28 February 2010
Singing Dumb Kitty
Buster, the male half of our brother sister cat team of Smudge & Buster, is, gosh, how does one put this delicately... really, really, irretrievably, irreparably, terminally, dumb. He doesn't mean to be. He just is. You know how some cute guys are really dumb because they know they can get by on their really good looks? And you know how some of those guys might be "lacking" in a certain department so they try to make up for it with a really fancy car or something? That's Buster. The kitty version of a big car for him though is a preternaturally long, ridiculously fluffy tail. One of his peculiarities is that he likes to meow when humans whistle... Worth noting: He's also a terrific wimp. Don't be fooled by his sudden butch-ness when Smudge approaches. Nine times out of ten she kicks the cr-p out of him! My 13 year old daughter did the video's titles. Don't mind the laundry & assorted clutter...
Lions & Tigers & Bears, OH MY!
UPDATE: 03.17.10: Oopsie... Al Gore starts asserting that "weather" IS "climate" again... His ridiculousness is cut and pasted way at the bottom... where it belongs.
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ORIGINAL POST: 02.28.10
Below is my "rebuttal" to Al Gore's unexpurgated Sunday NYT Op-Ed column. This is his first public declaration in the wake of the avalanche of revelations that the science behind the "global warming" crisis may not be as "settled" as Al would like to have us believe. Marshall McLuhan's famous assertion that "The medium is the message." is everything you need to know about the courage of his convictions. He put out his message in a form he had total control over, could pour over and edit to perfection, and involved the taking of not one question from anyone. It takes only a momentary return to common sense to understand that when you have the facts on your side and you are being attacked, you want to get in front of anyone with a microphone to trumpet those facts and make your case. This is clearly, evidently, demonstrably, the chicken's way out. So let's have some fun with it, shall we?
February 28, 2010
NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
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ORIGINAL POST: 02.28.10
Below is my "rebuttal" to Al Gore's unexpurgated Sunday NYT Op-Ed column. This is his first public declaration in the wake of the avalanche of revelations that the science behind the "global warming" crisis may not be as "settled" as Al would like to have us believe. Marshall McLuhan's famous assertion that "The medium is the message." is everything you need to know about the courage of his convictions. He put out his message in a form he had total control over, could pour over and edit to perfection, and involved the taking of not one question from anyone. It takes only a momentary return to common sense to understand that when you have the facts on your side and you are being attacked, you want to get in front of anyone with a microphone to trumpet those facts and make your case. This is clearly, evidently, demonstrably, the chicken's way out. So let's have some fun with it, shall we?
February 28, 2010
NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
--"unimaginable calamity"? Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: When attacked, double down and create a climate of fear. Way to go, Al!
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil.
--It's been the radical left greenies that have kept us from DOMESTIC drilling, sir. Have you forgotten that?
And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.
--As soon as Andy Stern & SEIU endorse slave labor for ten cents an hour, we'll be able to compete with China. Not palatable. Not likely. Rose-colored glasses won't change stubborn geo-economic reality, sir.
But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.
--And if angels danced on pinheads...
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion.
--Your stockbroker sure as hell doesn't. Neither do your children with expectations of big, fat trust funds dancing in their heads...
But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
--It's more than two mistakes, and the ones we know about are just the ones we know about...
In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer. It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law. But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.
--The consensus lives only in your fevered imagination, Al.
It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea. Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
--130 years ago is approximately .00000000000001 second in geologic terms. And just for kicks, what man-made constructs were producing all the carbon-heating in 1880?
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
--Again, the operative word here is "modern." Only superhuman narcissism enables people like you to really believe that our modern era means anything to the temperature cycle throughout millennia.
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
--Al, (sigh... this is truly tiring) there's an old scientific maxim: "If a scientific precept proves everything, it proves nothing." Yes, we "deniers," we "flat-earthers," have used the recent snowstorms as comic fodder, but only as a part of a larger piece of comedy which is that your ilk has used both hot and cold weather as proof of your ridiculously narcissistic, demonstrably flawed theory. We know that weather isn't climate. Why don't you?
Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising.Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.
--Things melt, Al. Then they re-glaciate. And your hurricane predictions fell flat just last year. Again, weather isn't climate. Stop it.
Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them. And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act. Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution. The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues. This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.
--Didn't you just say that China was, in essence, kicking our collective ass as far as producing "green" goods? But now they're killing the planet to do it. Al, it's pretty simple. Either they are good planetary citizens or they are bad. Me cavewoman. See things black and white. Puppies & kittens cute. Cancer & body parts falling off, bad. Help me understand.
Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution. But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up. Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.
--Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Can the locusts be far behind? This is getting embarrassing.
It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action. The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy. The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.
--Now it's a Constitutionalist's call-to-arms to believe this load of cr-p? Did your mother drop you on your head as a baby? When did you discover the Constitution?
