Monday, August 17, 2009
Venture financing with SBIR grants
When I was at Maricopa Colleges SBDC I developed an audiovisual introduction to the SBIR grants program sponsored by the SBA. I am not sure if it is still on-line, but I had been told that it is a helpful explanation of the program and how it can benefit certain entrepreneurs. I decided to repost it here as a public service. In addition to this summary, I provide consulting services on how to apply for SBIR grants. I can also assist with programs provided by the Arizona Department of Commerce to assist innovators that wish to apply for SBIR grants.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Medical Insurance - one more experience, one more opinion
Foreign experience:
I grew up in Italy where national medical insurance was always the norm. There, people that wanted could afford extra service and options had supplemental insurance to cover private clinics and whatever extra they wanted. Supplemental insurance was relatively affordable because it was only for the extras. All citizens are covered with a minimum of care as befits a civilized country.
I lived and worked as a Canadian resident (same taxes and benefits as citizens) and there again all taxpayers have a minimum of medical care as befits a civilized society. Those that could afford a supplemental insurance to cover extra services and choices could do so at a reasonable price. Canadian care and facilities in my experience were no less than I've experienced in the US. A single payer system made it more convenient and efficient. People can change jobs without having to change insurance and employers largely can stay out of employees' medical lives.
US experience:
In 39 years in the US I had to use personal individual policies, group policies and shop for policies for my employees in several companies. My views reflect the experience as a consumer and as an employer:
In the US we hail competition, but in reality we regulate insurance at the state level in such a way that competition really cannot work efficiently because information is not standardized and broadly distributed. Complexity and confusion are the best stiflers of competition.
Insurance tied to place of employment started in WWII as a way to attract workers despite wage controls. Since then, relative to medical insurance (MI) we've created two classes of citizens: the employed with group plans (no preexisting condition exclusions, competitive rates shopped by employers, negotiated service fee schedules, little or no cost to the employee, no management of the policy's features and costs by the insured), and the non-employed (self-employed, unemployed, retired, etc.) with a confusing and bewildering insurance options, pre existing condition exclusions, etc.
Since the consumer of care is not the decider of the features of employer provided MI, options selected in policies reflect what the HR department prefers, not what the user would like (cafeteria plans try to address that but only marginally). Trade offs between insurance cost and deductibles and copays are difficult if not impossible to do.
When one changes employer one has to change MI. Besides generating employment in the HR departments and insurance sales offices, what is the benefit of this? Since medical record-keeping goes hand in hand with payment for services, does the continuous changing of insurer not create an artificial obstacle to implementing electronic medical records with a historical scope?
If one goes from employment to new employment to unemployment to self employment as any are learning to do in the new economic environment, one can change insurance many times in few months. My own recent experience is 3 times (soon to be 4) in six months.
It is argued that employer paid insurance plans promote coverage as they force coverage on workers that would not otherwise provide it for themselves. I'll ignore the coercive aspect of the argument which is questionable in itself. However, we manage to make automobile insurance mandatory without involving employers and I suspect auto insurance is more widespread than MI. The same model could easily be implemented for MI.
Individual MI plans are different by state, so advertising and comparative shopping require a PhD in business analysis and competition is stifled; probably on purpose.
Multiple insurers with different policies and terms make medical service providers insanely inefficient at processing claims and prevents adoption of standardized electronic records, which causes another source of inefficiency.
The idea that taxpayers do not (because they shouldn't have to) pay for the uninsured or illegal aliens is an illusion. Hospitals routinely provide at least a minimum of emergency care (as they should in a civilized society) to all comers. The unpaid bill of the uninsured becomes absorbed by society through the most inefficient and uncontrollable process flowing through budgetary deficits, reimbursements, charitable foundations, etc.
Here is a great analysis from The New York Times of some of the above ideas or click below listen to an economist make the case
Conclusion
So, what is the point? Here is a proposal that probably does not make much money to anyone so it will never happen:
Probably other aspects could be added, but the idea is to have a prescription that is SIMPLE so lobbyists cannot turn it into a paralysis by complexity. Once an open competitive market is fostered, competition will take care of the rest.
One aspect I purposefully did not address is: What is the minimum level of medical care that a taxpayer or any human being should be entitled to? The range from developing country to Sweden is big. A national debate must address that, but it does not have to be mixed with the decision of how to process payments or to insure ourselves. It is a moral issue that hospitals confront daily and requires ethical decisions of allocation of resources. Within the parameters proposed above, directives to service providers can be defined the reflect what "as a society we are willing to pay for". On their own, service providers may choose to do more, but if so they will have to do it as their own charity and not charge society for their value system.
You comments are welcome
I grew up in Italy where national medical insurance was always the norm. There, people that wanted could afford extra service and options had supplemental insurance to cover private clinics and whatever extra they wanted. Supplemental insurance was relatively affordable because it was only for the extras. All citizens are covered with a minimum of care as befits a civilized country.
I lived and worked as a Canadian resident (same taxes and benefits as citizens) and there again all taxpayers have a minimum of medical care as befits a civilized society. Those that could afford a supplemental insurance to cover extra services and choices could do so at a reasonable price. Canadian care and facilities in my experience were no less than I've experienced in the US. A single payer system made it more convenient and efficient. People can change jobs without having to change insurance and employers largely can stay out of employees' medical lives.
US experience:
In 39 years in the US I had to use personal individual policies, group policies and shop for policies for my employees in several companies. My views reflect the experience as a consumer and as an employer:
In the US we hail competition, but in reality we regulate insurance at the state level in such a way that competition really cannot work efficiently because information is not standardized and broadly distributed. Complexity and confusion are the best stiflers of competition.
Insurance tied to place of employment started in WWII as a way to attract workers despite wage controls. Since then, relative to medical insurance (MI) we've created two classes of citizens: the employed with group plans (no preexisting condition exclusions, competitive rates shopped by employers, negotiated service fee schedules, little or no cost to the employee, no management of the policy's features and costs by the insured), and the non-employed (self-employed, unemployed, retired, etc.) with a confusing and bewildering insurance options, pre existing condition exclusions, etc.
