Spinosaurs show semi-aquatic oxygen isotopes

Both of these are posts to the Dinosaur Mailing List: From: Ben Creisler In case this ref has not been mentioned yet: Oxygen isotope evidence for semi-aquatic habits among spinosaurid theropods. Romain Amiot, Eric Buffetaut, Christophe Lécuyer, Xu Wang, Larbi Boudad, Zhongli Ding, François Fourel, Steven Hutt, François Martineau, Manuel Alfredo Medeiros, Jinyou Mo, Laurent Simon, Varavudh Suteethorn, Steven Sweetman, Haiyan Tong, Fusong Zhang, and Zhonghe Zhou Geology 38: 139-142 (February 2010) Abstract: Spinosaurs were large theropod dinosaurs showing peculiar specializations, including somewhat crocodile-like elongate jaws and conical teeth. Their biology has been much discussed, and a piscivorous diet has been suggested on the basis of jaw as well as tooth morphology and stomach contents. Although fish eating has been considered plausible, an aquatic or semiaquatic lifestyle has seldom been suggested because of the apparent lack of corresponding adaptations in the postcranial skeleton of spinosaurs, which on the whole is reminiscent of that of other large terrestrial theropods. On the basis of the oxygen isotopic composition of their phosphatic remains compared with those of coexisting terrestrial theropod dinosaurs and semiaquatic crocodilians and turtles, we conclude that spinosaurs had semiaquatic lifestyles, i.e., they spent a large part of their daily time in water, like extant crocodilians or hippopotamuses. This result sheds light on niche partitioning between large predatory dinosaurs, since spinosaurs coexisted with other large theropods such as carcharodontosaurids or tyrannosaurids. The likely ichthyophagy and aquatic habits of spinosaurids may have allowed them to coexist with other large theropods by reducing competition for food and territory. And: Hi everyone, Here is an recent press release by the French CNRS, regarding an incoming paper on the oxygen isotopic ratios in spinosaurids: http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/1778.htm For non-French speakers (or non-Google-tried-unsuccessfully-to-Translate users), it says that French, English, Moroccan, Brazilian, Chinese, and Thai paleontologists analyzed and compared the oxygen isotopic ratios of dinosaurs - including spinosaurids - and amphibious crocodiles, and turtles. And the ratios obtained for spinosaurids were close to those of crocodiles and turtles, but significantly different from those of other dinosaurs... No more details for the moment, but the team analyzed at least *Siamosaurus*, and most likely also Moroccan, English, Chinese, and Brazilian spinosaurids (ok, it's not surprising, but that would mean they have a pretty large taxonomic sampling given the number of spinosaurids now known). Be patient until the release of the February issue of Geology ! Here are the references given in the press release: [Same authors and reference as above.] See also a previous isotopic analyze of Thai vertebrate faunas including *Siamosaurus* which suggested the same semi-aquatic habits for this taxon: Amiot R., Buffetaut E., Lécuyer C., Fernandez V., Fourel F., Martineau F. & Suteethorn V. 2009. Oxygen isotope composition of continental vertebrate apatites from Mesozoic formations of Thailand; environmental and ecological significance. In: Buffetaut E., Cuny G., Le Loeuff J. & Suteethorn V. (eds.), Late Palaeozoic and Mesozoic Ecosystems in SE Asia. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 315: 271-283. doi: 10.1144/SP315.19 Phosphatic remains (tooth enamel, turtle shell fragments and fish scales) of continental vertebrates (freshwater fish, crocodilians, turtles, and theropod and sauropod dinosaurs) recovered from eight localities of NE Thailand ranging in age from the Late Jurassic to the late Early Cretaceous have been analysed for their oxygen isotopic compositions ({delta}18Op). From these preliminary data, local meteoric water {delta}18Ow values estimated using {delta}18Op values of crocodilians and turtles range from –4.1±2{per thousand} at the end of the Jurassic to –8.3±2{per thousand} during the Early Cretaceous, suggesting a transition from dry to wetter climates with increasing amount of seasonal precipitation from several hundred millimetres per year to several thousand millimetres. Measurable offsets in {delta}18Op values observed between dinosaur taxa (the spinosaurid theropod Siamosaurus, other theropods and nemegtosaurid sauropods) are interpreted in terms of differences in water strategies, and suggest that Siamosaurus had habits similar to those of semi-aquatic vertebrates such as crocodilians or freshwater turtles. All this reminds me of a recent paper in which Billon-Bruyat et al. (2004) found typical frankly marine oxygen isotopic ratios in the cryptodiran turtle *Talassemys*, while it shows no morphological adaptation for an aquatic lifestyle ! -- Jocelyn Falconnet

