XDA

► I vote Democrat because I think it’s better to pay billions of dollars to people who hate us rather than drill for our own oil, because it might upset some endangered beetle or gopher.
► I vote Democrat because I believe it is okay if liberal activist judges rewrite the Constitution to suit some fringe kooks, who would otherwise never get their agenda past the voters.
► I vote Democrat because I believe that corporate America should not be allowed to make profits for themselves or their shareholders. They need to break even and give the rest to the federal government for redistribution.
► I vote Democrat because I’m not concerned about millions of babies being aborted, so long as we keep all of the murderers on death row alive.
► I vote Democrat because I believe it’s okay if my Nobel Peace Prize winning President uses drones to assassinate people, as long as we don’t use torture.
► I vote Democrat because I believe people, who can’t accurately tell us if it will rain on Friday, can predict the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don’t start driving a Chevy Volt.
► I vote Democrat because Freedom of Speech is not as important as preventing people from being offended.
► I vote Democrat because I believe the oil companies’ profit of 3% on a gallon of gas is obscene, but the federal government taxing that same gallon of gas at 15%isn’t obscene.
► I vote Democrat because I believe a moment of silent prayer at the beginning of the school day constitutes government indoctrination and an intrusion on parental authority ….. but sex education, condom distribution and multiculturalism are all values-neutral.
► I vote Democrat because I agonize over threats to the natural environment from CO2, acid rain and toxic waste ….. but I am totally oblivious of the threats to our social environment from pornography, promiscuity and family dissolution.
► I vote Democrat because I believe lazy, uneducated stoners should have just as big a say in running our country as entrepreneurs who risk everything and work 70 hours per week.
► I vote Democrat because I don’t like guns ….. so no one else should be allowed to own one.
► I vote Democrat because I see absolutely no correlation between welfare and the rise of illegitimacy.
► I vote Democrat because I see absolutely no correlation between judicial leniency and surging crime rates.
► I vote Democrat because I believe marriage is obsolete, except for homosexuals.
► I vote Democrat because I think AIDS is spread by insufficient funding.
► I vote Democrat because I think “fairness” is far more important than freedom.
► I vote Democrat because I think an “equal outcome” is far more important than equal opportunity.
And lastly, I vote Democrat because I’m convinced that government programs are the solution to the human condition, NOT freedom

(h/t Steven Goddard)

Labels: Republican Bill of Particulars against Opposition Party

Here is near hysterical coverage, of the recently released Executive Summary of the long and never read IPCC report on climate, by Richard Schiffman at the Atlantic. There is a lie in nearly every paragraph. Here we go.

The polar icecaps are melting faster than we thought they would; seas are rising faster than we thought they would; extreme weather events are increasing. Have a nice day! That’s a less than scientifically rigorous summary of the findings of the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released this morning in Stockholm.

The Arctic Ice cap is shrinking (although the period of knowledge about extent of the sea ice--since 1979--is too short for us to tell if it's a natural cycle or not) but the Antarctic sea ice is expanding. So his use of the plural is a lie, a knowing untruth.

Sea level rise, which always happens during an interglacial, has not accelerated. Another knowing untruth.

Extreme weather events are not increasing, many are in decline just now. A third knowing untruth in the first paragraph. Can he top that? Let's see.

Appearing exhausted after a nearly two sleepless days fine-tuning the language of the report, co-chair Thomas Stocker called climate change “the greatest challenge of our time," adding that “each of the last three decades has been successively warmer than the past,” and that this trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

The last 10 years were not warmer than previous two decades as the global average temperature has declined during that period. And it was certainly much warmer than now during the Medieval Warm Period when CO2 was at its Pleistocene low of 280 ppmv. Furthermore, the likely prognostication is for colder still in the coming three decades at least.

Pledging further action to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, "This isn’t a run of the mill report to be dumped in a filing cabinet. This isn’t a political document produced by politicians... It’s science." 

 Completely corrupt, argumentum ad populum, GIGO model science, bitches. I'll skip ahead a bit.

