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.

Zuckerman Versus Obama

Zuckerman is rumored to be considering a run for the Senate.

If he does, it looks like it will be a candidacy that is a reaction to Obama's extremism.

Read Zuckerman's own words: He's Done Everything Wrong

Obama’s ability to connect with voters is what launched him. But what has surprised me is how he has failed to connect with the voters since he’s been in office. He’s had so much overexposure. You have to be selective. He was doing five Sunday shows. How many press conferences? And now people stop listening to him. The fact is he had 49.5 million listeners to first speech on the economy. On Medicare, he had 24 million. He’s lost his audience. He has not rallied public opinion. He has plunged in the polls more than any other political figure since we’ve been using polls. He’s done everything wrong. Well, not everything, but the major things.

I don’t consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster.

One business leader said to me, “In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines.”

I’m very disappointed. We endorsed him. I voted for him. I supported him publicly and privately.

There is talk that if Zuckerman decides to run for the Senate, he will do so as a Republican or as an Independent.

I could respect Zuckerman as an Independent. I would have a hard time trusting him as a Republican. He really should run as a Democrat. The Democrats need a few sane people in their Party. Mort could help them reduce the influence of the kooks in the Democrat Party and still stay true to his political ideals.

Is Zuckerman A Republican Or A Democrat?

He will have to decide if he is going to run for the Senate.

See Zuckerman Said to Mull Run for U.S. Senate

Mr. Zuckerman, 72, is known as a Democrat, , but if he runs, it would likely be as a Republican or independent, to avoid participating in a costly primary.

In doing so, Mr. Zuckerman would be following the path of his close friend and fellow media executive, Michael R. Bloomberg, who switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican to run for mayor of New York City.

What is he?

I do not like candidates that choose their political party affiliation by sticking a wet finger to the wind. They are suspect from the start. They cannot be trusted. One day they may be with you, the next they are against you.

Enableing Savagery.

The following is a security-cam video of a savage beating that took place in Seattle a few weeks ago.

Warning. This is brutal.



This is what an emasculated culture devolves into.

The thugs become the De Facto rulers of the city.

The guards will not protect you. The bystanders will do nothing, especially if there are guards their doing nothing. Guards in uniform. Guards looking all the world as if they are there to prevent this kind of savagery from taking place. Guards guarding nothing.

The victim of the attack in the video thought that the guards could protect her.

See: Girl, 3 men charged in tunnel attack

The 15-year-old girl who was beaten and robbed in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel as security personnel watched said she had headed straight for the guards because she thought they would help her.

"I went to the security and told them that these kids were trying to jump me," the girl wrote in a statement to King County sheriff's investigators. "I know that I am about to get jumped and I am hanging around the guards to try and get protection. ... I thought the security guards would defend me."

But the girl was wrong.

The guards were following "policy."

According to the Sheriff's Office and King County Metro, the guards followed policy by not intervening in the Jan. 28 attack. Instead, they alerted transit officials, who summoned police.

The attack has prompted Metro to discuss contract changes with Olympic Security Services, whose guards were in the tunnel during the attack. It also has sparked widespread anger at the guard policy and with the suspects accused of the attack and robbery.

It was policy? Policy to not intervene?

What kind of madness puts such a policy in place?

What kind of madness requires adverse publicity from a video like this being released to make a change to that policy?

Do you believe that if this video had not been released that any change would have been made to their "policy."

Madness.

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.

Audi, Eco-Nazis and the Green Police

Audi fucked-up.

You have to wonder what would posses a German corporation to sponsor an ad like this.



The Green Police?

Fucking Eco-Nazis!

Towards A More Productive And Useful Understanding Of North Korea

Christopher Hitchens reviews B.R. Myers' The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.

Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.

I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more "total" than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state.

When Christopher Hitchens is good, he is very good. His review of B.R. Myers' book, flavored with his own personal in person observations of North Korea, make it clear that the oft ignored and shunned little crazy kingdom of North Korea may be far too dangerous to just ignore and shun.

I think I will head on over to the bookstore this weekend.

Hat Tip To FinallyFree at Correspondence Committee

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.

Barrack Obama, Reckless Lending, The State Of The Union and Punishing Banks.

There are lots of people out there taking the President's State Of The Union Speech to pieces. It lends itself easily to that task. It really is a stinking pile.

The part that I would like to highlight is a few of President Obama's comments about Banks.

Our most urgent task upon taking office was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis.

The Banks are to blame?

Look, I am not interested in punishing banks. I'm interested in protecting our economy. A strong, healthy financial market makes it possible for businesses to access credit and create new jobs. It channels the savings of families into investments that raise incomes. But that can only happen if we guard against the same recklessness that nearly brought down our entire economy.

Barrak Obama's interests in banks goes way back. Punishing banks is not a new thing to him. I suspect that from a certain point of view, he really isn't particularly interested in “punishing” banks per say, but punishing them is not a new thing for him.

From Forbes.com: A Poisonous Cocktail by Peter Schweizer

Obama's battle against banks has a long history. In 1994, freshly out of Harvard Law School, he joined two other attorneys in filing a lawsuit against Citibank, the giant mortgage lender. In Selma S. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, the plaintiffs claimed that although they had ostensibly been denied home loans "because of delinquent credit obligations and adverse credit," the real culprit was institutional racism. The suit alleged that Citibank had violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Housing Act and, for good measure, the 13th Constitutional Amendment, which abolished slavery. The bank denied the charge, but after four years of legal wrangling and mounting legal bills, elected to settle. According to court documents, the three plaintiffs received a total of $60,000. Their lawyers received $950,000.

