The brand new Modern Whig Party of Virginia

I have finished the initial version of the website for the MWP of Virginia.  It links to the mailing list and the forums through the Join page.  I have a History page with a description of the original Whigs in America.  There are a couple of Philosophy pages.  Come over and read all about it and don't forget to join up!  Whig Out!

More climate facts from an IPCC Expert Reviewer

Lee C. Gerhard, an IPCC Expert Reviewer, noted some facts about climate change that seems to undermine claims of an open and shut case:

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen. 

Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:
• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.
• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.
• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.
• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.
• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.
We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:
• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.
• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.
• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.
• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.
• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change. 

Contrary to many public statements:
• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.
• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.
• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years - extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.
• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.
• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century. 

The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.

 http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/fact_based_climate_debate/

The Dominoes are falling after Climategate

The following article describes developments in the aftermath of the release of emails and papers and data manipulation software from the CRU in England.  One of the developments is:

A story is beginning to take shape. This story broke into the world media Wednesday. An article in RIA Novosti, the Russian state-owned news service, states:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office inExeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The article reports that the IEA had taken a new look at the data used in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climatic Change (IPCC) reports. These reports, which became the basis for warnings of dramatic human-caused global warming that led to calls for extensive regulation and to the current climate change conference in Copenhagen, are based on world temperature estimates using measurements from thousands of reporting sites throughout the world.

Novosti reported that the data used for temperature measurements in Russia appeared to have been carefully chosen from the warmest reporting sites. If an average were taken over all Russian reporting sites, then there was little or no warming to report.

The article goes on to report on the release of data from the UK:

While the Novosti report has gotten the most attention, it’s not the only such report. The Climategate files forced the UK Meteorological Office to make at least part of their raw data available. One of the first was Willis Eschenbach, at Watts Up With That. Read the whole discussion and also Eschenbach’s answer to a critique published in the Economist for the details, but here is the “money shot”:

In this figure, the blue line is the raw data. The black line is the adjustments that had been applied to that data, and the red line is the result following the adjustments.

As you can see the adjustments are what causes the increase in the red line.  The blue line shows no warming at all.  Next is from the US:

The next domino was a study by Dr. Richard Keen of the University of Colorado that was reported at the Air Vent blog. In it, Dr. Keen compares the raw data from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) with data from the Global Climate historical network, the adjusted data as published in the IPCC report. Dr. Keen finds that the raw data does indeed show an upward trend of 0.69°C per century, which he believes is explained by the “Pacific Decadal Oscillator,” a well known long-term phenomenon.

The data used by the IPCC instead shows warming four times greater, 2.8°C per century, an adjustment of about 2°C.

All in all, these revelations result in this conclusion:

What can be said is this: We now have substantial evidence, from several independent sources, that the data used as the basis for the IPCC report has been adjusted in undocumented ways, and those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.

Until the data is re-examined, fully, openly, and transparently, it is impossible to conclude how much of a contribution to global climate change humans have made, or whether that contribution has been made by human-generated CO2. And without knowing that, attempts to “fix the problem,” through cap and trade or Copenhagen agreements, is misguided at best — and dangerous at worst.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-faster-and-faster-the-dominos-fall/

Global Warming - Beyond Debate?

Martin Cohen writes on the non-scientific aspects of global warming promotion:  Beyond Debate?

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them (see box page 36)? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

Whether rational or not, global warming theory has become a political orthodoxy. So entrenched is it that those showing any resistance to it are described as "heretics" or even likened to "Holocaust deniers".

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and columnist for The New York Times, has said: "Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual? Yes, it is - and that's why it's unforgivable ... the deniers are choosing, wilfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is."

Another columnist, this time for The Boston Globe, has written: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, although one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

Such pronouncements from these commentators and from other people highly placed in government, international organisations, the press, academia and science make the debate seem closed and the conclusion beyond dispute. Yet the plain fact is that there is something deeply unscientific about the theory of global warming. Despite this, it has gained such widespread, uncritical acceptance that any scientist expressing a doubt often finds his or her actions tarred with accusations of the rankest political and personal motivations.

How this situation came about says much about how science is co-opted to sway public opinion. The case is built, deliberately or not, on misleading images and interpretations that have been perpetuated by parties with a vested interest. It morphs into a tool for governments to intimidate their populations into passive acceptance of very real changes: from the tiny, such as accepting miserable fluorescent light instead of the incandescent light we've been used to; to the major, like welcoming nuclear power plants and obliging rainforest tribes to make way for biofuel plantations.

National Council Meeting

I had a great day today and met some interesting people. At times the schedule was specific about what we were to talk about and at other times we changed it to talk about what we wanted to talk about. This was my first experience with Robert's Rules of Order or whatever they are called. So without further ado, let me talk a little about what we covered.

Bylaws: Brian from Texas gave us a rundown on the bylaws and how they impact what we were doing. Elections for the national officers will be held tomorrow. I didn't catch any specifics.

Communications: We discussed the communications plan from the national party to the state party chairs, to include weekly summaries of activity, a monthly newsletter and how to handle changes in leadership. Group communications was also covered regarding the member database, email lists, and forums.

Georgia Whigs: Drew from the Georgia Whigs gave a pair of presentations that discussed GA's strategic approach. He divided this into Communications, Structure and Strategy. Part of the discussion on Communications was about the Tenets. He added several Tenets including: Methodology over Ideology, Self-Discovery, and a Long-term Solutions approach.

They have a two-pronged approach which I didn't capture, but I think it was developing leaders and getting members active. To do this there is an Academy that members go through which provide some basic education about Whig stuff and state stuff. These classes are online and last a couple of hours. The first class introduces members to the Academy where they create a personal profile. This profile contains personal info and a resume, as well as a number of Whig artifacts, like classes taken and events participated in.

Now there is also an Association Forum and a Solutions Forum. The Association Forum brings participants together to identify and quantify problems and alternate problems. So a given situation, like high-drug use (my example) may have a primary problem, identified if a super-majority of the participants agree, that it is culturally encouraged and getting high makes you forget about your troubles. There is also an alternate problem, if less people agree, which states that poor upbringing causes high drug use. Once problems are identified, they move to the Solutions Forum where Whigs can debate and vote on solutions to the problem(s).

There was a presentation on Strategy but that is confidential.

Tenets: We spend significant time on developing and refining the National Tenets. They will be announced shortly.

Short term and Long term Goals: We all contributed our ideas to the goals over the next year and those for the next 10 years.

Ballot access: we talked about what it takes to get a candidate on the ballot in each of the 50 states. Along with that comes the rules for collecting donations. Also, establishing the party officially.