It is now 95 percent likely that human spewed heat-trapping gases — rather than natural variability — are the main cause of climate change, according to today’s report. In 2007 the IPCC’s confidence level was 90 percent, and in 2001 it was 66 percent, and just over 50 percent in 1995.

So let me get this straight. As the models the IPCC writers totally rely on for their apocalyptic predictions become ever more wrong, the scientists become ever more sure? Is that sound scientific method? We're spewing only one gas worth talking about (although absolutely trivial methane is bound to get mentioned here), CO2, and if there is anything clear from the ice core record of this beneficial trace gas and heat in the atmosphere for the last 600,000 years is that CO2  follows heating, it doesn't cause it.

Mann cites the decline of Arctic sea ice to explain : “Given the current trajectory, we're on track for ice-free summer conditions in the Arctic in a matter of a decade or two... There is a similar story with the continental ice sheets, which are losing ice — and contributing to sea level rise — at a faster rate than the [earlier IPCC] models had predicted.” 

Fraudster Mann (go ahead and sue me, ya' pussy) is correct that there has been a decline in Arctic sea ice over the last 33 years, but there is no reason, other than his near religious belief in CO2 having properties it doesn't, to believe that trend will continue for another 20. I have $10,000 I am willing to bet that on September 20, 2033 the ice extent (15% or greater) will be above 4 Million square kilometers. No one ever takes my bet.

There is also uncertainty about an apparent slowdown over the last decade in the rate of air temperature increase. While some critics claim that global warming has “stalled,” others point out that, when rising ocean temperatures are factored in, the Earth is actually gaining heat faster than previously anticipated.

 The so-called missing heat in the deep ocean is in reality 1/16th of a degree C in 50 years. That tiny, immeasurable amount of added heat does not begin to answer the question why have all the models over stated the lower troposphere warming? Unmentioned in all of this duplicitous article on a largely worthless consensus report (AR5) is that the new IPCC report scales back its guess about the range of sensitivity of the atmosphere from a doubling of CO2, from this in the 2007 report: "2 to 4.5 °C with a best estimate of about 3 °C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5 °C. Values substantially higher than 4.5 °C cannot be excluded" to this now: "[Average temperature from a doubling] is “extremely likely” to be above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), “likely” to be above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and “very likely” to be below 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit)." That's a clear retreat from the 2007 statements about sensitivity. Color me skeptical of an article that won't tell you one of the most important revisions to the report since its inception. Oh and the link in the above paragraph leads you to a Nature paper which talks about "successful retrospective prediction." Think about that phrase for a second. I have one: Unsuccessful future history.

“Temperatures measured over the short term are just one parameter,” said Dr Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in an interview. “There are far more critical things going on; the acidification of the ocean is happening a lot faster than anybody thought that it would, it’s sucking up more CO2, plankton, the basic food chain of the planet, are dying, it’s such a hugely important signal. Why aren’t people using that as a measure of what is going on?”

 How many times are they going to misrepresent what is actually happening to the ph of the ocean. The sea, basic at 8.14, is getting less basic with the infusion of additional CO2 but is still very much above 7, the dividing line between acidic and basic. It is not getting more acidic; it is getting more neutral. This change in ph is having no identifiable effect. The basic food chain of the planet is certainly not dying (although we probably are over fishing the top of the sea food chain). There are plankton blooms visible in the oceans all over the world, all the time. To answer his question, people aren't using ph as a measure of catastrophic man caused global warming, because that measure is the opposite of what they say it is and some people, at least, don't relish lying.

For most climate experts, however, the battle is long over — at least when it comes to the science. What remains in dispute is not whether climate change is happening, but how fast things are going to get worse.

No one with an IQ over 70 denies that the climate, like the weather, changes over time (usually in a sine wave pattern of varying amplitudes). The gist of the skeptical dissent to the supposed consensus concerns the value judgement "worse" and the idea that the climate is changing too fast, that it is a crisis. These last two are what we denialist say the catastrophic global warming believers have wrong. The climate change we are seeing is largely natural, not at all scary and will actually do most people good, especially in the largest nations.

