Politics Is Downstream Of Culture

Bill Whittle's Declaration Entertainment Project



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Yoram Hazony makes a similar argument. Hazony argues that books and schools are the big drivers in the culture. I think that both Whittle and Hazony are correct. Books and Movies are entertainment venues. Schools shape the people who will wright the books and make the movies that America and the world will read and see.

See: Israel Through European Eyes

What can be done? A good start would be to read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—or to read it again if you read it in college. If you’re used to academic books, it’s an easy read. And if not, it’s a bit of an effort, but worth it. No book will give you a clearer insight into what’s happening to Israel today in the international arena, on the campuses, and even, to some extent, in Israel’s universities.

After that, we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed. There’s much to be said about this, and it’s not for now. But I’ll leave you with just this thought as a start on it: Paradigm shifts aren’t like an election campaign or a struggle over some aspect of policy, much less a short-term media battle like the one over the Turkish flotilla, which can be resolved one way or another in matter of weeks or months, if not days. Paradigm shifts are unusual in the lives of individuals. And when they happen, they often take years to work themselves out. For this reason, clashes between political paradigms tend to play themselves out over a generation or more. By the same token, the relevant media in which these clashes are played out aren’t the newspapers or television or the internet. By the time we’re reading the newspapers or watching CNN, we’ve already got our paradigm in place—just like the reporters we’re watching, who just keep reporting from within their own set paradigm, over and over again. When it comes to shifts of political paradigm, these take place principally through books, which expose people to an idea at length and in depth; and in schools, where such books are studied and discussed, especially universities. If we are interested in the reconstruction of the paradigm that has served as the foundation for Israel’s existence, that’s where the work is going to have to be done.

See: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas S. Kuhn

HT CC

Global Warming Activists And The Rising Sea Level Lie

One type of Environmental Scientific Charlatanism is to hype Anthropogenic Global Warming as a cause for some notable environmental change when another far less frightening and very natural cause might actually be the source.

We can see an example of this in a report on the sinking of New Moore Island.

See: New Moore Island Sinks From Global Warming

New Moore Island has been sinking for 30 years. However, the island itself, known as New Moore, is no more. In fact, it's now completely submerged under water.

Scientists used satellite imagery to prove their point. Moreover, sea patrols have confirmed that New Moore Island has sunk. Now the Global Warming experts say it's because of Climate Change.

However, the fact is, the island has been sinking dramatically during the past decade. Global Warming experts claim that the sea level is rising in accordance with rising temperatures. The island is about two square miles.

The island itself could be the first of many islands to soon disappear. Reports say that around 10 other islands are at risk of being submerged by rising waters. It is either caused by rising sea levels or the island itself might be sinking in mud.

Note how even the headline for article at this link declares Global Warming to be the cause of the island's sinking.

It is bullshit. More to the point, it is a lie.

There is something very interesting about New Moore Island that is alluded to only in passing in that article, as if it shouldn't be given much thought. The key to understanding what is happening to New Moore Island gets an oblique half sentence mention in the fifth paragraph of the article " . . .or the island itself might be sinking in mud." In another half sentence, several paragraphs later, the island's “geological instability” is sited as the reason why neither India nor Bangladesh established permanent settlements on the island.

Sinking in mud?

Geological instability?

The article gives the truth of the mater the most casual and off hand treatment. Global Warming is hyped hysterically but the importance of the geological makeup of the island and its role in the the life of the island is all but ignored.

New Moore Island is a sandbar. The Island is made up of alluvial silts and muds flowing out of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta. In other words, it is not the kind of island that should be thought of as a stable land mass. New Moore Island is just sinking under its own weight, which is within the norm for sandbars. Sandbars are by their very nature, ephemeral structures, existing for fleeting geological moments at the whims of nature's tides, waves, winds and storms.

While the sea level itself may also rise and fall of its own accord, it would be irresponsible if not outright ignorant or deliberately deceptive to claim that the sinking of New More Island was primarily a product of Global Warming and a concurrent rise in the sea level.

