The station’s annual snowfall averaged 624 centimeters per year, with a non-significant trend of +0.5 cm per decade. He found similar positive-but-insignificant trends for spring snowfall, annual stream flow, and precipitation. Nor did he find any trend in the published regional temperatures.

Where’s the evidence of man-made global warming?

James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist, published way back in 1992 that California’s big-population counties had a strong warming trend, medium-sized counties had a much slower increase, and rural stations almost no temperature rise at all. Meanwhile, the number of reporting stations has fallen from 6000 in 1970 to 2000 today, with mostly the rural stations dropped.

Concrete, car exhausts, and air conditioners have all increased over the last 40 years. Thermometers are increasingly at sewage treatment plants that generate their own heat. The problem isn’t so much Los Angeles, which as been a big city for more than 100 years, but the smaller urban regions that have expanded rapidly. How big is the Urban Heat Bias now? Prominent warming skeptic Fred Singer asks whether the earth is warming only at airports.

NASA recently made a critical adjustment in mean temperature record, after famed whistle-blower Steve McIntyre discovered an error. The adjustment lowered temperatures since 2000 by 0.15 degree C per year. NASA told the media that the change was “not significant.”  But by that standard, the U.S. warming over the past 77 years hasn’t been “significant” either.

The earth is simply not getting the radical warming forecast 20 years ago by modelers such as NASA’s James Hansen. The earth has had no warming since 1998, and temperatures began actually falling in 2007. The longest sunspot minimum in a century is now forecasting colder weather, and the Pacific—our largest heat sink—has shifted into a 30-year cold phase.

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Recently, global temperature-taking has been obfuscated by a strong El Nino that warmed the past 12 months. Now we’re apparently entering a La Nina, which will drop Pacific temperatures below their long-term mean until next year. It may be several years before we can be sure whether a longer-term Pacific cooling phase has resumed.

In the meantime, President Obama is demanding that we immediately take out “climate insurance,” by blocking new power plants and paying fabulous costs for poor-mileage corn ethanol. Harvard says it may take $7-per-gallon gas to meet the president’s goal of cutting transport greenhouse emissions by 14 percent. Britain’s new government has just blocked the new third runway at Heathrow Airport, to stop “binge flying.”

We’ve known for centuries about the Roman Warming, the cold Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. Are we now getting man-made warming—or just recovering from the Little Ice Age? John Christy says our climate is still dominated by natural factors. He says clouds are the key factor. He says the evidence shows the planet responding to heat impulses by producing more clouds, which allow more solar heat to warm it up. And vice versa.

Have our “mainstream” scientists blundered toward the government grant money?

Sources

J. Christy and J. Hnilo; “Changes in the Snowfall of the Southern Sierra Nevada of California since 1916.” Energy and Environment, Vol. 21; 2010.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The Midwest had a drought—but the real problem was that all of the nitrogen had been “farmed out” of the region’s soils. The organic content of the soils had dropped sharply from pioneer days, leaving little root structure to hold the soils against wind and water. The Dust Bowl soils blew as far east as Washington D.C. startling the Congress into creating the U.S. Soil conservation Service.

One of the world’s top soil scientists is now warning that, without more chemical fertilizer, a similar fate could befall Africa. Pedro Sanchez, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says Africa’s traditional “bush fallow” farming system is unsustainable at today’s higher population densities. The “rest periods” for the soil have gotten too short to restore the soil nutrients. There are few livestock and, therefore, little manure. Each season the farmers’ yields decline further, triggering the plowing of more land to feed more people.

Sanchez praises a government program in Malawi that permits farmers to buy small amounts of N fertilizer and improved seeds at a discount, with the government paying the difference. In 2005, Malawi’s corn harvest had been only half what was needed. Yields were below a ton per hectare. In 2006, farmers armed with fertilizer and better seeds doubled their yields and produced a small surplus. By 2007, yields almost tripled, up from 0.8 tons to 2.2 tons per acre.

The high-yielding seeds are already available from regional research centers and Norman Borlaug’s Mexican plant-breeding center. Can a fertilizer and improved seed boost triple African crop yields and free the continent from its  hunger/soil trap—before it becomes a “Dust Bowl”?

