The Beginning of Common Core's Trouble

• By JAMIE GASS and JIM STERGIOS Print this article.

President Obama unveiled his Race to the Top initiative in 2009, the idea was to award $4.35 billion in federal grant money to states to replicate policies that boosted student achievement.  That quickly changed and the federal money was instead used to persuade states to adopt administration-backed nationalized K-12 English and math standards and tests. By last year, most states had adopted the standards, known as Common Core, and it seemed a foregone conclusion that the United States would join countries like France in having a uniform curriculum.

But what a difference a year makes. Today, a full-blown epidemic of buyer’s remorse has taken hold. Popular resistance is rampant and bills to pull out of Common Core are making their way through multiple state legislatures.

Had the Obama administration been interested in policies with a proven record of improving students’ academic performance, it would have looked to Massachusetts. In the early 1990s, Massachusetts was an above average but unremarkable performer on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and SATs.  After enactment of the Bay State’s landmark 1993 education reform law, SAT scores rose for 13 consecutive years.  In 2005, Massachusetts students became the first state ever to score best in the nation in all four categories on the NAEP’s fourth and eighth grade reading and math assessments.  The next three times the tests were administered—in 2007, 2009, and 2010—this feat was repeated.

While American students as a whole lag their international peers, the 2007 “Trends in International Math and Science Study” showed Massachusetts students to be competitive with top-performing nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore.  With the Bay State’s eighth graders tying for first in the world in science, it could truly be said to be one of the few states to have answered the alarm bell of the Reagan administration’s 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report, which declared that, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future.”

Other states, such as Florida, claim to have developed reform models that work. But while they have shown good (though inconsistent) improvement, their performance remains below average on national tests and downright dismal on international assessments. 

Given this record, you might expect strong commonality between what Massachusetts did and what the U.S. Department of Education was trying to advance.  But it would be hard to imagine an approach that has less in common with the Bay State’s than the one promoted by Race to the Top.

The most obvious difference is that Massachusetts’s success was built upon a relentless focus on academics, specifically on literacy, math, and the liberal arts. Common Core emphasizes experiential, skills-based learning while reducing the amount of classic literature, poetry, and drama taught in English classes. Its more vocational bent includes far greater emphasis on jargon-laden “informational text” extracts, and it supports analyzing texts shorn of historical context and background knowledge.  

The impact on English classrooms in Massachusetts, which adopted Common Core in 2010, has been to reduce the amount of classical literature studied by more than half.  Goodbye Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

In math, consider the view of Stanford University emeritus professor of mathematics James Milgram, the only academic mathematician on Common Core’s validation committee. (He refused to sign off on the final draft of the national standards.) He describes the standards as having “extremely serious failings,” reflecting “very low expectations,” and ultimately leaving American students one year behind their international peers by fifth grade and two years behind by seventh grade. 

One major practical effect is that American students will not get to algebra I in eighth grade, which is critical if our students are to be college-ready in mathematics.

Rather than learn from leading states like Massachusetts, Common Core draws from the so-called “21^st century skills” movement, which elevates soft skills like global awareness, media literacy, cross-cultural flexibility and adaptability, and creativity to equal footing with academic content.  This less academic approach has, in fact, been road tested in places like Connecticut and West Virginia. Predictably, the results have been dismal.

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Back in 1998, Connecticut had higher reading scores than Massachusetts. But just as the Bay State was adopting clearly articulated academic goals, Connecticut opted for a "hands-on," skills-based approach. By 2005, Massachusetts's scores had jumped dramatically, and Connecticut was one of seven states experiencing outsized drops in reading scores.

West Virginia’s was perhaps the most enthusiastic embrace of 21^st century skills.  As Matthew Ladner, a research scholar at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, has demonstrated, its impact on poor students is deeply troubling.  West Virginia is the only state whose NAEP reading and math scores for students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch fell between 2003 and 2009.  The major D.C.-based drivers of Common Core and national tests like the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, Achieve, Inc., and the Obama administration all enthusiastically support 21^st century skills.

Common Core’s problems, however, extend beyond academic deficiencies.  No estimate was ever performed to determine what it would cost to implement the new standards. In 2011, Pioneer Institute commissioned the first independent, comprehensive cost study, which showed that transitioning states to the new standards will be $16.7 billion, more than triple the amount of the federal Race to the Top inducements. Massive technology upgrades, training and support, together with the purchase of new textbooks and instructional materials, and professional development account for most of the expense.     