It shouldn't take a rocket scientists to figure out that if the sinking of New More Island was solely due to global warming induced rising seal levels, we should be able to see the equivalent sinking of coastlines all around the world. That no such corresponding global coastline sinking is occurring all over the world should have given the writer and the editors responsible for that terrible piece of journalism a bit of pause. It didn't.

They left the truth out there to just sink in the mud.

See Also: Bengal Island succumbs to global warming nonsense – AP gets nutty over the loss of a sandbar
Wattsupwiththat critiques another news article on the same subject. They also have pictures and charts on the subject.

See Also:AP Lies: Island Sunk By Global Warming
Sweetness & Light goes after the same AP article as Wattsupwiththat.

Rushing The Sale. A Look At An Environmentalist Propaganda Technique.

With the Cap and Trade bill comming up again, there will be many examples of crude environmentalist propoganda to highlight.

Here is one that claims that Anthropogenic Global Warming will cause the sea-levels to rise and destroy a coastal city.

See:How global warming might transform Vancouver’s shoreline

Rather typical of one of the most dishonest forms of Anthropogenic Global Warming propaganda, the article starts out by suggesting a picture of a well known place transformed (as if in an instant) into a devastated landscape of watery ruin. Many of these propaganda scare stories use this technique to induce an emotional response in the reader.

Granville Island, Kitsilano and Jericho beaches, the Stanley Park seawall, the Downtown Eastside, and the port all help to define Vancouver in the eyes of the world. But try to imagine what this city would look like if all of these local landmarks were underwater.

Ridiculous, you say? Perhaps. But it’s not so far-fetched if all of Greenland’s glaciers were to disappear, causing sea levels to rise—and if Vancouver didn’t take steps to ameliorate the effects.

Of course it is ridicules. It is an extreme picture painted in the most frightening and immediate terms possible in order to rush people into accepting a ready made prescription.

The AGW activist have a solution readymade. You are to transform your life, from everything that you are allowed to do and even everything that you are allowed to think. You are to surrender your body and soul to their benevolent guidance.

If you resist or ask troubling questions, you will be called a “denier,” akin to the insane people that deny the holocaust. With this type of rhetorical slight of hand, they will try to make troublesome AGW doubters into social and political pariahs.

Asking questions will not be allowed in the beautiful future they offer.

"Serve the state" you will be told. "Be happy. Surrender all of your cares and worries to those that can better manage you and the world around you."

And in whispers they will ask - (You aren't a “denier” are you?)

~~~

Climate change is real. The planet's climate is not static. It never has been. It never will be.

AGW is politics. It is a scheme to frighten enough people with something as natural as the rising and the setting of the sun to force the whole world's population to surrender to statist totalitarianism.

It's a Brave New World that the AGW activist are going to bring about. Their paradise of universal totalitarian chattel slavery will do nothing to freeze the climate. The climate can't be made static. Only the mad and the evil would try to shape people's lives on the AGW premise that the climate can or even should be made static. Unfortunately, there are mad and evil people in the world.

A Climate Alarmist's /dev/null Debate Strategy

After the alarmists have politicized the science in a way that would make even Trofim Denisovich Lysenko blush, some are arguing that the best way for them to deal with those that have doubts about the credibility of AGW science is to just refuse to discuss it with them in public forums.

See: How Best to Debate Climate Deniers on TV? Simple: Don't.

The solution to the climate debate crisis is simple.

Since the Peer Review process is no longer credible, open source the data. If the data can stand on its own, it will stand. If it can't, it won't.

The email leak from the CRU proved that the much of the data and the whole of the Peer Review process must be reexamined and reformed.

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Disproving The Nightmare Lie Of AGW

The Lysenkoism of Anthropogenic Global Warming will continue until like a Vampire, a wooden stake is driven through its heart.

See: The AGW Smoking Gun By Gary Thompson

The science behind the AGW hypothesis is that increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere (that humans produce by burning fossil fuels) will block more outgoing long-wave IR radiation (OLR) from exiting the atmosphere and thereby warm the surface. It is well-known that IR radiation causes CO2 molecules to vibrate, but only at very specific wavelengths (wavelengths are the distances between peaks of each wave), and that wavelength is 15µm. (Fifteen µm means that each wavelength crests at a distance of 15 millionths of a meter.) As was discussed above, this vibration of the molecule causes it to heat and then radiate IR radiation back toward the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth. If the solar activity is taken to remain constant, more CO2 in the atmosphere will trap more of the OLR, and thus cause a net heating of the planet.

So what type of experiment could be performed to test this AGW hypothesis? If there were satellites in orbit monitoring the emission of OLR over time at the same location, then OLR could be measured in a very controlled manner. If, over time, the emission of OLR in the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs decreases over time, then that would prove the AGW hypothesis (i.e., that OLR is being absorbed by CO2 and heating the planet instead of being emitted from the atmosphere). But what if, over time (say, over thirty years), the emissions of OLR wavelengths that CO2 absorb remained constant? That would disprove the hypothesis and put the AGW argument to bed.

As luck would have it, that experiment has actually been performed! Three journal papers report the data from three monitoring satellites that have measured the OLR of 1997 and 2006 and compared those measurements to 1970, and they are located here, here, and here.

HT to PaladinPhil and JCM of CC


