The Global Warming Hoax is Now Killing People

By Alan Caruba

By Friday, February 10th, an estimated 500 Europeans had died from the freezing weather gripping the continent. This is the price they and British citizens are paying for embracing the global warming hoax, spending billions for wind power when they should have been building coal-fired and other sources of energy to heat their homes and businesses.

As the British daily, The Telegraph, reported on Friday, “Serbia has started implementing power cuts in a desperate bid to stave off the collapse of its national grid as the country suffers the effects of days of freezing temperatures.”

I and others have been warning for years that the Earth has been cooling since 1998 and that the planet is on the cusp of a new ice age because the average length of an interglacial period of warmth between such ages is now coming to an end after the passage of some 11,500 years.

All aspects of global warming legislation and spending programs must be utterly reversed if we are not going to see huge losses of life and the disruption of entire economies.

The Ottawa Citizen published an Agence France Presse article on Friday reporting that “Thick ice closed vast swaths of the Danube on Thursday, crippling shipping on Europe’s busiest waterway, as the death toll from bitter cold across the continent rose…as it has every day for nearly two weeks.” The report noted that “Navigation was impossible or restricted in Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria, as ice covered the river or formed dangerous floes in shipping lanes.”

No shipping means no delivery of coal and oil and no shipping of food and other necessities. Europe is freezing over as the United States has been experiencing an unusually mild winter thus far. That, too, is likely to yield to the increased cooling of the planet and then, maybe, Americans will realize the threat to their lives that the closing of coal-fired plants, instigated by the Environmental Protection Agency, really means.

In England, the Mail, reported on Sunday, February 12th, that large numbers of its elderly citizens are being “frozen to death as fuel bills soar: hypothermia cases among the elderly double in five years.” England, now gripped by foolish green notions of renewable energy, has covered itself with wind turbines, despoiling its countryside and coasts while proving unreliable and incapable of meeting its energy needs.

Figures showed that “1,876 patients were treated in hospital for hypothermia in 2010-2011, up from 950 in 2006-2007” reported the Mail. “Three-quarters of victims were pensioners, with cases soaring among the over-60s more than any other age group.”

In Europe, other news organizations reported that “Many of the dead were homeless people, who literally froze to death as the temperatures dropped to minus 50 degrees in some parts of the continent. Their bodies were found in the streets buried under snow, in rivers, and in doorways. Dozens of people were also killed in weather-related accidents.”

Writing in a Turkish newspaper, the Hurriyet Daily News, Sophie Quintin Adali, an analyst for a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, said, “As if the debt crisis weren’t bad enough news, the climate freeze sweeping across Europe is wreaking havoc by severely disrupting travel, business and people’s lives. Local authorities, indeed whole countries, are caught poorly prepared.” Turkey is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.

“The lack of readiness should come as no surprise because for decades the sensationalist message of global warming has dominated the public area,” said Ms. Adali.

“Politicians and decades of political environmentalism have a lot to answer for,” said Ms. Adali. “The man-made climate theory…is still supported by a mighty European Union bureaucracy and a green network addicted to public funds.” Even now, the Green Climate Fund “through which millions of taxpayer’s money will still be disbursed” is threatening the lives and the economy of people worldwide.

The current freeze is not just affecting Europe, but reaching across the Mediterranean to North African nations. And at some point America will feel it too.

We have not built a single new nuclear plant in America since 1978. EPA rules are forcing the closure of coal-fired plants throughout the nation. The national grid for the distribution of electricity is in need of upgrades.

The nation’s policies are controlled by the most environmentally insane administration in its history, wasting billions on so-called green energy. Its new budget raises taxes and proposes a trillion-dollar deficit without any significant effort to cut the spending that has left this and future generations in debt while the price of gas soars to new heights.

America and the rest of the world have been horribly deceived by the United Nations Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel that continues to drive the global warming hoax. The lying scientists who got on the global warming gravy train, the politicians that embraced it, and the media that misled millions are all culpable, all responsible.

They should be driven from office, defunded, and chased through the streets like villagers in pursuit of  Frankenstein.

People are freezing to death in their homes and in the streets. What will it take to drive a stake into the heart of the global warming monster?

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Editor's Note: You can learn more from Robert W. Felix's article, posted here

Ice Age "News" is Wrong--It's Coming Sooner Than Later

By Alan Caruba

When you consider the millions of words published as “news” about global warming, a massive hoax based on the theory that an increase in the Earth’s levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), a minor atmospheric gas (0.0380%), it boggles the mind that reporters for a respected newswire, Reuters, would still be writing utter rubbish about it.

Just as the “news” about global warming was demolished in 2009 and again in 2011 with the leaked emails of the conspirators behind the fictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main agency behind the hoax, on January 9, Nina Chesney of Reuters London Bureau, reported about a paper in the journal, Nature Geoscience, that the “Next Ice Age not likely before 1,500 years: study.”

The paper claimed that “Concentrations of the main gases blamed for global warming reached record levels in 2010 and will linger in the atmosphere for decades even if the world stopped pumping out emissions today, according to the U.N.’s weather agency.”

The U.N. does not have a “weather agency.” It has a propaganda agency devoted in its own words to “climate.” The two are not the same. Weather is what is occurring right now and climate is the measurement of trends over centuries.

The authors of the paper based their ice age predictions on “variations in the earth’s orbit and rock samples” and was “conducted by academics at Cambridge University, University College London, the University of Florida, and Norway’s University of Bergen.

These people have to justify their salaries and, just like all the other academics who jumped on board the global warming wagon, they are likely among the last holdouts making claims about CO2. Their conclusions are absurd. This isn’t science. It’s the dying gasp of those trying desperately to keep the global warming hoax alive.

The science—the known facts—aren’t that difficult to understand. Climatologists have established that, over the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence, ice ages have had interglacial periods that averaged about 11,500 years. Then the Earth lapses into a period of extreme cold. The Earth is 11,500 years since the end of the last major ice age.

We are due the onset of the next ice age any day now and when it begins, it will come on so fast that all the manmade CO2 will have no effect whatever. Moreover, CO2 shows up in the atmosphere in a greater quantity AFTER a major climatic event, not before.

There have been periods when there was much more CO2 in the atmosphere; the age of the dinosaurs comes to mind. Indeed, when the last big ice age struck, mammoths were literally frozen in place, waiting to be discovered and dug up centuries later, so intact scientists were able to determine what their last meal was!

I count myself fortunate to have Robert W. Felix, perhaps the world’s leading authority on ice ages, as my friend. I recommend you visit www.iceagenow.info and benefit from the facts. You can also read “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, his book on the topic of ice ages.

In a post on his website regarding the latest nonsense about a distant ice age, Felix cites the fact that Argentina’s Perito Moreno is growing and it is in the southern hemisphere. In addition, glaciers are growing in India, in the Rockies, in California and Washington State. Do you believe that CO2 will stop this growth or have the slightest affect on it?

The assertion that “an increase in ice-sheet volume would not be possible” is a lie. Just like all the other lies published about global warming by the IPCC and all the others that sought to profit from the hoax.