Since the consumer of care is not the decider of the features of employer provided MI, options selected in policies reflect what the HR department prefers, not what the user would like (cafeteria plans try to address that but only marginally). Trade offs between insurance cost and deductibles and copays are difficult if not impossible to do.
When one changes employer one has to change MI. Besides generating employment in the HR departments and insurance sales offices, what is the benefit of this? Since medical record-keeping goes hand in hand with payment for services, does the continuous changing of insurer not create an artificial obstacle to implementing electronic medical records with a historical scope?
If one goes from employment to new employment to unemployment to self employment as any are learning to do in the new economic environment, one can change insurance many times in few months. My own recent experience is 3 times (soon to be 4) in six months.
It is argued that employer paid insurance plans promote coverage as they force coverage on workers that would not otherwise provide it for themselves. I'll ignore the coercive aspect of the argument which is questionable in itself. However, we manage to make automobile insurance mandatory without involving employers and I suspect auto insurance is more widespread than MI. The same model could easily be implemented for MI.
Individual MI plans are different by state, so advertising and comparative shopping require a PhD in business analysis and competition is stifled; probably on purpose.
Multiple insurers with different policies and terms make medical service providers insanely inefficient at processing claims and prevents adoption of standardized electronic records, which causes another source of inefficiency.
The idea that taxpayers do not (because they shouldn't have to) pay for the uninsured or illegal aliens is an illusion. Hospitals routinely provide at least a minimum of emergency care (as they should in a civilized society) to all comers. The unpaid bill of the uninsured becomes absorbed by society through the most inefficient and uncontrollable process flowing through budgetary deficits, reimbursements, charitable foundations, etc.
Here is a great analysis from The New York Times of some of the above ideas or click below listen to an economist make the case
Conclusion
So, what is the point? Here is a proposal that probably does not make much money to anyone so it will never happen:
- Start chartering medical insurance companies at the national level requiring all participants to cover all buyers in all states (no more cherry picking people, make money out of efficient processing and promoting preventive care)
- Direct a federal agency in whatever department to web publish a side by side comparison of fees and coverage features for all authorized insurers (promote standardization so buyers have an easy time comparing alternatives and making decisions)
- Stop employer tax deduction for employer paid MI. If the employer wants to pay for it, let them pay the employee as wages.
- Make all MI costs tax deductible to the taxpayer.
- At tax filing time require the taxpayer to demonstrate personal medical coverage (PMC). If PMC is not demonstrated, the taxpayer is charged a premium (like is done now for Social Security) for a federal insurance to cover the minimum level of care (use a developing country or Sweden or something in between for a standard). Those happy with the federal insurance can still buy supplemental for whatever extras they desire.
- Mandate electronic medical records maintenance by the insurers along with services records. Providers may subcontract, but the service must be provided and standardized so all clinics and hospitals can easily process all bills to all insurances along with all medical records. This is not over regulation - for instance we already demand all automakers to make cars that drive the same way on the same highways with similar signaling devices, etc.
- Have all unpaid medical bills for illegal aliens charged to the Homeland Security Department. By doing so we'll see how much this aspect of the business costs and how much we should spend to fix it. Now we have no tracking method we as a society we pay the full cost any way for sure.
Probably other aspects could be added, but the idea is to have a prescription that is SIMPLE so lobbyists cannot turn it into a paralysis by complexity. Once an open competitive market is fostered, competition will take care of the rest.
One aspect I purposefully did not address is: What is the minimum level of medical care that a taxpayer or any human being should be entitled to? The range from developing country to Sweden is big. A national debate must address that, but it does not have to be mixed with the decision of how to process payments or to insure ourselves. It is a moral issue that hospitals confront daily and requires ethical decisions of allocation of resources. Within the parameters proposed above, directives to service providers can be defined the reflect what "as a society we are willing to pay for". On their own, service providers may choose to do more, but if so they will have to do it as their own charity and not charge society for their value system.
You comments are welcome
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Due Diligence for Angel Investors
In another post in this site, addressed to business owners seeking angel investment, I proposed that, in my experience, Angel Investors fall in one of two groups: "Golf Cart Investors (GCI)" and "Professional Angels (PA)".
GCIs buy into deals pitched on the golf couse by a buddy with supposedly inside knowledge of a revolutionary shure thing. They generally experience an improving golf handicap, a badly handicapped portfolio, significant loss of capital and a high level of frustration resulting from failures that are perceived as unpredictable and arbitrary.
PAs spend perhaps less time on the course to put more effort in Due Diligence Investigations (DD) of the deals they are offered thereby resulting in fewer deals being done, but with a higher probability of success.
The difference between the two groups is the degree of due diligence they apply to investigating all aspects of a deal before getting into it.
GCIs frequently see due diligence as no more than reviewing financial statements and projections and calculating deal terms that could let them "make a killing" if the deal succeeds.
PAs on the other hand see DD as absolutely required to develop the necessary competence in the business and its technology to decide whether to go on to negotiating the terms of their funding knowing that besides capitalthey may have to contribute advice and expertise to see the vnture succeed.
So, what does DD have to address?
In my experience the order of the above list is not accidental because the answers found at each step determine how the following stage may be approached. Let's look at the questions and answers involved in each:
GCIs buy into deals pitched on the golf couse by a buddy with supposedly inside knowledge of a revolutionary shure thing. They generally experience an improving golf handicap, a badly handicapped portfolio, significant loss of capital and a high level of frustration resulting from failures that are perceived as unpredictable and arbitrary.
PAs spend perhaps less time on the course to put more effort in Due Diligence Investigations (DD) of the deals they are offered thereby resulting in fewer deals being done, but with a higher probability of success.
The difference between the two groups is the degree of due diligence they apply to investigating all aspects of a deal before getting into it.
GCIs frequently see due diligence as no more than reviewing financial statements and projections and calculating deal terms that could let them "make a killing" if the deal succeeds.
