Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Remember the Akademic Shokalskiy

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There may yet be some redemption in this Chris Turney event. I noted that there has been no mainstream news reporting on this incredible scandal of scientific malpractice but for a change this lack of reporting is being taken note of. This one is found on Drudge and others like it are showing up. The title makes very clear what it’s about, “Frozen Out: 98% of Stories Ignore That Ice-bound Ship Was On Global Warming Mission”.

A group of climate change scientists were rescued by helicopter Jan. 2, after being stranded in the ice since Christmas morning. But the majority of the broadcast networks’ reports about the ice-locked climate researchers never mentioned climate change.

The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.

This is no ordinary mishap amongst climate “scientists” but a full blown clown show of the most incredible proportions. They sail into a bay and are frozen in ice where Mawson had sailed in ice free a century ago. They not only disprove what they set out to show but better still, demonstrate how completely out of touch with reality they are.

Someone has to find some kind of way to remember this along the lines of “Remember the Alamo” because this is a moment that should be remembered every time one of these global warming types takes the stage.

And to add to the piling on, there is then also this, the above-the-headline linked stories from Drudge today:

NYC WINTER WARNING…
UP TO 14″ IN BOSTON…
UPDATE…
RADAR…
1,400+ flights stopped…
Cuomo Closes Highways…
Declares state of emergency…
De Blasio: ‘Stay home tonight’…
Meteorologist: ‘Exposed skin could freeze in 15 minutes’

Not to mention this just below:

Blizzard to Reach From NYC to Boston…
CHILL MAP…
USA ushers in 2014 with record-low temps…
Chicago Sees Biggest Snowfall In 15 Years…
NFL: Bitter cold coming to Green Bay on Sunday – High of four degrees…
Winnipeg deep freeze — cold as uninhabited planet…

The last one is the most interesting because Winnipeg yesterday recorded lower temperatures than those recorded on the planet Mars.

UPDATE: Here’s another report on the media cover up, this one at Hotair:

Oddly, the CNN reports seem to be missing something fairly important to understand the reason why the researchers were out in the Antarctic seas in the first place. This a tweet from John Nolte:

CNN giving the researchers stuck in the ice a lot of play. Not hearing a lot, tho, about what they were researching.

At least the word ‘climate’ appears once in their web report, although not as an explanation. It doesn’t appear at all in the CBS report. The Associated Press report similarly avoids this key data point. Scott Johnson called this expedition the ‘ship of fools,’ and perhaps that can be applied to these reports on the denouement, too.

AND YET ANOTHER: And here is an editorial from The Washington Times, “No more dead parrots: Global-warming fans spend a frozen Christmas in Antarctica”.

A look at readily available satellite imagery would have prevented the fiasco; they show an abundance of ice in the Antarctic. ‘Climate scientists’ don’t want anything to disturb their denial. They called their voyage the ‘Spirit of Mawson’ in honor of Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, whose 1912 expedition to the South Pole ended in disaster as well. One of the 1912 survivors wrote a memoir called ‘The Worst Journey in the World.’ The journey hasn’t improved in the century since. Despite all the carbon dioxide emitted since, there still aren’t any sunny beaches or sweltering jungles in Antarctica.

Mr. Turney expected something better than a frozen wasteland, since he and Al Gore argue that man-made global warming is real and has been melting the polar ice caps. Mr. Turney insists his frozen ship is further evidence of global warming — that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it. According to the professor, the field of ice that trapped his ship was created by an iceberg that broke apart three years ago because of global warming. (The dog ate the paperwork.) His employer, the University of New South Wales, is doubling down, too, with another ‘study’ concluding that the earth’s temperature will rise by 4 degrees by 2100 because man insists on electric lights and the internal-combustion engine.

I now know who wants the NBN

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It’s all those idiots who bought Apple computers, i.e., people who tend to vote Labor.

I have a $500 piece of junk PC laptop that runs rings around my new Apple Mac on speed. I can work out the commands, although the PC is better that way as well, although I admit I have a lot to learn. But unless there’s a speed-up button I forgot to push, this will drive me mad before I’m done.

UPDATE: Seems to be much better on Chrome. It might yet make the cut.

Wasted moments

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Australia is in the midst of the greatest teaching moment on global warming possibly since this entire business began. Our team of scientists getting frost bite while frozen in, even with technologies today that did not exist a century ago when Douglas Mawson made the same journey. Yet this is not the way it is being reported, although I was pleased to see that Andrew Bolt has made it onto Powerline Picks. But the deep deep scandal, that ought to be one of the most instructive moments in this long and sad saga, is going to waste. And it is worse that I could have thought.

