Was 2008 the year that Global Warming was finally debunked as Unscientific Nonsense?

Ask one of those polar bears that have failed to drown like they should have.


Or better still, read this article by Christopher Booker from the Telegraph:

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

[...] Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world. [...]

We can only hope. But fantasies don't always die easily. I expect that just like Holocaust deniers, the hard core of the Global Warming Chicken Littles will always be with us.

And of course, since global warming has failed to materialize, it's adherents now claim that, no matter what the weather does, it's all proof that their theory is true anyway:

"Global warming" is a pseudo-science like astrology

A theory that can't be disproved, because no matter what happens, it's true anyway? What's science got to do with it? Nothing that's demonstrably true.
     

Cell Phone Dangers: how true are they?

Perhaps you've heard stories about cell phones causing kernels of corn to pop when they all work at once? How true is this stuff? Not very, apparently. An article by Gregory Lapin, Chairman of the ARRL RF Safety Committee, explains a few things:

Anything for a Buck

After writing my last column I was amazed by the number of people who wrote to tell me that cell phones are dangerous, and they have proof! I was directed to one of a number of videos that were available on YouTube, showing kernels of popcorn on a table that popped when one to four cell phones around them were transmitting. "It's obvious," reasoned these correspondents, "that if a cell phone can generate enough heat to pop corn, then it can also fry your brain cells!"

If you haven't witnessed one of those videos, you should. Pretty scary stuff, isn't it? When I first saw one of these videos it gave me pause. It didn't seem possible but there it was on the screen. These videos are copies or remakes of a professionally produced version from Cardo Systems, a manufacturer of Bluetooth remote headsets.

Popping corn with a cell phone is clearly a hoax. Similar hoaxes include hard boiling an egg with a cell phone. Take a look to see how it is done (needless to say, every ham should immediately realize how dangerous this trick could be to perform).

Just as radio amateurs must prevent their stations from exposing people to unsafe levels of RF, cell phones are extensively tested to confirm that exposure to users will be under the Maximum Permissible Exposure (MPE). These thresholds are far below the levels of energy absorption that can raise the temperature of tissue noticeably -- really far below what it would take to pop a kernel of corn. If you're interested in experimenting, place a small container of water between the antennas of two or more operating cell phones and try to measure a change in temperature. [...]

The article also addresses supposed "cell-phone protector pouches" that are supposed to protect you from ... who knows what. It's just a scam.

A cell phone is essentially a small radio device. The police, the military, emergency services and many businesses use radio devices for communication all the time. Many people use two way radios their whole lives, without harmful effects.

Some people claim cell phones cause brain cancer. But the data I've seen is conflicting, and doesn't seem conclusive either way. Cell phones may be unique from other radio communications, in that the transmitter device is pressed right up against the head, for hours at a time. Hours and hours and hours, for some people. It could be argued the people who use radios professionally aren't chit chatting for hours on end, every day, with the transceiver pressed up against their heads. Some folks seem to have their cell phones permanently attached there.

I don't spend a lot of time on the phone like that, but anyone who does ought to get a headset anyway. They are inexpensive, and it's much more comfortable than holding a phone.

I would guess that it's not healthy to have a cell phone glued to the side of your head 90% of the time. But then it's probably not good to be on ANY telephone that much. Many people could benefit from hanging the phone up, and going outside more for fresh air and exercise.