Barrack Obama has been a major player in our current banking problem for a long time.

He is offering the people of the United States solutions to a problem that can substantively be laid at his feet. It would be unfair to lay the blame exclusively on Barrack Obama. Lots of people were helping “punish” the banks. He was just one of many.

And now he offers to help fix the problem.

A problem that he helped create.

What a guy.

Fox News Wins In Trustworthyness.

Reported at Politico: Poll: Fox is most trusted name in news

Fox is the most trusted television news network in the country, according to a new poll out Tuesday.

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Ouch.

That has to sting.

Worse yet, Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a Democrat affiliated polling company.

I have some concerns about the survey because it was a robot-poll, which typically excludes cell phone only households. Cell phone only households are a large and growing minority of eligible respondents. Excluding cell phone only households from a poll of this type can result in some misleading numbers.

PPP is a Democrat affiliated polling company known for its extreme partisanship. These are the same yucks that thought it would be fun to ask "Do you think that George Bush is the Antichrist?" and "Do you think that Barak Obama is the Antichrist?" and then report results that were almost identical as a slam against Republicans. In a survey that acknowledges a +/-3.9% margin of error, a 2 point difference is no difference at all. These are the kind of snotty hacks that give polling a bad name.

Beau Biden Decides Against Running For Senate

Vice President Joe Biden's son, Beau Biden, has decided to just run for re-election as Delaware's Attorney General instead.

From Fox News:GOP Encouraged to Pick Up Senate Seat as Beau Biden Decides Not to Follow Dad

"Clearly, Beau Biden's decision not to run for the United States Senate represents a major recruiting setback for national Democrats, who have been counting on his candidacy to keep the vice president's former seat in Democrat control," Reed said. "As we saw in Massachusetts last week, voters clearly stated that these seats belong to the people - not to either political party or dynasty."

Democrats on Tuesday saw the seat formerly held by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts fall to Republican Scott Brown. The win raised questions about Democrats' ability to hold onto seats once thought to be reliable for their party.

This is not good for the Democrats. It makes it look as if they see defeat in their future when their more promising candidates give up on what would have been easy wins.

I was looking forward to a Beau Biden race. What little I had heard about him made it sound like he was one of the very few Democrats that wasn't a stark raving loon.

Hat tip/ design czar @ Correspondence Committee

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.)

The New York Times Exposes A Blogger Suffering From A Self-Inflicted Flame-War

Many of us knew that the New York Times would be publishing a feature article about a certain blogger this month. That his melodramatic flouncing away from “the right” would attract the attention of the New York Times was no surprise. What was surprising was how thorough the New York Times article was. It wasn't the "puff piece" that we had expected that blogger to get.

Johnathon Dee of the New York Times gets much right about how the fracas spun out of control.

It was a kind of orgy of delinking, an intentionally set brush fire meant to clear the psychic area around Johnson and ensure that no one would connect him to anyone else, period, unless he first said it was O.K. No one would define Johnson’s allegiances but Johnson. Of course, much of this was accomplished by the very methods he felt so threatened by: a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership. It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore.

I sure don't. I won't link to him. I don't even like having his or his blog's name mentioned here in these quotes.

The following paragraph is essential to understanding how that place devolved into what it has become. I am very surprised that Johnathon Dee included it. I am grateful that he did.

No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.

That place got freaky weird.

Cults and abusive spouses threaten their victims with being cast-out. They will tell their victims, and it will be echoed by their enablers, that they would be nothing without their leader/spouse. They are also slowly but then thoroughly isolated from friends and relatives outside the group/family. Even speaking to or associating with casual acquaintances or strangers on the outside is discouraged and sometimes even forbidden.

These are powerful tools of control. As you can see from what Johnathon Dee describes, those tools were evident in their use, even if their named intent was for something else. When these methods start out small and grow in their utilization over time, the victim may not even recognize that they are being manipulated in this way. They become like the frogs sitting in a pan of cool water with the heat set on low.

But . . .

This is the internet . . .

I would never have thought such relationships could be made on the web.

Now I am certain that they can.

I used to think that internet cults were an impossibility.

Now I believe that they are possible and even real.

Pres. Obama Is Nationalizing The Democrat 2010 Midterm Campaigns

Pres. Obama is assigning his 2008 Campaign manager, David Plouffe, to coordinate his parties campaigns accross the whole country.

Mr. Obama has asked his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, to oversee House, Senate and governor’s races to stave off a hemorrhage of seats in the fall. The president ordered a review of the Democratic political operation — from the White House to party committees — after last week’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, aides said.

This is a risky stratagy in that by running the Democrat's various 2010 campigns from the White-House, with Obama 2008 Campaign staffers, they will make the Midterm Elections de facto a referendum on Obama.

This does not mean that the Midterm Elections will be a cake walk for Republicans. Karl Rove explained a few weeks back how the Democrats think that they can retain and even potentialy gain power.

