Hoping to unravel the mysteries of human origin, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent three young women to Africa and Asia to study our closest relatives: It was chimpanzees for Jane Goodall, mountain gorillas for Dian Fossey and the elusive, solitary orangutans for Birute Mary Galdikas. Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of his “angels,” is the only one still at it. And the red apes she studies in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations.

Galdikas worries many questions may never be answered. How long do orangutans live in the wild? How far do the males roam? And how many mates do they have in their lifetime? “I try not to get depressed, I try not to get burned out,” says the Canadian scientist, pulling a wide-rimmed jungle hat over her shoulder-length gray hair in Tanjung Puting National Park. She gently leans over to pick up a tiny orangutan, orphaned when his mother was caught raiding crops.

“But when you get up in the air you start gasping in horror; there’s nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be plush rain forest. Elsewhere, there’s burned-out land, which now extends even within the borders of the park.”

The demand for palm oil is rising in the U.S. and Europe because it is touted as a “clean” alternative to fuel. Indonesia is the world’s top producer of palm oil, and prices have jumped by almost 70 percent in the last year. But palm oil plantations devastate the forest and create a monoculture on the land, in which orangutans cannot survive. Over the years, Galdikas has fought off loggers, poachers and miners, but nothing has posed as great a threat to her “babies” as palm oil.

There are only an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 90 percent of them in Indonesia, said Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. Most live in small, scattered populations that cannot take the onslaught on the forests much longer. Trees are being cut at a rate of 300 football fields every hour. And massive land-clearing fires have turned the country into one of the top emitters of carbon.

Tanjung Puting, which has 1,600 square miles, clings precariously to the southern tip of Borneo island. Its 6,000 orangutans - one of the two largest populations on the planet, together with the nearby Sebangau National Park - are less vulnerable to diseases and fires.  That has allowed them, to a degree, to live and evolve as they have for millions of years.

“I am not an alarmist,” says Galdikas, speaking calmly but deliberately, her brow slightly furrowed. “But I would say, if nothing is done, orangutan populations outside of national parks have less than 10 years left.” Read more here.

In 1971, perhaps entertaining thoughts of entering the full-time ministry, Al Gore, raised in and baptized into the Southern Baptist Church, entered the Vanderbilt Divinity School. His sojourn was relatively brief. In three semesters, he enrolled in eight classes. He received an “F” as his grade in five of those classes. So, having failed out of school, he entered the family business, which was politics. But he apparently never lost his desire to enter a ministry, and since he couldn’t make the grade in the conventional sense, he did the next best thing. He started his own religion.

The result was the Church of Global Warming. With Gore as its high priest, the church was not long in establishing tenets of faith, nor in immediately branding those who refused to worship there as apostate. The tragedy is that Gore, in his tenure in the family business, learned well how to work the political system, and when he turned to evangelizing for his new church, he was able to effectively use what he learned as a politician to grant government sanction to that church, sanction that would have been vehemently opposed had he attempted to grant government sanction to the church in which he grew up.

Now, what began as government sanction is well on its way to becoming government policy. The establishment of the Church of Global Warming immediately attracted as acolytes those leftists orphaned by the collapse of the old Soviet Union, those who saw, and continue to see, free-market capitalism and individual liberty as grave threats. So convincing were they developing plausible pseudo-science and both faulty and falsified data that they were able to bring into the church those political leaders - read United Nations - who have long sought the destruction of the one bulwark standing against the encroaching tide of totalitarianism.

The success of Gore’s evangelical fervor can be seen in the apparent commitment of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama to some sort of cap-and-trade program, a program designed by Gore to create a personally lucrative market for a product that will be created by legislative fiat. The legislative fiats already in place, spurred by Gore and his followers, have played a major role in helping to bankrupt the American automobile industry, have driven up the cost of food, have hamstrung domestic energy exploration and production, and are threatening to destroy, through onerous taxation, the American livestock industry.