There are some possibilities that are deliberately left out of the IPCC projections, because we simply don’t have enough data yet to model them. Jason Box, a visiting scholar at the Byrd Polar Research Center told me in an email interview that: “The scary elephant in the closet is terrestrial and oceanic methane release triggered by warming.” The IPCC projections don’t include the possibility — some scientists say likelihood — that huge quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas thirty times as potent as CO2) will eventually be released from thawing permafrost and undersea methane hydrate reserves. Box said that the threshhold “when humans lose control of potential management of the problem, may be sooner than expected.”

I told you they'd get around to methane (now 680 ppbv, parts per Billion and steady). There is no greater evidence of utter negligibility than to be measured by parts per billion. However, methane has been in higher concentrations in the atmosphere 3 times in the last 400,000 years, presumably before the pervasive effects of mankind were made manifest. This paragraph is also a lie by omission. Methane is not the only thing the models can't handle. The list of what the models don't account for is very long and the left out parts are only part of what's making the models so unreliable as to be worthless. Finally, is there greater evidence of hubris than saying humans have the current ability to "manage" the climate? Yeah, were like Gods. Only if you actually believe we can have a substantial effect on climate can you think that we can effect substantial management of it--or worse, do have the ability now substantially to manage it but are in the process of losing that supposed ability because of other human endeavors. There is no chance, no political possibility, we are going to mitigate CO2 production worldwide until we don't have any fossil fuels left, which is many centuries away. So to overcome this political inertia, the catastrophic global warming true believers are compelled to overstate their case in the hope of getting governments to do something useful (in their eyes) and to justify their own existence. The problem is that the overstatement becomes ever more apparent as the models' predictions get ever more out of phase with reality. They lose credibility and have to overstate further and just about now the true believers come off sounding like apocalyptic kooks, which they kind of are.

Box, whose work has been instrumental in documenting the rapid deterioration of the Greenland ice sheet, also believes that the latest IPCC predictions (of a maximum just under three foot ocean rise by the end of the century) may turn out to be wildly optimistic, if the Greenland ice sheet breaks up. “We are heading into uncharted territory” he said. “We are creating a different climate than the Earth has ever seen.”

The rapid melt of the central Greenland ice fields has ended. No explanation asked for or given, I guess. The Earth has in the distant past had CO2 levels at 7000 ppmv (currently we are just under 400 ppmv at Mauna Loa) and has been both much hotter, on average,  at 4000 ppmv, 10 times what is is now and the same as now at 1200 ppmv, 3 times what it is now. How could the model predicted climate be other than like one from the past? This is a stupid lie, made by desperate liars. Big ending.

The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, speaks for the scientific consensus when he says that time is fast running out to avoid the catastrophic collapse of the natural systems on which human life depends. What he recently told a group of climate scientist could be the most chilling headline of all for the U.N. report:

"We have five minutes before midnight."

"Scientific consensus" is a term that should cause everyone to stop and be very skeptical. Science doesn't work by consensus. It works by constantly evaluating the theory against the data to see if the theory survives. Real scientists never stop testing their theories, because a million successful experiments do not prove the correctness of the theory when the very next experiment can destroy it. No real scientist says the science is settled. None.

And look at the alarmism: "catastrophic collapse" "chilling headline" "five minutes to midnight". You don't get funded for saying the climate is changing within the historically natural range of change. Which it probably is.

OK, given that models are not evidence, what actual data are your proof that the change we are seeing is alarming?

Crickets.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax: New Alarmist IPCC Report

The Ruski geosynchronous orbiting satellite Electro0-L takes a high resolution of the Earth every 30 minutes but only on two days each year is the whole Earth illuminated by the sun directly overhead.


Still largely blue white.

Labels: Autumnal Equinox photo of Earth

President Obama has added six-and-a-half trillion bucks to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. As Churchill would say, had his bust not been bounced from the Oval Office, never in the field of human spending has so much been owed by so many for so little.

Mark Steyn

Labels: Mark Steyn quote

(h/t Good Shit)

Labels: Sand Sculpture

Kenyan armed forces crouch and await deployment against Islamic Terrorist in an upscale mall in Nairobi.