Mr. Obama can placate congressional Democrats by arguing that all that extra spending he has already crammed through can cover their spending desires at least through the 2010 congressional elections.

The Democrats believe that campaigns can be bought. They are banking on it this next go-round.

The Democrat Rank and File Rebellion Begins tonight.

It may sputter and die quickly or it could result in Reid and Pelosi being tossed out of their leadership posts on their asses.

A political office is a pretty cushy job. Elected Democrats now understand that their once "safe" seats, even the safest of them as were the Massachusetts Senate seats, are now all at risk because of Obama's, Pelosi's and Reid's extremist leadership over the last 365 days.

From Politico: The fallout: Democrats rethinking health care bill

Republican Scott Brown’s upset win in Massachusetts on Tuesday threatened to derail hopes of passing a health reform bill this year, as the White House and Democratic leaders faced growing resistance from rank-and-file members to pressing ahead with a bill following the Bay State backlash.

Democratic leaders and the White House insisted ahead of the vote that they aren’t preparing to desert health care. They admit they’ll have to come up with a new strategy to win passage but said they didn’t want to allow one Senate race to take them off course on the president’s top legislative item for the year.

This was not just "one Senate race" and the Democrats know it. It is a Republican trouncing a Democrat out of the one of the safest Democrat seats in the country largely due to the Democrats arrogant and base lust for power.

Tonight, the Democrats got their clock cleaned. They know it. They will try to play it down, but they all know the truth of it.

The Democrats will now show their true colors in how the deal with seating Senator Elect Brown.

If they play games and delay seating him, they will just make their naked malice and greed so plain that only the willfully blind will not see it.

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.

Can the New York Times Be Marketed Like Porn?

The New York Times will soon try a strategy that will reduce its readership and relevance, further accelerating its decline.

How?

They will try to charge you to read their articles.

This model does work for online porn. (It is pretty amazing that it does since so much Internet porn is available completely free of charge.)

The New York Times must think that their content will sell as well as porn. I think that they should keep their pants on.

News, for the most part, is not porn.

Most people will just begin to skip links to the NYT and to any other news organization that attempts this online subscription (Porn) model.

Display ads can still be seen in the off the rack "paper" newspapers. When people used to regularly read news printed on paper, display ads were profitable.

Then the Internet happened and print readership plummeted. Click-through ads were then touted and became the de facto norm for online advertising.

Click-through ads are stupid. Think about the long ago days of yore when you actually read a "paper" newspaper. There were ads all over the execrable thing were there not? Did you drop everything when you came across an advertisement about a product or service that interested you, pick up the phone and call or hop in your car to run out and buy it? No? No shit.

What on earth would make anyone think that such a model would then work for news-sites on the Internet?

Display ads in the paper and even the ads on television and radio worked on the concept of impressions. The idea was to use the ads to put the product brand or service brand in your mind for when you were actually ready to buy that type of product or service. The impression concept focused on shaping your opinion of which brand you would buy when you were ready to buy. There was no expectancy of an immediate customer response while you were reading through the newspaper.

While the Internet changed the way the news was delivered to the reader, it did not change the way the reader responded to display advertisements.

Display ads can be profitable online. Keep them simple. Sell them by the old impression model. Human psychology has not changed even if the news delivery medium has.

Leave the click-through ads for the adult content websites.

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)

A Compassionate Invasion?

From a Time Magazine article titled: The U.S. Military in Haiti: A Compassionate Invasion

The Obama Administration is doing things differently: Haiti, for all intents and purposes, became the 51st state at 4:53 p.m. Tuesday in the wake of its deadly earthquake. If not a state, then at least a ward of the state — the United States — as Washington mobilized national resources to rush urgent aid to Haiti's stricken people.

I wonder if these idiots understand what they are saying here. They are putting us in the position of being responsible for Haiti. Do they sling around their words like the meaningless guttural utterances of drunkards or do they really think that the US should become Haiti's owner?

Will Haiti Devolve Into A Mogadishu?

The Earthquake in Haiti is truly a catastrophe.

The number of dead may be innumerable. We will likely never really know the true number of causalities. In that kind of climate, the bodies must be disposed of quickly. There will not be time for careful counts.

The desperation of the survivors will soon be at a pitch. They are on the verge of losing what little ties they have to civilization. There are no police. There is no government. There are reports of armed gangs setting up road blocks to demand money and goods from relief trucks attempting to bring in emergency relief supplies. Armed shop keepers are attempting to protect their property from roving gangs of looters.

While there are some UN “Peace keepers” there in Haiti, individuals are left to fend for themselves against looters and thieves that would rob them of what they have left. Relief workers and even those driving truckloads of the dead off for disposal are being threatened and even killed while they attempt to do what little they can.

Sending US troops into this mix is problematic.

What will be their mission?

What will be their Rules Of Engagement(ROE)?

How can they bring law and order to that country without operating as an Army of Occupation? And most importantly to that question, do we have the will and courage as a nation to allow our troops to use the deadly force that will be necessary for them to use in order to bring Haiti back from the brink of anarchy.

Are we prepared for that first day that an American soldier has to kill a Haitian? What if he kills several, or if several troops get trapped and have to kill and wound a whole lot of them? Can we allow US troops to put down the Riots and Unrest that are likely to result in the days and weeks to come?