Do not believe these claims. The Earth has been in a perfectly natural cooling trend since 1998. We are at the end of the most recent interglacial period and could tip into a new ice age tomorrow.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

This is How Ice Ages Begin - A Warning to be Heeded

Visitors to this blog know that it is very rare for me to post anyone else because the blog exists for my work, but it is called "Warning Signs" for a reason. One of them involves the changing climate--no, not the bogus global warming, but the cyclical timeclock of a coming ice age. My friend, Robert W. Felix is the expert on ice ages, author of "Not by Fire, But by Ice" and proprietor of http://www.iceagenow.info/. He should be heeded.

This is how ice ages begin

By Robert W. Felix
November 4, 2011

Look at this weekend’s Halloween snowstorm. Headlines across the U.S.A. called it “historic.” Historic because it dumped record snowfall on at least 20 cities from Maryland to Maine. Historic because it was the most snow – and the earliest – in many areas since the end of the Civil War.

And we’re not talking mere tenths-of-an-inch here. This snowfall shattered the old records, it obliterated them.

The 14.6 inches of snow that fell in Worcester, Mass., almost doubled its previous single-day October record of 7.5 inches set in 1979, while Hartford’s 12.3 inches crushed the previous single-day October record of 1.7 inches, seven times more than its earlier record.

But with 32 inches (81 cm) of snow, Peru, Massachusetts, won the prize. Two-and-a-half feet! Waist deep! Before Halloween!

This is how ice ages begin.

Not by huge glaciers slowly grinding out of the north, not by temperatures plunging to Siberian levels, but by more and more snow.

Unfortunately, we’re getting that snow.

According to Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, three of the four snowiest winters in the Northern Hemisphere have occurred in the last four years.

Three of the four snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters have occurred since 2008. http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1

Look at last winter.

Last year’s blizzard-filled winter and unusually cold, wet spring left record snowpack at more than 90 measuring sites across the western United States.

By Memorial Day, epic snowpack had been reported in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California.

On California’s Mammoth Mountain, the snowpack measured an incredible 728 percent of normal.

At Oregon’s Mt. Bachelor Ski Resort, snow totals reached 650 inches, far eclipsing the previous record of 606 inches.

In Washington, Crystal Mountain broke its all-time snowfall record for the second time in only 11 years.

And the snow kept coming. In early June, Utah’s Snowbird ski resort reported snowpack at 525 percent of normal

“There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long,” said Emily Moench, Sunbird’s communications manager.

Read that again. “There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long”!

This is how ice ages begin!

And lest we forget, just a few months ago the Missouri River suffered its second 500-year flood in 15 years. Why? Because of heavy rains and melting record snowpack.

But the news gets even worse.

Glaciers are growing in the United States.

Even though last winter’s historic snowpack has not yet melted, new snow is already piling up in the Rocky Mountains.

In Montana’s Glacier National Park, in Colorado’s Front Range, in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, the glaciers and snowfields are actually gaining volume.

When Bob Comey, director of the Bridger-Teton National Forest Avalanche Center, compared photographs of Wyoming mountain peaks, he found “significantly” more ice in the Teton Range compared with two years ago.

“I’ve never seen a season with a gain like we’ve seen this summer,” said Comey.

And when scientist Nel Caine checked on Arikaree Glacier 20 miles west of Boulder, Colorado, he measured between 2 and 3 feet of snow from last winter and spring still remaining in late September.

Meanwhile, scientists have measured a “very modest” increase on Sperry Glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

Mind you, these are not the only glaciers growing in the United States. Glaciers are also growing in California, Alaska and Washington state.

This is how ice ages begin.

And our leaders keep screaming about global warming.

The New "Consensus" Predicts an Ice Age

By Alan Caruba

Since the late 1980s a “consensus” of scientists, we were told, agreed that the Earth was in a period of “global warming” and anybody who disputed that was a “skeptic” or a “denier.”

Then, in 1998, the Earth began to cool. The handful of scientists at the heart of the global warming hoax began to sweat and not from the heat, but because they knew their scheme, created and blessed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would soon be revealed. Frantic emails went back and forth as they tried to come up with some way of keeping the lie alive.

Literally thousands of scientists had climbed on the global warming bandwagon, scooping up billions in research grants that were all intended to “prove” that global warming was real. Nations, including ours, were making investments and controlling people’s lives based on the hoax. By 2009, the game was up. A huge blizzard concluded the 2009 IPCC Copenhagen climate change conference. The next one was held in Acapulco.

On June 30-July 1, the Heartland Institute, headquartered in Chicago, a free-market policy center, will hold what may likely be the last of its six climate change conferences, all of which debunked global warming by bringing together some very brave scientists to present seminars based on real, not fraudulent, science. It will be held in Washington, D.C. You will be able to “attend” by watching it on streaming video.

In 1997 Robert W. Felix published a book, “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, a softcover. It’s second edition, can be purchased from his website, IceAgeNow.com. For anyone interested in knowing the truth about the Earth’s many cycles of warming and cooling, and especially about its ice ages, I recommend it. While there, pick up his other book, “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps.”

Fourteen years ago Felix pointed out that ice ages occur in a “dependable, predictable, natural cycle that returns like clockwork every 11,500 years.” Then he noted that the Earth is at the end of the current interglacial period!

The human species, homo sapiens, that had been evolving from an ape-like state really hit its stride around 500,000 years ago while modern humans showed up around 200,000 years ago. It took a while to learn how to use fire, make tools, develop language, and spread around. It wasn’t until about 5,000 years ago that what we call civilization began.

In addition to developing agriculture, building pyramids, and such, our ancestors spent their time making war on each other. With each passing century we developed new weapons of war, plundering, looting, raping and pillaging. Religions were invented, discarded, refined, but the wars have continued unabated. Now we are so “advanced” we can kill thousands of people with a single bomb.

Civilization was greatly facilitated by an interglacial period that provided increasing crop yields to feed armies and populations clustered in cities, virtually all of which were surrounded by large walls.

Since the weather was critical to agriculture and the waging of war, humans began to pay greater attention to what the sun was doing and keeping records. It was noticed that lots of sunspot activity was an indicator of warmer climate.

From 1645 to 1715, virtually no sunspots appeared and this phenomenon called the Maunder Minimum coincided with the Little Ice Age. Rivers froze over in Europe and America. Crops failed. Revolutions occurred.

Now, instead of “global warming”, scientists are agog over a new slowing of sunspot activity—enormous magnetic storms—something that occurs every 11 years, half of the 22-year sunspot cycle. Now the U.S. National Solar Observatory and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory are suggesting that a new Little Ice Age is on its way.

Robert W. Felix told them that back in 1997 while most U.S. climate agencies were still blathering away with global warming predictions. This time, though, based on cycles known to the ancient Chinese and others, they have gotten it right.

What is not being said, however, is that this predicted Little Ice Age could very well turn into a very Big Ice Age. It’s due. It could start tomorrow. Bundle up!