Africa has tried fertilizer subsidies before, but the governments too soon ran out of cash. It worked, however, in India, where chemical fertilizer and the Green Revolution’s high-yield rice and wheat seeds tripled national yields in little more than a decade. That led to more stable government, better roads, more investment—and India’s Asian Tiger economy. A radical drop in birth rates followed, along with huge gains in India’s incomes and health. The fertilizer subsidy probably got too big and went on too long, but, compared to Africa, it’s hard to argue with the fabulous long-term results..

Sanchez says ten African countries are now trying to triple their yields by emulating Malawi’s progress—backed by promises of $20 billion in funding from the G8, including the United States.

If the aid donors honor their commitments, Africa might be able to break out of its unsustainable low-yield farming pattern. Roads will be built, to bring in the fertilizer and then export white corn to African countries that didn’t get rain that year. Surplus food would fund off-farm jobs and economic growth. A virtuous circle may start, as it did in India.

Organic enthusiasts claim their cover crops could provide all the nitrogen needed for expanded African food production—but their key report overstated the nitrogen available from green manure crops by threefold. Africa can’t afford more land in low-yield crops.

America’s “summit” fertilizer commitment to Africa is one that must be kept.

Report noted: Catherine Badgley et al. “Can Organic Farming Feed the World” Renewable Ag & Food Systems; July 2007.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Dan Miller, climate expert with the Roda Group and ardent believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming, responded to Easterbrook at Fox News: “It’s absurd to talk about global cooling when global heating is with us and accelerating.” But Miller is referring to the current temperature spike from an El Nino in the Pacific Ocean—a short-term climate event already ending, according to Pacific sea surface temperatures. The key question now is where the temperatures will go after the El Nino fades.

Easterbrook offered geological evidence that the earth has had ten big “recent” warmings that dwarf the 0.7 degree temperature increase estimated for the 20^th century. Over the past 15,000 years, those temperature shifts drove the earth’s temperatures radically up or down by 9–15 degrees C within a single century. He also noted 60 sharp-but-smaller temperature changes in the past 5,000 years. All of these occurred before 1945, when the post-war Industrial Boom began to ramp up human-emitted CO₂ levels.

Easterbrook calls this evidence “astonishing.” Current data seem to support Easterbrook’s prediction of an end to global warming, at least for the next three decades. Since 1998, atmospheric CO₂ has continued to increase—but total solar activity, as measured by satellites, has declined sharply after trending strongly, but erratically, upward for 150 years.

Satellite-measured solar activity has also been trending down moderately, which essentially predicts cooling. And the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cool phase, as NASA told us in 2008. Tree rings and coral samples tell us these PDO shifts have predicted moderate cooling for the whole earth, lasting for about 30 years at a stretch. Easterbrook predicts that this PDO phase will last until 2030, with warming from 2030–2060, and then cooling again to 2090.

The PDO, however, doesn’t seem to control whether the planet as a whole will warm or cool over the next century. Easterbrook’s geology says powerful, natural cycles, probably solar-driven, control longer-term climate trends. Ice cores, seashells, and fossil pollen all show a moderate-but-abrupt 1,500-year cycle, which apparently gave us the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming, and 500 similar previous warmings over the past million years.

The prediction: Higher temperatures will not parboil the earth. Global warming will continue, slowly and erratically, perhaps with another 0.5 degree C over several hundred years. The biggest danger will be extended drought in unusual regions, almost certainly including Kenya and California. Such drought ended the Mayan civilization in the 9^th century. But it’s as unstoppable as the sun itself. This very real threat should be the focus of modern technology in helping effected areas to adapt.

Eventually, we’ll get another big Ice Age, and our descendents will deride the memory of Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth”—as they shiver watching glaciers approach Chicago.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

A new study shows that flying squirrels have been adapting to recent warming since the 1990s by both moving and hybridizing. C.J. Garroway and his research team trapped more than 1600 of the flying squirrels in Ontario and Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2004. The flying squirrels’ DNA shows the southern G. volans flying squirrels are increasingly mating with the northern G. sabrinus flying squirrels. The researchers say this is the “first report of hybrid zone formation following a range expansion induced by contemporary climate change.”

That’s certainly interesting, but hardly earth-shaking. Ice cores and fossil pollen show the earth has had six major global warmings since the last Ice Age, interspersed with centuries-long cold periods. The earth’s temperatures are always cycling up and down.

We have even more dramatic evidence of creatures moving to stay at the right temperatures from the city of York, England. Excavations under the city find that the nettle ground bug was common in York during the Roman occupation in the first century, and during the Medieval Warming. In between those warm times, it has typically been found in the much-warmer south of England.

