Agreement

In today's Guardian, Simon Jenkins argues against the proposed reclassification of cannabis from C to B, and at the time I am writing, not one comment disagrees with him.

Marginal tax rates

I haven't been able yet to find any empirical research into whether or not marginal tax rates do act as a disincentive to employment. Anyone know any?

From the Journal of Obvious Research

A listing at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation:

Struggling to pay council tax: new perspectives on the local taxation debate

This study explores how many low-income households are struggling to pay the council tax and why.

And here's what they found:

“The problem is my wages [£170 per week]. I just don’t earn enough.” (Gardener, male, 20s)

Collective punishment

Norman Geras:

Not only is Wright rather selective in what he takes from the Bible, since somewhere in it there will be an injunction against killing the innocent, he himself is innocent of the understanding that guilt is not acquired simply through community membership, much less by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Chris Dillow:

This government is supporting the financial sector to an unprecedented degree, with a £50bn bail-out. It's only right that those who work in that sector should pay in some way for this state aid.

To achieve which, he suggests raising the top rate of tax, but not just for the financial sector.

The Cravath System

Very interesting:

Here’s how the “Cravath System” works. Bring lots of new employees in, team them up with mentors, provide real work to do, and give them a choice: either get lots of great experience and get out, or work hard for a higher-up position. Whenever you hear someone aspire to “make partner”, he’s undoubtedly working at a firm that’s adopted this model.
[...]
A company with a culture of quitting does not have ex-employees; they have alumni. This is far more than a semantic distinction. An alumni relationship is positive; something that people can take pride in; and one that keeps the door open for further opportunities on both ends.

Oh look

A Global Cooling alarmist site!

Police priorities

There's a story round my neck of the woods, about an incident a couple of years ago just like this one:

ARNOLD A family who dialled 999 when eight men wearing balaclavas burst into their home at 11.15pm were told by the police that they were too busy to come.

Mathew Sims, 24, his partner Sarah Barham, also 24, and their two children, aged 6 and 5, ran upstairs when the men, one brandishing an axe, smashed the glass in a door that Mr Sims was trying to keep closed.

Eventually the burglars left in two cars after stripping the downstairs rooms of electrical items. Three hours later the police turned up at the house – barely a mile from a police station – in Arnold, Nottinghamshire. Mr Sims said: “The minute we knew these people were in the house we rang the police, but they said it would be at least half an hour before they could come out.

“No one from the police had turned up half an hour later, and when we rang again they said there was no one they could send.”

In this story, a farmer in a remote farmhouse heard burglars downstairs, called the police and was told they had nobody in the area and that the farmer should lock himself in his bedroom. he hung up, thought for a moment, then called the police back, saying "It's OK, I shot them". The police - armed police - arrived ten minutes later.

That might be apocryphal but it does show what people think of the police, just as the news report quoted above shows they are right to think this.

Bloody Libertarians

I'm feeling annoyed with the UK Libertarian Party. Stealing my ideas. OK, I hadn't actually mentioned them to anyone before, but that just makes it more sinister: thought theft.

Mind you, in this instance I will grudgingly admit this is such an obvious piece of sense it might just have occurred to more than one person at much the same time:

Repeal specific legislation about phone use, smoking and so on, and rely on historic laws in regard to vehicle control. Killing as a result of driving a vehicle while incapacitated—for whatever reason—should be manslaughter, and treated accordingly.

Even before reading the LPUK manifesto, I'd been preparing a post about this. Hurling a car into a blind corner, I had explained to my Labrador, Humphrey, last week while out walking, is like hurling a piano out of an upstairs window without looking out first to make sure the way was clear. Maybe the piano wouldn't hit anybody, maybe it would. If it did, the hurler would be looking at a manslaughter charge. Why not the motorist? Why do some forms of hurling-heavy-things-without-looking have special, extra-lenient legislation, but not others?

Humph seemed to take the point.

And this micro-legislation of harmless activity - very literally harmless: activity that hasn't caused harm - like using a phone safely while driving just allows the 20% or so of people who become sadists when given power over others to, well, become sadists. It diverts the police into lying in wait for people who are not harming anyone, it transforms the police from an agency that protects people who are doing no harm into an agency that preys on ordinary people.

It's not even as though it can be effective. What if I lean over to the passenger side of the car to pick up a packet of mints I use to fend off the nicotine pangs because I can't smoke because my car has been designated a workplace? That isn't illegal but it's more dangerous than lighting a cigarette. You can't ban every silly thing people might do while driving, so just deal with the effects of their actions, if there are any, in the normal way taking into account, as usual, any exacerbating or mitigating factors.

So, all very sensible and right. But is this part of a pattern? How many other ideas have they nicked? I'll report on more Libertarian Party policies over the coming week. I have a feeling it won't just be me: a lot of people will find that LPUK have been stealing their ideas.

Unless it's more a case of these ideas being widely held, if often unarticulated, and this new Party has started to put into concrete policy terms what millions hold to be true. Maybe thousands ruminate about the absurd, oppressive and ineffective interference in the minutiae of our daily lives by political agencies while out walking their dogs. Maybe all the people in my local pub who never even knew there was such a thing as Libertarianism when the smoking ban forced us outside last summer and a sort of rolling political debate began, maybe they'll find that LPUK are articulating the thoughts they'd been feeling growing in them over the past ten or so years.

Hmmm... Maybe. Now that would be interesting.

Climate bias at Wikipedia

Trivialising the reputations of realists, exaggerating those of alarmists.

Libertarian Party

I haven't written much about the new UK Libertarian Party, but I think they might face a small test. The much older Libertarian Alliance runs a blog, and recently this was posted on it:

"IF you prefer Ken or Boris as Mayor but want to cause a stir and wake up the political establishment give your first preferences to BNP and the 2nd preferences to Ken or Boris.

If you do the last option the media will scream blue murder and the politicians might notice. Doing the same tactic with any other party will go totally unnoticed!"



Since the BNP is the only major party in the UK (apart from LPUK of course) that behaves actually as if it’s listening to voters who are drowning, franchistically-speaking, in the tide of corporato-leftist-big-government, the last two short paras above may be for you. I don’t think the Libertarian Party of the UK is fielding a condidate this time, but I could hope so. I have always advocated the formation of a UK Libertarian Party as you all know.

I added the quote marks, because the initial part of the quote is itself a quote, from a posting at the Libertarian Alliance Yahoo Group.

Association with the BNP would be extremely damaging for this fledgling party, which I broadly support. Will they disassociate themselves from this post?

To the Western World

The Egyptian blogger Nah·det Masr recently posted a message to the Western World, in which he wrote:

To the western world: check out the roots of hatred

This is a musical that documents some of the autrocities committed by the Israeli "Defense" Forces that you support. I would be the last one to defend or make execuses for terrorism. I only want the readers to understand the roots of hatred. These autrocities have been going on since the first settlers came in large numbers from Europe to Palestine between the two wars. This musical (this is only one part of four) sums up the feelings in the hearts of hundreds of millions of Arabs. You don't have to understand the words, but just look at the scenes which we are accustomed to on our news channels, and you probably don't get a chance to see in your news channels

I think he might be surprised; we do see a lot of footage of the type in this video on our news bulletins, even to the point of outright Pallywood staged incidents presented as truth.

But this blogger, an Egyptian academic, is exactly the sort of person we need to engaging in dialogue with, he is a humane democrat who longs for a renaissance in his mother country. I have been reading his blog for a couple of years and have never seen anything anti-Semitic on it. He frequently attacks Islamist extremists and dreads any expanded Islamic influence in the government of his country. He holds up secular Turkey as an example of a model Egypt might follow.

Unfortunately he has comments turned off at the moment, and no email address so I can't speak to him directly. This is my indirect attempt at initiating such dialogue.

First, he has asked us to view this clip - it seems to be a collaborative effort featuring singers and musicians from a number of Muslim countries, and is mourning the plight of the Palestinians. If this is to be a dialogue then we have a responsibility to hear his case. Here is the clip, and apart from anything else, there are some fine musicians taking part:



In response, I have two questions. There were some incursions into Egypt recently:

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have surged into Egypt from the Gaza Strip after masked militants destroyed parts of the border wall.

Initially, Mubarek said he wanted to allow the Palestinians to buy food, but after a short time things became uglier and eventually:

Egypt said on Thursday it would no longer tolerate Palestinians infiltrating the country from the Gaza Strip, and threatened to break the legs of anyone crossing the Rafah border illegally. “Anyone who breaches the border will have their legs broken,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit was quoted as saying by the official MENA news agency on public television overnight.

My questions are:

1. Is the Israeli wall, recently built along their border with Gaza, worse than the older Egyptian wall and, if so, why?
2. If Palestinian rockets were falling daily on an Egyptian border town, home made rockets but still sometimes lethal, more often bringing injury and loss, and always terrifying, if Egyptian soldiers were occasionally kidnapped, if suicide bombers sometimes murdered women and children, and men, in cafés, restaurants, at weddings, on buses and in schools - if Palestinians did all these things to Egypt and to Egyptians, then what would be the right response from the Egyptian government?

Williams

Right Wing Prof just posted what happens to be one of my favourite William Carlos Williams poems, The Red Wheel Barrow. Here's another, Flowers by the Sea:

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s
edge, unseen, the salt ocean
lifts its form – chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone
but colour and the movement – or the shape
perhaps – of restlessness, whereas
the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem

RIP Humph

Humphrey Lyttelton, 23 May 1921 – 25 April 2008

Chinese arms return home

After the dockers in Durban refused to unload arms bound for Mugabe's thugs in Zimbabwe, the ship carrying them has turned back for China. Mozambique, Namibia and Angola had all refused it permission to dock.

“This is a great victory for the Durban dockers,” said Sprite Zungu, of the South African International Transport Federation.

“They took action while the rest of the world, including the UN, the US and even the South African government just agonized and twiddled their thumbs.”

It's no surprise the UN failed to act. The US had no power to do so and the word "even" is out of place before the words "South African government"; Mbeki is the main reason Mugabe still clings to power.

But congratulations to the Durban dockers, and to the governments of Mozambique, Namibia and Angola.

In praise of zotero

The fact that half the traffic to this blog uses Firefox is extraordinary. Internet Explorer has seen a collapse of something like 40% in their market share in just two years. There are all kinds of reasons why people have been switching, but Firefox extensions ought to be one of them.

For web developers, and this increasingly includes network application development, Firebug has become the sort of tool you wondered how you managed without. I've been trialling the research tool Zotero for a short while, and it's fantastic. Using it has become second nature. If you stumble on something relevant to research you're doing, click zotero open and file the link, or copy the page, to the right collection.



