Just a quick note – as you all know (or should know), in Australia, it is heading in to bright, warm, sunny Summertime.  Time to put a couple shrimp on the barbie, crack open a Fosters and head down to the beach…except for one, small problem.  It’s snowing.

Update: Snowing in Egypt, too.  First time in more than a century.

Just a quick one – Antarctic sea ice at a 35 year record.  Climate scientists are “baffled”.

From Climate Depot:

Unprecedented July Cold – Arctic Sees Shortest Summer On Record

“Normally the high Arctic has about 90 days above freezing. This year there was less than half that,”  says Steven Goddard website.

I know, I know – the cold in the Arctic is due to Global Warming – except for the increased CO2 caused by racist, sexist, homophobic, straight, white males, the Arctic would have just been as cold as usual this year…

UPDATE: Walter Russell Mead weighs in on the Greens, in general:

…Global greens develop stupid, horrible, expensive, counterproductive climate policy agendas, and then try to use the imprimatur of “science” as a way to panic the world into adopting them. All too often, in other words, they fall prey to the temptation to make what the science says “clearer than truth” in Acheson’s phrase, in order to silence debate on their cockamamie policy fixes. A favorite tactic is to brand any dissent from the agenda as “anti-science.” It is not only a dishonest tactic; it’s a counterproductive one, generating new waves of skepticism with every exaggeration of fact…

This is, of course, all true – but Mead is still a “warmist”; he believes it is happening and that human actions might play a role in this.  The reason Mead believes this is because he works on the assumption that there is some element of honesty and rationality on the left.  For all his knowledge and excellent analytical skills, Mead hasn’t woke up to the fact that the left – in its leadership – is corrupt to the bone.  All they want is power and wealth for themselves and they’ll use whatever bit of BS that comes to mind to obtain it.  I don’t know that warming is happening, at all – I think we haven’t sufficient data on temperature and on the internal workings of the global climate to determine if its warming, cooling or staying the same (though I doubt it is staying the same – it seems to me that fluctuation is rather built-in).  Because people in responsible positions assert that it is happening, people like Mead work on the assumption that such people are not necessarily full of ****.  Trouble is, they are.  The wise man, in 2013, works on the assumption that anyone on the left in a leadership position who makes a statement is lying until proven otherwise.

Think about it – they say they care about families.  Then why implement policies which destroy families?  They say they care about the workers.  Then why implement policies which make it harder to create jobs which will go to the poor?  They say they care about education.  Then why implement policies which make it ever less likely that a child after 12 years in school will be literate?  They say they care about women.  Then why implement policies which ensure that more of them will be aborted?  On and on it goes – what they say they want is directly attacked by the policies the espouse.  The explanation:  they are in it for themselves and it is more likely that they’ll gain personal power and wealth – without having to earn it – if they advocate policies which are actually destructive.  Like this:  you can work for a living, or you can live off those who will pay you in order to keep a corrupt, unionized bureaucracy in power over education.

So it is with the environment – liberals say they want to clean it up.  Ok.  So lets go full bore in to nuclear power, natural gas, clean coal and other technologies which will provide us abundant, cheap and clean energy.  Nothing doing, say our liberals – they want to go in for solar and wind which are ineffective, massively expensive but which provide all manner of opportunity for graft (on both ends – corrupt “green energy” companies get government subsidies in return for providing donations and well-paid sinecures for liberals on the make).  The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is, at best, weak – and yet this lack of evidence, cleverly parlayed by propaganda, has been used to give massive new powers to liberals while also enriching liberals.  That it isn’t happening and that their proposed solutions will only make things worse doesn’t matter…they’ll just keep at it because they are narrow minded, greedy and self-centered (in short, what they claim we are – projection is not at all unconscious in the left: it is deliberate, a means of deflecting attention away from their corruption and failure).

But here’s our real problem – a good portion of those who should be on the side of the angels (like Mead) simply haven’t grasped the fact that the nice, articulate and oh, so friendly liberals they socialize with are con artists…who know how to turn on the charm and present a bright face, at need (they also know how to turn the wicked, gangster face on, too…a good con artist will switch from one to another with great ease).  To be sure, in the lower reaches of liberalism you don’t find con artists as often as you find dupes…but even there, it is dupery with a purpose: a low level liberal knows that if he toes the party line, rewards will follow.  But on top – nothing but liars on the make.  Understand that, and the battle becomes crystal clear.