Good read by Doug Hornig at Casey Research. Go read the whole article.

It’s possible that no concept in history has ever come so far, so fast, and with so little substance behind it, as “global warming.” Or, to be precise, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – the kind caused by us puny humans rather than by that fireball that keeps the planet habitable.

…

Now, rather suddenly, carbon is the designated boogey man. Individually and collectively, we are told, we must work on reducing our “carbon footprint,” or else something awful is going to happen. The headlines are terrifying: we’ll have hellacious droughts, monster hurricanes, and entire cities disappearing beneath the waves.

Well, perhaps. In a climatic feedback system as complex as Earth’s, anything is possible. More likely, though, is that we’ll see none of the above. Or at least not because of anything humans do or fail to do.

The simple (yes, inconvenient) truth is that scientists don’t even know whether the planet is warming at all, let alone if AGW has any role in causing it. The data are inconclusive at best. Most of those dire predictions you’ve read are based upon computer modeling, and anyone who watches the nightly weather forecast knows how infallible that tends to be.

…

Sadly, that misallocation is about to get a whole lot bigger. If the Obama administration has its way – and it is expected to, since there’s no meaningful opposition – carbon caps will soon be coming to every American town.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a carbon cap, it’s simple. It’s a tax. The president wants to reduce per-capita U.S. carbon emissions to 14% below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83% by 2050. And he’s promoting this as a good idea by suggesting that it will pour $646 billion into federal coffers between 2012 and 2019, through government auctions of the rights to emit greenhouse gases. Those rights would be sold to energy companies, manufacturers, utilities, or anyone else who “pollutes” the air with carbon dioxide. And they could be traded.

Leave aside the question of whether reducing human carbon emissions is truly a valid goal; and whether we need another huge tax; and whether the government will do anything constructive with an infusion of our money, to the tune of nearly two-thirds of a trillion dollars. Instead, just consider the consequences.

The cost of everything will go up, as the affected businesses compensate for their lost revenue. If carbon credits are auctioned at the lower end of the projected range (between $13 and $20 a ton), estimates are that the average price of gasoline will jump by 12 cents a gallon and the average electricity bill by 7%.

Worse, though, is that the pain will be unevenly distributed. As the Detroit News editorialized, the cap-and-trade plan “is a giant dagger aimed at the nation’s heartland — particularly Michigan. It is a multi-billion-dollar tax hike on everything that Michigan does.”

That is, it penalizes states and regions with large manufacturing bases and coal dependence for electricity, and rewards places with larger populations but light industry and cleaner power plants. As Michael Morris, CEO of coal-heavy American Electric Power, put it: “It is a clear transfer of the middle part of the country’s wealth to the two coasts.” Small wonder that politicians from California and New England are such enthusiastic supporters.

For what to expect here, we can look to Europe, where cap-and-trade is firmly established. While it has worked, in the sense of lowering carbon emissions (though not by as much as anticipated), its effects have been stifling. For example, the Washington Post cited “the Dutch silicon carbide maker that calls itself the greenest such plant in the world, but now can’t afford to run full-time; the French cement workers who fear they’re going to lose jobs to Morocco, which doesn’t have to meet the European guidelines; and the German homeowners who pay 25 percent more for electricity than they did before – even as their utility companies earn record profits.”

Imagine that you decide to sell your home oh, around 2011, and you find that you have to spend $18,000 on energy upgrades before you sell it. How ya’ gonna’ feel about Obama and the Democrats then, Willis?

From CNSNews.com

The 1,400-page cap-and-trade legislation pushed through by House Democrats contains a new federal policy that residential, commercial, and government buildings be retrofitted to increase energy efficiency, leaving it up to the states to figure out exactly how to do that.

This means that homeowners, for example, could be required to retrofit their homes to meet federal “green” guidelines in order to sell their homes, if the cap-and-trade bill becomes law.

