Reader Tips

Reader Tips 60 Comments

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio.
Peter Lilley, one of several senior members of Britain’s ruling Tory party who are questioning whether the science of AGW is settled, and whether a political consensus on AGW actually exists, is quoted in today’s Independent as saying that the “effects (of global warming) tend to be exaggerated.”
In the ongoing debate over AGW, this important question of whether we actually know that a one or two degree increase would lead to environmental Armageddon has been pushed off the proverbial radar screen. Well, never mind a degree or two, let’s up the ante: in tonight’s musical selection, flamboyant Australian songwriter/entertainer Peter Allen is practically on fire as he commences to perform his signature song I Go To Rio, and when he does burst into flames at around the 2:25 mark, he simply grabs a hand fan and uses it to fan the flames! What panache!
Feel free to grab your own maracas and bunny hop your Reader Tips into the comments.

60 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Time the relentless. Time the destroyer. Time, rolling ever onward, tripping over its own relentless feet….like jazz….like a fat man falling down the stairs….
    Former Environment Canada research scientist Dr. Madhav Khandekar, in an article published on Dec. 1, 2026:
    “…where did this number 2035 (the year when (Himalayan) glaciers could vanish) come from?
    “According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents…”
    Unconfirmed sources indicate that the IPCC will issue a correction on June 2, 1950.

  5. I don’t know if it has been mentioned on another thread but on the 7:00 CBC news a story ran about the “stepping aside” of Phil Jones. At last the MSM has acknowledge that there is a story.

  6. Today the weather in Thompson, Manitoba was -14C. I was curious how people up there felt about Global Warming. So I asked a friend & colleague of mine. He’s a very smart fellow and not particularly political.
    Here’s what he said:
    “Actually we have not been following and as a matter of fact I do not hear anyone really speaking about such things as climate change here in Thompson. Of course we see it all on the news, but from our perspective we have not seen any direct effects from the phenomena. Our last 2 – 3 winters have been very cold with loads of snow and the summers have generally been nothing to speak of (read miserable) – wet and cloudy.
    I can remember the summers in the mid to late 1970’s when we first came here and they were belting hot, but we have not seen such things for years.”

  8. On a completely different subject, I have it on good authority that a frightening conspiracy is unfolding, right here at home. The RCMP have been admitting white men, in great numbers, into their ranks. I know, it’s hard to believe. Think of it, white men, with guns, on our streets.

  10. RD – Jones has been suspended pending the findings of an inquiry.
    The same goes for that fraud Mann at Penn State. Suspended.

  12. Henry Waxman, CA DemRat, that pusher of frauds, just cannot connect the dots, is in full panic mode – may lose his biggest partner in crime.
    [The newspaper industry is suffering “market failure” and the government will need to help preserve serious journalism essential to democracy, an influential US congressman said Wednesday. ] Breibart
    Can you believe that sh!! ??

  13. Excerpt from Bret Stephens’ WSJ essay “Climategate: Follow the Money”:
    “Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them. Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.”
    At one point Stephens quotes an hilarious email from one of the CRU-ers:
    “I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”
    …and notes: “This is not the sound of settled science but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.”

  14. @Robert W Vancouver:
    That’s why it’s been changed to ‘Climate Change”. Can’t argue that climate changes………

  15. Like I said; breeding shows!
    Posted by: larben at December 2, 2009 12:25 AM ”
    hey-o larby, please if you will, point out the ‘breeding’ evident when prince harry traipsed around in a nazi uniform.
    3w.people.com/people/article/0,,1017620,00.html
    failing that (and you will fail) alternatively submit a defense of the duck of windsor buddying up to the original nazis:
    video.google.ca/videosearch?hl=en&source=hp&q=duke+of+windsor+nazi&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=TzgXS9OiBMrklAeo99DsAg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCIQqwQwAw#hl=en&source=hp&q=duke+of+windsor+nazi&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=TzgXS9OiBMrklAeo99DsAg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCIQqwQwAw&qvid=duke+of+windsor+nazi&vid=928714193842951570
    or just google ‘duke of windsor nazi’ and frantically click away whilst you mess your pants.

  16. Of course James Hansen wants Copenhagen to fail.
    Changed his mind right after a lawyer whispered in his ear;
    Jim, cut your losses – if this scam passes, the fruadsuit would be $Millions and about a four lifetimer.

  17. From the “Journalists: our moral and intellectual superiors” files, this excerpt from a 1975 issue of Newsweek:
    “The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic….
    (….)
    “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
    The science is sound.

  21. different thread curious, time to move on. let the dead bury the dead; the past is a foreign country!

  22. Liked the Liberace comparison, (may he rest in peace) at least he had talent, more than can be said for the peanut farmer.

  23. Ah, sorry to be a pest, and not to put too fine a point on it, but Stephens is incorrect: it is not “the sound of the cracking of an empirical foundation”, it is the sound of the cracking of a non-empirical foundation.

  24. Temperature at Eureka Station, Nunavut, Wed. Dec. 10, 2009, 10:00 PM CST Dec 02-09.
    -29° C
    Source: Enviroment Canada Weather.
    Conclusions: A: Arctic ice caps don’t melt at -29°C.
    B: Cold air from the arctic high pressure systems cause cold air on the Saskatchewan plains.
    C: Global warming is a hoax.