This is just the start of extended Firefox functionality. FF isn't a web browser, it's an application development framework in which a web browser has been implemented. Completely different applications can be implemented within it, but the only one that seems to have got any traction yet is Celtx.

Solar surfing

Space weather and atmospheric light effects on Jupiter.

Yes

It is.

Views of America

From the Middle East:



So financial aid and the spread of democracy poll much lower than political issues [Bad Phrasing - domestic polls lower than international] the Palestinian issue, America out of Iraq, America off the Arabian peninsula entirely and the end of American aid to Israel.

That's an intense politicisation; Arabs aren't innately less interested in financial well-being and political emancipation than other peoples. Egypt has Kefaya and Ayman Nour, yet 86.5% of Egyptians polled prioritised these political concerns.

People of good will from all sides have a great deal of mutual incomprehension between them. The important thing is not to confuse that with dislike.

An oldie

But updated. Going the rounds:

The Rt Hon David Miliband MP
Secretary of State,
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA),
Nobel House
17 Smith Square
London SW1P 3JR

16 May 2007

Dear Secretary of State,

My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for GBP3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs.

I would now like to join the “not rearing pigs” business. In your opinion, what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on and which is the best breed of pigs not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy.

I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs, but if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will just as gladly not rear porkers. Are there any advantages in not rearing rare breeds such as Saddlebacks or Gloucester Old Spots, or are there too many people already not rearing these? As I see it, the hardest part of this programme will be keeping an accurate record of how many pigs I haven’t reared. Are there any Government or Local Authority courses on this?

My friend is very satisfied with this business. He has been rearing pigs for forty years or so, and the best he ever made on them was GBP1,422 in 1968. That is - until this year, when he received a cheque for not rearing any. If I get GBP3,000 for not rearing 50 pigs, will I get GBP6,000 for not rearing 100? I plan to operate on a small scale at first, holding myself down to about 4,000 pigs not raised, which will mean about GBP240,000 for the first year. As I become more expert in not rearing pigs, I plan to be more ambitious, perhaps increasing to, say, 40,000 pigs not reared in my second year, for which I should expect about GBP2.4 million from your department.

Incidentally, I wonder if I would be eligible to receive tradable carbon credits for all these pigs not producing harmful and polluting methane gases? Another point: These pigs that I plan not to rear will not eat 2,000 tonnes of cereals. I understand that you also pay farmers for not growing crops. Will I qualify for payments for not growing cereals to not feed the pigs I don’t rear?

I am also considering the “not milking cows” business, so please send any information you have on that too. Please could you also include the current DEFRA advice on set aside fields? Can this be done on an e-commerce basis with virtual fields (of which I seem to have several thousand hectares)?

In view of the above, you will realise that I will be totally unemployed, and will therefore qualify for unemployment benefits. I shall of course be voting for your party at the next general election.

Yours faithfully,

Nigel Johnson-Hill

Capitalism and climate

Here's an interesting take on climate alarmism and wealth.

To paraphrase slightly (or, indeed, a lot), is climate change caused by capitalism and the wealth (economic activity) it has brought, or has climate alarmism been a luxury recreational activity made possible by the wealth capitalism has brought, and one that is fading now that there are harder economic times ahead?

Redistribution #2

From the poorest to the slightly better-off.

Via.

BBC bias, and we're not going to die

Quite apart from the fact that it appears to falsify a major component of recent climate alarmism, this is yet another example of the BBC's climate bias. It was spotted a few days ago by Jennifer Marohasy.

The past year has been characterised by a period of low levels of ice in the Arctic, which was widely reported, and simultaneously of high levels of ice in the Antarctic, which wasn't reported much at all.

This piece on the BBC website, last updated on Friday 18th April and written by my old friend Richard Black, is titled: More doubt on cosmic climate link. Here's how it begins:

Research has thrown further doubt on the notion that cosmic rays are a major influence on the Earth's climate.

The idea that modern global warming is due to changes in cloudiness caused by solar influences on cosmic rays is popular with "climate sceptics".

But scientists found changes in cosmic ray flux do not affect cloud formation - the second such report in a month.

Like his last piece on this subject, it was published initially without any response from Svensmark. Unlike that earlier piece, it still contains no comment from Svensmark, something I'll follow up and report back on later.

But for the moment, I want to draw your attention to a few paragraphs in a supplementary section at the bottom of the report. This, different, research is presented in such a tendentious way by Black that I'm going to excerpt just the money quote, but it refers to an observed effect of "energetic particles hitting the top of the atmosphere in polar regions". Black does not say whether these particles come from, or are affected by, solar radiation. But this is what they seem to do:

In periods of relatively intense particle activity, some areas of the Earth's surface in both the Arctic and Antarctic are warmer while others become colder, showing differences of up to 2C or 3C compared to the long-term averages.

In periods of unusually low particle activity, the patterns are reversed.

The mechanism appears to be redistributing heat across the polar regions; there is no evidence for any overall warming or cooling, Dr Seppala added, nor that the scale of the effect has changed over time.

In other words, Arctic cooling accompanied by Antarctic warming, or the reverse as was observed this last year, has nothing to do with global warming or cooling, but is a localised effect.

Svensmark's idea is that when the sun is quiet, as it has been recently, energetic particles that are otherwise screened from the earth by solar radiation instead hit the earth with greater intensity. That is entirely consistent with the new research Black reports. Svensmark then links this to patterns in cloud formation, which is what Black dismisses.

But given the enormous coverage that Arctic ice levels had this winter, you'd think a better title for the piece would have been Low Arctic Ice Does Not Mean World is Warming.

UPDATE: I have emailed Richard Black and offered him the opportunity to comment. Under the circumstances, he can hardly object to a comment, if he supplies one, being added to an already published piece.

UPDATE 2: Svensmark's colleague and co-author Nigel Calder writes:

Dear Peter

If Richard Black had asked me about the new report from Kristjansson of Oslo, I'd have made the same comment as Dr Svensmark's about Sloan of Lancaster in the report on the same theme in early April. Just changing the name: "Jon Egill Kristjansson has simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds."

But it's not my job to give tutorials to people who are intent on attacking Dr Svensmark. Nor have I time to spare in trying to keep the BBC honest. That's a job for the BBC Trust, which has already cautioned broadcasters about their handling of climate change.

You can quote that if you like.

Nigel

"If Richard Black had asked me..." Extraordinary.

The case for 42 days' detention without trial

In perspective:

But what about the IRA? Ah, says Commissioner Blair, they didn't have mobile phones or the Internet back then, did they? And they usually phoned in warnings. And they weren't into suicide bombing. Altogether a better class of terrorist.

Such nice, friendly, unthreatening terrorists were the IRA that they managed to kill an estimated 1800 people during a thirty year campaign. Which is an average of 60 per year. This contrasts with the 52 victims of the London tube bombings. If we say that their "campaign" has been going since 2001, then in all but one of those eight years there have been no deaths at all in Britain. The IRA were so gentlemanly that they came within an ace of murdering the entire cabinet in 1984 (and, as I recall, there was no warning). They were a real threat, and we got through it.

We got through it without executing innocent plumbers on underground trains too, if I remember right.

UPDATE: Jackart expands on this.

What it says on the tin

The Competition Commission:

The commission said that splitting up ownership of the three main London airports would result in greater efforts to create extra capacity and relieve overcrowding. “Separate ownership would itself create a greater incentive to expand capacity.”

Good. One of the valid roles of government is to act to prevent monopolies forming.

Inconvenience

Filming real ice shelves, for example. That's why Al Gore used CGI footage from the movie The Day After Tomorrow in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

As it happens, this doesn't affect the validity of his argument either way, but it's unsettling that it doesn't seem to have been disclosed before last Friday.


Via.

UPDATE: Gore wants to make a sequel:

Mr Gore added: “I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the movie in 2006. Sure, awareness has grown and more people are concerned since scientists said we had just ten years to take action to halt rising sea levels.

“But the situation has got worse. The entire North Polar ice cap is melting and could be gone in some areas in as little as five years."

I'm afraid that last assertion doesn't seem to be true. Well, I'm glad it isn't true, but afraid he'll include it in his sequel.

Candy Mountain

What could go wrong?

£50 billion would buy a £200,000 property for a quarter of a million families.

It’s very appealing on the face of it. What would be the catch in the government doing that and being a low or no interest mortgage broker?

Apart from anything else, placing mortgage approvals in the hands of functionaries would be an anti-corruption drive in itself.

And that would be worth the extra taxes, completely un-repaid to the taxpayer, the galloping house price inflation, the mortgage firms going bust as the best risks head for the zero interest rates, the extra taxes to bail them out, the black market in zero-interest bought-to-rent scams, the extra taxes to pay for the extra functionaries who'll run this zero-interest, zero-income scheme, the defaults, the extra taxes to top up the fund after the defaults, the extra taxes to pay people to police the scams, the sudden entry of organised crime into an artificial two-tier property market, the extra taxes to pay for the police investigations...

As the man said, what's the catch?

Surface stations (again)

In daylight:



Infra red:



And that's after a light rain, and overcast sky (just starting to clear when the images were taken).

13% of stations so far surveyed (540 ish, with 600 to go) are like this, sited directly over heat sources.

Congratulations

A palpable hit.

Redistribution of wealth

From the poorest to the richest:

But what we do know is the market value of Britain's five biggest banks shot up by around £10bn last week (see this blog). Even RBS, with its announcement of a vast multi-billion new share issue, was up by about £4bn.

It's as good a measure as any of how much taxpayers are handing over to the banks.

The triumph of modern education

Don't be disheartened to read that in America:

After adjusting for multiple sources of bias and differences in sample construction, we establish that (1) the U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at around 80 percent in the late 1960s and then declined by 4-5 percentage points; (2) the actual high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the 88 percent estimate of the status completion rate issued by the NCIS [National Center for Educational Statistics]; (3) about 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics leave school with a high school diploma, and minority graduation rates are still substantially below the rates for non-Hispanic whites.

Because there's good news too: many black men are:

obtaining GED credentials in prison.

Surveillance Supermarkets

What used to be once a month posts about government intrusion are becoming daily. On my last post about insupportable enquiries into our private lives, Julia M suggested everyone questioned should tell the sex-lives inspectors to fuck off. Just so, but who do we tell when the government recruits... well, read it yourself:

The Government wants councils to spy on supermarkets shoppers to find out where eastern Europeans are settling in Britain.
[...]
Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary told MPs today: "The Local Government Association has recently suggested that we look at footfall in supermarkets.

"They reckon Tesco has pretty good accurate information about the people who use their stores.

