Smith absurdly wrote: "Some think automobiles and industrialization are to blame for Earth's current warming period. Yet, just as many scientists point to natural indicators ..." Smith’s comments led the Daily Astorian to proclaim that the Senator had joined the "Flat Earth Society."

This appears to be similar to Smith's thinking about resolving the Klamath Basin Water Crisis that resulted in tens of thousands of fish dying and threatening the livelihood of hundreds of people dependent on fish stocks.

Major kudos to Steve. The Sanders-Boxer bill is the only Senate bill that would meet the targets scientists say are necessary to stabilize the climate and avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

Building support for the bill is one of Environment Oregon's top federal priorities.

Kudos to Novick

Has anyone calculated the effect of the Sanders/Boxer bill on low income people?

Will it raise their energy costs? Will it raise their transoprtaion costs? Will it raise their food costs?

Will it force them to choose betweem heat and food?

Thanks JK

Perhaps he should have made reducing global expenditures on military weapons a priority, or ending the drug war. MW

Why is there no comment about the ice build up in the south pole? No comment about the longer food growing seasons that directly aids the poor? No comment about the financial costs of unemployment to UNION employees when the US abides by some pact that is ignored by China, Russia, and the other large industrial producers.

Union brothers & sisters, prepare to lose even more jobs to 2nd world countries that will not be bound by an elitist global warmin dogood measures.

What a joke. It appears the left is incappable of a learning curve with Global Warming, turning blind and deaf to all of the scientific contradictions by more and more scientists every week. It seems it doesn't matter. Why is that?
Oh yeah, you had already declared the debate over. Nice approach. Real fact based and responsible.

Amazingly similar to Novick/Democrat et al's support for the 15 year education fraud CIMCAM. Nice call there Steve. Did you study that policy real close too? Not hardly. Had you done any homework you would have realized long ago the many CIMCAM misrepresentations which you blindly echoed.

Well here you go again, pushing complete BS about human caused global warming calamity. No need to rely on Jim Karlock, go google yourself and discover the extensive, growing and conclusive debunking of this Gore fraud.

You folks present yourselves as experts in detecting all sorts of fraud perpetrated by Republican evildoers.

So go detect the Global Warming fraud.

Pat curses! the ever wily jim karlock (google him, seriously) has discovered the real rationale behind the entire "global warming" conspiracy!

now that we've been discovered, i will reveal, in true super-villain fashion, that our intent was all along to raise "transoprtaion costs" for the poor. and we would have gotten away with it too, if weren't for you meddling kids that d*mned dog of yours... JK: Why is it that local “progressives” never seem to really care about the poor? They just try to make a joke out of your hurting the poor.

Why don’t you address the harm your proposal will cause to the poor? Or don’t you really care?

Thanks JK

Pat:if the globe is this warm, it won't be a choice between "heat and food." there will be enough "heat" to go around. JK: Hey, give that warming crap a rest, at least until the ice uncovers the last of those old Viking farms on Greenland.

I presume that you know that two of your key emotional arguments have disappeared in the last year: 1) The “hockey stick” temperature chart that Gore uses was debunked by Steve McIntyre and the debunking was verified by the National Academy of Sciences. The guy that created it misapplied statistics and didn’t even get the name of the procedure he used right.

2) The warmest year in recent history was 1934 NOT 1998, like Gore loves to claim. The ten warmest years WERE not in the 1990s, but most were in the 1930s.

What you have left is a bunch of alarmism over ordinary weather phenomena.

It is time to give up on your chicken little line. You could learn a lot from ClimateAudit.org and icecap.us/

Thanks JK

"Every single person you have ever cited as doubting warming shows up on a list of nutbags with no credibility whatsoever."

That seals it torrid. You are completely lost. For you to batch up all of the plentiful and growing contrarian science and scientists as "fossil fuel-backed, crackpots & nutbags with no credibility", you have to be
something of a complete ignorant fool incappable of simple study.
And Jim you quoted the wrong person.

Pat:And Jim you quoted the wrong person.

JK: Oops, sorry.