It is possible, however, that the Church of Global Warming has reached its zenith. Despite its best efforts to brand as heretics those who would question the basic tenets of the church - that global warming is man-made, that it is immediately imminent, and that the only salvation lies in the church - there is increasing evidence that those tenets are, and always have been, wrong. A man named Khabibullo Abdusamatov, who heads a space-research laboratory in Russia, has suggested that the world is headed for global cooling, a hypothesis seconded by one of his countrymen, Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, another respected scientist. The Russian scientists have been joined by many others who have examined the tenets of the Church of Global Warming not on data presented in the church’s doxology but rather in the study of sunspots, something mankind has been doing with considerable interest since the early 17th century.

It is, however, interesting to note that the Green politicians in Europe, the elders of the Church of Global Warming who, like Gore, see the movement as a chance to enrich themselves, are suddenly finding themselves without support as record-low temperatures have eviscerated their propagandist efforts to evangelize, and take control of, the population. Like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the Church of Global Warming has presented itself as an answer, a place of refuge, a shelter and a protection from the “sins” of the world, particularly the “sins” of the free world. Like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the Church of Global Warming is also designed to enrich its own coffers by separating its followers from their hard-earned dollars. The difference is that Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker relied on voluntary donations. The Church of Global Warming resorts to theft by taxation, all the while explaining that its fail-safe computer models, the holy scripture of the Church, prove the future. Unfortunately, there was a flaw in the computer model. It turns out that suddenly, the Northern Hemisphere is now gaining daylight with each passing day. And the much-anticipated global warming is somehow being replaced by global cooling. Without any help at all from mankind. See story here.

In a few short days, millions will be flocking to the nation’s capitol to celebrate a truly historic moment in U.S. history - the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. Among his many campaign pledges, the President-elect has made energy and environment policy a cornerstone of his campaign, promising American votes a “new chapter” in climate leadership while also calling on Americans to do their voluntary part benefit the environment.

But the four-day festivities surrounding his upcoming Inauguration will produce enough carbon dioxide to make most environmentalists turn a sickly shade of green. The Institute For Liberty (IFL) utilizes data from federal agencies, environmentalist organizations, and news accounts to extrapolate the estimated environmental impact for the 2009 Inauguration. IFL estimates that, given the millions of people expected to converge on the nation’s capital: the 600 private jets expected to fly visitors to and from the event will produce 25,320,000 POUNDS of CO2, personal vehicles could account for 262,483,200 POUNDS of CO2, in the parade, horses alone will produce more than 400 POUNDS of CO2, the total carbon footprint for the Inauguration will likely exceed 575 million POUNDS of CO2. It would take the average U.S. household 57,598 years to produce a carbon footprint equal to that of the new president’s housewarming party

POLICY CONSIDERATIONS
While the Obama administration is free to celebrate as it sees fit, the extraordinarily high environmental impact of its Inauguration produces a troubling juxtaposition with policies then-Senator and presidential candidate Obama supported.

THE CAP-AND-TRADE CARBON SCHEME
The Obama/Biden campaign has said it wishes to impose a cap-and-trade scheme to regulate carbon dioxide and reduce emissions by an astonishing 80 percent by 2050. Unlike a direct tax on carbon, which would be transparent and allow for U.S. businesses and citizens to plan their budgets accordingly, a cap-and-trade scheme is not transparent. It would create a giant slush fund for government bureaucrats while doing little or nothing to improve the environment.

EPA ATTEMPTS TO REGULATE CARBON DIOXIDE AS A “POLLUTANT”
The U.S. regulatory structure already costs the American economy more than $1 trillion per year. For the average small business (of 20 employees or fewer), this translates to $7,700 per employee per year. An announced rulemaking effort by the EPA would add millions of more hours of paperwork to this burden as the department seeks to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. If politicians mandate that U.S. businesses radically limit their emissions, the fallout could be widespread: construction could screech to a grinding halt, trial lawyers could file millions of greenhouse gas-related civil suits, and many industry may be forced to permanently scale down their presence in America, sending countless jobs and capital overseas. Still developing nations such as China maintain much less stringent environmental standards than the United States, and businesses and populations living in these places will continue to emit at increasingly higher rates as their economies grow. The leakage of these emissions will effectively ensure that global greenhouse gas concentrations will not improve. Regulation of carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act could therefore result in economic chaos with little, if any, actual benefit to the environment.

