The HeartDickland Institute
06/05/12 02:16
The HeartDickland Institute
Christopher Hitchens, the late lamented pundit, God-denier and scourge of Saddam Hussein, invented the wonderful word game in which you replace the word “heart” in a well-known phrase with the word “dick” to get a humorous effect. Hitchens’ favourite examples were:
Bury my dick at Wounded Knee and;
I left my dick in San Francisco.
My own favourite used to be the McGarrigle sisters’s song Heart Like a Wheel:
Some say the dick is just like a wheel
When you bend it you can't mend it
But this billboard suggested a new contender:
To associate the patron saint of union crushing with the plot to install a one-world government is in unacceptably poor taste. This institute clearly has no heart.
For this reason, I will be joining fellow Canadians Ross McKitrick and Donna Laframboise in a principled boycott of the next meeting of the Dickland Institute.
Christopher Hitchens, the late lamented pundit, God-denier and scourge of Saddam Hussein, invented the wonderful word game in which you replace the word “heart” in a well-known phrase with the word “dick” to get a humorous effect. Hitchens’ favourite examples were:
Bury my dick at Wounded Knee and;
I left my dick in San Francisco.
My own favourite used to be the McGarrigle sisters’s song Heart Like a Wheel:
Some say the dick is just like a wheel
When you bend it you can't mend it
But this billboard suggested a new contender:
To associate the patron saint of union crushing with the plot to install a one-world government is in unacceptably poor taste. This institute clearly has no heart.
For this reason, I will be joining fellow Canadians Ross McKitrick and Donna Laframboise in a principled boycott of the next meeting of the Dickland Institute.
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John Cook wins Eureka Prize, Archimedes screwed
08/09/11 20:31
Establishment science apologist and propagandist John Cook has been awarded the Eureka Prize by the Government of New South Wales supposedly “for communication that motivates action to reduce the impacts of climate change.” And , they might well have added, for promoting a one-world government and a return to the stone age.
John Cook emerging from one of his infrequent baths. Source
Luboš Motl, the articulate and compassionate science blogger —cruelly dubbed NSF or even the Irredeemable Czech by his many jealous detractors—has said it better than FoGT ever could:
Instead of congratulating someone which would be truly inappropriate, cynical, and unethical, let me express my deep condolences to Archimedes and all his fans (and all fans of science) – because his famous trademark has just been brutally humiliated and desecrated.
And Cook, now you're not just a regular crackpot but a corrupt one. A few years in prison have been added to my Excel table next to your name.
Standing up for the reputation of a dead Greek scientist is the kind of magnanimous and principled statement that we have come to expect to read on Mr Motl’s elegant website.
Ethical Asbestos
01/08/11 01:05
Ethical Oil campaign argues that the mining of Alberta’s tar sands is not about corporate greed at the expense of the planet’s climate but, rather, is a force for good in promoting gay and women’s rights. Here’s the clever bit: green fanatics are actually in favour of human rights so this argument places them on the horns of a dilemma. Ouch!
Source: Ethical Oil (no joke)
Lonely welders are free to hold hands on Fort McMurray’s Main Street on their day off and no women in the town has ever got stoned, well not in that way, anyway.
Read More...Long-Form Surface Stations Paper: A Forgery?
16/05/11 22:30
Fall, S., A. Watts, J. Nielsen-Gammon, E. Jones, D. Niyogi, J. Christy, and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2011: Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., in press.
The recent release of the long-form version on the US surface weather stations is a blatant, if subtle, attempt by the “team” to discredit the efforts of the 650 volunteers who visited obscure corners of the USA to photograph asphalt and air-conditioner outlets. As with l’affaire O’Donnell, the scientific establishment has taken breakthrough research that, as reported on blogs, totally undermines the whole silly notion of global warming and, after subjecting the work to pitiless peer-review, dilutes the results to such an extent that the team can then patronizingly declare: “Well done chaps, that was pretty much what we were saying all along”.