Thanks JK

torridjoe (quoting JK) "You could learn a lot from ClimateAudit.org and icecap.us/"

You could...but almost none of it would be true. For the 100th time, quit pimping fossil fuel-backed "science" by known crackpots. Every single person you have ever cited as doubting warming shows up on a list of nutbags with no credibility whatsoever. JK: crackpots? How about Steve McIntyre who spotted major errors in Mann’s “hockey stick”? Said errors were verified by the National Academy of Sciences. I know, to you, they are not as credible as the sierra club , but to the rest of the world they are one of the most respected organizations around. I almost forgot: Mann didn’t even get the name of ths statistical process that he used right. BTW McIntyre runs ClimateAudit.org.

As for Icecap.us, it is run my genuine meteorologists - you know the real weather experts, not some computer hack playing with climate models like Mann, Gore’s “science” advisor”

torridjoe as for harming poor people, I'm pretty sure being dead is harmful. JK: As for harming people, warmer weather will actually help man - like it did during the medieval warm period when climate change to warm weather may have ended the dark ages. That is when most people’s thought processes were like you are showing here.

BTW did you know that one can find a correlation between sunspots and the price of wheat going back hundreds of years?

You really ought to try reading some real science instead of all that nutbag alarmist crap. I’ll bet you even got sucked in by the coming ice age in the 70s. See: saveportland.com/Climate/index.html

Thanks JK

Sal Peralta: McIntyre holds no advanced degrees in climate-related science, and is a paid consultant for the George C. Marshall Institute, which has received $715,000 in funding from Exxon-Mobil over the last 9 years -- primarily to help cast doubt on Climate Change.

He has never had an article published in a peer-reviewed journal. JK: What is your point? This is just another ad hominem from someone who won’t bother to look at the evidence (or is incapable of looking at it.)

Sal Peralta: Mann's graph was endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences:

'"We roughly agree with the substance of their findings," says Gerald North, the committee's chair and a climate scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station. In particular, he says, the committee has a "high level of confidence" that the second half of the twentieth century was warmer than any other period in the past four centuries. But, he adds, claims for the earlier period covered by the study, from AD 900 to 1600, are less certain.' taken from Nature, June 28, 2006.

Jim, you'd fare much better with a more honest approach. You just never know when someone is going to fact-check your statements. JK: Lets fact check your “honest approach”. And lets use the primary source: National Academy of Sciences Report on global climate change ( Report is at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html ) Here is the actual quote: It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies. (Bold Added) But they also said: Large-scale surface temperature reconstructions yield a generally consistent picture of temperature trends during the preceding millennium, including relatively warm conditions centered around A.D. 1000 (identified by some as the “Medieval Warm Period”) and a relatively cold period (or “Little Ice Age”) centered around 1700. The existence and extent of a Little Ice Age from roughly 1500 to 1850 is supported by a wide variety of evidence including ice cores, tree rings, borehole temperatures, glacier length records, and historical documents.(Bold Added) Now lets do some grade school arithmetic (If you are up to it): Four centuries before now is: 2007 - 400 = 1607. Golly gee!! Right in the middle of the Little Ice Age from roughly 1500 to 1850 Got that: We are warming up after the little ice age. (And CO2 naturally increases a few hundred years after warming starts. See: realclimate.org/index.php?p=13)

I hope you noticed the references to the “Medieval Warm Period” and the “Little Ice Age”? The interesting thing is that neither of these features appear on Mann’s “hockey stick.” That shows the hockey stick is pure garbage.

You also neglected to tell us about this (the Wegman report was commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences and he is past prez. of the statistics division.): Wegman: In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. 07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf, page 4 JK: Again, MBH98, MBH99 are the papers that gave us Al Gore’s hockey stick temperature curve while MM03/05a/05b are from McIntyre, who pointed out a number of flaws such as: You can take red noise and put it into the algorithm used in MBH98 and get the famous hockey stick. You can remove the bristle cone pines from the data set and the hockey stick disappears. If you use the correct centering methodology, the hockey stick disappears.

Wegman: page 4: In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. JK: This debunks the claim that MM98 false conclusions don’t matter because they are supported by other “scientists”. They other “scientists” are probably NOT independent.

Wegman: page 4: Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

BTW, 1998 was not the warmest year, 1934 was and many of the warmest years were in the 30s.

You have no case. It is time for you to face reality and admit that the sky is not falling. The world is not ending. We do not need to give up our way of life.

