I’m a denier for several reasons. There is no substantive evidence that the planet has warmed significantly or that any significant warming will occur in the future. If any warming does occur, it likely will be concentrated at higher latitudes and therefore be beneficial. Climate research has largely degenerated into pathological science, and the coverage of global warming in the media is tendentious to the point of being fraudulent. Anyone who is an honest and competent scientist must be a denier.

Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for changes in latitude, elevation, and land use?

Determining a mean planetary temperature is not straightforward, but an extremely complicated problem. Even the best data are suspect. Anthony Watts and his colleagues have surveyed 82.5 percent of stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. They have found – shockingly – that over 70 percent of these stations are likely to be contaminated by errors greater than 2 deg C [3.6 deg F]. Of the remaining stations, 21.5 percent have inherent errors greater than 1 deg C. The alleged degree of global warming over the past 150 years is less than 1 deg C. Yet even in a technologically advanced country like the US, the inherent error in over 90 percent of the surveyed meteorological stations is greater than the putative signal. And these errors are not random, but systematically reflect a warming bias related to urbanization. Watts has documented countless instances of air temperature sensors located next to air conditioning vents or in the middle of asphalt parking lots. A typical scenario is that a temperature sensor that was in the middle of a pasture a hundred years ago is now surrounded by a concrete jungle. Urbanization has been a unidirectional process. It is entirely plausible – even likely – that all of the temperature rise that has been inferred from the data is an artifact that reflects the growth of urban heat islands.

The “denier” is portrayed as a person who refuses to accept the plain evidence of his senses. But in fact it is the alarmist who doesn’t know what they are talking about. The temperature of the Earth and how it has varied over the past 150 years is poorly constrained. The person who thinks otherwise does so largely because they have no comprehension of the science. Most of these people have never done science or thought about the inherent difficulties and uncertainties involved.

And what is “global warming” anyway? As long ago as the fifth century BC, Socrates pointed out that intelligible definitions are a necessary precursor to meaningful discussions. The definition of the term “global warming” shifts with the context of the discussion. If you deny global warming, then you have denied the existence of the greenhouse effect, a reproducible phenomenon that can be studied analytically in the laboratory. But if you oppose political action, then global warming metamorphoses into a nightmarish and speculative planetary catastrophe. Coastal cities sink beneath a rising sea, species suffer from wholesale extinctions, and green pastures are turned into deserts of choking hot sand.

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 Read More at lewrockwell.com By David Deming, lewrockwell.com

During the recent Fox News and Google presidential debate, Ron Paul opined to the crowd, “You ought to have a right to opt out of the public system if you want.” Although he could have been drawing comparisons between Obamacare and European socialized medicine, the congressman was actually referencing America’s socialized educational system. It was a brilliant point. Just as the “public option” is merely a different term for socialized medicine, public education is simply a euphemized phrase for socialized education.

In the early 1900s, Horace Mann led a movement to replace America’s community and parent-controlled school model with Prussian-style public schools. He believed that free education was a right and demeaned religious institutions that already made education available.

Mann’s vision was originally met with strong resistance, as parents were reluctant to cede control of their children’s education to government bureaucrats. Ultimately, a compulsory attendance mandate was passed — not unlike the individual mandate found in Obamacare. Shortly afterward, private schools began to close.

Three-time New York City teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto notes that archetypal Americans like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison were leading productive, fulfilled lives by the time they were in their teens, and yet “[t]hey were too unpredictable and insufficiently pliable. What better way to (change this) than by removing children from the steadying influences of their families, and placing them instead in the hands of (free government) schools[?] Just in case parents were unwilling to comply, the powers that be committed school attendance into law.”

However, as we all know, “free education” isn’t free, but subsidized through tax levies on all citizens — even those with no school-age children and those who have chosen to educate their children privately. Herein lies the genius of the left: by dictating the funding of government-run education and health care programs, millions of families are left with few alternatives outside the government’s control. Although the right to enroll their children in private schools remains, this “right,” for all practical purposes, often cannot be exercised due to income limitations. The reality is that many middle- and lower-income families cannot afford to pay taxes towards our public schools while also sending their own children to schools of their choice. The same holds true for health insurance policies — thus, freedom of choice is suddenly available only to the elite and wealthy.

Follow Joe Miller at Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Read More at American Thinker By Josiah Cantrall, American Thinker

Apparently deciding one ongoing, undeclared war was not enough, our president of peace has committed 100 U.S. soldiers to central Africa to fight the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). That announcement came Friday, two days after deployment. In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner on Friday, Barack Obama wrote “the U.S. forces are combat-equipped,” but — not to worry — “they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.” The president asserted that his action was taken in “furtherance of the Congress’s stated policy,” citing the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, which encourages greater “military” cooperation to defeat the LRA. However, he concluded, “I have directed this deployment, which is in the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.” This has some questioning whether this is a second war-by-decree, following the still-simmering conflict in Libya.

Ironically, Obama closed the letter, “I am making this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution” — an act he is currently violating in Libya.

No, the intervention does not mean Obama is actively targeting Christians for death — although we already did that in our intervention to subject Christian Serbia to the tender mercies of Muslim Kosovars. However, some find the hand of George Soros’ internationalists behind the intervention. Aaron Klein at WND.com notes:

In April 2010 Soros’ International Crisis Group, or ICG, released a report sent to the White House and key lawmakers advising the U.S. military run special operations in Uganda to seek Kony’s capture…

Soros sits in the ICG’s executive board along with Samuel Berger, Bill Clinton’s former national security advisor; George J. Mitchell, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader who served as a Mideast envoy to both Obama and President Bush; and Javier Solana, a socialist activist who is NATO’s former secretary-general as well as the former foreign affairs minister of Spain.

Jimmy Carter‘s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is the ICG’s senior advisor.

The ICG’s president emeritus is Gareth Evans, who, together with activist Ramesh Thakur, is the original founder of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, with the duo even coining the term “responsibility to protect.”

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Read More at Floyd Reports By Ben Johnson, The White House Watch

(CNSNews.com) – U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, a Clinton appointee, has ruled that the Justice Department does not need to release emails Solicitor General Elena Kagan sent from her DOJ email account to people in the White House—in which she discussed her recusal decisions as solicitor general—because the emails were “used for a purely personal objective.”

CNSNews.com and Judicial Watch were seeking public release of the emails through lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The “purely personal objective” cited by the judge was Kagan’s goal of being confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.

At issue is whether Kagan must recuse herself as a Supreme Court Justice when the cases challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare reach the court.

Kagan was the Obama administration’s solicitor general—charged with defending the administration’s positions in federal court cases–at the time President Obama’s health-care plan was enacted and when Virginia and Florida filed lawsuits against that health-care plan in federal court.

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 Read More at CNS News By Terence P. Jeffrey, CNS News