PAs on the other hand see DD as absolutely required to develop the necessary competence in the business and its technology to decide whether to go on to negotiating the terms of their funding knowing that besides capitalthey may have to contribute advice and expertise to see the vnture succeed.
So, what does DD have to address?
- Management team
- Technology assessment
- Market assessment
- Scalability
- Potential returns
- Exit strategy
In my experience the order of the above list is not accidental because the answers found at each step determine how the following stage may be approached. Let's look at the questions and answers involved in each:
[hana-code-insert name='dd4ai' /]or check my roadmap. In either format the above list is only a brief summary for illustration purposes. A comprehensive DD effort requires a variety of domain experts with an emphasis on determining the scalability of the process and of the company, which is most often the Achilles' heel of new technology businesses. For more information contact the author or SafeTnet Consulting LLC
Friday, July 10, 2009
AngelCalc - Calculating With Angels
Do you know when your young business venture is "fit" to attract angel investor financing?
There are many theories and rules of thumb being bandied around about how angels seek their targets. The reality is that angel investors can be roughly divided in two groups, each with dramatically different decision making processes (and ROIs).
"Golf Cart Investors"These are the ones who buy into a deal on a hot tip, topically received by a buddy on the golf course. Most often the buddy has done little or no due diligence, has little or no knowledge of the industry and technology involved, and has received the supposedly hot inside information from another buddy in similar fashion.
These angels are dangerous to your and your business' health. They invest with virtually no understanding of the deal, have unjustified expectations and eventually will prove to have little or no patience to wait for the business to succeed. Their returns are almost inevitably negative and most often they will do no more than one or two deals before they go back to golfing only. Unfortunately they will tell others that angel investing is a crap shoot and waste of money, thus limiting startup capital availability in the community.
"Professional Angels"These are the real Angels entrepreneurs want to work with. Frequently they work in groups so that they can share the heavy burden of due diligence research required and they bring to their side of the table scientists, engineers and management experts in different industries and technologies. They will ask a lot of questions and then more questions and then proof and supporting documentation. They will not move fast but will cover their bases well. When they invest they will stay involved and help with seasoned advice and working their contacts to help the business succeed. These are true ANGELS.
Research by the Kaufman Foundation shows that their returns are on average quite attractive (2.6 times their investment in 3.5 years). On the other hand, a rule of thumb often quoted is that these angels consider a deal if they see a potential to earn 30 times their investment in about 5 years. These two seemingly conflicting perspectives are reconciled if one presumes that the probability of success of a well researched deal is only about 10-12%. From experience I believe that it is a reasonable and not overly pessimistic expectation considering that the typical business that fits angel investors has many or all of these characteristics: Little or no sales, limited proof of market, may have lab tested technology, but little or no production, no proof of scalability, delivery, distribution experience. Moreover, all of the following may aply: in some other garage a similar or better mousetrap may be ready to come to market, the management team may have or may develop unforeseeable weaknesses (from sociopathy leading to financial embezlement to personality incompatibilites to love affairs - I've seen them all as causes of aborted successful businesses); "effective" IP protection may prove difficult to obtain or worse may be revoked when prior art appears unexpectedly (see the post about patents and RIM's adventure), government regulations may prevent or delay market acceptance, unforeseen and totally unrelated vested interests may create insurmountable barriers to market acceptance. All considered the 10-12% probability may even be high, but it appears to be what angels use implicitly if not explicitly.
So, with all this in mind, below is AngelCalc (copyright Marco Messina 2007-2010). Its intent is to help you determine if your business has sufficiently high growth and profitability potential in an industry with sufficiently high PEs to satisfy the requirements of the Pro Angels. Services, generally are unlikely to qualify unless they have a unique IP component and market dominance potential. If your business cannot meet the angels' criteria, your funding efforts will be better put elsewhere. F&F (friends and family) may be an alternative at least until the criteria may be met.
Calculating with AngelsThis model attempts to explain the finance-ability of a business based on angel investors' required returns.
Its objective is not to set a valuation. It seeks to determine whether the relationship among the following factors allows a viable solution that meets investors criteria.
The factors for a P/E-Multiple based calculation (as for a public company) are:
1. time horizon is 5 yrs,
2. future EBITA,
3. future PE and market cap (from current comparables),
4. investor's average returns and required return,
5. the ASK needed to implement the plan
6. The % equity to give up for the ASK
The factors for a valuation based on revenue multiple (e.g. selling the company) are:
1. Time horizon is 5 years
2. Revenues in year 5
3. Applicable multiplier for comparable companies sold
With both valuation methods the implied probability of success is 12% because it reconciles the return multiple identified by the Kaufman Foundation research (2.6 times return in 3.5 years) with the rule of thumb often quoted of "30 times the investment".
Questons or comments? I'd love to hear from you,
Good luck. May you be so lucky to find a real ANGEL.
There are many theories and rules of thumb being bandied around about how angels seek their targets. The reality is that angel investors can be roughly divided in two groups, each with dramatically different decision making processes (and ROIs).
"Golf Cart Investors"These are the ones who buy into a deal on a hot tip, topically received by a buddy on the golf course. Most often the buddy has done little or no due diligence, has little or no knowledge of the industry and technology involved, and has received the supposedly hot inside information from another buddy in similar fashion.
These angels are dangerous to your and your business' health. They invest with virtually no understanding of the deal, have unjustified expectations and eventually will prove to have little or no patience to wait for the business to succeed. Their returns are almost inevitably negative and most often they will do no more than one or two deals before they go back to golfing only. Unfortunately they will tell others that angel investing is a crap shoot and waste of money, thus limiting startup capital availability in the community.
"Professional Angels"These are the real Angels entrepreneurs want to work with. Frequently they work in groups so that they can share the heavy burden of due diligence research required and they bring to their side of the table scientists, engineers and management experts in different industries and technologies. They will ask a lot of questions and then more questions and then proof and supporting documentation. They will not move fast but will cover their bases well. When they invest they will stay involved and help with seasoned advice and working their contacts to help the business succeed. These are true ANGELS.