This is a very dangerous situation for us to be in.

It will get worse before it gets better.

Obama will have to be very careful if he is to avoid having Haiti become his Mogadishu.

Taxation Used As A Weapon

It didn't take long for the “Tax everything that moves and doesn’t move”* party to set its sights on taxing bonuses at 50%.

The initial proposal here is to tax bonuses paid out to bank executives for expressly punitive purposes. This is copy-cat to something that the socialist kleptomaniacs in the UK imposed on their bankers in December of 2009. (See Make Them Work for Free Dammit!)

Reported in The Hill.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) will introduce legislation that would impose a 50% tax on excessive bonuses at firms that received bailout funds.

The "Wall Street Bonus Tax Act" would apply only to bonuses over $50,000, and would use the tax revenue to support loans to small businesses.

Democrat Congresscritter Peter Welch's claim that the tax would be used “to support loans to small businesses” is pure bullshit. This is taxation being used as a weapon. It is just that simple.

~~~
*“The percentage of taxes on GDP (in Pakistan) is among the lowest in the world... We (the United States) tax everything that moves and doesn’t move, and that’s not what we see in Pakistan,” - Sec. Of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton(D) October 2009.

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.

A Jobless Recovery And A Devious Midterm Election Strategy

The new Unemployment Numbers are telling a grim tale.

From Bob Willis and Courtney Schlisserman at Bloomberg.com:

The so-called underemployment rate -- which includes part- time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want work but have given up looking -- rose to 17.3 percent in December from 17.2 percent.

The number of discouraged workers, those not looking for work because they believe none is available, climbed to 929,000 last month, the most since records began in 1994.

Normally, this kind of news would doom the Party in power to a Midterm Election rout. This next Midterm Election may well be an exception.

Watch for the Democrats to begin spending money like its going out of style as the Midterm Elections approach. The Stimulus moneys are still largely unspent. That will change as the election approaches. The Stimulus moneys were never meant to be spent to improve the economy, rather their purpose was to stimulate Democrat election chances in the midterms.

Karl Rove discusses this at the Wall Street Journal.

But Americans shouldn't be misled by the election year ploy: Mr. Obama rigged the game by giving himself plenty of room to look tough on spending. He did that by increasing discretionary domestic spending for the last half of fiscal year 2009 by 8% and then increasing it another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

So discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24% from President George W. Bush's last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion. That's a huge spending surge, even for a profligate liberal like Mr. Obama. The $102 billion spending increase doesn't even count the $787 billion stimulus package, of which $534 billion remains unspent.

Mr. Obama can placate congressional Democrats by arguing that all that extra spending he has already crammed through can cover their spending desires at least through the 2010 congressional elections.

This will be an interesting election cycle.

Gelb on Islam

There is an important article posted up at The Daily Beast by Leslie H. Gelb . The Daily Beast is notably left of center so the publication of Gelb's article there is all the more notable.

Of the terrorist killings and maimings that have taken place over the last three years, over 90 percent have been Muslim on Muslim, Shiite on Sunni, Sunni on Sunni, or Shiite on Shiite, with rare exceptions. Most of these slaughters have religious, cultural, and historical causes. But wherever the fanatics lodge themselves firmly in power, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, they will try to practice the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin. Their rule is the end of hope for women, the end of freedom for all, except themselves—and the institutionalization of corruption and cruelty, which they rationalize with their interpretation of the Koran. They’ve tried to impose totalitarianism in Iran, but haven’t succeeded so far—because the Iranian people have fought back. And if you listen to the fanatics’ rhetoric, they plan to move on to the rest of the world and apply the same principles. They are Muslim fanatics. The culprits are not Hasidic Jews running amok around the world or Tea-baggers bent on replanting Christianity among the heathen.

I think that Gelb still has a few misconceptions about Islam to work through, but he is looking at the problem of Islam with more thought than is usually found on the political left. For that he deserves our respect.

Gelb correctly takes American Political leaders on both the left and the right to task for their counterproductive avoidance of specifically identifying Muslims or Islam as the source of most terror attacks in the present world. He correctly blames "Political Correctness" for their failure to speak honestly about the problem.

Go to the link.

Read the whole article.

Car-B-Ques In France.

Here in the Puget Sound Region of Washington State, my neighbors set off Fireworks, banged on pans and shouted "Happy New Year" at the top of their lungs to any and all that would here them at midnight. For the most part, it was good and fairly uneventful celebration.

Not so good elsewhere.

From Crispian Balmer at Reuters.

It said police detained 549 people overnight, compared with 288 in 2009 New Year celebrations. However, unlike in previous years, there were no direct clashes between police and youths. "The few disturbances that did take place were brought swiftly under control," the ministry said in a statement.

"Youths." A curious euphemism. Something important is being left unsaid in that little article.

"move along, move along, nothing to see here, move along. . . ."

An Age of Plagues

There is time enough in the world to deal with the rise and fall of the sea. There is time enough in the world to work out a way to cope with desertification or coastal erosion.

But what about Drug Resistant plagues?

Will there be enough time?

The thing to keep in mind about plagues is that their behavior in the wild is that they infect at an exponential rate, not an additive rate. In other words, damn fast.

Here is how it will start. (From an AP article at Yahoo.)

Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.

I'm dying, he told himself, "because when you cough blood, it's something really bad."

Oswaldo is lucky. Well, that may or may not be so. If he has a relapse, he could end up starting a wild fire.

We may come to a point in our near future where the grim fate of Prince Prospero will be less the stuff of fables then a dark reality.

Conclusive Environmentalist Insanity