First there was the headline on Drudge, “‘Global Warming’ Intensifies”. So I went into the story which turned out to be from The Telegraph in London. And there, right at the start of the story, was this about Australia. But it’s not about what you might have thought:

As the planet marked its fourth hottest year on record, a study published in the journal Nature found increasing levels of carbon dioxide will lead to thinner ocean clouds and reduce their cooling impact, causing temperature rises of at least 5.6F (3C) over the course of the century.

The team of scientists said the findings show some climate models have been too ‘optimistic’ and previous estimates of a minimum temperature rise of only 2.7F (1.5C) could now be discounted. The optimistic models did not properly assess the impact of water evaporation, which sometimes rises only a short distance into the atmosphere and causes updraughts that reduce cloud cover, the study found.

‘These models have been predicting a lower climate sensitivity but we believe they’re incorrect,’ Professor Steven Sherwood, from the University of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.

‘The net effect of [climate change] is you have less cloud cover.’

The study comes amid a controversy in Australia over claims by Maurice Newman, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser, who said the world had been taken “hostage to climate change madness”.

Mr Newman said the climate change establishment, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, remained ‘intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money’.

‘The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,’ he wrote in The Australian. ‘Global temperatures have gone nowhere for 17 years… If the IPCC were your financial adviser, you would have sacked it long ago.’

Mr Newman, a former chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange, was criticised by the opposition and pilloried by scientists, who said he was expressing “flat earth” views and should be sacked.

‘His piece is a mix of common climate change myths, misinformation and ideology,’ said Professor David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne, in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald.

‘I would not choose a person who believes that the Earth is flat to advise Australian shipping or airline businesses on how to plan routes to travel around the world. It is clearly not sensible to have a person who believes that climate change science is a delusion as leader of the prime minister’s Business Advisory Council.’

Mr Abbott, who is something of a climate change sceptic, once claimed that ‘climate change is “absolute crap”,’ though he later said he accepts it is ‘real’.

Since winning a federal election last September, he has moved to scrap Labor’s tax on carbon emissions and instead proposes to address climate change by paying polluters to reduce emissions, though critics say the plan is underfunded and will not achieve its reduction targets.

The debate comes as Australia in 2013 marked its hottest year since reliable recordings began in 1910. The world’s driest continent also recorded its hottest day, hottest month, hottest winter’s day and hottest summer.

The run of warmer weather began late in 2012 and was so great that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology last year changed its official weather forecasting map to include new colours – deep purple and pink – for areas with temperatures above 50C (122F).

So let me return to Andrew Bolt one more time. This is on Professional warmist attacks amateur sceptic for being on the take:

David Karoly’s salary depends on him being a warmist. He is Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Climate Change Authority.

Today he attacks sceptic Maurice Newman, the former ABC chairman and now head of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, who is paid not a cent to point out – correctly – that the world has not warmed as alarmists predicted and the carbon tax wouldn’t prevent it anyway. Says Karoly of Newman:

As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Is Karoly at all aware of how stupid he looks?

Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t, but to tell the truth, he could not care less.

The single greatest teaching moment in the history of the global warming fraud

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This is a crisis that we cannot let go to waste. At long last, a bunch of global warming cranks have put their money where their mouths were and went off to prove, in a practical way, just how much global warming has harmed the environment. And instead of finding the cove where Douglas Mawson had landed a century ago ice free and easy to navigate, they are now stuck in ice and with some luck may end up spending the next twelve months pondering their stupidity, half the time in total darkness.

This is a massive embarrassment for the global warming industry. This is an undeniable failure to use their scientific knowledge in a practical way. They have, instead, demonstrated that global warming is a fraud, with no useful insights into anything. They know nothing whatsoever about anything in relation to the actual climate on the planet earth. They have a single theory that has been tested and failed on one scale after another but on they persist, inflicting billions in costs upon the rest of us.

Chris Turney and his band of fools must become one of the major moments in the history of this debate. This is not an event that can be allowed to fade into the background, to disappear the moment these clowns are finally on dry land again. This has to become the great teaching moment where it is recognised that those who peddle global warming are idiots, absolute fools. Speaking on behalf of global warming should mark someone as naive and ignorant.

How to do this must be a major part of the thought processes that go into thinking these questions through. To christurney must become a verb meaning to believe global warming is true in a suicidal way.

UPDATE: My letter to Scott Johnson at Powerline. I sent him this post from Andrew Bolt which he put up on the Powerline Picks. I have now written to Scott again with the following note:

Dear Scott

I am very pleased to see you have put that up on your “picks” list because this is a story that needs to get around. My worry is that we here in Australia are too provincial to have an effect on any major part of the debate; if this had happened in relation to some Italian academic, say, it would have almost no impact here or I imagine anywhere else. We see it for what it is because we live here and understand our own turf quite well. Yet the great interest is that an actual climate sciences academic from one of our more important universities decided to demonstrate the impact of climate change, and has now done so but in a way that shows the opposite of what he intended to prove. We don’t often get such clear cut demonstrations of just how off the planet the global warming crowd is which is why this is a moment that should be seized on if we can.