Most disturbing are serious questions about Common Core’s legality.  Three federal laws explicitly prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from directing, supervising, or controlling any nationalized standards, testing, or curriculum.

And yet Race to the Top favored a state’s grant application if it adopted Common Core.  The U.S. Department of Education subsequently awarded $362 million to directly fund two national testing consortia to develop common nationalized assessments. The consortia funding application clearly state that they will use federal funds to develop curriculum materials and to create a “model curriculum” and instructional materials “aligned with” Common Core.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan himself noted that the consortia would develop “curriculum frameworks” and “instructional modules.” 

The Department of Education then made adopting Common Core a condition for waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability provisions, even though the national standards have never been approved by Congress and are, in fact, expressly prohibited by the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which defined the federal government’s role in K-12 education, the 1970 General Education Provisions Act, and the 1979 law establishing the U.S. Department of Education.

It is worth reminding our friends who call it a conservative policy that Common Core would have been a bridge too far even for President Johnson, who signed the ESEA, and President Carter, who signed the law creating the federal Department of Education.  As syndicated columnist George Will wrote last year about the push for Common Core, “Here again laws are cobwebs. As government becomes bigger, it becomes more lawless.”

The problems with what is now federal policy are not lost on state and local leaders.  In just the past few weeks, Indiana lawmakers agreed to pause implementation of Common Core.  Ditto in Pennsylvania. Michigan’s House of Representatives voted to defund the effort.  And the national standards are under fire in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Utah.

Nationally, the Republican National Committee recently adopted an anti-Common Core resolution, but opposition is bipartisan.  Many Democrats are troubled that Common Core is not based on research and ignores too much of what we know about how students learn.  American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten recently told the Washington Post, “Common Core is in trouble … There is a serious backlash in lots of different ways, on the right and on the left.”

The backlash is richly deserved.  The Common Core standards are academically inferior to the standards they replaced in high performing states; and they ignore empirical lessons of how states like Massachusetts achieved historic successes.  Neither local leaders nor their constituents like having policies force fed by Washington, especially when the new requirements amount to a massive, and possibly illegal, unfunded mandate.  Common Core’s troubles are just beginning.

Source: The Weekly Standard Blog, 5:31 PM, May 29, 2013 Jim Stergios is executive director of Pioneer Institute. Jamie Gass is director of the Pioneer Institute’s Center for School Reform.

Feds, Stop Funding Global Warming Mitigation

As The Economy Recesses, Obama's Global Warming Delusions Are Truly Cruel

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President Obama issued this threat to the American people in his 2013 State of the Union Address (SOTU): “But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change….Now, the good news is, we can make meaningful progress on this issue while driving strong economic growth….But if Congress doesn’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”

President Obama talks as if only he was reelected in 2012.  He fails to recall that the entire House of Representatives was on the ballot with him.  And the American people elected a majority of Republicans to the House, not to be a rubber stamp on anything Obama wants, but as a check on Obama excesses, which is what they serve as.

Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Obama cited as support for his threatened global warming regulatory jihad, “Yes, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15.”  The fact is also, however, that years of decline from a peak in global temperatures, as occurred in 1998 due to the entirely natural El Nino effect that year, can also be among the warmest on record.  (That global temperature record he is talking about only goes back about 125 years, most of which has been reflecting recovery of global temperatures from the “Little Ice Age” occurring roughly from 1350 to 1850.).

That global temperature record has been flat lining for 16 years now.  As the website Climate Depot reported in response to Obama, “The halt in global temperatures has shown up in multiple data sets and peer-reviewed literature.”  Even NASA’s James Hansen, the bureaucratic godfather of global warming hysterics, admits that the global temperature standstill is real, according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  “The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade,” Hansen said on January 15.

Professor Werner Kirstein of the Institute for Geography at the University of Leipzig told MDR German Public Radio that sensational PR claims of the hottest year or hottest decade on record are just political spin, because they are based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few hundredths of a degree.  As Hansen told reporters on January 13, “2010 differed from 2005 by less than 2 hundredths of a degree F (that’s 0.018F).”  And those are global averages reflecting a composite of hundreds of local weather station observations worldwide, a concoction that borders on alchemy.