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Disputing Darwin

By Alan Caruba

Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day, February 12, as Charles Darwin in 1809. The place was Shrewsbury, England and he was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susanna Wedgwood. He would bequeath the family name to science as Darwinism or Darwinian.

He wrote “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), generally referred to as “The Origin of Species” for short. From Darwin we have the common phrase “the survival of the fittest” and, of course, “the theory of evolution.”

When I sold my home, one of the biggest problems I had was what to do with all the books my parents had filled it with over the years. They seemingly read everything and built shelves for all them. I did bring a few of the older, leather-bound books with me and one was the “Descent of Man” by Darwin.

When I cracked it open, its yellowing pages, each with two columns of text in small print, struck me immediately as intensely researched, filled with the kind of minutia that only someone with a scientific turn of mind could gather and write. It is no dazzling page-turner, but in his time, before radio or television, reading was the way people entertained and educated themselves.

Darwin’s books ran counter to many religious beliefs of his time or even ours. Even today some preachers take exception to the notion we are descended from monkeys. We’re not, but we do share a lot of DNA with chimps and gorillas. Suffice to say, Darwin stirred considerable debate in England. His theories of evolution were quite revolutionary in his time. And since!

Just ask Robert W. Felix, the author of “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps: The True Origin of Species.” I am biased because I was among a select few to read the manuscript before publication.

What Felix had learned from his research for a previous book, “Not By Fire, But by Ice” he extended in his book about magnetic reversals. It is fairly dazzling science. Even Darwin, had he ever known about magnetic reversals would have had to revise his theories

“I learned, “wrote Felix, “that many geomagnetic reversals—far more than could be dismissed as mere coincidence—had occurred in sync with mass extinctions. And many of those magnetic reversals had occurred in sync with our plant’s descent into catastrophic glaciation”; in other words, ice ages.

And here’s where it gets downright astonishing. Many “entirely new kinds of plants and animals appeared in the geologic record almost immediately after extinctions—time after time after time. The new plants and animals had arrived as if from nowhere, with no known ancestors, with no intermediate life forms to explain their sudden presence.”

So, while Darwin theorized that animals mutated over millions of years, adapting to their environments, growing longer beaks to suck nectar from plants, developing larger hearts and lungs to run or swim faster, acquiring the ability to fly instead of just gliding, coming up with all sorts of ways to avoid becoming prey, Felix says it likely happened in the flash of a galactic minute.

It’s useful, too, to understand what newcomers we humans are. “Did you know,” asks Felix, “that we (anatomically modern humans) are blindingly new?—that we’ve existed for only 200,000 years or so.”

As for what we call “civilization”, that’s only at best 5,000 years in which humans developed agriculture and technologies such as metallurgy. If the ancient texts are a guide, we spent much of our time making war on one another. In just the last century, we perfected instruments of war to a point where we swiftly slaughtered millions. Humans, though highly social, are surely one of the most dangerous species on Earth.

“Mass extinctions,” writes Felix, “have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet. Almost identical, each extinction was abrupt, each was extensive, and each was caused by some temporary, unexplainable event.”

It turns out that magnetic reversals are likely those events. “During a geo-magnetic reversal, cosmic radiation would bombard our planet, leading to mutation or death. New kinds of animals appear in the geologic record ‘virtually simultaneously’ with magnetic reversals…”

All of which suggests that, while millions around the globe have been hoodwinked by the global warming charlatans, the real challenge to the human race and all other species is a colossal cosmic event beyond our imagination or control.

And while Darwin got us thinking about evolution, in his time of study and writing, 1836 to 1859, indeed right up to his death in 1882, there was much that limited the scientists of his day and influenced the interpretation of their discoveries.

It is likely that Darwin’s theory is fundamentally wrong.

If Robert W. Felix is right—and I think he is—the planet is at the end of a typical 11,500 interglacial cycle between ice ages and will tip into one any day now. When a magnetic reversal occurs, we humans shall be like the dinosaurs or saber tooth tigers, a thing of the past.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Cassandra Says It Will Get Very Cold

By Alan Caruba

In the Greek myth about Cassandra, she could foresee the future, but no one believed her warnings. Her name is believed to be derived from the words for beauty and the sun.

Any number of solar scientists and others are warning that the Earth is on the brink of a new Ice Age at worst, a mini ice age at best. Dr. Achim Brauer of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam has concluded that the next Ice Age will come on so swiftly that in barely a year much of the northern hemisphere will be incased in ice and snow.

The Little Ice Age from around 1300 to 1850 lasted long enough to transform European society and have a profound affect on the histories of America and France. In England, they went from growing grapes to skating on a completely frozen Thames.

All the signs are in place and throughout the northern hemisphere nations, their leaders prattle on about global warming, clean energy, endangered species, and all the other environmental foolishness without once casting an eye toward the source of all climate on Earth, the Sun!

While the warmists were trying to stir up hysteria over an Earth whose temperature was suppose to rise dramatically, Nature had other plans. For the past decade the magnetic field that triggers sunspots, magnetic storms on the face of the Sun, has been steadily declining and, with it, so has the overall temperature of planet Earth.

No matter what august figure blathers about climate change these days, they are either an ignorant fool or a charlatan seeking to enrich himself by one scheme or another. The situation for the warmists has become so dire that even the science advisor to the President, Dr. John Holdren, wants to change the terminology of global warming to “global climate disruption”, admitting the former is “a dangerous misnomer.”

It’s worse than that. It is a huge fraud, a hoax, a crime intended to deceive millions.

Okay, let’s all forget the millions of words and millions of dollars spent to convince us that “global warming” was such a sure thing that any scientist or reasonably intelligent person disputing it was labeled a denier, but the truth was that the data generated by the computer models to justify the claim was rigged!

My friend, Robert Felix, author of “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, and editor of IceAgeNow.com, probably knows more about ice ages than anyone on the planet. In his book, he says “Ice ages begin and end abruptly every 11,500 years.” Guess what? We are now 11,500 years since the last Ice Age ended!

While idiots run about claiming that humans actually have any affect whatever on the climate and thus the fate of the Earth, Felix reminds us that “the Earth is a violent and dangerous place to live. We’re beginning to realize that mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet.”

On June 14 in an article published in the New Scientist by Stuart Clark, he raised the question of why and where the sunspots of gone. Noting that they ebb and flow in cycles lasting about eleven years, Stuart said, “But for the last two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged in nearly 100 years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”

Not everyone, though. Felix believes we are on the cusp of the next Ice Age and, frankly, so do I. “This is not the calm before the storm,” says Felix. “This is the storm.”

If we’re lucky, it may just be a new Little Ice Age, but it could be a new Ice Age and, if that’s the case, a lot of life on planet Earth is going to be severely disrupted for a very long, long time.

Even a brief ice age of several hundred years will increase the demand for the generation of energy to keep us warm. All of a sudden everyone including the environmentalist liars will be crying out for more coal, more oil, and more natural gas.

Cassandra is saying bundle up!