Research by the Kaufman Foundation shows that their returns are on average quite attractive (2.6 times their investment in 3.5 years). On the other hand, a rule of thumb often quoted is that these angels consider a deal if they see a potential to earn 30 times their investment in about 5 years. These two seemingly conflicting perspectives are reconciled if one presumes that the probability of success of a well researched deal is only about 10-12%. From experience I believe that it is a reasonable and not overly pessimistic expectation considering that the typical business that fits angel investors has many or all of these characteristics: Little or no sales, limited proof of market, may have lab tested technology, but little or no production, no proof of scalability, delivery, distribution experience. Moreover, all of the following may aply: in some other garage a similar or better mousetrap may be ready to come to market, the management team may have or may develop unforeseeable weaknesses (from sociopathy leading to financial embezlement to personality incompatibilites to love affairs - I've seen them all as causes of aborted successful businesses); "effective" IP protection may prove difficult to obtain or worse may be revoked when prior art appears unexpectedly (see the post about patents and RIM's adventure), government regulations may prevent or delay market acceptance, unforeseen and totally unrelated vested interests may create insurmountable barriers to market acceptance. All considered the 10-12% probability may even be high, but it appears to be what angels use implicitly if not explicitly.
So, with all this in mind, below is AngelCalc (copyright Marco Messina 2007-2010). Its intent is to help you determine if your business has sufficiently high growth and profitability potential in an industry with sufficiently high PEs to satisfy the requirements of the Pro Angels. Services, generally are unlikely to qualify unless they have a unique IP component and market dominance potential. If your business cannot meet the angels' criteria, your funding efforts will be better put elsewhere. F&F (friends and family) may be an alternative at least until the criteria may be met.
Calculating with AngelsThis model attempts to explain the finance-ability of a business based on angel investors' required returns.
Its objective is not to set a valuation. It seeks to determine whether the relationship among the following factors allows a viable solution that meets investors criteria.
The factors for a P/E-Multiple based calculation (as for a public company) are:
1. time horizon is 5 yrs,
2. future EBITA,
3. future PE and market cap (from current comparables),
4. investor's average returns and required return,
5. the ASK needed to implement the plan
6. The % equity to give up for the ASK
The factors for a valuation based on revenue multiple (e.g. selling the company) are:
1. Time horizon is 5 years
2. Revenues in year 5
3. Applicable multiplier for comparable companies sold
With both valuation methods the implied probability of success is 12% because it reconciles the return multiple identified by the Kaufman Foundation research (2.6 times return in 3.5 years) with the rule of thumb often quoted of "30 times the investment".
Questons or comments? I'd love to hear from you,
- particulalry if you disagree.
Good luck. May you be so lucky to find a real ANGEL.
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Gift Of Time
Leaving one's job can be distressing to put it mildly. Many are living through that stress these days. However there is another side to that coin: Free Time, time free from the requirement of going to an office and focusing on narrow concerns of your employer. Free time is the opportunity to surf the internet unbound and research the answers to one's curiosity. Since leaving my last position I have gorged on that opportunity. Information is freely available, but that most of the time hidden behind too few hours in the day, too much focus on business decisions to be made.
My father, in retirement, with the luxury of plentiful time, became my information digest of all that fit "must read". Since he died last August I missed his "must read" warnings. So, starved and eager I've been catching up. In case I can save you some time or share some of the doors I opened for myself, here is the list with brief comments. Of course it is all stained by my particular interests and viewpoints. As my forced freedom permits I will continue this effort. If you want to know when I dig out something new subscribe (RSS or email - top right).
Your comments will be greatly appreciated and your sharing your own "must read" findings even more so.
Global WarmingThe landscape seems to be changing. As mass hysteria increased and penetrated our political process, dissenting views of scientists seem to get a little more attention in the media. Skeptics have become slightly more vocal. The populace has lost some interest after the high mark of the months leading to the Presidential Election. The fear of the staggering cost of taking action is finally translating into "are we sure enough of this before we spend trillions on it?" or "if India and China's negative impact accounts for 5 times the best that could ever be expected if all participants implemented Kyoto 100%, what difference could Kyoto make? Do we not need a better plan?" (see Fareed Zakaria below).
Must Read/WatchClimate changes are not global warming - Interview with John Coleman, weather scientist and founder of The Weather Channel
Testing The Hypothesis of Global Warming - 5 Tests of CO2 - Prof. Bob Carters at Conference on Climate Change N.Y. 2008
Sen. Inhofe on Al Gore
Charlie Rose and Michael Crichton on Global Warming (skip 22 min. to GW)
20/20 John Stossel: The myth of consensus
20/20 John Stossel: The media and global warming
20/20 John Stossel: Don't fight it, adjust to it
The real greenhouse gas
Why use scare tactics and doctored data if the argument holds?
The debate is not over, Al Gore
Those so convincing photos...
The naked truth of An Inconvenient Truth
Geopolitics and Economics
The world is changing and we hardly notice because nationally we are trained by mass media to be concerned only about the US. Our markets are large enough so too many companies think exporting is too much trouble. We are the last industrialized country not on the metric system (along with Myanmar). We are pleased that the whole world is learning English, so we do not learn their languages and our educational system makes sure that some do not master English even here and live speaking a pidgin English in the name of diversity.
Then you run into an interview by Charlie Rose with Fareed Zakaria and in one hour you learn a lot, really a lot. If you read The Economist or The Atlantic regularly you'd learn even more, but few even seem to know they exist.
Is "Peak Oil" not at peak?
Then what about ethanol?
Old Standby Brain food2008 Did You Know 3.0 the stats keep changing...
2007 Did You Know 2.0
2006 Did You Know
TED Conference if you are curious, this is heaven
Jill Bolte Taylor - inside view of her stroke
Eva Vertes a most brilliant mind
Now be nice, leave some of your favorites "must read". If they do not agree with mine, so be it, I'll learn from you. Thank you.