~~~

(Carthago delenda est!)

The peer review process needs to be reformed.

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Everything must be be out in the open and available for all to see.

Environmentalists And The Change In The Climate

The environment for the Climate Change Alarmist is changing. More and more their critics are likening them to Chicken Little, or the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Unfortunately for them, those criticism are very apt.

See: Climate turning against kooky alarmists

The latest revelation is that there's been no significant warming for 15 years. One prominent climate scientist has acknowledged the current warming period may be no hotter than the medieval warming era (800 to 1300 A.D.) when the world lived green with nary a SUV or industrial smokestack around.

The devastating Hurricane Katrina of 2005 was cited as the harbinger of killer storms to come, spawned by a warming planet. Then came this winter's record snowstorms. Now the climate alarmists lecture us that one season's weather tells us nothing about climate change.

Actually, they've gone further to claim that the cold weather mess is in fact a product of a hotter globe. Their cause has come to resemble religion more than science -- it explains everything! One British Internet site, www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm, offers a list of articles linking global warming to a whole catalog of woes -- from the conflict in Darfur to the deadly 2007 Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse to more potent dope from poppies to higher waves off the Pacific Northwest coast to a boom in kitten litters in Toronto to the prevalence of acne.

It is not hard to predict that we will see more commentary like this in the future.

Former IPCC Chairman: ‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’

Professor Watson, a former IPCC Chairman, is calling for an investigation of what happened with the IPCC report. Professor Watson points out that that the errors are just too one sided to be easily excused as simple mistakes.

See UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chief
‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’

Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.

The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.

The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

[Emphasis is mine - Syrah]

The "why" of it all is multifaceted. From the highly political nature of how Academia receives funding for research projects to the narcissistic desire of many in the environmental movement to save the world. The temptation of the dark side became too great for many of the well intentioned people in the environmental and climate sciences to resist.

They meant well. It is very important to understand that. They really did and really do want what is best. The did not wake one day and decide to be villains or monsters. Many fell into it unwittingly and with the best of intentions and the noblest of goals. They became caught up in something bigger than themselves, with their social and their financial lives caught up in a maelstrom of compounding errors and narcissistic conceits that became ever more impossible and dangerous to escape.

Much of their data was good and they could and did take refuge in that. Unfortunately, much of their data was just dead wrong, plain missing or even totally faked. Unsurprisingly, their conclusions suffered miserably from their impossible reality.