"I welcome that kind of imaginative thinking if it can help us to get a better and more accurate view at the local level of what the impact [of migration] is."

They will not be limiting this to information about migrants.

Sex wildebeest

She isn't a sex kitten any more, and unlike Cranmer I'm not referring to her looks. Cranmer is sympathetic:

... the 73-year-old Ms Bardot, who was evidently quite beautiful in her day, is being prosecuted for ‘inciting racial hatred’, even though Islam is not a race. But such a minor technicality appears to present no hindrance to the zealous prosecutors of Paris. Under the Napoleonic system, there is an uneasy fusion of the judiciary with the legislature which is rapidly developing into an EU-wide ‘corpus juris’.
[...]
Cranmer thinks that Ms Bardot should counter-sue for harassment, or take her case to the European Court of Human Rights. His Grace would be more than happy to begin a fund to help defray the costs.

The Dissident Frogman is less sure:

Bardot is but one small crab in that fetid European cesspool of politics, but the interesting point beyond her own person is that in this instance, every party involved is equally deserving of contempt.

The estimable frogman also refers to a quarrel between various of the blogosphere's biggest names in the anti-Jihad ring, something I had been meaning to get round to myself. Concern over Islamism does not, and should not, lead to a sanguine attitude to various fascist and white supremacist groups that have piggy-backed onto the issue.

It is her connections to these that makes Ms Bardot less deserving of support than the Archbishop suggests.

Back to front

Iain Dale is glad to see the back of ex-Tory MP Bob Spink.

I wonder why, when Spink was distributing his "What part of send them back..." election leaflets, few Tories seemed unhappy to see his front.

Sex quiz

I am not making this up:

More than 500,000 people a year are to be questioned about their sex lives and salaries by Government inspectors, it has emerged.

Officials will ask for information about former sexual partners, contraception and how long couples have lived together before getting married.

I had intended to mention John Cowperthwaite's policy in Hong Kong of not collecting any statistical data at all, in case any of it motivated a bureaucrat to do something.

I had intended to make some sort of light crack about this. I had thought this might distract from the obvious gross invasion of privacy this represents. I thought it might make it easier to point out that the government is not entitled, under any circumstances, to involve itself in the private and sexual lives of consenting adults.

But it won't work. The rage is rising. How did we come to be governed by such people?

In fact, there's a simple answer. Labour is one of the least successful political parties ever, and this is why. This is what they do, this is what they are like. They had never even managed two full successive terms before Blair came along. And Tone had what seem to be the prerequisites for a vastly successful politician: immense vanity, imperviousness to criticism, religious mania and the ability to smile like the Joker from Batman while simultaneously lying to the public and knifing a colleague in the back.

Thank God he's finally gone, leaving the Labour Party to slither back into their trench.

Charlie

Charlie Benningfield taught my mother Russian. That didn't mean there was any reason why I should have met him, or his wife whose name, I think, was Dolly, but I did meet them several times. They both loved children and were very kind and attentive, with the knack of making a child feel his or her words mattered. They listened, and when they talked to a child it was without any trace of condescension.

It must have been some time in the early 1970s. I'm vague about the name of his wife because she kept very much in the background, wearing her old-fashioned house coat, bringing in tea and biscuits on a tray. I misplaced, years ago, the book Charlie gave me, of adventure stories for boys, by authors like Jack London, and it's one of the lost books I really miss, because of where it came from.

They were elderly then, older than the century. Dolly died a couple of years later, followed after a short time by her husband. If they were old fashioned, that didn't mean they weren't obviously devoted to each other in a way even a young boy could see and feel touched by, so it wasn't a surprise that Charlie didn't survive her by long. They were lovely, gentle people. And they were lifelong, committed communists.

That's why Charlie knew Russian. He visited the Soviet Union often. He must have known, first hand, something of its horrors, and he wanted to replicate them here. How could that have been?

Several years ago, the BBC ran a radio programme in which they asked people who had been members of the Communist Party (perhaps, given the tendency to split into rival groups, that should read "a Communist Party") how they reconciled these things. People like Bea Campbell and Alexei Sayle, along with assorted Trades Unionists and Labour politicians, tended to give similar answers. Ah, they said, but when we joined, all young and idealistic, it wasn't like that. The horrors came later.

No, they didn't. Not for them. But maybe it was a case Charlie could have made. He must have been able to remember the Russian revolution and maybe, just maybe, this provides the excuse I so very much want him to have had. It certainly isn't available to those of later generations. For people of my generation or thereabouts to have supported the Soviet Union, in full knowledge of its nature, required and requires flat-out, unadorned malevolence.

The sort of malevolence that George Galloway manifests in almost every action and word. That he has allied himself with people who wish to bring an even greater tyranny than that of the Soviet Union can be no surprise.

There's a great start to this post by Freemania:

David Edgar has written a piece apparently about “defectors” from the “left” – although, given that he appears to count Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of the left, I may have misread the article completely. Perhaps it’s actually about Bolivian transport policy, or Renaissance dentistry, or fairies.

Hizb ut-Tahrir are a perfect fit with this left, but there are other lefts. And, just as the free-market, personal freedom right has almost no connection with the protectionist, censorious right, so these lefts are almost entirely unrelated to one another. All may have read Marx. But, then, Desmond Tutu, Jerry Falwell, Jeremiah Wright, Ian Paisley and the Pope have all read the Bible. It's fair to say it led them to different conclusions and in different directions. So it is with Marx and the left.

Perhaps the misleading thing is the fondness the left has for the word "solidarity". All these lefts might have joined in (misguided) solidarity to support the kleptocratic print unions in the 1980s. Ian Paisley and the Pope both oppose abortion. That doesn't make them alike.

There hasn't been a split in the left. It's just that the malevolent fellow-travellers of a broader-based democratic socialist movement have lost their grip of the coat tails of people like Marko Hoare, Nick Cohen, Norman Geras, the Harry's Place people, and Christopher Hitchens.

I'm not a socialist at all. I don't agree with these people about economics. But I don't confuse them with the grotesque, parasitic malice of their former hangers-on. In an earlier post I described Cohen et al as "neo-conservatives", and Cohen complained in the comments. He was right, it was the wrong language to use. They are, of course, socialists.

It's just that their detractors, the fellow travellers, entryists, now allies of clerical fascism, are not socialists at all. They represent some, as yet unnamed political tradition, together with the BNP, white nationalists and Neo-Nazis. Left and right don't meet at the extremes; these people come from some special, foetid pit of their very own.

I'd just like to think Charlie Benningfield didn't.

UPDATE: Also see Bob from Brockley on obscure historical figures from the "decent", anti-Stalinist left, like, um... George Orwell.

Question answered

Back in January, Steve asked:

Where is this heavy yoke of EU dictatorship? I can't feel it on my shoulders and neither can most other people. That's why there is no public outrage, apart from among the likes of Simon Heffer. If he is expecting an uprising from disgusted Middle-England, he is going to have a long wait.

In March he gave a partial answer to that question, in another context:

That's one of the problems with the British. Most of us don't get worked up about abstract stuff like rights. It's only when the practical impact of losing those rights hits home that we take to the streets.

How not to measure temperature

Anthony Watts summarises the results so far of the survey of the temperature measuring stations in America. An incredible 69% have artificial heating sources within ten metres of the station.

Defector

Norman Geras.

Optimism

For the future of Iran.

Pulling up the ladder

How the European Union's excessive regulation damages smaller businesses.

Odd. You'd almost think larger companies affected legislative decisions.

Expelled

From a European perspective, it's odd that creationism has come to be so strongly associated with the conservative right. Even in the USA, where this association comes from, it's hard to imagine a Democratic presidential candidate who doesn't flaunt their religious affiliations - and all religious affiliations bring with them some version of creationism. The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury both take political positions, especially on foreign policy, that are of the political left.

But there we are, that's the association, and it's one that damages the right, in my opinion. There's a very long comment thread at Little Green Footballs that illustrates the split between some rather simple folk who question evolution ("Who created the primordial soup? Huh?") and a smaller number of rational people.

The post at the top of these comments links to this site that debunks some of the assertions made in Ben Stein's new creationist film "Expelled". More seriously, this piece at Scientific American exposes some systematic deceit in Stein's film. Stein has plainly descended to the level of Michael Moore.

Repost - The unconscionable cruelty of Polly T

I think this is the best post I've written, so for those who haven't clicked through before, here it is again:

Almost twenty years ago I pitched up in London, found a bedsit and took a job as a minicab driver. Knowing I would otherwise be on my own, one of the controllers invited me for Christmas dinner.

He lived on the fourteenth floor of one of three tower blocks that backed onto wasteground in Camberwell. The lifts were broken so I walked up the stairs, stepping round pools of urine, looking carefully for the small piles of human excrement that lurked in shadows beneath shattered light fittings. I knocked at his door, and it opened into a room of lights, decorations, children laughing by a Christmas tree, and the smell of roasting turkey.

A couple of years later I used to visit someone who lived in a lower-rise block on the fringes of Brixton. The car park was always full of playing children, even during school hours. I drove a very old ex-gas board long wheel base Land Rover at the time and somehow it developed that I'd leave it unlocked and let the children play in it while I was upstairs.

I think it was the little mother who started it, a girl of perhaps eight who always seemed to have her youngest, snot-nosed sibling on her hip while she bawled at her five year old brother to stop whatever he might be doing at the time. She was a friendly child with a beautiful smile. One day she confided in me as though she were telling me about a rare feast that her Mum had let her have a burger with her chips that evening. Normally, it was just chips, from a shop a couple of hundred yards away.

I only ever saw her mother from a distance. When she wanted the children to come in, because she wanted to go out with her latest boyfriend, she would come to the balcony and shout down,

"If you don't get up here right now, I'll come down and kick your cunt in!"

After a few weeks, there would be a dozen or more children playing in the Land Rover. The oldest and most senior taking it in turns to pretend to drive, younger ones camping in the covered back. The more adventurous would climb up the sides and over the roof. One day, as I came down the stairs, I was met by a delegation. Someone had broken an indicator light cover while scaling the south face of the vehicle. The culprit was there, shamefaced, in the middle, with half a dozen concerned friends along for moral support. These were good kids.

Then I started driving them all, very slowly, round the car park. There'd be kids on the roof, on the bonnet, holding on to the sides, in the back and on the bench seat in the front. The rule was, I had to be able to see them all at all times - a leg or arm at least had to be visible in one of the mirrors. They policed this rule assiduously, as I drove at walking pace, yelling at each other to make sure they were visible.

One of the mothers came out to see what it was all about, a shy young Irish woman, and she rode in the front with her son on her lap, chatting with the other children as we crawled around the hardstanding.

