Island Disappears

Disputed isle in Bay of Bengal disappears into sea

NEW DELHI – For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island's gone.

Or so Al Gore would have us believe! (Dramatic music:Dum Da Dummm!!!)


Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! The fools! And all I had to do was melt a few glaciers, raising the level of the ocean and covering an island! And they bought it hook, line and sinker!
Yes my plans are all coming to fruition, soon I shall be the, um, what was it exactly that I was supposed to have gained by making up the concept of global warming and then convincing every legitimate scientist in the world to go along with my scam, and then actually warming the globe so that the globe appeared to be warming? Well, whatever it is that I'm supposed to gain from this giant scheme, I will soon have it! It will be mine!!!! A-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!! And there's nothing you can do about it Mr. Bond!

Now This Is a Depressing Headline

(from Yahoo News)

Momentum Shifts to Skeptics on Global Warming Debate

Eroding confidence in climate science punctuated by a pair of blizzards has global warming skeptics across the United States calling for a sharp rollback to years of political and industrial efforts to curb greenhouse emissions thought to contribute to global warming.

Why are we required to act as though there is some sort of legitimate debate about this?

If we're going to pretend like these anti-science troglo-tards have some sort of a point, why don't we open up a debate on whether the moon landing was fake? Some people really believe the moon landing was fake, so why not pretend that the jury's still out on that question? Honestly, their logic isn't any worse than the climate deniers'. Both groups think NASA is full of shit, and believe that their "common sense" holds as much weight as scientific data.

Hey, why not have a representative from the Flat Earth Society on TV debating a geologist?

How does anyone take people seriously who think that a couple of snowstorms disprove Climate Change? That's like saying, "Hey, Payton Manning threw a big interception and lost the Superbowl. So much for that 'Manning's a good quarterback' theory!" You'd be laughed out of any sports bar in America.

So this is the debate. On the one side, we have every living Nobel Prize-winning scientist, NASA, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and decades of research and data.

On the other side: Hey, it's snowing!

And honest to God, that's the argument they're making on FOX "News."




And somehow, people are buying this line of BS:

In a survey released last month, the percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening declined 14 percentage points vs. the year prior, to 57 percent.

So, if Climatology were something we got to vote on, then we'd be getting close to solving the problem.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of climate scientists still agree the data on global warming is solid

Oh, like that matters. Scientists! What the hell do they know? Can't they see it's snowing?

We have to grow up in this country and realize that people who have spent their adult lives studying the subject know a little more about it than some guy who looks out the window and sees snow. Otherwise, we're screwed.

The Entire Inhofe Family are Ignorant Jerks

Senator James "If I don't understand it, it can't be true" Inhofe's Facebook page is proudly featuring photos of his horrid little grandchildren in a homemade igloo.



Ordinarily, kids playing in the snow should be adorable,but this is the Inhofe family, so you know it's going to be something awful or stupid or both.


And sure enough, here is the title of this set of photos:

Senator Jim Inhofe's Photos - Inhofe Family Pokes Fun at Al Gore, Global Warming During DC Feb Blizzard

Classy move, Senator. Getting little kids involved in your smear campaign against science!

Hahaha, hilarious!

Because Al Gore invented global warming and it's cold today, so he has to, um, live in an igloo? Or something, I guess?

Honk if you love Global Warming? I don't even get that one.

So here, I think, is what we're supposed to take away from this demonstration:

1) It's cold today, so Global Warming can't be real.

2) If you mock the messenger, the message becomes untrue.

3) Al Gore is a weiner.

4) Ignorance is a virtue.

5) Children needn't respect their elders if those elders believe in science, or are otherwise weiners.

6) Every legitimate scientist in the world is wrong because Grandpa says so.

Honest to God, Inhofe is such a dunce it's barely worth pointing out how wrong he is.

First of all, pretending that Al Gore came up with the idea of Global Warming is like saying that the Rolling Stones invented the Blues.

Secondly, the fact that the DC area is having a lot of snow is not only not evidence against global warming, it's actually one of the things you'd expect to see on a planet whose climate is getting warmer.

Don't take my word for it, ask climate scientist Amanda Staudt:

As National Wildlife Federation climate scientist Amanda Staudt notes, winter storms are getting fiercer even as the season gets warmer. “The last few years have brought several unusually heavy snowstorms as warmer and moister air over southern states has penetrated further north, colliding with bitter cold air masses,” she explains.

Warmer air holds more moisture. More moisture means more precipitation. It's pretty simple, I don't know anything about climatology, and I can understand this simple concept.

Plus, NASA just announced this:

2009: Second Warmest Year on Record;

End of Warmest Decade

Jan. 21, 2010

2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880. . . January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record.

So, even if we use the Inhofe method of anecdotal evidence (Uh, seems pretty cold to me, so fuck you, Al Gore) the evidence of the last decade overwhelms the data of these last few days being snowy.

