Victor Davis Hanson: A Gasoline Nightmare | JunkScience.com

Obama is barnstorming the west — blasting oil companies, trying to convince voters that he supports an “all of the above” policy, and reminding them that drilling has increased since his tenure.

I can understand why Obama is furious about the politics of oil, but frantically doing derrick photo-ops simply looks desperate and cynical. Far better would be to explain to the American people why his team once wanted higher fossil-fuel prices and why that was or is wise or is no longer true; and, why he has radically curbed new leasing on federal lands, and why that is wise or at least once was wise from 2009-12; and why tapping the reserve or getting other foreign nations to pump more is helpful in a way additional American production would not have been; and why he will insist on budget discipline and restore balance in the purchasing power of overseas dollars.

Thomas Richard: Mild Winter a sign of Global Warming or Political Machinations? | JunkScience.com

For those living in the Northeast, and elsewhere in the United States and Canada, you may be asking if the official day of Spring (March 20, 2012) is the harbinger of climate change due to the mild weather we had during winter ’11-’12 and particularly this week.

According to AccuWeather’s Brett Anderson, the answer isn’t that simple. Several factors coincided this winter and early spring that included a sustained, record positive phase of the Arctic Oscillation, which trapped Arctic air far to the North; a stronger western Atlantic high pressure ridge; a mostly positive phase of the north Atlantic Oscillation; more bare ground from lack of snow cover; La Nina; and warmer than normal temps over the Great Lakes and off the East Coast.

As he states, “In terms of global warming, we have to remember that this is just one season over a relatively small part of the Earth (North America).”

Asia and Europe and parts of Russia had unseasonably cold temps, so as tempting as it is to stick one’s thumb out the window and proclaim global warming is the culprit, this is simply the nature of weather.

Nicola Scafetta: Major new paper on Solar-Planetary theory published « Tallbloke's Talkshop

Multi-scale harmonic model for solar and climate cyclical variation

throughout the Holocene based on Jupiter–Saturn tidal frequencies plus the

11-year solar dynamo cycle

Climate Science From the Onion? | Watts Up With That?

Guest post by Dr. Patrick Michaels

Three items appeared last week that make me wonder if The Onion is surreptitiously acquiring science journals and trade publications.