Tag: climate change

Spam Gore Spammity Spam Global Warming and Spam.

Oh, my, but this is funny.

In 2009, at its peak, Gore’s group [the so-called ‘Climate Reality Project’] had more than 300 employees, with 40 field offices across 28 states, and a serious war chest: It poured $28 million into advertising and promotion, and paid about $200,000 in lobbying fees at the height of the cap-and-trade energy bill fight on Capitol Hill.

Today, the group has just over 30 people on staff and has abandoned its on-the-ground presence — all of its field offices have since shut down — in favor of a far cheaper digital advocacy plan run out of Washington. Advertising expenses have decreased from the millions to the thousands, and the organization no longer lobbies lawmakers. Donations and grants have declined, too — from $87.4 million in 2008 to $17.6 million in 2011, and many of its high-profile donors have drifted away, one telling BuzzFeed she now sees the group’s initial vision as “very naïve.”

Slick and omnipresent television ads from the group’s early years, produced by the same agency that made the Geico Auto Insurance gecko famous, have been replaced by smaller web-based programs. One ongoing effort, “Reality Drop,” helps activists post boilerplate comments to blog entries written by climate change skeptics.

So, basically, Al Gore is now a spambot.

Moe Lane

PS: No, I don’t really think that I need to respond further. I mean. SPAMBOT.

PPS: I saw this on Twitter, but I don’t remember from whom, sorry.

#OfA’s rather embarrassing Climate Change spluttering, in three tweets.

Well, this is embarrassing:

Not to mentioned, scrubbed:

Fortunately, the Internet is forever.

Continue reading #OfA’s rather embarrassing Climate Change spluttering, in three tweets.

QotD, Maybe The Farmers Are RIGHT, #Slate edition.

You just can’t make stuff like this up:

The long-term prediction for the Corn Belt in Iowa says that the weather will get hotter and drier—much like western Kansas is currently. Yet, over the decades of [Iowa corn farmer and Farm Bureau economist Dave] Miller’s farming career, conditions have been increasingly wet. “If I had done what climate alarmists had said to do, I would have done exactly the wrong thing for 20 of the last 25 years,” Miller says.

…bolding on, and hold on.  For the benefit of the author of the Slate piece, who apparently missed this article: that was Miller telling you that if he had listened to the global warming enthusiasts he’d have long since gone belly-up. Continue reading QotD, Maybe The Farmers Are RIGHT, #Slate edition.

“Global Warming” or “Climate Change” or whatever the term is this week…

…notice how they have to keep changing the name, by the way? Modern demonology is a very, very fast-paced field indeed. – Anyway, a new poll suggests that global concerns about global warming are fading:

Public concern about environmental issues including climate change has slumped to a 20-year low since the financial crisis, a global study reveals.

Fewer people now consider issues such as CO2 emissions, air and water pollution, animal species loss, and water shortages to be “very serious” than at any time in the last two decades, according to the poll of 22,812 people in 22 countries including Britain and the US.

Continue reading “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” or whatever the term is this week…

Robert Murphy on Peter Gleick’s faked Heartland memo: “oozing absurdities.”

I am deeply envious of that phrase.

I rather badly want to have been the person who first came up with that phrase, in fact.  I feel that I need to get this on the record.

Anyway, if you were looking for a recap on the entire didn’t-turn-out-as-intended climate alarmist attack on the Heartland Institute by – well, I suppose that it has not been proven in a court of law that Peter Gleick was responsible for the forged memo, so we’ll go with “person or persons unknown who could conceivably have the initials ‘P.G.'” and be done with it.  Anyway, this is a pretty good recap: it describes the initial ‘data’ dump, identifies the central trouble with it (essentially, the central document is a farrago of nonsense and lies, and absent it the ‘supporting’ documents are thoroughly innocuous), notes the ghoulish zeal with which alarmist blogs treated the original ‘revelation’… and ruthlessly spotlights the petulant refusal of most of said alarmists to admit that the whole thing exploded in their face. Continue reading Robert Murphy on Peter Gleick’s faked Heartland memo: “oozing absurdities.”

