Month: June 2015

What Was Lost

The Axis of Ego

ConstitutionToday’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges represents the culmination of a perfectly executed public-relations campaign.

It is impossible not to be impressed by what this activist-driven effort accomplished—I mean in real terms, not the unserious victory slogans of the campaign itself.

In no particular order, it:

1. Successfully and fundamentally transformed the definition of “marriage,” and did so in a way that portrayed efforts to preserve traditional marriage as the novelty, rather than as the millennia-old status quo.

2. Successfully convinced a critical mass of the public that there is only one side in this debate, despite the fact that the side claiming the monopoly had only existed in any meaningful form for perhaps 20 years.

3. Successfully convinced a critical mass of the public that race and sexual orientation are directly analogous.

4. Successfully convinced a critical mass of the public (and jurists) that there is no possible argument…

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ABC news asks: Is the phrase “climate change denier” offensive?

It’s not only offensive, it’s reached the point it’s abusive and I consider it hate speech.

Watts Up With That?

If you were to ask Joe Romm, Jim Hansen, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and some of the other hard core angry people who use this word daily, they’d probably say “no”. They think nothing of it, they’ve desensitized themselves to it and use it without even thinking about it any more. It’s a sad form of commentary.

But ask reasonable and rational people who don’t have anger and angst wound up in the climate change debate, and the answer is likely to be different.

Andrew Bolt has a disturbing piece on the use of the word by Australian PM Julia Gillard, who is so far the highest level government official to use the word as far as I know. He writes:

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Illegal EPA scheming on private email extended to GHG rules

Watts Up With That?

Guest essay by Chris Horner

Former Secretary of State, and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is not the only current or former Obama administration official facing investigation for use of a private email account skirting federal record keeping laws. The list of offenders recently grew longer, with an interesting twist.

In late May, House Science Committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DoE) seeking private-account emails of a former key staffer. He was following up on revelations from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests I made on behalf of the Energy & Environment Legal Institute. Chairman Smith also wrote to the former appointee, a man named Michael Goo currently ensconced on Capitol Hill as a Democratic lawyer.

E&E Legal had learned that Goo, also formerly with the environmentalist pressure group NRDC, used his Yahoo email account to correspond on…

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The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science

Watts Up With That?

They are behaving like sixteenth-century priests who do not think the Bible should be translated into English. 
Guest essay by Matt Ridley 
(Note: due to the length of this essay, I am only including paragraph excerpts here. See the link at the end for the full essay. – Anthony)

The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested — or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas

For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics”…

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NZCLIMATE Truth Newsletter No. 313

Watts Up With That?

By Dr. Vincent Gray

1. Roy Spencer and Murry Salby

The greatest difficulty facing the promoters of the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause dangerous global warming is the inconvenient truth that it is impossible to measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface by any known technology. Without this information it is not possible to claim global warming.

In order to make this claim the “Mean Global Surface Temperature Anomaly Record” (MGSTAR) was fabricated from temperature measurements made at meteorological weather stations.

It did not matter that 

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Historical Station Distribution

Climate Audit

In his comment to How much Estimation is too much Estimation?, Anthony Watts suggested I create a scatter plot showing station distribution with latitude/longitude. It turned out not to be the ordeal I thought it might be, so I have posted some of the results in this thread. I started with 1885 and created a plot every 20 years, ending in 2005. I deliberately ended with 2005 because this is the final year in the GHCN record prior to the US station die-off of 2006.

Every dot on a plot represents a station, not a scribal record. Stations may be comprised of multiple records. A blue dot represents a station with an annual average that was fully calculated from existing monthly averages. A red dot represents a station that had missing monthly averages for that year, so the annual average had to be estimated. Stations that had insufficient data…

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