New Zealand authors, Robert and Brenda Vale, are promoting their book "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living."

From the AFP

PARIS (AFP) – Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

It is not a joke. These people are serious. Deadly serious.

They are representative of the logical conclusion of the environmental movement.

The Price Of Obama's Weakness

Iran smells weakness in Washington. They have been playing Obama and the EU states for idiots and cowards over their Nuclear Weapons development. Obama and the rest of the West have done nothing but whimper and whine.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to up the stakes. Iranian troops have marched into Iraq and have siezed an Oil Well in Iraqi Territory.

This is an act of war.

The Iranians are betting that Obama has no balls.

An official of the state-owned South Oil Co in the southeastern city of Amara, and west of the field, said: "An Iranian force arrived at the field early this morning (Friday).

"It took control of Well 4 and raised the Iranian flag even though the well lies in Iraqi territory," the official added.

What will Obama do?

Will he do anything more than just whimper and whine?

Russia thinks something is rotten in England

Climategate is getting noticed in the far corners of the world. Russian newspapers are discussing a report from a Moscow based organization that claims that Russian Climate data has been deliberately misrepresented by AGW proponents.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

You can't cherry pick your data. Doing so is politics, not science.

Hugo Chavez And The Essence Of The Climate Change Hysteria

Among the many world leaders that went to and spoke to the delegates of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, stood one angry ugly little man. This ugly little man spoke to the very essence of what drives the Climate Change Fear Mongers. He reveals that science and the climate are only magicians props that are used to gull the ignorant and the impressionable.

Then President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

Chavez, and those that gave him his thundering standing ovation, have at that moment stripped away their masks and revealed their real intent. There goal is to advance socialism and to end capitalism where ever it exists.

The Climate Change Fear Mongers know that the science of weather and climate change is full of so many variables and unknowns that it is easy for them to use it to gull the impressionable and to frighten the fearful. They aim to frighten people with the threat of global destruction in order to get them to give up their rights as free human beings.

It has been fairly effective.

That it is all a ugly hoax matters not a bit. Fear is what gives them power.

The Climate Change Fear Mongers have used half truths to hide huge lies. Climate Change is real. It is not something that you should be frightened of anymore than you should be frightened of the rising and the setting of the sun.

Climate Change is as natural to our earth's long existence as are the tides of the sea.

The Earths Climate will change. Mankind can not do anything to prevent that from happening.

In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Hank Morgan uses his knowledge of eclipses of the sun to fool the locals into believing that he has magical powers. Hank Morgan was good guy. The Climate Fear Mongers are not. But like the character in Mark Twain's fable, the Climate Fear Mongers hope to use something as natural and as normal as the changeable weather and the inevitable climate variability of our planet to frighten you and your friends into freely giving up your rights as a free person.

Do not be afraid.

Have the courage to live free.

Are we all Refusniks now?

Using soviet era political language to describe those that have refused to “go along” with the “stimulus” plan, the framing continues.

From an MSNBC article

Some refuseniks use terms like “Obama’s filthy, stinking stimulus,” and some have ambitions for higher office, but they insist their actions to reject the money are motivated by a sense of fiscal responsibility, not partisan politics.

. . . and the loudspeakers blare "Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia."

A Glossary Of Environmentalist Newspeak

The BBC has very helpfully provided a short glossary of Environmental Newspeak.

Here are three for your amusement.

Carbon footprint The amount of carbon emitted by an individual or organisation in a given period of time, or the amount of carbon emitted during the manufacture of a product.

Carbon intensity A unit of measure. The amount of carbon emitted by a country per unit of Gross Domestic Product.

Carbon leakage A term used to refer to the problem whereby industry relocates to countries where emission regimes are weaker, or non-existent.

Its kind of like Pirate Jargon - a code language of thieves and scum.

Make Them Work For Free Dammit!

The Left's war against the productive continues.

The UK has imposed an onerous tax on Bonuses paid out to bank executives and employees. (See this CNN Article.)

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- The odds aren't on its side, but a bonus tax could happen in the United States too.

The United Kingdom this week slapped a 50% tax on bankers' bonuses above about $40,000. The one-time tax will be paid by all banks with employees in the country. France pledged it would adopt the same policy, while Germany's chancellor called the idea "charming."

What would stop US Politicians from bringing this onerous tax to the US?

What would stop them from making it applicable beyond just bank employees?

Can you really trust them to not make it apply to you?

Palin versus Copenhagen

An OpEd in the Washington Post.

In fact, we're not the only nation whose people are questioning climate change schemes. In the European Union, energy prices skyrocketed after it began a cap-and-tax program. Meanwhile, Australia's Parliament recently defeated a cap-and-tax bill. Surely other nations will follow suit, particularly as the climate e-mail scandal continues to unfold.

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Hat tip to Jim In Virginia at the Correspondence Committee

It is not difficult to see why this woman is able to attract so much attention and respect on the Republican side of the isle. If she keeps this up, she will be a very serious contender for the top of the Republican ticket in the next Presidential election cycle.

(Send her some money. Shake up the weak side of the Republican party by supporting someone who is not afraid to take the fight to the Democrats.)

Snow In Sacramento - Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax Promoted In Copenhagen.

Snow in the Sacramento area is very rare. Fog, that is plentiful enough, snow is not.

From the Sacramento Bee

Snow fell all the way down to the valley, dusting low-lying Elk Grove, Galt and Stockton. Roseville and communities at similar elevation received measurable snowfall, while El Dorado Hills, Auburn, Placerville and beyond felt the weight of a full-blown snowstorm.

