After Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pauchaurigate now comes Greenpeacegate. The Global Warming movement is unraveling faster than the North Pole is supposed to be melting. As Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org writes, it is hard to find out where greenpeace ends and the IPCC starts:the IPCC reports has a large number of “peer reviewed” references to  that seem to come from Greenpeace flyers and other un-reviewed Greenpeace literature.

Donna writes:

When discussing solar energy elsewhere, the report references two Greenpeace documents in one sentence. Here it uses a Greenpeace paper as its sole means of documenting where the “main wind-energy investments” are located globally (Wind).

She continues:

The expert reviewers who had input into just one portion (Working Group III) of the IPCC report are listed in this 8-page PDF. They include three Greenpeace employees, two Friends of the Earth representatives, two Climate Action Network reps, and a person each from activist organizations WWF International, Environmental Defense, and the David Suzuki Foundation.

And:

In short, Sawyer’s [seasoned campaigner on board Greenpeace boats and a tireless lobbyist] career has focused on political activism and environmental lobbying. How does that qualify him to be an IPCC “scientific expert reviewer”?

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report has been proven to be the greatest work of fiction since the french included vows of fidelity in their marriage service [quote: Edmund Blackadder].

The next time you grab your digital camera, phone or PDA to browse the ‘Net or talk to your friends, or control your fridge, or whatever you do with your phone, I want you to think of the two people who made it possible: Professor Steve Furber, and Sophie Wilson (formerly Roger Wilson). Back in the early eighties, these two people, with no team or money, developed the original ARM1 microprocessor chip, the predecessor of the StrongARM chip, which core is now used in over 90% of the world’s hand-held devices. Without their work, there would not have been such an explosion in hand held devices as we have seen in the past ten years. While Intel and IBM just wanted to make bigger and more powerful chips, Steve and Sophie set out to make the chip smaller and less power hungry for Acorn Computer‘s new microcomputer. Steve tells this story:

“Acorn Computer realised that it needed a 16-bit microprocessor instead of an 8-bit, for its microcomputer which had been adopted as the BBC Micro. Acorn CEO Hermann Hauser asked Intel if they could license the 286 but Intel said No.”

There were, however, other 16-bit microprocessors, and the job of evaluating them fell to Furber.

“We looked at National Semiconductor’s and Motorola’s but they were too slow “, says Furber. The obvious answer was to design their own but this looked daunting.

“The general view was that microprocessors had a mystique – that they were designed by very special people”, says Furber, “I’d never designed a microprocessor, and everything I knew about them I’d learned at the Cambridge University Microprocessor Group where people met to make computers for fun. We knew that it had taken National 200 years of development time to build their 16-bit microprocessor, and Acorn couldn’t afford that – we only had 300 people at the time.”

“Then we came across the Berkeley RISC. A group of graduate students had built a microprocessor with only a tiny percentage of the resources used by National. In late 1983, I started working closely with Sophie Wilson who had developed all the versions of BASIC for the BBC Micro.”

“Sophie and I went on a trip to Phoenix to the Western Design Centre (an independent microprocessor design house which designed the 6502)”, remembers Furber, “we found it to be a cottage industry working in a bungalow in a back street. That gave us confidence. Sophie started playing with instruction set design. Our mentality was: ‘Let’s have a go at building a microprocessor’.”

The next problem was to persuade the boss. “Hermann was a great guy to work for ” says Furber, “if he had confidence in you technically he’d back a crazy idea. Building our own microprocessor was a crazy idea – but he backed it.”

“Steve is one of the brightest guys I’ve ever worked with – brilliant ” says Hauser, “and when we decided to do a microprocessor on our own I made two great decisions – I gave them two things which National, Intel and Motorola had never given their design teams: the first was no money; the second was no people. The only way they could do it was to keep it really simple.”

Furber defined the architecture while Sophie developed the instruction set. “While IBM spent months simulating their instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her brain,” remembers Hauser.

It was the birth of a microprocessor phenomenon – a chip which did the same amount of work as other 16-bit microprocessors but used one tenth of their transistors – and consequently one tenth of their electricity.

“At 1pm on April 13th 1984, the first ARM microprocessors arrived back from the manufacturer – Plessey”, recalls Furber, “they were put straight into the development system which was fired up with a tweak or two and, at 3 pm, the screen displayed: ‘Hello World, I am ARM’.”

JANUARY 27 UPDATE: Apple just unveiled iPad tablet computer powered by, you guessed it, a customized A4 chip based on a licensed ARM core.

Mr. McGuinty announced his latest project today: 7 billion dollars goes to South Korea, for which a consortium led by Samsung will build and set up wind and solar farms across Ontario. The government has guaranteed them to pay above-market prices for green power. For all this, they’ll create 15,000 jobs.

So, to recap, we’re paying Samsung to build unproven wind and solar farms, and we’ll be buying over-priced power from them after. In addition, we paid nearly half a million dollars for each job created.

How does this help us?

I suppose the commercial is right: there is no place like McGuinty’s Ontario…

A brand new garage for Ottawa’s OC Transpo’s bus fleet: $29 million.

Oh, the columns are placed so that our articulate busses can’t turn in it, better change the design while we’re building it: add $30 million.