My father, in retirement, with the luxury of plentiful time, became my information digest of all that fit "must read". Since he died last August I missed his "must read" warnings. So, starved and eager I've been catching up. In case I can save you some time or share some of the doors I opened for myself, here is the list with brief comments. Of course it is all stained by my particular interests and viewpoints. As my forced freedom permits I will continue this effort. If you want to know when I dig out something new subscribe (RSS or email - top right).
Your comments will be greatly appreciated and your sharing your own "must read" findings even more so.
Global WarmingThe landscape seems to be changing. As mass hysteria increased and penetrated our political process, dissenting views of scientists seem to get a little more attention in the media. Skeptics have become slightly more vocal. The populace has lost some interest after the high mark of the months leading to the Presidential Election. The fear of the staggering cost of taking action is finally translating into "are we sure enough of this before we spend trillions on it?" or "if India and China's negative impact accounts for 5 times the best that could ever be expected if all participants implemented Kyoto 100%, what difference could Kyoto make? Do we not need a better plan?" (see Fareed Zakaria below).
Must Read/WatchClimate changes are not global warming - Interview with John Coleman, weather scientist and founder of The Weather Channel
Testing The Hypothesis of Global Warming - 5 Tests of CO2 - Prof. Bob Carters at Conference on Climate Change N.Y. 2008
Sen. Inhofe on Al Gore
Charlie Rose and Michael Crichton on Global Warming (skip 22 min. to GW)
20/20 John Stossel: The myth of consensus
20/20 John Stossel: The media and global warming
20/20 John Stossel: Don't fight it, adjust to it
The real greenhouse gas
Why use scare tactics and doctored data if the argument holds?
The debate is not over, Al Gore
Those so convincing photos...
The naked truth of An Inconvenient Truth
Geopolitics and Economics
The world is changing and we hardly notice because nationally we are trained by mass media to be concerned only about the US. Our markets are large enough so too many companies think exporting is too much trouble. We are the last industrialized country not on the metric system (along with Myanmar). We are pleased that the whole world is learning English, so we do not learn their languages and our educational system makes sure that some do not master English even here and live speaking a pidgin English in the name of diversity.
Then you run into an interview by Charlie Rose with Fareed Zakaria and in one hour you learn a lot, really a lot. If you read The Economist or The Atlantic regularly you'd learn even more, but few even seem to know they exist.
Is "Peak Oil" not at peak?
Then what about ethanol?
Old Standby Brain food2008 Did You Know 3.0 the stats keep changing...
2007 Did You Know 2.0
2006 Did You Know
TED Conference if you are curious, this is heaven
Jill Bolte Taylor - inside view of her stroke
Eva Vertes a most brilliant mind
Now be nice, leave some of your favorites "must read". If they do not agree with mine, so be it, I'll learn from you. Thank you.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Saved BY (not from) the Swine Flu
This is not a story of medical details, but one of people, their courage and the difference they make
My blog is not only for proclaiming my opinions (I probably do too much of that), but is a world-sized wall where I can write, for the world to see, of the bad and the ugly in search of a fix, and the good: my tribute to the people that cross my life and make a difference - sometimes the give the gift of living a better rest of my life.
What follows are facts with medical details only for context. All the names are true. To those whose names I omitted, I apologize for my poor memory and the hospital's policy to not give me the names.
My blog is not only for proclaiming my opinions (I probably do too much of that), but is a world-sized wall where I can write, for the world to see, of the bad and the ugly in search of a fix, and the good: my tribute to the people that cross my life and make a difference - sometimes the give the gift of living a better rest of my life.
What follows are facts with medical details only for context. All the names are true. To those whose names I omitted, I apologize for my poor memory and the hospital's policy to not give me the names.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The Creation of Beliefs and Crusades
If you think that facts are the only thing driving beliefs and public policy check this out.
http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/2007/fax20070419-1.asp
http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/2007/fax20070419-1.asp
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Last Comments on Al Messina - (one last lesson)
(If you came to see the slide show or read about my father, it is in the next blog below.)
Now
When the time came my mother was relieved of that worry and from PMA’s statewide roster we picked Barton Family Funeral Service in
Linda and Carolin, Oncology Nursing Staff at U of W
Joie Goodwin and the serene Kirkland Women’s Clubhouse
Sunday, August 24, 2008
My Father - Al Messina (1/1/1922-8/20/2008)
What can I say in 3 minutes of a man of whom I could easily write a book?
To many that knew him; my father was a renaissance man that also retained a great sense of humor. To many a teacher’s teacher.
To my mother he was the immovable rock on which she built a life that befits her stoic character. After he retired he made supporting her and her artist career the mission of his remaining years. His greatest wish was that he could outlast her by a day so to spare her today’s anguish.
To those that trusted him, he gave unflinching loyalty to the point of taking a bullet not by accident, but in a calculated gamble to pursue safety not for himself, but for the group. When I met his commander 55 years later, he could not stop telling me how I exist against all odds.
To me he was a father in the warm and loving sense we all have one, but as I grew into adulthood he became even more than a best friend. He became the only one on earth that understood my drive and sometimes quixotic goals; the one that shared my sense of being, in this new country, always a bit of a stranger in a strange land.
He backed me to the end on a hopeless business venture because he alone understood that honor demanded it and finances be damned. We both loved Shackleton’s story and understood that against the slimmest chance of success it is one’s duty never to give up.
He was my Chief Editor for all I wrote and tried to publish – Sorry for you he did not get to edit these thoughts for today.
He was my Software Testing Department whenever I needed a partner to test the countless programs that made my professional career possible – Let it now be known: that was my secret.
He was my Research Department – Every day on my way home from the office I could call and ask “Se ghe’, what’s new today” and I got the news summary, analysis of politics, global economics, capital markets, global warming, peak oil. I often wished our president had ½ that much insight available.
He was my library – I never left Bellevue without new books and often got them in the mail. English, Italian, French were all in he game; latin and greek he just quoted on occasion. Engineering, architecture, economics, computer systems, art history, painting, photography, movie making, writing, philosophy, physics, classical music, opera and jazz, his favorite. For him, the whole of this added up to the wonder of our reality and consciousness and character.