On the other hand, Italian researchers have just finished surveying bird species in a high Piedmont valley where the temperature since the early 1990s has increased about 1 degree C. How did the birds adapt?  They did nothing. Sixty-eight bird species were detected in both the 1992-94 survey and the 2003-05 survey. The researchers report “the number of species whose mean elevation increased (42) was higher than the number whose mean elevation decreased (19).”  But the birds move up and average of just  29 meters—not statistically different from zero.

Why didn’t the birds move?  We’d advise asking whether the birds’ food sources moved. Higher levels of CO₂ allow vegetation to adapt to higher temperatures—without moving. Perhaps the foliage, fruits and insects on which the birds depend didn’t change much either.

We might even think about humans adapting to a one-degree change in global average temperatures, rather than destroying our only available energy sources. The net warming since 1850 has been something less than 0.7 degree C when we allow for the increasing impact of urban heat islands on our thermometer 1–3 degree total warming in the early decades. Then the warming rocks along in 30-year up-and-and-down spurts, as we’ve seen in the earth’s 1915–1940 warming, its 1940–1975 cooling, and its 1976-1998 warming. For centuries at a time.  Until the sun brings the next global cooling.

We need to get rid of the biologists’ “climate envelope” theory that predicts species extinctions will occur unless their climate environment remains absolutely stable (never has been, never will be). Looking at real global history, specie extinctions are more likely to happen when the next asteroid collides with earth. Those are the times the earth has lost the vast majority of its species.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC,  is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

• India has documented that the Intergovernmental Panel’s claim of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was mere speculation—and has now been proven false.

 

• The 2007 IPCC report claimed global warming could cut rain fed African food yields in half by 2020. New lead author Chris Field says this is highly unlikely, and he can find nothing in the report’s supporting chapters to document it.

 

• The Dutch are complaining that the IPCC said half of its land area lies below sea level, when the figure is actually 20 percent.

 

All this criticism is valid and long overdue. But the biggest scandal in the IPCC’s closet remains its 1995 claim to finding a “discernible human influence” on the earth’s changing climate. Lead author Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore government laboratory inserted those words—after the IPCC’s consulting scientists had signed off on a draft that specifically said no such “human fingerprint” had been found! 

 

Santer deliberately reversed the meaning of the whole IPCC 1995 report—and the trajectory of every IPCC document since. He claimed the rewrite was justified by two of his own studies. However, Santer’s papers “cherry-picked” the earth’s temperature record from 1963–1987, ignoring the earlier and later temperatures that didn’t confirm the Greenhouse theory! Thus the IPCC’s whole claim of a “discernible human influence” remains without scientific support to this day.

 

What will we learn next about the IPCC and its frolicking alarmists? Expect proof that the land-based thermometer records have been deliberately sabotaged to lower the temperature readings of yesteryear and raise recent thermometer readings—to make global warming seem scarier.

 

The most obvious case of this record manipulation to date is in New Zealand, where the “official” graph shows the country’s temperatures rose 0.92 degrees C through the 20^th century. However, NIWA’s own raw data showed no 20^th-century temperature uptrend in any of its stations. Is it an accident that most of the world’s raw climate historical data has disappeared? 

 

Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo appeared on John Coleman’s TV special at KUSI-TV on January 14, charging that U.S. official temperatures have been rigged by quietly dropping “cold” weather stations: those at high altitude, high latitude, or in rural areas.

 

Clear back in 1992, James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist, published a peer-reviewed paper that sorted the state’s weather trends by county population. The urban counties had a strong upward trend of plus 3.14 degrees F per century. Rural stations showed no upward trend at all.

 

Looking back, an “official” global warming of 0.6 degrees since 1900 may not seem all that dramatic. Especially after a dozen years of non-warming. But think how hard it would have been for the global warming alarmists to panic the people if they’d admitted the rural areas hadn’t warmed at all!  That “global warming” was mostly cities ratcheting up their own heat!

 

The supposedly dedicated “climate researchers” have nearly cost the world trillions of dollars in higher energy costs, agonies of wintertime suffering for the elderly “energy poor,” and needless deaths for lack of air conditioning in the summers. They and the Green campaigners came awfully close to destroying human society as most of us have known it.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

 

Senior climate researcher Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research recently admitted to colleagues “we have no idea why the earth isn’t warming, and it’s a travesty that we don’t know.” That’s a quote from one of those e-mails leaked at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

 

That pretty much tells us how much faith we dare to put in the new USDA climate-change forecasts.