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WWF's income 2003-2008 - $3.1 BILLION, Greenpeace however...

...didn't do nearly as well. But Greenpeace at least tends not to take money from governments it criticises, whereas the WWF has no such scruples. And YES, we are talking BILLIONS of dollars, not millions. These figures are obviously for the global operations of these groups. Climate Resistance reports: As we reported in May 2008, it’s even less of a hill of beans when it is seen in contrast to the budgets of the big Green, NGOs. WWF, for example, took this much money in recent years: Year Income ($US) 2003 370,245,000 2004 468,889,000 2005 499,629,000 2006 549,827,000 2007 663,193,000 TOTAL 2,551,783,000 According to WWF’s latest financial report, 2008 was not quite such a good year for them. They’ve switched their accounting to Euros, rather than dollars, and say that in 2007, they took €508,137,000, and in 2008, they took €447,251,000. Poor WWF. Still, we make that to be roughly $584,000,000 – over half a billion dollars, bringing their total income since 2003 to just over $3.1 billion, not including 2009. Of interest to some of our readers is the fact that WWF took €73,938,000 ($104,320,000) in 2007 and €76,930,000 ($108,856,000) in 2008 from ‘Governments and Aid Agencies’. ‘Why are you banging on about how much money WWF have, again?’ you may well be asking. The point is first to demonstrate again that, in purely cash terms, the alarmist cause is considerably better funded. This must also be seen in the context of the rhetoric produced by the likes of Greenpeace, who, as we’ve pointed out before, don’t do so badly themselves. They say that ‘deniers’ have intended ‘to deny the urgency of the scientific consensus on global warming and delay action’, yet as the events that are unfolding reveal, it is much more organisations such as the WWF who have influenced the debate with misinformation. http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/01/well-funded-well-funded-denial-machine.html We thought it might be time to tot up Greenpeace’s accounts to date… Year Income (US$) Income (Euros) 1994 137,358,000 —————- 1995 152,805,000 —————- 1996 139,895,000 —————- 1997 125,648,000 —————- 1998 —————- 110,833,000 1999 —————- 126,023,000 2000 —————- 143,646,000 2001 —————- 157,730,000 2005 —————- 173,464,000 2006 —————- 171,367,000 2007 —————- 204,982,000 2008 —————- 196,620,000 TOTAL 555,706,000 1,284,665,000 To put these crudely into the same terms, we make that $2,373,506,970 ($2.37 billion) at today’s euro to US dollar exchange rate. Most of this money comes from people who think that they are giving to save the rhino, panda, or the whale, because that’s how Greenpeace and the WWF sell themselves. They hire companies to accost people in the street on their behalf and to phone people, harassing them into signing agreements to pay monthly amounts, deducted automatically from their bank accounts. Yet these organisations don’t simply save whales and rhinos, they use their not inconsiderable financial clout to influence the political agenda throughout the world, in a way that the ‘deniers’ simply have not been able to. This obviously includes preparing ‘research’ that finds its way into IPCC Assessment Reports. There may be nothing wrong with this, as such. We can’t really complain that such-and-such an organisation gets money from old ladies, and uses it to look into things. But the rise of the NGO has coincided with the decline in other forms of political engagement. Thus, politicians turn increasingly to organisations like the IPCC and the WWF for their moral authority. This process isn’t healthy.

