Re: Snow Reports February 6
The South Hills of Pittsburgh–18 inches.
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Snow Reports: February 6
Central Montgomery County…. 16 inches.
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Global Warming: The Hits Keep Coming January 31
First we find out that the story about disappearing Himalayan glaciers is fabricated, then we find out that the head of the IPCC knew that, now we find out that the IPCC thinks that magazine articles and grad student theses are authoritative enough to include in their report.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
Climbing magazines? Really? I wonder if they quoted the National Enquirer, too.
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Global Warming: IPCC Head Caught Lying January 29
The unraveling continues with the latest admission from the Chariman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that he knew the data on the disappearing Himalayan glaciers was bogus well before the Copenhagen summit where he repeated the claim.
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.
So what did he know and when did he know it? And when are we going to stop taking these people seriously?
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Commonwealth Foundation Taking Climategate Flak January 28
The ultra-liberal Huffington Post’s Kevin Grandia attacks us because of our call for an independent investigation of PSU’s Michael Mann and his role in Climategate.
Of course, in accusing us of erecting a “straw man”, the HuffPost author erects his own straw man along with some great hyperbole, including “Once Mann is painted as the red-robed leader of the Freemason conspiracy to take over the world…”
This is similar to PennFuture’s attack on us from last week. Neither the Huffington Post nor PennFuture address the merits of our call for an investigation. Instead, they resort to calling us “right-wing ideologues, climate deniers, tea party activists and big industry cheerleaders.”
For eight years, the left pointed the finger at the right saying that we were politicizing science…. now they’re lashing out at us for calling them on it.
… another data point for the “if the left accuse the right about it, they’re guilty of it” stack.
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Another Nail in the AGW Coffin January 24
Remember those disappearing Himalayan glaciers? Yep. All made up.
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’
Never mind whether it was true or not, it was important, so truth be damned!
This would be funny if it weren’t so serious.
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Climategate Researcher Gates Stimulus Money January 15
Creating or saving jobs by making shit up.
But I repeat myself.
Mann is also the creator of the “Hockey Stick” graph, which purported to show a sharp increase in recent temperatures. That work has been thoroughly discredited by researcher Stephen McIntyre. Yet, in June 2009, the National Science Foundation awarded Mann a three-year $500,000 to further study the climate’s response to human activity. According to the grant award:
The broader impacts involve supporting postdoctoral scholars and graduate students and contributing to the understanding of abrupt climate change.
So, the research is supposed to give us a better ‘understanding of abrupt climate change.’ Mind you, the research isn’t to determine whether there is abrupt climate change occurring. Given that Mann is known for using “tricks” to finesse his data, the National Science Foundation will not be pleased with the results.
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Fact Checking: Michael Mann & the Inquirer January 11
Watt’s Up With That looks at an Inquirer story about Penn State climatologist Michael Mann and finds the story a little, ahem, lacking.
One of the great mysteries of climate science is why Mann never gets interviewed by an informed and intelligent interviewer in command of the facts – or maybe it isn’t such a mystery after all.
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All your global warming are belong to us January 5
Spotted on every available utility pole in the vicinity of Chester Pike and Morton Avenue in Ridley Park and presented without further comment:
(click image to embiggen)
Transcript (spelling and punctuation in original):
Are you cold on this winter eve? Well if so, I know a very resourseful way of keeping warm. This is of course GloBAL WARMING. Unfortunatley PeoPle such as AL Gore, Barrack Obama, and Saddam Hussain are trying to keep us down. Please join our cause and you will be heaveley rewarded with the sensation of GLoBAL WARMING. And oh yah don’t forget green is a color not a life style.This message was brought to you by teens for truth (R)!!!!
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Media Malpractice Award for 2009 January 4
The votes are in, and “Climategate” had the strongest showing for “Worst Media Malpractice of 2009” with 33% of the vote. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog agrees, it’s the number one most under-reported story of 2009.
