Has anybody heard? The Brits are also looking at their worst summer in a long long time. So cold and wet that the Olympics are imperiled.

Lake's point: weather is not climate.

Funny how no one in the MSM, including all those covering the London Olympics, can bear to bring themselves to suggest that weather might deleteriously affect the Big O.

Olympics, I mean.

My thanks, John. The reason I can write so quickly about this is because I think about it constantly and try to stay very up to date on it.

I'm sorry to hear about your medical crises, hope all is well.

You make a good point about the mindset of the alarmists. It puzzled me for a while that so many scientists and science-minded people were so easily converted into this religious-like consensus view. They are blind to any parallels with groupthink from the rich history of science and scientific theories, and so many that are 'smart' fall into the trap that much more easily. I almost fell into it myself, several years ago.

As with so many important things in life, the answer comes from our host's great work, The Boomer Bible. At their core, people are looking for the next best reason to *stop thinking* and be happy. Climate scientists and their environmentalist hangers-on are certainly not immune, and in some ways, more susceptible.

I'm with you -- the growing self-flagellation of the first world and its seeming need to find *itself* as the blame-worthy source of all evil is troubling. I hope the trend is not our ruin in the end.

At the very least, I think the tide is turning on the AGW alarmism as more evidence comes in. Something new will crop up, of course, but until then I want to fight this battle vigilantly from with my school. Besides, I find some perverse pleasure at being a scientific heretic on this front!

Been off with medical, family, and family medical crapola for a while, but good to be back, hear that the Lairds are surviving the "land hurricanes", and read some Lake again. The man can write, and that's a fact.

This article comes pretty close to helping me answer the latest - and perhaps last - refuge of AGW diehards, the renaming of "global warming" to "climate change", or, more evocatively, "global weirding". It all boils down to the notion that if you put more energy into the system, you get unnatural changes in the system, which could go any direction at any time or place. This conveniently makes it so that anything which happens can be lumped in and counted as proof. (Can we actually blame the Chinese for anything yet, while maintaining political correctness? Does their communism give them a vestigial Noble Savage protection?) The main point of it seems to be: Something is happening, it's bad, it's our fault, and we can and should undo it.

How to untangle such a strange and illogical belief, which persists in otherwise very smart people in the face of piles of facts to its contrary, perplexes me.

[...]"When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical."

"Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape." [...]

-DH Lawrence Studies

[just having a bit of fun. wondering what DH would have thought of the warmenists]

The heat can be a killer in the wrong conditions (see: RL's plight last week), but give me a sultry summer evening sunset any time. Young maybe, but not too young.

PS on the Derecho: yes, Global Warmists want to claim this one too, but once again, actual observations derail them.

From NOAA again:

This article catalogs a list of over 20 notable derechoes.

They get a spurious and non-committal link to global warming here. I think that they just include it now to plant the idea without having to do any of the actual work to see if it's true. Given today's science journalism (or just ALL of journalism), it's no real surprise.