Frustration

This intense eagerness to get Sarah Palin for whatever it is she might have done on line unfolded concurrently with all the attention that had to be paid to Anthony Weiner for his on-line antics. What we can’t see is the agony the poor journalists must have endured as Weiner’s wienerisms hurt the Democratic Party just when they stood ready to damage the Republican Party with Sarah’s misdeeds. And then — oh, how awful! — they got nothing from Sarah. Nothing but hard work and — urrrgghhh! — good government and — damn! — family values.

Palin is even better at confounding her enemies than Bush is. The genius of it is that she makes it look like shear luck. But then she does it again and again and again...

via: instapundit.com

Trig Letter

Among the emails in the Palin document dump is one in which Palin contemplates the birth in a few weeks of her child with Downs Syndrome. The maturity, wisdom, equanimity, and thoughtfulness with which she approaches this is a joy of which to read.

Where's the Warming?

Atmospheric CO2 levels have increased even more than the IPCC predicted in 2001. If their predictions were correct there should have been an even bigger increase in atmospheric temperatures than they predicted, but over the 10 years since their report was published there has been no increase in those temperatures at all.

Why? What is missing?

The core idea of every climate model the IPCC uses is the idea that for every unit of increase of temperature caused by CO2 there will be a total increase of 3 units caused by water vapor. Disagreement over this assumption is the source of all the disagreements and misunderstandings about climate models.

What did they find when they tried to prove that the assumption about water vapor is correct?

If the assumption about water vapor was correct then it should have been possible to detect a hot spot in the troposphere over the tropics. During the last 4 decades weather balloons and satellites have failed to detect any such spot, not even a trace of it.

This means that the assumption about water vapor is incorrect. This first became clear in the mid '90s, and with Aqua satellite data it is even more clear.

And if you plug a more reasonable figure for the water vapor effect into the climate models you get results that, surprise, match what has happened over the last 10 years and over the previous 100 years as well.

Why haven't the scientists we're all familiar with acknowledged this? I suspect it's because if they did they would lose their funding. There is simply no question that they would. Without the disaster scenario of global warming there would be no interest in the field. They'd sink out of sight into obscurity.

WI Democrats, Unions Don't Like Democracy

From Power Line:

A common theme of the union demonstrators in Madison today was that Governor Walker is a “dictator.” This showed up on sign after sign. It sheds light, I think, on how public union members in particular, and liberals in general, think. What is going on here is that the voters of Wisconsin have elected a Republican Governor and–overwhelmingly–a Republican legislature, precisely so that they can get the state’s budget under control.

What the Democrats don’t like isn’t dictatorship, it is democracy. That is why the Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate fled the state en masse–they prevented a quorum, so that a vote they were going to lose couldn’t take place. Once again, it is democracy they are trying to frustrate, not dictatorship.

One could make the point more broadly about the organized labor movement. The unions’ top priority is to eliminate the secret ballot in union certification elections. Why?

We all know why.