BETTER SOLUTIONS
Instead of increasing the cost of energy by regulating or taxing Americans, political leaders should heed the saying, “Drill, baby, drill.” Expanding access to America’s domestic resourceswill increase energy security and provide a means of keeping the price of foreign energy sources down. This will unleash U.S. economic growth instead of further stunting output and investment by imposing punitive and unproductive policies. See more here.

THE CHIEF REASON for skepticism at the official position on “global warming” is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic “global warming”; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.

In short, science is being artfully manipulated to fabricate what are in essence political and not scientific conclusions – a conclusion that is congenial to powerful factions whose ambition is not to identify scientific truth but rather to advance the special vested interests with which they identify themselves.
We have demonstrated that, if CO2 concentration continues to rise more slowly than the IPCC had predicted, and if climate sensitivity to CO2 concentration is in any event well below the IPCC’s projected range, the likelihood of any “global warming” >2 C/century to 2100 is vanishingly small.

We have also demonstrated that official sources have: (1) relied upon questionable and occasionally downright dishonest methods to inflate the observed rate of temperature increase, (2) created the false impression that the rate of increase is itself rising when an identical argument can be used to demonstrate that it is falling, (3) diminished earlier and warmer temperatures in this century, (4) abolished the mediaeval warm period, (5) diverted attention away from the fact that throughout almost all of the Holocene, and throughout all four previous interglacial periods, surface temperatures were
considerably warmer than they are today.

For reasons of length, the present paper cannot consider the numerous and flagrant official as well as unofficial distortions, inflations and exaggerations of the supposed consequences of “global warming”: the present analysis has been confined only to the analysis of its imagined causes. This note should, however, be sufficient to convince the open-minded and diligent reader that, if so many artful steps have been and are being taken to falsify and exaggerate the scientific truth, perhaps the truth is not as those who are so ingeniously and persistently tampering with the science and the data would have us believe.

No correlation, so no causation: Neither the global-temperature trend (red line) nor the global-CO2 trend (cyan line) falls within the regions that encompass the IPCC’s projected intervals. Furthermore, there is a startling absence of correlation between the CO2-concentration trend and the temperature trend,
necessarily implying that - at least in the short term - there is little or no causative link between the two. See larger image here.

See full pdf here.

Shivering at the Show The talk is of global warming-fighting cars inside Cobo, but the bone-chilling weather outside is evidence that the Detroit Three isn’t the only industry that’s suffered of late. Global Warming Inc. is also reeling after a year in which climate science took big hits.  Even as global carbon dioxide emissions exploded, satellite readings found the globe has been cooling for over a decade. New studies have emerged finding solar cycles a much better predictor of global climate.

A panel of six Nobel laureate economists rated global warming dead last in a list of ten global priorities (AIDS research was tops). The world’s most-renowned scientific advocate of warming theory was widely denounced after he endorsed industrial vandalizism, arctic ice grew, polar bear populations are at historical highs, and so on. Michigan itself is shivering from another harsh winter with snow blanketing Southeast Michigan as early as October. Now the 2009 Auto Show has been welcomed by three snowstorms in four days and temperatures forecast to plummet below zero.  Both GM Vice President Bob Lutz and Johan de Nysschen, Audi’s U.S. president, called this week for increasing gas taxes to encourage the auto show’s bevy of fuel-sipping, pro-planet cars. But polls have consistently found the American public shy to any taxation to combat the alleged climate crisis. This winter’s weather isn’t likely to convince them otherwise. Read more here.

Icecap Note: Coldest weather in years is crossing the northern states and will drop temperatures below zero even in some of the major cities. Meanwhile snow continues to pile up heading towards more records for the second straight year and very probably more late winter/spring flooding while drought continues in Florida which will lead to spring brush fires, both of which the media and alarmists unusually quiet during mother nature’s inconvenient winter show will blame on global warming.

