More impending chaos in the Middle East?

Saudi King Abdullah is dead.

Yemen's government falls to Iranian backed rebels.  Anti-American rebels, no less.  So, now what happens to Obama's prize drone-strike program?

Fact checking the Pinocchio-in-Chief

During his SOTU address yesterday Obama boasted about US diplomacy success in negotiations with Iran saying:

"... for the first time in a decade we've halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material ..."

That might be nice, except that "he outright lied"!



More fact checking at Politico and the WaPo.  Of note (from the WaPo) was his global warmist claim:

“2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does – 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.”

That may not have been a "lie", technically, because he was just regurgitating the NASA-NOAA-NCDC alarmist bullcrap.
 

Was 2014 the warmest year on record? Not so fast!

The NOAA NCDC announcement yesterday, "2104 Earth's warmest year on record" spread quickly through news and social media channels, just as planned.  2014 was the warmest "on record", but
that record is based on historical land and sea surface thermometer measurements with missing readings filled in by statistical and other tricky methods.  See a full discussion of the (in)significance of the 2014 result here.

However, there's another record considered to be somewhat more reliable than surface thermometer readings - and that is the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) Satellite Based Temperature of the Global Lower Atmosphere.  That record shows "2014 was Third Warmest Year Since 1979, but Just Barely":

Update: Updates on all the global temp data sets: the three surface temp data sets (GSS, NCDC and HADCRUT) and the satellite data sets (UAH and RSS). 

Update: 2014: The Most Dishonest Year on Record

... What remains of the original description of this ‘warmest year on record’ news? Nothing but bluff, spin, and the uncritical press-release journalism that dominates mainstream reporting on the climate. ...

The great carbon tax grab and BC's bogus green claims

Terence Corcoran:

Just as consumers start getting used to the idea of lower gasoline prices, putting billions of dollars in their pockets for spending on other things, politicians are conspiring to grab it back ... a long list of economists and celebrity policy wonks eager to provide support... Preston “Don’t call it a tax” Manning, The Globe and Mail’s editorial board, assorted think tanks ... Obama advisor Lawrence Summers ... Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada ...

... The carbon tax issue is no small policy shift. This is big statism in a green cloak, filled with policy inconsistencies, economic nonsense and out-of-control rationalizations.

... Carbon taxes are piled on green taxes piled on congestion taxes on top of regulations and other direct interventions. ... Worse, none of these taxes will do anything to improve the environment or curb carbon emissions...

Far left radical Saul Alinsky once wrote "never let a good crisis go to waste". Obama's far left fixer, Rahm Emanuel famously repeated it.   So, now, with a "crisis" in falling oil prices, opportunistic political weasels and wonks of all stripes are rationalizing a tax they hope can be imposed with minimal objection.  And once imposed it'll stay there after oil prices rise again. It's time for tax payers to show up en-mass on all their doorsteps carrying tar, feathers, torches and pitch-forks.

The B.C. carbon tax: Gordon Campbell's Liberals imposed a carbon tax in 2008 and have long held it up as a glowing success in  lowering BC's carbon footprint.  Terence Corcoran puts the lie to that load of junk economics:

... B.C. gasoline consumption is actually higher today than it was in 2008, both in absolute and per capita numbers. B.C. is therefore today producing more carbon emissions than it was the day the carbon tax was introduced.... Economics 101 is still the law, and the B.C. case for a carbon tax does not exist.

How multiculturalism fuels Western paralysis in dealing with radical Islam

Multicultural Suicide by Victor Davis Hanson:

... In terms of the challenge of radical Islam, multiculturalism manifests itself in the abstract with the notion that Islamists are simply the fundamentalist counterparts to any other religion. Islamic extremists are no different from Christian extremists ...

... In the end what is multiculturalism? A global neurosis. For its elite architects, it is a psychological tic, whose loud professions square the circle of enjoying guilt-free the material comfort that only the West can provide. For the rest, multiculturalism is a sort of fraud, a mechanism to blame something that one secretly desires in lieu of addressing the causes of personal or collective self-induced misery.

...

An excellent essay, well worth the read and saving for future reference.

And, for a good example of a multi-cult "useful idiot" that fits Mr. Hanson's decription here's "Harry Potter" billionairess, J.K. Rowling.

Does the Sun drive climate change?

Jo Nova:

The central mystery in climate science is the Sun.  ... Stephen Wilde has a theory:

In essence: The Sun affects the ozone layer through changes in UV or charged particles. When the Sun is more active there is more ozone above the equator and less over the poles, and vice versa. ... Thus the Sun’s UV and charged particles modulate the solar heating of the Earth. ...

 the Andersson “energetic electron” paper

The new paper by Andersson et al builds on the hypothesis that ozone is influential and a potential mechanism to amplify solar factors. It adds energetic electron precipitation (EEP) to spectral changes in UV, which is a significant step forward. ... Observations of climate changes across the last thousand years suggest that it must be so....

Western leaders still in denial about Islam

Not long after the perps of the Islamist terror attacks in Paris were put down, French President Francois Hollande delivered this "reassuring" bit of whitewash: ("... these fantatics had nothing to do with the Muslim religion")


And, we know how Obama thinks (".... ISIL is not Islamic ..."):


So, who should we believe? The above two lefties and their numerous ilk, or Muslim President Al-Sisi of Egypt ("...we must revolutionize our religion ...":