8/3/2010 – Rodrigo Orihuela -
Argentina is importing record amounts of energy as the coldest winter in 40 years drives up demand and causes natural-gas shortages, prompting Dow Chemical Co. and steelmaker Siderar SAIC to scale back production.

Electricity supplied from Brazil and Paraguay rose to a daily combined record of about 1,000 megawatts on July 12, while consumption peaked at 20,396 megawatts three days later, according to Buenos Aires-based energy broker Cammesa. Shipments of liquefied natural gas are set to double this year.

Dow, Siderar and aluminum maker Aluar Aluminio Argentino SAIC are among companies closing plants, cutting output or seeking alternative energy sources after temperatures in parts of Argentina fell below those of Antarctica on July 15. Rising demand is exacerbating a shortage that began six years ago as economic growth accelerated and energy investment fell. The shortage is boosting costs as companies spend more to guarantee supplies.

“The situation is getting worse, because the shortage period is growing every year,” Gerardo Rabinovich, a director at the General Mosconi Energy Institute in Buenos Aires and an adviser to the opposition Radical Party, said in a telephone interview. “When this started in 2004, it lasted for about a week, then it was two weeks and now it’s more than a month.”

In July, temperatures in Buenos Aires were, on average, 1 degree Celsius below the usual low and high of 8 and 14 degrees (46 and 57 degrees Farenheit), with temperatures plummeting to about 2 degrees Celsius on July 15.

Renewed Cold
Also on July 15, temperatures in Mendoza, the wine- producing region in western Argentina, fell as low as -8.9 degrees Celsius below the temperature registered that day in the Argentine-controlled area of the South Pole, according to a national weather institute report.

Argentina is bracing for a renewed polar front this month. On Aug. 1, almost half of the country’s 23 provinces registered temperatures below zero, while the northern city of La Quiaca on the border with Bolivia fell to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit.) The average low predicated through Aug. 5 is 1 degree, according to the National Weather service.

Dow closed a polyethylene plant in July and reduced operations at another facility to minimum capacity after gas supplies were rationed by the government, said Soledad Echague, a spokeswoman for the Midland, Michigan-based company in Buenos Aires. The cuts were more severe than the company had expected, she said.

HT: Bloomberg

Al Gore’s Church of Climatology has been abandoned by world leaders in their quest to maintain power and political position.

Lawrence Solomon recently reported that G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy by turning their backs on global warming legislation.

Will the “mainstream” media in the U.S. report these findings? Not likely!

Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change.

Not trying to outdo each other, the global-warming commitments of the G20, which now carries more clout than the G8, went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”

These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also a major proponent of global warming legislation, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt.

The Church of The Church of Climatology’s choir director, on global warming Gordon Brown, of the U.K. likewise lost his job.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had vowed to “save the human race” from climate change by introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.

Spain? Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided to gut his country’s renewable industry by unilaterally rescinding the government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding would put most of his country’s 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of business.

Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8 and G20, putting them into default, too.

The U.K may be making the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments responsible for climate-change policies, previously immune to cuts, must now contract by an extraordinary 25%.

Other U.K. departments are also ditching climate-change programs, the casualties include manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and, as the minister in charge put it, “every commitment made by the last government on renewable energy is under review.“

Some areas of U.K.’s economy not only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record offshore oil development in the North Sea, when it granted a record 356 exploration licenses in its most recent round.

Support for global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show as in Europe, that the vast majority of Americans reject the global-warming agenda. Americans resent repeated attempts to pass cap and trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress.

Will progressive ideologues in the U.S. Congress change their tune quickly to save their jobs? Not likely, ignorance and stubbornness are frequently a fatal combination. In anticipation that cap and trade legislation would be stalled in the senate, the current administration tasked the Environmental Protection Agency with capping carbon emissions.

Public opinion surveys now predict that this November’s elections will see sweeping change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the global warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don’t buy it.

One country, Canada and one leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper have stood out for avoiding the worst excesses associated with climate change. Called the Colossal Fossil three years running by some 500 environmental groups around the world, Canada and Stephen Harper are reviled among climate-change campaigners for failing to fall into line.

Not coincidentally, Canada has also stood out for having best withstood the financial crisis that beset the world. Fittingly, Canada and its leader played host to the meetings.

HT: Santa Ana Statehouse Examiner

World Leaders Turn on Al Gore Hoax of Global Warming

The greatest danger to our wealth, our liberties, our values, and our safety today comes from the deconstruction of truth. We live in a world driven by information. Almost all real wealth today is based upon information and knowledge. Almost all real power today is based upon mass communication, education, and entertainment. Even military power relies upon data and intelligence, not brute force.

This drift of modern life toward an information-driven society is morally neutral. Our capacity to control nature, to order our lives, and to know much more than we ever have before allows us to do much more good than we ever have before. Knowledge allows us to cure disease, reduce poverty, expand our horizons of thought, and spend much more time in recreation.

This power also allows us to do much more evil than men in the past. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China could not have survived without information technology. Orwell understood this well in 1984. Every slave in Oceania was subject to electronic surveillance. Meaningless global war consciously consumed all surplus wealth. Science was used to insure poverty, misery, and loneliness: Only the Inner Party and Big Brother were allowed to have any meaning in life. History changed every day. Government statistics were altered without any connection to reality. Information in such a hellish place meant only the momentary position of the Party, which changed constantly.

