agw – Moe Lane

Phrase of the day: ‘Climategate Denier.’

As per Simon Scowl of Deceiver.com, who uses it with malice aforethought against Cubslayer Gore. The context: Gore claimed that the Climategate emails were ten years old, and the CNN guy called him on it right away, and Gore… said nothing further about it. Simon Scowl:

His financial and psychological investment in this crap is way too deep for him to acknowledge such, ahem, inconvenient truths. The only way to deal with such a massive blow to his ego is to just bull through it. Pretend it’s not happening. He is, to borrow a phrase, a Climategate denier.

Perfect.

Moe Lane

PS: Having listened to Gore, I’m reminded: dag. Triple-digit IQ people believe in this guy? And how long will the CNN guy last at his job?

Crossposted to RedState.

This Scrappleface article on giant ants is depressingly untrue.

No, really.

House-straddling tarantulas, mosquitoes the size of German shepherds, ants with the speed and mass of a diesel locomotive — all of these threats and more face humanity unless delegates to the Copenhagen Climate Conference agree on the wording of a treaty that would put an end to greenhouse gases once and for all, according to two well-known climate scientists.

Phil Jones, currently on involuntary sabbatical from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, as well as Penn State professor Michael Mann, agreed that global citizens “face near-certain doom — crushed in the massive, venomous mandibles of insects and arachnids the likes of which we haven’t seen outside of science fiction movies.”

Because while some people may look on a train-size ant as some inexorable, rampaging, acid-spitting formican juggernaut OF DOOM… I look on that and see WAR ANT. Which would still be a inexorable, rampaging, acid-spitting formican juggernaut OF DOOM, only I’d be riding it. It’s amazing how less bothersome those adjectives become when they’re referring to your riding animal.

Moe Lane

PS: Ach, the dang things would suffocate anyway at that size. They did science on this topic, once.

If you are an industrialist who contributed to Democrats… [UPDATED]

…here is your reward:

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded greenhouse gases are endangering people’s health and must be regulated, signaling that the Obama administration is prepared to contain global warming without congressional action if necessary.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson scheduled a news conference for later Monday to announce the so-called endangerment finding, officials told The Associated Press, speaking privately because the announcement had not been made.

And by ‘reward’ I mean of course ‘betrayal.’ The intention here is to use the EPA to impose by executive fiat what the Senate has sensibly refused to do by legislative action: use the Clean Air Act to shut down businesses that they don’t like. And, given that the dislike is based on religious grounds – and much, much, much worse; the people with the religious objections don’t see themselves as being religious – forget about trying to compromise. The ‘compromise’ is that the industrialists don’t go to jail, a monastery, or the gibbet*.

In short: elections have consequences. Here, have some.

Moe Lane

(H/T: AoSHQ)

*Obviously, being burned at the stake isn’t really carbon-neutral.

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE]: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) summed up my reaction to this pretty nicely:

“With double-digit unemployment and over 3.5 million jobs already lost this year, the administration inexplicably continues to push for a job-killing national energy tax—either through legislation or regulation.”

One tree.

They hung absolutely critical long-term policy positions on the results of one freaking tree.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was [Canadian statistician Steve] McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.

Via Protein Wisdom. At this point, I have to start wondering whether I should be showing these people the same reluctant respect that I would any really successful grifter. Except, of course, that regular devotees of the Spanish Prisoner con are not attempting to rewrite the tax code to keep taking my money.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The non-AGW non-snows of Kilimanjaro.

Oops.

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

Guess that Al Gore’s going to come up with a new talking point – HA! I kid, I kid. He’ll ignore it completely, of course. Doesn’t fit the religious orthodoxy. It’s too good an iconic image for proselytizing efforts. Can’t confuse the faithful, no?

[pause]

Eppur e’ meno umido.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

UK Met office pushes reset button on CRU data.

It’s going to take a while for them to cycle through the process, though. As in, more than a week. A lot more than a week.

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world.

Just in time for Copenhagen, which relied heavily on the climate change data that CRU provided, and can no longer even remotely back up. Meanwhile, the President – who seems to have a real gift at walking into these controversies at the worst possible moment for him – seems determined to use the luster of his name to ensure results at the Copenhagen thing. Personally, I think that it’d be good for the planet, the country, and his political party if the President just dropped the trip entirely. Which he won’t, of course.

Via Q&O, who thinks that they should completely cancel Copenhagen; and Hot Air, who thinks that the British government should stop trying to keep the Met Office from pushing the reset button. And if either actually happens, all three of us will be massively surprised.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.