As Lisa pointed out in the Watercooler comment section, “[T]he MSM is still full speed ahead with their green agenda as if the email leak never happened at all. For my money, the under or non-factual reporting of Climategate has the most far-reaching consequences for the world.”
Indeed, some seem more interested in finding out who the hacker/leaker/whistleblower was than in what was revealed. Perhaps the media folks bought the whole “science is settled” thing, or just lacked the technical skills to understand the manipulation problem. Also under-appreciated is the damage done to “peer review”. Manipulations of the peer review process undermine the credibility that the process is supposed to bestow. “Peer reviewed” is no longer a magic bludgeon in the politics of climatology.
The climate issue, even apart from the email leak, is a chronically mis/under-reported issue. The green agenda has several potential points of failure…
- Is the earth really warming? [-- Probably.]
- Is the warming historically unprecedented? [-- Not really.]
- Is the warming caused primarily or substantially by human carbon dioxide emissions? [-- Good question.]
- Would the projected warming cause catastrophic damage to humanity? [-- For some locales, certainly yes. Others could benefit. It may be a net plus to humanity. More people die from cold than from heat each year.]
- Would any of the proposed treaties or legislative fixes meaningfully mitigate the anticipated effects of climate change? [-- Not on your life, not by a mile.]
Of course, answering any of the above questions in a politically incorrect manner makes one a “denier” because doubt about any of those points seriously undermines the green agenda. I answer that the real deniers are those who overlook the “watermelon” (i.e. Red-green) nature of the global warming alarmists, whose “tax the West” solution is remarkably similar to recommendations socialists have been making for decades before climate change was an issue, back when folks were more concerned about the “legacy of colonialism” or some such thing. Hammer…, nails…,[some assembly required].
And what are the potential consequences for failing to report this story? Something between a massive economy-neutering tax on the United States and transferring of wealth to two-bit third world dictatorships (on the modest end), to a virtual repeal of the Industrial Age civilization (on the extreme, AlGore-ish end). — No biggie… oh look, something shiny!
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Climategate: Fingers Will Be Pointed January 3
I am so glad to report that Michael Mann – creator of the incredible Hockey Stick curve and one of the scientists most heavily implicated in the Climategate scandal – is about to get a very nasty shock. When he turns up to work on Monday, he’ll find that all 27 of his colleagues at the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University have received a rather tempting email inviting them to blow the whistle on anyone they know who may have been fraudulently misusing federal grant funds for climate research.
Under US law, regardless of whether or not a prosecution results, the whistleblower stands to make very large sums of money: it is based on a percentage of the total government funds which have been misused, in this case perhaps as much as $50 million.
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Cognitive Dissonance Strikes the PG December 30
Since I am a capitalist, I only trade my money for things that will have value to me. Thus I read the online edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette because it is free.
I found this article the other day which made me wonder if the free version of the PG isn’t still overpriced.
Refinery Struggles Bruise NJ Communities
Harry Schaeffer was a toddler when his family moved in 1955 to National Park, where nearby Eagle Point Refinery had been turning crude to gasoline, heating oil and other products for years.
Schaeffer grew up near the towers and tanks and got a job at Eagle Point as a young man. He spent 34 years controlling the valves and switches that moved oil products around the 1,100-acre spread of giant tanks before he was furloughed indefinitely this month.
A tragedy to be sure, and I want to be clear that stories of closing factories and good people losing good jobs infuriates me. What absolutely puts me over the top, though, is that this article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a newspaper which routinely vilifies business and industry and has never met a tax it didn’t like. This article is nothing more than a bone they’ve thrown to the seven actual factory workers who still read the PG.
What I find most interesting, though, is a little further down in the article.
Schaeffer and others at the Sunoco Inc. plant are among more than 1,000 workers who lost their jobs in the past few months in the refinery industry within 50 miles of Philadelphia, a bad sign for an enterprise that paid blue collar workers well for decades. And when the company hosted a job fair for workers facing furloughs or layoffs, the refinery positions available were far-flung — in Illinois and the Texas Gulf Coast.
