An environmental wacko took several hostages at the Discovery Channel studios today which ultimately resulted in police fatally shooting him.

The fanaticism this Cult of the Carbon Cow drives is impressive.  Following is the kook’s online missive:

The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:

1. The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!

4. Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??

5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

6. Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don’t build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!

7. Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!

8. Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies! You’re the media, you can reach enough people. It’s your resposibility because you reach so many minds!!!

9. Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.

10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC. Stop Future Weapons shows or replace the dialogue condemning the people behind these developments so that the shows become exposes rather than advertisements of Arms sales and development!

11. You’re also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war.

Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!

It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES! Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It’s like a couple are having 30 babies even though it’s just one! If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!

Also, war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!!

The world needs TV shows that DEVELOP solutions to the problems that humans are causing, not stupify the people into destroying the world. Not encouraging them to breed more environmentally harmful humans.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

The humans? The planet does not need humans.

You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation. Surely you MUST ALREADY KNOW this!

I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.

Like all good prophetic rants, there are some correct ideas wrapped within inane, simi-coherent babble.

Yes overpopulation is an issue, yes pollution is an issue, yes deforestation is an issue, yes depopulating the animal kingdom is an issue.  Those issues must be addressed satisfactorily, but halting all human reproduction is not the answer.  Arming oneself with a gun and homemade bombs and taking hostages at a TV studio is also not the answer.

We are part of nature, we are not parasites, we are the stewards of this good Earth whether we have the wisdom to be so or not.  To a rabid Cultist such as the former Mr Lee, it isn’t sufficient to be green, one must be soylent green, and I personally do not accept that.

The religious parallels here are indicative of the mindset so many people have, and representative of the natural human condition of succombing to a belief system:

• simply being born is a sin against Mother Gaia
• everyone else must hear the message and accept the tenants of the message
• sacrificing non-believers is perfectly acceptable
• sacrificing oneself is the ultimate act of commitment

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is responsible for advising the UN on climate issues.

The reader is asked to look at their name and consider whether or not (no pun intended) this group is likely to conclude that climate is progressing naturally.

Several whitewashes, er studies, have cleared the IPCC of any wrong doing. 

This one does not.  Notably, this is a study by an independent group of scientists from around the world, the InterAcademy Council.

“The IPCC has raised public awareness of climate change, and driven policymakers,” said Harold Shapiro, chair of the IAC Committee to Review IPCC and former president of Princeton University. But the controversies that have erupted, and revelations of errors, have put the group under the microscope. “We recommend some significant reforms,” he told the U.N.

These scientists did not argue the validity of the climate models or the climatologist’s assumptions, rather the IAC scrutinized the scientific practices of the climatologists, and suggested:

“We did not redo the science,” said Shapiro. Instead, the IAC focused its attention on the procedures and methodologies of the IPCC, suggesting many areas for improvement.

The rate of melt of the Himalayan glaciers was one touchstone among skeptics of manmade global warming that the group addressed. Shapiro explained that many reviewers noted the lack of substance behind the claim, but their criticism didn’t make it into the final report. 

It appears that editors “didn’t follow through carefully enough on what review editors commented,” said Shapiro. 

And:

“We found in the summary for policymakers that there were two kinds of errors that came up — one is the kind where they place high confidence in something where there is very little evidence. The other is the kind where you make a statement … with no substantive value, in our judgment.” 

That seems to me to be a polite way of saying, “you guys aren’t scientists”.

Here is an article from the BBC regarding geo-engineering techniques that may help to prevent global warming.

It is interesting to me that the first technique is to limit the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth.  The very first recommendation in this global warmist propaganda silliness is to acknowledge that the Sun plays the most significant role in global temps.

Oops.

For this prediction, I’ve added a new category, “Predictions”.  Let’s see how this one plays out.

I find it unreasonable to predict that solar storms in 2012 will do “something”, but then I don’t subsist on your tax dollars, I make my living from my demonstrable network security skill set.

The BBC reports here on the likelihood that at least two meteor strikes were responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs.