While on the other side of the world, (might as well be on a different planet), delegates from various government agencies and their NGO enablers are meeting in Copenhagen Denmark to work out more ways that they can empower themselves at your expense while using AGW as an excuse.

And they are living large while they party on your dime.

From the Telegraph

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

It seems that AGW fear mongering can provide a very comfortable lifestyle.

Lula's Unserious And Infantile Response To The Iranian Nuclear Weapons Problem.

While it might be breathtakingly stupid, it is all too commonplace on the left to argue that nations that have nuclear weapons should just crumple them up and toss them away in order to achieve a moral high ground when dealing with other nations that have or are attempting to develop Nuclear Weapons.

I suppose it is possible for someone to be so naive as to really believe that such a strategy is anything more than madness.

From the Chinese Xinhua News Agency

Brazilian president: only countries without nuclear weapons can criticize Iran

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Thursday that the countries which criticize Iran's nuclear program should get rid of their own nuclear weapons as well, according to news reaching here from Berlin.

In order to have the moral authority to criticize Iran, "It is important that those which have a (nuclear) arsenal let go of it, so that we will not have any more arguments," he said during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had said that negotiations with Iran were not progressing.

Lula, if the world was run only by Gandhi's, such a strategy might even work. Gandhi is dead. There was only one of him and he only had the success he had because the British did not have it in them to fight and kill several million Indians in order to maintain an expensive and unprofitable empire.

Either Lula is a fool of the first order or he is just bloviating out of his gaseous ass to make himself a figure on the world stage. Dangerous loons like Lula end up provoking wars that other people have to fight and die in.

If Lula is not willing to commit Brazilian troops to a land war in Iran, he should not be allowed anywhere near the discussions on Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program.

~

Hat tip to Correspondence Committee: C2 Saturday A.M. Bulldog Edition

The Copenhagen COP15 Climate Summit Screw Job

For some, the Copenhagen COP15 Climate Summit really is a screw job.

Copenhagen's city council in conjunction with Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to 'Be sustainable - don't buy sex'.

"Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes," the approach to hotels says.

Now, Copenhagen prostitutes are up in arms, saying that the council has no business meddling in their affairs. They have now offered free sex to anyone who can produce one of the offending postcards and their COP15 identity card, according to the Web site avisen.dk.

. . . um . . . ah . . .

Climate Gate RoundUp

Various stories about Climate Gate.

Coleman: Media Will Ignore Climategate Until They Hear ‘I Was Wrong’ (PJM Exclusive)

This simple three-word phrase is almost impossible to say because it changes everything. It is easiest for a child to say it — after all, a child isn’t expected to be right about things. But the higher you climb through life, the more difficult it becomes to admit being wrong. It would be devastating for a president of the United States to say it: “I was wrong.” And it may be about as difficult for an established, respected scientist who does research at an institution funded by millions of tax dollars.

That is why I don’t expect any of the scientists caught by the Climategate leak to admit “I was wrong” anytime soon.

~

The High Costs of Copenhagen
What Obama's pledge to reduce emissions by 83% would mean in practice.

When President Obama goes to the Copenhagen climate change summit next week, he is expected to once again declare that the U.S. will reduce its carbon emissions 83% by 2050. Even though no legally binding agreement is expected, what Mr. Obama says in Denmark will define the U.S. position in subsequent international negotiations. He will not say how the cuts will be accomplished. For Americans, the details are worth knowing.

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Climate Fog

As Barack Obama prepares to head to the climate change conference in Copenhagen, there are some distressing signs about the drift of public opinion on the issue.

A recent Washington Post/ABC poll found that the percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening at all has dropped eight points in just the past year. A comprehensive Pew poll released in October was even more worrying: only 57 percent of respondents think there's evidence of warming (down from 71 percent last year), and just 36 percent think it's because of human activity (down from 47 percent). The number of people who think it's a "very serious problem" declined to just 35 percent.

~

We-Don't-Want-to-Talk-About-It-Gate

Americans honor the courageous informant, the gutsy citizen who stands against the savagery of the profit-mongering conglomerate. Well, sometimes. It appears, believe it or not, that there are those who aren't religiously tethered to this sacred obligation.

For now -- because of revelations of the ClimateGate scandal, in which hacked e-mails revealed discussions among top climate scientists about the manipulation of evidence -- Phil Jones, head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain, has stepped down from his position. Michael Mann, architect of the famous "hockey stick" graph, is now under investigation by Pennsylvania State University. Similar inquiries should follow.

~

Tainted science
Climate-change research fraud is an outrage

This editorial page has accepted the predominant view of the scientific community that global warming is occurring partly because of mankind’s industrial activity, specifically the release of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere. This view was strongly buttressed by a March 2007 editorial board interview with climate change experts Tony Haymet and Richard C.J. Somervill of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who laid out a comprehensive view of the scientific case for global warming and the risks it posed to civilization.

But after the events of recent weeks, we have deep doubts about at least one assertion of Haymet’s: that climate researchers operate in “a very open community.” Instead, the recent leak of thousands of e-mails to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia in England, the world’s most influential climate research center, showed something else entirely.

The e-mails described systematic manipulation of data to promote conventional wisdom on global warming and of trying to marginalize or harm scientists with contrary theories. They spoke of deleting e-mails, documents and raw data that were the target of public records requests, in apparent violation of British law.

~