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What Do The World's 25 Dirtiest Cities Have In Common?

They are all poor.  Think on that, environmentalists, when you argue that limiting CO2 emissions should trump economic growth. From the Climate Skeptic blog

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13 year old girl's father & brother tried to get her to become a suicide bomber

I saw the television report on this story from the BBC. Apparently her younger sister did as she was told. A 13 year-old Pakistani girl recounts horrific tales of psychological abuse and beatings inflicted by those seeking to pressure her into strapping on a bomb to indiscriminately kill in the name of Allah: My brother used to prepare bombs and my sister-in-law did too. He told me that he would teach me this. I told him no. I would not even look at what they were doing. My father and brother told me to carry out a suicide attack. They were pressuring me to do this. They told me: "If you do it you will go to paradise long before us." I replied: "Why don't you tell me I will go to hell long before you?" Every day they used to tell me this. Every day. I was very young when they started telling me this. I said to them: "What about all the people I will kill? They are all Muslims." They started beating me when I refused. They beat me non-stop. They made my life hell. I never had a single moment of happiness. They did everything other than kill me. This young girl was fortunate to escape with her life and amazingly remains hopeful for the future: The Taliban slaughter other people's children. They turn women into widows. They should be made to suffer too. I want these Taliban to be burned alive. If there is justice in this world young Meena's wish will be realised. Allah willing. From RWDB - J F Beck

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Miranda Devine on how it has "suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic."

As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it's suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends. But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the "Big Polluters", bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism. But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls. Read it all. It's a great article and a good summary of the various revelations that have come to light in recent weeks.

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Prince Charles can be a bit of a dill

From the UK Express

PRINCE CHARLES ON CLIMATE CHANGE: GLOBAL WARMING SCEPTICS ARE ALL LIARS

Charles, who has campaigned on global warming for more than 20 years, said: “I have watched with growing dismay and alarm the glee with which the sceptics have leapt upon the recent news stories that question the science that climate change is man-made and suggesting it is nothing more than a myth.

Prince Charles: ‘I’m not willing to play Russian Roulette over climate change’

“Well, if it is but a myth, and the global scientific community is involved in some sort of conspiracy, why is it then that around the globe sea levels are more than six inches higher than they were 100 years ago?

“This isn’t an opinion – it is a fact.”

He added: “And, ladies and gentlemen please be in no doubt that the evidence of long-term and potentially irreversible changes to our world is utterly overwhelming.”

Charles spoke after arriving in Manchester by Royal Train pulled by a coal-fired steam locomotive, named the Tornado, which was rebuilt from a 1948 design.

Watts Up With That? puts him right.

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If it's so cold in so many places, how can January 2010 be the hottest on record?

And January this year was the hottest globally since the University of Alabama at Huntsville has been measuring it by satellite.

Now admittedly, that has been for only 30 odd years, but this is a data set that, unlike NASA's GISS, you can trust.

So what's going on?

Dr Roy Spencer from the UAH says that the temperature anomaly is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures.

And apparently the planet has recently experienced its warmest El Nino since the very severe one of 1998.

However, Bob Tisdale goes on to say that this peaked 5 weeks ago and that the "NINO3.4 SST anomalies [have] been dropping like a stone" since.

So are we in store for a repeat of 2007? That year started with a January that is now the second warmest on record.

Every thing seemed set for a record breaking hot year. The UK Met Office said so in early January:

2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2007/pr20070104.html

(Though of course, we now know how much we can trust the Met Office )

Here's what actually happened in 2007:

But the Met Office was wrong in 2007.   Instead of breaking the temperature record, temperatures plummeted nearly 0.8C to below normal after El Nino quickly faded – as you can see in the graph below.

Source : Wood For Trees – Late 2006 to mid 2008

Hmmm, as the El Nino quickly faded.

And then 2008 was cooler than 2007, and 2009 cooler still.

