People in the north-central part of the Canadian province of Ontario are digging out after one of the worst snow storms on record.

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A snowy dusting in Victoria's summer
Sam Terry, Friday December 11, 2009 - 18:12 EDT

Despite the certainty many seem to feel about the causes, effects, and extent of climate change, we are in fact making only slow progress in our understanding of the underlying science.

My old professor at Harvard, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter, used to insist that a principal tool of economic science was history--which served to temper the enthusiasms of the here and now. This must be even more so in climatological science. In recent years the inclination has been to attribute the warming we have lately experienced to a single dominant cause--the increase in greenhouse gases. Yet climate has always been changing--and sometimes the swings have been rapid.

At the time the U.S. Department of Energy was created in 1977, there was widespread concern about the cooling trend that had been observed for the previous quarter-century. After 1940 the temperature, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, had dropped about one-half degree Fahrenheit--and more in the higher latitudes.

In 1974 the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation, stated: “During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade.” Two years earlier, the board had observed: “Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of higher temperatures should be drawing to an end ... leading into the next glacial age.” And in 1975 the National Academy of Sciences states: "The climates of the Earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know.”

These statements--just a quarter-century old--should provide us with a dose of humility as we look into the more distant future. A touch of that humility might help temper the current raging controversies over global warming. What has concerned me in recent years is that belief in the greenhouse effect, persuasive as it is, has been transmuted into the dominant forcing mechanism affecting climate change--more or less to the exclusion of other forcing mechanisms. The CO2/climate change relationship has hardened into orthodoxy--always a worrisome sign--an orthodoxy that searches out heretics and seeks to punish them.  FULL STORY

The Fiction of Climate Science

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."

Random House dutifully printed THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age. This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."

OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.

Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.

Sorry, I noticed.

It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.  FULL STORY

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." -- Rahm Emanuel  Friday, November 7, 2008

99.998% of air consists of only four compounds. NASA/JPL

Nearly all of the Earth's atmosphere is made up of only five gases: nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, argon, and carbon dioxide. Several other compounds also are present. Although this CRC table does not list water vapor, air can contain as much as 5% water vapor, more commonly ranging from 1-3%. The 1-5% range places water vapor as the third most common gas (which alters the other percentages accordingly).

Answer: This is composition of air in percent by volume, at sea level at 15°C and 101325 Pa.

Nitrogen -- N2 -- 78.084% (Whoa!  Look how polluted our oxygen supply is!)

Oxygen -- O2 -- 20.9476%

Argon -- Ar -- 0.934% (Sounds like bad stuff)

Carbon Dioxide -- CO2 -- 0.0314%  (Plants LOVE it.  Makes your soda pop fizzy too.)

Neon -- Ne -- 0.001818% (Glows when electricity flows through it)

Methane -- CH4 -- 0.0002% (Escaping from politicians)

Helium -- He -- 0.000524% (Escaping from environmentalist's heads. Makes you talk like Donald Duck)

Krypton -- Kr -- 0.000114% (Why Superman died)

Hydrogen -- H2 -- 0.00005% (Like Helium, but burns really well- think Hindenburg) 

Xenon -- Xe -- 0.0000087% (Female comic book character)

Ozone -- O3 -- 0.000007% (Remember the Trillion$ it cost our economy to save the poor defenseless ozones?  Made by the tons daily by lightning storms.  By the way, the #1 POLLUTANT in SMOG is...OZONE)

Nitrogen Dioxide -- NO2 -- 0.000002% (Nitrogen dioxide plays a role in atmospheric chemistry, including the formation of tropospheric ozone)

Iodine -- I2 -- 0.000001% (Momma used on your owies to make them "better")

Carbon Monoxide -- CO -- trace

Ammonia -- NH3 -- trace

Reference: CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, edited by David R. Lide, 1997