Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, climate scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, say that only about half of the heat believed to have built up in the Earth in recent years can be accounted for. . . .

“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” Trenberth said. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”

This sounds like something I would have written on the write-up for a high school chemistry project when asked, “Why didn’t you get the result you expected?” Of course, in high school chemistry I was running experiments based upon centuries-old fundamentals, and deviance from the expected answer was always my fault. Also, I wasn’t expecting governments around the globe to rearrange their economies based on my results.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

This is true for every aspect of public life, and part of the Hayekian opposition to centralized planning is that unknown unknowns will always foil even the greatest planning.

Nowhere, perhaps, is it truer than in the realm of climate change, which is based on new, highly speculative, and even more highly political science. For example, if there’s one thing we’ve always been taught about global warming, it’s that cows are a serious problem. But now it turns out, that’s at least partly wrong.

Or not; I mean, I’ve no reason to believe there’s not another unknown unknown lurking out there that negates this study. That’s the problem with making dramatic, economy-wide regulations all based on climate change science. If what we know on the subject could fill an encyclopedia, what we don’t know would fill a library.

He begins thusly:

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Who the hell is he kidding? Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change Skeptics (try saying that 3 times fast) aren’t attacking science (well some are), they are going after people whose malfeasance has done more damage to science than a fleet of Kentucky educated christians ever could.

Al goes on to make the typical noise about foreign oil, but then gets right back to the crux of the matter:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skepticsmay not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

Nice try, Albert, but there are considerably more than two mistakes in those thousands of pages, but its cool I guess, we’ll ignore that…

The rest of the Op-Ed is the typical pablum about how temperatures over the last decade have been getting hotter. Uh, no. That hurricanes and other weather based natural disasters are getting worse. Uh, no. And calls for the US to be the leaders in the fight against disaster.  Please God, no.

Look despite what, Albert Little wants us to believe, the sky is not falling. Those of us who are skeptical of CAGW, aren’t knuckle dragging anti-science young earth creationists. Some of us love science and the process of scientific discovery. It’s because of our reverence for science that we want to hold the charlatans at the University of East Anglia and in the IPCC to the standards science demands. We aren’t saying that Global Warming is over, thanks, have a nice day. We’re saying that more study is needed.

What real scientist would ever say that we should stop researching? Oh yes, the ones that said the science was settled.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,”

John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

From The Times.

MILWAUKEE — Cities around the country that have installed energy-efficient traffic lights are discovering a hazardous downside: The bulbs don’t burn hot enough to melt snow and can become crusted over in a storm — a problem blamed for dozens of accidents and at least one death.

“I’ve never had to put up with this in the past,” said Duane Kassens, a driver from West Bend who got into a fender-bender recently because he couldn’t see the lights. “The police officer told me the new lights weren’t melting the snow. How is that safe?”

Many communities have switched to LED bulbs in their traffic lights because they use 90 percent less energy than the old incandescent variety, last far longer and save money. Their great advantage is also their drawback: They do not waste energy by producing heat.

…Wisconsin, which has put LED bulbs at hundreds of intersections, saves about $750,000 per year in energy costs, said Dave Vieth of the state Transportation Department. LEDs installed seven years ago are still burning, while most incandescent bulbs have to be replaced every 12 to 18 months, he said.

“With LEDs we have energy savings in excess of 80 percent, and we don’t have to have crews replacing them as often,” Vieth said. “So it’s clear the overall savings are pretty significant.”

In Minnesota, where authorities have upgraded hundreds of traffic lights to LEDs, the Transportation Department occasionally gets reports of an obstructed light. But by the time a highway crew arrives, the wind has often knocked out the snow and ice, said traffic systems specialist Jerry Kotzenmacher. Minnesota is experimenting with weather shields.

One reason there have been so few deaths is that drivers know they should treat a traffic signal with obstructed lights as a stop sign, traffic experts say.

“It’s the same as if the power is out,” said Dave Hansen, a traffic engineer with the Green Bay Department of Public Works. “If there’s any question, you err on the side of caution.”

That this happened is probably just a failure of engineering; an understandable-if-inexcusable and mundane tragedy.  That people aren’t moved to fix the lights to prevent traffic delays — to say nothing of injury or death! — is global warming religiosity.  That’s scary.

I’d like to thank the people of California for giving the rest of us a senator with such a keen sense of justice.

I’m moving myself from the “climate change skeptic” category to the “climate change denier” category. If there really were a serious problem that threatened the entirety of humanity, scientists who knew about it would realize the gravity of the situation and rationally explain the problem to me. Since that’s not happening — the only thing that is happening is that a movement composed of would-be petty tyrants, asshats, and clowns is screaming at the top of its lungs that I have to let them regulate every aspect of my life or else THE WORST THING IMAGINABLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN!!!!!11! — I think its safe to assume that nothing serious is awry.

P.S. As a new member of the Denier community, I’m looking forward to my check from the “fossil fuel industry.” Thanks, Scientific American, for pointing out that all deniers get paid for being deniers. This is a great alternative cash stream I might otherwise have missed.

Now comes a report from from climate scarers that global warming will cause more women to go into prostitution.

Let me rephrase that for the less economically inclined: GLOBAL WARMING WILL REDUCE THE PRICE OF PROSTITUTES!

So you’ve got a choice. You can live in a teepee, eat sprouts, and ride an emission-controlled donkey to your town’s only prostitute, who charges extortionate rates, all so you can sleep soundly at night knowing that coastal villages in Bangladesh aren’t being flooded as badly as they might otherwise be. Or you can live in a big air-conditioned house, eat a steak each night for dinner, and drive a fast car to a red light district that has a wide selection of women at low prices, and send part of the money you save on prostitutes to the Bangladeshi Swimming Education Fund.  Like our friends in “Hopenhagen,” I think the choice is clear.

No wonder we’re about to damage our economy irreparably.