© Alan Caruba, 2010

A Bad Future for Everyone

By Alan Caruba

Every so often it’s a good idea to take stock of the threats facing the modern world. Any student of history will know that this analysis is going to be grim. Take a deep breath and read this for a few minutes. After that, you may need a stiff drink!

I have this theory that the world goes mad every twenty to fifty years, forgets what the devastation of war does to nations and the lives of those who want nothing to do with war.

It has been sixty-five years since the end of the last world war, fought in Europe, Russia, and in the Far East, China, the Philippines, Pacific islands, and against Japan. Much of the world lay in wreckage, millions were dead.

After that the U.S. spent a total of twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, in Vietnam, followed now by nine years in Afghanistan, and seven years in Iraq, not counting an earlier invasion to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.

Though the scale was small, war came to the American homeland with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York at a cost of nearly 3,000 lives along with the attack on the Pentagon. There have been smaller terrorist attacks since.

In the combined military services, the U.S. has over 1.4 million men and women under arms. The United States of America maintains some 700 bases around the world. We are the sole guarantor of any measure of peace, of any resistance to tyranny.

The single greatest threat to freedom worldwide is the resurgence of militant Islam. More than a billion people are Muslims, but the locus of the attack on industrialized, modern nations has been the Middle East, a region of the world that remains trapped in this seventh century retrograde religion. If successful, it could drag the world back to a new version of the Dark Ages when humanity will be oppressed by a faith based on the hatred of all other faiths.

Trying to accommodate Islam is an invitation for conquest. It has a history of building mosques over or near the holiest sites of older faiths.

The environmental movement took shape in the late 1960s and, from around the late 1980s, the greatest “scientific” fraud ever perpetrated, global warming, was launched by the United Nations and maintained through a huge propaganda program and, as often as not, by various national leaders, including our own.

Billions were allocated to research and other responses to this non-event. The planet was not in the throes of a sudden and dramatic warming, nor is there any need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. For the past decade, the planet has been steadily cooling.

The rise of the United Nations following World War Two has been a ceaseless quest for control over the world’s population. The UN has never successfully deterred any war, large or small. It seeks to undermine the individual sovereignty of nations. It is a cesspool of corruption and deception.

The other major threat has been the specter of communism that gained momentum at the beginning of the last century, primarily in the former Soviet Union, thereafter spreading to China and other nations. It takes the form of socialism in many nations, including our own. As an economic system, it is a total failure. It engenders huge governmental apparatus, centralized planning, and attacks on the ownership of private property. It destroys innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

There is, too, the prospect of the growth of the Earth’s population to eight billion by 2050. It will be coupled with the demand for more sources of energy, oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear. The Earth’s resources may or may not be finite, but the stresses this will put on nations as they compete for what does exist are seen in the bizarre refusal of successive U.S. administrations to open its own huge reserves of coal and oil for extraction and use.

Yet another factor is the stress on the global banking community. The potential failure of nations like Greece, Spain, Italy and others have put huge strains on other nations that are, in one way or another, invested in them. These troubled nations have two things in common, aggressive unions and socialism. The huge debt of the United States, now at $13 trillion, surpassing our annual gross domestic product, poses a threat to the entire world’s financial stability.

Population, financial stability, a militant religion, and energy all will place stress on the nations of the world in ways that have historically erupted in warfare.

Finally, there is something called the Grand Solar Minimum, a diminution of radiation from the Sun that is likely to precede a new ice age. Since the period between ice ages is generally 11,500 years we are at the very end of the current interglacial period.

To put that in context, we and the rest of humanity are living in the period in which the human race created what we call civilizations.

Dennis Avery. a scientist with the Hudson Institute, notes that “Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that begin in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted the severe cold of the early 1800s.”

These factors all portend a very bad future for the whole of the Earth’s population no matter where they live, what they believe, or how they behave.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

"Deniers" Meet and the Media Ignores Them...Again

By Alan Caruba

“Denial” is not a river in Africa, nor is it a proper term for the legion of climatologists, meteorologists, geologists, and others like myself who have devoted decades to debunking the utter rubbish called “global warming.” So toxic has the term become, the charlatans pushing the fraud have long since abandoned it and begun to refer to “climate change” instead.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and I daresay that its climate has been changing since it first cooled, oceans formed, and one-celled forms of life began to develop into complex creatures like dinosaurs, Al Gore and politicians continuing to lie about global warming.

The Fourth International Conference on Climate Change concluded Tuesday in Chicago. Sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank, it brought together eminent (and legitimate!) scientists and other distinguished folk for panels and speeches addressing the arcane mysteries of climate.

Among the dignitaries addressing the thousand or more people who attended was former astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, PhD, a one-term Senator who discussed why the U.S. Constitution makes no provision whatever for the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency. For three days men who know their science in ways that would fill entire libraries held forth.

A Google search for any mainstream media coverage of the event turned up little evidence of it, nor is it likely that were I to list the names of the speakers, you would have ever heard of them. These foremost “deniers” have received short shrift in a media that has been determined to convince Americans that the Earth is burning up due to an infinitesimal amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The conference was of great significance this year because the Kerry-Lieberman Cap-and-Tax bill has been introduced in the Senate for the purpose of putting limits on carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., the use of all energy; a bill without a scintilla of scientific justification, nor merit. It will, however, create the buying and selling of utterly bogus “carbon credits” to enrich utilities and those involved in the exchanges based on the global warming fraud.

It will also kill the U.S. economy.

I attended the first three conferences and, although I have been a member of the National Association of Science Writers since shortly after the last ice age ended, I confess that when some of the scientists began to get deep into the issues of climate anomalies, minutia of paleoclimatology and comparable matters, my eyes would glaze over and I would feel a strong urge to take a nap.

It occurs to me that this has long been a part of the problem for most people who either dropped out of school, slept through science class, or who preferred to ignore all the silliness of global warming being blamed for…for…for everything.

The problem is that global warming or climate change is being used to manipulate the world’s population into accepting global governance that involves the loss of their nation’s sovereignty in favor of international organizations like the United Nations. A draft international treaty making the rounds would be the end of democracy.

Not surprisingly, the whole global warming scam began somewhere in the bowels of the UN, emerged with the Kyoto Climate Change Protocols, and is the basis for the waste of billions on “clean” or “alternative” energy in the form of wind and solar energy.

It is a full scale attack of the very basis for modern life, the use of coal, oil, and natural gas. Those of us living in advanced societies tend to forget that vast portions of the globe have no electricity whatever. How would you like to cook your dinner over dried animal dung?

The conference and the fact that the mainstream media has once again chosen to ignore it is a shining example of why the MSM is losing readers and viewers who have correctly concluded it can no longer be trusted.

Global warming? Here’s an excerpt from the latest edition of IceAgeNow.com:

UK - Coldest winter in a lifetime - Freezing in May - 12 May 10
Record Cold in Paris - 11 May 10
Snow in "sunny" Spain - Coldest May since records began - 6 May 10
Snow In Southern France - 5 May 10
Again? Yet another Alberta snowstorm! - 5 May 10

The biggest news emerging from the conference is that, in addition to the fact that the Earth is ten years into another perfectly natural cooling cycle, it is also verging on another ice age. We are all literally at the end of an interglacial period of approximately 11,500 years.