Top Swedish climate scientist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, who has served on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official global warming advocacy body, was also quoted publicly on February 3 as saying,

“We are creating great anxiety without it being justified…there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic.  The warming we have had the last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.  The Earth appears to have cooling properties that exceed the previously thought ones, and computer models are inadequate to try to foretell a chaotic object like the climate, where actual observations are the only way to go.”

The award winning Bengtsson, highly decorated by scientific bodies across the globe, also pointed out that the heating effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) is logarithmic, which means the higher the concentration is, the smaller the effect of a further increase.  That is why historical proxy data going back millennia show much greater concentrations of CO2 — 10, 20 or 30 times today’s levels – with no associated catastrophic global temperatures.  That lack of association between temperature trends and CO2 has continued over the last century, as the up and down pattern of global temperatures over the past 100 years does not follow the upward climb of CO2 as the industrial revolution has expanded globally.  It follows instead the pattern of natural causes, such as sunspot cycles, and ocean temperature cycles.

Bengtsson reported as well, “The sea level has risen fairly evenly for a hundred years by 2-3 millimeters per year. The pitch has not accelerated.”  That is because the sea level has been rising as the Earth has been recovering from the freezing period of the Little Ice Age.  It is not due to man-caused global warming.

President Obama also told us in the SOTU, “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense.”  But that is a fairy tale.  On the website of Obama’s own EPA is a chart of a U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index, 1895 to 2008, which supports this statement, indicating that heat waves were much worse in the 1930s:  “Heat waves occurred with high frequency in the 1930s, and these remain the most severe heat waves in the U.S. historical record (see Figure 1). Many years of intense drought (the “Dust Bowl”) contributed to these heat waves by depleting soil moisture and reducing the moderating effects of evaporation.”  The EPA also acknowledges that there is no trend in the historical record of heat waves becoming worse.

As Climate Depot also reports, the temperature records of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network show that “the 1930s holds a wide lead for all-time daily record maximums in the U.S. There is zero evidence that ‘climate change’ has increased the probability of setting temperature records.”  That is why the 1930s is actually the hottest decade on record.

As reported on the website Real Science, forty percent of weather stations in the Historical Climatology Network set their all-time record maximum temperature during the 1930s.  Only one percent of those stations set their all-time record maximum temperature in the current decade, allegedly the hottest on record.  While NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) has claimed that 2012 was the hottest year on record, only 3 weather stations (0.3%) set their all time record maximum that year, while 172 (21%) did in 1936.  So much for Obama’s heat wave fantasies.

A 2012 study published in the journal Nature “suggests that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years…The major 2012 drought obscures the fact that U.S. has seen a decline in drought over the past century.”  Since 1950, wildfires have decreased globally by 15%, and the National Academy of Sciences expects that declining trend to continue for another 40 years.  A 2011 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that wildfires in the western United States are now at their lowest levels in 3,000 years.  University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. reports on another 2011 study, published in the Hydrological Sciences Journal showing that flooding has not increased in the United States over the last 85 to 127 years.

Steven Goddard summarizes at the website Real Science, “We know that hurricanes have declined, tornadoes have declined, floods have declined, and droughts have declined. That is why history has been redefined to start in the 1970s,” by the global warming alarmists.

But Obama persisted in error at the SOTU, adding, “We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.”

But as Pielke explained in the Denver Post on October 12, 2012, “Remarkably, the U.S. is currently experiencing the longest-ever recorded period with no strikes of a Category 3 or stronger hurricane. The major 2012 drought obscures the fact that the U.S. has seen a decline in drought over the past century.”  He added, “Sandy was terrible, but we’re currently in a relative hurricane drought.”

Steven Goddard again reported the facts on Real Science: “According to NOAA, hurricanes have been on the decline in the US since the beginning of records in the 19th century.  The worst decade for major (category 3,4,5) hurricanes was the 1940s.”

Carrying out his threat, Obama’s EPA is already in the process of imposing restrictive regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions under the Clean Air Act.  The impact of EPA’s CO2 regulation will be to sharply raise the cost of traditional energy sources — oil, natural gas, and coal — which will sharply raise the prices of electricity and gasoline.  These are the energy sources that have powered the industrial revolution.  Those price increases will effectively be yet another major tax increase on the economy of trillions over the years.  That will only further destroy jobs, depress wages, increase poverty, and contract economic growth.  Particularly devastated will be energy intensive manufacturing that Obama also touted in his 2013 SOTU.