I count 3 H&K G3s and a single AK under-folder. Not American guns. Note too the British type camouflage shirts. Most former British colonies retain the distinctive Brit camo. Not us, of course.


Kenya police and soldiers and three more AK under-folders. Note too the standard sized magazines in each. These probably differ from our notorious assault rifles in that these are full auto. I can't be sure though because I can't quite make out the selector switch positions. Our semi-auto have two; three means full auto.

Labels: Kenyan Armed Forces

It is an infamous 2009 e-mail admission from warmist true believer Kevin Trenberth that:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

But in May, 2013, Trenberth, et al seemed to say they have found the missing heat in the deep ocean in this paper. They find "considerable warming occurring below 700 m." How considerable?


First, it is possible that the heating of the surface of the ocean by the sun or warm air would warm the adjacent water but it is difficult to believe that the heat moved from the surface to the deep without being fully detected in the intermediate space.

Second, sun-heated water is less dense than cold water and therefore more buoyant than the cold water so it would take an outside force (downwelling current) to make the warmth go deep down. Why downwelling currents would start just when lower troposphere temperatures stopped getting warmer (and indeed began to decline), nearly two decades ago, was never explained.

Finally, I and a few others began to smell a big, fat Commie rat when the y-axis of the supporting  charts for the ocean warming were in Joules rather than degrees C. Behold:


It looks pretty bad doesn't it? Nearly 20 times 10 with 22 zeroes Joules in just 50 years. That's a lot of Joules.

I tried my hand at calculating what the Joules would mean to actual heat in the ocean. I came up with an insignificant, tiny amount of heat, but I have never been good at calculus so I never published my calculations, as far as I remember.

But an actual physicists from the Czech Republic, Luboš Motl, has done the numbers and here is what he gets.

The ocean heat content is defined as

H=ρcw∫h1h2T(z)dz

where ρ is the water density, cw is the specific heat capacity, and T(z) is the temperature profile from the top depth h1 to the bottom depth h2. The additive shift is a bit ambiguous; we want to talk about the changes of the ocean heat content only.

Now, in the first graph, 0-2000 meters, the change between 1968 and 2013 was the difference between +17 and −9 "units" used in the graph. That's 26 units. Looking at the y-axis, you see that the unit is 1022 joules. So the change of the ocean heat content of this layer during the last 45 years was

2.6×1023J.

That's nice. How much is it? We want to translate it to the average temperature change of this layer of water. To do so, we have to know the volume of the layer and multiply it by the heat capacity.

The total volume of the world's oceans is about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers which is

1.4×1018m3→1.4×1021kg

where the mass in kilograms was obtained by the multiplication by 1,000kg/m3 and one cubic kilometer was translated to one billion cubic meters, OK? The heat capacity of the world's ocean is this number multiplied by 4,200J/(kg⋅K) which is

5.9×1024J/K.

The same page tells us that the average depth of the ocean is 3.8 kilometers. The layer we consider is slightly more than one-half of that but this layer will carry more water than one-half of the world oceans' water simply because at many/most places, the restriction that the layers beneath 2 kilometers of depth are omitted is inconsequential. (Or did I get it backwards and the deep places are more relevant for the nonlinearity?) So I estimate the heat capacity of the layer between 0 and 2 kilometers of depth to be around

4×1024J/K.

Plus minus 20 percent. I am just calculating an estimate. The last step is a simple division. We take the change of the ocean heat content from the NOAA graph, 2.6×1023J, and divide it by the figure above. We obtain

2.6×1023J4×1024J/K=0.065K

plus minus 20 percent. In the last 45 years, the average temperature of that layer of the ocean increased by 0.065 Celsius degrees only! That would give you 0.14 °C per century, about 20 times smaller temperature difference than the changes of the global mean temperature predicted for the surface.

(Update: Paul Matthews informed me via Twitter about this ARGO page where they confirm that since the 1960s, the warming of that layer was 0.06 °C.)

So Argo (not the movie but the oceanographic guys) and Dr. Motl find that in 50 years the deep heat in the ocean has skyrocketed about 1/16th of a degree C. This slight warming is below the ability of the ocean going thermometers to detect because the range of error for the oceanographic thermometers is greater than .1 degrees C. This "considerable" warming is merely fluctuation within the "noise" of a chaotic system.