Bundle up!

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cognitive Disconnect: Cold Equals Warming

By Alan Caruba

Over the course of Obama’s first year in office I have become convinced that he and his cronies think you are STUPID.

That’s why Nancy Pelosi could say the process by which Obamacare was put together and passed in the House and Senate was “open” and still think that doing it behind closed doors in both chambers while bribing every Democrat vote with public funds went unnoticed by the voters.

She thinks you’re STUPID.

It’s why Harry Reid may still hold onto his job as Majority Leader in the Senate after saying things about his favorite “Negro” that got Trent Lott removed from the same job in just under a month. We tend to forget that, from FDR to JFK, the Democrats thwarted civil rights legislation until they no longer could.

He thinks you’re STUPID.

The latest example of the complete disdain the White House has for the public is a response by press secretary Robert Gibbs who dismissed the worldwide cold snap as just another example of “climate change”, the new term for “global warming.”

On January 6, the Drudge Report headline links were as follows:

Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA...
CHILL MAP...
Britain's big snow shuts cities...
GAS SUPPLIES RUNNING OUT IN UK...
Elderly burn books for warmth?
Army drafted to rescue 1,000 snow stranded motorists...
Vermont sets 'all-time record for one snowstorm'...
Iowa temps 'a solid 30 degrees below normal'...
Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years...
3 die in fire at Detroit home; power was cut...
Midwest Sees Near-Record Lows, Snow By The Foot...
Miami shivers from coldest weather in decade; Florida Gov Signs Emergency Order ...
Cold snap spurs power rationing in China...

It’s “cognitive disconnect”, a fancy way of saying that the White House and Congress is under the impression that Americans actually believe that “warming” means “colder” and colder “proves” that warming is happening.

As the Drudge headlines then and since reflect, cold weather has historic implications. Indeed, if the Earth had not begun to warm at the end of the last ice age, some 11,500 years ago, the world would be a very different place than it is today. It only took one or two degrees Fahrenheit to bring about the advent of civilization, i.e. the spread of agriculture, the early cities, the movement of people to warmer climes.

The first warming era began around 4,300 BC when the Sahara bloomed with plants and forests spread over Northern Europe and Canada. Then, for a thousand years, cold returned until another short warming occurred around 1,450 BC. Then the cold returned and it wasn’t until the Roman Warm Era began in 250 BC that populations began to grow. When it got cold in Scandinavia, the Vikings climbed into their longboats and began to pillage and then colonize warmer southern lands.

There was a Medieval Warm Period that began around 800 AD which was a time of great achievement and prosperity. There was farming in Scotland and Norway. Greenland was colonized. Vineyards bloomed in England, in Prussia and in Norway.

Trouble returned with the Little Ice Age that began around 1,300 AD and brought with it famine and food riots. The Spanish Armada was destroyed by the horrid weather that afflicted Europe. During the frigid years of the Dalton Minimum (1790 to 1820 AD), Napoleon lost most of his army when he attempted to conquer Russia. In America, the Continental Army or what was left of it over-wintered in Valley Forge.

So weather and, in particular, long cold spells can have a dramatic affect on history. It was so cold in the 1970s that the environmentalists were all predicting a new ice age. Warm weather means farming and that ensures enough food. If you look around the world, people tend to congregate where it is warm.

Telling people that it is warming when it is demonstrably getting colder is STUPID. Assuming that people are stupid enough to believe you is a good way to get thrown out of office.

The collapse of the recent Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in the midst of a huge blizzard that hit that city and much of the northern hemisphere should mark the end of the huge fraud of “global warming.”

Now the U.S. and Europe has to walk itself back from all the idiotic laws passed that were based on the global warming hoax, not the least of which is Cap-and-Trade that is still waiting a vote in the Senate.

Has it occurred to anyone why President Obama took his winter vacation in Hawaii instead of Wyoming or the Dakotas? It wasn’t just because he was allegedly born there.

Not by Fire but by Ice

By Alan Caruba

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-- Robert Frost, American Poet

Considering the thousands of absurd claims made about the discredited fraud of “global warming”, a recent National Geographic News story, “North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux”, struck me as potentially far more significant.

“Earth’s north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles a year due to magnetic changes in the planet’s core, new research says.” The article by Richard A. Lovett, noted that “The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field, but researchers can infer the field’s movements by tracking how Earth’s magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space.”

Most people are familiar with magnetic north because that is where compass needles actually point. It is not the same as the North Pole and, currently, magnetic north is close to Canada’s Ellesmere Island on the edge of the Arctic. The movement has been erratic since first located by scientists in 1831. In 1904, it began to shift northeastward at about nine miles per year. In 1989, it sped up a bit and is now “galloping toward Siberia.”

If I hadn’t read Robert W. Felix’s latest book, “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps”, I frankly would have paid little attention to the news, but I had to pause because Felix asks, “Could this movement be the beginning of the next reversal? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Why is this of interest? Because ice ages recur every 11,500 years and right now the Earth is at the end of the latest interglacial period, i.e., the interim between ice ages.

Since ice ages and magnetic reversals appear to occur together, it is entirely likely that what we’re really looking at is the next ice age and, to make matters much worse, a potential magnetic reversal.

“Among the many species of mammals now existing in Europe and Asia, all but six appeared during the past two million years, with no time to evolve,” says Felix, neatly dispatching Charles Darwin’s theory that species evolve over tens of millions of years.

At some point in the past 200,000 years Homo sapiens climbed down out of the trees, stood upright, and began their trek toward what we call civilization and civilization as we know it—the spread of agriculture and the rise of cities—is only about 5,000 years old.

The late paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, said, “We have not a shred of evidence for any genetic improvement since then. I suspect that the average Cro-Magnon, properly trained, could have handled computers with the best of us.”

The bad news about magnetic reversals is that they have often been accompanied by massive extinctions and, as noted, they return in a dependable, predictable cycle. “Mass extinctions,” says Felix, “have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 million years that life has existed on this planet.”

Many scientists maintain that the last magnetic reversal occurred about 780,000 years ago at the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary, but in addition to full-scale reversals, Felix includes magnetic “excursions” in his calculations.

Magnetic excursions are times when the earth's magnetic north pole moved south for a short while--sometimes as much as 500 years--and then moved back. Magnetic excursions are apparently aborted magnetic reversals, says Felix. They recur about every 11,500 years. And they are deadly.

The last one, the Gothenburg magnetic excursion, took place about 11,500 years ago. Is it just a coincidence that some 40 percent of the large animal species, including the sabre-toothed cat, the mammoth, the mastodon, and the great Dire wolf went extinct at the time? "No," says Felix. "That was no coincidence.”

Nor is it a coincidence that more than one million huge elliptical holes - some the size of a small city - were blasted into the earth at the same time. Today, those huge holes are sometimes known as Carolina Bays, Grady Ponds, Maryland Basins, or, in Texas, Salinas.