Recent energy production breakthroughs have opened vast new vistas of booming, low cost energy prosperity for America.  Such a vastly expanded energy industry would directly create hundreds of thousands of good paying additional jobs in the expanded energy industry itself.  The Keystone pipeline would contribute the similarly booming resources of Canada to America, more than a million barrels a day, more than is imported from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.  That would create still more jobs, another quarter of a million in the energy industry alone, and the potential for freeing America from the cost of energy imports from the Middle East, and other hostile sources.  Moreover, the resulting dramatically increased supply of energy would also lower the cost of energy for the American economy, effectively constituting a major tax cut for the economy that would help fuel booming growth.   But if President Obama and his EPA have their way, all of this will be lost to America.

The notion that foregoing the enormous effective tax cut and job creation involved in developing America’s enormous natural energy resources, and instead imposing an enormous effective tax increase on the economy through soaring traditional energy prices, can drive strong economic growth, as Obama said in the SOTU, cannot be taken seriously.  No rational person could believe such a gross self-contradiction.  That is just boob bait to seduce the most gullible and credulous.

All of the costs of Obama’s global warming regulation will be for zero benefits in any event.  The formerly third world countries with rapidly emerging economies, such as China, India, Brazil, joined by Russia, and other growing countries, have made clear in power grabbing United Nations confabs that there is no way they are going to compromise their growth over the politically correct Lysenkoism of potentially catastrophic, man-caused, global warming.  But even wild-eyed global warming hysterics admit that strict CO2 emission restrictions in America alone are not going to have any more than a negligible effect on future global temperatures.  So Obama’s global warming regulatory crusade would suffer the most upside down cost benefit ratio in world history.

One more quarter of negative economic growth, and we will be in the 2013 double dip recession I predicted back in 2011 as a result of Obamanomics.  (See: “Obama and the Crash of 2013,” published by Encounter books).  With Obama persisting in his global warming delusion contributing to that, the double dip recession may provide the political foundation to impeach Obama for abuse of office.

Source: Forbes, by Peter Ferrara, 5/28/13

Roots of Global Warming

The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory

Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin.  He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics.  As a result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern genetics.

Under Lysenko’s view, for example, grafting branches of one plant species onto another could create new plant hybrids that would be perpetuated by the descendants of the grafted plant.  Or modifications made to seeds would be inherited by later generations stemming from that seed.  Or that plucking all the leaves off of a plant would cause descendants of the plant to be leafless

Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t MoveLysenkoism was “politically correct” (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with certain broader Marxist doctrines.  Marxists wanted to believe that heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics changed by living under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations of humans.  Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man.

Also Lysenko himself arose from a peasant background and developed his theories from practical applications rather than controlled scientific experiments.  This fit the Marxist propaganda of the time holding that brilliant industrial innovations would arise from the working classes through practical applications.  Lysenko’s theories also seemed to address in a quick and timely manner the widespread Soviet famines of the time arising from the forced collectivization of agriculture, rather than the much slower changes from scientific experimentation and genetic heredity.

Lysenko was consequently embraced and lionized by the Soviet media propaganda machine.  Scientists who promoted Lysenkoism with faked data and destroyed counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award.  Lysenko and his followers and media acolytes responded to critics by impugning their motives, and denouncing them as bourgeois fascists resisting the advance of the new modern Marxism.

The V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced on August 7, 1948 that thenceforth Lysenkoism would be taught as the only correct theory.  All Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenkoism.  Ultimately, Soviet geneticists resisting Lysenkoism were imprisoned and even executed.   Lysenkoism was abandoned for the correct modern science of Mendelian genetics only as late as 1964.

The Theory of Man Caused Catastrophic Global Warming 

This same practice of Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming.  That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly increased government powers and control over the private economy.  Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries.  Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.

Those who promote the theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award.  Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory.  Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?

Those in positions of scientific authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money, publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.

