The winter of 2009-2010 was a memorable one in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, with locations like Philadelphia enjoying multiple massive snow storms that led to record totals for the winter. As with all exceptional weather events of late, the usual suspects blamed the occurrence on global warming. In a NOAA press release reported in USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2010-07-15-heat-record_N.htm), Jay Lawrimore stated that…

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December was indeed a December to Remember (or for many, to forget!) with widespread cold and snows. The Central England Temperature record is one of the longest continuous temperature records in the world extending back to the Little Ice age in 1659. December 2010 was the Second Coldest December Temperature in the entire record (352 years) with an average of -0.7C just short of the record of -0.8C recorded in December 1890.

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Deutsche Bank Group published a report purporting to respond to skeptic arguments. I took issue with a number of points in that document, and DB has responded with a revision to its original report (available at http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/_media/DBCCAColumbiaSkepticPaper090710.pdf) accompanied by 2 weblog entries at http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/tag/climate-matters. I will discuss their response, indicating where some meeting of minds has occurred, as well as places where I think it falls short; also I would like to raise a few points not taken up earlier.

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On September 21, 2010, US Senator Bingaman (D-NM) introduced a bill1 that would create an insidious national “Renewable Electricity Standard” (RES). Bingaman now has 32 cosponsors but expects 60. The bill would result in higher monthly bills for millions of home owners and renters, farms, businesses, industries, hospitals, educational institutions, and any other organization that uses electricity.

Despite the intense citizen displeasure with Congress, Bingaman’s RES bill shows that both Democrats and Republicans, while in Washington, are eager to favor special interests and their lobbyists while ignoring the adverse impact of their actions on the nation’s ordinary citizens, consumers and taxpayers. The bill belies Republican claims that they favor less federal government intrusion, control, and damage.

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In the next few weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to rule on a proposal to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent the amount of ethanol that may be blended into gasoline. If the EPA approves the move, the U.S. motor-fuel market would yet again become the victim of misguided federal intervention. Since the 1970s, Congress has justified subsidies to the corn ethanol industry with the oft-repeated claim that boosting domestic production of ethanol will increase America's energy security by reducing U.S. oil imports. That claim has no basis in fact.

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The record of continental (as opposed to island) bird and mammal extinctions in the last five centuries was analyzed to determine if the “species-area” relationship actually works to predict extinctions. Very few continental birds or mammals are recorded as having gone extinct, and none have gone extinct from habitat reduction alone. No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause. Since the species-area relationship predicts that there should have been a very large number of recorded bird and mammal extinctions from habitat reduction over the last half millennium, I show that the species-area relationship gives erroneous answers to the question of extinction rates.

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The current debate is a public policy debate with enormous implications. It is no longer about climate. It is about the government, the politicians, their scribes and the lobbyists who want to get more decision making and power for themselves. It seems to me that the widespread acceptance of the global warming dogma has become one of the main, most costly and most undemocratic public policy mistakes in generations. The previous one was communism.

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The impact of time?varying radiative forcing on the diagnosis of radiative feedback from satellite observations of the Earth is explored. Phase space plots of variations in global average temperature versus radiative flux reveal linear striations and spiral patterns in both satellite measurements and in output from coupled climate models.

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Science is increasingly being manipulated by those who try to use it to justify political choices based on their ethical preferences and who are willing to suppress evidence of conflict between those preferences and the underlying reality. This problem is clearly seen in two policy domains, health care and climate policy.

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