More on the Peter Gleick Fakegate Memo.

This is pretty good stuff of Megan McArdle, re Peter Gleick’s own-goal sabotage of climate change advocates by disseminating/allegedly creating a fake Heartland memo on its global warming strategies (not to mention his confessed identity theft):

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths–including lying–to advance their worldview, I’d say one of the movement’s top priorities should be not proving them right.

…but it must be said: Gleick really doesn’t deserve much benefit of the doubt at this point with regard to his probable authorship of the original, blatantly fake, Heartland memo.  There is a credible case to be made at this point that Gleick stole the original documents, then created the memo himself; and, given that he’s a self-confessed liar, it’s going to take more than I’m not lying about this for Gleick to get out of it. Continue reading More on the Peter Gleick Fakegate Memo.

Rasmussen and the Global Warming Liars.

Hey, don’t look at me.  Or Rasmussen Reports.  We’re just reporting results.  Object to the American people:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 69% say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who say this is Very Likely. Twenty-two percent (22%) don’t think it’s likely some scientists have falsified global warming data, including just six percent (6%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Another 10% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here .)

Continue reading Rasmussen and the Global Warming Liars.

#rsrh WH blames Greenies for lack of GOP.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Yeah.  Apparently they were the ones who were supposed to bring in the Republican party to support the climate bill.

(pause)

Wait.  What?

One exasperated administration official on Thursday lambasted the environmentalists – led by the Environmental Defense Fund – for failing to effectively lobby GOP senators.

“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” the official told POLITICO. “They spent like $100 million and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.”

Yeah.  Um.  Right.  I don’t know how to quite break this to the Obama administration, but here you go… the only reason why the environmental movement doesn’t want to see the Republican party all die in a fire is because they’re worried about the resulting carbon footprint.  Bless their hearts, but they hate us so much that it gives them permanent wrinkles on their foreheads; so just how were they supposed to bring us on-side, anyway?

Or am I just in an alternate universe again?  If so, is this at least one where they found the sequel to Children of the Lens? That’d actually be worth the hassle of setting up a new bank account and credit card.

Moe Lane

Obama’s drilling bribe is insultingly small.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) Does he really think that this is sufficient to peel off cap-and-tax opposition? Let’s do some strategic bolding:

The Obama administration’s plan adopts some drilling proposals floated by President George W. Bush near the end of his tenure, including opening much of the Atlantic and Arctic Coasts. Those proposals were challenged in court on environmental grounds and set aside by President Obama shortly after he took office.

[snip]

The first lease sale off the coast of Virginia could occur as early as next year in a triangular tract 50 miles off the coast that had already been approved for development but was held up by a court challenge and additional Interior Department review, officials said.

But as a result of the Obama decision, the Interior Department will spend several years conducting geologic and environmental studies along the rest of the southern and central Atlantic Seaboard. If a tract is deemed suitable for development, it is listed for sale in a competitive bidding system. The next lease sales — if any are authorized by the Interior Department — would not be held before 2012.

Let me put it another way: the White House is implying the promise of jam tomorrow – in reality, it’s just a study to revisit the denial of jam yesterday – in exchange for jam today. Only the jam today is actually a swarm of angry wasps.  Try again, Mr. President.  Start with rescinding your interference with the Bush drilling permits, and expect to give up more.  A lot more: your opponents are not interested in indulging the Greenies’ quaint, somewhat primitive religious sensibilities.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Any excuse to put up a Feynman speech… #rsrh

…is a good one; but as commenter Skip notes here, this is a particularly good time to remind the universe of this particular speech.

But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Hey, that Richard Feynman guy was kind of smart, wasn’t he? Wonder how he would have reacted to the IPCC meltdown.