Churchill also grasped the magnification of evil which greater information allowed, which he spoke of “the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science” which would follow Nazi victory in Europe. Any thought that technology alone is good should take into account how nearly jet engines, nerve gas, smart ordnance, and long-range missiles came to fulfilling the odious dream of a Thousand-Year Reich.

Our modern economies, also, are driven almost entirely by information. Government labor statistics, national debt figures, corporate profit margins, financial interest rates — these and many other numbers largely determine the direction of our economy. Government programs are largely machines into which statistics are tossed and actions taken. We live in this world so fully that it is almost inconceivable that life could be otherwise. But, of course, that is our myopia.

The Constitution and the early republic had only a few numbers of significance: persons within a state were counted once a decade, monies were appropriated for certain narrow purposes (always backed by slender federal tax revenues), certain vital statistics were collected and published (a review of the Statistical Abstract, however, shows just how few numbers were considered worth collecting).

Liberty, a principal purpose of the establishment of our nation, was not quantifiable: Indeed, personal liberty, almost by definition, defies calibration. Peace was not a number, but a fact. Even in the area of monetary value, the federal government did almost nothing. It insured the constancy and accuracy of weights and measurements, but even the term “dollar” referred for a long time simply to a defined measurement of gold, and dollar bills were issued by any number of institutions.

What made the dollar useful was that it was backed up by truth, honor, and integrity. When the federal government issued a dollar bill or a bank in Ohio issued a dollar bill, this was simply a promise to pay a defined weight of “dollar” to the bearer. The crises of a bankrupt California government, uncontrolled federal spending, and politically manufactured economic statistics is the absence, or at least irrelevance, of truth.

What is the heart of the ugly “man-made global warming”? Its acolytes lie. Numbers, data, and other elements of knowledge are simply raw materials to construct a system of extracting power, money, prestige, and other goodies from a befuddled population. Truth is either an a priori given (not connected to scientific research) or an elastic concept which must fit the dictates of partisan whims.

Modern education has also become largely divorced from the founding principles of learning: Take truth and critically build upon it, and reservedly doubt when truth requires doubt. Disciplines like history have been mutilated into freaks reflecting the bitterness of educational elites. Soft sciences like sociology are simply police-state guardhouses. We have not yet reached the point in Orwell’s 1984 where two plus two equals five, but with no clear dividing line between objective truth and politically correct thinking, some of us may live to see that day.

Indeed, one of the most unsavory aspects of the modern power-mongers and their strategies for stealing power is that the holy mantle of “science” is too often wrapped around a false priesthood, casting the doubters into the outer darkness of unscientific thinking. Remember that the Nazis approached their variation of demonic madness entirely dedicated to “science” as their guiding principle. The intoxication of the radical left with “scientific” Marxism is simply astounding: No wild theory has been more disproven by grim experiment than scientific socialism, but no matter — its truth defies consistent laboratory failures.

We have a president who is almost solely the creature of a partisan pseudo-science, which views truth as an odd waste product. Has Obama ever seriously searched for truth? His lifelong chums are a gaggle of pseudo-thinkers and strong-arm operatives who float through college into jobs unconnected with honor. He reads us his soul off a teleprompter whose digitized letters conform to polling data. The terrifying numbers which his surreal spending has created mean nothing to him. The threats to our nation are real to him only as they affect his polling numbers. His indifference to truth is the greatest danger he presents the world. Truth is our highest virtue. Too many millions of us simply do not believe that that is true. As long as concern for honesty, dedication to what is real, and intellectual integrity flounder, all the tricks, toys, and tickets of knowledge and technology will simply be little curses in our lives.

HT: American Thinker

In a rather stunning series of admissions, the suspended chief of the East Anglia CRU now admits that the warming seen in the late 20th century may not be unprecedented after all, that the planet has stopped warming for the last 15 years despite the predictions of AGW advocates, and that his own record-keeping has been poor. Phil Jones, who stepped down at least temporarily from his position at the CRU when its e-mails exposed a series of embarrassing attempts by climate scientists to undermine careers of skeptics and to hide contradictory data, now says that the entire basis of the “hockey stick” graph could have been invalid:

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.  … The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

But that’s just the start:

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming. …

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

The “hockey stick” graph has already been shown to be mainly a creation of graph-scaling bias, but this gets to the heart of the entire argument.  During the MWP, farmers grew crops on Greenland for a couple of centuries.  Until now, AGW advocates insisted that the warming only took place in the northern hemisphere.  If that warming was indeed global, then it dwarfs anything seen in the 20th century, as these two charts from Climate Audit, via  Sonic Frog, demonstrate:

If the massive warming seen in Europe occurred around the world, then what we have seen in the 20th century would be almost certainly a moderate, natural, cyclical warming coming out of a cold trough.  It would also call into question what exactly a good temperature would be for the Earth.  After all, even if the second graph only applied to the northern hemisphere, the increased temperatures didn’t cause the end of life on the planet; indeed, food became more plentiful, and the melting of the polar-region ice didn’t create massive catastrophes.  Further underscoring this interpretation are the cooling cycles seen in the mid-century and last fifteen years or so, expecially since the 1940s saw a huge increase in carbon emissions due to wartime production.

Jones’ late admissions demonstrate that there is nothing “settled” about AGW, and that the process and the data are too murky for any declarations of certainty.

To summarize the latest developments:
* Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes

HT: HotAir.com