I recall being lectured as a young student of science about the sins of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. He was a man who began with the best of intentions, the noblest of goals, and he was also terribly wrong. His error led to the deaths and imprisonments of those that challenged his ideas. His ideas had become the "settled science" of the party and were enforced by the guns and the bludgeons of the state.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko's ideas became the scientific "consensus" of his nation. That consensus did not make his ideas any less wrong. That consensus did not prevent people from starving or from being shot or from being imprisoned because they were wrong.

The horror of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko's sins are truly monumental.

Every scientist and probably every politician should bow their heads in prayer every day, earnestly beseeching whatever God they pray to, that they do not become so full of themselves that they end up committing the same sins as Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.

~~~

(Carthago delenda est!)

The peer review process needs to be reformed.

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Everything must be be out in the open and available for all to see.

Professor Jones: for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The foundations of the AGW movement has taken another serious blow, this time, one delivered by one of their principles.

See Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

It has all been nothing but bafflegab and flumadiddle designed to help the power mad fleece the public treasuries. Tons and tons of money have been burned to foment this fraud. Countless laws and regulations have been passed and enforced to prevent something that mankind can neither start nor stop.

And it had all the scientific credibility of the Piltdown Man.

The peer review process needs to be reformed. (Carthago delenda est!)

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Everything must be be out in the open and available for all to see.

The IPCC, Sea Levels and Flooding - An Underlying Credibility Issue

The IPCC is acknowledging that they erred when they stated that 55% of the Netherlands is below sea level.

See U.N. climate panel admits Dutch sea level flaw

The 2007 report included the sentence: "The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea level rise and river flooding because 55 percent of its territory is below sea level."

"A preliminary analysis suggests that the sentence discussed should end with: 'because 55 percent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding'," the IPCC note said.

So what drove the need to have the original erroneous sentence in the initial IPCC report?

Was it included because like the Himalayan Glacier Melt farce, it was meant to advance a political agenda?

Given all of the other problems that the IPCC report has been shown to have, given the revelations from the CRU email dump that brought to light the attempts to manipulate data and rig the peer review process, how can we believe that it was anything other than politics?

The whole peer review process needs to be reformed. No more secret data. No more secret software. If they can't tell us how they arrived at their conclusions including showing us the raw data and the underlying programing that they used to derive them, then they should not be taken anymore seriously then we should take the Discovery Institute "Intelligent Design" creationist.

Its time to scrap the IPCC in its entirety and start from scratch with data and programing that they can show us.

IPCC's African Rainfall Reduction Claims Prove Unsupportable.

The IPCC report continues to fail under scrutiny.

See Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed 'Glaciergate' by commentators.

Someone should remind all of the responsible persons involved in putting together the now much-discredited IPCC report of the old tale about the little boy who cried wolf. The story ends badly for all involved, except for he wolf. The wolf does alright. But the boy, the sheep, and the villagers, not so well.

An Example Of How Climate Change Hysteria Hurts Everyone

Soil erosion is a very serious problem. As the world's population increases, the importance of good soil conservation practices increases in pace.

The US had an early attention getting experience with why good soil management is essential. The Great Dust Bowl was impossible to ignore. We learned a lot from it. There is still more that we can learn to help us protect and better manage our soils.

However, confusing soil science with the discredited AGW hysteria will do more to hurt the advancement of good soil management practices than it will do to help it.

See: Britain facing food crisis as world's soil 'vanishes in 60 years

Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.

Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said.

[Emphasis is Mine]

Due to climate change?

Bullshit.

Bad farming practices yes. Climate change? Give me a fucking break.

This is the kind of bullshit that discredits science. Every kind of environmental calamity that is discussed, some idiot comes along and claims that "climate change" is the cause or part of the cause.