See larger image here

Europe is experiencing one of the coldest periods in recent decades. The German weather service event went further to state this winter is already one of the coldest in 100 years. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) considers these brutal cold days “normal” as result of the ocean variability. The Secretary-General of WMO, Michel Jarraud, told journalists this week that, despite the current cold snap in Europe, the major trend remained unmistakably one of warming. “If we look at the trajectory over the last 160 years”, he said “it overlays a large natural variability, and that’s what causes confusion”. The cooler weather that was a hallmark of 2008 could be explained partly by La Nina, a reversal of the phenomenon by which warm waters build up on the surface of the Pacific.

Well, I love these statements. First of all, if you go the WMO web page dedicated to the ENSO phenomena there is no information on La Nina. Despite the clear signals from the Pacific (marked subsurface cooling, persistent negative PDO and the highest SOI values since 1988 for that time of the year) and the forecasts of many climate models since September and October, the World Meteorological Organization issued a forecast in November for neutrality for early 2009:

“Near-neutral conditions of air-sea interactions currently prevail in the tropical Pacific. These are expected to continue at least through the remainder of 2008. Historically, the normal period for development of El Nino or La Nina is March-May, so forecasters will be watching for any signs of such development. At this time, it is too early to derive reliable indicators on possible El Nino or La Nina development during March-May 2009. Models and expert interpretation are in good agreement that near-neutral conditions are expected to continue at least to the end of 2008 and indeed into early 2009. The situation over the tropical Pacific will continue to be carefully monitored and timely updates of any new developing anomalies provided”.

Well, the Pacific is in classic La Nina mode and no update was provided so far. Isn’t funny to read the WMO blaming La Nina for the massive cold snap in Europe when they were (and still are forecasting in the organization webpage) neutrality for this early 2009 ? If you are a daily ICECAP reader, you must remember we and Joseph D’Aleo were forecasting a La Nina event when the WMO issued its ENSO forecast in November. They cannot forecast correctly the Pacific for 60 days and we are forced to believe they can envision the weather in 100 years. My friends, the real fact is that when Europe suffers a heat wave they rush to point global warming and CO2 as a cause, but when the continent suffers a major cold snap is just natural variability. Pardon Monsieur Jarraud, the Earth is cooling this decade and it is time to update your ENSO web page. See PDF here.

From the editor’s notes in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays (1891-1910), we find this amazing tidbit of science and medical history:

“Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis, (1811-65), a Hungarian physician working in Vienna, demonstrated the infectious nature of puerperal ("childbed") fever in 1846 and greatly reduced the maternal mortality rate by requiring childbirth attendants to wash their hands with a chlorine solution. He was ridiculed for his belief and forced from his hospital post by his supervisor. He returned to Hungary and accepted a part-time position at Pest hospital, offered on the condition that he not promote his theory. His book The Etiology of Puerperal Fever (written in the mid-1850s detailing his experiments in Vienna) was harshly criticized when it was published in 1861. He died in a mental hospital of an infection resulting from a self-inflicted wound with a contaminated scalpel. His findings were not widely accepted until the 1890s.”

In “Dr. Loeb’s Incredible Discovery,” a short essay by Mark Twain, Twain prefaces his remarks with an excerpt of what was at the time a recent editorial by the New York Times (March 2, 1905: If you would like to read the original editorial, you can find it at THIS PDF. It is worth looking at, as the column is shown in facsimile.)

Here is, in small part, Mr. Twain’s reply to the New York Times’ trust in consensus: “[I]n the drift of years I by and by found that a Consensus examines a new thing by its feelings rather oftener than with its mind. You know, yourself, that this is so. Do you know of a case where a Consensus won a game? You can go back as far as you want to and you will find history furnishing you this (until now) unwritten maxim for your guidance and profit: Whatever new thing a Consensus coppers (colloquial for “bets against"), bet your money on that very card and do not be afraid.