Then there was the Mono Lake magnetic excursion of 23,000 years ago, when the earth descended into catastrophic glaciation, and the mammoths were almost decimated. And prior to that was the Lake Mungo magnetic excursion of 33,500 years ago, when the Neanderthal went extinct and the earth descended into yet another period of glaciation.

If this cycle holds true, says Felix, the next magnetic reversal—--and extinction—-is due any day.

Solar scientists have been watching the sun with a fair amount of trepidation lately. As Felix notes, “At the beginning of each (geological) cycle, magnetic polarity on the Sun reverses and magnetic north becomes magnetic south. No one knows why.”

We are in the Holocene cycle that began about 10,000 years ago.

Anthony Watts, a climate scientist—-one of the many that did not buy into the global warming fraud—-recently reported that “The sun has seen a resurgence of activity in December, with a number of cycle 24 sunspots being seen.” That’s good news because sunspot activity seems to correlate with warming and cooling cycles. The fewer the sunspots, the cooler the Earth becomes.

“If the past two years have taught us anything,” says Watts, “it is that the sun can be tricky and unpredictable.”

Will the next ice age begin shortly? Depends on what you mean by “shortly” because it could be tomorrow or it could be another two centuries or so. One thing is sure; the Earth’s latest interglacial period is nearing an end.

A magnetic reversal would likely have a devastating effect on planet Earth and, frankly, I don’t want to be around when it occurs.

Editor’s Note: To learn more, visit www.iceagenow.info
.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

By Alan Caruba

One of the great ironies of the Climate Change Conference taking place in Copenhagen is that its focus is on “global warming” at a time when Planet Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the passed decade.

That fact alone is testimony to another one; the United Nations conference has nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with a binding treaty that would ultimately transfer power from the individual sovereign nations whose representatives are attending to centralized governance by unelected bureaucrats.

Just as Communism concentrates all power in the “State” and relegates its citizens to “property” of the state, the UN Climate Change program would subjugate entire nations in the name of “saving the Earth.” It needs saving, but not from a fraudulent “global warming”. The present greatest danger to mankind is the various power centers represented by the delegates to the conference.

There is, however, another danger and it is the climate; not a warming one, but one that is at the tail end of the latest interglacial period between ice ages. The last ice age ended about 11,500 years ago, though some argue it was only 10,000 years.

The late Dr. Theodore Landscheidt, founder of the Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity in Waldmuenchen, Germany, was a giant in the field of climatology. This science looks at climate trends in terms of millions or thousands of years.

Before his passing in 2004, Dr. Landscheidt predicted a new Little Ice Age similar to what the northern hemisphere experienced from around 1300 to 1850. He based this on an analysis of the sun’s activity in the last two millennia and he believed it would arrive by 2030. Meteorologists are in general agreement that the current cooling cycle will continue for another two decades. Thereafter it gets really cold!

Meteorology is about the weather that is occurring now and predicting what that weather will be in the near future. As we know, even short range predictions of a few days are subject to variations. Modern meteorology depends on computer climate models, but none can factor in the role of clouds on the weather because they remain a mystery. Other unknown factors include countless active undersea volcanoes.

The Sun, however, can and is closely monitored and, since it is the primary source of warming and cooling cycles, predictions can be made. Dr. Landscheidt wrote, “The current 11-year sunspot cycle 23 with its considerably weaker activity seems to be a first indication of the new trend.”

Winter will grow colder and last longer. By 2030, people in the northern hemisphere will experience what occurred between 1300 and 1850. History is filled with examples from the devastation of Napoleon’s army when he invaded Russia to Valley Forge in America. In England, the Thames froze over.

My friend, Robert W. Felix, the author of “Not by Fire, but by Ice” and editor of the Internet site, www.iceagenow.com, has been predicting not just a Little Ice Age, but a full-fledged Ice Age like the one that occurred about a million or more years ago and did not end until about 10,000 years ago.

“We’re beginning to realize,” Felix wrote, “that earth is a violent and dangerous place to live. We’re beginning to realize that mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet.”

Civilization as we know it is relatively new. Homo sapiens, humans, began their dominance around 10,000 years ago and the development of agriculture and other aspects of modern civilization are only about 5,000 years old. When you stack that up against vast epochs, it is a historical blip on the radar screen. Not that long ago in America, the only means of transportation were horses.

What is occurring in Copenhagen is an obscenity. The fact that the President of the United States and other world leaders would attend and endorse its lies calls out for a massive repudiation.

The “science” on which it is based has been revealed to have been deliberately falsified by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and we may yet confirm that even NASA’s and NOAA’s data was inaccurate as well.

As the White House and Congress try to impose a “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on all energy use, on Americans, what scientists have been trying to explain for years is that no evidence exists that carbon dioxide (CO2) effects global temperature.

This puts the lie to the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement that it intends to regulate CO2 emissions in order to avoid a global warming that is not happening or that CO2 poses a health risk. We are witnessing gangsterism masquerading as regulation.

There isn’t even evidence that CO2 is a so-called “greenhouse gas” or that a greenhouse effect even exists. There is no evidence that the seas are rising at an alarming rate or that glaciers and polar caps are melting.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the sponsor of the Copenhagen conference, should be disbanded for being nothing more than a political instrument intended to coordinate a massive international fraud. All U.S. legislation based on “global warming” or “greenhouse gas emissions” should be repealed.

The worldwide mass media’s self-inflicted damage to its credibility requires a major effort to report the actual science and prepare the Earth’s population for some ugly consequences of the cooling that is occurring and is likely to accelerate in the decades immediately ahead.

It’s going to get colder and all the lies flowing from a morally debased United Nations will not change that.

It's Getting Colder Everywhere

By Alan Caruba

There’s an ancient Scandinavian legend that says, “A long time ago, the universe was made of ice. Then one day the ice began to melt and a mist rose into the sky. Out of the mist came a giant made of frost and the earth and the heavens were made from his body. This is how the world began and this is how the world will end, not by fire, but by ice. The seas will freeze and winters will never end.”

Thus begins “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, a book by my friend, Robert W. Felix, published initially in 2005. You can pick up a copy from www.iceagenow.com. While you’re there, pick up “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps” as well. Taken together, both books explain why the Earth, now at the end of an interglacial cycle, is heading into its next ice age and why Darwin got it wrong with his theory of slow, evolutionary mutations accounting for various species being different from one another.

The Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. Homo sapiens, the human race as we know it, have been around for about 40,000 years. We date our modern ancestry back to the Cro-Magnon man who superseded the Neanderthals. The development of agriculture, growing food rather than hunting it, dates back some 7,000 years and civilization in the form of city-states and nations is relatively new; only about 5,000 years.

For all that time, tribes tried very hard to appease the gods of sun and rain to ensure a good harvest. They would sacrifice the spare virgin or offer the hearts of captives. There were elaborate dances and prayers created by the shamans and priests, but humans never quite got the knack of actually controlling the weather or climate because they can’t and never could.