That’s because the economic and regulatory environment is much better in the gulf coast states and even in Illinois than it is in New Jersey. Even Pennsylvania is better it seems.
In October, Sunoco announced its plan to idle refining operations and furlough some 400 employees, leaving a much smaller staff to handle already refined oil shipped in from overseas. The company has not announced a long-term plan for the plant. Refining functions remain at Sunoco’s nearby plants in Philadelphia and Marcus Hook, Pa.
Of course that’s a little like being the healthiest guy on death row.
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PA Mercury Rule Gets the Ax December 26
Earlier this month, the PA Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling which bars the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection from imposing its own set of mercury regulations on coal-fired power plants (more info on that here). This is good news. I say that not because I’m an evil conservative who likes pollution, but because these regulations would have been one more thing that put Pennsylvania industries, in this case power plants, at a competitive disadvantage compared to plants in other states.
“But,” you say, “I’ve heard mercury is bad, so shouldn’t we regulate it somehow?”
Good question. The answer to that is found in the information that is not in any of the articles you’ll find on the subject. The US Environmental Protection Agency is already working on regulations which address mercury emissions and other emissions like it. These regulations are called Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards and, as the name suggests, they are already pretty stringent. More importantly, these regulations will apply to virtually all power plants in the US, including those in Pennsylvania. The end result is that power plants in Pennsylvania are going to be regulated one way or another. The only question is whether or not they’ll have to meet federal AND state regulations or just federal regulations like most of the other power plants in the country.
Having spent most of my career complying with federal environmental regulations, I can tell you first-hand that EPA is not lobbing regulatory softballs at anyone. Environmental regulations, and MACT standards in particular, are very strict and very difficult to comply with; there are no loopholes. The state DEP with its limited resources isn’t going to come up with anything more protective of the environment. State regulations are, more often than not, nothing more than cover for politicians in Harrisburg who want to be seen as “doing something”. All they’re really doing is increasing the cost of doing business in Pennsylvania and continuing to drive jobs and people out of the state.
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PSU’s Mann Ducks Fox Interview December 21
All six parts of the hour-long special aired during prime time Sunday night on Fox News featuring Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick are now online below. Both Phil Jones and Michael Mann ducked requests for interviews. I can perhaps understand Jones’ situation, since he has not been giving other interviews, but in Mann’s case he’s been on a media blitz writing op-eds for the Washington Post and giving interviews to dozens more.
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Quote of the Day December 17
Courtesy Dennis Prager:
“One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad.”
H/T Jay Nordlinger on The Corner
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Jon Stewart completely misses the point of Climategate December 4
Yes, it’s refreshing to see him poke fun at the Goracle. But if you can stand to watch this ass until the end of this clip, take note that Stewart is not pissed off that Climate Scientists lied, that they manipulated data, that the whole thing may be a vast hoax that has already cost us untold billions and could still cost us more; no, what Stewart is pissed off about is that they got CAUGHT lying and manipulating data and therefore give ammunition to those mouthbreathing deniers.
Jack. Ass.
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PSU’s Mann: Hey You, Get Under that Bus! December 3
And so the finger pointing begins.
Prof Jones, who has denied altering figures, has since said he would stand down from his post while an independent review is carried out.
One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: “I can’t put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email.”
Prof Mann also said he could not “justify” a request from Prof Jones that he should delete some of his own emails to prevent them from being seen by outsiders.
Oh… and Al Gore cancels his attendance at the Copenhagen conference.
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Mann Defends Himself December 3
Penn State’s “Climatologist” Michael Mann is interviewed by AccuWeather.
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Tiger Woods and White House Gate-Crashers; Sorry, no time to report on Climategate December 1
As I continue to contemplate the collapse of America’s institutions (our government, our education system, our financial system, our scientific system, et al) perhaps the most egregious, and most notable, has been the collapse of our free press, which has been, for the most part, a willing accomplice to the collapse of these institutions in order to pursue their own partisan agenda of a utopian society run by a few select elites. And the speed with which the fourth estate is losing credibility is increasing exponentially with each passing moment that the Democrats are in power.
