By Mark Steyn
With respect to our friend Hugh Hewitt, I think Michael Walsh’s column gets to the big problem with Mitt. It’s not that he’s a glib, finger-in-the-windy opportunist of no fixed principles; it’s worse than that: He has a weird knack for reaching into the icebox to pull out the conventional wisdom when it’s five years past its sell-by date.
He bragged about “protecting a woman’s right to choose,” which might have made sense for a pandering RINO squish in the late Eighties but not by the time he did it in 2002.
He embraced the governmentalization of health care not in the 1970s but at exactly the moment when, at home and abroad, the reality of the impact of Third Party universalism was plain to everybody who thought seriously about this issue.
Now he’s come out in favor of global warming not when it was actually happening (over a decade ago) but two years after the peer-review hit the fan in East Anglia, Copenhagen, and at the IPCC.
This is like watching your parents do the Macarena: It’s embarrassing and it’s dated.
Mitt had a lot going for him last time round, but he seems determined not to learn from experience. And the least that voters are entitled to in a time of crisis is a presidential candidate who’s one step ahead of the conventional pieties, not someone so out of it that he orders his political positions from the remainder bin. Post.
By Roger Pielke Sr.
There is an excellent, very informative presentation of Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent and long term trends and variability up to 2010 (Spring and Fall) and 2011 (Winter) from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab.
As concluded in the 2007 IPCC WG1 report:
“....snow cover [has] declined on average in both hemispheres.”
The reality of the snow cover trends is more complex, however, as clearly illustrated in the figures presented below. Only the spring shows a decline, and, even then, its decline is dominated by the period prior to 1990.
Enlarged.
Figure 1. Twelve-month running anomalies of monthly snow cover extent over Northern Hemisphere lands (including Greenland) as a whole and Eurasia and North America separately between November 1966 and December 2010. Anomalies are calculated from NOAA snow maps. Mean hemispheric snow extent is 25.0 million sq. km. for the full period of record. Monthly means for the period of record are used for 9 missing months between 1968 and 1971 in order to create a continuous series of running means. Missing months fall between June and October, no winter months are missing
By Chris Horner, ATI in the Washington Post
Thank you for acknowledging the University of Virginia’s agreement to provide us certain records under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act [”Harassing researchers,” editorial, May 30]. Over the past 18 months, U-Va. employed a series of ever-changing rationales to avoid doing so. Of course, like U-Va., The Post failed to articulate an argument grounded in the statute for treating one class of records, or people, differently from the rest of those expressly covered by the act’s terms as a condition of taxpayer-funded employment.
But we take issue with the editorial’s failure to acknowledge a critical point: It is customary among commonwealth universities to provide such records of academics, even the specific class of records we are seeking. For example, U-Va. began providing to Greenpeace records of former research professor Patrick Michaels, before Greenpeace suspended its request. And just this year George Mason University released correspondence of professor Edward Wegman regarding an already published paper, just as we seek former U-Va. assistant professor Michael Mann’s correspondence relating to his publications.
For the uninitiated, Mr. Michaels is a “skeptic.” Mr. Wegman was involved in exposing Mr. Mann’s statistical methods and problems with climate science’s version of peer-review. So their records are somehow different. For The Post to acknowledge this disparate treatment would be to acknowledge that the law is on our side, that the exception sought here is unique to a favored individual, and that this expression of outrage in response to our request is therefore selective and hypocritical.
Christopher Horner, Washington
The writer is director of litigation at the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center.