There was poverty there all right, but it wasn't financial. The children were poor - they would all have counted in child poverty statistics, but some were properly fed and some weren't. Some were loved, and some weren't. Some of them would be getting jobs in a few years' time. The little mother would become a real mother. But with others, the passage of puberty would see a setting of the eyes into a flinty middle-distance stare, and they'd start burgling, mugging, dealing or go on the game.

What makes the difference? One thing is for sure: it isn't money. All these people were on much the same incomes, the devoted Irish mother and the one who would kick her daughter's cunt in if she was slow to come upstairs, the cab controller and the people who shat in the stairwell of his block of flats.

Milton Friedman died a few days ago. He once said:

A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.

At Harry's Place, someone called Norman the carpet commented:

Well its nice to get some good news for a change. An appalling person who pedaled (sic) a dreadful ideology.

Like many Libertarian bloggers, I actually know what it is like to be broke. I have lived in high rises like the ones described above. I have gone hungry. Travelling in the Yukon twenty five years ago, after a lumber strike had closed down half the seasonal industries, I went three days without food - though my dog didn't - before I found work doing odd jobs in a motel. I treated my own frostbite, because I couldn't afford to see a doctor.

One thing, and one thing only, keeps people trapped in the kind of poverty of mind where they don't feed their children properly even when they could, and shit in their own stairwells. It's a lack of ownership; a lack of self-reliance. It's a lack of the very concept of self-reliance. It's an idea that the mere thought that they should be self-reliant is immoral, evil, callous and cruel. And though this idea is gibbered out by halfwits like Norman the carpet, it actually derives from Polly Toynbee.

Not just Toynbee, of course, but she has made a particular fetish of "social exclusion". And she claims that

...growing inequality multiplies all these problems

No, it doesn't. What multiplies them is continued state intervention in and control over these people's lives. They shit in stairwells because they don't own the stairwells and they don't feel responsible for keeping them clean. The same people will complain that the council are slow to disinfect them, before they shit in them again.

I don't know this because I've held focus groups; I know it because I've lived there and seen it. I have seen someone whose father sent him to school from a tower block in Walworth with the carving knife to stab a boy who was bullying him (which he did) buy a house and take his kids on holidays through sheer hard work, and I've seen middle-class lefties spend decades on the dole.

Telling people who are institutionalised into dependency that it's all the fault of unequal income distribution, that they are victims and that their salvation lies in more government money is hideously cruel, for all the fatuous false moral posturing of Toynbee and her carpet-brained acolytes. The only things that achieves are a deepening of the sanctimonious self-satisfaction in which Toynbee and her entourage wallow, and a broadening of the base of the state on which they depend and through which they thrive.

The answer lies not in the redistribution of wealth, but in the creation of wealth, by the poorest, for the poorest - for themselves. For that to happen, the state needs to get out of the way, not just by intervening less with "help", but also by hindering less with regulations and taxes. Taking money from the poorest, then giving it back to them in housing subsidies, tax credits and income supplements is grotesque - it wastes their few precious resources (unless tax collectors start working for free) and it institutionalises the recipients who could have just been left alone in the first place.

Constant regulation and "quality improvements" simply mean cutting off the bottom rungs of the ladder; instead, the focus should be on removing barriers to work and self-employment.

But then there'd be nothing for Polly and her friends to do, and nothing to give them that glow of self-righteousness that comes from stooping down from on high to hold the little hands of the poor. And that's the really unforgivable aspect of this: the sense that the unconscionable cruelty of keeping these people trapped is motivated in part by the self-interest of the advocates of statism.

Immigration #2

Just watch this.



Why don't we ever talk about the British dream?

Another PJ quote

I know, I know... but he holes it in one:

Hillary Clinton is "America's ex-wife."

Summed up

This encapsulates the abuse of language that has polluted our world. Emphasis added:

The report, by the all party parliamentary group on dementia, has found that elderly people are routinely being prescribed antipsychotic drugs to make the lives of carers easier, despite evidence that they are of little benefit to the patient and have potentially lethal side effects.

American politics

P.J. O'Rourke thinks Europeans need a simple explanation of a political system as unfamiliar to them as that of America:

The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.

Hmmm... Sounds strangely familiar.

Playing with scammers

Some people reply to 419 scammers and play them along, wasting their time, seeing how absurd they can get in their replies before the scammer realises they are being mucked about and goes away.

This is one of the best exchanges I've seen. My favourite part is when a delay in replying to the scammer is explained like this:

Dear Cynthia,

I got lost in a forest this week-end, and some wolves did attack me, and that’s why I’m late in responding you.
Don’t worry, I’m not wounded. But I was very scared. I have never been attacked by wolves before.
What is the name of the person I have to send money to?
Regards,
Bruno

The scammer replied.

Trade and migration

Bryan Caplan argues that the USA should give every Haitian a Green Card:

Invite the world's most precious resource - human labor - to leave a dirt-based economy and get an entry-level job in the modern economy. It's called doing well while doing good. And unlike everything else the world has ever done for Haiti, it works.

Milton Friedman, in one of his TV series, explained why this might be problematic and what might be less so. I've shown this clip before, but hey - it's always good to listen to Uncle Milt:



1.05 minutes in:

Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil, people who don't speak the same language, who practise different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met...

What makes them cooperate in the manufacture of a pencil is the price system, and trade.

Rageh Omaar has made a TV series called Immigration, the inconvenient truth. It's screening at the moment and this past week I overheard, then joined, a conversation about it between two people who work for me. The episode they were discussing featured the situation in the very racially mixed town of Leicester, where one of them grew up - on a council estate.

Omaar is controversial in this series, suggesting that there are problems in British society that have derived from immigration. Even so, the two people I heard talking were openly derisive of his approach, which was seen as a whitewash. The lad from Leicester grew up in a nightmare place of racially homogeneous gangs, constant fighting and racial bullying, and a level of open racial hatred that was unknown in the England of my youth. It is a shattered society in which the poorest have been condemned to live by the good intentions of those who do not have to.

I want to write about this properly but for the moment will comment that the most ardent supporters of open borders do not live in such places, do not expect to, and display what seems to me to be an open contempt for the interests, and rights of self-determination, of those who do.

Through trade, we can cooperate with people in other countries, enrich one another and even out imbalances of wealth, without destroying our own society or, at least, that part of it occupied by the poorest. It is not at all clear that we can achieve the same through open borders.

Inversion

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a gloriously deaf and absurd contribution to the debate about belief from a book titled Excerpt of God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, and written by John F. Haught.

Haught argues that:

In preparing treatises on a-theism, one would expect that scholars and journalists would have done some research on theism, just to be sure they know exactly what it is they are rejecting. It is hard to be an informed and consistent atheist without knowing something about theology. And yet, aside from several barbed references, there is no sign of any real contact between the new atheists and theology at all, let alone studious investigation. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology.

This approach is not new, and was memorably lampooned in a piece that purported to be a review of a (non-existent) Dawkins book The Fascism Delusion:

[Dawkins’s] sense of ‘Fascism’ is lamentably error-strewn. Dawkins has only a superficial knowledge of Mein Kamf Kampf, or the poetry of Marinetti; and he seems entirely ignorant of the much more subtle and intellectually stimulating work of Fascist philosophers such as Hermann Graf Keyserling, Alfred Baeumler, Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Gentile, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Alain de Benoist and many others. Only somebody who has mastered the complete works of all these thinkers could even conceivably be in a position to advance an anti-Fascist argument. The lack of that necessary body of knowledge fatally undermines Dawkins’s right to attack Fascism in the first place.

But if Haught's approach is fundamentally unoriginal and absurd, he does make one innovation, and it is one to treasure. He identifies atheists with creationists, believers with scientists, and theology with biology. This is one of the road-crashes between reality and metaphor that plague religious apology, and have done since at least the eighteenth century.

It's a road crash because it mixes the two things together, equivalent to saying "People who think apples are unlike oranges should imagine for a moment that this apple is an orange and this orange is an apple". Dawkins is a biologist. Haught is a creationist, even if he is a more sophisticated* one than some of the Intelligent Design people.

There is something charming about the tone of weary patience adopted by people who advance these ridiculous arguments. But fundamentally they miss the point. Theism is not the default position, atheism is. The onus is not on a disbeliever to prove their case, it is on a believer. If it weren't for the malevolent contemporary influence of religion on the world, people would feel less moved to write these books.



*The word 'Sophist' might serve equally well.

We caught you naked!

There's an interesting piece of social engineering going the rounds at the moment. An email that says something like "We caught you naked on video, click to watch it!" carries a link to what is undoubtedly a piece of malware (http://some.dodgy.site.com/video.exe), though I haven't bothered to download it to see what its signature is.

What strikes me as interesting is that for this to work, there must be enough people who fear they might have been caught naked on video.


[This won't hurt my hit rate. If you got here by googling, sorry you wasted your time.]

Opt-in payments for writers

It was good, this morning, to see Tim Worstall namechecked by Nick Cohen - as the UK's answer to Matt Drudge, no less.

Cohen has some justifiable concerns about the economic viability of writing in an age where the web is conditioning us to expect content for free:

Briefly, the net allowed the transmission of professionally produced and edited news, books, music and analysis to anyone anywhere in the world with a connection. But the golden age couldn't last because the net users weren't prepared to pay for decent content and the web degenerated into mediocrity.

I don't quarrel with his main thesis, but he didn't examine one phenomenon, the rise of a few reader-financed journalists like Michael Totten who, so far as I can see, have been able to sustain prolonged periods of in-field writing on the basis of voluntary support from their readers.

There have been several attempts but no identifiable leader has emerged in what might be an interesting and important micro-payment technology, one that would allow me to set a payment figure of my own choosing, set up a list of beneficiaries rather as I set up feeds in my rss reader, and have my account debited regularly and the payment shared between my chosen recipients.

In other words, one possible future includes the ability of readers not to choose what is often the least bad newspaper and pay for it, accepting the editors' choices of writers, but rather to choose themselves which columnists they want to read and, therefore, pay for.

I have a feeling that while Tim Worstall and Nick Cohen would succeed under such an arrangement, there are others who wouldn't. The demise of a self-selecting class of journalists might be no very bad thing.

Comments and Truth

Perhaps my favourite title from the peer reviewed climate science papers I listed in my last post was "Gulf Stream safe if wind blows and Earth turns", by Carl Wunsch. I've written about Wunsch before:

The man is Professor Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, and it's worth pondering his words carefully, not least because he is angry about the way he was persuaded to participate in the filming of the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Wunsch isn't a sceptic. He wrote:

I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component.