 

The USDA report’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Since 2007, the earth seems to have passed a “tipping point” into global cooling—at least temporarily. NASA told us in 2008 that the Pacific Ocean had shifted into a cool cycle, after strong warming both globally and in the Pacific from 1976-1998 and cooling from 1940-1975.

 

What does USDA predict from its new computer-generated look into the future? 

 

• Grain and oilseed crops will mature more rapidly, because of shorter, warmer winters—although rainfall may be more variable, perhaps even with more drought. (Seems reasonable and generally beneficial—but hardly earth-shaking.)

 

• Horticultural crops may be more vulnerable to climate change than field crops, since climate factors impact appearance and quality of the produce. (How much did this big report cost) 

 

• Livestock mortality will decrease with warmer winters, but USDA claims this will be more than offset by greater death losses during hotter summers. (More cattle die in blizzards than in summer pastures equipped with shade opportunities)

 

• Weeds may grow more rapidly with elevated levels of atmospheric CO₂. (But so do crop plants. It’s a wash.)

 

• Disease and insect prevalence will escalate as a result of shorter, warmer winters.

(Vaccines and medications have been more important than modest temperature changes—for both human and livestock diseases.)

 

• The trends toward reduced mountain snowpack and earlier spring snowmelt runoff in the western U.S. imply changes in the availability of irrigation water. (We’ve had lots of snowpack since 2007. Can the USDA tell us when that will change back again, and why?) 

 

USDA left out the most important information about CO₂ and farming’s future: More CO₂ in the atmosphere raises crop yields substantially, acting like fertilizer for the plants and increasing their water use efficiency. Doubling CO₂ in the air raises the yields of herbaceous plants 30–50 percent, and of trees by 50–80 percent, based on hundreds of studies in dozens of countries.

 

Higher CO₂ levels should mean higher crop and livestock yields! Talley ho!

 

Resources: 

 

B.A. Kimball, 1983, “Carbon Dioxide and Agricultural Yields: An Assemblage and Analysis of 430 Prior Observations,” Agronomy Journals 75, pp 779-788.

 

K.E. Idso and S. B. Idso, 1994, “Plant Responses to Atmospheric CO₂ Enrichment in the Face of Environmental Constraints, A Review 0of the past 10 years’ Research,” Agriculture and Forest Meteorology 69, pp 153–203.

 

R.R. Nemani et al., 2003, “Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999,” Science 300, pp 1560-1563.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

• The researchers don’t seem to be trying to find holes in the current scientific “consensus” on climate change. They lean, instead, to “confirmation research,” explaining why their colleagues must be right.

 

• They tend to have strong personal concerns about the environment where they live, and the weather they’ve lived through. Most have at least 15 years research experience, mainly tracking global warming, but not necessarily man-made warming. Most were probably invested in the warming ‘consensus’ when the current cooling came along.

 

• They tend to consider themselves environmental activists, trying directly to “save the planet.” Researchers swimming against the current earn opposition from their colleagues and are being shut out of currently respected journals.

 

• They seem to have a near-psychotic belief in computer models. As an economist, I was long ago forced to give up any belief in “macroeconomic” computer models. All economics is the sum of the microeconomics.

 

• They admit the failure of their computer consensus to model clouds and cloud impacts on the environment. This point is crucial, because the counter-theory to man-made warming is the solar-cloud theory.

 

The solar-cloud theory holds that changes in the sun’s activity produce changes in the earth’s cloud cover. Remember, the sunspot index has a very strong 79 percent correlation with our thermometer record over the past 160 years. The CO₂ correlation with our temperatures is a meager 22 percent.

 

Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute has demonstrated that when the sun’s magnetic field is weak, the earth is hit by more cosmic rays—and the planet gets more of the low, wet clouds that deflect heat back into space.

 

The UN’s Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change won’t listen. They say the sun’s total solar irradiance doesn’t change enough to account for the recent global warming surge. But the data show the clouds amplifying the changes in irradiance by roughly four-fold.

 

Only 25 percent of Bray’s respondents thought the models could adequately model cloud impacts. Yet 46 percent thought the models could accurately predict global temperatures over the next 10 years.

 

History supports the cloud impact. Analyzing Thousands of old museum paintings, the summer skies in the Medieval Warming tended to be sunny; the summer skies of the Little Ice Age paintings were cloudy, and the skies of the Modern Warming canvases have been sunny again.