That is until Greenus Homo Sapian came along. This creature who emerged out of the conservation movement hit its stride around the 1970s. Greenus is the Bigfoot of climate, the Satchquatch of weather.

After devoting a decade in the 1970s to correctly predicting that a new ice age was on the way, Greenus, also known as Greens, discovered that they could scare a lot more people by claiming that the Earth was suddenly and dramatically warming.

It turned out to be a fabulous fund-raiser and allowed them to pursue an agenda intended to rid the Earth of as many nasty Homo sapiens as possible. This would be accomplished by getting all kinds of beneficial chemicals banned from use; pesticides, herbicides, anything made from plastic, as well as genetically modified crops that could feed the billions of Homo sapiens.

Mostly, though, the Greens’ enemy were “fossil” or “dirty” fuels that just happened to generate the energy required for all modern society everywhere; coal, oil and natural gas.

The instrument of this “global warming”, according to the Greens, was carbon dioxide, a gas that is vital to all life on Earth. Without carbon dioxide (CO2) not a single bit of vegetation would grow. Remember agriculture? No crops, no food. And, if CO2 was forcibly limited by crazy “Cap-and-Trade” schemes, the Greens could depress the economies of nations.

Carbon dioxide was especially abundant in the atmosphere during the Jurassic period and the vegetation was so thick that lizard-like creatures became giants called dinosaurs. They were the masters of the Earth until something happened and they disappeared. Did a giant meteor wipe them out or was it a cyclical magnetic reversal that corresponds time and again with species extinction and the sudden appearance of entirely new species?

The “global warming” myth originated in the United Nations, an organization seeking to be the single, unelected governing institution for the entire Earth. A conspiracy of alleged scientists was brought together as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. Ever since, we have been assailed with claims that “global warming” was such a threat to the Earth and mankind that radical changes were required to avoid it.

The Greens, however, are running smack into a brick wall called reality.

All over the Earth, temperatures have been steadily falling. It is getting cooler and colder everywhere.

In a recent, desperate effort, the Union of Concerned Scientists announced that “Global warming made it less cool.” That’s right. It’s getting cooler because it’s getting warmer.

Newborn babes arrive fresh from the womb laughing at this absurdity.

At sites like Iceagenow.com and over at the most excellent www.climatedepot.com anyone with access to the Internet can learn about how weather records are being broken daily around the Earth as it cools. In Al Gore’s hometown of Nashville, cold temperatures broke a record set in 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

Chicago, Cincinnati, Peoria, California, the Arctic—everywhere!

So, who are you going to believe? The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The Union of Concerned Scientists? The Sierra Club? Friends of the Earth? U.S. government agencies like NOAA? The National Geographic? Newsweek? Time? President Obama? His cabinet Secretaries? The endless succession of “czars” he keeps appointing?

Congress? You better not believe Congress because they are getting ready to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill, incongruously named the American Clean Energy and Security Act. It will crush what’s left of the U.S. economy by imposing taxes on all energy use while dolling out billions to the least effective form of energy, wind and solar energy.

As America and the rest of the globe grow colder, do you really want to pay more for the energy to heat your home? All in the name of avoiding a “global warming” that is not happening?

Or will you cast out the liars in Congress who keep telling you that it’s getting warmer when it’s obviously getting colder?

Will you rebuke a President who is lying to you by returning the Republican Party to power in 2010?

It's getting colder everywhere.

A Snowy Halloween

By Alan Caruba

Some folks in my home state of New Jersey woke up to a blanket of snow the same week as Halloween. The state’s largest daily headlined the story as “October Surprise: Snowfall snarls traffic and cuts power to 62,000 homes.” In a swath of northern counties, snow fell as if it were mid-winter. Fourteen inches of snow fell at High Point State Park.

Snow in October is, indeed, a surprise to most, but not to those of us who, for years now, have been both debunking the “global warming” hoax and warning about a coming ice age. It may be one of short duration as in the case of the Little Ice Age that gripped the northern hemisphere from around 1300 to 1850 or it could be another like previous, major ice ages that alter history.

If you visit http://www.iceagenow.com/2008_Other_Parts_of_the_World.htm you can read about scores of weather events occurring right now that attest to the way the entire world has gotten much colder of late. Meteorologists track the latest cooling cycle to 1998, making it a decade old at this point with no end in sight for decades to come or longer.

From Austria to Australia, in places like Costa Rica and New Zealand, all around the world the Earth is getting cold and snow is occurring. To ignore this is pure folly.

To continue passing legislation to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) or other “greenhouse gases” isn’t just stupid, it is lethal. What people are going to need more of is the energy to heat their homes and workplaces. Thwarting the building of more coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate electricity is suicidal.

That is, however, exactly what Congress intends to do and we can anticipate blizzard of legislation, instituting “cap-and-trade” requirements, increases in ethanol requirements, and a host of other poisonous legislation that will severely handicap any recovery from the current financial crisis and inflict a host of allegedly “unintended” consequences.

One of those consequences were the food riots that occurred earlier this year around the world when the price of corn rose in response to U.S. mandates that ethanol be used along with gasoline. Proposed increases in such ethanol use will require engineering changes in new automobiles and likely damage to current models. It is highly corrosive, to the point where it cannot be transported by pipeline, but only by truck. The public is never told that ethanol increases the cost of each gallon of gasoline while at the same time reducing the mileage it gets.

Both candidates for the presidency profess to believe in global warming. Both are wrong. Both need to visit northern New Jersey or any one of a swath of northeastern states that could well be under a blanket of snow on Election Day.

A lot of scary ghosts, goblins, and other creatures will go trick or treating on Halloween, but future Halloweens will likely be scary for the early arrival of winter conditions similar to those experienced this week.

Cold and Colder

By Alan Caruba

Joe Bastardi, the Chief Long-Range Forecaster at AccuWeather, has released his 2008-09 Winter Season Forecast addressing issues of average temperature and precipitation that will impact the nation.

His forecast calls for one of the coldest winters in several years across much of the Eastern portion of the United States, the population-dense third of the nation. The northern Rockies and Northwest is predicted to have more snow than normal, though not as much as last year when the snow pack reached twice normal levels. In the East, however, he anticipates a lot more snowfall than last year.

AccuWeather employs 113 meteorologists to provide forecasts and severe weather bulletins to more than 110 million Americans every day via the Internet, mobile devices, and other media. Chances are, if you are checking the weather on CNN, ABC stations, the Washington Post or The New York Times, you are getting an AccuWeather report.

The snowier winter is predicted to begin in December and is likely to generate blizzards in late January and into February.

This forecast has all kinds of implications for the economy. Those in the East will no doubt see their heating bills soar. Blizzards impact the delivery of all kinds of goods because most are transported via truck around the nation. Severe storms can close down schools and affect other public services. Icy roads predictably lead to more auto accidents and deaths.

Thomas Jefferson, our third President, was very interested in the weather, but at that time the nation’s economy was largely agricultural and weather played a major role in the success of crops. The early years of the nation’s history occurred during a Little Ice Age that affected not only the U.S. but much of Europe. Dating back to around 1300, it did not begin to end until around 1850.

