Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Peer-reviewed blunders

...a former mining executive has, working alone, once again exposed as error-riddled the work of top peer-reviewed climate scientists - and scientists working for a huge bureaucracy:

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Sunday, August 12, 2007

Believe in warming, or I’ll destroy you

When you are on a mission to save the world, nothing - and no one - must be allowed to stand in your way. After all, they must be corrupt, deceitful or just plain evil to even doubt you. And so global warming prophet Michael Eckhart of the American Council on Renewable Energy sent this remarkable letter:

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Freeman Dyson's heretical thoughts

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated."

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Thursday, August 9, 2007

Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one | csmonitor.com

A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.

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Flying Pterosaurs Hunted Like Dinos?

The bird-like reptiles likely didn't skim the water's surface, as has been thought.

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Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Will chicken Gore accept the challenge now?

Al Gore Faces New Debate Challenge Expert

Battle of best-selling authors

CHICAGO, Aug. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Best-selling author DennisAvery is the next prominent figure to challenge the facts Al Gore is promoting in his global warming crusade. Mr. Avery is co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years. Both Al Gore and Dennis Avery have New York Times best-selling books on global warming, but with opposite conclusions.

The list of Al Gore detractors continues to grow as his extreme rhetoric and conclusions get dissected by scientists, economists, and researchers. Avery joins Lord Christopher Monckton (former Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher advisor), Bjorn Lomborg (Danish economist), author Michael Crichton, Prof. S. Fred Singer (former director of the U.S.National Weather Service), Tim Ball, Ph.D. (historical climatologist), Prof. Ian Clark (University of Ottawa), and Prof. Richard Lindzen (MIT) among others.

Gore claims recent climate change is the result of human activities, and society must give up most of its energy supply to prevent global catastrophe. Conversely, Avery amassed physical evidence of pastwarming/cooling cycles and experimental evidence demonstrating variations in solar activity affect Earth's constantly varying temperatures.

"My book says our warming is natural, unstoppable - and not very dangerous anyway," stated Avery.

"These books represent the two leading explanations for the Earth's recent temperature changes - and they conflict. If global warming truly is the most important public policy issue of our day, then it is high time the public got to hear the arguments from both sides matched up against each other," continued Avery.

Gore has refused all debate challengers to date. Joseph Bast, presidentof The Heartland Institute, noted, "Maybe it's because climate alarmists tend to lose when they debate climate realists. [As happened recently with the Intelligence Squared debate in New York.] Or because most scientists do not support climate alarmism." The Heartland Institute has run more than$500,000 of ads in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and WashingtonTimes promoting a debate.

1998 no longer hottest year in the US - 1934 was!

Oops. It turns out that 1998 wasn’t the hottest year on record for the US, after all. Global warming must be working backwards, because NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, having fixed some calculating errors, has discovered that the hottest year was in fact 1934.

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Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Newsweek against "deniers": three responses

Thanks to Professor Lubos Motl of Harvard:

Monday, August 06, 2007

Newsweek against "deniers": three responses

Sharon Begley has what is known as a poultry brain - the readers of TRF also know her as the author of a lousy, but not the lousiest, article on string theory - but she has a huge, fanatically believing religious heart, especially if the task is to parrot musings by scientific titans such as Barbara Boxer, Al Gore, and Naomi Oreskes. So she decided to write, together with a few collaborators, another Goebbelsian article in Newsweek,

Global warming deniers: a well-funded machine

It is full of insults, "corrupt deniers". The criminal reasons why skeptics do what they do are "explained" in detail: for example, Pat Michaels needs some extreme weather to grow his award-winning pumpkins. ;-) But the article doesn't contain facts that would be both relevant and true. The only fair part of the article is the cover of the magazine (on the left) as long as you omit the silly footnote and the somewhat exaggerated color of the Earth (assuming it is supposed to be Earth) :-).

Marc Morano responds here, explaining, among many other interesting things, that the alarmists have actually received 2500 times more funding (50 billion vs 19 million per decade) than the skeptics.

Another response comes from

Noel Sheppard
Amy Ridenour

Ratings: Begley only gets 2 stars, Lindzen's article in Newsweek had 4 stars. A poll next to Lindzen's article showed that 54% of readers think that there is no permanent momentum to fight global warming. The poll attached to Begley's article shows that 40% of the readers think that global warming is not a major threat to life on Earth while 6% are not sure.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Iraq's 'sustainable stability' | The Australian

Despite everything the world knows about how badly the war in Iraq is going, how hopeless themilitary outlook remains and how urgently everyone should pack up and go home, the debatein America has unexpectedly shifted to a radically different perspective: are things actually going better than we think?

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This person's a doctoral candidate?

"Subject: You are f**king nazi's (sic)
"It is IMPOSSIBLE to speak politely, intelligibly, with reason to moral cretins masquarding (sic) as humans, cretins utterly devoid of intelligence, humanity, common sense, courage: YOU ARE ALL F**KING NAZI'S (sic). May you and all your progeny burn in hell for eternity. Perhaps there is a special place there for nazi's (sic)."


But only a pretend one, because all she's doing is sociology.

Go here to find out what she's so cross about.

Via Knowledge is Power

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Robbing you, even in death



Andrew Bolt reports another astouding series of "compensation" payouts in Victoria, this time to the widows of criminals killed in gangland violence.

This follows on the decision of the Victorian government to pay $700,000 "compensation" to violent street protesters complaining about heavy handed policing. (The wonder of this is that anybody watching these demonstrations would have come away thinking why on earth the police had allowed themselves to be little more than useless punching bags for these people. But that's the state of the Victoria Police these days.)

But what happens to honest people earning a living honestly?

Postmaster Gilbert Icke, shot during a hold-up, at first received only $231 for clothes. After public outrage, he received about $2500 -- for petrol and other expenses.

Friday, August 3, 2007

Cold water over bleached reef

When warm seas bleach the Great Barrier Reef, it’s easy to blame our favorite bogeyman - global warming. But who to blame when the bleaching is caused not by warm seas but cold?

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Update

(Sigh heavily)

Just in case some of you think that I exaggerate when I complain about how the media distorts, hypes and spins stories, this latest coral bleaching one is a case in point.

news.com.au's Breaking News section has the story with this headline:

Reef ruined by record cold snap

Ruined? That's pretty serious, isn't it?

But what do you get when you click on the link to the actual article?

The much more sober heading of "Coral bleaching as record cold snap hits."

And absolutely nothing to even remotely justify saying that the reef had been ruined.

Paying for your cat’s farts

Even cats feel guilty about global warming, and fret about their farts. Or so believes EasyBeingGreen, a company headed by former Greenpeace boss Paul Gilding which has found an ingenious new way to make money from the warming scare:

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Thursday, August 2, 2007

Global feeding frenzy

Trial lawyers are gearing up to turn global warming into their next pot of gold. A coalition of environmental groups and cities are suing the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank of the United States for making loans to finance oil pipelines, oil drilling, and similar projects...

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Doomsayers frothing at the mouth

THE real question in this huge new catfight isn’t whether nice Dr Mohamed Haneef was too matey with his airport-bombing relatives. Points on both sides. Not all facts yet known. No, what’s really at stake is what kind of argument should win in these hysterical times: apocalyptic or calm?

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