In this case, climate change is not a factor. Deep tilling and the failure to let a field lay fallow after a season can destroy the soil. Rotating crops and protecting the soil from the wind can do a lot to remedy this very serious problem. Fretting over a non-existent climate crises won't help at all and will actually make the problem worse by distracting people and resources away from things that could actually help.

Blaming soil erosion on climate change? When the "scientist" include that drivel in these kinds of reports, they make a mockery of science, or at the very least, make it appear as if they can't really be taken seriously. If they are including climate change in this kind of report without any real or credible evidence, then how can we trust the other claims that they make in their report?

Soil erosion is a very serious issue. It should be discussed and treated by the scientific and political community as a serious issue. Attempting to tie soil erosion to anthropogenic climate change is dangerous and stupid.

Dutch Call "BullShit" On IPCC Report

The hits just keep coming. Holland issued another blow to the IPCC report, challenging the grossly exaggerated claim it made that more than half of the country was below sea level.

See:Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level -- 26 percent -- to the area threatened by river flooding -- 29 percent -- Vallaart said.

"They should have been clearer," Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

The CRU Email dump has unraveled the IPCC report. The more that the report is critically examined, the more crap that is found in it.

The CRU Email dump and the consequent unraveling of the IPCC is proof that the whole of the "Peer Review" process needs to be reexamined. At present, "Peer Reviewed," means squat.

The Secular Religion Of Global Warming

Michael Barone has an amusing article in the Boston Herald.

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many elites were taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty.

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we pollute), ritual (must recycle), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from any flimsy source.

The Global Warmist are on a quest to save the world. Anything that stands in the way of their quest to save the world threatens the world, even it is just data that does not conform to their preconceived notions. For the Global Warmist, the stakes are so high, there is so much at risk, they cannot permit the inconvenient truth to stand in their way.

They believe with a powerful belief. Their Crusade is not yet over. For them, these recent setbacks are minor. They also have many willing allies in the government and in the media that have profited in both power and money from the global warming hysteria of the last three decades. They will give each other succor and rejoin the fray with even more bitterness and hatred for "the evil" that has set them back.

It is incumbent upon us, the enemies of the anti-human luddites of the environmental movements, to heed the ancient old ways of battle. When you have shattered your enemies ranks and knocked your enemy to the ground, when you have winded him, shriven his shield, broken his sword, and splintered his lance, you keep hitting him. Do not stop till he is dead. You can show your enemies mercy only after they have fully and completely surrendered, not before, and even then, you must not be too eager to let the hurts they have caused you to be forgotten.

Fun times.

Hat tip: Kosh'sShadow at Correspondence Committee

NASA Probe To Study The Importance And Role Of Sun Storms

NASA is embarking on what will be an interesting mission. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) probe is set to launch in less then two weeks time. The probe will observe disturbances in the sun's atmosphere.

Barbara Thompson, project scientist, said: “It is Nasa’s first weather mission and it aims to characterise everything on the sun that can impact on the Earth and near Earth.

“We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts.

The Sun is our planet's primary source of heat. This mission has the potential to reveal more information about our planets unstable climate then any study involving tree rings ever has.

4 billion years of an unstable climate before SUV's were even invented is nothing to sneeze at. It is good that NASA will begin to look at our climate's primary driver, the sun, with an eye to how it can affect things here on earth.

Space Exploration For India: All Systems Are Go!

Here in the US, at the direction of Democrat President Obama, our nation is scaling back our efforts to reach for the stars.

India, on the other hand, is stepping it up.

From CNN World: India plans manned space mission in 2016

New Delhi, India (CNN) -- Indian researchers have announced plans to send their astronauts to space in 2016.

The cost of the proposed mission is estimated at $4.8 billion, said S. Satish, spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

Studies have begun on the design of the crew capsules that will be used to put a pair of astronauts 300 kilometers aloft for seven days, he said. The project budget has been sent for federal approval, he added.

While the US is saddled with politicians launching ever larger and ever more intrusive government programs, India is taking steps to become a space faring nation.

The race to the stars will not go those driven to shakedown the banks. It will go to those that see man's place among the stars.

Bogus Claims Were Included In The IPCC Report To Advance Political Agendas

More proof that politics trumped science in the UN's IPCC report.

