While we have warmed up somewhat in the past week, anyone who lives in San Diego can tell you how cold and gloomy the summer has been. In typical San Diego summer, there is a period in May and June where the cold water off the coast fuels a persistent fog layer that spreads miles inland, keeping the area cooler that the latitude would proscribe and giving rise to what the natives call “June Gloom”.  In most years, this pattern breaks by the 3rd week in June, and gives way to hot, sunny days moderated in the afternoon by a strong sea breeze.

Not so this year.  The gloom was entrenched until mid-August.  One likely explanation is a massively cold area of water in the eastern Pacific.  This is frequently referred to as  La Niña, the cold counterpart to El Niño’s warmer than normal water.

At the moment, science is not able to connect our diminished solar radiation to the cooling of the eastern pacific.  But if the lowered solar output is a driver for this, North America could be in for some unwanted weather patterns.

For starters, it could be very cold indeed over California and Nevada this winter.  With that huge pocket of cold water driving our air temperatures, we could see much lower daily lows than we are used to.  If this acts like the last La Niña, we could see a lack of rain this winter in the southwest, putting further strain on our sources in the Sierra and the Colorado River.?

Gerard Van der Leun over at American Digest posted the poster above.

As for me and my house, well, here’s a photo of our place from Earth Hour 2009:

Repeat and rinse.  ..bruce w..

…Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU made a series of (for warmists) startling admissions over the weekend. And, of course, Hitler has to weigh in. Hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun over at American Digest (one of the best blogs on the web). I know the Hitler clip is a bit overused, but this is very, very well done. Heh.

UPDATE 1830 MDT

FX is showing “The Day After Tomorrow” right now; I don’t know if that’s pure coincidence or some clever programming on someone’s part.  In either case, the movie’s wretched and nonsensical scientific gaffes, as well as the political heavy-handedness (e.g., the Dick Cheney clone), are even more painful in the light of the wholesale collapse of AGW during the past several months.  ..bfw..

How it looks in the planners' minds.

One fundamental economic problem with mass transit is that it rarely, if ever, is financially self-sufficient. This is usually explained away with something like, “Well, if we get enough people riding it, the benefit to the environment will be worth it.” Besides the fact that this generally isn’t true, there’s the additional problem that when (a) fuel prices go up and/or (b) economic times get tough, mass transit fares go up and services face cutbacks — right at the time when mass transit would might make more sense.

(Another fundamental problem is that mass transit, like most ‘alternative energy’ sources, lacks the density, carrying capacity, and convenience to make it worthwhile. But that’s another discussion.)

California, which never saw a green idea it didn’t like (and totally screw up), is facing this problem with mass transit right now (hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit):

For three years, Veronique Selgado took BART from the East Bay to her job working for an airline at San Francisco International Airport. But she recently switched to driving because BART raised fares and upped its SFO round-trip surcharge from $3 to $8, boosting her daily trip cost to nearly $20.

“It’s outrageous,” Selgado said. “At what point do they stop raising the prices,  when it’s $50 a day to go round-trip to work? At what point does BART stand back and say, ‘People can’t pay that much to commute’?”

One of the comments to the article points to this Onion classic:

WASHINGTON, DC–A study released Monday by the American Public Transportation Association reveals that 98 percent of Americans support the use of mass transit by others.

“With traffic congestion, pollution, and oil shortages all getting worse, now is the time to shift to affordable, efficient public transportation,” APTA director Howard Collier said. “Fortunately, as this report shows, Americans have finally recognized the need for everyone else to do exactly that.”

Of the study’s 5,200 participants, 44 percent cited faster commutes as the primary reason to expand public transportation, followed closely by shorter lines at the gas station. Environmental and energy concerns ranked a distant third and fourth, respectively.

Note that I lived in and around Washington DC for eight years and was a great fan of the Metro system — but I still have to admit it’s poorly run, poorly maintained, and heavily subsidized.  ..bruce..

…they’d probably look something like the one above. Hat tip to Steven Hayward over at NRO. ..bruce w..

I'm shocked, shocked! to discover that this has been going on.

I’ve avoided doing a lot of blogging on Climategate because so many other sites and bloggers are doing such a great job, while the Left gets increasingly shrill (“Pay no attention to the scientists behind the curtain!”).

But a new critical point has been reached: the Warmist scientific elite are starting to turn on one another:

One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: “I can’t put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email.”

Prof Mann also said he could not “justify” a request from Prof Jones that he should delete some of his own emails to prevent them from being seen by outsiders.

“I can’t justify the action, I can only speculate that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that’s clear.”

Prof Mann then argued however that there was “absolutely no evidence” that he too had manipulated data, while he also said “I don’t believe that any of my colleagues have done that”.