Thanks JK

Sal Peralta: Here's my challenge to you, Pat: Provide me with a list of "experts" who publishes a position that claims to debunk Climate Change.

I will provide you with public information that demonstrates that in the overwhelming majority of cases, their work is funded, directly or indirectly, by energy concerns. JK: Funding is only important to those who are incapable of evaluating the facts. Since you seem to have that problem, lets start with Al Gore who is president of a mutual fund that makes money off of the warming scare. Of course, most of the warmers are funded by government and their funding disappears if we quit worrying about climate. It is a multi-billion industry. Jim Hanson works for NASA, which gets funding for researching things like climate change. As an employee, Hanson has a personal financial stake in climate alarmism.

Anyway, try this list of over 60 papers that debunk at least one aspect of global warming: friendsofscience.org/assets/files/documents/Madhav%20bibliography%20LONG%20VERSION%20Feb%206-07.pdf

Anxiously awaiting you reply Thanks JK

It worked for me. Here it is in link form if it gets past the spam filter: bibliography.

As to you other comments: I think you must have missed the Wagman quote I posted above:

Wegman: In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. 07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf, page 4 JK: That is harsh criticism in the understated world of real science. MBH98, MBH99 are the papers that gave us Al Gore’s hockey stick temperature curve. Wegman called them somewhat obscure and incomplete .... leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. In ordinary English they are caca.

You will recall that the MM03/05a/05b, that Wegman talks about, are the McIntyre papers severely criticizing Mann. McIntyre pointed out that: You can take red noise and put it into the algorithm used in MBH98 and get the famous hockey stick. You can remove the bristle cone pines from the data set and the hockey stick disappears. If you use the correct data centering methodology, the hockey stick disappears. Wegman described the criticisms in MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling

Bottom line: the Mann papers that gave us the hockey stick are “obscure and incomplete” and had a “misuse in principal component analysis” while the critics of the Mann papers were found to be “valid and compelling.”

Al Gore’s hockey stick is shown, by competent experts, to be wrong. None of this is deny moderate warming (probably mostly solar caused), it just deny’s the foundation of the “sky is falling” alarmists like Al Gore and Jim Henson (who just today/yesterday released the computer code used to create the climate record used by many scholars after trying to keep it secret).

BTW how will anti warming measures hurt the poor?

Thanks JK

Sal Peralta: (quoting JK) BTW how will anti warming measures hurt the poor?

They won't. That's just another bullet in the disinformation campaign being promoted by Big Oil in an attempt to protect their profits. JK: Big Oil = evil --- sort of like the big multinational enviro corporations = evil?? BTW, how can you raise the price of energy (carbon tax, etc.) without hurting the poor? How can you mandate higher gas mileage without raising the cost (hybrids) or getting people killed (smaller cars)?

Sal Peralta: What will hurt the poor is a failure to explore, in a timely fashion, alternatives to oil. Changes to technology that serve the dual purpose of decreasing CO2 emissions and increasing fuel economy and/or the efficiency of plants that rely on fossil fuels will decrease consumer costs over time. JK: Glad to see that you are on board for currently proven technologies like tar sands, coal to oil and nuclear (to charge plug-in hybrid cars.) Hopefully, for those that worry about and are willing to pay for it, in the future it will become economic to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to use the carbon to make carbon neutral synthetic oil (probably using nuclear energy.)

Of course we are probably only a couple years away from the realization that global warming has been vastly over-hyped and that CO2 is not a real problem. We saw a little hint of what is to come when Jim Hansen (poor persecuted NASA "scientist") changed the official USA temperature history to make 1934, not 1998, the warmest year in the record and that also made most of the warmest years in the 30s, not the 90s.

Coming soon will be the revelation that thermometer type changes were not properly accounted for and that the world's best temperature monitoring network (USA) really isn't that good. We have official thermometers in asphalt parking lots, near air-conditioner outlets and near jet taxiways (they are supposed to be in a clear field of about 200' dia). The rest of the world appears generally of worse quality.

Heck, we may even be about to enter a cooling cycle as the next solar cycle is starting to look like a cool one for the Earth.

BTW, did I mention that it has been known for years that there is a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots? If there is a cause and effect there, there can be no doubt about its direction.

Thanks JK