The bill, which now goes to the Senate, directs the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop and implement a national policy for residential and commercial buildings. The purpose of such a strategy – known as the Retrofit for Energy and Environmental Performance (REEP) – would be to “facilitate” the retrofitting of existing buildings nationwide.

“The Administrator shall develop and implement, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, standards for a national energy and environmental building retrofit policy for single-family and multi-family residences,” the bill reads.

It continues: “The purpose of the REEP program is to facilitate the retrofitting of existing buildings across the United States.”

The text of the one-minute speech by Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan is more interesting than the quick video, which can be seen here. Remember, the Democrats limited debate and were literally re-writing the bill as it was being voted upon. The bastards.

“Today we consider a bill that claims that government can control the weather by raising your taxes, taking your job and dictating your life.  In my state of Michigan, with a 15% unemployment rate, we know we cannot afford this cap and tax bill.  Others, however, disagree.

“Make no mistake.  President Obama pronounced: ‘This is a jobs bill.’  He is correct—this bill will destroy jobs.  But then again, this comes from an administration that claims its trillion-dollar stimulus bill would stop unemployment from going over 8%.

“The argument for this bill is nuts on its face.  Government cannot design our economy and prosperity; it can only engineer our decline in poverty.  But such feelings explain why this job-killing cap and tax bill is a fundamental shift from a manufacturing economy to an old, green economy called hunting and gathering.

“Passing this abominable energy tax on working families in a recession shows this job-killing, budget-busting government doesn’t understand how much real Americans are hurting for work.  This is the hubris of big government:  the delusion that our families’ economic future rests in the manicured hands of Congress rather than in the hard-working hands of the American people.  I disagree and I urge the rejection of this bill.”

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter has a 100% rating from the National Right-to-Life Committee. He supports school vouchers, privatizing social security, and is generally pretty darn good on social and financial issues. McCotter is kind of scrawny-looking but he plays a pretty mean guitar.

This horrible vote has shown us who the bad guys are but has also given the good guys an opportunity to shine.

Three great quotes in this short video:

“A two trillion-dollar tax increase that will give government control over virtually every aspect of our lives.”

“You know the one question that not on this survey, Glenn? Are you a US citizen?”

“They used the US census information to round up the Japanese and put them in internment camps.”

People wonder where Republican leadership is. Rep. Michele Bachmann from Minnesota is a great example of real, conservative leadership.

She’s pro-life, she dislikes government intrusion in our lives, she’s anti-tax, and she’s not afraid to fight.

It passed by one lousy vote.

From Yahoo! News

The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, saying it would cost jobs in the midst of a recession.

If passed by the senate, this bill will drive jobs out of the country and raise prices of all goods and services for everyone in the country. And for once, the old canard of “poor, women, and minorities hardest hit” is true.

Here are the eight Republican turncoats:

• Bono (CA) 202-225-5330
• Castle (DE) 202-225-4165
• Kirk (IL) 202-225-4835
• Lance (NJ) 202-225-5361
• Lobiondo (NJ) 202-225-6572
• McHugh (NY) 202-225-4611
• Reichart (WA) 202-225-7761
• Chris Smith (NJ) 202-225-3765

Call them, be polite, and let them know that you will financially support more conservative challengers to them in 2010. This bill is not centrist or moderate — it is the most extremist and damaging act to pass the house in the history of the United States.

This is a Pyrrhic victory for the Obama administration. The bill will not be voted on by the senate for 6 to 8 weeks. That leaves us a lot of time to get the sordid details to the public. As we do, poll numbers for Obama and the Democrat majority will tumble.

If by some chance the bill does pass the senate, our economy will tank further and the 2010 election will make the 1994 rout by Republicans look like a minor voting blip. I would rather this bill not pass the senate in the first place because I do not want to damage the country for years to get a political victory.

Remember, Obama himself told us that “energy rates would necessarily skyrocket” under this bill. For once, believe him.