Yes, I recognize that meteors only exist in space and that meteoroids are atmospheric phenomenon and that at the time of impact the correct technical term is meteorite, however everyone else says meteor so I will too.

The above reporting coincides nicely with the evidence that the volcanoes in the Urals and elsewhere in Asia had been erupting for years prior to the meteor strike discovered in the Gulf of Mexico in 1980.

My prediction would then be that there were at least three large impacts, the one that shattered the mantle allowing for the volcanoes and the two reported in the above BBC article.

I once saw a program on the Science Channel, NatGeo, or Discovery that demonstrated how an impact on one side of the planet would ring like a bell throughout the mantel, and the reverberations would cause mantel failure (volcanoes, earthquakes) on the opposite side of the planet.  Very interesting.

Likely, that is what occurred several times in a relatively short time span as the solar system was sorting out the final location of the accretion debris.

Life is fragile, life is short.

The BBC reports that beer microbes lived 553 days in space.

Many have speculated over the years that bacteria could survive in space, and that life could pass between planets through meteor impacts that eject rocks into space which eventually are trapped by another planet’s gravity well and subsequently fall onto that planet.

No evidence in the article that the microbes would have survived re-entry, but extremophiles suggest to me it’s possible.

Wonder how long bacteria might actually be able to survive in space without sustenance?  I’ve read about studies suggesting it could be a very, very long time as the bacteria essentially hibernate when under duress.

Has biological material been shared between our solar system and that of Alpha Proxima?  Unknown, but interesting to consider while sipping sweet, sweet beer.

The BBC is reporting a study of the true cost of electric cars.

Not surprisingly, given the huge cost of the short lived battery, electric cars are more expensive than conventional vehicles.

I’ve been saying for years that electric cars are for those who are easily fooled at magic shows.  Electric cars simply move the source of pollution over the horizon, where most people never look.

How is electricity generated?

How are we going to handle the additional electrical transmission facilities required for electric cars?

How are the metals for the batteries obtained?

How are the batteries disposed of?

The above questions don’t seem to enter the smug minds of electric car drivers.

I stumbled across an incredibly interesting article regarding evolution here.

For years those who believe that the human eye is ‘irreducibly complex’ and therefore evolution is false have failed to recognize that more primitive eyes do exist.  Eyes run the gamut from basic light sensitive neurons to highly complex structures such as our eyes.  There are eyes out there such as bird eyes and butterfly eyes that see beyond the  spectrum we do.

There are also ears that are different than ours, the elephant for instance hears well below our range of 20-20k hertz, elephants communicate over huge distances using low rumbling sounds in the single digit hertz range.  Crocs communicate at this range as well.  (A single hertz is one complete cycle per second.)

In short, the world is not designed for us, and we have evolved to fill our ecological niche.  It’s a fact.  Like pure bred dogs and flu shots, evolution is a fact.  Purebred dogs demonstrate that genes are real and through deliberate control of breeding pairs, desired traits can be reinforced and undesirable traits can be bred out.  (Mendel nods in agreement, Mendel was a monk who developed gene theory.)

Flu shots are necessary each year because the flu virus evolves over the course of the year.  All the seniors thumping their One Book as they queue up for their seasonal flu shots are missing something very, very basic: evolution is the way of things, ordained or by random chance, evolution is real.

For any who still do not believe, there is the above incredible article.  Certain lizards have been observed to be slowly evolving from egg laying animals to live breeders, while the same species in other regions are not.

Clear evidence of evolution.  Evolution is unarguable, it is the way of things, even the man of God Mendel would agree.

P Gosselin has a list of climate related “gates” here.  I’ve not read through them, but thought it was interesting and wanted to pass the link along.

The satellite “NOAA-16″ has been taken offline apparently, due to degraded sensors as reported by John O’Sullivan here.

Choice cuts from O’Sullivan’s article:

US Government admits global warming satellite sensors “degraded” – temperatures may be out by 10-15 degrees. Now five satellites in controversy. Top scientists speak out.

