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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (57001)	12/20/2008 11:27:31 AM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Respond to of 224749

What did Mark Twain say 'if you don't like the weather wait 15 minutes'. Seems like it was weird weather 150 years ago.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (57001)	12/20/2008 1:24:26 PM
From: lorne	7 Recommendations Respond to of 224749

Your statement...."Good morning Ann. It's warmer in Anchorage AK right now (20 degrees) than it is in Seattle, WA (16 degrees). Wierd weather.".... Not wierd at all. Ken...You ever heard of the Japanese current?? Like the Gulf Stream current only in the Pacific Ocean??...Oh and the Gulf Stream Current is in the Atlantic ocean. You really are a hopeless and a bit delusional person...you appear to say or do anything to make your political party look good to yourself. Gees wake up! Climate Anchorage is commonly misconceived as being cold and dark the majority of the year. However, the truth is that the climate is actually quite mild. With the Alaska Range to the north and the warm Japanese current to the south, Anchorage experiences a surprisingly moderate, maritime climate. Anchorage residents enjoy four distinct seasons. During the Spring and Summer, Anchorage's climate is similar to San Francisco's spring weather, with temperatures that can reach into the 70s. Winters bring snow with high temperatures dipping into the 20s, creating a climate very much like ski resorts in the Rocky Mountains, Canada or Europe. Low humidity also contributes to Anchorage's comfortable climate. aedcweb.com

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (57001)	12/20/2008 5:18:34 PM
From: lorne	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224749

Emanuel talked directly to gov: source DEEPER ROLE? \| Pushed Jarrett for Senate seat December 18, 2008 BY NATASHA KORECKI suntimes.com Federal Courts Reporter nkorecki@suntimes.com President-elect Barack Obama's incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had a deeper involvement in pressing for a U.S. Senate seat appointment than previously reported, the Sun-Times has learned. Emanuel had direct discussions about the seat with Gov. Blagojevich, who is is accused of trying to auction it to the highest bidder. Emanuel talked with the governor in the days following the Nov. 4 election and pressed early on for the appointment of Valerie Jarrett to the post, sources with knowledge of the conversations told the Sun-Times. There was no indication from sources that Emanuel brokered a deal, however. A source with the Obama camp strongly denied Emanuel spoke with the governor directly about the seat, saying Emanuel only spoke with Blagojevich once recently to say he was taking the chief of staff post. But sources with knowledge of the investigation said Blagojevich told his aides about the calls with Emanuel and sometimes gave them directions afterward. Sources said that early on, Emanuel pushed for the appointment of Jarrett to the governor and his staff and asked that it be done by a certain date. At least some of the conversations between Emanuel and Blagojevich were likely caught on tape, sources said. After Jarrett took herself out of the running in mid-November, Emanuel submitted a list of suitable names to the governor's camp that didn't include her name. Emanuel, who has refused to comment on the issue, is not accused of wrongdoing. In portions of conversations released in a criminal complaint against Blagojevich, he can be heard complaining that Obama wouldn't give anything in return for a Jarrett appointment.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (57001)	12/21/2008 1:28:23 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	1 Recommendation Respond to of 224749