The warming that occurred thereafter was entirely natural and had nothing to do with the phony “global warming” that has afflicted public policy since the 1980s and is responsible for the waste of billions of taxpayers’ dollars thrown at the study of a non-existent problem. It continues to distract us from reality, intruding into the presidential debates and campaigns as both candidates inaccurately or deliberately exploit pure nonsense about carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

A nation suffering a financial crisis can ill afford to indulge in idiotic “cap-and-trade” programs involving millions of dollars thrown at bogus “carbon credits”, but I can assure you that this is occurring even as I write.

There are a lot of good reasons to pay attention to Bastardi’s forecast which, by the way, is comparable to the Farmer’s Almanac forecast predicting the same thing. For one, this would be a good time to make sure you have some good cold weather outerwear in the closet and, if you don’t, to buy some.

I have a friend who lives in a cabin in rural Missouri and you can bet he is laying in a supply of firewood in case his new electric housewarming device for himself and his companion dogs gets disabled by downed lines in a big snowstorm.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that “global warming” does not cause cold weather, although it has and will surely be blamed again for this, as well as for hurricanes and every other form of weather. There never was any unnatural “global warming” and we are most certainly into a new cycle of cooling on planet Earth. It’s been occurring since around 1998.

The question on my mind and others who take an interest in climate cycles is whether or not we are actually at the beginning of another major ice age? They occur every 11,500 years and we are at the end of the most recent interglacial cycle between ice ages. It’s going to be a cold winter in the United States and elsewhere around the world. My guess is that this is just the beginning of a very long period of cold.

A Heat Wave, But....

By Alan Caruba

While the East Coast swelters in temperatures that are in the high 90’s, I waited for the usual environmental propaganda to say that this was proof of global warming, but it has not yet been pumped through the usual mainstream media system of lies about the climate.

Instead, the reality is that the Earth continues to cool and one interesting example of that was a news item out of Aspen, Colorado. The Aspen Skiing company announced on Monday, June 9, that it will open Aspen Mountain from June 13 to June 15 for skiers and snowboarders. It seems that record winter snowfall has left an average of more than three feet of snow on the upper slopes.

In late May, despite Green predictions that the Arctic is melting so fast that it will provide a new route, a Northwest Passage, for ships, a group of eco-tourists on a vessel offering polar expeditions found themselves trapped when a former Soviet icebreaker, refitted for visits to the supposedly disappearing ice, was trapped in late May by ice.

According to Quark Expeditions of Norwalk, Connecticut, the ship included a heated indoor swimming pool, exercise rooms and a sauna, and I am sure the passengers, tiring of looking at a sea of ice appreciated them. Eventually, after being in the icy grip of Mother Nature for a week, winds and tide permitted the ship to break free of the ice pack.

In April, approximately one hundred sealing ships were trapped in ice floes off the northeast coast of Newfoundland while they were participating in the annual seal hunt off Canada’s easternmost province. It required the Canadian Coast Guard to rescue a number of the trapped vessels and their crews. However, at one point, an icebreaker sent to free them actually found itself trapped. As reported, “In addition to three icebreakers on hand, the Coast Guard is flying helicopters in to provide food and support to the stranded sailors.”

So much for the blather about the North Pole melting.

In May, meteorologist Anthony Watts issued a report on the way temperatures continue to cool. The new global data revealed a whopping three quarters of a degree Celsisus drop in temperatures since January. That may not seem like much, but climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer, formerly of NASA and now the principle research scientist at the University of Alabama, said that, "If you exclude the anomalous 1992 cooling from the Pinatubo volcano eruption, it's the coolest May in 20 years."

Even the U.S. government, courtesy of NASA, has admitted that the Earth is now a decade into a cooling cycle and it is likely to last at least two or three more decades.

Question: Why do both candidates for President keep talking about global warming?

All this is occurring as the Public Broadcasting System is preparing to foist a two-hour pack of lies in a television spectacular called “Heat.” Check your local listings for more of the same brainwashing and propaganda that has nothing to do with the realities of a Sun that has been largely devoid of magnetic storms, sunspots, for a few years now. It is the Sun that determines how warm or cool the Earth will be and this is a known sign of cooling. It has real scientists very worried.

And, of course, this planet is now approaching the end of the latest interglacial period between ice ages, about 11,500 years on the average, so some massive climate shifts will occur at some point, changing everything we humans have grown accustomed to over the past centuries.

What we called “civilization” coincides with this period between ice ages. A new one is going to ruin a lot of plans.

Six More Weeks of Winter

By Alan Caruba

Punxsutawny Phil, Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s most famous groundhog, took time out from hibernation to let us know that there will be six more weeks of winter. Apparently, once again he did not see his shadow.

This annual bit of theatre arrived the same time we are reading about horrendous blizzards in China that killed some, stranded millions, collapsed 100,000 homes, and have wrecked winter crops. But it’s winter, right? Well, how about the snowstorms in the Middle East? In January, dozens died in Iran after being stranded in their cars by blizzards. Jerusalem was blanketed with heavy snow. But it’s winter, right?

In January 2007 there was a major freeze in California and in April a severe freeze hit the Midwest and South East. In the first weeks of 2008, there have been some equally severe blizzards and freezes in parts of the nation. The Cascade snowfall was 150% above normal. A number of record low temperatures occurred across the U.S. But it’s winter, right?

If you want to check out the weather, you can visit NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/weather-events.html. They have the data on 2007’s worldwide major weather events.

Weather watchers noticed for example that, by July 2007, Alaska’s glaciers had advanced one-third of a mile in less than a year. Glaciers normally tend to be…well, glacial. But in October 2007, there were reports that the Mont Blanc glacier on the border of northern Italy and France almost doubled in four years. When glaciers begin to grow it is a sign that the weather is getting colder and over long enough periods of time to permit and encourage such growth.

So, yes, it’s winter, but some of us are not so sanguine about what we’re seeing. Some of us think that, because we are at the end of the typical interglacial period of about 11,500 years, these blizzards and glaciers that are on the move likely signal the arrival of a new ice age. And when it comes, it will arrive very swiftly. The last one left wooly mammoths frozen in place with their last meal still fresh in their belly when the scientists dug them up.

To learn more about this, visit http://www.iceagenow.com/, a website that Robert W. Felix maintains. He authored “Ice Age Now”, a book filled with the science about ice ages and the prediction that the real climate drama coming soon will be a whole new ice age.

An earlier change in the climate chased the Vikings out of a place they called Greenland because, when they arrived, it was green. During the mini-ice age from 1300 to around 1850, the Thames River in London froze over and Napoleon’s army was destroyed by the cold after it failed to conquer Russia. Here in the U.S., it made for a very cold winter in Valley Forge.

That’s the thing about ice ages, large and small, they do not take into account the problems for humans. They, like the bogus “global warming”, are not caused by humans. They are the result of forces far greater than anything humans can create. Or stop.

But, hey, it’s winter, right?