Dr. John Christy indicates, the real Satellitegate is not about one satellite. The scandal is endemic with comparable flaws across the entire network

NOAA’s chief Program Administrator, Chuck Pistis, at first disingenuously tried to discredit my report and whitewash the matter with disinformation.

the U.S. agency continued to sell its flawed data products to numerous international institutions without making it public that satellite sensors were “degraded” and unreliable for assessing climate change.

The snuffed out satellite had been run continuously up until being taken offline soon after my article went viral (August 10, 2010) in which I exposed the full extent of how seriously degraded it’s sensors were. The automatic readings had been contaminated by hundreds, if not thousands, of false and absurdly high temperature readings

we know the automated numbers were sold throughout the world and it’s readings of land and ocean temperatures have been used by climate scientists in their models since the satellite’s launch in September 2000. As a consequence and without full disclosure by NOAA, it is feared innumerable scientific studies about rising global temperatures are now rendered entirely invalid.

The National Academy of Sciences, in its 2007 455-page report concluded that because of degradation in the U.S. satellite network, the country’s ability to monitor the climate and severe weather was “at great risk.”

Ridiculous behavior on the part of NOAA.  Anyone heard updates on the Argo buoy data lately?  I haven’t read anything in the mainstream literature since NOAA admitted on NPR several months ago that the seas were slightly cooling.

The current status summary from NOAA shows the instrument in question, the HIRS, to be in “Yellow” condition which indicates “operational with limitations”.  Why NOAA has chosen to not use an Orange status (operational with degraded performance”, or a Red status (not operational) for the HIRS on NOAA-16 brings into question O’Sullivan’s article.

Maybe the debate is still playing out?  If the US government has been intentionally selling bogus data for years then the taxpayers of this country are liable for the fraud law suits coming our way.

Wired.com is reporting on a new way to measure the mass of planets in the solar system.

The technique utilizes the pulses from pulsars.  These are (assumed to be) regularly occurring signals from rapidly spinning failed stars.  Most likely, these are very regular patterns over the observational lifetime of a human (perpetual motion is a thermodynamic impossibility).

As such, we can very predictably calculate when we should see the next pulse.  Deviations from that calculated time represent the tug on the Earth from the gravitational center of the solar system.  This tug can in turn be used to reverse engineer the gravitational effects of each of the bodies within the solar system.

Interesting, and proven to a seemingly ridiculous accuracy.  Although, over the distances and times involved, all the more accurate the better.  Round off error on galactic terms is huge.

Hillarious has weighed in today regarding the recent heat wave in Russia and flooding in Pakistan.

She draws a direct link between climate change and the floods and heat wave, something actual climatologists tell us is impossible to do.

Hillary is willing to sell obviously bogus and inflated information in an effort to control the unwashed.

Case in point: her “100,000 police” bill that she and Bill were trying to get passed to protect us all back in the early 90′s.

When one reads the actual bill, it funded 10,000 cops for 10 years, not 100,000 cops.  Given that an average cop likely works 20-30 years, the bill wouldn’t have even funded 10,000 cops, more like 2,500-3,300.

So, in Hillary’s world 3,000 = 100,000 if it’ll help sell the message.

I expect that’s what we’re seeing here, climate alarmism to sell the message.  If not, then she simply is a fool for not listening to actual climatologists.

There is a post from a guest blogger on WUWT regarding the contribution of human produced CO2 to the atmosphere.  The guest blogger is Ferdinand Engelbeen and his post is here.

This is the second in a series of posts arguing that ‘excess’ CO2 in the atmosphere is the result of our actions.  I think that cannot be argued, obviously we add quite a bit of CO2 to the atmosphere.

However, Engelbeen then goes on to assert that the temperature record recorded in ice cores establishes the link between CO2 and temperature, once the observed data is corrected to account for the time CO2 and other gases were allowed to escape from fallen snow before the weight of snow compacted snow below into ice, thus trapping the CO2.

So, Engelbeen argues that once proper ‘adjustments’ are made to ‘correct’ the observed data, then the temperature signal aligns nicely with the CO2 signal.  Engelbeen makes no mention of the Sun during this post.