The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is supposed to represent the best science of the U.S. government on the issue of global warming.  In January, the USGCRP released the draft of its Third National Climate Assessment Report.  The first duty of the government scientists at the USGCRP is to produce a complete picture of the science of the issue of global warming, which is what the taxpayers are paying them for.  But it didn’t take long for the Cato Institute to do the job of the USGCRP with a devastating line by line rebuttal, The Missing Science from the Draft National Assessment on Climate Change, Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2012, by Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert C. Balling, Mary J. Hutzler & Craig D. Idso.

Check it out for yourself if you dare.  Both publications are written to be accessible by intelligent laymen.  See which one involves climate science and which one involves political science.

All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution.  The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.

Again, check it out for yourself.  You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.

The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well.  They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times.  They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists.  They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.

Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions.  They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists.  Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science.  The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.

Indeed, 31,487 U.S. scientists (including 9,000 Ph.Ds) with degrees in atmospheric Earth sciences, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science have signed a statement that reads: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” See here.  Some consensus.

Real science, of course, is not a matter of “consensus,” but of reason, with skepticism at its core.

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The Decline and Fall of the Theory of Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming

The alarmist claims of the UN’s IPCC are ultimately based not on scientific observations, but on unvalidated climate models and their projections of future global temperatures on assumptions of continued increases in carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning and use of fossil fuels.  The alarmists are increasingly in panic because the past projections of the models are increasingly divergent from the accumulating actual temperature records.  Those models are not real science, but made up science.  And no way we are abandoning the industrial revolution as the Sierra Club is hoping based on model fantasies and fairy tales.

The Economist magazine, formerly in lockstep with the Lysenkoists, shocked them with a skeptical article in March that began with this lede:

Move up http://i.forbesimg.com “OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade. . . .’”

Reality is not complying with the alarmism of the UN’s global warming models, just as it refused to do for Trofim Lysenko.  Remember all that hysteria about melting polar ice caps and the disappearing ice floes for the cute polar bears?  As of the end of March, the Antarctic ice cap was nearly one fourth larger than the average for the last 30 years.  The Arctic ice cap had grown back to within 3% of its 30 year average.  (The formerly declining Arctic ice was due to cyclically warm ocean currents).  Global sea ice was greater than in March, 1980, more than 30 years ago, and also above the average since then.

Remember the alarm about the rising sea level?  Yeah, that has been rising, as it has been since the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago.  Just exactly as it has been, at the same rate.  And anyone you know that has been scared by this alarmist propaganda has been successfully played by whatever media the fool has been relying on.

Murderous recent winters in Europe are killing as well belief in alarmist global warming on the continent.  University of Oklahoma Professor and geophysicist David Deming reported in a recent column,

“The United Kingdom had the coldest March weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in 134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles to clear snow from the streets.”

In the Northern Hemisphere, Deming adds, “Snow cover last December was the greatest since satellite monitoring began in 1966.”  That reflects similarly bitter cold winters in North America as well.  Despite claims by global warming Lysenkoists that soon children “won’t know what snow is,” on February 6, 2010, a blizzard covered the northeastern U.S. with 20 to 35 inches of snow.  Three days later another 10 to 20 inches were added.

These developments should have been expected from known indisputable facts.  Carbon dioxide is a natural substance essential to the survival of all life on the planet.  It is effectively oxygen for plants, and without plants there would be no food for animals to survive.  Because of the increased atmospheric CO2 agricultural output is already increasing.

CO2 is also a trace gas in the atmosphere, representing only 0.038% of the total atmosphere, up only 0.008% since 1945.  That tiny proportion of the atmosphere is supposed to produce catastrophic global warming that will end all life on the planet?  The historical proxy record shows CO2 concentrations in the distant history of the earth much, much greater than today.  Yet life survived, and flourished.  Moreover, the basic science of global warming is that the temperature increasing effect of increased CO2 concentrations declines as those concentrations increase.  So stop worrying and enjoy the agricultural abundance in your grocery store.

A tip off regarding reality should have been apparent from the dodgy propaganda involved in changing the labeling of the problem from “global warming” to “climate change.”  Of course, Earth has been experiencing climate change since the first sunrise on the planet.  We are not going to abandon the workers’ paradise of capitalism because climate change will continue.

Another tip off should have been the effective admission by global warming alarmists that they cannot defend their position in public debate.  The day the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming died can be dated from the time that one leading alarmist was foolish enough to debate James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, a video of which can be found on the Heartland website at Heartland.org.