I can witness the birth of a true grassroots movement in the Summer of Tea Parties and I can fume at the MSM for ignoring it, while they breathlessly report on the recipe for Michael Jackson’s nightly sleepytime narcotics cocktail during a tour of Neverland Ranch. But I am not surprised.
I can witness two amateur journalists single-handedly take down one of the most corrupt and powerful left wing organizations in the country with little more than a video camera and a mini skirt, and I can fume at the MSM for ignoring it while Kate Gosselin is granted her seventh tear-streaked interview of the week. But I am not surprised.
Liberal bias in the media is nothing new, it’s almost a banal fact of life and conservative whining about is not going to change anything. It is helpful to point it out, but frankly, any story, whether it be Van Jones or Anita Dunn or Sarah Palin, the narrative is always going to be the same: Liberals good. Conservatives bad. Unless or until incontrovertible facts come to light and the media can no longer ignore it or spin it in such a way that the great unwashed will continue to believe it, such as in the cases of Van Jones, the Tea Parties and ACORN.
But I cannot sit still and watch exclusive interviews with the insipid gate-crashing couple from the White House State dinner, or listen to 9-11 tapes of Tiger Woods fire hydrant decapitation while the biggest story in the century is going down and the media continue to try to ignore it.
With each passing day, Warmergate gains steam and credibility and the press loses theirs. Global warming, environmentalism and going green have been ingrained into our culture not as some sort of policy, but as a full blown religion with commandments you must obey either by law or by social stigma. It is not enough to just recycle, use energy responsibly and generally be a good steward to the environment. Like our cave dwelling, knuckle dragging ancestors, we now believe Gaia demands sacrifice or she will become angry and unleash her hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis as punishment. The seas will rise and the polar bears will die unless we sacrifice our modern lifestyleand our filthy, ill-gotten money on Gaia’s altar. We are given a daily catechism in green living with scolds from our green high priests in the media and Hollywood who tell us how to live, what to buy, and where to shop for a greener lifestyle. And they tell us that Environmentalists are the enlightened ones because this isn’t like worshipping some sky-God who offers no proof of his existence; this is science. And the science is settled.
And while no-one can offer definitive proof that there is a God, neither can anyone offer definitive proof that there is NO God. And that is what the global warmists trumpet as their secular superiority: They are guided only by provable SCIENCE.
EXCEPT THERE NOW IS PROOF THAT THERE IS NO PROOF OF GLOBAL WARMING.
Because the global warming “scientists” who came up with and studied global warming and produced that ominous hockey stick graph that turned us all into weather worshipping pagans again conveniently THREW ALL THEIR DATA AWAY. Man-made global warming can now be categorized with any other snake-handling, comet-following, Tom-Cruise-loving cult out there. If the “science” is not “settled” then your unquestioning belief in it can only be classified as a religion. And now you must, by virtue of the proof that has come to light and the Constitution of the United States of America, GET IT OUT OF MY FACE.
And yet, the media, the “watchdog” media, upon whose relentless pursuit of the truth we are supposed to rely, is ignoring it. Think of how much of society is entwined, invested and created around the idea that the earth is warming and man is causing it. Think of how much money has been thrown at this belief.
Now consider if there was definitive proof that the “science” is not quite so “settled” and not only can it not be verified, but it is very likely, based on the evidence that is out there, that the whole idea of man-caused global warming is a big fat lie.
I think that might warrant a headline or two on one of the network news channels, wouldn’t you? A teensy headline in the New York Times?
Charts, and a great roundup of Warmergate here at The Devil’s Kitchen.
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Quote of the Day December 1
On Warmergate, courtesy Jonah Goldberg on The Corner:
The great moral scandal of global warming hysteria is that — even if it’s a real danger — it steals political and financial capital that might be spent on addressing far more immediate problems and spends it on ideological schemes that empower global elites.
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