  28. Not at all, Vitruvius. Stephens agrees with you; he is saying the same thing you are, and defending the same thing that you are. He’s saying that the empirical foundation of the Hadley CRU’s case is cracking, in the sense that one might describe the prosecution’s case – or the defendent’s – as cracking at a key moment in a particular criminal trial.
    Note – learn it, live it – that he didn’t say “It’s the sound of the cracking of THE empirical foundation,” but rather “an” empirical foundation, as in the putative empirical foundation of the – fraudulent – case-makers in question.
    To describe or note that there’s a crack or a hole in someone’s logic, for example, is NOT in any way, shape, or form to take a shot at the foundation of *logic itself*. Quite the contrary. It’s a distinction with a difference, and a critical one. One can legitimately say of a particular example of fraudulent science that its empirical foundations are weak, or fraudulent, or non-existent, or not up to standards, etc etc etc. The act of merely referring to such standards is a buttressing of these empirical standards, not a refutation of them, or an insult against them, or an assertion of their non-existence or compromise.

  29. Mini-SDA Get Together on Canada’s Left Coast
    On Thursday, December 17th I’m meeting a fellow SDA’er for the first time at a local Tim Hortons (Broadway & Fir). We’re meeting there between 10am-12pm. Not the best time, I know, but if anyone else would like to join us, please know you’re most welcome!

  30. The Telegraph link (11:44 PM) is hilarious, Black Mamba. The Telegraph’s Damian Thompson:
    “Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif) thinks those responsible for Climategate should face criminal charges. ‘Wow, that’s a bit harsh,’ I thought when I read it.
    “On closer inspection, however, Boxer was calling for prosecution of the hackers, not the resourceful prof and his pals. As she told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday: ‘You call it Climategate; I call it E-mail-theft-gate.'”
    E-mail-theft-gate. Wowee, Babs.

  32. North Koreans dare to protest as devaluation wipes out savings
    Rush for dollars and Chinese yuan after Kim Jong-il’s surprise move to reassert control over economy
    This must be one of those countries where the stolen wealth
    of the nation has been returned to its rightful owners.

  33. Of course James Hansen wants Copenhagen to fail.
    Changed his mind right after a lawyer whispered in his ear;
    Jim, cut your losses – if this scam passes, the fruadsuit would be $Millions and about a four lifetimer.
    Posted by: ron in kelowna ∴ at December 2, 2009 11:15 PM
    Exactly Ron – this guy is transparent and stupid – does he also have beach frount in Saskatchewan that he’d like to sell? Hopydopy.

  34. And yet it remains the case, EBD, that in retrospect we now know that it is not the case that what they were doing was empirical. It was fiction. Fiction and Empirical are separate fields of study. I don’t think they should be conflated in the name of casting equivalences. Trust, such as in trusting science (as an epistemological methodology) and its undergirding empiricism, is more important than that: it should not be bartered for a turn of phrase.

  35. “It is not the case that what they were doing was empirical.” – Vitruvius
    Well yes, exactly, inasmuch as the empirical basis of their case, as measured and determined by those who are the gatekeepers of the method itself, was cracked, broken, non-existent, fraudulent, fictional, etc. And yet it remains the case that what they did is/was measured against the empirical standard. Here’s the question, Vitruvius: if one describes a particular case as being irremedially broken by empirical standards, i.e. as not actually meeting empirical standards, in what sense is such a description a *shot* against, or a denigration of, empirical standards, rather than evidence of the shortcomings of the case they’re attempting to make in terms of those empirical standards?
    Is it the case taht a description of an experiment that doesn’t meet empirical standards a shot against empirical standards by mere virtue of the fact that it refers to empirical standards? If so, how could one conceivably enforce particular standards without being allowed to refer to those standards in terms of those standards? Should those qualified to bear witness to a lack of adherence to, and respect for, the empirical standard be disallowed from making reference to the lack of empirical standards on the mere grounds that to do so would be making reference to, and therefore denigrating by association, empirical standards?
    Should we forbid ourselves from referring to an illogical case, for example, on the grounds that to do so would invoke the word ‘logic’? Should we never describe someone’s position as unreasonable, for example, on the grounds that to do so would invoke and sully the word “reason”? Should we refrain from describing someone as ‘insane’ because it might sully the good name of those who are sane?
    I don’t understand why it should in any way be considered in error or wrong to say that a particular case didn’t meet empirical standards, or to suggest that a particular case, when evaluated in the strict terms of sound empirical standards, is ‘cracked’ in the context of those terms. It seems to me that to whatever extent one is fond of the empirical method one should not only allow others to describe, whenever appropriate, the precise shortcomings of assertions that do not meet empirical standards of examination, but should encourage them to do just that, and to make direct and loud reference to the shortcomings of any such assertions in the specific context of these defined criterion without being subject to criticisms from those who would deign to defend empirical standards and the scientific method itself.

