Over at Protein Wisdom, Darleen Click takes apart Al Gore’s op-ed in the Fish Wrap of Record, the New York Times, in which Gore inadvertently tells the truth, and pulls aside the progressive curtain. It’s a must read.
Click highlights this immortal line as a pull quote:
From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.
[Correct Darleen's name; see comments.]
Instapunk points to this archive[PDF, 1 MB] of all the emails at the heart of the East Anglia climate study scandal, along with an analysis of each and every one.
Remember, too, that besides the emails, the original dump also included key data, the programming code used to generate the climate models involved, and even notes by one of the programmers.
It wasn’t just the handful of soundbites dismissed by the warmists.
From the Daily Mash:
TREES will not uproot themselves and embark on blood-soaked killing sprees by 2035, global warming experts have admitted.
The IPCC headquarters in Geneva
The International Panel on Climate Change confirmed the evidence had not been peer-reviewed and will now amend the section of its 2007 report devoted to ‘killer trees’.A spokesman said: “It appears the claim was not based on new data or field research but on that bit with the angry, talking trees in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”
…
“We still think there’s a strong chance that trees will become sentient and take revenge on man for chopping down all their friends and turning them into spatulas, we’re just not sure when.”
Having recently been the victim of a tree attack on my parked car, I am very relieved to read this, as I was becoming a bit concerned.
Anyway, I prefer Teflon or stainless steel spatulas, so I should be pretty much on their side.
update:
The original article includes this image, which portrays the home of Bilbo Baggins, one of the hobbits from Lord of the Rings. I believe this was taken from the movie trilogy.
I just this minute realized, it’s an eye. An eye in great contrast with the other eye in the story, the flaming Eye of Sauron.
I’m more than a little rushed this morning, but I have to point to Eric S. Raymond’s excellent analysis of the collapse of the Anthropomorphic Global Warming movement, calling for “The Naming and Shaming the AGW Fraudsters”:
The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:
If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud.
The segment Raymond has identified as zombies and greenshirts I’ve heard elsewhere named as watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Oh, and don’t miss his conclusion:
The key point — and the reason the AGW frauds need to be shamed and punished — is that the political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place.
That is, the zombies and green-shirts still have a powerful interest in magnifying scientific errors that suit their agendas into politicized crusades that could produce error cascades just as huge. Somewhere out there, there are now-innocent scientific research groups who could become the next decade’s version of the “team”, degenerating into fraudulent conspiracies as careerism draws them in, the political villains cheer them on to rationalize the power-grab of the week, and the Gaianists gamely but stupidly try to do the right thing.
I’m even prepared to hazard a guess where the next fraud would be ginned up from: environmental toxicology and what are called “endocrine disruptors”.
[Emphasis ESR's]
Absolutely, read the whole thing. This is one of those lens articles that brings an entire scene into focus.
update:
From the Devil’s Kitchen, an excellent explanation of the decision tree we should be using :
and the very simplified tree actually in use:
…And frankly, right now I’m kinda glad I don’t. Because that would mean I’d be working in a field that looks to be on the verge of falling apart, and possibly losing official favor.
Watts Up With That commenter J.C. writes in comments there:
I work at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. I’ve been following the Climategate scandal since its inception. The first time many of my coworkers had heard of the situation was when I asked them about it.
Well, well, well.
Look what was waiting in every single email Inbox on Monday morning:DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”
This cannot be good for the AGW establishment.
An excellent graphic from Watts Up With That?
Follow the link for more explanation, and for links to other versions of this graphic, including a Youtube version with useful annotations.
Everybody’s favorite weasel-girl did an early version of this using WUWT’s original charts.
Stewart Brand proclaims “Environmental Heresies“, over at TED.
There are TED presentations that make you gasp with awe and wonder. The audience laughs and claps throughout, simply because the charts and graphs are so enlightening.
This is not one of them. It is cold, dry, and sobering. The audience is silent. I’m not going to try to summarize, you really need to see the whole thing.
I don’t agree with everything here — Brand believes in AGW, for instance, and is reflexively socialist — but overwhelmingly, the message is good, and Brand presses the need for local, even personal control and power. (Brand understands very well the difference between the two.) As I say, his socialism is reflexive, but the message is inherently capitalist.
The amazing thing is, he sees so clearly that even though his politics color his presentation, he still tells the truth.
From America’s Right. Unfortunately, he doesn’t a provide a link to just the list; it’s a box on his sidebar. (Also, he doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, pretty much a requirement right now to be on my daily read list, although I’m working on that.)