But he also wrote:

I am on record in a number of places complaining about the over-dramatization and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts. Thus the notion that the Gulf Stream would or could "shut off" or that with global warming Britain would go into a "new ice age" are either scientifically impossible or so unlikely as to threaten our credibility as a scientific discipline if we proclaim their reality.

Recently, I had a short debate with the pseudonymous blogger Unity, of the Ministry of Truth. It was shorter than I had intended, because of the, um... interesting comments policy at that blog. The first couple of times I commented, my remarks appeared. Then, as I tried to respond to the replies I had first a comment moderation message, then another one, then the message that my comments were filtered out as spam. None subsequently appeared, not the moderated two and not the spam one that was, according to the message, going to be drawn to the site owner's attention.

I'd point Unity to Wunsch's paper, but I doubt the comment would appear. I guess that's one way to win an argument. Or. at least, appear to.

Unity has a specialisation: s/he operates a smoke machine. Vast quantities of words pour out, completely missing the point. The point in this case - and I need to point this out here for reasons that are obvious from the above - is not that systems can be chaotic. Of course they can. It's that this system, the Gulf Stream, isn't likely to tip.

UPDATE: In the comments, Unity insists s/he did approve my comments shortly after I made them. I didn't see them when I checked before writing this post, but Unity seems very honest from what I've seen so I'll accept that, and withdraw my accusation.

Demolition

UPDATE: Two more papers should be added to the list lower down this post. There's an introduction to each, and an associated, peer-reviewed paper as a pdf. Both are by Douglas Keenan.

1. Grape harvest dates are poor indicators of summer warmth Introduction - Paper (pdf)
2. The fraud allegation against some climatic research of Wei-Chyung Wang Introduction - Paper (pdf)

END UPDATE

Environmentalist Mark Seal started up a forum where global warming could be debated, but he had some initial concerns:

I was initially worried as to where I would find people who didn’t believe in global warming. I had planned to create a furious debate, but in my experience global warming was such a universally accepted issue that I expected to have to dredge the slums of the internet in order to find a couple of deniers who could keep the argument thriving.

Happily, things turned out all right:

I was swamped by climate skeptics who did a good job of frightening off the few brave Greens who slogged out the debate with. Whilst there was a lot of rubbish written, the truth was that they didn’t so much frighten the Greens away - they comprehensively demolished them with a more in depth understanding of the science, cleverly thought out arguments, and some very smart answers. If you want to learn about the physics of convection currents, gas chromatography, or any number of climate science topics then read some of the early debates on TalkClimateChange. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I had to admit that these guys were good.

In the following months the situation hardly changed. As the forum continued to grow, as the blog began to catch traffic, and as I continued to try and recruit green members I continued to be disappointed with the debate. In short, and I am sorry to say it, anti-greens (Reds, as we call them) appear to be more willing to comment, more structured, more able to quote peer reviewed research, more apparently rational and apparently wider read and better informed.

In the comments, someone expresses incredulity that there are any peer reviewed papers that don't support alarmism. As a public service, here are a few links. They come from the Global Warming Clearing House, a newish site that tries to post pro- anti- and neutral links every day. The site author summed up the conclusions this balanced approach had led him to in his first month, as follows (heavily edited down to just some of the headings):

The Global Temperature is actually going down.

Measuring data is difficult and prone to errors. Measuring data over a long time is even more so.

CO2 reacts logarithmically so that the more that enters the atmosphere the less effect it has.

The Ocean temperatures are not rising and may be dropping.

Ice coverage is actually above the mean.

Here are the links to peer reviewed papers, originally from Pete's Place Popular Technology.

1,500-Year Climate Cycle:

A 150,000-year climatic record from Antarctic ice(Nature 316, 591 - 596, 15 August 1985)- C. Lorius, C. Ritz, J. Jouzel, L. Merlivat, N. I. Barkov
A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates(Science, Vol. 278. no. 5341, pp. 1257 - 1266, 14 November 1997)- Gerard Bond, William Showers, Maziet Cheseby, Rusty Lotti, Peter Almasi, Peter deMenocal, Paul Priore, Heidi Cullen, Irka Hajdas, Georges Bonani
A Variable Sun Paces Millennial Climate(Science, Vol. 294. no. 5546, pp. 1431 - 1433, 16 November 2001)- Richard A. Kerr
Cyclic Variation and Solar Forcing of Holocene Climate in the Alaskan Subarctic(Science, Vol. 301. no. 5641, pp. 1890 - 1893, 26 September 2003)- Feng Sheng Hu, Darrell Kaufman, Sumiko Yoneji, David Nelson, Aldo Shemesh, Yongsong Huang, Jian Tian, Gerard Bond, Benjamin Clegg, Thomas Brown
Decadal to millennial cyclicity in varves and turbidites from the Arabian Sea: hypothesis of tidal origin(Global and Planetary Change, Volume 34, Issues 3-4, Pages 313-325, November 2002)- W. H. Bergera, U. von Rad
Late Holocene approximately 1500 yr climatic periodicities and their implications(Geology, v. 26; no. 5; p. 471-473, May 1998)- Ian D. Campbell, Celina Campbell, Michael J. Apps, Nathaniel W. Rutter, Andrew B. G. Bush
Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model(Nature 438, 208-211, 10 November 2005)- Holger Braun, Marcus Christl, Stefan Rahmstorf, Andrey Ganopolski, Augusto Mangini, Claudia Kubatzki, Kurt Roth, Bernd Kromet
The 1,800-year oceanic tidal cycle: A possible cause of rapid climate change(PNAS, vol. 97, no. 8, 3814-3819, April 11, 2000)- Charles D. Keeling, Timothy P. Whorf
The origin of the 1500-year climate cycles in Holocene North-Atlantic records(Climate of the Past Discussions, Volume 3, Issue 2, pp.679-692, 2007)- M. Debret, V. Bout-Roumazeilles, F. Grousset, M. Desmet, J. F. McManus, N. Massei, D. Sebag, J.-R. Petit, Y. Copard, A. Trentesaux
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 10, 2003)- Stefan Rahmstorf
Timing of Millennial-Scale Climate Change in Antarctica and Greenland During the Last Glacial Period(Science, Volume 291, Issue 5501, pp. 109-112, 2001)- Thomas Blunier, Edward J. Brook
Widespread evidence of 1500 yr climate variability in North America during the past 14 000 yr(Geology, v. 30, no. 5, p. 455-458, May 2002)- André E. Viau, Konrad Gajewski, Philippe Fines, David E. Atkinson, Michael C. Sawada

An Inconvenient Truth:
An Inconvenient Truth : a focus on its portrayal of the hydrologic cycle(GeoJournal, Volume 70, Number 1, September, 2007)- David R. Legates
An Inconvenient Truth : blurring the lines between science and science fiction(GeoJournal, Volume 70, Number 1, September 2007)- Roy W. Spencer

Anthropogenic:
Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide(Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 439-468, 1 September 1999)- Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, Willie Soon
Global warming(Progress in Physical Geography, 27, 448-455, 2003)- W. Soon, S. L. Baliunas
Human Contribution to Climate Change Remains Questionable(American Geophysical Society, Vol 80, page 183-187, April 20, 1999)- S. Fred Singer
Industrial CO2 emissions as a proxy for anthropogenic influence on lower tropospheric temperature trends(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L05204, 2004)- A. T. J. de Laat, A. N. Maurellis
Implications of the Secondary Role of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Forcing in Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future(Physical Geography, Volume 28, Number 2, pp. 97-125(29), March 2007)- Soon, Willie
Methodology and Results of Calculating Central California Surface Temperature Trends: Evidence of Human-Induced Climate Change?(Journal of Climate, Volume: 19 Issue: 4, February 2006)- Christy, J.R., W.B. Norris, K. Redmond, K. Gallo
Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties(Climate Research, Vol. 18: 259–275, 2001)- Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Eric S. Posmentier
Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties. Reply to Risbey (2002)(Climate Research, Vol. 22: 187–188, 2002)- Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Eric S. Posmentier
Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties. Reply to Karoly et al.(Climate Research, Vol. 24: 93–94, 2003)- Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Eric S. Posmentier
On global forces of nature driving the Earth's climate. Are humans involved?(Environmental Geology, Volume 50, Number 6, August, 2006)- L. F. Khilyuk and G. V. Chilingar
Quantitative implications of the secondary role of carbon dioxide climate forcing in the past glacial-interglacial cycles for the likely future climatic impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcings(arXiv:0707.1276, 07/2007)- Soon, Willie
The continuing search for an anthropogenic climate change signal: Limitations of correlation-based approaches(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 24, No. 18, Pages 2319–2322, 1997)- David R. Legates, Robert E. Davis

Antarctica:
A doubling in snow accumulation in the western Antarctic Peninsula since 1850(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, L01706, 2008)- Elizabeth R. Thomas, Gareth J. Marshall, Joseph R. McConnell
First survey of Antarctic sub–ice shelf sediments reveals mid-Holocene ice shelf retreat(Geology, v. 29; no. 9; p. 787-790, September 2001)- Carol J. Pudsey, Jeffrey Evans
Orbitally induced oscillations in the East Antarctic ice sheet at the Oligocene/Miocene boundary(Nature 413, 719-723, October 2001)- Naish TR, Woolfe KJ, Barrett PJ, Wilson GS, Atkins C, Bohaty SM, Bücker CJ, Claps M, Davey FJ, Dunbar GB, Dunn AG, Fielding CR, Florindo F, Hannah MJ, Harwood DM, Henrys SA, Krissek LA, Lavelle M, van Der Meer J, McIntosh WC, Niessen F, Passchier S, Powell RD, Roberts AP, Sagnotti L, Scherer RP, Strong CP, Talarico F, Verosub KL, Villa G, Watkins DK, Webb PN, Wonik T
Past and Future Grounding-Line Retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet(Science, Vol. 286. no. 5438, pp. 280 - 283, October 1999)- H. Conway, B. L. Hall, G. H. Denton, A. M. Gades, E. D. Waddington
Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise(Science, Vol. 308. no. 5730, pp. 1898 - 1901, 24 June 2005)- Curt H. Davis, Yonghong Li, Joseph R. McConnell, Markus M. Frey, Edward Hanna

Arctic:
Actual and insolation-weighted Northern Hemisphere snow cover and sea-ice between 1973–2002(Climate Dynamics, Volume 22, Issue 6-7, pp. 591-595, 2004)- R. Pielke, G. Liston, W. Chapman, D. Robinson
Scary Arctic Ice Loss? Blame the Wind(Science, Vol. 307. no. 5707, p. 203, 14 January 2005)- Richard A. Kerr
Sea-ice decline due to more than warming alone(Nature 450, 27, 1 November 2007)- Julia Slingo, Rowan SuttonCO2 lags Temperature changes:
180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 2, pp. 259-282(24), March 2007)- Beck, Ernst-Georg
Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations(Science, Vol. 283. no. 5408, pp. 1712 - 1714, 12 March 1999)- Hubertus Fischer, Martin Wahlen, Jesse Smith, Derek Mastroianni, Bruce Deck

QUOTE
High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations.