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Penny Wong's excruciating interview on Lateline

From Andrew Bolt: Here are just some of the questions Climate Change Minister Penny Wong refused to answer last night in her excruciating interview on Lateline TONY JONES: The Prime Minister has spelled out that in the first two years of your emissions trading scheme, electricity prices would rise by 7 and then by 12 per cent in the second year; a total of 19 per cent by 2013. What happens after 2013? TONY JONES: I’ll just interrupt there because you put out some of the modelling. There’s no modelling, is there, that we’ve seen or that I’ve seen beyond 2013? TONY JONES: Yes, understood. That’s the difference as you paint it. But let me ask you this: you say that the big question is about the two schemes, but actually one of the big questions is about the costs. So what happens after 2013? What does Treasury model tell you? For example, if your targets go from 5 to 10 per cent, does that mean automatically and exponentially you get a doubling in the cost of electricity from 20 per cent increases to 40 per cent increases? TONY JONES: Yes, but the open question is: how much will you have to increase? You must have Treasury modelling which tells you what a 10 per cent reduction would be, a 15 per cent reduction, a 20 per cent, or even a 25 per cent reduction in emissions would cost in terms of cost-of-living increases. Do you have that modelling? TONY JONES: That’s not the only policy question. The policy question that is on a lot of people’s minds at the moment is what this is going to cost. And so I’m asking you: do you have Treasury modelling that tells you what the additional costs will be to electricity and cost of living if your targets increase from 5 to 10 per cent, from 10 to 15, or even to 25 per cent, as you’ve canvassed, if the rest of the world moves? TONY JONES: Alright, but before the voters go to an election with an emissions trading scheme, potentially, as a virtual referendum on how to deal with climate change - before the voters go to election, are they entitled to know what your modelling is telling you about what different targets would do to the cost of electricity and the cost of living? TONY JONES: OK, but what happens? Is there an exponential change to the cost of electricity? Does it double from a 20 per cent increase with a 5 per cent reduction in emissions trading to a 40 per cent increase in electricity costs with a 10 per cent and so on, up to 80 per cent with 20 per cent reductions? Does it work like that, or is it somehow different? What does the modelling tell you? TONY JONES: OK. But before people vote for this in an election, as they are likely to do this year, do you commit to giving the complete Treasury modelling to the public so they can see what happens at the different targets that you’ve proposed? TONY JONES: Will you release the full Treasury modelling about the potential cost to electricity and cost of living with the different targets? TONY JONES: But they won’t know prior to the election, based on what you’ve just said, what the potential economic impact is of higher targets. TONY JONES: Yes, but you’ve already told the rest of the world that you’re prepared to go to 25 per cent if the rest of the world moves. You’ve also set a target for 2050 of 60 per cent, so there has to be large reductions over time, and don’t the public have the right to know what the cost of those increases will be? TONY JONES: Well, no, we don’t have to, I was just trying to get to the bottom of whether you’re prepared to release that modelling. I think the answer is no. TONY JONES: If that is the issue, let me ask you this: is it now standard practice to pass confidential departmental briefing documents to the press, or to sections of the press, I should say, as part of a media strategy to undermine the Opposition’s position? TONY JONES: No, no, I’m not talking about honesty. I’m talking about the way in which this information was released. And isn’t it precisely the sort of thing that infuriated you about the previous government: the use of confidential departmental material to undermine the Opposition’s case? It’s hard to recall a worse performance by a federal Minister. When I say Wong didn’t answer Jones’ questions, I don’t mean that she simply failed to give an answer that was full or frank. I mean exactly what I say: that she did not supply any kind of answer to these specific questions, leaving every viewer with the clear impression that she had something very ugly to hide. Fact is, of course, that she does. The clear message last night was that Rudd’s warming plans will cost you more than you’ve been told - or will be told, either. (Thanks to reader uncle John.) UPDATE Much more entertaining media performances by Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott in the first of their weekly debates on Channel 9’s Today. I also detected a greater willingness by Abbott to suggest the science around global warming has some questions to answer.

