The failure of Gazprom is an indication of the fact that "life under Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair"

Nothing shows the failure of putinomics better than the state Gazprom, the world's most corrupt energy company:

Back in April 2007, in the midst of the greatest commodities rally on record, OAO Gazprom (OGZD)’s deputy chief executive officer, Alexander Medvedev, was talking big.
Russia’s natural-gas export monopoly aspired to be the world’s largest company, he said while offering up a prediction: its market value would quadruple to $1 trillion in as little as seven years.
Medvedev was off by $910 billion. Since he made that forecast, no company among the world’s top 5,000 has suffered a bigger collapse in market capitalization than Gazprom, a $154 billion plunge that’s become emblematic of the malaise that has overtaken President Vladimir Putin’s economy. The state-run company has tumbled three straight years in the stock market as it stepped up spending on everything from the Olympic games in Sochi to projects in Siberia.
“Gazprom is a champion in value destruction,” Ian Hague, founding partner of New York-based Firebird Management LLC, which manages $1.3 billion of assets including Russian stocks, said by phone April 2. “It’s not just Gazprom that failed to achieve its goal of increasing market capitalization. It’s Russia who failed. It failed to create an environment where state-owned companies would function as shareholder-owned entities.”

Now wonder then that "life under Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair":

In most countries, the happiness curve bottoms out somewhere around middle age -- 47 in the United States and 41 in Britain, for instance. This usually happens long before the average person is expected to die, with one major exception: Russia. In Russia the curve doesn't bottom out until age 91. Essentially, life under Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair.
Graham explains it bluntly: "What's going on in Russia is deep unhappiness." In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Better Life Index, for instance, Russians rated their general life satisfaction a 3.0 out of 10. Three-quarters of Russians are "struggling" or "suffering," with only 25 percent "thriving," according to their responses to a 2012 Gallup survey. Contrast these figures with the United States, where life satisfaction is a robust 7.6 and nearly 60 percent are thriving.
At least American millennials can expect life to get better for three full decades after they hit rock bottom. In Russia, the only thing to look forward to is death's sweet embrace.
 

A look behind the scenes of the new IPCC scare report

Stanford professor Chris Field gives us an interesting look behind the scenes of the new IPCC scare report. It is fascinating to read about how incredibly tough the last five years have been for Field and his team.

We are told that he scientic process started with an "American Idol-style search for scientists to serve as authors and editors". (Perhaps we will see the highlights on television at some later date?) After probably hundreds of meetings in such hardship locations as Bali and Venice, professor Field and his "idols" finally produced "a 2,000-page report as part of a massive, three-part U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report:

In the summer of 2009, Stanford Professor Chris Field embarked on a task of urgent global importance.
Field had been tapped to assemble hundreds of climate scientists to dig through 12,000 scientific papers concerning the current impacts of climate change and its causes.
The team, Working Group II, would ultimately produce a 2,000-page report as part of a massive, three-part U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which details a consensus view on the current state and fate of the world's climate. --

For Field's group, the long road began in earnest at a July 2009 meeting in Venice, Italy, where 209 scientific experts and IPCC members from around the world developed a chapter-by-chapter outline of the report. Their outline was later formally accepted at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
But before Field and his team could begin the heavy lifting of writing the report, they hosted a kind of American Idol-style search for scientists to serve as authors and editors. --

"Stanford didn't see it as a distraction, but as a fundamental function of the university," Diffenbaugh said. His 9-year-old daughter, however, had a different perspective. Her father, worn out from after-hours work on the assessment, would often fall asleep while reading bedtime stories. --

The article also includes some interesting glimpses into the scientific method of the IPCC process:

Sometimes, it took pen sketches too. Lobell recalled a group effort to come up with a key summary figure for the chapter he worked on about food security. "We ended up doodling on napkins over dinner, and then I went back and made a version that ended up in the final report. One of the senior authors described that as the highlight of his career." --

"The challenge is also to communicate things clearly," he added. "For example, it doesn't help much to say, 'Things are uncertain.' It's better to say something like, 'If we knew A, we would know B, but we don't really know A."