To quote Glenn Reynolds: heh.  By the way, Mann himself is under investigation by Penn State, which may help explain the hasty denials. Don’t these scientists ever watch “Law & Order”? The first to cut a deal gets off easier.

UPDATE

Oh, and Al Gore has just canceled his pay-per-view ‘global warming’ lecture at Copenhagen. Wonder how many of his slides in his “new multimedia show” were based on Climategate-tainted research?  Hat tip to Climate Depot. (P.S. The photo above is the one that accompanied the original Danish news article.)

YET ANOTHER UPDATE

Courtesy of the Anchoress comes this Ghostbusters clip that let the secret slip years ago:

I worked for 18 months at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, which back then was right next door to NASA/JSC, and while it was possibly the best job I ever had, it forever disabused me of the notion of science as untainted by ambition, greed, money, politics and personality conflicts. ..bruce w..

I haven’t written much about ‘Climategate’ because so many others are doing such a great job (for example, see here, here, and here). But this video (hat tip to Ace of Spades) pretty much sums things up (and with a catchy tune, too!).  ..bruce w..

The sad thing is, it’s true.  An electric car is, in effect, a NIMBY-mobile. Unless you’ve got your own clean energy source (e.g., a large solar panel farm on your property — and here’s a shout-out to Jim Hamerly), you’re likely still impacting the environment — just at a distance.  ..bruce w..

ITEM: My co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, has a post over at the New Ledger about the proposed legislation to give the President “emergency control of the Internet”:

S773 makes no attempt to outline and describe what form of emergency would trigger the use of these broad new powers to limit communication, nor any means by which it could be reviewed by anyone outside the executive branch. The bill also proscribes that the executive branch will perform periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies “shall share” requested information with the federal government.

Translation: the US government bureaucracy will be spending your tax dollars to figure out private networks, find choke points and places where they can control the flow of communication. Furthermore, companies (such as your ISP) are going to be required, by law, to supply the federal bureaucrats with whatever network, account, usage and history information they deem appropriate. All in the name of cyber safety, you see.

Read the whole thing. I propose that we label S773 “the stupid Rockefeller bill“, just as an earlier idiotic piece of legislation by (now former) Senator Fritz Hollings to require all computers to have controls to block digital copying became known on the Hill as “the stupid Hollings bill”. The stupid Hollings bill eventually died; let’s work to ensure that the stupid Rockefeller bill dies as well.

ITEM: It’s passe now, but guess what? Van Jones did not fill out the infamous 63-question form that the White House was requiring for background checks. No word on whether the FBI ran the usual mandatory background check on Jones and, if so, just what they reported to the White House. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is saying, “Who? What happened? Was it important?”

ITEM: Maybe it’s just as well that Van Jones, the White House’s “Green Jobs czar” is gone. Doesn’t look as though those “green jobs” are materializing all that well.

ITEM: Speaking of clueless journalists, Sandra and I fly out tomorrow (Wednesday) to DC for the 9/12 March on the Capitol. Estimates of the expected protest crowd for Saturday have doubled, from 25,000 to 50,000. Anyone want to lay bets on how much actual coverage this gets in the mainstream media? ..bruce w..

The Obama/Joker image (above) was just the start. Combined with the “fishy e-mail” snitching request on the White House blog — a request of dubious legality and unquestionable bad taste — there are more images and videos coming out of the woodwork.

The Obama/Joker poster above may have been inspired by this one from last November:

Both in turn may have inspired this poster by Slublog:

Also, be sure to go see the whole “Dark Knight” sequence over at Jim Treacher’s blog. Here are the first two panels:

As I said, go read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone presents this St. Obama cover not as mockery but in all seriousness:

(David Gergen, Paul Krugman and Michael Moore? Are you kidding me? It’s hard to imagine three more self-important and pretentious commentators. Couldn’t they have at least included P. J. O’Rourke?)

Back on track here: Blue Crab Boulevard serves this up:

And here’s this video from Reason TV (hat tip to Instapundit):

Now, Ace of Spades has this poster up:

Ace has this one up as well:

Darlene over at Protein Wisdom has a pair. Here’s the first:

And here’s the second:

Note that Vinnie over at My Pet Jawa suggests that we all use “flag@whitehouse.gov” as our e-mail address in blog comments and to forward spam.

Here’s one from Harvey over at IMAO:

In the meantime, Gerard Van der Leun over at American Digest finds this snippet from Madagascar II somehow appropriate to the current ‘stimulus’ effort:

Gerard also has this nifty poster:

And finally, in light of the cap-and-trade debacle, here’s an old yet timely reminder from the late George Carlin, courtesy of Check Your Premises (language warning — this is George Carlin, after all):

More as I track them down. ..bruce w..