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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (64535)	3/4/2008 1:06:58 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Cool And The Gang By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, March 03, 2008 4:20 PM PT Climate Change: Knut the polar bear isn't so cute and cuddly anymore. He's grown up a tad and is now a killing machine capable of surviving in perhaps the Earth's most hostile environment — the Arctic. Nor is the poster animal for warming warnings that drive children to tears and his kind in danger of perishing anytime soon. Funny thing about ice: It melts in summer and thickens in winter. And according to Gilles Kangis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice service in Ottawa, this Arctic winter has been so severe that the continent's allegedly vanishing ice is 10 to 20 centimeters thicker than it was at this time a year ago. Polar bear Knut, shown here snapping at a child at the Berlin Zoo, is no longer so cuddly. But at least the ice floes that supposedly have been stranding his fellow bears in the Arctic are thickening up this winter. Recent satellite images, moreover, show the polar ice cap is at near-normal coverage levels, according to Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. This winter has been particularly severe. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reports that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. The average temperature in January "was 0.3 (degrees) F cooler than the 1901-2000 average," the NCDC says. Ontario and Quebec have experienced major snow and ice storms. In the first two weeks of February, as Canada's National Post reports, Toronto got 79 centimeters of snow, "smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950." This is a consequence of what we recently commented on: The sun, the greatest influence on earth's climate, seems to be entering an unusually quiet cycle of limited sunspot activity. As Kenneth Tapping of Canada's National Research Council warns, we may be in for severely cold weather if sunspot activity doesn't pick up. Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." The last time the sun was this quiet, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age, which lasted five centuries and ended in 1850. The winter at Valley Forge, a famous part of history, occurred during this period. It's a good time, therefore, for some of the best climate scientists in the world to be gathering in New York City — setting for the Al Gore-promoted doomsday flick "The Day After Tomorrow" — for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change hosted by the Heartland Institute. More than 550 climate scientists, economists and public policy experts are at March 2-4 event, their very presence shattering Gore's myth of a warming "consensus" and a debate that is over. Yet because of the media's embrace of Gore's crusade, this may be one of the few places you read about the conference. The keynoter, Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute and the University of Virginia, debunked claims of "unprecedented" melting of Arctic ice. He showed how Arctic temperatures were warmer during the 1930s and that the vast majority of Antarctica is cooling. President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic is scheduled to speak Tuesday. Klaus, who knows what it is to live under a mindless tyranny, thinks he knows the motives of warm-mongers like Gore. He sees an eerie similarity between communism and what he calls the global warming "religion." In the June 14 Financial Times he wrote: "As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning." If Marx and Lenin were alive today, they'd be environmentalists. ibdeditorials.com

To: Sully- who wrote (64535)	3/4/2008 3:28:38 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Mark Falcoff: A war in South America? Power Line Mark Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Cuba: The Morning After -- Confronting Castro's Legacy. He writes tonight to offer his perspective on the possibility of war between Venezuela and Colombia: <<< Of course, with Chavez anything is possible. We are dealing here with a troubled, overgrown adolescent. Nonetheless, it's worth contemplating the likely outcome. The Venezuelan army is -- from a professional point of view -- something of a joke. Have you seen any photographs of its general officers? They all need to go to Weigh Watchers. It's been many years since that armed force had to face a serious enemy, or indeed any enemy except high carbs. In contrast, the Colombian army has been at war for decades with a vicious enemy, often elusive, all the moreso since (as we have recently learned) it has been using Venezuela and apparently Ecuador as safe havens. Even the purportedly right-wing Washington Times refers to President Alvaro Uribe as a "hard liner." Let the US media make the most of it. Uribe is no hand-wringing liberal and doesn't much worry about the approval of outsiders. Why should he? The US Congress -- that is to say, the Democrats -- have told him he isn't going to get a free trade agreement anyway, so he has nothing to lose on that front. Meanwhile, at home he's virtually turned the military and security situation around over the past five or six years, and he isn't afraid of Chavez. Why should he be? If push comes to shove, the Colombian army could make mincemeat out of its Venezuelan counterpart. And if the latter is humiliated on the battlefield, what do you suppose would be its attitude towards the man who sent it into combat? One guess. >>> powerlineblog.com