The sun’s activity is winding down, triggering fevered debate among scientists about how low it will go, and what it means for Earth’s climate. NASA recorded no sunspots on 266 days in 2008 — a level of inactivity not seen since 1913 - and 2009 looks set to be even quieter. Solar wind pressure is at a 50-year low and our local star is ever so slightly dimmer than it was 10 years ago.

Sunspots are the most visible sign of an active sun - islands of magnetism on the sun’s surface where convection is inhibited, making the gas cooler and darker when seen from Earth - and the fact that they’re vanishing means we’re heading into a period of solar lethargy.

Where will it all end? Solar activity varies over an 11-year cycle, but it experiences longer-term variations, highs and lows that can last around a century.

“A new 11-year cycle started a year or two ago, and so far it’s been extremely feeble,” says Nigel Weiss of the University of Cambridge. With Jose Abreu of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf and others, Weiss recently predicted that the long-term solar high we’ve been enjoying since before the second world war is over, and the decline now under way will reach its lowest point around 2020. Their prediction is based on levels of rare isotopes that accumulate in the Earth’s crust when weak solar winds allow cosmic rays to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere.


There’s even a chance, says Weiss, that we might be heading for a low as deep as the Maunder minimum of the 17th century. Either side of that trough, Europe shivered through the Little Ice Age, when frost fairs were held on the Thames and whole Swiss villages disappeared under glaciers.

From What should we call the current solar minimum? at Watts Up With That?

There is growing press coverage about the current state of the sun, most recently from Charles Osgood of CBS News as well as the BBC and other major outlets. While the sun slumbers
deeper and has missed its cyclic snooze alarm, our media is finally
waking up to the solar somnolence.

Here is a short roundup of news articles on this subject today:

‘Still Sun’ baffling astronomers

Scientists warn sun has dimmed

Sun ‘at its quietest for 100 years’

Has the sun gone in? Earth’s closest star ‘dimmest it’s been for a century’

So the question arises, now that this has been identified, what should we call it?

There are no sunspots, very few solar flares — and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time.

The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting.

The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period.

Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity.

According to Prof Louise Hara of University College London, it is unclear why this is happening or when the Sun is likely to become more active again.

“There’s no sign of us coming out of it yet,” she told BBC News.

Today is the summer solstice for the southern hemisphere and, contrary to what you might believe if you read the mainstream media and listen to the politicians, we are in a cooling period. Antarctic sea ice, considered to be one of the greatest predictors and proofs of global warming, is almost 20% above normal. From Watts Up With That?:

The science of global warming is taking a big hit these days. More and more scientists are now stepping out, risking their careers, and saying that global warming is bunk. I try to keep my mind open, but the Keepers of the Data are making it difficult for me to believe their dire predictions.

My education is in science and I have worked in the science field most of my life. I do understand that data adjustments are sometimes necessary. But one has to wonder when all the data happens to be adjusted in the same direction — a direction that is politically correct and is guaranteed to give you grant money.

When you look at the poor state of so many official weather stations, one has to wonder why they are adjusting temperature data up instead of adjusting it down. Bad data equals bad results.

Here is a picture from Climate Skeptic that shows global temperatures before and after data adjustments by NOAA. You look, you decide:

Have you noticed that the media and the environmental hysteria-mongers have quietly changed the phrase “man-made global warming” to “man-made climate change?” The reason is that no matter what happens to the climate, they can still blame humans for it.

From Daily Tech’s Temperature Monitors Report Widespread Global Cooling:

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here.  The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out.

From Lorne Gunter at the National Post. Finally, a journalist who addresses facts instead of assembling quotes from dubiously qualified people who happen to share the same viewpoint.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

…

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

What is it about failed Democrat presidential candidates that turns them into total dunces?

From Business & Media Institute:

Politicians using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a tried-and-true strategy. Paint the idea green and a natural catastrophe became political fodder for former Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (Mass.).

Kerry appeared on MSNBC on February 6 to discuss storms that have killed at least 50 people throughout the Southeastern United States. So, of course, Kerry used the platform to advance global warming alarmism.