Who but me had his personal Mensa-scale Socratic philosopher to teach endless curiosity, logics, reasoning, dialectics, objectivism and the irony of life and yet always hunting for teaching accounts of human courage and survival in the service of a grander purpose.
I had it all and so grand it was. So grand is the void now that will never fill.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Memorial
Al Messina (1/1/1922 - 8/20/2008)
Al was born 1-1-1922, moved from Italy to the USA in 1969 and retired in Bellevue in 1989. Wednesday August 20 he suddenly passed away with acute leukemia while surrounded by his family.
Family, friends and his airplane were his loves. He was a man with a wonderful mind, intelligent and inquisitive, generous and with a huge sense of humor; a polymath who lived to learn and understand and share his insights until his final moments.
A man who gave of himself beyond compare and lived to make a difference for all around him has now left friends and extended family around the world with a void that will be hard to fill.
His adored wife of 57 years, Pia, sons Marco (Darlene) and Andy (Valerie), grandchildren Alex, Sarah, Ali (Bill, Sadie, Mandy) and Ryan will try to go on without him.
A memorial service will be held Sunday August 24 at 2-5 pm at Kirkland Woman’s Club, 407 First Street, Kirkland 98083.
me@piamessina.com
Al was born 1-1-1922, moved from Italy to the USA in 1969 and retired in Bellevue in 1989. Wednesday August 20 he suddenly passed away with acute leukemia while surrounded by his family.
Family, friends and his airplane were his loves. He was a man with a wonderful mind, intelligent and inquisitive, generous and with a huge sense of humor; a polymath who lived to learn and understand and share his insights until his final moments.
A man who gave of himself beyond compare and lived to make a difference for all around him has now left friends and extended family around the world with a void that will be hard to fill.
His adored wife of 57 years, Pia, sons Marco (Darlene) and Andy (Valerie), grandchildren Alex, Sarah, Ali (Bill, Sadie, Mandy) and Ryan will try to go on without him.
A memorial service will be held Sunday August 24 at 2-5 pm at Kirkland Woman’s Club, 407 First Street, Kirkland 98083.
me@piamessina.com
Thursday, August 14, 2008
National Michael Phelps Day
Since the start of the 2008 Olympics we've seen Phelps smiling, Phelps yelling, Phelps cheering, Phelps concentrated, Phelps sleeping, Phelps spitting, Phelps swimming, Phelps winning, Phelps awarded, Phelps whatever.
Congratulations Michael Phelps! It's a tremendous feat so far, and perhaps to become more so.
So here is a proposal: lets make a National Phelps Day - we all go swimming for a day and honor the hero. Along the way we may also give thought to what the networks seems to have forgotten:
1 We have dozens of other athletes competing, if not as successfully, at least with as much effort and determination. From that, we may remember that it's harder to continue to compete day in and day out when you are not at the top but while you struggle to get there, and don't make it, and try again.
2 There are hundreds of sports that once in four years we could admire and learn something about. Not football, not baseball, not basketball, not golf and even not tennis, but all those sports that promise no professional high paying careers to heir stars, those sports that participants pick just for the sake of competing, those that have no incentives to use drugs to win because winning unfairly would be no win at all.
Those are the sports that some of our children who did not make it into the high school popular sport team may have picked to learn about sportsmanship, about good manners in winning and losing, about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. The sports that are still just sports.
There are more than the gold-medal-count obsessed networks are letting us see. Buying a monopoly on broadcasting obviously is a ticket to do what you please, yet I wonder if along with the power there isn't a moral responsibility. In this case a responsibility to: sportsmanship, to the values of fair play, struggle, persistence, graciousness in winning, graciousness in defeat.
Every four years, for so brief a moment, one someone somewhere has the opportunity to decide for us all what we'll see and understand and remember of hundreds of sports and competitors, either with a broad mind or a narrow provincial view. We'll just have to wait another four years for another chance.
Congratulations Michael Phelps! It's a tremendous feat so far, and perhaps to become more so.
So here is a proposal: lets make a National Phelps Day - we all go swimming for a day and honor the hero. Along the way we may also give thought to what the networks seems to have forgotten:
1 We have dozens of other athletes competing, if not as successfully, at least with as much effort and determination. From that, we may remember that it's harder to continue to compete day in and day out when you are not at the top but while you struggle to get there, and don't make it, and try again.
2 There are hundreds of sports that once in four years we could admire and learn something about. Not football, not baseball, not basketball, not golf and even not tennis, but all those sports that promise no professional high paying careers to heir stars, those sports that participants pick just for the sake of competing, those that have no incentives to use drugs to win because winning unfairly would be no win at all.
Those are the sports that some of our children who did not make it into the high school popular sport team may have picked to learn about sportsmanship, about good manners in winning and losing, about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. The sports that are still just sports.
There are more than the gold-medal-count obsessed networks are letting us see. Buying a monopoly on broadcasting obviously is a ticket to do what you please, yet I wonder if along with the power there isn't a moral responsibility. In this case a responsibility to: sportsmanship, to the values of fair play, struggle, persistence, graciousness in winning, graciousness in defeat.