Tierney's Lab finds Obama's choice unwise: Flawed Science Advice for Obama? By John Tierney, newyorktimes.com, December 21, 2008 Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday. [UPDATE: Mr. Obama did indeed pick Dr. Holdren.] Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce. In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990. Now, you could argue that anyone’s entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who’s supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who’d seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon’s predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissent from today’s environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven’t seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren. Consider what happened when a successor to Dr. Simon, Bjorn Lomborg, published “The Skeptical Environmentalist” in 2001. Dr. Holdren joined in an an extraordinary attack on the book in Scientific American — an attack that I thought did far more harm to the magazine’s reputation than to Dr. Lomborg’s. The Economist called the critique “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance”; Dr. Lomborg’s defenders said the critics made more mistakes in 11 pages than they were able to find in his 540-page book. (You can read Dr. Lomborg’s rebuttal here.) In an earlier post, I wrote about Dr. Holdren’s critique of the chapter on energy, in which Dr. Lomborg reviewed the history of energy scares and predicted there would not be dire shortages in the future: Dr. Holdren began his critique by complaining that Dr. Lomborg was “asking the wrong question” because environmentalists had known for decades that there was no danger of energy being in short supply. This struck me as as odd bit of revisionist history, given both the “energy crisis” rhetoric of the 1970s and Dr. Holdren’s own bet that resources would become more scarce. Then, in the rest of the critique, Dr. Holdren faulted Dr. Lomborg for not paying enough attention to the reasons that there could be future problems with energy supplies. Dr. Holdren’s resistance to dissenting views was also on display earlier this year in an article asserting that climate skeptics are “dangerous.” (You can read about the response to that article at DotEarth.) Dr. Holdren is certainly entitled to his views, but what concerns me is his tendency to conflate the science of climate change with prescriptions to cut greenhouse emissions. Even if most climate scientists agree on the anthropogenic causes of global warming, that doesn’t imply that the best way to deal with the problem is through drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions. There are other ways to cope, and there’s no “scientific consensus” on which path looks best. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado and the author of “The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics,” discussed Dr. Holdren’s conflation of science and politics in a post on the Prometheus blog: The notion that science tells us what to do leads Holdren to appeal to authority to suggest that not only are his scientific views correct, but because his scientific views are correct, then so too are his political views. AT the Reason Hit & Run blog, Ronald Bailey reviews some of Dr. Holdren’s work and notes that in a 1995 essay, he and his coauthors (Gretchen C. Daily and Dr. Ehrlich) “acknowledge ecological ignorance about the principles of economics, but don’t express any urgency in learning about them.” At OpenMarket.org, the Competitive Enterprise Institute blog, Chris Horner criticizes the reported Holdren appointment and suggests that Dr. Holdren got in to the National Academy of Sciences through a “back door.” What kind of White House science advisor you think Dr. Holdren would make? tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (57001)	12/21/2008 1:34:11 PM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Respond to of 224749

MURDOCK: Global cooling? Deroy Murdock Sunday, December 21, 2008 Winter officially arrives today with the solstice. But for many Americans, autumn 2008's final days already felt like deepest, coldest January. Some New Englanders still lack electricity after a Dec. 11 ice storm snapped power lines. Up to eight inches of snow struck New Orleans and southern Louisiana that day and didn't melt for 48 hours in some neighborhoods. In southern California Dec. 17, a half-inch of snow brightened Malibu's hills while a half-foot barricaded highways and marooned commuters in desert towns east of Los Angeles. Three inches of the white stuff shuttered Las Vegas' McCarren Airport that day and dusted the Strip's hotels and casinos. What are the odds of that? Actually, the odds are rising that snow, ice and cold will grow increasingly common. As serious scientists repeatedly explain, global cooling is here. It is chilling temperatures and so-called "global-warming." According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2008 will be America's coldest year since 1997, thanks to La Nina and precipitation in the central and eastern states. Solar quietude also may underlie global cooling. This year's sunspots and solar radiation approach the minimum in the sun's cycle, corresponding with lower Earth temperatures. This echoes Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas' belief that solar variability, much more than CO2, sways global temperatures. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service reports that last summer was Anchorage's third coldest on record. "Not since 1980 has there been a summer less reflective of global warming," Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News. Consequently, Alaska's glaciers are thickening in the middle. "It's been a long time on most glaciers where they've actually had positive mass balance," U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia told Mr. Medred Oct. 13. Similarly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center found that Arctic sea ice expanded 13.2 percent this year, or a Texas-sized 270,000 square miles. Across the equator, Brazil endured an especially cold September. Snow graced its southern provinces that month. "Global Warming is over, and Global Warming Theory has failed. There is no evidence that CO2 drives world temperatures or any consequent climate change," Imperial College London astrophysicist and long-range forecaster Piers Corbyn wrote British members of Parliament on Oct. 28. "According to official data in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been colder than that year, yet CO2 has been rising rapidly." That evening, as the House of Commons debated legislation on so-called "global warming," October snow fell in London for the first time since 1922. These observations parallel those of five German researchers led by Professor Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences. "Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade," they concluded in last May's Nature, "as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic (man-made) warming." This "lull" should doom the 0.54 degree Fahrenheit average global temperature rise predicted by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Vatican of so-called "global warming." Incidentally, the IPCC's computer models factor in neither El Nino nor the Gulf Stream. Excluding such major climate variables would be like ESPN ignoring baseball and basketball. So, is this all just propaganda concocted by Chevron-funded, right-wing, flat-Earthers? Ask Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a physical chemist and retired Navy meteorologist. "As a scientist and life-long liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear-mongering clap-trap about human-caused global warming to be a disservice to science," Mr. Hertzberg wrote in Sept. 26's USA Today. "From the El Nino year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C (0.45 F). From Jan., 2007 until the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C (1.35 F)." As global cooling becomes more widely recognized, Americans from Maine to Malibu should feel comfortable dreaming of a white Christmas. Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.