Changing to Joules rather than degrees is classic misdirection. Don't be fooled. Trenberth's missing heat is still missing (or more likely was never missing because the climate models predicting the heat's very existence are all worthless).

Labels: Deep Ocean; Joules; Misdirection, Global Warming Hoax; Missing Heat

Finally saw Argo on HBO and it was pretty good. Affleck is turning out to be a better director than an actor. But I have a problem with the narration before and after the movie.

Yes the Persian Empire had a good run but Alexander crushed it 350 years before Christ. The barbarian remnants were a thorn in the Roman Empire's side for a while. Then the Mongols crushed everyone in the region and it never really mattered again until oil was discovered there by the British. They're not Arabs there, but they are Muslims and 90% Shia. Ancient history complete.

It is important to consider American actions during the Cold War with this frame of reference: We would do nearly anything to prevent a Communist take over of a non-Communist country. If our actions to stop Communism's spread were evil in the purest sense, they were much less evil than the imposition of Communism and the political murder spree and general suffering that always entailed. During this time, we did support despots who were non-Communist and we sought to get out of office despots who were pro-Communist. And if you don't think that was the right thing to do, then you don't know enough 20th Century history.

The communist party in Iran (the Tudeh party) tried to kill the Shah (Mohammed Reza Pahlavi) in 1949, which failed assassination ultimately caused the Shah to take more interest and then control of the Iranian government. There was a socialist group primarily interested in nationalizing the huge oil fields the British had developed called the National Front and its leader was Mohammad Mossaddegh. By '51 the National Front had the most seats in parliament and Mossaddegh became Prime Minister (picked by the Shah). The parliament voted to nationalize the British oil companies in Iran.

The Brits imposed a economic boycott of Iranian products (mainly oil) and sought with the US to get a more friendly government into power. It helped the cause a lot that Mossaddegh formally united with the Iranian communists and sought and obtained a popular vote to give him dictatorial powers. We bribed Iranians to foment revolution and they succeeded in ousting Mossadegh who was tried for treason and given house arrest. The unrest we caused resulted in from 300 to 800 deaths in riots and political murder. The Shah returned to the Peacock Throne with crowds shouting their approval.

The Shah then ruled as a despot and used not so secret police (the SAVAK) to prevent a counter-coup. But under the Shah, the country flourished, women made great strides in emancipation and equality, and Iran was a modern country in almost every sense of the word. They did not go Communist. The people most decidedly did not starve as the narration in Argo lies/states.

Then in 1979, as is their wont, the Democrats stabbed our Cold War Ally in the back and enabled the long threatened counter-coup to depose the Shah. An extremist Moslem cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini, took power and set about ruining modern Iran. Women went back under the burkha; Khomeini's supporters made the SAVAK look like boy scouts; and the numbers of political arrests, political murder and torture soared. The economy fell into the sort of L shaped recession and no recovery we've been seeing lately.

Iran violated the well established civilized nation norm of not attacking other nation's embassies. We did nothing in response.

Iran fought an 8 year war with Iraq and suffered more casualties than we did during WWII.
Iran became a supporter of Islamic terrorism. It is the greatest source of backwards turning political/religious thinking in the Middle East. It has interfered with the internal politics of several nations nearby. It is developing nuclear weapons. It is a horrible place. Well done, Pres. Carter.

Iran let the hostages go only because it feared, rightly, what President Reagan would do in response if they didn't take the bribes.

I have no idea how accurate the rest of Argo was (I doubt there was a race of truck against airliner at the airport--in fact I think the rescue of the 6 was about as exciting as boarding a plane), but its narration failed miserably to give either an accurate or complete picture.

Here is a brief, shortened point by point from other fact checkers:

1. The voiceover narration says, "In 1950, the people of Iran elected Mohammad Mossadegh, the secular democrat, Prime Minister. He nationalized British and U.S. petroleum holdings, returning Iran’s oil to its people."