Douglas Mawson sailed there at the end of 1913. The intent a hundred years later was to demonstrate how much easier it would be this time because of all the warming that had gone on but instead, found it not only impossible, but they are now embedded in an ice floe that may keep them there for a year if things go really bad. But like with everything else about the news today, it’s not really a story until it is not just carried but harped on by the ABNBCBS. That, I’m afraid, is not going to happen. But we can but try.

Kind regards

Steve

I am no longer PC

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So to start the New Year I have brought home my new Apple Mac and am no longer using a PC, at least not at home. So all different but I am sure I will get the hang of it. I love Steve Jobs, I love his madness for perfection, I love how he drove his business to create technologies that have transformed the world, and I love his model of entrepreneurship. So we shall see but this is hardly a radical change in my life, going from one absolutely worldwide standard to another. But what did it was getting a virus on my PC and I have therefore decided never again, and hopefully using the Apple really will mean never again.

The Roman Empire really did fall

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My favourite statistic, which may be entirely wrong but it has been said, is that the Roman Empire reached its highest living standard during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and from his death in 180 A.D., and the ascension of his son Commodus (i.e. Joaquin Phoenix, the emperor in the film Gladiator) it took until the middle of the 16th century for living standards to reach where they had been 1500 years before. Some corroboration from the latest IPA Review:

In the next IPA Review, Chris Berg will review The Roman Market Economy by Peter Temin – a fascinating new book which shows just how extensive the Roman market economy was. You can read the review here.

Rome was an extremely wealthy society. It had a complex market economy. People living in Britain could easily purchase products made in Anatolia, and vice-versa. Large cities flourished, and would not be outsized in Europe until Industrial revolution. There is even evidence that Roman pottery factories adopted quality control measures.

This changed after Rome fell. Brian Ward-Perkins published this controversial book in 2005, showing just how catastrophic the fifth and seventh century crises were. Here is an excellent review of it by Canada Free Press. And here is an interview with Ward-Perkins on Historically Speaking.

Based on a range of evidence – including the size of Roman cows, the size of cities, building activity and the dispersion of farms outside Rome – he concluded that there was indeed a catastrophic economic collapse between the fourth and seventh centuries.

On both sides of the Mediterranean, cities declined or were abandoned altogether. Factories disappeared. Domestic animals were smaller due to lack of nourishment. In some regions, quality-controlled, factory-made pottery was replaced with poor-quality hand-moulded pots. Different regions were impacted at different times, and some were more hard-hit than others, but as a general rule economic activity declined everywhere.

Overall, ‘Late Antiquity’ would hardly have been a time of ‘peaceful’ transition for anyone involved.

Any parallels with the world today is, of course, strictly coincidental.

How a civilization commits suicide

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The sense that we in the West, our entire culture of freedom and individual rights, are under mortal threat is not an uncommon theme. Adding to this is an article, a long article, from Camille Paglia:

‘What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,’ says Camille Paglia. . . . The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead.

And why does all this matter?

‘The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,’ she says. ‘These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.’

An interesting article, commented on here where it was picked up by Powerline, linked to at Instapundit and mentioned prominently at Drudge.

Perhaps a slow news day, but going to the movies yesterday which started with a trailer for Nelson Mandela, the movie and then watched a film as some English man becomes best mates with the chap who tortured him in a Japanese prisoner of war camp – and let me not forget the man who the Americans have elected president – you really do wonder whether we have what it takes to survive as a culture.

The evidence looks overwhelming

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From The Australian on 23 December:

AUSTRALIAN entertainer Rolf Harris is facing three additional sex assault charges involving two new alleged victims, one aged “seven or eight” at the time.

The additional counts mean Harris, 83, is now accused of assaulting four victims dating back to the late 1960s. He’s facing 16 separate charges in total.

“`Rolf Harris is to be prosecuted over a further three allegations of indecent assault,” the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said in a statement.

“The alleged offences relate to one existing complainant and two new complainants.”

Harris was already facing six counts of indecently assaulting a 15-year-old girl in 1980 and 1981 and three charges of indecent assault on a girl aged 14 in 1986.

He was also charged previously with four counts of making indecent images of a child in the first half of 2012.

The additional counts include one offence of indecent assault “relating to a girl aged seven or eight in 1968 or 1969“, the CPS said.

The artist and singer is also accused of indecently assaulting a girl aged 14 in 1975 and indecently assaulting a girl aged 19 in 1984.