"[I] don't want to sort of leap into the larger meaning of, you know, inappropriately, but on the other hand, the weather service has told us we are going to have more and more intense storms," Kerry said. "And insurance companies are beginning to look at this issue and understand this is related to the intensity of storms that is related to the warming of the earth. And so it goes to global warming and larger issues that we're not paying attention to. The fact is the hurricanes are more intensive, the storms are more intensive and the rainfall is more intense at certain places at certain times and the weather patterns have changed."

The only problem is that Kerry is either wrong or lying. According to Earth & Sky, there are "no scientific studies solidly relate climatic global temperature trends to tornadoes." Given Kerry's history, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he's lying.

From Watt's up with that? Meteorologists are blaming it on an exceptionally strong La Niña.

See also Kate's winter pictures of snow where it usually does not snow -- like Saudi Arabia and Baghdad.

Does a few months of cold mean a trend? Of course not. But try telling that to the mainstream who reports every heat wave in the world with breathless abandon.

From Kate at Small Dead Animals:  Gore science advisor refuses to take responsibility for Gore’s global warming errors.

Check it out.

Also check out her series on the Kyoto agreement and her Settled Science series.

And we can’t do a thing about it.

We’ve been subjected to horror stories for several years now about the melting of Greenland’s glaciers. Never mind that the glaciers melted from the 1920s to 1940s in the same way that they’re doing today. Never mind that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Client Change (IPCC) has been accused by a leading expert, Nils-Axel Mörner, of falsifying data, destroying data, and appointing unqualified people to come to a pre-ordained conclusion of rising sea levels.

Anybody named Axel has got to be good.

Oh, and never mind the fact that dinosaurs roamed Antarctica 190 million years ago. Yeah, I know about continental drift — Antarctica was probably further north back then, but it sure wasn’t at the equator.

I won’t even go into the Medieval Warming Period or the Little Ice Age except to note the two blaringly contradictory sentences on NOAA’s site where they do a little jig, wave a few hands, and discount the Medieval Warming Period altogether.

There are not enough records available to reconstruct global or even hemispheric mean temperature prior to about 600 years ago with a high degree of confidence.
…

In summary, it appears that the 20th century, and in particular the late 20th century, is likely the warmest the Earth has seen in at least 1200 years.

We can’t be certain about the earth’s climatology before 600 years ago but we sure as heck are absolutely positive that it’s warmer now than it’s been in 1,200 years. Sure, that makes great sense, oh great ones — I believe anything the global warming climate change priests say because they have my BEST INTERESTS at heart. It doesn’t matter whether they’re right; it only matters that they care.

I try to be open-minded about global climate change — I really do — but I’m not exactly impressed with the quality of the science behind it.

Now we learn that an influx of magma close to the earth’s surface may be contributing to or even causing most of the melting of Greenland’s glaciers:

“Stop the MAGMA!”

A Kansas University researcher in a presentation to the American Geophysical Union today will show evidence that global warming may not be the only — and perhaps not even be the largest — cause of declining ice sheets on Greenland.

In a presentation at the AGU meeting in San Francisco, researchers from KU’s Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets will show evidence that a weakness in the earth’s crust could be causing underground magma to melt the ice above. If that is in fact happening, the water could be melting and carrying away more ice as it flows away from the “hot spot.”

“We think it may be a part of greater geothermal activity beneath the entire ice sheet,” said Kees van der Veen, a KU researcher and professor in the department of geography.

The CReSIS researchers found the weakness in the crust using data gathered with the center’s airborne radar, which has been flying over Greenland, combined with Navy data on the gravitational pull over the ice sheet. Van der Veen and Tim Leftwich, of KU, worked with Ralph von Freese of Ohio State University to analyze the data.

“For the most part, up until recently, the glaciologists ignored the geophysical activity beneath the ice sheets,” van der Veen said.