Every four years, for so brief a moment, one someone somewhere has the opportunity to decide for us all what we'll see and understand and remember of hundreds of sports and competitors, either with a broad mind or a narrow provincial view. We'll just have to wait another four years for another chance.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Measuring CO2 concentrations
In August 2006, Georg Beck, a biologist at Merian-Schule Freiburg, Germany, published a study that proved how CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is NOT caused by human industrial activities but it's a natural phenomenon that follows climate variations recurrent in the natural history of the planet. You can find the study's full text at http://www.climatepolice.com/Co2_report.pdf It is written for the specialist, but there is a Summary at the end, which I transcribe here.180 years accurate CO2 air gas analysis by chemical methods (short version) Dipl. Biol. Ernst-Georg Beck, Merian-Schule Freiburg, 8/2006This is an unofficial extract of E-G Beck's comprehensive draft paper and is for discussion not citing .SummaryAccurate chemical CO2 gas analyses of air over 180 years show a different trend comparedto the literature of IPCC climate change actually published. From 1829 the concentration of carbon dioxide of air in the northern hemisphere fell down from a value of e.g. 400 ppm up to 1900 to less than 300 ppm rising till 1942 to more than 400 ppm. After that maximum it fell down to e.g. 350 ppm and rose again till today, 2006 to 380 ppm. Accurate measurements had been done amongst others by de Saussure 1826, ..........or Scholander 1946 with ....an accuracy of +/-0,0006 Vol% to under +/-0,0003 Vol% =~3 ppm (Lundegardh 1926)...These pioneers of chemistry, biology, botany, medicine and physiology constituted the modern knowledge of metabolism, nutrition science, biochemistry and ecology. Modern climatology ignored their work till today even though it is the basis of all textbooks of the mentioned faculties and was honoured with several Nobel prizes. In total over 90 000 measurements within nearly every year since 180 year gave the following results:1. There is no constant exponential rising CO2-concentration since preindustrial times but a variing CO2-content of air following the climate. E.G. around 1940 there was a maximum of CO2 of at least 420 ppm, before 1875 there was also a maximum.2. Historical air analysis by chemical means do not prove a preindustrial CO2-concentration of 285 ppm (IPCC),as modern climatology postulates. In contrast the average in the 19th century in northern hemisphere is 321 ppm and in the 20th century 338 ppm.3. Todays CO2 value of. 380 ppm, which is considered as threatening has been known several times in the last 200 years, in the 20 th century around 1942 and before 1870 in the 19th century. The maximum CO2-concentration in the 20th century roses to over 420 pmm in 1942.4. Accurate measurements of CO2 air gas contents had been done from 1857 by chemical methods with a systematical error of maximal 3%. These results were ignored reconstructing the CO2 concentration of air in modern warm period.5. Callendar and Keeling were the most important founders of the modern greenhouse theory (IPCC) beside Arrhenius. Literature research confirmed that they ignored a big part of available technical papers and selected only a few values to get a validation of their hypothesis of fuel burning induced rise of CO2 in air. Furthermore these authors discussed and reproduced the few selected historic results by chemical methods in a faulty way and propagated an unfounded view of the quality of these methods, without having dealt with its chemical basis.6. To reconstruct the modern CO2 concentration of air icecores from Antarctica had been used. The presented reconstructions are obviously not accurate enough to show the several variations of carbon dioxide in northern hemisphere.
The scam of CO2 concentrations
Just a self serving play in 5 acts or a global tragedy?Try this for size:Act 1You just lost an election, you have no job outside of politics since that is all you or your daddy ever did, you got money to spend and people who believe you when you claim you invented the internet. Then you imagine a good strategy: find a cause and lead the parade; better yet, make it a real crusade. But how do you find a crusade?Act 2Go to Harvard and listen to some lectures on a subject you know nothing about, get excited, you find a crusade, select data that suits your arguments (and eventually admit the fraud in an interview - that's moxy), use your followers (the one who believed you invented the internet?) and those who like your name to fuel their own crusade - lead the charge.Act 3Some misguided souls follow your arguments ignoring some 3000 scientists that disagree. They buy your hocus pocus "science", you give it a clever name like "inconvenient truth" that smells of conspiracy and implies you are the only honest one to call a spade a spade. Create a crusade leveraging your notoriety on the United Nations, make a movie, become a guru, get a nobel prize (lower case is intentional).Act 4You get our crusade. The world may pay a high price for undertaking misguided efforts premised on untruth convenient just to you. Who cares, you are important, the leader, the guru, the nobel.Fantasy? No, you can do it too with the right resources and character. It has been done.Act 5 (and this is where I hope I can help)At first few, then more (3000+) scientists become incensed at the irrationaity of it all, they see the making of a modern day Inquisition (uncritical belief and fear - a state of fear), of a crusade usefull to some politico willing to "use" well intentioned environmentalists to reinvent themselves. This time it is far more dangerous than claiming to have invented the internet.Reports start circulating. Even young teenagers build web sites debunking the "convenient" hocus pocus (of course they are dismissed as young, ignorant and naive by the Grand Inquisitor). But, in fact there is still serious science out there and people willing to find it, willing to put it in terms we all can understand. Even the wizard admits in interviews having skewed the numbers to incite to action (somewhat like yelling "fire" in a theater?).I am not a scientist or subject matter expert, but I felt compelled to read about the sudden "crisis". In the process I easily found credible dissenting supported and peer-reviewed arguments.As a public service I am posting what seems to make common sense and ask for all to do so - submit a summaries of the argument that we all can quickly digest, and provide the full scientific reports and references linked or attached as back up. Come back and check out what we find, and bring what you find.Let's try to change the end to this play about a self serving monumental ego and fool before it becomes a tragedy of global proportions.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Ignorance is inconvenient and no truth
The only thing more dangerous than fools for leaders is ignorant ready-to-believe followers. Understanding the issues before following the leader is the only way to avoid wars (as we have seen) and crusades that break that national bank and economy for no valid reason.Ask yourself what you think you know and why. Here are some thoughts inconvenient to the Church of Gore, but recognized bymore and more scientists. Read carefully, the stakes are high. What do you believe and why?
Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gasby John Coleman
You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.
The future of our civilization lies in the balance.
That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.
With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet.
Here is my rebuttal.
There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.
Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.
Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?
The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.
Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.
Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.
The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.
All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.
Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.
Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.
The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and viola, we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.
May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars. Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.
Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.
So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.
So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.
To start with global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis. From YK2 to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.
So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.
I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.ds. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel. In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC. There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken. There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.com. Following the publicity of my position form Fox News, Glen Beck on CNN, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other interviews, thousands of people come to the website and read my comments. I get hundreds of supportive emails from them. No I am not alone and the debate is not over.
In my remarks in New York I speculated that perhaps we should sue Al Gore for fraud because of his carbon credits trading scheme. That remark has caused a stir in the fringe media and on the internet. The concept is that if the media won’t give us a hearing and the other side will not debate us, perhaps we could use a Court of law to present our papers and our research and if the Judge is unbiased and understands science, we win. The media couldn’t ignore that. That idea has become the basis for legal research by notable attorneys and discussion among global warming debunkers, but it’s a long way from the Court room.
