Mountain Farm Museum
May 6, 2009
near Cherokee, North Carolina

The Mountain Farm Museum is a unique collection of farm buildings assembled from locations throughout the park. Visitors can explore a log farmhouse, barn, apple house, springhouse, and a working blacksmith shop to get a sense of how families may have lived 100 years ago. Most of the structures were built in the late 19th century and were moved here in the 1950s. The Davis House offers a rare chance to view a log house built from chestnut wood before the chestnut blight decimated the American Chestnut in our forests during the 1930s and early 1940s. The museum is adjacent to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. – National Park Service website

Great Smoky Mountains National Park,
Tennessee and North Carolina

Gallery: Great Smoky Mountains National Park

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The Great Climate Change Retreat

UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chie1f

Nature editor quits ‘Climategate’ review panel

IPCC ex-chairman Robert Watson calls for review of climate change mistakes

Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda.

Scientists are saying that temperature records around the world have been compromised, according to UK Times Online article (from The Sunday Times).

 

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

Read the rest of the Times Online article:  World may not be warming, say scientists

Another claim of the UN Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is crumbling.  According a UK Telegraph report, an alarming claim on future African crop failures is disintegrating.

 

Ever more question marks have been raised in recent weeks over the reputations of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. But the latest example to emerge is arguably the most bizarre and scandalous of all. It centres on a very specific scare story which was included in the IPCC’s 2007 report, although it was completely at odds with the scientific evidence – including that produced by the British expert in charge of the relevant section of the report. Even more tellingly, however, this particular claim has repeatedly been championed by Dr Pachauri himself.

Only last week Dr Pachauri was specifically denying that the appearance of this claim in two IPCC reports, including one of which he was the editor, was an error. Yet it has now come to light that the IPCC, ignoring the evidence of its own experts, deliberately published the claim for propaganda purposes.

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

Read the Telegraph article: African crops yield another catastrophe for the IPCC.

Dane County Farmer’s Market on the Square
September 20, 2008

On the streets around the Wisconsin Capitol Building.

Gallery: Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Square – Madison, Wisconsin,
September 13 and 20, 2008,
on the streets around the state capitol building

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The lead professor at the center of the Climategate affair is talking, and what he is saying is not what many might have expected.  An article from the UK Daily Mail describes an academic with an office filled with tens of thousands of pieces of paper piled high.

 

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

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.

Read more in the UK Daily Mail/Mail Online article:  Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

The internet is having an impact on the public perception – and confidence – of the “settled” science of anthropogenic global warming, according to a report in The Australian.

 

What we are witnessing, in defiance of officialdom, government propaganda and the bulk of funded researchers in the field, is the collapse of a scientific paradigm. This is something that has never happened before. Politically speaking, it’s a game-changer with the potential to overturn the normative assumptions commentators rely on. Not least of these is the idea that Australian voters will always give newly elected federal governments a second term.

In the latest edition of The Spectator, Matt Ridley, a veteran science journalist, offers an explanation for how the consensus came unstuck. "Despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference?

"In a word, the internet. The `climate consensus’ may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to camera and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm."

Part of Ridley’s argument is that it’s distinguished scientists in retirement, who have no fear of faculty censure or funding bodies and have nothing to lose, who have led the internet revolt. In Australia, that body includes Garth Paltridge, the author of The Climate Caper, and William Kininmonth, author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard. As well as publishing books and journal articles, both have an internet presence.

For more, go to The Australian article, World Wide Web of Doubt.

Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas regulations not yet in place are placing enormous financial burdens on companies  that produce and use energy – costs that will be passed on to consumers.  Yet, according to an Investor’s Business Daily editorial and many other sources, even if fully implemented, the regulations will have very little benefit and little or no impact on future global temperatures.

 

That the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency are on the wrong climate path is the understatement of the decade.

Recent disclosures through ClimateGate, an EPA whistle-blower and a daily barrage of scientific data call into question every assumption of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

These disclosures make it clear that the EPA’s rush to regulate every aspect of American commerce, energy and consumer choices is based on flawed and perhaps even fraudulent scientific data.

Even according to a number of IPCC scientists, if the entire planet adopted the Kyoto Protocol and additionally ceased all productive activity worldwide tomorrow, the global temperature might be reduced slightly less than 1 degree — in 20 to 50 years, a trivial "benefit" purchased at catastrophic cost.

Read the rest of the Investor’s Business Daily editorial: EPA Mandates Rely On Unsettle Science.

The author of the editorial is executive director and chief legal counsel for the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm and policy center now litigating against the Environmental Protection Agency.

Virginia Beach Boardwalk *
May 10, 2009

*The Virginia Beach Boardwalk isn’t actually made out of boards at all. It’s a concrete walkway that is more than 3 miles long. Starting at 3rd Street and continuing along the ocean to around 39th street, the boardwalk offers everything from oceanfront restaurants like Waterman’s Grill, to everyone’s favorite pit stop, Dairy Queen. That’s not to mention the more than 40 hotels with oceanfront rooms.

The public access to the beach features running water stations which allow you to rinse off after your day in the sun. Quite convenient for those who love the sand, but would prefer to leave it at the beach.  (Virginia Beach.com)

Gallery: Virginia Beach, May 10, 2009

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