Southern Hemisphere and Deep-Sea Warming Led Deglacial Atmospheric CO2 Rise and Tropical Warming(Science, September 27, 2007)- Lowell Stott, Axel Timmermann, Robert Thunell
The phase relations among atmospheric CO2 content, temperature and global ice volume over the past 420 ka(Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 20, Issue 4, Pages 583-589, February 2001)- Manfred Mudelsee
Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III(Science 14, Vol. 299. no. 5613, March 2003)- Nicolas Caillon, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Jean Jouzel, Jean-Marc Barnola, Jiancheng Kang, Volodya Y. Lipenkov

QUOTE
The sequence of events during Termination III suggests that the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years and preceded the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation.


Computer Climate Models:
A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions(International Journal of Climatology, 5 Dec 2007)- David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer
Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L13208, 2004)- David H. Douglass, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer
Effects of bias in solar radiative transfer codes on global climate model simulations(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, L20717, 2005)- Albert Arking
Global Climate Models Violate Scaling of the Observed Atmospheric Variability(Physical Review Letters, Vol. 89, No. 2, July 8, 2002)- R. B. Govindan, Dmitry Vyushin, Armin Bunde, Stephen Brenner, Shlomo Havlin, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber
Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, D24S09, 2007)- Ross R. McKitrick, Patrick J. Michaels
Seductive Simulations? Uncertainty Distribution Around Climate Models(Social Studies of Science, Vol. 35, No. 6, 895-922, 2005)- Myanna Lahsen

Greenhouse Theory:
Are observed changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really dangerous?(Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology,v. 50, no. 2, p. 297-327, June 2002)- C. R. de Freitas
Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the Last Glacial Termination(Science, Vol. 291. no. 5501, 5 January 2001)- Eric Monnin, Andreas Indermühle, André Dällenbach, Jacqueline Flückiger, Bernhard Stauffer, Thomas F. Stocker, Dominique Raynaud, Jean-Marc Barnola
Atmospheric CO2 fluctuations during the last millennium reconstructed by stomatal frequency analysis of Tsuga heterophylla needles(Geology, v. 33; no. 1; p. 33-36, January 2005)- Lenny Kouwenberg, Rike Wagner, Wolfram Kürschner, Henk Visscher
Can increasing carbon dioxide cause climate change?(Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 94, pp. 8335-8342, August 1997)- Richard S. Lindzen
Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L15707, 2007)- Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell, John R. Christy, Justin Hnilo
CO2-induced global warming: a skeptic’s view of potential climate change(Climate Research, Vol. 10: 69–82, 1998)- Sherwood B. Idso
Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 82, Issue 3, pp. 417–432, March 2001)- Richard S. Lindzen, Ming-Dah Chou, and Arthur Y. Hou
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics(Physics, arXiv:0707.1161)- Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner

QUOTE
A. there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, B. there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, C. the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, D. the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, E. the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, F. thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

Heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity of Earth's climate system(Accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research)- Stephen E. Schwartz
Phanerozoic Climatic Zones and Paleogeography with a Consideration of Atmospheric CO2 Levels(Paleontological Journal, 2: 3-11, 2003)- A. J. Boucot, Chen Xu, C. R. Scotese
The "Greenhouse Effect" as a Function of Atmospheric Mass(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 351-356, 1 May 2003)- H. Jelbring

Greenland:
Global Warming and the Greenland Ice Sheet(Climatic Change, Volume 63, Numbers 1-2, pp. 201-221(21), March 2004)- Petr Chylek, Jason E. Box, Glen Lesins
Greenland warming of 1920–1930 and 1995–2005(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, 2006)- Petr Chylek, M. K. Dubey, G. Lesins
Rapid Changes in Ice Discharge from Greenland Outlet Glaciers(Science, Vol. 315. no. 5818, pp. 1559 - 1561, 16 March 2007)- Ian M. Howat, Ian Joughin, Ted A. Scambos
Recent cooling in coastal southern Greenland and relation with the North Atlantic Oscillation(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2003)- Edward Hanna, John Cappelen
Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland(Science 11, Vol. 310. no. 5750, pp. 1013 - 1016, November 2005)- Ola M. Johannessen, Kirill Khvorostovsky, Martin W. Miles, Leonid P. Bobylev

Hockey Stick:
Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years(Climate Research, Vol. 23, 89–110, January 2003)- Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas
Corrections to the Mann et al (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Number 6, pp. 751-771, November 2003)- Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick
The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate Index: Update and Implications(Energy & Environment, Volume 16, Number 1, pp. 69-100, January 2005)- Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick
Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, February 2005)- Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick

QUOTE
Their method, when tested on persistent red noise, nearly always produces a hockey stick shape...

- Reply to comment by Huybers on "Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance"(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, October 2005)- Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick-
Reply to comment by von Storch and Zorita on "Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance"(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, October 2005)- Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick
Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data(Nature 433, 613-617, February 2005)- Anders Moberg, Dmitry M. Sonechkin, Karin Holmgren, Nina M. Datsenko and Wibjörn Karlén
Comment on "The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years"(Science, Vol. 316. no. 5833, p. 1844, June 2007)- Gerd Bürger
A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 1049-1058, December 2007)- C. Loehle

Hurricanes:
Can We Detect Trends in Extreme Tropical Cyclones?(Science, Vol. 313. no. 5786, pp. 452 - 454, 28 July 2006)- Christopher W. Landsea, Bruce A. Harper, Karl Hoarau, John A. Knaff
Causes of the Unusually Destructive 2004 Atlantic Basin Hurricane Season(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 87, Issue 10, October 2006)- Philip J. Klotzbach, William M. Gray
Comments on "Impacts of CO2-Induced Warming on Simulated Hurricane Intensity and Precipitation: Sensitivity to the Choice of Climate Model and Convective Scheme"(Journal of Climate, Volume 18, Issue 23, December 2005)- Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Christopher Landsea
Counting Atlantic Tropical Cyclones Back to 1900(EOS, Transactions American Geophysical Union, Vol. 88, No. 18, Page 197, 2007)- Christopher W. Landsea
Hurricanes and Global Warming(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 86, Issue 11, November 2005)- R. A. Pielke Jr., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, and R. Pasch
Meteorology: Are there trends in hurricane destruction?(Nature 438, E11, 22 December 2005) - Roger A. Pielke, Jr
Sea-surface temperatures and tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 22, No. 33, L09708, 2006)- Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert E. Davis
Tropical Cyclones and Global Climate Change: A Post-IPCC Assessment(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, January 1998)- A. Henderson-Sellers, H. Zhang, G. Berz, K. Emanuel, W. Gray, C. Landsea, G. Holland, J. Lighthill, S.-L. Shieh, P. Webster, K. McGuffie

Kyoto:
Time to ditch Kyoto(Nature 449, 973-975, 25 October 2007)- Gwyn Prins, Steve Rayner

Medieval Warming Period -Little Ice Age:
A 700 year record of Southern Hemisphere extratropical climate variability(Annals of Glaciology, vol. 39, p.127-132, 2004)- P.A Mayewski, K. Maasch, J.W.C White, E.J. Steig, E. Meyerson, I. Goodwin, V.I. Morgan, T. van Ommen, M.A.J. Curran, J. Sourney, K. Kreutz
Coherent High- and Low-Latitude Climate Variability During the Holocene Warm Period(Science, Vol. 288. no. 5474, pp. 2198 - 2202, 23 June 2000)- Peter deMenocal, Joseph Ortiz, Tom Guilderson, Michael Sarnthein
Evidence for a 'Medieval Warm Period' in a 1,100 year tree-ring reconstruction of past austral summer temperatures in New Zealand(Geophysical Research Letters. Vol. 29, no. 14, pp. 12-1 to 12-4. 15 July 2002)- E. R. Cook, J. G. Palmer, R. D'Arrigo
Evidence for the existence of the medieval warm period in China(Climatic Change, Volume 26, Numbers 2-3, March, 1994)- De'Er Zhang
Glacial geological evidence for the medieval warm period(Climatic Change, Volume 26, Numbers 2-3, March, 1994)- Jean M. Grove, Roy Switsur
Late Holocene surface ocean conditions of the Norwegian Sea (Vøring Plateau)(Paleooceanography, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1044, 2003)- Carin Andersson, Bjørg Risebrobakken, Eystein Jansen, Svein Olaf Dahl
Low-Frequency Signals in Long Tree-Ring Chronologies for Reconstructing Past Temperature Variability(Science, Vol. 295. no. 5563, pp. 2250 - 2253, 22 March 2002)- Jan Esper, Edward R. Cook, Fritz H. Schweingruber
Medieval climate warming and aridity as indicated by multiproxy evidence from the Kola Peninsula, Russia(Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 209, Issues 1-4, Pages 113-125, 6 July 2004)- K. V. Kremenetski, T. Boettger, G. M. MacDonald, T. Vaschalova, L. Sulerzhitsky, A. Hiller
Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and 20th century temperature variability from Chesapeake Bay(Global and Planetary Change, Volume 36, Issues 1-2, March 2003, Pages 17-29)- T. M. Cronin, G. S. Dwyer, T. Kamiya, S. Schwede, D. A. Willard
Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal(Energy and Environment, Vol. 14, Issues 2 & 3, April 11, 2003)- Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Craig Idso, David R. Legates

QUOTE
Many records reveal that the 20th century is likely not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.

