Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut. He is also part of the “tiny minority” of flat-earth, knuckledragging, mouthbreathing deniers of The World According to Gorp.

Phil’s piece in The Australian looks at the lack of recent sunspot activity, and draws a plausible correlation to global cooling, resulting in a coming ice age. Great read. Hope it’s not too scary for the chicken littles.

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

Read more: “Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh”

See Also: “Nobody Listening to The Goracle”

from junkscience.com

“Once upon a time the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to individuals who dedicated their lives to the betterment of humanity. They focused on real world issues and championed real world solutions. In 1952, Dr. Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work. Dr. Schweitzer founded a hospital in French Equatorial Africa. He would later expand the facility and by the 1960’s the hospital would serve more than 500 patients at any one time.

In 1964, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. won the award for his leadership during America’s civil rights movement. Between 1957 and 1968 Dr. King had traveled more than 6 million miles and spoke more than 2,500 times as he advocated equal rights for all people.

In 1986, Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel received the award for his human rights activities. He is the founding president of the Universal Academy of Cultures, in Paris, and chairman of the Eli Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife established to combat intolerance and injustice.

Things have changed.” (Joe Bell, Opinion Editorials)

Updated and Bumped
Momentum is building. Google hits 1,680,000 entries for the phrase “the greatest campaign finance scandal in American history.” Hillary Rodham Clinton is now at the top of the heap. Keep it going folks!
++++++

“the+greatest+campaign+finance+scandal+in+American+history”

“the greatest campaign finance scandal in American history”

Now that this phrase has been published by a respected member of the MSM, and, as such, is now in the LexusNexis search database, it seems appropriate to associate that phrase with the person to whom it refers: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I received a ping from FReeper “Spirit of Allegiance” this morning which pointed to an article which featured our pal, “Dougfromupland.”

The article was in the San Francisco Chronicle’s on line edition. Here is the introductory paragraph of the article about “the greatest campaign finance scandal in American history.”

In his other life, Douglas Cogan, 59, is a San Bernardino County commercial real estate broker. But for years, the conservative Republican has spent thousands of hours painstakingly researching what he calls “the greatest campaign finance scandal in American history” by a woman he calls one of the most dangerous political figures the country has ever seen - Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Since it appears that Google has enabled “google-bombing” again, I thought it might be interesting to get the phrase, “the greatest campaign finance scandal in American history,” permanently associated with Hillary Rodham Clinton. That is the purpose of this post. And, if any of you bloggers out there want to join in, just copy+paste this post at your blog, or pass it along in the comments section of your favorite blogs. The more the merrier. I’m going to track-post it to Linkfests, and post it at FR and Hannity. I’ll also activate every tag I have ever used to associate it with this post. Heh.
+++++++

Read the rest of this entry »

News you can use in one stop.

Humorous:
Speech Disorder.
You have to stay on your toes, like Ahmadinejad at a urinal, to grasp this point since it’s so often confused in our public discourse…
Osama bin Laden Dead, Hundreds of Thousands Protest
Osama bin Laden was cornered by U.S. forces in his cave. He was reported to have been surrounded by 17 virgins whom he blew up along with himself, while shouting “Allahu, Akbar!”
In response, massive rallies were held in Washington.

Iraq:
Iraqi Parties Denounce Splitting Country
Biden takes another to the jaw.
Iraqi army says kills 40 militants.
That says the Iraqi Army…not the MNF, folks.
US military deaths in Iraq lowest in 14 months.
And yet, the defeatist still want to surrender.
War Protest Draws Small Crowd.
Participants Cite Public Apathy in Low Turnout for Rally at the Capitol…Four blocks away on the Mall, thousands were attending the National Book Fair…

Gorebal Warming:
Gore Dodges Repeated Calls to Debate Global Warming.
He’s too self-important for that.
It’s All About Money!
Yep, our money.

Finally, since it’s Sunday:
Mark Steyn.
Sometimes it’s not about “freedom of speech,” but about freedom. Ask an Iranian homosexual. If you can find one.
Read the rest of this entry »

This BBC Channel 4 production was hosted on several video sites a few months ago, but it has been slowly disappearing.

I don’t know why, but I agree with Don Hagen, who suspects the producers may be getting ready to release it on DVD, and they’re trying to protect their copyrights.

Makes sense.

Of course, there may be other reasons [cue black helicopters].

So, before it disappears completely, here it is….

And, if you want to save your own copy, go here and grab a VLC media player (Replaces Windows Media Player, Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc.) and download the video while you still can.