Freezing Heat Chills Theory of AGW

If someone were to try to make this up, they wouldn't be this surreal. They wouldn't because restraint would hold them back -- the understanding that they couldn't stretch things that far without becoming unbelievable.

What I am referring to is the recent debacle regarding October 2008 being the "hottest October on record". This was the proclamation by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by none other than Dr. James Hansen. You know Dr. Hansen. Or at least you've likely seen or heard him before. He's the NASA scientist who was all over the news a few years back decrying the fact that the Bush Administration had made him rewrite his reports (or rewrote them for him) in order to hide the "fact" that mankind was turning up the thermostat on good ol' Earth.

You simply must read this article. I cannot adequately summarize it without taking away some of its glory. Basically, the GISS made their conclusion on the basis of data from Russia that was actually September data that had just been carried forward for inexplicable reasons. Once the error was pointed out to them and they obtained the correct data, they had to retract their statement, for as anyone paying attention has noticed, it wasn't that particularly warm last month -- as reports came in from around the world "of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years."

Of course, this has not been the first time that Dr. Hansen has been shown the error of his ways: "Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s." I have pointed this out before, on Blog Action Day 2007.

So at least twice now, we can see how the AGW zealots have played fast and loose with the data when it supports their position. It makes sense that they do this, as the real data don't support them at all. And if we've caught them twice, how many other times have they done it and gotten away with it? Don't forget that they have no qualms about suppressing contrary data and theories as well.

Previously I have mentioned the fact that the sun has been clear of sunspots for a good long while now, and that this is not a good thing. Here, courtesy of the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is a photo of the sun from November 16, 2008:

Notice the continued lack of sunspots. This is not a good thing.

Washington State Slides Down the Slippery Slope

The state of Washington voted yesterday to allow physician-assisted suicide.

Another state thus joins Oregon in sliding down the slippery slope first foreseen by Hippocrates and into the morass of allowing imperfect humans to decide when others get to die.

First it's the terminally ill. Then it's the severely depressed. Next it's the people that we healthy people decide are 'existing' in a 'life not worth living' -- the mentally retarded, the infirm, those with physical disabilities. Finally it's those people around us that are merely inconvenient -- the chronically ill and the frail elderly.

For all intents and purposes, this is eugenics. The Nazis did this.

That's why it's called the slippery slope. The best course of action is to not even start to go down it. No one can without slipping.