Big Costs Are Hurdle to Climate Pact
Many Countries Agree to the Idea of Cutting Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, But They Are Sharply Divided Over How to Fund It

BRUSSELS -- In the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference, countries from China to Singapore have pledged cuts to their greenhouse-gas emissions.

One question still lurks unanswered: Who is going to pay for it?

Cutting carbon costs money. Factories must be retrofit and industries must be prodded to buy more-expensive green technology. Estimates for the annual tab in developing countries vary widely, but could reach €100 billion ($150 billion) by 2020, and poorer nations are insisting their richer brethren pick up the bulk of it.

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UN panel promises to investigate leaked 'climategate' e-mails

The United Nations panel on climate change has promised to investigate claims that scientists at a British university deliberately manipulated data to support the theory of man-made global warming.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the allegations raised by leaked e-mails in the so-called "climategate" controversy were too serious to ignore.

"We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it," he told BBC Radio 4's The Report programme. "We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail."

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White House Pushes Back on Climate Change Email Controversy

President Obama's science adviser, Dr. John Holdren, faced a barrage of questions yesterday from Republican Members of Congress about a series of hacked emails at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit that climate change skeptics have seized upon as evidence that the whole concept of climate change is a hoax.

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Webb warns Obama on Copenhagen trip

President Barack Obama should be wary of committing the U.S. to any binding climate standards at a global conference this month without congressional input, one senator warned.

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) sent a letter to the president late last week warning Obama against agreeing to any binding climate change agreement during a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this month.

"I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed upon at the upcoming [conference]," Webb wrote to Obama.

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Rep. Issa: Obama's refusal to investigate 'Climategate' emails is 'unconscionable'

The U.N.'s decision this week to investigate whether some of its climate change research had been manipulated constitutes a "direct rebuke" of the Obama administration, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Friday.

The White House's unwillingness to open a similar inquiry could now only be characterized as "a sad abdication of their responsibility to ensure that U.S. policies are not driven by corrupted science and data," the congressman added.

“The very integrity of the report that the Obama administration has predicated much of its climate change policy has been called into question and it is unconscionable that this administration and Congress is willing to abdicate responsibility of uncovering the truth to the United Nations," explained Issa, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

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Day Fourteen and Counting
Bozell Defends Networks’ Silence on ClimateGate:“Maybe They Just Don’t Know”

Alexandria, VA – For the fourteenth straight day, the three broadcast networks have failed to report on the great and growing ClimateGate scandal on their weekday morning or evening news programs. How to explain this?

Perhaps it is that ABC, NBC and CBS have not yet heard of the story, despite two weeks of non-stop reporting on and discussion of ClimateGate in a whole host of media outlets.

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Parliamentary Speaker: Climate debate derailed?
The Speaker of the Danish Parliament has issued a damning criticism of the climate debate, saying politicians gullibly turn theories into facts.

As the world prepares to converge on Copenhagen for the COP15 Climate Summit, Denmark’s Speaker of Parliament has expressed serious doubts as to the way in which the climate debate has developed.

“The problem is that lots of people go around saying that the climate change we see is a result of human activity. That is a very dangerous claim,” Parliamentary Speaker and former Finance Minister Thor Pedersen (Lib) tells DR.

“Unfortunately I seem to experience that scientists say: ‘We have a theory’ – then that crosses the road to the politicians who say: ‘We know’. Who can be bothered to hear a scientist who says ‘I have a theory’ when politicians go around saying ‘I know’” Thor Pedersen says

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Take back Al Gore's Oscar, 2 Academy members demand in light of Climategate

No, it wouldn't do anything for the environment.

But two Hollywood conservatives (yes, there are some) have called upon the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to rescind the prestigious, profitable gold Oscar statuette that it gave ex-Vice President Al Gore et al two years ago for the environmental movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

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Academy — Take Back Gore’s Oscar!

Los Angeles, CA — Today, Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd, both members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Oscar nominees, called on the Academy to rescind Al Gore’s Oscar in light of the Climategate revelations.

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Researcher: NASA hiding climate data

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."

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Copenhagen targets not tough enough, says Al Gore

Even if a deal is reached at the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen next week it will only be the first step towards the far more radical cuts that are needed in global carbon emissions, Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, told The Times last night.

Mr Gore said that to avoid the worst ravages of climate change world leaders would have to come together again to set more drastic reductions than those now planned.

“Even a final treaty will have to set the stage for other tougher reductions at a later date,” he said. “We have already overshot the safe levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

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India will not sign binding emission cuts-minister

NEW DELHI, Dec 3 (Reuters) - India will not accept a legally binding emission cut nor a peak year of carbon emissions at the global climate talks in Copenhagen, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday.

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A Few Good Scientists
You want the truth? You can't understand the truth!