There was that primitive steam engine—ages back, in Greek times: a Consensus made fun of it. There was the Marquis of Worcester’s steam engine, 250 years ago: a Consensus made fun of it. There was Fulton’s steamboat of a century ago: a French Consensus, including the Great Napolean, made fun of it. There was Priestly, with his oxygen: a Consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out, banished him. While a Consensus was proving, by statistics and things, that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic, a steamship did it. A Consensus consisting of all the medical experts in Great Britain made fun of Jenner and inoculation. A Consensus consisting of all the medical experts in France made fun of the stethoscope. A Consensus of all the medical experts in Germany made fun of that young doctor (his name? forgotten by all but doctors, now, revered by doctors alone) who discovered and abolished the cause of that awful disease, puerperal fever; made fun of him, reviled him, hunted him, persecuted him, broke his heart, killed him. Electric telegraph, Atlantic cable, telephone, all “toys,” of no practical value—verdict of the Consensuses. Geology, paleontology, evolution—all brushed into space by a Consensus of theological experts, comprising all the preachers in Christendom, assisted by the Duke of Argyle and (at first) the other scientists.”

I must stop for fear of boring readers with Twain’s many examples of how scientific consensuses actually hinder scientific inquiry and progress. It is not merely a fact of history, but one of process: scientific knowledge is not advanced by consensus. If anything, it is advanced by the force of a lone voice, by the voice of the minority, shaped and perfected by the stubborn denials of the majority. By the way, Dr. Jacques Loeb was right. The New York Times, aligned with all the really “bright” minds united in consensus, was wrong.

T. S. Kuhn, years after Mark Twain, argued that prior to scientific consensuses bearing any epistemological weight, a period of conflict between rival theories and theoreticians must—and does—take place. This conflict not only revolves around differences of methodology, but also around anomalies in data and criteria of value. Once the conflict phase has been passed, a paradigm shift occurs, or, truer to Kuhn’s language, there is a revolution in science.

I believe it can be clearly shown that the current “consensus of opinion” regarding global warming has attempted to leap right over the conflict phase of scientific progress. Anomalies do abound; there is disagreement about variables and constants and algorithms. But the consensus is presented as if none of those things exist; it is consensus’ pretense that all is fine and all is understood, accepted and assimilated. Amazingly, lone voices, all equally expert (if not more so), are dismissed as crankish, peevish, fatuous or corrupt if they challenge the consensus, or if they point out systemic problems and anomalies.
Read more here.

You have to wrap up well against this global warming. Over the past 48 hours the temperature has fallen as low as -12C in Dorset, with the sea at Poole Harbour frozen up to 20 yards from shore, and parts of Britain colder than Greenland. Phew, what a scorcher! Might be a good idea to start up the car (if it will start) and pump some more CO2 into the atmosphere before we freeze to death. What did the media warn us about climate change? “There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest.

It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth - like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way."That apocalyptic warning came from Fortune magazine - in 1974, when it was alerting readers to an imminent new Ice Age. By 2006 it had conformed to the latest fashion and had revised its doomsday scenario to: “The media agrees with the majority of scientists: global warming is here. Now, what to do about it?” So much for the media as climatic arbiter. In the current climate, Fortune’s earlier scenario seems more plausible. A few months ago, Lewis Pugh set off on a much-hyped journey paddling a kayak to an “ice-free” North Pole: he was stopped by ice 600 miles from his destination and 100 miles south of where a canoeist had reached a century earlier. As this egg-on-face setback for climate alarmists illustrated, there was 9 per cent more ice at the Arctic last autumn than the year before. After a record ice melting there was a record freeze. Although Arctic sea ice last summer reached the lowest level recorded since satellite observation began (an important qualification), Antarctic ice reached the highest, but Al Gore was not shouting about that.

Global average temperatures hit a peak in 1998, but have been declining since. Now, to the further embarrassment of alarmists, Kerry Emanuel, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, who first advanced the thesis of a connection between global warming and hurricanes, has rejected his own theory after further research. Bad luck for Al Gore, who used the image of a hurricane emerging from a smoke stack to promote his fantasy extravaganza An Inconvenient Truth.

The core ice samples featured in Gore’s film actually proved that increased CO2 emissions have historically followed 800 years after warm periods - but what the hell, this ain’t science, it’s politics. Just how we are supposed to influence carbon emissions when mankind is only responsible for 3.5 per cent of them is unclear. But the cash from UN grants, wind farms, carbon trading and all the billions squandered on a politically useful (to totalitarians) superstition is very clear indeed: this is big bucks. “Man-made” global warming is the new sub-prime commerce of the planet.  Meantime, wrap up well. 
See more here.