The recent release of the long-form version on the US surface weather stations is a blatant, if subtle, attempt by the “team” to discredit the efforts of the 650 volunteers who visited obscure corners of the USA to photograph asphalt and air-conditioner outlets. As with l’affaire O’Donnell, the scientific establishment has taken breakthrough research that, as reported on blogs, totally undermines the whole silly notion of global warming and, after subjecting the work to pitiless peer-review, dilutes the results to such an extent that the team can then patronizingly declare: “Well done chaps, that was pretty much what we were saying all along”.
So what do you believe, a bunch of statistical mumbo-jumbo or your own lying eyes? Source
Read More...E pluribus unum
04/02/11 15:31
The declaration of independence from the historic Lisbon Conference:
Judith Curry deserves to become known as the Founding Mother of the United Skeptics of Alarmism. For a while, her she fooled the red-coat alarmist occupiers of the consensus that her offer of a parlay was an attempt to negotiate a cease-fire between the two sides. Instead it was a ruse de guerre that rallied the yeomen of the oppressed colonies, bringing together lukewarmers, magical thinkers, iron-sun theorists, ocean-oscillation promoters, photographers of tarmac and air-conditioning vents, venal billionaires, curmudgeons, principle-component-analysis obsessives, high-discount-rate advocates and one-world-government paranoids into a More Perfect Union. Read More...
Judith Curry deserves to become known as the Founding Mother of the United Skeptics of Alarmism. For a while, her she fooled the red-coat alarmist occupiers of the consensus that her offer of a parlay was an attempt to negotiate a cease-fire between the two sides. Instead it was a ruse de guerre that rallied the yeomen of the oppressed colonies, bringing together lukewarmers, magical thinkers, iron-sun theorists, ocean-oscillation promoters, photographers of tarmac and air-conditioning vents, venal billionaires, curmudgeons, principle-component-analysis obsessives, high-discount-rate advocates and one-world-government paranoids into a More Perfect Union. Read More...
Jaws of Denial
26/12/10 23:28
Denial Depot, our esteemed fellow skeptical climate denial blogger has a wonderful post , illustrating how alarmists scheme to manufacture scares, predatory fish in his chosen case. He shows how self-appointed experts, playing on our primal fears, jump to conclusions, ignore competing hypotheses and misrepresent evidence to promote their political agendas.
FoGT would add one more argument, based on concentrations. The biomass of marine fish is estimated at 800-2000 billion tonnes; let’s say 1.4x1012 kg. This mass can be divided by the mass of the oceans, approximately 1.4x1021 kg. This means that the fish concentration in the ocean is approximately 0.001 ppm. This should be compared with the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere of 389 ppm—and they call that a trace gas! But it’s even worse: there are approximately 32,000 species of fish, among which only 360 are sharks and among those only four of those are anthropophagic. However you do the math, the concentration of man-eating fish in the ocean is dilute to a homeopathic degree and there is therefore no reason at all for us to suppose that sharks could in any way pose a threat.
FoGT would add one more argument, based on concentrations. The biomass of marine fish is estimated at 800-2000 billion tonnes; let’s say 1.4x1012 kg. This mass can be divided by the mass of the oceans, approximately 1.4x1021 kg. This means that the fish concentration in the ocean is approximately 0.001 ppm. This should be compared with the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere of 389 ppm—and they call that a trace gas! But it’s even worse: there are approximately 32,000 species of fish, among which only 360 are sharks and among those only four of those are anthropophagic. However you do the math, the concentration of man-eating fish in the ocean is dilute to a homeopathic degree and there is therefore no reason at all for us to suppose that sharks could in any way pose a threat.
Lawrence Solomon: Summer 2010, “Yet another Year in Which the Arctic did not melt”
16/09/10 05:32
Lawrence Solomon, the National Post’s answer to WTFUWT’s Steven Goddard, has crafted a radical new hypothesis to explain the absence of melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2010. Solomon bases his theory on the graph from the Danish Meteorological Institute illustrated below. It shows daily mean temperatures for the area north of the 80th northern parallel, comparing 2010 temperatures (red) to the mean temperatures for the period 1958-2002 (green).
Guardian Scoop: IPCC Chairman made Millions in Moonlighting Consulting work
29/08/10 23:58
Sticklers may object that “taxpayer’s dime” is an exaggeration, since Pachauri is not actually paid a penny for his IPCC duties. However, it’s important to consider these salary figures in the perspective of the per capita GDP ($1031) of his home country, India, where they don’t look quite so far out of line, relatively speaking.
