to statistical analysis is because sometimes the data available does not expose the fundamental situation. Nassim Taleb calls these Black Swan situations, and invents an example of turkeys using statistical analysis to extrapolate 1000 straight days of plentiful food and uninterrupted growth into the future. They decide, of course, based upon their data, that plentiful food and uninterrupted growth will continue indefinitely, blissfully unaware that day 1001 is Thanksgiving. The data available to the turkeys did not expose the true nature of their lives.

In the same fashion, the data which the IPCC-crowd uses to prognosticate miniscule changes in global temperature disregards the true nature of our climate, which we happen to know is mostly a history of precipitous declines into lengthy ice ages, with only occasional forays into the warmer temperature ranges of the last 10,000 years. Sooner or later, our Thanksgiving will come. We’ll be freezing our butts off and praying for global warming when that happens.

At least we’re better off than the turkeys, because this knowledge is available to us, although the IPCC seems hell-bent on ignoring it.

Sighing, you look sadly at your empty pipe, and force your thoughts back to the topic of measuring Earth’s temperature. With thermometers discredited, is there another way?

It just so happens there is.

Using satellites, we can measure the albedo of the planet, calculate the incoming solar radiation, subtract the outgoing long-wave radiation, and arrive at a temperature of Planet Earth, relative to somebody in near-Earth orbit, which is somewhere in the vicinity of twenty degrees below the freezing point of water.

Although it works, and finally gives us a bona fide temperature reading for the planet as a whole, this calculation is notable for three reasons: one, it is far less accurate than the fractional temperature changes which the IPCC-crowd pretends to measure in support of AGW theory; two, it is dependent upon an estimation of the planet’s albedo (the reflective properties of the overall whiteness of its clouds and snow cover) which tends to change minute to minute and season to season and is therefore wildly inconsistent; and three, it is a marvelously useless number for almost every purpose for which we require temperature to be measured... unless Polar Bears and whippets suddenly start living in outer space.

20 degrees below the freezing point of water? Does anybody really feel that this temperature applies to them? Maybe polar bears and penguins could identify, but the rest of the planet would probably question this temperature calculation. The tube worms that live at subterranean hydrothermal vents, where the temperature is hundreds of degrees higher, certainly wouldn’t find it relevant to their existence. Neither would crocodiles, which probably have trouble hunting when the water is frozen solid.

In short, the measurement of the temperature of the whole planet for climate purposes is an impossible, irrelevant, and silly exercise in hubris by so-called scientists whose main goal is apparently something other than the advancement of science.

And if the measurement of the planet’s temperature is a no-go, the logical follow-up conclusion is that Anthropogenic Global Warming is either a nonexistent invention (at worst), or an unknowable conjecture until its magnitude exceeds the magnitude of the error inherent in the calculation of the planet’s temperature by satellites.

You’ve reached these conclusions without leaving your living room and without spending one dime of grant money from the government. Picking up the phone, you call the president of MIT.

Damn, I hope this doesn’t mean another trip to Oslo, you think to yourself.

Polar bear attack—October 11, 2010

In September of 1994, Alvah Simon motored his 36-foot sailboat into a place few people have heard of, visited, or even noticed on a map—a place called Tay Bay. To give you an idea of where this place is, start in Michigan and go straight north into Canada, straight north across Canada to Hudson Bay, straight north across Hudson Bay to Baffin Island, straight north across Baffin Island to Eclipse Sound, and finally straight north across Eclipse Sound to a little island called Baylot.

That’s where Tay Bay is, on the west side of Baylot Island. In the Inuit language Baylot means Too Cold To Pee Without Freezing Your… actually I don’t speak Inuit. I’m just guessing.

Tay Bay isn’t the North Pole but it’s close enough to trade Sunday brunch invitations with Santa Claus, watch the northern lights by looking south, and share a backyard fence with Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

Alvah’s big plan was to find a small bay in the Arctic, anchor his boat, and get frozen in for the winter. (At first that sounds a little nutty, even for a sailor, but after thinking about it for a minute you’ll raise your estimate.) He wanted to test his resistance to solitude and experience the beauty of the north but he was running out of time because summers are short in those latitudes. Tay Bay already had a thin crust of ice on it—not enough to stop the boat but enough to tell him he needed to find an anchorage soon.

Tay Bay was perfect—small enough to give him shelter from winter storms but big enough (probably) to melt and let him escape in the spring.

He could see a polar bear standing on a hill looking at him as he entered the little bay and his first thought was, How beautiful! Once he was anchored, hard against a forty-foot-long mound of ice, he turned to admire the bear some more and that’s when Mr. Beautiful charged down the hill, dove into the bay, and started swimming under the ice toward the boat.

Alvah could see the bear through the ice and once in a while it would surface, breaking gently through the ice to study the boat briefly before ducking underwater to resume its approach. The bear was probably thinking, "This dumbass isn’t running away yet?"

Alvah was amazed at how fast the bear could swim and how huge it was. That’s the first thing people notice when they see a polar bear for the first time: their size. The next thing they notice (and possibly last thing) is how crafty they are and how perniciously they hunt people. Polar bears are in fact the only predators on Earth that habitually hunt humans for food. Oh, sure, they prefer a fat seal but they will spend significant time stalking, out-smarting, and imagining how they will eat you. In the Arctic, man is not the top of the food chain which requires some mental adjustment for newbies.

Breaking through the ice one last time, the bear’s eyes stared straight into Alvah’s. That was important because looking into a predator’s eyes tells him he doesn’t have to be sneaky anymore. The bear immediately changed direction, swam to the mound of ice, and hauled himself out of the water. Next thing Alvah knew, he was looking up at a polar bear getting ready to leap from the ice to his boat. Lucky for him the bear hesitated. We can guess what the bear was thinking: This is one stupid seal. He knows I’m here but still hasn’t jumped in the water to escape. Am I missing something?

Just as the bear was concluding, Who cares what I’m missing, I’m a polar bear and I’m hungry! Alvah finally regained his senses, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the only weapon he had handy: a small compressed-air horn. He pointed it at the bear and blasted it just as the bear was about to leap. The bear backed up, irritated. Not only the stupidest, but also the loudest seal the bear had ever seen. When he turned back to resume his attack, Alvah blasted him with the horn again and the bear decided to give his ears a break and think about things for a minute.

Diving back into the water, the bear swam around behind the boat, poked his head up though the ice, and then, as Alvah watched, scraped up some ice and slush with his giant paws and covered his head. With his eyes half closed, and the ice over his head, the bear completely disappeared even though he was mere feet from the boat. This is a good trick that works on seals almost every time. The seals have short attention spans. They forget. They know the bear is there but after