You do not understand the first thing about climate research. Man-made global warming is settled science. Disaster is imminent. We know this. It is a fact. We don’t waste time on studies that say otherwise, the same way we don’t waste time on studies that assert that the earth is flat. We are very smart people, and when we say something is so, you should just accept it.

So you think what is in those emails is important? Well, what exactly do you know? Do you see the white lab coats we wear? That color symbolizes pure science. Were someone like you to wear one, within five minutes it would be stained with neon orange powdered cheese and wet with drool from you trying to comprehend the data sets people like me look at every day.

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Dutch: Gore Wrong on Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Netherlands is afire today over a Dutch study concluding Mount Kilimanjaro's snow melt — used as a symbol of AGW by Al Gore — is entirely natural.

Newspapers and news sites in the Netherlands today extensively broke the news of the findings of a research team led by Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damste — a leading molecular paleontologist at Utrecht University and winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize — about the melting icecap of the Kilimanjaro, the African mountain that became a symbol of anthropogenic global warming.

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

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Climategate – it ain’t just about the weather

Climategate is about a lot more than climate. It’s about science and its relationship to politics and profit, the academy, the state and, perhaps most importantly, information control. The manner through which we learn (or thought we did) important knowledge about key aspects of our existence, the way things are hidden, has been exposed in this one instance like the Wizard of Oz.

It’s obvious similar methods of control apply to many other information sources in our society. That is why Barbara Boxer is in shrill blaming-the-messenger mode, insisting that any Congressional investigation of Climategate would target the nefarious “hacker.” She realizes a great unraveling could come from this. So do to the global bureaucrats at the UN and the EU as they prepare for the Copenhagen conference. It is also why the mainstream media was so slow to report the East Anglia CRU emails and documents. They know that if you begin to report these things, you have to report on a lot of other things they have so scrupulously chosen to avoid.

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The End of the Line for Climate Hysteria?
Global warming: the junk science of the modern age.

Following the release into the webworld of hacked emails, computer codes, and a raft of supplementary documents recording the antics of sundry paleoclimatolgists at the University of East Anglia’s influential Climate Research Unit, it has now become ice-crystal clear not only that the world has been cooling for the last decade, but that the global warming crusade is an environmental racket of historical proportions. Many “climate skeptics” and independent researchers have long known this to be the case and have understood that the motivating factor behind this massive and unprecedented fraud is the unsavory quest for power and profit on the part of governments, corporations, and ambitious individuals, scientists as well as entrepreneurs. The evidence for data tampering and all manner of hocus-pocus was available some time ago for anyone who cared to look.

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Competitive Enterprise Institute Petitions EPA to Suspend Proposed CO2 Regs
CEI is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to halt efforts to control carbon dioxide emissions in light of Climategate information.

In light of the Climategate fraud scandal, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) on Wednesday filed a petition asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suspend its plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act, pending a thorough investigation of and public comment on the newly released information.

The still unfolding Climategate scandal produced by the release of thousands of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University in the UK raises new questions and doubts about the scientific basis for the Kyoto climate treaty, the successor treaty to be negotiated later this month in Copenhagen, the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer climate bills, the EPA’s proposed finding that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare, and other EPA regulatory proposals related to the endangerment determination.

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Liberals on Climate: A bridge too far?
Denmark’s prime minister may be battling for a firm agreement at the COP15 meeting, but several members of his party constituency say the climate and energy debate has gone too far.

A mere three days before Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen moves into COP15 negotiating mode to reach a political agreement in Copenhagen, there is unrest on the issue in his own Liberal Party parliamentary group.

According to Berlingske Tidende, several members of the group told a group meeting yesterday, that the climate and energy debate has gone too far, and restricts personal freedoms to an unreasonable degree.

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. . . and some would call it a "Nontroversy."
(Nontroversy? What a creepy Orwelian term. The Irony is thick.)

David Frum Versus Charles Johnson

David Frum tries to talk some sense to Charles Johnson.

Charles Johnson, editor of the Little Green Footballs site, has written a post declaring his personal breach with the American right.

He offers 10 reasons, but they all boil down to the same one: His outrage at the bad characters found in right-wing media and blogosphere.

And yes, there’s no shortage of bad characters. No shortage on the left-hand side either. Or the middle, for that matter. But why surrender to them? Why let them get away with their claim to define your movement?

David, you are wasting your breath.

Charles needs to go his own way. He was never very comfortable with ours. Ours was never "His" movement.

Let him go.

He, and we, will all be the better for it.

Climate Scientists: "No Problem, No Money."

Something from a Jack Kelly article to keep in mind as the Panic Mongers meeting in Copenhagen work themselves into frenzied calls and pleas for ever more powerful and intrusive government controls over peoples lives.

"In the 600-year long Roman warming (3rd Century BC-4th Century AD), it was 4 degrees C warmer than now," he said. "Sea levels did not rise and ice sheets did not disappear. The Medieval Warming (AD 800-1300) followed the Dark Ages and for 400 years it was 5 degrees C warmer. Sea levels did not rise and the ice sheets remained."

There is a saying among climate scientists: "No problem, no money."

AGW is becoming ever more indefensible.