In a disturbing development–and a threat to the freedom of the press to print whatever “facts” they please–Pachauri employed the notorious Farter-Fuck law firm to extort a groveling apology and retraction from the Sunday Torygraph: Read More...
Monckton Channels FoGT
14/08/10 22:01
We have long suspected that when Viscount Monckton makes an utterance, there is more meaning buried in his message than can be discerned from the face value of his words [I would bloody well hope so-ed.]. Indeed, in the first minute of his latest missive, his lordship apparently speaks the words “the true believers in the new religion of climate change”, whereas he is actually implying something else entirely. Using the advanced closed-captioning technology of YouTube (click the red “cc” icon), the world’s super computers render this phrase into the text shown in the subtitle in the still from Monckton’s movie.
Read More...
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The Thin End of the Camel’s Nose on the Slippery Slope
01/08/10 11:18
There have been some very disturbing incidents of denial-apostasy lately.
Firstly, Willis Eschenbach in the world’s most popular science blog argues that measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa are reliable and that the amount of plant food in the atmosphere is increasing due to human activities. This is the thin end of the wedge, once we admit that humans are causing this increase, extremists could twist this into making a case for reducing emissions. Read More...
Ol’ Ma Gaia
26/07/10 00:00
Ah, gits weary
An' sick of tryin'
Ah'm tired of livin'
An' skeered of dyin',
But ol’ Ma Gaia,
She jes'keeps rollin' along!
Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert Laughlin has written an essay on deep time and the futility of even attempting to do anything about climate change. His thoughts were commented upon recently by libertarian journalist Neil Reynolds in the Globe and Mail. Laughlin’s argument roughly goes:
- The Earth is old, truly, staggeringly old.
- On one hand: Carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuel is building up in the atmosphere at a frightening pace, enough to double the present concentration in a century. This buildup has the potential to raise average temperatures on the earth several degrees centigrade, enough to modify the weather and accelerate melting of the polar ice sheets.
- On the other hand: Climate change, by contrast, is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.
- The only practical thing we can do is to short Bangladeshi real estate.
- We’re screwed and entirely helpless but, not to worry, alarmists, ol’ Ma Gaia, she’ll jes’ keep rollin’ along.
A Lesson in Graphing and Trend Fitting from WTFUWT
06/07/10 00:01
Steven Goddard, as loyal readers of this blog will already know, has transformed Venusian atmospheric physics with his egregious (that word as used here means standing out from the flock not the derogatory unusually crappy) thinking on adiabatic heating, thereby rubbishing the greenhouse effect theory in our solar system.
Mr Goddard has now turned his penetrating insight onto that favourite bête blanche of the alarmists, the supposedly shrinking Arctic sea ice. Goddard performs some simple time series analysis on the JAXA data, disentangling all that confusing varicoloured spaghetti and shows how the long term trend is revealed by a linear fit. Thus:
(Gentle readers of the FoGT blog may be confused by the last sentence in Goddard’s caption where he uses the rhetorical device of irony, whereby the literal meaning of his words is the opposite of what he really means to say.) Some critics immediately jumped on Goddard’s results and claimed that the California-sized increase in sea ice was an artifact of Goddard’s analysis and that everything depends on where you pick the starting point. I suppose that, taking this idea to an extreme, means that the JAXA data could even show “more proof that the Arctic is melting down”, which would be doubly ironic when you think about it.
Read More...
Mr Goddard has now turned his penetrating insight onto that favourite bête blanche of the alarmists, the supposedly shrinking Arctic sea ice. Goddard performs some simple time series analysis on the JAXA data, disentangling all that confusing varicoloured spaghetti and shows how the long term trend is revealed by a linear fit. Thus:
(Gentle readers of the FoGT blog may be confused by the last sentence in Goddard’s caption where he uses the rhetorical device of irony, whereby the literal meaning of his words is the opposite of what he really means to say.) Some critics immediately jumped on Goddard’s results and claimed that the California-sized increase in sea ice was an artifact of Goddard’s analysis and that everything depends on where you pick the starting point. I suppose that, taking this idea to an extreme, means that the JAXA data could even show “more proof that the Arctic is melting down”, which would be doubly ironic when you think about it.
