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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (486227)	6/7/2009 4:29:21 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573852

'Realists' challenge claim of consensus on warming By Marieke van der Vaart SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES \| Sunday, June 7, 2009 CITIZEN JOURNALISM Several hundred scientists, politicians and activists participated in the third annual International Conference on Climate Change on Tuesday, marking another stage in the timeline of a scientific social movement. The conference, sponsored by the nonprofit Heartland Institute, hosted panels of climatologists and meteorologists as well as members of Congress to address questions surrounding global warming and climate-change legislation. In its 25 years, Heartland has drawn together about 31,000 scientists, more than 9,000 of whom hold doctorates, to provide a forum for scientific debate on the issue of man-made global warming. Self-titled "global warming realists" who are scientific members of Heartland's community band together to fight the misconception of scientific consensus on the issue of global warming. The third conference opened with the publication of "Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change." Mirroring the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the nongovernmental group, NIPCC, claims membership by several hundred scientists skeptical of IPCC's findings. Although individual members of the NIPCC have questioned the U.N. body's claims for years, the release of their own 800-page report makes their arguments difficult to ignore, said Heartland Institute President Joseph L. Bast. "This is the first time the realists have had a comprehensive reply to the IPCC," he said. "The other side kept saying, 'Where is your report? Where is your IPCC?' This book says we're here, we have got our act together." The report, the largest collection of independent research on the topic, doesn't claim perfection. "This is not the last word on climate change," Mr. Bast said. "It's much more intellectually honest." Conference speakers said openness to questions is missing in the global-warming debate. "It's not about discussing facts," said astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon of the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "It's always been a non-engaging debate. It's all about how much money you get from Exxon Mobil." Environmental activists also attack Heartland for its past ties to Exxon Mobil Corp. Mr. Bast countered that the foundation's emphasis on global warming predated funding from the corporation. Scientists at the conference disputed the claim that human activity and emissions of carbon dioxide cause catastrophic global warming. Instead, they examine climate change in the context of history and credit natural atmospheric cycles with recent warming. "Cooling, warming, change in general are natural features of the climate," said Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The mere existence of change tells us nothing beyond this." Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama, criticized the models used by the IPCC for failing to sufficiently take into account natural factors like cloud coverage. "All you need is to alter cloud coverage by 1 percent, and you've got global warming or global cooling," Mr. Spencer said. Heartland's third conference took place in Washington to emphasize to legislators what's at stake in the issue of man-made global warming. "The specter of man-made global warming has been promulgated and has been used [for] stampeding the public in the biggest power grab in all of human history," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, told attendees. Mr. Bast and his colleagues hope their openness to debate will fuel public involvement. "Today, you're seeing the transition of an ad-hoc group of scientists turned into a social movement," Mr. Bast said. Marieke van der Vaart, who lives in Fairfax County, is studying journalism and American history at Hillsdale College.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (486227)	6/7/2009 5:00:51 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573852

Indeed, keep giving till your checks bounce.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (486227)	6/7/2009 5:41:17 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1573852

PRUDEN: 'Inner Muslim' at work in Cairo By Wesley Pruden (Contact) \| Friday, June 5, 2009 OPINION/ANALYSIS: Now it's on to Normandy, to apologize to the Germans. It's the least an American president can do after the way the Allied armies left so much of Europe in rubble. There's a lot of groveling to do for what America accomplished in the Pacific, too. This prospect should appeal to Barack Obama, who relishes the role of Apologizer-in-Chief. Apologizing for manifold sins against civilization is not always easy, but it's simple enough: "Blame America First." You just open a vein and let it flow. In Cairo, Mr. Obama opened an artery. America, unlike the president, is guilty of hubris, arrogance and cant. All that must change. "Change" is what the smooth-talking Chicago messiah says he is all about. "Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail," he told the Muslim elites Thursday at Cairo U. "So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it." It's not "a world order" that elevates America, but events. No other country is as generous, as forgiving, as willing to sacrifice blood and bone when the world calls for help. If not America, who? Hasn't the president heard? Big talkers don't know when to stop when they're on a rhetorical roll because they can't remember which facts are actually facts and which "facts" they're making up. Mr. Obama even attributed the Golden Rule, from the teachings of Christ, to "every religion." In an interview before the Cairo speech, he called the United States one of "the largest Muslim countries," based on its Muslim population, and he later put the number of Muslims in America at 7 million, more than even most Islamic advocacy groups claim. The most reliable estimate, by the nonpartisan Pew research organization, is 1.8 million. That would make the United States the 48th "largest" Muslim nation, just behind Montenegro. Mr. Obama often has trouble with numbers, big and small; he once boasted of having campaigned in 57 states. Mr. Obama described himself as "a Christian, but," and offered a hymn to the Muslim roots he insisted during the late presidential campaign he didn't have. He invoked his middle name, "Hussein," as evidence that he was one of "them." The Obama campaign insisted last year that anyone who uses the middle name was playing with racism. He told the Cairo audience that "to move forward we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts," but he wasted the opportunity to forcefully instruct Muslims that respect and appreciation must be mutual. While conceding the mote in American eyes, he said almost nothing about the beam that blinds Muslim eyes. He enumerated the "sources of tension" between Islamic countries and the West and never mentioned terrorism. He chided the West for its harsh view of Islamic treatment of women - "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal" - and suggested that denying education to women is the gravest Muslim sin against women. He could have denounced "honor killings," forced marriages and how women in Muslim countries are flogged on the pretext of minuscule violations of eighth-century Sharia law. But it was more fun to fish for applause by berating America and throwing rocks at Israel. "Let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." Israel, he said, must "live up to its obligations," but he had hardly a word of rebuke for the long record of broken Palestinian promises. It was a remarkable insult to an absent ally, delivered to the applause of Israel's sworn enemies. Mr. Obama's revelation of his "inner Muslim" in Cairo reveals much about who he is. He is our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture, history, tradition, common law and literature whence America sprang. The genetic imprint writ large in his 43 predecessors is missing from the Obama DNA. He no doubt meant no offense in returning that bust of Churchill ("Who he?") or imagining that a DVD of American movies was appropriate in an exchange of state gifts with Gordon Brown. Nor did he likely understand why it was an offense against history (and good manners) to agree to the exclusion of the Queen from Saturday's commemoration of the Anglo-American liberation of France. Kenya simply routed Kansas. The great Cairo grovel accomplished nothing beyond the humiliation of the president and the embarrassment of his constituents, few of whom share his need to put America on its knees before its enemies. No president before him has ever shamed us so. We must never forget it. • Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.