Mossadegh was elected to the Majlis (Iranian Parliament) in 1944. He did not become Prime Minister until April 1951 and was not "elected by the people of Iran." Rather, he was appointed to the position by the representatives of the Majlis.

Also, the United States did not have petroleum interests in Iran at the time.

2. After briefly describing the 1953 coup, the narrator says Britain and the United States "installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah."

Wow. First, the Shah's name was not Reza Pahlavi. That is his father's (and son's) name. Furthermore, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was not installed as Shah since had already been Shah of Iran since September 1941, after Britain and the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Iran and forced the abdication of his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi.

During the coup in 1953, the Shah fled to Baghdad, then Rome. After Mossadegh had been forced out, the Shah returned to the Peacock Throne.

This is not difficult information to come by, and yet the screenwriter and director of "Argo" didn't bother looking it up. And guess what? Ben Affleck actually majored in Middle East Studies in college. Unsurprisingly, he didn't graduate.

Oh, and Argo won Best Picture of the Year at the 2013 Oscars.

Hmmm.

Labels: Argo; Iranian History

If you put a circle on the globe that includes China, India and Indonesia then you have located where most of the 7 Billion humans live. The minority live spread out over the rest of the planet. Although sub-Saharan Africa and South America have very interesting histories and cultures, most of what's important in the world is in the Northern Hemisphere (read Guns, Germs and Steel to find out why that was historically inevitable).

The cool thing about the Northern Hemisphere is that air routes over the northern polar regions make travel from America to Poland, for example, a matter of a half dozen hours or so, and if you're way up north, like in Edmonton or anywhere in Alaska, the air miles are fewer still.

Diomedes used to kid me about my excitement about Alaska. He said I was like the guy in the James Taylor song Mexico, I really liked the place but I'd never really been. Now I've been.

I only saw Anchorage, Seward, Denali and Fairbanks, but I have to think that those places gave me the general templates--coastal mountains, interior mountains, taiga and tundra. There might be more, but there certainly is a lot of that stuff up there. The cool thing I noted is that Anchorage is closer to Tokyo than it is to New York; Moscow is only 250 miles further from Anchorage than Miami.

North to the Future.

Maybe.

Labels: Alaska

I foolishly ruptured my left Achilles tendon playing soccer on the playa at Burning Man. That put me eventually into a boot which meant that the actual walking around looking for moose to shoot was very limited. Still, I loved Alaska. Here are some less than overwhelmingly well framed photos from Burning Man (mainly Playa Art) and Alaska.








 The Temple (all pegged shaped plywood).


And from Alaska
Lion's Mane Jellyfish.









The Bay at Seward.
Abandoned, burned gold dredge.


Me at the pipeline.

Sunrise at the hunting grounds.
The only live moose I saw.




I had surgery to repair my tendon yesterday and that gave me, for the first time, some actual pain. Not bad and the huge cast is a pain in the neck that overwhelms the real pain in the back of my ankle.

Labels: Personal History: Travel and Injury

This is the quick view.

Labels: Burning Man

This is not an AR-15. It is an 870 Remington 12 gauge pump shotgun. I have owned this for over 40 years. It is the most popular shotgun in America. It is the weapon the crazy DC shooter used earlier this week to shoot 20 and kill 12. He picked up two 9mm pistols, possibly Beretta F-92s, along the way

What do you propose now, gun grabbers?

Piers Morgan is an idiot, even about British soccer.

Labels: Mass Murder; DC shooting Navy Yard

Or breaches, whatever.

Labels: Albino Humpback Whale

While I was incommunicado at Black Rock City last week, the intrepid Arctic explorers seeking to row from the MacKenzie River Delta in the extreme western part of the Northwest Territories to Pond Inlet on Baffin Island in Nunavut, stopped about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way there. They never made it past Victoria Island and Real Science blogger Steven Goddard predicted. It was a particularly cold Summer in the Arctic this year and the Northwest Passage was never actually open to, well, pass through.

Pulling part of the way together for the totally natural concept of climate change.

Labels: Epic Failure, Global Warming; Intrepid Arctic Publicity Stunt