  36. Search engines continue to block auto suggest of “CLIMATEGATE”.
    The clumsy attempts of Google to muzzle the information by killing the suggestion of a topic with 22 million hits may be creating the opposite effect, as some curious folks keep typing in the term to see what the search engines are up to. Are the search engines really that political that they would try and influence the debate by obscuring the information that runs counter to their politics?
    Damn right they are.
    With a tip of the hat to Russ Steele at NC Media Watch (http://ncwatch.typepad.com/media/webtech/), we go to this story from a few weeks back at NewsBusters by Noel Sheppard: Al Gore advised Google on “search quality” (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/10/15/al-gore-advised-google-about-its-search-quality).
    Apparently Big Al has been a “long-time Google adviser.” Very interesting read…
    There are now about 11,000 hits on “why are search engines not suggesting climategate”. The more they try and hide things, the worse they make it look.

  37. http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/02/news/economy/Sanders_Bernanke_confirmation_hold/index.htm
    “What American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”
    0:00 /03:18Buffett: Bernanke deserves an A
    Sanders said Bernanke, who took the helm of the Fed in 2006, could have averted the financial crisis in several ways, but failed at “core responsibility of the Federal Reserve” and thus “it’s time for him to go.”
    yet…
    http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/16/whose-policies-led-to-the-credit-crisis/
    However, what many do not recall is that Bush wanted to tighten oversight with a new regulatory board for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other government recipients for the express purpose of addressing bad loan practices — and Democrats blocked it.

  38. “It is not the case that what they were doing was empirical.”
    — Vitruvius
    “Well yes, exactly.”
    — EBD
    That’s all I was sayin’, man.

  39. I hope I’m not about to get slammed for this, but might I point out that the HadCRUT temperature reconstructions are not really the theoretical foundation of AGW theory? That is based upon the observed IR absorption bands of CO2 gas, coupled with an inference that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 would increase the amount of solar heat energy so trapped in the atmosphere. Call it the snark hypothesis, for short.
    With the snark hypothesis in hand, climate scientists went hunting the snark, seeking its footprints in historic instrumental climate records and in proxies, notably ice cores and tree rings. Sadly, though, for the intrepid hunters, snark tracks were few and far between, if not altogether illusionary. But they persevered, and eventually found their snark, although the skeptics scoffed, and said it was just a Mann in a snark suit.
    Seriously, though, the global temperature series could be said to buttress the CO2-forcing theory, but they are not the foundation of it. A global temperature record that is flat for 1500 years, with a sudden rise in the last 20 or so could buttress any one of hundreds of proposed climate-change mechanisms, but it is not, in itself, theory. A temperature record, in and of itself, is just data. Nothing more.
    What the Climategate leak reveals, is that the custodians of that data appear to have been somewhat less than ethical in how they handled that data, and somewhat less than ethical in how they handled relations with other scientists and government officials. That certainly calls into question the validity of their so-called “value-enhanced” data. Would you care for a “value-enhanced” cheeseburger? I have passed it through my digestive tract, and greatly enhanced its value as fertilizer, you know.
    Stay tuned. Will “Is Crud” become known as the present tense of “Had CRUT”?

  40. re google’s reluctance to admit the truth:
    Forced to look, Google.ca finds some 23 million references to climategate. On the other hand, Bing finds 56 million. It’s not looking like Google knows how to look! But Ask.com is even worse – they can only come up with 10 million
    Let’s try a less politically incorrect test – how about “Warren Spahn”.
    Google -108 thousand
    Bing – 423 thousand
    Ask – a pathetic 17 thousand
    Hey – maybe Google just isn’t as good as people thought?

  41. http://bit.ly/4UI4pC
    A little update on the sun’s status. Of course, this will have no tangible impact on us, but it is kind of interesting.
    “SOLAR MINIMUM: The sun is in the pits of a very deep solar minimum. Many researchers thought the sunspot cycle had hit bottom in 2008 when the sun was blank 73% of the time. Not so. 2009 is on the verge of going even lower. So far this year, the sun has been blank 75% of the time, and only a serious outbreak of sunspots over the next few weeks will prevent 2009 from becoming the quietest year in a century. Solar minimum continues.”

  42. I don’t see what the big deal is about the temp records being destroyed is. It would be very easy to reconstruct them.
    They could simply take the “adjusted” figures that they now have, apply the same “adjustment formula” that they used to get the “adjusted figures” and work backwards. Kinda like if you multiply 2 times 10 to get 20 , if you divide 20 by 10 you get 2.
    Whats so hard about that.
    Horny Toad

  46. Re: “North Koreans dare to protest as devaluation wipes out savings”
    Time for the Ceausescu Treatment for Kim Jong-Il!

  47. Some sad news from the entertainment world
    Maggie Jones who played Blanche Hunt on Coronation Street has passed away at the age of 75.
    She was a cast member for 35yrs. She portrayed Deidre’s Mum & Kens pain in the side.

  49. Andrew Garfield and Jeff Haynes, A surge is not enough
    The bottom line is that unless we, the US and the international community, accept and are willing to make a long-term commitment to the fundamental rebuilding of Afghan society, the window of opportunity created by the surge will likely be lost and failure will almost certainly follow…

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