Read More...
Global Inquisition into Spanish Warming
28/06/10 07:44
A recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science is based on the obsessive work of the shadowy Toronto-based activist Jim Prall who keeps a blacklist of climate scientists who dare question the AGW articles of faith. Prall and his coauthors categorize scientists as either “convinced” or “unconvinced” by the evidence of AGW. How does he arrive at making such loaded judgments? By raking through the muck of published petitions and looking for incriminating signatures, that’s how. Prall’s simplistic logic is that if someone expresses an opinion publically and in writing and then never retracts it, then that somehow reveals what they actually think. Hitherto unpublished citizen-scientist Prall even has the gall to categorize the distinguished Roger Pielke Sr as “unconvinced”. Contrast this, if you can, with the humble and respectful tone that Steve McIntyre adopts when he refers to “The Team”. Read More...
AGW Disprovers getting younger; Fetal Disproof imminent
13/06/10 07:00
This was in 2007, when she was 15, I think.
Now in 2010, we see that a 4th-grader has disproved AGW. I assume 4th-grade means about 10.
Defying the wrath of those that might insist that 2 points are insufficient to obtain a statistically valid trend, since others do this all the time, and since I am at least not cherry-picking, but using the entire data set:
I compute the slope is -1.66 year of age per calendar year, although I did no further analysis.
Put another way, in about 6 years, some unborn baby will disprove AGW just before birth…”
Now I know that many of us skeptical-deniers prefer graphic visualization to dry tables of values, so here’s a chart for you.
Read More...
Now in 2010, we see that a 4th-grader has disproved AGW. I assume 4th-grade means about 10.
Defying the wrath of those that might insist that 2 points are insufficient to obtain a statistically valid trend, since others do this all the time, and since I am at least not cherry-picking, but using the entire data set:
2007 15
2010 10I compute the slope is -1.66 year of age per calendar year, although I did no further analysis.
Put another way, in about 6 years, some unborn baby will disprove AGW just before birth…”
Now I know that many of us skeptical-deniers prefer graphic visualization to dry tables of values, so here’s a chart for you.
Read More...
Alberta’s $2B CCS plan: Cash Confiscation & Sequestration
03/06/10 00:00
Some of you dear followers of this blog who haven’t had the benefit of a classical education--unlike his learned eminence Viscount Lord Monckton of Brenchley--may have some difficulty with the term “sequestration”. Basically it’s a word of Latin origin that, translated into Albertan, means sticking something where the sun don’t shine. The Government of Alberta has a plan to take hard-earned dollars of ordinary Albertans and give them to large corporations so that the companies can take plant food (carbon dioxide) and “sequester” it deep in the bowels of the earth, where the sun most definitely does not shine. Read More...
Three simple Words: We do not know
23/05/10 00:03
In a recent editorial on Watt’s Up With That, Willis Eschenbach laments the fact that climate scientists never use these three precious words: We don’t know. Imagine how this will reduce uncertainty, no more of Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns; the world would henceforth be more clearly demarcated into known knowns and known unknowns. Let’s have no more obfuscating IPCC talk of qualitative or quantitative uncertainty (page 5), no more waffly phrases such as medium evidence, high confidence or the breathtakingly equivocal about as likely or not. So let’s start demanding clear answers, just like in court: Do you know, yes or no? Read More...
Venus and the Half Wit
14/05/10 00:33
There’s quite a little fuss going on in the blogosphere because of the revolutionary ideas of Mr Steven Goddard who has come up with the wonderfully simple idea that Venus is hot (is she ever!) not because of carbon dioxide, the plant food that is fingered by the UN for all the problems in the Universe, but because of simple adiabatic heating. Read More...
Black Bonanza
08/05/10 00:02
Neil Reynolds in the Globe and Mail reports on a new book Black Bonanza: Canada's Oil Sands and the Race to Secure North America's Energy Future by Alastair Sweeny. Sweeny tells us that Canadians have no inkling that what they are sitting on is really the country’s greatest asset and he encourages us all to have a closer look at it. Read More...
