Your eyes on California Government

AUG. 30, 2011

By JOHN SEILER

Granted, Twitter isn’t exactly a medium for syllogisms. But as Katy Grimes reported:

At a press conference yesterday, Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena, presented independent research which he says proves that the California Assembly manipulated budget numbers to make him look bad. He had Dakin Sloss with him. Sloss is the President of Stanford-based California Common Sense, an open-government non-profit organization, which found the Rules Committee data a little dubious.

However, after the conference, political attack dogs went after Sloss instead of attacking the data or methods used. Democratic strategist Steve Maviglio used Twitter to call-out the Stanford Senior. Maviglio said Sloss is “on leave from Stanford” and is a “climate change denier,” as if that makes the data suspect.

Portantino’s office said that Sloss took one semester off to create the  CACS, and accused Assembly leadership of “attacking the messenger.”

If you took a logic class, you might remember the “ad hominem fallacy” — which in English means “attacking the man” — that is, attacking the messenger instead of the argument.  Which is what Maviglio did.

Maviglio never refuted Sloss’ facts on the Assembly finances, which you can read for yourself here.

Then Maviglio launched the biggest attack leftists have today: pointing out that Sloss denies man-made global warming occurs. Excuse, me! I forgot — the new name is “climate change,” because it’s a bigger catch-all to increase government power and reduce our personal liberties.

Maviglio doesn’t point out that the whole “climate change” scam was uncovered two years ago in the Climategate scandal, which showed that the “climate change” boffins cooked the books and suppressed dissenting views.

Global Warming Refuted

And in just the last week, new evidence shows that global “climate changes” is cause exclusively by the sun, not humans.

Lawrence Solomon writes in the Financial Post:

New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

You can read the rest at the link. And check out the graph and the explanation below, which was part of the research publication.

Commenting on the new scientific results, James Delingpole writes in the London Telegraph about how the news about the CERN results have been suppressed. But you, constant reader of CalWatchDog.com, have read them here.

The CERN discoveries mean that the whole global-warming — excuse me, “climate change” — ideology is false. It’s a cargo cult.

Global Warming Laws

If we have any sense, we’ll repeal all the legislation that’s based on man-caused global warming, beginning with ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. That’s its actual name, before the “global warming” propaganda was changed to “climate change.”

It mandates draconian reductions in greenhouse gases of 25 percent by 2020. It’s killing 1 million jobs. No wonder California’s unemployment rate is 12 percent, almost 3 percentage points higher even than the dismal U.S. rate.

And earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown made matters even worse by signing into law a mandate that renewables must comprise 33 percent of electricity production by 2020.

According to the text of the bill, SBX1 2, by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto:

399.11.  The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:….

(b) Achieving the renewables portfolio standard through the procurement of various electricity products from eligible renewable energy resources is intended to provide unique benefits to California, including all of the following, each of which independently justifies the program:….

(4) Meeting the state’s climate change goals by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases associated with electrical generation.

In the text of the bill, the words “global warming” are mentioned only when AB 32′s full title perforce must be directly quoted.

California probably will be the last place to give up the man-made global warming — excuse me, “climate change” — superstition. It’s especially popular among Simitian’s billionaire Silicon Valley constituents, who fund much of the state’s politics. Even Meg Whitman — remember her? — bought into it.

But it’s encouraging that kids like Sloss know the real gen.

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Note: The following graph, and the comments below it, are from the CERN research.

Source: Fig. S2c from supplementary online material for J. Kirkby et al., Nature, 476, 429-433, © Nature 2011

The graph above does not appear in the print edition of Nature, but it does make showing at the back of the online supplementary material. The graph shows how cosmic rays promote the formation of clusters of molecules that can then grow and seed clouds in the real atmosphere.

At 03.45 am in a CLOUD experiment in Geneva, ultraviolet light began to create molecules in the cloud chamber, which approximates the air in the atmosphere. Jn above shows the neutral phase of the experiment, during which the CLOUD experiment electrically removed ions and molecular clusters. At 4.33 am, the CLOUD experiment stopped the electrical removal and allowed natural glalactic cosmic rays (Jgcr) to enter the chamber through the roof of the Geneva building, leading to a faster rate of cluster buildup.

Then, at  4.58 am, CLOUD also beamed charged pion particles (Jch) from an accelerator (these are equivalent to cosmic rays), the rate of cluster production took off, convincingly demonstrating the effect of cosmic rays on cluster growth.

Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dakin Sloss, global warming, Jerry Brown, John Seiler, Katy Grimes, Steve Maviglio