The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in the Sargasso Sea(Science, Vol. 274. no. 5292, pp. 1503 - 1508, 29 November 1996)- Lloyd D. Keigwin
The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming in South Africa(South African Journal of Science 96: 121-126, 2000)- P. D. Tyson, W. Karlén, K. Holmgren and G. A. Heiss
The 'Mediaeval Warm Period' drought recorded in Lake Huguangyan, tropical South China(Holocene, Vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 511-516, 2002)- Guoqiang Chu, Jiaqi Liu, Qing Sun, Houyuan Lu, Zhaoyan Gu, Wenyuan Wang, Tungsheng Liu
The Medieval Warm Period in the Daihai Area(Journal of Lake Sciences, Vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 209-216, Sep 2002)- Z. Jin, J. Shen, S. Wang, E. Zhang
Torneträsk tree-ring width and density ad 500–2004: a test of climatic sensitivity and a new 1500-year reconstruction of north Fennoscandian summers(Climate Dynamics, January, 2008)- Håkan Grudd
Tree-ring and glacial evidence for the medieval warm epoch and the little ice age in southern South America(Climatic Change, Volume 26, Numbers 2-3, March, 1994)- Ricardo Villalba
Was the Medieval Warm Period Global?(Science, Vol. 291. no. 5508, pp. 1497 - 1499, 23 February 2001)- Wallace S. Broecker

QUOTE
The Little Ice Age and the subsequent warming were global in extent. Several Holocene fluctuations in snowline, comparable in magnitude to that of the post-Little Ice Age warming, occurred in the Swiss Alps. Borehole records both in polar ice and in wells from all continents suggest the existence of a Medieval Warm Period. Finally, two multidecade-duration droughts plagued the western United States during the latter part of the Medieval Warm Period. I consider this evidence sufficiently convincing to merit an intensification of studies aimed at elucidating Holocene climate fluctuations, upon which the warming due to greenhouse gases is superimposed.

Polar Bears:
Polar bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change: Are warming spring air temperatures the “ultimate” survival control factor?(Ecological Complexity, Volume 4, Issue 3, Pages 73-84, September 2007)- M.G. Dyck, W. Soon, R.K. Baydack, D.R. Legates, S. Baliunas, T.F. Ball, L.O. Hancock

Sea Level:
Estimating future sea level changes from past records(Global and Planetary Change, Volume 40, Issues 1-2, Pages 49-54, January 2004)- Nils-Axel Mörner
New perspectives for the future of the Maldives(Global and Planetary Change, v. 40, iss. 1-2, p. 177-182. 2004)- Nils-Axel Momer, Michael Tooley, Goran Possnert
Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise(Science, Vol. 308. no. 5730, pp. 1898 - 1901, 24 June 2005)- Curt H. Davis, Yonghong Li, Joseph R. McConnell, Markus M. Frey, Edward Hanna)

Solar:
A mechanism for sun-climate connection(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, 2005)- Sultan Hameed, Jae N. Lee
A Millennium Scale Sunspot Reconstruction: Evidence For an Unusually Active Sun Since the 1940's(Physical Review Letters 91, 2003)- Ilya G. Usoskin, Sami K. Solanki, Manfred Schüssler, Kalevi Mursula, Katja Alanko
Celestial Climate Driver: A Perspective from Four Billion Years of the Carbon Cycle(Geoscience Canada, Volume 32, Number 1, March 2005)- Ján Veizer
Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?(GSA Volume 13, Issue 7, July 2003)- Nir J. Shaviv, Ján Veizer
Climate Change: The Sun's Role(arXiv:0706.3621, 23 Jun 2007)- Gerald E. Marsh
Comparison of proxy records of climate change and solar forcing(Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 23, Issue 4, p. 359-362, 02/1996)- Crowley, Thomas J., Kim, Kwang-Yul
Evidence of Solar Variation in Tree-Ring-Based Climate Reconstructions(Solar Physics, Volume 205, Number 2, Pages 403-417, February 2002)- M.G. Ogurtsov , G.E. Kocharov, M. Lindholm, J. Meriläinen, M. Eronen, Yu.A. Nagovitsyn
Geophysical, archaeological, and historical evidence support a solar-output model for climate change(PNAS, Vol. 97, No. 23, 12433-12438, November 7, 2000)- Charles A. Perry, Kenneth J. Hsu
Has solar variability caused climate change that affected human culture?(Advances in Space Research, Volume 40, Issue 7, Pages 1173-1180, 2007)- Joan Feynmana
Imprint of Galactic dynamics on Earth's climate(Astronomische Nachrichten, Volume 327, Issue 9 , Pages 866 - 870, 10 Oct 2006)- H. Svensmark)
Is solar variability reflected in the Nile River?(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 111, D21114, 2006)- Alexander Ruzmaikin, Joan Feynman, Yuk L. Yung
Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate(Science, Vol. 254. no. 5032, pp. 698 - 700, November 1991)- E. Friis-Christensen, K. Lassen
Linkages between solar activity, climate predictability and water resource development(Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, Vol 49 No 2, Pages 32–44, June 2007)- W J R Alexander, F Bailey, D B Bredenkamp, A van der Merwe, N Willemse
Long-Period Cycles of the Sun's Activity Recorded in Direct Solar Data and Proxies(Solar Physics, Volume 211, Numbers 1-2, December, 2002)- M.G. Ogurtsov, Yu.A. Nagovitsyn, G.E. Kocharov, H. Jungner
Orbital Controls on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and the Tropical Climate(Paleoceanogrpahy Vol. 14, No. 4, Pages 441–456, 1999)- A. C. Clement, R. Seager, M. A. Cane
Palaeoenvironmental evidence for solar forcing of Holocene climate: linkages to solar science(Progress in Physical Geography, Vol. 23, No. 2, 181-204, 1999)- Frank M. Chambers, Michael I. Ogle, Jeffrey J. Blackford
Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene(Science, Vol. 294. no. 5549, pp. 2130 - 2136, 7 December 2001)- Gerard Bond, Bernd Kromer, Juerg Beer, Raimund Muscheler, Michael N. Evans, William Showers, Sharon Hoffmann, Rusty Lotti-Bond, Irka Hajdas, Georges Bonani
Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900–2000 global surface warming(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L05708, 2006)- N. Scafetta, B. J. West
Phenomenological solar signature in 400 years of reconstructed Northern Hemisphere temperature record(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L17718, 2006)- N. Scafetta, B. J. West
Possible solar forcing of century-scale drought frequency in the northern Great Plains(Geology, Vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 263-266, Mar 1999)-Zicheng Yu, Emi Ito
Reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich – The persistent role of the Sun in climate forcing(Danish National Space Center Scientific Report, 3/2007)- H. Svensmark, E.Friis-Christensen
Regional tropospheric responses to long-term solar activity variations(Advances in Space Research, Volume 40, Issue 7, Pages 1167-1172, 2007)- O.M. Raspopov, V.A. Dergachev, A.V. Kuzmin, O.V. Kozyreva, M.G. Ogurtsov, T. Kolström and E. Lopatin
Rhodes Fairbridge and the idea that the solar system regulates the Earth’s climate(Journal of Coastal Research, SI 50, pp. 955-968, 2007)- Richard Mackey
Solar activity variations and global temperature(Energy (Oxford), Vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 1273-1284, 1993)- Friis-Christensen, Eigil
Solar and climate signal records in tree ring width from Chile (AD 1587–1994)(Planetary and Space Science, Volume 55, Issues 1-2, Pages 158-164, January 2007)- Nivaor Rodolfo Rigozoa, Daniel Jean Roger Nordemann, Heitor Evangelista da Silva, Mariza Pereira de Souza Echer, Ezequiel Echer
Solar correlates of Southern Hemisphere mid-latitude climate variability(International Journal of Climatology, Volume 22, Issue 8 , Pages 901 - 915, 27 May 2002)- Ronald E. Thresher
Solar Cycle Variability, Ozone, and Climate(Science, Vol. 284. no. 5412, pp. 305 - 308, 9 April 1999)- Drew Shindell, David Rind, Nambeth Balachandran, Judith Lean, Patrick Lonergan
Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands(Science, Vol. 292. no. 5520, pp. 1367 - 1370, 18 May 2001)- David A. Hodell, Mark Brenner, Jason H. Curtis, Thomas Guilderson
Solar total irradiance variation and the global sea surface temperature record(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 96, NO. D2, Pages 2835–2844, 1991)- George C. Reid
Solar variability and climate change: Geomagnetic aa index and global surface temperature(Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 25, Issue 7, p. 1035-1038, 1998)- E.W. Cliver, V. Boriakoff, J. Feynman
Solar variability and ring widths in fossil trees(Il Nuovo Cimento C, Volume 19, Number 4, July 1996)- S. Cecchini, M. Galli, T. Nanni, L. Ruggiero
Solar Variability Over the Past Several Millennia(Space Science Reviews, Volume 125, Issue 1-4, pp. 67-79, Friday, December 22, 2006)- J. Beer, M. Vonmoos, R. Muscheler
Suggestive correlations between the brightness of Neptune, solar variability, and Earth's temperature (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L08203, 2007)- H. B. Hammel, G. W. Lockwood
Surface warming by the solar cycle as revealed by the composite mean difference projection(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L14703, 2007)- Charles D. Camp, Ka Kit Tung
The link between the solar dynamo and climate - The evidence from a long mean air temperature series from Northern Ireland(Irish Astronomical Journal, vol. 21, no. 3-4, p. 251-254, 09/1994)- C.J. Butler, D.J. Johnston
The Sun–Earth Connection in Time Scales from Years to Decades and Centuries(Space Science Reviews, v. 95, Issue 1/2, p. 625-637, 2001)- T.I. Pulkkinen, H. Nevanlinna, P.J. Pulkkinen, M. Lockwood
Variable solar irradiance as a plausible agent for multidecadal variations in the Arctic-wide surface air temperature record of the past 130 years(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, L16712, 2005)- Willie W.-H. Soon
Variability of the solar cycle length during the past five centuries and the apparent association with terrestrial climate(Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, Volume 57, Issue 8, Pages 835-845, July 1995)- K. Lassen, E. Friis-Christensen
Variations in Radiocarbon Concentration and Sunspot Activity(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 66, p.273, 01/1961)- Stuiver, M.
Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages(Science, Vol. 194. no. 4270, pp. 1121 - 1132, 10 December 1976)- J. D. Hays, John Imbrie, N. J. Shackleton
Variations of solar coronal hole area and terrestrial lower tropospheric air temperature from 1979 to mid-1998: astronomical forcings of change in earth's climate?(New Astronomy, Volume 4, Issue 8, Pages 563-579, January 2000)- W. Soon, S. Baliunas, E. S. Posmentier, P. Okeke
What do we really know about the Sun-climate connection?(Advances in Space Research, Volume 20, Issue 4-5, p. 913-921, 1997)- Eigil Friis-Christensen, Henrik Svensmark
Will We Face Global Warming in the Nearest Future?(Geomagnetism i Aeronomia, Vol. 43, pp. 124-127, 2003)- V. S. Bashkirtsev, G. P. MashnichSolar -