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Children [still being] killed by the "stolen generations" myth

From Andrew Bolt: Before getting on to the latest example of how the stolen generations myth continues to harm and kill Aboriginal children, you can read how one of the chief propagandists of the myth, Robert Manne, continues to be unable to provide a list of even ten names, out of the 25,000 he claims were "stolen," who clearly and unambiguously were taken for no good reason. Indeed he includes in a general response "a fatherless 12-year-old girl with syphilis, a 13-year-old who was seven months pregnant and working for no wages on a station, and a boy who was kept chained up in a back yard by white employers when he was bad." Manne gives these three tragic and pathetic kids as part of his "proof" that Aboriginal children were "stolen!" Whereas the real crime for the state would have been not to take these terribly abused children into care. So, if these are the kinds of cases that Manne has to refer to to support claims of a stolen generation, then what real evidence is there for it then? Remember that the Bringing Them Home report was based solely on the acceptance of untested anecdotes and claims by people. No effort was ever made to verify whether or not any of these were true. Also, see how poisonous this myth has become - even producing false claims that "stolen" children had been used as guinea pigs for drug testing. Yet another example of how the “stolen generations” myth can kill - by making welfare officials too scared to remove Aboriginal children they’d save if they were white: AT a remote health clinic in the dusty reaches of central Australia, a toddler is being airlifted to hospital. The little boy, John (not his real name), has been burned so badly he needs skin grafts. Despite the severity of his burns and his agonising pain, John’s Aboriginal carers have not sought medical aid for the boy. Amid the alcohol-ridden violence of their remote community life, it takes a lot to trigger an emergency. In the offices of Northern Territory ministers, there is a growing understanding that the crisis in child protection is finally coming home to roost… At the centre of the crisis is a particular failure to protect Aboriginal children, who are routinely placed in the care of relatives in unsafe circumstances, where they are often exposed to sexual abuse and violence. (Pyschologist Howard) Bath (in a government report) blames the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle—a national guideline that stipulates indigenous children should be put in the care of relatives wherever possible to maintain links to their culture—for the lack of rigour in assessment of relative carers. “The present data suggests, as do some of the decisions in the case studies, that in some cases this principle appears to be given primacy over basic child protection considerations,” Bath says… Recent coronial hearings into the deaths of 12-year-old Deborah Melville and a seven-week-old baby hinted at the extent of the government’s failings… The Country Liberals’ member for the Alice Springs seat of Araluen, Jodeen Carney, says the scale of the crisis is on clear display in the streets of Alice Springs, where children as young as five roam the streets in packs at midnight. “In Aboriginal communities and in Alice Springs, anyone can walk down the street and see children who are clearly neglected,” she says. “And there seems to be an acceptance of that neglect. Anywhere else in Australia, those children would be reported to welfare and they would be taken away from their families because they are not being fed properly, they are allowed to roam the streets at night and they are not going to school. If that’s not child abuse, I don’t know what is.” Those who helped to fake the “stolen generations” myth have blood on their hands.

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Dinosaurs just got to look a whole lot stranger

Yes. It is a dinosaur. There are obviously speculative elements in this reconstruction, but it is speculation based on some interesting new evidence.

The subject of the February 4, 2010, Science study—the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi—turns out to have looked something like a woodpecker the size of a chicken, with black-and-white spangled wings and a rusty red crown.

Only a short time ago Anchiornis was completely unknown to science. The chicken-size dinosaur species' color patterns were decoded after the study authors had used a scanning electron microscope to study pigment samples taken from fossil feathers all over a specimen and then compared the samples to pigment from modern birds.

From National Geographic:

For the first time, scientists have decoded the full-body color patterns of a dinosaur, a new study in the journal Science says.

That may sound familiar, given last week's announcement of the first scientifically verified dinosaur color scheme.

But the previous research, published in Nature, had found pigments only on a few isolated parts of dinosaurs (see pictures)—and had used less rigorous methods for assigning colors to the fossilized, filament-like "protofeathers" found on some dinosaur specimens, say authors of the new report.