Honest to God, Oklahoma, aren't you embarrassed to have this obtuse windbag representing you? Can't you find anyone else to send to Washington? Don't you know that when people see this asinine ignoramus with "R-OK" next to his name that they laugh at you? Seriously, you've gotta find someone else.

Send this guy. He'd be taken more seriously.

Or this guy. Sure, he's an inanimate object, a pen and ink drawing, but at least he won't spew the kind of ridiculous BS that makes your state a laughingstock.

Holy Crap! The AP Does It's Freakin' Job!

AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject

global cooling

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Mon Oct 26, 5:12 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

Holy Crap! I can't remember the last time I saw a major news outlet actually verifying the veracity of someone's claims. Usually, the best you can hope for is that they'll quote someone who disputes the claim and say "OK, we've presented both sides, we'r objective!"

But someone at the AP finally figured out that there aren't two sides to every story. If the story is about, say, the budget, you can have someone on one side saying "this is a good budget" and someone on the other side saying "this is a bad budget" and really, neither one can be right or wrong, it's a matter of opinion. But if one person claims "the budget totals 3 trillion dollars" and the other side claims "the budget totals 10 trillion dollars" then you have the responsibility to figure out which is correct. Because they can't both be right. (although they can both be wrong)

So with stories about global warming, if one side says "the planet is getting hotter" and the other side says "the planet is getting cooler," you need to find out which is correct. And damned if the AP didn't actually do just that!

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

The recent Internet chatter about cooling led [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's] climate data center to re-examine its temperature data. It found no cooling trend.

Statisticians say that in sizing up climate change, it's important to look at moving averages of about 10 years. They compare the average of 1999-2008 to the average of 2000-2009. In all data sets, 10-year moving averages have been higher in the last five years than in any previous years.

So thank you, Associated Press, for finally doing your fucking job!

Now where the hell was this when Bush was claiming there were WMD's in Iraq?

Anti-intellectualism

I believe we've touched on this theme before (here) so bear with me if this feels repetitive.

I know by now, it shouldn't be shocking, or even surprising to read something like this column by some pea-brain named Micheal Barone:

On Guns and Climate, the Elites Are Out of Touch

by Michael Barone



but I'm still stunned by the level of willful ignorance and the lack of simple logic that goes into a statement like this:

Similarly, last month, pollster Scott Rasmussen found that only 34 percent believes that global warming is caused by human activity, while 48 percent said it is caused by long-term planetary trends. That's almost exactly the opposite of what he found 12 months before -- 47 to 34 percent the other way around. However, 48 percent of the group Rasmussen calls the "Political Class" -- in other words, the elite -- continues to believe global warming is man-made.

I'm seriously flabbergasted that someone would actually posit that public opinion polling is in some way relevant to science.

I imagine that if Mr. Barone's car breaks down, he stops 100 people at random and asks them what they think is wrong with it. Then if his mechanic's diagnosis is different, well, the mechanic must be wrong!


In Mr. Barone's world, this counts as scientific research!



















What else ya got, Barone?

As for global warming, many Americans may have noticed that temperatures actually haven't been rising over the past decade, as global warming alarmists predicted. The elites are able to hire armed security guards and jet off on private jets, so they are less likely to notice these things.

Seriously, I can't believe I actually have to tell you this, but casual observation is NOT on a par with scientific research.

Here's another point. Let's say global warming has topped off. Let's say that it's not going to get any warmer. Even if that were true, it's already too hot! The polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, if the temperature doesn't go any higher, that just means that these phenomena will not speed up. It doesn't mean that the will stop or reverse themselves.

If you place an ice cube out on the kitchen counter, it will start to melt. Assuming your kitchen is kept at a normal temperature, it will melt pretty slowly. If the temperature is raised, the melting will speed up, but even if the temperature never increases, the ice will continue to melt. No matter how many people you survey who might believe otherwise, the facts don't change.

There's something very wrong with our society if people believe that scientific facts are subject to opinion polling. Sure, everyone has an opinion, and on some subjects, like say, the best flavor of ice cream, or the best hitter in baseball, one opinion's as good as the next. No, scratch that! When it comes to the best hitter in baseball, yes, that's a matter of opinion, and there can never be any one definitively right answer, but the opinion of, say, Willie Mays, or Hank Aaron, or Joe Torre should carry a lot more weight than that of the average baseball fan, and a hell of a lot more than the opinion of someone who doesn't follow baseball. Would anyone disagree with that? Would anyone argue "I know as much about hitting as Willie Mays!" No! No one with any sense would make that claim.









So why should the average person's opinion carry that kind of weight when it comes to science? I'll bet the average Joe on the street knows a hell of a lot more about baseball than he does about climatology, but he would never claim to know as much as Mays, or Aaron, or Torre, etc. But on the much more arcane subject of global climate trends, oh sure! My high-school science class that I slept through and copied off of the smart girl to pass gives me the same level of expertise as a PhD who has spent his adult life studying the subject. Where does this level of bone-headed arrogance come from? It's stunning! But I guess by now I shouldn't be surprised.