From MailOnline: Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

This is just the tip of the iceberg glacier.

The IPCC report and every other outrageous environmental claim will begin to be rightly challenged. Good science will stand. Politicized science will fail.

UN IPCC Report Included Unsupportable Linkage Between Natural Disasters And AGW

Another indication that the UN IPCC report was a sloppy con from the word go.

TimesOnLine: UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

The AGW con-artists needed the linkage so it was included in the report. They effectively said "fuckall" to the demands and rigors of science because for them, the authority and prestige of the UN IPCC report is just a cover and a stage-prop for their grifting.

(PS - Its the Sun that you guys need to be looking at. You know, that great big energy pump in the sky. Its kind of important.)

Tuesday, Massachusetts will elect a new Senator.

So far, Scott Brown, the Republican, looks likely to win in a landslide. A big landslide.

Elected Democrats are predictably freaking out. Well that they should. This race may be a bellwether for the next ten years.

If the establishment Democrat, Martha Coakley, loses big to a Republican in Massachusetts, then no Democrat will feel that their seat is “safe” anywhere. If a Democrat can lose “Ted Kennedy's seat,” then all bets are off on every Democrat “safe” seat.

If Coakley loses, and loses big, watch for a rebellion among elected Democrats who will realize that they could lose their cushy sinecures by being associated too closely with Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's flavor of politics.

The polls are all over the place. There are many reasons for this. The whole polling industry is struggling with some huge changes that they must come to grips with.

The primary problem is cellphones and cellphone only households.

If you would like a first hand anecdotal feel for how big of a problem cellphones present to the polling industry, ask the following question in the next large group that you are in. “How many of you no longer have a land-line phone and only have cellphones in your household?” If your group is made up largely of people under forty years of age, odds are that half to over half of them will be cellphone only households. This is very significant. It is a game changer in the polling business. It is also a number that is very likely to increase over the next ten years. In twenty years, land-line phones may be as anachronistic as Telegraph machines.

There are rules for calling cellphone sample that make it very expensive to work with. Mainly, you cannot use any kind of automated dialing method. If you are knowingly dialing on cellphone sample, you must hand dial the phone numbers.

Robo polls will miss cellphone only respondents. The results of a robo poll are ever more doubtful due to the fact that the robot dialed poll cannot account for the opinions of respondents that live in cellphone only households. (Texting may be a way around this problem. So far as I know, there are no rules against using automated systems to send out text messages to cellphones.[Where there is a will, there is a way - especially if there is money involved.])

When it comes down to the wire in regards to elections, I find that I am much more trustful of the punters then I am of the pollsters.

The punters ask a different question. They do not ask “Who will you vote for?” they ask “Who are you willing to bet good money, your money, on to win?” Its a question of knowledge, not of opinion. Which makes its a very different question. The results can be significantly different and potentially far more accurate.

Predicting elections was once something that the odds-makers dominated. Scientific telephone polling changed the game and allowed telephone pollsters to take that role away from the bookies. Now the game may be changing again, giving the advantage in predicting election outcomes back to the gamblers.

Take a look at Intrade and watch the election numbers as they come in Tuesday. Election Markets may be the way of things to come. Time will tell.

And these are very exciting and interesting times indeed.

Another AGW Hysteria Fraud Exposed.

More indications that you have to view Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) claims with a certain amount of skepticism.

From an article titled World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown at Times Online

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

It turns out that it was all just gum-flapping bullshit.

The old peer review process must be revised. No more secret data. No more secret programing. If they “can't” share their data and their sources, they should not be given the time of day.

HT: squatch at Correspondence Committee (See Post #20)

Its The Sun Stupid!

It may take some of the Anthropogenic Global Warming clowns a little while to accept that the sun dominates the climate cycles, but give them a little ice-age in the middle of their histrionics and they may have no other option.

From a report at Fox News:

Latif thinks the cold snap Americans have been suffering through is only the beginning. He says we're in for 30 years of cooler temperatures -- a mini ice age, he calls it, basing his theory on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the world's oceans.

We should be cautious however since Professor Mojib Latif is a major proponent of AGW. His track record is a little suspect.