The later offence relates to the same complainant as six of the charges laid in August.

The additional counts were included in the original police file sent to prosecutors in August.

But it was only after a “review process” that the CPS decided the allegations should be formally added to the indictment against Harris.

Prosecutors say because evidence relating to the further counts has already been served on the court and the defence, Harris won’t appear again at a Magistrates Court.

Rather, the Australian will front Southwark Crown Court on January 14 as previously scheduled for a plea and case management hearing.

Harris has not commented on the allegations since he was first named in the press in April.

He appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court in September looking frail and confused for his only court appearance to date.

The 83-year-old, who was accompanied by his wife Alwen and daughter Bindi, spoke only briefly to confirm his personal details.

His lawyer indicated the entertainer would plead not guilty.

For the offences committed after 1985 Harris could face up to 10 years’ jail.

Harris was asked by UK tabloid the Daily Mirror if he wished to comment on the new charges.

“I don’t think so, thank you,” he said over the intercom at his Berkshire home the paper reported.

Harris was first questioned by officers from Operation Yewtree back in November 2012. He was arrested in March and rearrested in early August before being charged three weeks later.

The Australian is on conditional bail under which he is banned from having contact with anyone under 18 unless he’s accompanied by someone over the age of 21.

His trial is scheduled to begin in late April.

During 2013 one-time royal favourite Harris has been dropped as the face of British Paints, the host of hit TV show Animal Clinic and as the narrator on Olive the Ostrich.

His paintings have been removed from cruise liners including the Queen Mary 2 and no-one, including Buckingham Palace, seems to know what’s happened to his 2005 portrait of Her Majesty.

Nothing more recent than 25 years ago but justice must be served. Still, something more recent would make a difference, don’t you think? With Jimmy Savile, the allegations came from every side. With Rolf Harris, there is nothing more recent than the 1980s.

Santa is a conservative

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That Santa Claus is a conservative is conclusively shown on this post. There are thirteen pieces of evidence but I’ll only list numbers one and eleven:

1. Did you ever hear Santa wishing someone a ‘Happy Holidays?’ No, for the man in red, it’s always ‘Merry Christmas’ – no matter who it offends.

11. The naughty or nice list also shows an objective moral compass. Santa apparently rejects liberal relativism or explaining away bad behavior with pop psychology and ‘culture’ issues.

And not a government handout anywhere to be seen.

The left will still seek to destroy anyone who dares to dissent

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Mark Steyn wrote an article in which he basically told his editor at National Review Online to get rooted only much less politely than that. Steyn had written an article in defence of the Duck Dynasty and found his editor at NRO taking sides against him. Mark Steyn’s scathing and angry reply elicited a further reply from his editor. A bit complex, but made up of a brief article by Mark, an inane response by his editor, a further rejoinder by Mark and then another even more idiotic response from his editor.

But what really interests me is this from Mark Noonan at the blogsite blogsforvictory.com. This was his comment on the second statement by the National Review Online editor:

No, Mr. Steyn cannot mount an argument against the left without insulting them. To disagree with them is, in their view, to be insulting. We’re not dealing with rational people, here. We’re dealing with people who are, in the largest sense of the word, insane. For crying out loud, they really think that its ok to kill a baby! When you’re dealing with that sort of irrationality, trying to keep it polite is the least of your concerns. Our job, as sane people, is to drive these people entirely out of power. We won’t do that if we try to pretend that lunacy has a proper place in the debate.

And now he has written an even more scathing article defending Mark and attacking the NRO editor in no uncertain terms. This is the best para but it’s a short post so you should read it in full:

As I noted in my small comment, liberals are essentially insane. Not in the clinical sense where we could diagnose and treat them, but in the fact that what they propose flies in the face of facts and logic. That what they propose, if really and fully implemented, would utterly destroy human life on earth. People who think that babies can be killed, that tax increases cause prosperity, that crony-capitalism is a good idea, that government employees are altruistic, that a small elite can better decide things than people on their own; that a hack, Chicago politician is a new messiah – these are not rational views to hold. Added to their irrationality and completing it is a mercilessness which knows no bounds. You can rely on it that no matter how nice and polite we are, the left will still seek to destroy anyone who dares to dissent. This is not a call for us to start being mean and merciless – but for pity’s sake, don’t just sit there and be a punching bag. Hit back. And keep on hitting because until we completely remove the left from all ability to effect policy in this nation, we will not be able to reform and save it.

I let my subscription to National Review lapse years ago and I now almost never visit its website. I am more of the persuasion of Mark Steyn and Mark Noonan. We are dealing with uncertifiable nutters whose pious and hypocritical superficial inanities will yet be the ruin of us.