This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere. Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.
--You're not going to bring up tobacco again, are you Al? Didn't you learn your lesson the first time? (See below)
Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.
--I presume we're talking about Fox News Channel, here. Really hacks you off that their viewership is more than the other cables news channels' combined, doesn't it? But that doesn't change flaw in your infantile snit. There are, off the top of my head, ten "green" propagandists for every one "denier" on any airwave, radio, television, satellite, or digital, or in any form of print, internet of ink-stained. Just because you're losing in the battlefields of ideas, doesn't mean it's not a balanced field. In fact, it's demonstrably, factually, obviously, un-balanced, in favor of your side. FNC, talk radio, and the internet are all we have, and if Obama and his pal Mark Lloyd at the FCC get their way, that will be gone, too.
From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced. The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions. Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation. I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy. We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.
--Oh... We'll replace "them" all right!
Al Gore's Tobacco Problems: "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've dug in it. I've sprayed it, I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.
(Source: [New York] Newsday, 2/26/88
Oh wait.. I didn't mean that... "Sometimes, you never fully face up to things that you ought to face up to." -- Al Gore, discussing why he accepted checks from his family tobacco farm and contributions from tobacco companies for years after the tragic death of his sister that he spoke about so emotionally at the 1996 Democratic convention.(Source: "'Numbness' Let Gore Accept Tobacco Help," San Francisco Chronicle, August 30, 1996)
Al Gore's Tobacco Problems: "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've dug in it. I've sprayed it, I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.
(Source: [New York] Newsday, 2/26/88
Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.
You say potato, I say potato... One Al says one thing, the other Al says another... Thanks to Alan Reynolds below for getting my back. I know it wasn't me personally, but I'm grateful!
You say potato, I say potato... One Al says one thing, the other Al says another... Thanks to Alan Reynolds below for getting my back. I know it wasn't me personally, but I'm grateful!
Updated March 02, 2010
Al's Latest Global-Warming Whopper
- NYPost.com
Al Gore's defense of global-warming hysteria in Sunday's New York Times has many flaws, but I'll focus on just one whopper -- where the "Inconvenient Truth" man states the opposite of scientific fact.
RECOMMEND (16)
AP
Dec. 14: Former Vice President Al Gore speaks at the U.N. Climate summit in Copenhagen.
Al Gore's defense of global-warming hysteria in Sunday's New York Times has many flaws, but I'll focus on just one whopper -- where the "Inconvenient Truth" man states the opposite of scientific fact.
Gore wrote, "The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere -- thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States."
It's an interesting theory, but where are the facts?
According to "State of the Climate" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "Global precipitation in 2009 was near the 1961-1990 average." And there was certainly no pattern of increasing rain and snow on America's East Coast during the post-1976 years, when NOAA says the globe began to heat up.
So what was it, exactly, that Gore's nameless scientists "have long pointed out"? A 2008 report from theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Climate Change and Water," says climate models "project precipitation increases in high latitudes and part of the tropics." In other areas, the IPCC reports only "substantial uncertainty in precipitation forecasts."
In other words, the IPCC said that its models predicted some increases in rain or snow -- not observed them. And only in high latitudes or the tropics, which hardly describes New York or Washington, DC.
In fact, recent research actually contradicts Gore's claims about "significantly more water moisture in the atmosphere."
In late January, Scientific American reported: "A mysterious drop in water vapor in the lower stratosphere might be slowing climate change," and noted that "an apparent increase in water vapor in this region in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated global warming."
The new study came from a group of scientists, mainly from the NOAA lab in Boulder. The scientists found: "Stratospheric water-vapor concentrations decreased by about 10 percent after the year 2000 . . . This acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25 percent."
Specifically, the study found that water vapor rising from the tropics has been reduced, because it has gotten cooler there (another inconvenient truth). A Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: "Slowdown in Warming Linked to Water Vapor."
Moisture in the lower stratosphere (about 8 miles above the earth's surface) has been going down, not up.
Aside from clouds, water vapor accounts for as much as two-thirds of the earth's greenhouse-gas effect. Water vapor traps heat from escaping the atmosphere -- but clouds have the opposite effect (called "albedo") by reflecting the sun's energy back into space. And snow on the ground from the IPCC's predicted precipitation in high latitudes would have the same cooling effect as clouds.
What the new research suggests is that changes in water vapor may well trump the effect of carbon dioxide (only a fraction of which is man-made) and methane (which has mysteriously slowed since about 1990).
This raises an intriguing question: Since the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it has the authority to regulation carbon emissions because of their presumed effect on the global climate, why hasn't the EPA also attempted to regulate mist and fog?
Alan Reynolds, a Cato Institute senior fellow, is author of "Income and Wealth."
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UPDATE 03.17.10
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UPDATE 03.17.10
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