Both studies raise hopes that improved knowledge of dinosaur coloration could lead to insights into how some prehistoric animals behaved and why feathers evolved in the first place.

You can see a 3-D illustration of it here.

The other critter referred to is this:

"Sinosauropteryx is the first fossil dinosaur to have its color scientifically established."

Pigments have been found in fossil dinosaurs for the first time, a new study says.

The discovery may prove once and for all that dinosaurs' hairlike filaments—sometimes called dino fuzz—are related to bird feathers, paleontologists announced today. (Pictures: Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find.)

As discussed previously, the really interesting thing about Sinosauropteryx is the fact that phylogenetically it is a quite primitive theropod (irrespective of when it particularly lived), being a compsognathid.

So the presence of feathers (or something clearly ancestral to these structures) so "early" within the theropods is significant.

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YouTube: Lord Monckton in Melbourne

From Watts Up With That?:

Highlights of Lord Christopher Monckton’s Melbourne Presentation at the Sofitel Melbourne. Recorded 1st February 2010. There are two parts below.

Part 1

Part2

Slides used in his presentation:

Photos for use in blogs and articles:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/04/lord-monckton-wows-melbourne/

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Paul Murray in today's West - A case for cooling it on warming

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/opinion/post/-/blog/paulmurray/post/441/comment/1/

A very balanced treatment of the subject from Murray.

Final paragraphs:

Now, 30 per cent is even beyond the upper-end target of the Rudd Government. It is offering only 5 per cent now with the possibility of increases to 15 or 25 per cent depending on international action.

You do the maths on the effect of that tiny cut to our 1.5 per cent of global emissions.

Cutting atmospheric pollution is never a bad thing, especially if it doesn't entail an over-complicated system of trading permits that even on its own modelling causes huge fluctuations in the carbon price and would damage our international competitiveness if not matched by our trading partners and competitors. But trying to fool Australians that cuts to carbon emissions of 5 per cent - even 30 per cent - will have any real effect on global warming is just dishonest.

Australians are concerned about the implications of climate change. Cynical politicians, on both sides, do them no favours by merely trying to turn those fears to their electoral advantage.

Both sides of politics need to think hard about Lord Monckton's final words in his open letter to Mr Rudd. He argues that waiting and adapting will be more cost-effective than trying to change how the atmosphere works:

"It would be kinder to your working people to wait another decade and see whether global temperatures even begin to respond as the IPCC has predicted.

"What is the worst that can happen if you wait? Just 0.02C of global warming that would not otherwise have occurred. It's a no-brainer."

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Our ABC's commitment to unbiased journalism on display again

Typical ABC hatchet job carried out tonight on Lord Monckton. (But as another example of how far too much of our taxpayer funded network engages in dishonest advocacy journalism, ie pushing one side of an argument, you can check out here how Monckton was treated during a debate with Rupert Posner on John Faine's morning program on Melbourne's ABC radio. Suffice to say that Monckton wasn't debating Posner, he was up against Posner and Faine, who continually interjected and interrupted him as he sought to make his points.) Anyway, on to the 7:30 Report tonight: When I heard that Lord Monckton would appear on the ABC’s 7.30 Report, I wondered: “How will they rig this?” I mean, would host Kerry O’Brien, a warmist, really dare interview Monckton on his own, and let him put his arguments? Would he really give Monckton the same opportunity to speak that O’Brien regularly allows warmists such as Sir Nicholas Stern, Tim Flannery and Al Gore - none of them climate scientists themselves, and with records between them of exaggeration, grotesque alarmism, statistical trickery, vested interests, untruths, misrepresentations and false predictions that O’Brien let’s go through unchallenged?. Answer: of course not. Check those links on the warmists’ names to see how O’Brien lets climate alarmists put their case directly, in friendly one-on-one discussions with him . But now see how Monckton, a sceptic, was set up. First, Monckton was denied a similar in-studio interview, unedited, with O’Brien, presumably because O’Brien would have been hopelessly exposed and outgunned. Instead, he appeared only in an edited report, interspliced with comments from three fervent warmists: green lobbyist and lawyer John Connor from the Climate Institute, Chief Scientist Penny Sackett and Ben McNeil from the Climate Change Research Centre . (Naturally, not a single sceptical scientist was interviewed in this report.) The rest here And our taxes pay for this rubbish.