I am very serious about this issue. I think stamping out the global warming scam is vital to saving our wonderful way of life.
The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring. And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy. The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughput the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.
So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices. We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks. Not only is it running up gasoline prices, it has changed government policy impacting our taxes, our utility bills and the entire focus of government funding. And, now the Congress is considering a cap and trade carbon credits policy. We the citizens will pay for that, too. It all ends up in our taxes and the price of goods and services.
So the Global warming frenzy is, indeed, threatening our civilization. Not because global warming is real; it is not. But because of the all the horrible side effects of the global warming scam.
I love this civilization. I want to do my part to protect it.
If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss. And it would largely be a direct result of the global warming frenzy.My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Hey Al Gore, anybody home?
While at Harvard did you hear about sunspots? They talked about them in my high school back in Italy in the 60's. Not clever enough for a Nobel perhaps, but at it was real science tested by centuries of observation. Check it out below.
When the world finally discovers the magnitude of your "inconvenient" contributions by way ov conveniently selective data analysis we'll really know you should have been president (you'd make a good match for Dubya). May be the committee will institute a Nobel for Inconvenient Cretinism so you can become a multiple prize winner.
When the world finally discovers the magnitude of your "inconvenient" contributions by way ov conveniently selective data analysis we'll really know you should have been president (you'd make a good match for Dubya). May be the committee will institute a Nobel for Inconvenient Cretinism so you can become a multiple prize winner.
With the debate focused on a warming Earth, the icy consequences of a cooler future have not been considered
By Lawrence 
You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age.”
The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.
Sunspots have been well documented throughout human history, starting in the fourth century BC, with written descriptions by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer. In 1128, an English monk, John of Worcester, was the first person known to have drawn sunspots, and after the telescope’s arrival in the early 1600s, observations and drawings became commonplace, including by such luminaries as Galileo Galilei. Then, to the astonishment of astronomers, they saw the sunspots diminish and die out altogether.
This was the case during the Little Ice Age, a period starting in the 15th or 16th century and lasting centuries, says NASA’s Goddard Space Centre, which links the absence of sunspots to the cold that then descended on Earth. During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a time known as the Maunder Minimum (named after English astronomer Edward Maunder), astronomers saw only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period, less than one half of 1% of the sunspots that would normally have been expected. Other Minimums — times of low sunspot activity — also corresponded to times of unusual cold.
The consequences of the Little Ice Age, because they occurred in relatively recent times, have come down to us through literature and the arts as well as from historians and scientists, government and business records. When Shakespeare wrote of “lawn as white as driven snow,” he had first-hand experience –Europe was bitterly cold in his day, a sharp contrast to the very warm weather that preceded his birth. During the Little Ice Age, the River Thames froze over, the Dutch developed the ice skate and the great artists of the day learned to love a new genre: the winter landscape.
In what had been a warm Europe , adaptations were not all happy: Growing seasons inEngland Greenland , Iceland , Scandinavia and North America , making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland Finland ’s population fell by one-third,Iceland ’s by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island .
In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period — a time of bounty in which grapes grew inEngland andGreenland was colonized — also was a time of high sunspot activity, called the Medieval Maximum. Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call “the Modern Maximum” — the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.
But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures — they reached a plateau and then remained there — and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows — the science is far from settled on what drives climate.
But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. “The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” believes Dr. Chapman. “There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in theU.S. and Canada
We are now at the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, so named because it is the 24th consecutive cycle that astronomers have listed, starting with the first cycle that began in March, 1755, and ended in June, 1766. Each cycle lasts an average of approximately 11 years; each is marked by sunspots that first erupt in the mid latitudes of the sun, and then, over the course of the 11 years, erupt progressively toward the sun’s equator; each is marked by a change in the polarity of the sun’s hemispheres; each changes the temperature on Earth in ways that humans don’t fully understand, but cannot in all honesty deny.
Financial Post Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.
Sunspots have been well documented throughout human history, starting in the fourth century BC, with written descriptions by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer. In 1128, an English monk, John of Worcester, was the first person known to have drawn sunspots, and after the telescope’s arrival in the early 1600s, observations and drawings became commonplace, including by such luminaries as Galileo Galilei. Then, to the astonishment of astronomers, they saw the sunspots diminish and die out altogether.
This was the case during the Little Ice Age, a period starting in the 15th or 16th century and lasting centuries, says NASA’s Goddard Space Centre, which links the absence of sunspots to the cold that then descended on Earth. During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a time known as the Maunder Minimum (named after English astronomer Edward Maunder), astronomers saw only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period, less than one half of 1% of the sunspots that would normally have been expected. Other Minimums — times of low sunspot activity — also corresponded to times of unusual cold.
The consequences of the Little Ice Age, because they occurred in relatively recent times, have come down to us through literature and the arts as well as from historians and scientists, government and business records. When Shakespeare wrote of “lawn as white as driven snow,” he had first-hand experience –
In what had been a warm Europe , adaptations were not all happy: Growing seasons in
In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period — a time of bounty in which grapes grew in
But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures — they reached a plateau and then remained there — and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows — the science is far from settled on what drives climate.
But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. “The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” believes Dr. Chapman. “There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the
We are now at the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, so named because it is the 24th consecutive cycle that astronomers have listed, starting with the first cycle that began in March, 1755, and ended in June, 1766. Each cycle lasts an average of approximately 11 years; each is marked by sunspots that first erupt in the mid latitudes of the sun, and then, over the course of the 11 years, erupt progressively toward the sun’s equator; each is marked by a change in the polarity of the sun’s hemispheres; each changes the temperature on Earth in ways that humans don’t fully understand, but cannot in all honesty deny.
Financial Post Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Photo: The spotless Sun, as it appeared yesterday at 12:48 p.m. The Sun’s spotlessness is giving rise to speculation of another Little Ice Age.
(Solarcycle24.com)
(Solarcycle24.com)
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