I’m putting the list below the fold, because it’s so damn long. The crucial thing to understand is that every one of these items has a news media link behind it. They’re actually serious about this crap.
This is a tremendous resource, and I wish Jeff Schreiber would post this in a linkable format.
(more…)
At The National Review, Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson lay out what we face with the Cap and Trade bill. It isn’t pretty.
The stimulus bill was the legislative equivalent of the famous cantina scene from Star Wars, an eye-popping collection of the freakish and exotic, gathered for dubious purposes. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, known as ACES (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), is more like the third panel in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights — a hellscape that disturbs the sleep of anybody who contemplates it carefully.
Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.
The House of Representatives, famously, did not read this bill before passing it, which is testament to either Nancy Pelosi’s managerial incompetency or her political wile, or possibly both. If you take the time to read the legislation, you’ll discover four major themes: special-interest giveaways, regulatory mandates unrelated to climate change, fanciful technological programs worthy of The Jetsons, and assorted left-wing wish fulfillment. We cannot cover every swirl and brushstroke of this masterpiece of misgovernance, but here’s a breakdown of its 50 most outrageous features.
Be more responsible than the thugs you voted into office. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Gene Green! I voted for you! And you voted for this! Never again! You are dead to me now!) Read at least the first ten items in the list. (But be advised, this isn’t a top-down “fifty most tyrannical” list. It’s organized by the type of damage each item generates, not how awful that damage is.)
Here’s a foul taste:
10. Rural electrical cooperatives are demanding that the offsets be awarded in proportion to historic emissions, and they probably will prevail. This means that high-polluting generators, such as the coal-fired plants typical of electric co-ops’ members, will be rewarded because they pollute more, while cleaner producers, such as those using nuclear and hydroelectric power, will be penalized.
“Perverse” doesn’t begin to cover this. This is psychotic.
There is nothing beyond the government’s reach in this. Nothing. (Don’t believe me? See items 21-26, regulating light bulbs — light bulbs! — home appliances, home construction, and snowmobiles.)
This is naked fascism, the compulsory blending of government and business, in all its hideous progressive horror.
Han doesn’t shoot first (because the ATF confiscated his blaster when he registered it), Greedo does, and Greedo doesn’t miss. Jaba the Hut prospers. Darth Vader rules. The Republic falls.
There is no Force but Liberty, and when that dies, we will not be saved by spunky kids and gruff smugglers, and most especially not by mysterious old farts in robes living in the desert.
From the Vancouver Sun, “Little Ocean Tattletales Fail to Find Right Facts”:
They drift along in the worlds’ oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres — more than a mile down — constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.
Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface, gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through.
After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.
These 3,000 yellow sentinels — about the size and shape of a large fencepost — free-float the world’s oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.
It’s fascinating to watch their progress online. (The URLs are too complex to reproduce here, but Google “Argo Buoy Movement” or “Argo Float Animation,” and you will be directed to the links.)
[Here's a good one. Below is a still from one of these movies, so you can get an idea of just how well these little guys are surveying the ocean. -- djm]
Still from a NASA animation showing tracks of free-floating oceanographic buoys.
When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.
No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.
So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.
In fact, “there has been a very slight cooling,” according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.
I’d quote the whole thing, but the Sun deserves your traffic, so go read the whole thing.
update:
Cold Fury calls out global warming: “It ain’t science, it’s religion.”
The people pushing the GW agenda don’t give a good goddamn about Mother Earth. They want to return us all to a pre-industrial culture, with us as dirty sweaty agrarian peasants and them as the exalted overlords, wallowing in the rotting corpse of the richest, most powerful society the world has ever seen. The religion is all about making us accept it by making us think we’re saving ourselves.
They will never accept the limits they want to impose on us.
Damn straight, Al Gore and Barack Obama are only the most visible of the They.
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio rocks,. and I mean hard. I’m going to be spending more time there than I have, I can tell. Just… damn!
Here’s what I found by just clicking on the “Next” link on the Argo page:
This is a map of “relative sea level around the Earth“. Red indicates highs, blue lows.
Here’s the trick: this map shows a variation of 500 mm above and below average. The total range, highest to lowest, is one meter. That’s right, about a yard on a globe 8000 miles in diameter, measuring a surface covered with waves well over one meter high.
There is nothing, nothing, we cannot know about our world if we choose to find out.
And if this is a firehose, just wait: It’s going to become a Niagra.
[Credit for both images to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.]
[Link to Sun via Dan at Protein Wisdom.]
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