Cosmic Rays:
Solar variability influences on weather and climate: Possible connections through cosmic ray fluxes and storm intensification(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 94, No. D12, p. 14783 - 14792, October 1989)- Brian A, Tinsley, Geoffrey M. Brown, Philip H. Scherrer
Hale-cycle effects in cosmic-ray intensity during the last four cycles(Astrophysics and Space Science, Volume 246, Number 1, March 1996)- H. Mavromichalaki, A. Belehaki, X. Rafios, I. Tsagouri
Variation of Cosmic Ray Flux and Global Cloud Coverage - a Missing Link in Solar-Climate Relationships(Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Vol. 59, No. 11, pp. 1225-1232, July 1997)- Henrik Svensmark, Eigil Friis-Christensen
Influence of Cosmic Rays on Earth's Climate(Physical Review Letters, Volume 81, Issue 22, pp. 5027-5030, November 30, 1998)- Henrik Svensmark-
Reply to comments on "Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage - a missing link in solar-climate relationships"(Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Volume 62, Issue 1, p. 79-80, January 2000)- Henrik Svensmark, Eigil Friis-Christensen
Cosmic rays and Earth's climate(Space Science Reviews, v. 93, Issue 1/2, p. 175-185, July 2000)- Henrik Svensmark
Cosmic rays and climate - The influence of cosmic rays on terrestrial clouds and global warming(Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 41 Issue 4 Page 4.18-4.22, August 2000)- E Pallé Bagó, C J Butler
Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate(Space Science Reviews, v. 94, Issue 1/2, p. 215-230, November 2000)- Nigel Marsh, Henrik Svensmark
Low cloud properties influenced by cosmic rays(Physical Review Letters, Vol. 85, Issue 23, pp. 5004-5007, December 2000)- Nigel D Marsh, Henrik Svensmark
On the relationship of cosmic ray flux and precipitation(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 28, No. 8, pp. 1527–1530, 2001)- Dominic R. Kniveton and Martin C. Todd
Altitude variations of cosmic ray induced production of aerosols: Implications for global cloudiness and climate(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 107, No. A7, pp. SIA 8-1, July 2002)- Fangqun Yu
The Spiral Structure of the Milky Way, Cosmic Rays, and Ice Age Epochs on Earth(New Astronomy, Volume 8, Issue 1, p. 39-77, January 2003)- Nir J. Shaviv
Galactic cosmic ray and El Niño–Southern Oscillation trends in International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project D2 low-cloud properties(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 108, No. D6, pp. AAC 6-1, March 2003)- Nigel Marsh, Henrik Svensmark
The effects of galactic cosmic rays, modulated by solar terrestrial magnetic fields, on the climate(Russian Journal of Earth Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 5, October 2004)- V. A. Dergachev, P. B. Dmitriev, O. M. Raspopov, B. Van Geel
Formation of large NAT particles and denitrification in polar stratosphere: possible role of cosmic rays and effect of solar activity(Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Volume 4, Issue 9/10, pp. 2273-2283, November 2004)- F. Yu
Long-term variations of the surface pressure in the North Atlantic and possible association with solar activity and galactic cosmic rays(Advances in Space Research, Volume 35, Issue 3, Pages 484-490, 2005)- S.V. Veretenenko, , V.A. Dergachev, P.B. Dmitriyev
Galactic Cosmic Rays and Insolation are the Main Drivers of Global Climate of the Earth(arXiv:hep-ph/0506208, June 2005)- V.D. Rusov, I.V. Radin, A.V. Glushkov, V.N. Vaschenko, V.N.Pavlovich, T.N. Zelentsova, O.T. Mihalys, V.A.Tarasov, A. Kolos
On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget(Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 110, Issue A8, August 2005)- Nir J. Shaviv
Cosmic rays and the biosphere over 4 billion years(Astronomische Nachrichten, Vol. 327, Issue 9, Page 871, 2006)- Henrik Svensmark
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays(physics/0612145v1, December 2006)- Henrik Svensmark
Interstellar-Terrestrial Relations: Variable Cosmic Environments, The Dynamic Heliosphere, and Their Imprints on Terrestrial Archives and Climate(Space Science Reviews, Volume 127, Numbers 1-4, December 2006)- K. Scherer, H. Fichtner, T. Borrmann, J. Beer, L. Desorgher, E. Flükiger, H. Fahr, S. Ferreira, U. Langner, M. Potgieter, B. Heber, J. Masarik, N. Shaviv, J. Veizer
Empirical evidence for a nonlinear effect of galactic cosmic rays on clouds(Royal Society of London Proceedings Series A, Vol. 462, Issue 2068, p.1221-1233, April 2006)- R. Giles Harrison, David B. Stephenson
Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges(Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 48 Issue 1, Page 1.18-1.24, February 2007)- Henrik Svensmark
Evidence for a physical linkage between galactic cosmic rays and regional climate time series(Journal Advances in Space Research, February 2007)- Charles A. Perrya
200-year variations in cosmic rays modulated by solar activity and their climatic response(Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Physics, Volume 71, Number 7, July 2007)- O. M. Raspopov, V. A. Dergachev
On the possible contribution of solar-cosmic factors to the global warming of XX century(Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Physics, Volume 71, Number 7, July 2007)- M. G. Ogurtsov
Cosmic rays and climate of the Earth: possible connection(Comptes Rendus Geosciences, December 2007)- Ilya G. Usoskina, Gennady A. Kovaltsovb
Galactic Cosmic Rays - Clouds Effect and Bifurcation Model of the Earth Global Climate. Part 1. Theory(arXiv:0803.2765, Mar 2008)-V. Rusov, A. Glushkov, V. Vaschenko, O. Mihalys, S. Kosenko, S. Mavrodiev, B. Vachev

Species Extinctions:
Dangers of crying wolf over risk of extinctions(Nature 428, 799, 22 April 2004)- Richard J. Ladle, Paul Jepson, Miguel B. Araújo & Robert J. Whittaker

Temperatures:
A test of corrections for extraneous signals in gridded surface temperature data(Climate Research, Vol. 26: 159-173, 2004)- Ross McKitrick, Patrick J. Michaels
Analysis of trends in the variability of daily and monthly historical temperature measurements(Climate Research, Vol. 10: 27-33, 1998)- Patrick J. Michaels, Robert C. Balling Jr, Russell S. Vose, Paul C. Knappenberger
Conflicting Signals of Climatic Change in the Upper Indus Basin(Journal of Climate, Volume 19, Issue 17, p. 4276–4293, September 2006)- H. J. Fowler, D. R. Archer
Disparity of tropospheric and surface temperature trends: New evidence(Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 31, L13207, 2004)- David H. Douglass, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer, Paul C. Knappenberger, Patrick J. Michaels
Differential trends in tropical sea surface and atmospheric temperatures since 1979(Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 28, NO. 1, PAGES 183–186, 2001)- Christy, J.R., D.E. Parker, S.J. Brown, I. Macadam, M. Stendel, W.B. Norris
Documentation of uncertainties and biases associated with surface temperature measurement sites for climate change assessment.(Amer. Meteor. Soc., 88:6, 913-928, 2007)- Pielke Sr., R.A. J. Nielsen-Gammon, C. Davey, J. Angel, O. Bliss, N. Doesken, M. Cai., S. Fall, D. Niyogi, K. Gallo, R. Hale, K.G. Hubbard, X. Lin, H. Li, S. Raman
Does a Global Temperature Exist?(Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, June 2006)- Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, Bjarne Andresen
Estimation and representation of long-term (>40 year) trends of Northern-Hemisphere-gridded surface temperature: A note of caution(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L03209, 2004)- Willie W.-H. Soon, David R. Legates, Sallie L. Baliunas
Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years(Springer Wien, Volume 95, January, 2007)- Lin Zhen-Shan, Sun Xian
Nature of observed temperature changes across the United States during the 20th century(Climate Research, Vol. 17: 45–53, 2001)- Paul C. Knappenberger, Patrick J. Michaels, Robert E. Davis
Natural signals in the MSU lower tropospheric temperature record(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 27, No. 18, pp. 2905–2908, 2000)- Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger
Observed warming in cold anticyclones(Climate Research, Vol. 14: 1–6, 2000)- Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert C. Balling Jr, Robert E. Davis
Revised 21st century temperature projections(Climate Research, Vol. 23: 1–9, 2002)- Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Oliver W. Frauenfeld, Robert E. Davis
Test for harmful collinearity among predictor variables used in modeling global temperature(Climate Research, Vol. 24: 15-18, 2003)- David H. Douglass, B. David Clader, John R. Christy, Patrick J. Michaels, David A. Belsley
Tropospheric temperature change since 1979 from tropical radiosonde and satellite measurements(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, D06102, 2007)- John R. Christy, William B. Norris, Roy W. Spencer, Justin J. Hnilo
What may we conclude about global tropospheric temperature trends?(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L06211, 2004)- Christy, J.R., W.B. Norris

Uncategorized:
A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L13705, 2007)- Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle Swanson, Sergey Kravtsov
Climate change 2007: Lifting the taboo on adaptation(Nature 445, 597-598, 8 February 2007)- Roger Pielke Jr, Gwyn Prins, Steve Rayner, Daniel Sarewitz
Floods, droughts and climate change(S. Afr. J. Sci./Suid-Afr. Tydskr. Wet. Vol. 91, no. 8, pp. 403-408, Aug. 1995)- Alexander, W J R
Global warming and malaria: a call for accuracy(Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 4, Issue 6, Pages 323-324, June 2004)- P. Reiter, C. Thomas, P. Atkinson, S. Hay, S. Randolph, D. Rogers, G. Shanks, R. Snow, A. Spielman
Global Warming and the Next Ice Age(Science, Vol. 304. no. 5669, pp. 400 - 402, 16 April 2004)- Andrew J. Weaver, Claude Hillaire-Marcel
Gulf Stream safe if wind blows and Earth turns(Nature 428, 601, 8 April 2004)- Carl WunschIs
global warming climate change?(Nature 380, 478, 11 April 1996)- Adrian H. Gordon, John A. T. Bye, Roland A. D. Byron-Scott
Measurement-based estimation of the spatial gradient of aerosol radiative forcing(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L11813, 2006)- Toshihisa Matsui, Roger A. Pielke Sr.
Misdefining ‘‘climate change’’: consequences for science and action(Environmental Science & Policy, Volume 8, Issue 6, Pages 548-561, December 2005)- Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming?(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 327-350, 1 May 2003)- Landscheidt T.
No upward trends in the occurrence of extreme floods in central Europe(Nature 425, 166-169, 11 September 2003)- Manfred Mudelsee, Michael Börngen, Gerd Tetzlaff, Uwe Grünewald
Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 71, Issue 3, pp. 288–299, March 1990)- Richard S. Lindzen
The Ever-Changing Climate System: Adapting to Challenges(Cumberland Law Review, 36 No. 3, 493-504, 2006)- Christy, J.R.
Very high-elevation Mont Blanc glaciated areas not affected by the 20th century climate change(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, D09120, 2007)- C. Vincent, E. Le Meur, D. Six, M. Funk, M. Hoelzle, S. Preunkert