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"He is both anal and banal." Ouch!

Niki Savva delivers the most flaying assessment of K R Puff'n'Fluff I've ever read. She captures the over-riding fakeness of the man, and it's almost painful to consider. If anyone out there stumbles across the real Kevin Rudd, could they please call his wife and kids. They are very worried because they haven’t seen him for a while and have apparently lodged a missing persons report with the police. There have been images of Rudd on television and in the newspapers, usually smiling and joking, often with toddlers, but there is no proof it is really him. Or anybody, really. He just looks and sounds like a clone of someone he wishes he was. Like some alien body snatcher he slithered into John Howard’s skin one night towards the end of 2006 and wore it comfortably all the way through the 2007 election to convince people they were electing a fresher, more modern version of Howard.   The cops should have dropped Haneef, and arrested Rudd instead for identity theft.   Rudd shed Howard’s skin as soon as the election was over, and ever since he has been sliding around desperately looking for someone else’s skin to crawl into. Read the rest here

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James Delingpole is apparently in no mood to be magnanimous in victory

We had lunch. “There are many more scientists who think the way I do,” he told me. “But they don’t want to stick their heads above the parapet. They don’t want to lose their jobs.” We talked a bit about the loneliness of our position, how impossible it was to place dissenting articles anywhere in the media, how people who thought like us were treated like pariahs.

Now suddenly it has all changed utterly. And you know what? I’m in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or imprisoned. I want warmist politicians like Brown and disgusting Milibands booted out and I want Conservative fellow-travellers who are still pushing this green con trick – that’ll be you, David Cameron, you Greg Clark, you Tim Yeo, you John Gummer, to name but four – to be punished at the polls for their culpable idiocy.

For years I’ve been made to feel a pariah for my views on AGW. Chris Booker has had the same experience, as has Richard North, Benny Peiser, Lord Lawson, Philip Stott and those few others of us who recognised early on that the AGW thing stank. Now it’s payback time and I take small satisfaction from seeing so many rats deserting their sinking ship. I don’t want them on my side. I want to see them in hell, reliving scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.

Yeah, maybe it isn’t the Christian way. But screw ‘em. It’s not as though they haven’t all been screwing us for long enough.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100024416/climategate-time-for-the-tumbrils/

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Michael Moore and the unquestioning self-righteousness of the Left

The trouble with the Michael Moore view of the world is that it elevates motive over outcome. Never mind if the consequence of what you’re proposing is to make people poorer. The main thing is that to flaunt your niceness by hating the right people. Hatred, like evil, is very important to a certain kind of Leftie. Not, let me stress, all Lefties: plenty of socialists accept that there are other valid points of view. The funny thing is that the ones who hate the hardest tend to be the ones who aspire to the highest of the moral high ground. Full article here Via http://twitter.com/s_dog

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Cold Showers, Rotting Food, the Lights, Then Dancing

Gate Du Jour: IPCC AR4 references NYT story “Cold Showers, Rotting Food, the Lights, Then Dancing” – Title of Pachauri’s next novel maybe? WUWT commenter “Galileonardo” writes: I found this reference to the New York Times in WGII 14.4.6. Just thought it should be part of the growing record: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch14s14-4-6.html The reference reads (Wilgoren and Roane, 1999) and is the source for the following claim: Unreliable electric power, as in minority neighbourhoods during the New York heatwave of 1999, can amplify concerns about health and environmental justice. The AR4 reference page can be found here: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch14s14-references.html It reads: Wilgoren, J. and K.R. Roane, 1999: Cold Showers, Rotting Food, the Lights, Then Dancing. New York Times, A1. July 8, 1999 That article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/08/nyregion/aftermath-heat-wave-neighborhoods-cold-showers-rotting-food-then-lights-then.html?pagewanted=1 I’m not sure who peer reviewed it. From Watts Up With That?