 

Why do scientists resist the obvious likelihood that the sun would be involved in a planet-wide warming?  First, it wouldn’t be exciting. Second, it wouldn’t bring in government grants for research.

 

Two-thirds of Bray’s scientists agreed evidence from paleoclimatology (ice cores, pollen, etc.) is important to solving the puzzle—but they’re ignoring hundreds of studies showing a moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year cycle that goes back a million years.

 

I hate to imply that these highly trained academics are merely human, but the evidence seems to speak for itself.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

Sources:

 

Dennis Bray, 2008, A Survey of the Perspectives of Climate Scientists Concerning Climate Science and Climate Change, Institute for Coastal Research, Geestacht, Germany.

Solar magnetic wind theory: Henrik Svensmark, “While the Sun Sleeps,” Jyllands-Posten (Denmark’s leading newspaper), 9 Sept., 2009.

Hans Neuberger, 1970, “Climate in Art,” Weather, Vol. 25, pp. 46-56.

 

I will be among splendid company such as John Coleman, founder of the weather channel, Ross McKitrick, who debunked the “hockey stick” study, physicist Willie Soon, and many other presenters with brilliant credentials. A thousand scientists, economists, and skeptics from every walk of life will meet to discuss the current climate indicators.

 

I’ll use physical evidence of the more than 500 warmings in the past million years, which are found worldwide in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. At least 700 scientists have published evidence on these solar-driven Dansgaared-Oeschger cycles. The good news is that the D-O cycle’s warmings have been getting somewhat cooler for the past 10,000 years—and there is no evidence that human-emitted CO₂ will make them much warmer.

 

This means that the Modern Warming will probably remain cooler than the Medieval Warming (950-1300). It was 0.3 degrees warmer than the 20^th century based on Craig Loehle’s study of 2000 years of temperature proxies. Willi Dansgaard’s 10,000-year reconstruction from ice cores shows the Roman Warming as warmer than the Medieval—but the two Holocene Warmings centered on 4,000 and 7,000 years ago were lots warmer than either.

 

The IPCC rejects the cycle evidence. They have concluded that the variability of the sun is “too small” to account for the earth’s recent warming 1976-98.  They want us to sacrifice trillions of dollars to displace fossil fuels based on computers that couldn’t even predict the current cooling.

 

In contrast, I’ll predict a cooling planet for the next 25-30 years, because of the D-O cycle’s solar linkage. The sunspots began predicting cooling back in 2000, and it arrived a bit early, in 2007. CO₂’s correlation with our temperatures over the past 150 years is only 22 percent. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent—What does the UN think caused the 500 previous D-O cycles in the ice cores and seabed records?

 

There’s more. NASA, bless their hearts, reported last April that their Jason satellite confirms a cooling shift in the Pacific, our biggest heat sink. Roseanne D’Arrigo’s tree ring and rainfall proxies from around the Pacific Rim tell us that the earth’s temperatures have mirrored the Pacific’s cyclical shifts—in 25-40 year spurts—for at least the past 400 years.

 

I predict that after the current Pacific cooling is over, the earth will resume getting slowly and erratically warmer. But not much warmer. That’s because the D-O cycles are typically abrupt, delivering about half their temperature increase in the first few decades. Remember, we’ve had no significant net warming since 1940.

 

If the moderating trend in the global warming cycles persists, then we will get less than 0.5 degree C more warming over the next two centuries. If the Greenhouse Theory has any validity, we might get a bit more than 0.5 degree more warming—but not much. We tend to forget that the climate forcing power of CO₂ unquestionably declines logarithmically, so the earth has probably already gotten three-fourths of the total.

 

As the earth cools, the U.S. will use our new natural gas surplus instead of biofuels, carbon taxes will die and the deliberate disruption of the economy will be stifled. Further warming 40 years from now will be too mild and erratic to renew public panic. Environmental assessments will become more realistic—and useful.

 

Sources for this Article:

 

Craig Loehle, “A 2000-year global temperature record based on non-tree ring proxies,” Energy and Environment 18 (7-8): 1059-1058 (2007).

 

S. Johnson, W. Dansaard, et al., “Oxygen isotope profile through the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets, Nature, 235:429-454 (1972)

 

Roseanne D’Arrigo et al., Tree-ring Estimates of Pacific Decadal Climate Variability” Climate Dynamics: Vol 18: 219-224, (2001).

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net