With more and more people changing their minds about man-ma de global warming as a consequence of the increase in juvenile alarmist propaganda on behalf of the warmists, Al Gore’s lies are increasingly being confronted in the public arena, on this occaision by Jonathan Elinoff and We Are Change Colorado.

On March 6, 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared on the Charlie Rose program, and made a profound statement about Google’s mission:

Charlie Rose: What was the original mission for Google?

Eric Schmidt: All the world’s information, universally accessible and useful.

Charlie Rose: And how we doing on that?

Eric Schmidt: Well, we’ve just started. And I would tell you that when you are 23 years old and you state that’s your mission, you’ve got a lot of years ahead of you. And Larry and Sergey still have a long way to go in that.

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Google stores every single search, along with the IP address of the computer doing the search, and has done so since the beginning.

Google’s motto is “don’t be evil.” However, that didn’t stop them from cooperating with the communist Chinese government to further cement The Great Firewall of China, by restricting access to certain information deemed unacceptable by the regime. So much for their commitment to the universally accessible component of their mission.

While it’s falling behind in making the world’s information universally accessible, it’s moving ahead at breakneck speed in storing all the world’s information. This recent article talks about how much Google knows about you, and how their new tool, Google Dashboard, introduced this November, will show you exactly that.

It should be clear that Schmidt wasn’t speaking metaphorically when he said “all the world’s information,” he literally meant it. All the world’s information, stored by Google.

Climategate: still an astonishing lack of coverage in the MSM, the only major UK exception being the Mail which, after years of agnosticism now seems to have decided to come down firmly in the climate sceptics’ camp – here, here and in this article today by the mighty Booker. (Nigel Lawson is able to slip in a mention, too, in today’s Times).

But is that because – as some of the commenters below my post are so eager to tell me – it’s a complete non-story which deserves to get me the sack for being such a rubbish journalist (with innumerable websites dedicated to telling the world just how crap I am, apparently)?

Or does it have legs? (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

This interview with retired climatalogist Dr Tim Ball offers quite a useful perspective.

There’s no point in anyone from the AGW camp watching it: they’ve made up their minds and no quantity of contrary evidence, however devastating, is going to shake their considered position of “Nyah nyah nyah. Got my fingers in my ears. Not listening. The world IS warming and it’s man’s fault. Must tax carbon now….”

But the type of people I would dearly love to watch it are those like my friends Dan Hannan, Danny Finkelstein, Ed West and Michael Gove. This particular rogues’ gallery has long been a source of frustration and disappointment to me. They are intelligent and wise, eloquent and funny. They are on the side of wisdom and commonsense. They correctly anatomise so many of the ills of the modern world, from the perils of rampant Islamism to the evils of the EU. I like and admire them all hugely. Yet on perhaps the biggest and most important issue of our age – because it’s going to cost so much money and do so much harm to our landscape – they all have a curious blind spot.

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What seems to have lulled these four – and many other clever people like them, I fear – into their dangerous complacency is the belief that given the majority of world scientific opinion is backing AGW theory, it would be irresponsible for us non-scientists to disagree.

What the Climategate scandal does is prove just how murky and unreliable this supposed scientific “consensus” really is.

Dr Ball is particularly trenchant on the phrase “peer-reviewed.” You’ll have heard it being brandished an awful lot over the last decade or so, invariably by scientists in the climate-fear-promotion lobby trying to show how all scientists who disagree with them are just ignorant cranks who need not be taken seriously. It’s a virus that has spread to non-scientists. Read George Monbiot; skim through the comments by AGW-believers below any blog on the subject of climate change. “Peer-reviewed”: it’s the magic phrase which – in their eyes – guarantees the reliability and credibility of their favoured scientists, and which completely pulls the rug from under that of the dissenters.

But what if that vaunted “peered-review” stamp of authenticity is about as valuable as a fake Rolex? It would mean, would it not, that the supposedly authoritative community of disinterested scientists who inform the IPCC’s reports are in fact  to be trusted about as much as a frog would a scorpion it was ferrying on its back across a river…

This is the key point made by Dr Ball.

“It confirms suspicions that I’ve had working in my thirty years of climate science. I saw the hijacking of climate science particularly by computer modelers and then by a small group associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….”

“What you’ve got here is confirmation of the small group of scientists who, by the way, Professor Wegman who was asked to arbitrate in the debate about the hockey stick, he identified 42 people who were publishing together and also peer-reviewing each other’s literature. So there’s a classic example of the kind of thing that bothered me. About twenty years ago, I started saying ‘Well why are they pushing the peer review?’..And now of course we realise it’s because they had control of their own process. That’s clearly exposed in these emails.”