The initial studies revealed the one known hot spot in an area of northeast Greenland that is home to a recently discovered ice flow. The researchers theorize that the ice flow could have been started by the magma — and not human activity. These streams have become more powerful and more prevalent in recent years. They can be responsible for taking ice from the center of the ice sheet more than 400 miles out to sea, where it eventually melts.

Yeah, that makes sense. So why have glaciologists been ignoring geophysical activity beneath the ice sheets? Could it be that global warming global climate change might be more complicated than blaming Bush? 

The founder of The Weather Channel writes today:

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

“Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam.”

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmentally conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minute documentary segment.

I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party. However, Global Warming, i.e. Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.

I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

More and more scientists are coming out against the idea of global warming. Why? Because they realize that the data does not support the conclusion. NASA’s recent horrible mishandling of the discovery of skewed-to-the-high by a blogger hasn’t helped things. Neither has the project by Steve McIntyre, formerly limited to the USA but now going worldwide, of the practice of measuring and photographing official climatological stations. I have two degrees in science:  One of the first things that I learned was that Bad Data = Suspicious results. The global warming proponents had their fingers in their ears and were yelling “nyah, nyah, nyah” the day they taught that basic fact in Science 101 — if they even took Science 101 at all.

I could go on and on. Check out some of my other articles on global warming:

• Global warming, er, not
• Al Gore and some inconvenient truths about global warming
• Global warming

From my good friend Kate at Small Dead Animals. As you read this, remember that satellite data is recognized as the highest-quality data that we have for temperature changes on planet Earth. And what does this data show over the past 27 years that this high-quality information has been available?

The northern hemisphere has warmed slightly while the southern hemisphere has not statistically changed. Click on the picture for an enlargement.

Whoop-de-doo.

The Past and Future of Climate is an excellent paper by David Archibald which was presented at The Lavoisier Group’s 2007 Workshop in Melbourne, Australia. The paper makes a claim that others have also made recently:  Based on sunspot cycles, the earth is about to enter the strongest cooling period since the Little Ice Age several hundred years ago

Here is one of my favorite quotes from the paper:

I should mention that the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming state that higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will cause the oceans to become more acidic which will kill off coral reefs and other types of marine life. Coral reefs first formed back in the Devonian period when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were ten times what they are today.

Remember that it was a blogger who discovered that NASA’s land-based global temperature measurements had been skewed high since the year 2000. Very embarassing. Even more disturbing than the revelation, the mainstream media payed little attention to the news which totally discredits Al Gore and the other environmental morons. The Wall Street Journal — essentially alone amongst its peers — recently published a redeeming article:

The new data undermine another frightful talking point from environmentalists, which is that six of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1990. Wrong. NASA now says six of the 10 warmest years were in the 1930s and 1940s, and that was before the bulk of industrial CO2 emissions were released into the atmosphere.

…

What’s more disturbing is what this incident tells us about the scientific double standard in the global warming debate. If this kind of error were made by climatologists who dare to challenge climate-change orthodoxy, the media and environmentalists would accuse them of manipulating data to distort scientific truth. NASA’s blunder only became a news story after Internet bloggers played whistleblower by circulating the new data across the Web.

So far this year NASA has issued at least five press releases that could be described as alarming on the pace of climate change. But the correction of its overestimate of global warming was merely posted on the agency’s Web site. James Hansen, NASA’s ubiquitous climate scientist and a man who has charged that the Bush Administration is censoring him on global warming, has been unapologetic about NASA’s screw up. He claims that global warming skeptics — “court jesters,” he calls them — are exploiting this incident to “confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change.”

So let’s get this straight: Mr. Hansen’s agency makes a mistake in a way that exaggerates the extent of warming, and this is all part of a conspiracy by “skeptics”? It’s a wonder there aren’t more of them.

Stupid, politics-playing NASA schmucks. I predict that within 10 years global warming will just be an old joke and the polticians and “scientists” who have pushed this phony crisis upon us will be totally discredited.