Still another tip off should have been the practice of the alarmist new Lysenkoists to respond to dissenting science with ad hominem attacks.  That apparently reflects poor public schooling that never taught that an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy, as Aristotle taught more than 2,000 years ago.  My how western science has fallen.

The basic science shows that global temperatures are just not very sensitive to CO2 itself.  Even alarmists will concede that.  Where they get their alarm is with the modeling assumption that the CO2 induced temperature increases will produce positive feedbacks that will sharply increase the overall resulting warming.  The better recent science indicates, however, that instead of positive feedbacks, the naturally stable Earth would enjoy negative feedbacks restoring long term equilibrium and stability to global temperatures.

Then there is the man caused, global warming, fingerprint that the U.N.’s models all showed would result in a hot spot of particularly large temperature increases in the upper troposphere above the tropics.  But the incorruptible, satellite monitored, atmospheric temperature record shows no hot spot.  That is further confirmed by modern weather balloons measuring atmospheric temperatures above the tropics.  No hotspot.  No fingerprint.  No catastrophic, man caused global warming.  QED.

The revival of western science requires that the new Lysenkoism be discredited.  That is going to require quite some work, given the extent of the infestation.

Source: Forbes, Peter Ferrara, 4/28/2013 @ 8:00AM |17,539 views

Global Cooling is Here

To The Horror Of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here by Peter Ferrara

Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through.

Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out. The last, surviving, written records of the Norse

Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in 1408 A.D. in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.

Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually. The first River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1607. In 1607-1608, early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June. In January, 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen. By the end of the 17th century, famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.

Reflecting its global scope, evidence of the Little Ice Age appears in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather from 1570 to 1820. A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa also indicates a colder period from 1500 to 1800. A 1997 study comparing West Antarctic ice cores with the results of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) indicate a global Little Ice Age affecting the two ice sheets in tandem.

The Siple Dome, an ice dome roughly 100 km long and 100 km wide, about 100 km east of the Siple Coast of Antartica, also reflects effects of the Little Ice Age synchronously with the GISP2 record, as do sediment cores from the Bransfield Basin of the Antarctic Peninsula. Oxygen/isotope analysis from the Pacific Islands indicates a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature decline between 1270 and 1475 A.D.

The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent in the early 1700s. The Mueller glacier on the east side of New Zealand’s Southern Alps expanded to its maximum extent at roughly the same time.

Ice cores from the Andeas mountains in South America show a colder period from 1600 to 1800. Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show cold periods from 1270 to 1380 and from 1520 to 1670. Spanish explorers noted the expansion of the San Rafael Glacier in Chile from 1675 to 1766, which continued into the 19th century.

The height of the Little Ice Age is generally dated as 1650 to 1850 A.D. The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, and New York harbor was frozen in the winter of 1780. Historic snowstorms struck Lisbon, Portugal in 1665, 1744 and 1886. Glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana advanced until the late 18th or early 19th centuries. The last River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1814. The Little Ice Age phased out during the middle to late 19^th century.

The Little Ice Age, following the historically warm temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about AD 950 to 1250, has been attributed to natural cycles in solar activity, particularly sunspots. A period of sharply lower sunspot activity known as the Wolf Minimum began in 1280 and persisted for 70 years until 1350. That was followed by a period of even lower sunspot activity that lasted 90 years from 1460 to 1550 known as the Sporer Minimum. During the period 1645 to 1715, the low point of the Little Ice Age, the number of sunspots declined to zero for the entire time. This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named after English astronomer Walter Maunder. That was followed by the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, another period of well below normal sunspot activity.

The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.

Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.

The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, the world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750. Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed. NASA’s Science News report for January 8, 2013 states, indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event rightnow. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 [the current short term 11 year cycle] is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.

That is even more significant because NASA’s climate science has been controlled for years by global warming hysteric James Hansen, who recently announced his retirement.

But this same concern is increasingly being echoed worldwide. The Voice of Russia reported on April 22, 2013,

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from

Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”

That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change  only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.

AGE 2 OF 2

The German Herald reported on March 31, 2013, German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is now the coldest in 208 years and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory [saying this] is proof as he said earlier that we are heading for a Mini Ice Age.” Talking to German media the scientist who first made his prediction in 2005 said that after studying sunspots and their relationshipwith climate change on Earth, we are now on an unavoidable advance towardsa deep temperature drop.