“On a global scale it’s frightening because this group of people not only control the Hadley Centre, which controls the data on global temperature through the Hadley Climate Research Unit but they also control the IPCC and they’ve manipulated that. And of course the IPCC has become the basis in all governments for the Kyoto protocol, the Copenhagen accord and so on….”

Dr Ball describes the scandal as not just a “smoking gun” but “a battery of machine guns.” How much more evidence, I wonder, do the likes of Messrs Hannan, Gove, Finkelstein and West need, I wonder, before they feel as strongly about this issue as I do?

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The mutated H1N1 strain that’s been making its way across Europe continues to claim more lives.

Bloomberg: Across the region, 670 people infected with the new H1N1 influenza strain have died since April, the Stockholm-based ECDC said today in a report on its Web site. Cases are being reported in all European Union and European Free Trade Association countries, ECDC said.

The infection, which causes little more than a sore throat, fever and a cough in the majority of cases, has hospitalized more than 4,400 people in Europe to date. Among those, the U.K. has 180 H1N1 patients in intensive care units, France has 81, the Netherlands 38, Norway 24 and Ireland 20, ECDC said.

Well at least people aren’t dying every couple of minutes, right? Wrong.

The number of deaths (670) is three more than the agency stated in an earlier version of the report obtained by Bloomberg News before its scheduled release at 9 a.m. central European time.

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Mead—whose 1928 book on the sex life of South Pacific Islanders was later found to be a fraud—recruited like-minded anti-population hoaxsters to the cause: Sow enough fear of mancaused climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development. Mead’s leading recruits at the 1975 conference were climate scare artist Stephen Schneider, population-freak biologist George Woodwell, and the current AAAS president John Holdren—all three of them disciples of Malthusian fanatic Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.

Read entire article (PDF)

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Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a report last week that says there is no conclusive evidence that climate change has caused the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. The report says that not all of the glaciers are receding at alarming rates and that a few are even advancing.

The report, an analysis of data from the past four decades, is part of India’s efforts to produce a body of indigenous research assessments on the subject.

“So far, we have been depending on research conducted by the West on what is happening to our glaciers and environment,” he said after releasing the report, which was prepared by a former scientist with the Geological Survey of India and included a disclaimer that it did not necessarily reflect the government’s view.

Read entire article

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The free and open source system is initially aimed at low-cost netbooks and does away with many of the features of a traditional program.

All applications are designed to run in a web browser and all the user’s data is stored on Google’s servers.

Engineers from the firm said the first computers running the system would be available before the end of 2010.

“We are trying to offer a choice for users,” said Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management, during an event at the firm’s headquarters in California.

Read entire article

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The state had been concerned that 10 percent of a home’s energy use is typically devoted to the TV and its related equipment, and that percentage has been increasing as consumers gain access to larger and larger (and cheaper and cheaper) televisions, which command an ever-increasing hunger for power.

The new rules go into effect a little more than a year from now: On January 1, 2011, televisions will be required to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent. In 2013, a second tier of restrictions will go into effect, with average energy consumption required to be reduced by 49 percent vs. today’s levels.

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The confirmation of the NSA’s role, which began during the development of the software, is a sign of the agency’s deepening involvement with the private sector when it comes to building defenses against cyberattacks.

“Working in partnership with Microsoft and (the Department of Defense), NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to enhance Microsoft’s operating system security guide without constraining the user’s ability to perform their everyday tasks,” Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s Information Assurance Director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a statement prepared for a hearing held this morning in Washington. “All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later in the product cycle.”

Read entire article

Via: New York Times:

Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.

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The inventors say the advertising would enable computers and other consumer electronics products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price. In exchange, recipients would agree to view the ads. If, down the road, users found the advertisements and the attentiveness tests unendurable, they could pay to make the device “ad free” on a temporary or permanent basis.

Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? (Agree to attend the sales seminar and get a free weekend getaway!) Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of 2009, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away PCs engineered to always display on-screen ads?

What the application calls the “enforcement routine” entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing to confirm that the user is paying attention.

These tests “can be made progressively more aggressive if the user has failed a previous test,” the application says. One option makes the response box smaller and smaller, requiring more concentration to find and banish. Or the system can require that the user press varying keyboard combinations, the current date, or the name of the advertiser upon command, again demonstrating “the presence of an attentive user.”