The last citation is actually the best summary of the entire report I have so far seen :-)

Climatologist Tim Ball's book The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science reviewed

Alan Caruba reviews climatologist Tim Ball's excellent book The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science:              

CO2, despite being a minor element of the Earth’s atmosphere, is essential for all life on Earth because it is the food that nourishes all vegetation. The Earth has passed through many periods of high levels of CO2 and many cycles of warming and cooling that are part of the life of the planet.

“Science works by creating theories based on assumptions,” Dr. Ball notes, “then other scientists—performing their skeptical role—test them. The structure and mandate of the IPCC was in direct contradiction of this scientific method. They set out to prove the theory rather than disprove it.”

“The atmosphere,” Dr. Ball notes, “is three-dimensional and dynamic, so building a computer model that even approximates reality requires far more data than exists and much greater understanding of an extremely turbulent and complex system.” No computer model put forth by the IPCC in support of global warming has been accurate, nor ever could be. --

“Ridiculous claims—like the science is settled or the debate is over—triggered a growing realization that something was wrong.”  When the global warming advocates began to tell people that cooling is caused by warming, the public has realized how absurd the entire UN climate change argument has been.

The warmist Guardian on the new IPCC report: "The hellish monotony of 25 years of IPCC climate change warnings"

Today the IPCC's latest scare report gets its usual share of publicity in the mainstream media. But even The Guardian, one of the main bastions of the global warming religion, admits that we have heard it before:

The hellish monotony of 25 years of IPCC climate change warnings

The latest blockbuster United Nations report on the impacts of climate change makes dire reading, just as the first one did almost a quarter of a century ago.--

There will likely be more floods, more droughts and more intense heatwaves, says the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
As human emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, natural ecosystems come under extreme stress with "significant" knock-on effects for societies.
"Changes in the availability of food, fuel, medicine, construction materials and income are possible as these ecosystems are changed," says the report.
But in the words of that great British band The Smiths, you can now stop me if you think you've heard this one before.
That's because all of the above comes not from today's blockbuster IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, but from the first one started in 1988 and published in 1990.

Fortunately, the new IPCC scare report will soon be forgotten - just as its predecessors - and responsible authorities and organizations will be able to concentrate on solving real environmental problems ...

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is now a high priest of the Church of Global Warming

A high priest of the Church of Global Warming.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, now a high priest of the Church of Global Warming, has given his blessings to the IPCC:

“We have heard for years the predictions that the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels will lead to an accelerated warming of the Earth. What is now happening indicates that these predictions are coming true; our actions have had consequences that are deeply threatening for many of the poorest communities in the world.
“Rich, industrialised countries, including our own, have unquestionably contributed most to atmospheric pollution. Both our present lifestyle and the industrial history of how we created such possibilities for ourselves have to bear the responsibility for pushing the environment in which we live towards crisis.”
Dr Williams, writing in his capacity as chairman of Christian Aid, said that the winter storms that battered Britain had brought climate change to the fore in this country and that the IPCC report publishedat a specially convened meeting in Yokohama in Japan tomorrow puts “our local problems into a deeply disturbing global context”.
The IPCC, he says, will be “pointing out that … we [the UK] have in fact got off relatively lightly in comparison with others”.
While the “chaos [of the flood] came as a shock to many”, other countries in the developing world such as Bangladesh and Kenya among others had suffered far worse catastrophes caused by climate change over many years.

Rowan Williams should read what Dr. Roger Pielke Jr, one of the foremost authorities on the relationship between climate change and floods/storms, has written:

It is wrong to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in frequency, intensity, or damage since at least 1900. The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970 (at which point the data became available to allow for a global perspective).
Floods in the U.S. have not increased in frequency or intensity since at least 1950. Indeed, flood losses as a percentage of U.S. GDP have dropped by about 75 percent since 1940. At the global scale there is a similar lack of evidence for upwards trends in floods. Tornadoes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage in the U.S. since 1950, and there is some evidence to suggest that they have actually declined.