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After the war on salt, the battle against butter

From Spiked Online: It certainly seems to be the case that eating more saturated fat increases the amount of cholesterol in your blood. It’s the cholesterol - or more particularly these days, the so-called bad cholesterol - which is deemed to cause those furry arteries. The trouble is that intervening in diet doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference. In the early Eighties, a massive intervention trial called MRFIT reduced cholesterol and saturated fat intake for a large group of Americans. If the theory was right, the result should have been a sharp drop in heart attacks. The actual result? No change. The kind of dietary changes that people are constantly told to make had no effect on the risk of having a coronary. Incredibly, however, this negative result had no effect on the popularity of the diet-causes-heart-attacks thesis, either. In 1998, the Danish doctor and cholesterol sceptic Uffe Ravnskov noted: ‘The crucial test is the controlled, randomised trial. Eight such trials using diet as the only treatment have been performed but neither the number of fatal or non-fatal heart attacks was reduced.’ Indeed, as Gary Taubes notes in his book The Diet Delusion, there was initially a lot of scepticism about the idea that cholesterol was a killer and it was only when the idea got the official stamp of approval from the US government in the 1960s that it became regarded as common sense; as Taubes shows, the epidemiological evidence for the theory was full of holes. (For a review of the book, see The Copernicus of the diet debate? by Rob Lyons.) Full article here Via the Food & Health Skeptic And as ever, I'd urge people to read this article from The New York Times concerning the Taubes' book referred to above: Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus

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Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian's (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment

From the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard: Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets. How do you catch up? If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.

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Is Sir David King completely barking mad?

James Delingpole clearly has is suspicions: Sir David King, the totally sane, not remotely hysterical, and non-aluminium-foil-hat-wearing  former advisor to much-loved and respected former Prime Minister Tony Blair, has spoken out on the Climategate emails. Apparently, he has told the Independent, they weren’t leaked (as pretty much every other person who has been following the story now thinks). They were hacked. Probably by US “anti-climate-change lobbyists” or, possibly, by evil foreign intelligence services. Sir David said, however, that it was not possible to dismiss the possibility of Russia’s involvement. “If it was a job done on behalf of a government, then I suppose there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency,” he said. Sir David – who, like Osama Bin Laden, believes strongly in man-made global warming – has had a bit of a problem with the Russkies ever since they made him look ridiculous at an international climate seminar in Moscow in July 2004 chaired by Putin’s chief economic adviser Alexander Illarionov. According to Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster, Sir David was horrified to find so many sceptical scientists at the conference and tried, unsuccessfully to have them censored. The final straw came during a speech by Professor Paul Reiter, one of the first IPCC contributors to point up the flaws in the IPCC process: the 2001 report had utterly misrepresented his expert views on insect-borne diseases in order to make it seem as if the incidence of malaria would increase with “global warming.” As Booker recounts: “When King himself then put forward the now familiar claim that global warming was responsible for the melting of the ice on summit of Kilimanjaro, Reiter challenged him by referring to various studies showing that the melting had been taking place since the 1880s. It was due not to global warming, these had concluded, but to deforestation causing a sharp drop in local precipitation. Apparently unable to answer Reiter’s point, King broke off in mid-sentence and led his delegation out of the room.” Illarianov was appalled by the behaviour of Sir David and his delegation, he wrote afterwards: “It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government and the reputation of the title “Sir” has sustained heavy damage.” I’m touched that the Independent continues to do the charitable work of making Sir David feel better about himself by still taking him seriously. But I’m not sure I can promise to carry on this tradition when I take over as Environment Editor. Problem is, I’m with Illarionov. I believe, as he does, that the eco-fascist ideology and warped science underpinning the AGW scam are like something out of Stalin’s Soviet Union. As Illarionov wrote: That ideological base can be juxtaposed and compared with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the twentieth century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda.

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