Jeepers, we forgot: we have double-deckers too: raise the ceiling and add another $30 million.

Total: $97+ million dollars. For a garage.

Are you all nuts there at city hall?

Once again, the IPCC was proven WRONG on a major issue regarding its claim that the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” in the Fourth Assessment Report. In fact, the scientist that initially informed the IPCC of the glaciers disappearing, immediately retracted his statement after he issued it,  months before the Fourth Assessment Report came out back in 2007. They had ample time to take it out, but I suppose the exposed Himalayas was a great mental image, not to be wasted.

The Fourth Assessment Report said the evidence for global warming was now “unequivocal,” the chief source for it was man-made and there were already signs, of which glacial melt was one. It was this publication that kicked the world into action and implement carbon caps, carbon trading schemes, and greenhouse gas reductions in nearly every developed nation in the world.

The IPCC is only now launching a probe, three years after the fact, and quickly adds that “the evidence of the report remained incontrovertible. I am careful in saying this, because immediately people will again engage in IPCC bashing, which would be wrong.” (Georg Kaser of the Geography Institute at Austria’s University of Innsbruck). Three years later, the damage has been done. Billions upon billions of dollars have been wasted as a result of this fraudulent report.

Once again the media mainly ignores this fact, and even if the Ottawa Citizen reports on it, the article is strewn with “Attack by skeptics” and “hacked emails” and “IPCC bashing”. Even the headline does not reflect badly on the IPCC: UN climate body to probe Himalayan glacier forecast. I could have come up with a more accurate headline, say: IPCC admits Fourth Assessment Report based on false data–apologizes to world for wasting billions of dollars.

I am getting pretty tired of this Global Warming crowd: time after time they have been proven to fudge the numbers, lie, cheat, make up numbers, manipulate global temperature data and yet half the world still follows them blindly.

It’s time our own government puts a stop to this sham, and stop following anything the IPCC or UN does on the climate front.

This is getting rediculous.

I’m off of Google. Google is no longer a verb in my vocabulary.

When introduced years ago as an alternative to Yahoo!, it was good. It was much better than Yahoo! And for a while it was the de facto standard for searching the Internet. However, recent revelations have me believe that Google is seriously censoring and filtering the search results, and as a free-thinking, freedom of speech advocate, I can no longer support such an institution.

From Lawrence Solomon’s column Better off with Bing comes this:

Sometime around then, in early December, Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users. By Dec. 17, the number of climategate pages that a Google search found dropped by almost 10 million, to 22.2 million. One day later Google dropped its find by another 8 million pages, to 14.1 million. By Dec. 23, Google could find only 7.5 million hits and on Dec. 24 just 6 million. And yesterday, when I checked, Google reported a mere 1.8 million climategate pages.

Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million, where they have remained since.

And he goes on to say:

But suddenly in late November, for reasons known only to Google, Google often would not suggest “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i. Even c-l-i-m-a or c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t weren’t enough to solicit a suggestion. Bing, in contrast, did not and does not steer users away from climategate — it has consistently suggested “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i or even c-l.

and:

Why would Google want to tamp down interest in climategate? Money and power could have something to do with it. Search for Google and its founders and you’ll see that they have made big financial bets on global warming through investments in renewable and other green technologies; that they have a close relationship with Al Gore, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is close to Barack Obama.

So, as much as I don’t like Microsoft (as a user), I am banning Google, and switching to Bing for my main search engine. They are not filtering any search results, and are not pushing any political agenda.

Anyone who is against nanny-states and relishes in free-thinking should do the same, but of course, as a free-thinking, freedom of speech advocate I cannot tell you what to do… You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

Just do some research (not on Google, they even filter out “Googlegate”…)

From Greg Weston’s column in Sun Media papers today:

Less than an hour after a massive earthquake turned Haiti into an unimaginable hell of death and devastation, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an extraordinary call to action, remarkably putting the first Canadian rescue team on the stricken island by the next afternoon.

By all accounts, the launch of Operation Hestia (goddess of the hearth) was vintage Harper: No nonsense; no excuses.

It all started Tuesday evening, minutes after word of the Haitian catastrophe reached Harper’s office.

The PM was briefed aboard his jet as he arrived in Ottawa from a day-trip to Quebec, and immediately issued two clear orders from the plane.

First, the forever hands-on Harper demanded he be kept at the centre of the action and fully informed at all times.

Second, he made it crystal-clear that the Canadian government would do everything possible to come to the aid of the Haitian people – immediately.

One insider says everyone from the military brass to the high-ranking bureaucrats got the PM’s message: “He wanted it done, and he wanted it done two hours ago.” Defence Minister Peter MacKay was also sitting in a government jet, his flight delayed on the tarmac at Halifax airport, when his marching orders arrived from the PM’s plane.

Again, the directive from Harper left no room for interpretation.

As one senior official observed: “It was clear to everyone that by the next morning, the prime minister didn’t want to hear what anyone planned to do, but what we had already done.” Still on the runway in Halifax, MacKay was immediately on the phone to Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.

Don’t let anybody tell you that Canada was too slow to react.

Donate to the Canadian Red Cross here.