Faith in Global Warming is collapsing in formerly staunch Europe following increasingly severe winters which have now started continuing into spring. Christopher Booker explained in The Sunday Telegraph on April 27, 2013,

A news report from India (The Hindu April 22, 2013) stated, March in Russia saw the harshest frosts in 50 years, with temperatures dropping to 25° Celsius in central parts of the country and 45° in the north. It was the coldest spring month in Moscow in half a century. Weathermen say spring is a full month behind schedule in Russia.” The news report summarized, Here in Britain, where we had our fifth freezing winter in a row, the Central England Temperature record  according to an expert analysis on the US science blog Watts Up With That – shows that in this century, average winter temperatures have dropped by 1.45C, more than twice as much as their rise between 1850 and 1999, and twice as much as the entire net rise in global temperatures recorded in the 20th century.”

Russia is famous for its biting frosts but this year, abnormally icy weather also hit much of Europe, the United States, China and India. Record snowfalls brought Kiev, capital of Ukraine, to a standstill for several days in late March, closed roads across many parts of Britain, buried thousands of sheep beneath six-metre deep snowdrifts in Northern Ireland, and left more than 1,000,000 homes without electricity in Poland. British authorities said March was the second coldest in its records dating back to 1910. China experienced the severest winter weather in 30 years and New Delhi in January recorded the lowest temperature in 44 years.”

Booker adds, “Last week it was reported that 3,318 places in the USA had recorded their lowest temperatures for this time of year since records began. Similar record cold was experienced by places in every province of Canada. So cold has the Russian winter been that Moscow had its deepest snowfall in 134 years of observations.”

Britain’s Met Office, an international cheerleading headquarters for global warming hysteria, did concede last December that there would be no further warming at least through 2017, which would make 20 years with no global warming. That reflects grudging recognition of the newly developing trends. But that reflects as well growing divergence between the reality of real world temperatures and the projections of the climate models at the

foundation of the global warming alarmism of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since those models have never been validated, they are not science at this point, but just made up fantasies. That is why, in the 12 years to 2011, 11 out of 12 [global temperature] forecasts [of the Met Office] were too high and none were colder than [resulted], as BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson wrote in January.

Global warming was never going to be the problem that the Lysenkoists who have brought down western science made it out to be. Human emissions of CO2 are only 4 to 5% of total global emissions, counting natural causes. Much was made of the total atmospheric concentration of CO2 exceeding 400 parts per million. But if you asked the daffy NBC correspondent who hysterically reported on that what portion of the atmosphere 400 parts per million is, she transparently wouldn’t be able to tell you. One percent of the

atmosphere would be 10,000 parts per million. The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 deep in the geologic past were much, much greater than today, yet life survived, and we have no record of any of the catastrophes the hysterics have claimed. Maybe that is because the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically. That means there is a natural limit to how much increased CO2 can effectively warm the planet, which would be well before any of the supposed climate catastrophes the warming hysterics have tried to use to shut down capitalist prosperity.

Yet, just last week, there was Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson telling us, by way of attempting to tutor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, for the record, and for the umpteenth time, there is no ‘great amount of uncertainty about whether the planet is warming and why. If you can read, and you have gotten this far in my column, you know why Robinson’s ignorance is just

Another Washington Post abuse of the First Amendment. Mr. Robinson, let me introduce you to the British Met Office, stalwart of Global Warming science, such as it is, which has already publicly confessed that we are already three quarters through 20 years of No Global Warming!

Booker could have been writing about Robinson when he concluded his Sunday Telegraph commentary by writing, Has there ever in history been such an almighty disconnect between observable reality and the delusions of a political class that is quite impervious to any rational discussion?”

But there is a fundamental problem with the temperature records from this contentious period, when climate science crashed into political science. The land based records, which have been under the control of global warming alarmists at the British Met Office and the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit, and at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S., show much more warming during this period than the incorruptible satellite atmosphere temperature records. Those satellite records have been further confirmed by atmospheric weather balloons. But the land based records can be subject to tampering and falsification.

Source: Forbes, To The Horror Of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here by Peter Ferrara, 5/26/2013 @ 9:44AM 165,098 views