Satellite Images Prove Al Gore and Global Warming Bunch of BS

The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’

Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.

But seven years after his warning, The Mail can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.

To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.

The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometers.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometers.

The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.

They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.

Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.

‘It seems that an unusually cool summer in 2013 allowed more ice to survive through to last winter. This means that the Arctic sea ice pack is thicker and stronger than usual, and this should be taken into account when making predictions of its future extent.’

Read More: The Daily Mail

Australian Bureau of Meteorology Accused of Fixing Climate Data

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been caught red-handed manipulating temperature data to show "global warming" where none actually exists.

At Amberley, Queensland, for example, the data at a weather station showing 1 degree Celsius cooling per century was "homogenized" (adjusted) by the Bureau so that it instead showed a 2.5 degrees warming per century.

At Rutherglen, Victoria, a cooling trend of -0.35 degrees C per century was magically transformed at the stroke of an Australian meteorologist's pen into a warming trend of 1.73 degrees C per century.

Last year, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology made headlines in the liberal media by claiming that 2013 was Australia's hottest year on record. This prompted Australia's alarmist-in-chief Tim Flannery - an English literature graduate who later went on to earn his scientific credentials with a PhD in palaeontology, digging up ancient kangaroo bones - to observe that global warming in Australia was "like climate change on steroids."

But we now know, thanks to research by Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy, that the hysteria this story generated was based on fabrications and lies.

Though the Bureau of Meteorology has insisted its data adjustments are "robust", it has been unable to come up with a credible explanation as to why it translated real-world data showing a cooling trend into homogenized data showing a warming trend.

This is a global problem. Earlier this year, Breitbart reported that similarly dishonest adjustments had been made to temperature records by NASA and NOAA. Similarly implicated are the UK temperature records of the Met Office Hadley Centre and at Phil "Climategate" Jones's disgraced Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

One of the many disingenuous arguments used by climate alarmists against sceptics is mockingly to accuse them of being conspiracy theorists. "How could global warming possibly not be a problem when all the world's temperature data sets from Australia to the US to the UK clearly show that it is? Are you seriously suggesting that so many different scientists and so many distinguished institutions from across the globe would collude in such a massive lie?" their argument runs.

Our answer: yes we bloody well are.

Read More: Breitbart London

Maureen Dowd and our Golf Fool of a President

FORE! Score? And seven trillion rounds ago, our forecaddies brought forth on this continent a new playground, conceived by Robert Trent Jones, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal when it comes to spending as much time on the links as possible — even when it seems totally inappropriate, like moments after making a solemn statement condemning the grisly murder of a 40-year-old American journalist beheaded by ISIL.

I know reporters didn’t get a chance to ask questions, but I had to bounce. I had a 1 p.m. tee time at Vineyard Golf Club with Alonzo Mourning and a part-owner of the Boston Celtics. Hillary and I agreed when we partied with Vernon Jordan up here, hanging out with celebrities and rich folks is fun.

Now we are engaged in a great civil divide in Ferguson, which does not even have a golf course, and that’s why I had a “logistical” issue with going there. We are testing whether that community, or any community so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure when the nation’s leader wants nothing more than to sink a birdie putt.

We are met on a great field of that battle, not Augusta, not Pebble Beach, not Bethpage Black, not Burning Tree, but Farm Neck Golf Club in Martha’s Vineyard, which we can’t get enough of — me, Alonzo, Ray Allen and Marvin Nicholson, my trip director and favorite golfing partner who has played 134 rounds and counting with me.

We have to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for my presidency, if I keep swinging from behind.

Yet it is altogether fitting and proper that I should get to play as much golf as I want, despite all the lame jokes about how golf is turning into “a real handicap” for my presidency and how I have to “stay the course” with ISIL. I’ve heard all the carping that I should be in the Situation Room droning and plinking the bad folks. I know some people think I should go to Ferguson. Don’t they understand that I’ve delegated the Martin Luther King Jr. thing to Eric Holder? Plus, Valerie Jarrett and Al Sharpton have it under control.

Read the Rest: Maureen Dowd The New York Times

Ferguson MO tells Jesse Jackson "We don't want you here"

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The ObamaCare Enrollment Failure

Much of the left has been trying its best to push the notion that "ObamaCare is working," largely based on the announced enrollment total of anywhere from 8 million to 10 million that has come out of the White House. Since this was more than the 7 million they originally said they needed to make the system viable, viola . . . success!

One problem: They counted everyone who enrolled, without regard to whether enrollees ever paid a premium. If you don't pay the premium, you're not insured and you're not part of the system. Thus, your enrollment is meaningless and there's no serious measure that can count you. So how is this phase of the implementation going?

Not well, if the experience of Aetna - one of the largest insurers participating in the system - is any indication. Investors Business Daily reports:

The nation's third-largest health insurer had 720,000 people sign up for exchange coverage as of May 20, a spokesman confirmed to IBD. At the end of June, it had fewer than 600,000 paying customers. Aetna expects that to fall to "just over 500,000" by the end of the year.

That would leave Aetna's paid enrollment down as much as 30% from that May sign-up tally.

"I think we will see some attrition ... We're already seeing it. And we expect that to continue through the end of the year," CEO Mark Bertolini said in a July 29 conference call.

It's not clear how representative Aetna's experience is of broader exchange trends, or whether its projection may be too conservative. (If it were representative, a similar 30% decline would drop ObamaCare enrollment to 6 million or less.)

Still, as one of ObamaCare's largest players, participating in exchanges in 16 states plus D.C., Aetna's experience provides a pretty good window into what is happening across the country, and there are other indications that enrollment has turned down.

Cigna (NYSE:CI) said that it expects its individual market customers, including more than 100,000 in the exchanges, to "move from 300,000 down to 280,000 in that range," Cigna CEO David Cordani said in a conference call.

Other major insurers danced around questions about attrition on recent earnings conference calls, but none denied that it was occurring.

Granted, you can't assume that Aetna's level of attrition will prove to be what happens across the board. The industry overall could do better. Or it could do worse.

Assuming Aetna's experience is not way out of line with what other insurers experience, where does ObamaCare end up if it's back down to only 6 million enrollees, especially given the likely problem of adverse selection that sees those insured through ObamaCare policies skew sicker and older than the population in general?

Also keep in mind that this only measures the attrition so far. For those who didn't have health insurance before because they couldn't afford it, how many are likely to drop off six, nine or 12 months after signing up because they thought they could handle the premiums, but found they couldn't? Especially after they go up again, which appears to be a near certainty?

ObamaCare is only "working" if you base that on phony and irrelevant numbers like the ones the White House has been pushing. The real facts suggest what we've always suspected: ObamaCare is a disaster.

Hat Tip: Best of Cain