Here was my reply: (the reader may wish to open the above link in a seperate window as I refer to graphs on the WUWT site)

I don’t think there’s any doubt we’ve contributed CO2 to the atmosphere and that any ‘extra’ should be attributed to our activities.

I also don’t think that a scatter plot is a useful mechanism to portray chronological data. Without knowing how each point on the plot was trending, we can’t decide if the variability in the CO2 causes the variability in the temperature record based on this plot. Scatter plots are useful for trending such variables as mortality rate versus toxicity levels, but not for showing a relationship between chronological data points.

What we can see from the scatter plot is that there appears to be no reliable relationship between temperature and CO2. Look at the variability along the T = -6 and T = -4 lines. Clearly a wide range of CO2 concentrations existed for those two temperature points, and without seeing the trend, I have to find that a doubling of CO2 does not raise temperature by 2 degrees. Along T = -6, the amount of CO2 seems to vary between 200 ppmv and 265 ppmv. (take the ratio whichever direction you want, I read enough bickering about it a couple posts ago) Along T = (about) -4, the CO2 concentration seems to vary between 190 ppmv to about 272 ppmv.

What do we get from the chronological data? We do see an apparent relationship between CO2 and temperatures, we see that there is a lag between the two. How is the lag explained by the climate modelers? Well, we have the explanation that the gasses escape from between the ice crystals until sufficient pressure makes that escape impossible.

I accept that, it’s really a good explanation. However, narrowing down when the pressure seals the gasses within the ice is very difficult to say with any certainty.

The statement is made that Al Gore “forgot to tell his audience that the CO2 levels lagged by some 800 years during a deglaciation and many thousands of years at the onset of new glaciations”. This statement seems apologetic to me. I would wonder if the theory of sealing gasses in the ice cores was well established prior to the drilling of the first ice core, or if the theory was developed afterward to explain away the apparent non-fit of the observed data to the climate theories? I expect the latter is true.

When the pressure would have sealed the gasses depends on (as stated in the post) how much snow falls during what period of time. It is the compressive weight of snow that seals the gasses, all very good and reasonable. However, the statement that during colder times there would be less humidity and therefore less precipitation and therefore less snow in a given area is unsupportable. I agree that colder temperature would produce less humidity and therefore less precipitation for water sealed in a lab flask. In the real world though, weather systems drive precipitation around the world, regardless of the temperature at Vostok or the Law Dome, regional or global weather patterns could certainly deliver more precipitation to the area. Freak snow storms occur.

Here is another paper behind many of the ideas in this post: http://www.scienceonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/317/5839/793 (requires registration)

Here is a statement given by the authors regarding their conclusions: “Experiments performed with an atmospheric general circulation model including water isotopes support [the paper's] temperature interpretation.”

Modeling past weather is of course impossible. We cannot say with any certainly exactly how much snow fell over a given period of time in a specific location thousands of years ago. We therefore have no reliable method for judging how much gas escape to attribute to each slice of the ice core, and therefore how to ‘correct’ the data. I recognize that we can date modern ice by the signature of recent volcanoes, but we’re talking about ice cores dating back hundreds of thousands of years where the time for volcanic eruption includes error bars that exceed the lag time between CO2 and temperature.

Occam’s razor leaves me with one conclusion: the main driver of temperatures on the Earth is the Sun and the reason that temperature and CO2 seem related but off by varying amounts of time is that the amounts of plants and animals increase under good conditions and decrease under poor conditions, in addition to the heat and gas exchanges occurring between the atmosphere and the oceans. CO2 and temperatures are generally related to one another through solar activity and biomass, with periodic disruptions in the relationship caused by volcanoes, meteor strikes, earthquakes, forest fires, and other natural occurrences. The relationship is impossible to predict or model with any degree of certainty.

Engelbeen has been thoughtfully and politely responding to the other posters’ objections to his assertions, so he seems to be a stand up guy.  I don’t care that he takes the time to respond to me, as he already has quite a few replies to make, I just wanted to record my thoughts here.