If All You See…

By William Teach March 25, 2015 – 1:00 pm

…is an area flooded by too much carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Patterico’s Pontifications, with a post on Ted Cruz signing up for Ocare.

Read: If All You See… »

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Latest Warmist Freakout: Hotcoldwetdry Slowing Gulf Stream

By William Teach March 25, 2015 – 11:47 am

We’re doomed or something

Global warming is now slowing down the circulation of the oceans — with potentially dire consequences

…this week brings news of another potential mega-scale perturbation. According to a new study just out in Nature Climate Change by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a group of co-authors, we’re now seeing a slowdown of the great ocean circulation that, among other planetary roles, helps to partly drive the Gulf Stream off the U.S. east coast. The consequences could be dire – including significant extra sea level rise for coastal cities like New York and Boston.

There’s no point in reading the rest of the article, it’s exactly as doomy as you’d expect. Oh, and exactly as wrong as you’d expect, with Cult member Chris Mooney refusing to actually investigate the claim

(Breitbart) But the paper, whose co-authors include one Michael E Mann, appears to be contradicted by real-world evidence which shows nothing of the kind.

Here is what the leading expert in the field, H Thomas Rossby, a professor at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography said in 2014 about the Gulf Stream, which he has been measuring for the last 20 years.

“We find absolutely no evidence that suggests that the Gulf Stream is slowing down.”

Oops. Anthony Watts dives deep into the paper and notes (along with all the science)

Of course, Rahmstorf and Mann don’t list Rossby’s study in their references, nor seem to use the “highly accurate” ADCP data. Instead they use a model along with [proxies, reconstructions, and] the highly interpolated GISS data to come to the conclusions they want. So, it isn’t surprising they are chasing phantoms in their study. They claim (in Figure 1 from their paper) that this cold spot south of Greenland is caused by meltwater from Greenland and it is evidence of a slowed circulation:

This is the Cult of Climastrology at its best: fear mongering with anything but real data. Computer models, proxies, invented data, etc are the be all say all. If the thermometer says 65 and their models say 72, they’ll go with 72. This is all about politics, particularly the politics of fear. “Science” is a means to that fear. And it very much begs the question that should be on everyone’s minds, including CoC members: why do they lie to us like this?

Read: Latest Warmist Freakout: Hotcoldwetdry Slowing Gulf Stream »

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People Super Enthused To Live In A Pre-electricity Time, At Least For One Hour

By William Teach March 25, 2015 – 10:03 am

They’re super enthused in Spain

(Euro Weekly News) A total of 125 Spanish towns and cities have pledged to turn off the lights on emblematic buildings at the end of March to raise awareness about climate change, organised by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Will you be spending an hour in the dark?

Think about that. This is part of what the Cult Of Climastrology brings, living in the dark thanks to CoC energy policies.

Paul Ross of Paul Ross Fitness in Huercal Overa, Almeria, said: “This is the first I have heard about it, to be honest, so I hadn’t planned to sit in the dark. However, if these cities and other places get involved, especially if they all light candles like they did recently in Mojacar, then it could have a massive positive impact. We do what we can to look after the planet. We recycle all our water for watering outside and call it ‘watering the desert’.”

I don’t want to pick on Paul, let’s just note the part about, essentially, sitting in the dark with lit candles, like it’s 1200 AD.

Read: People Super Enthused To Live In A Pre-electricity Time, At Least For One Hour »

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When It Comes To “Climate Change”, We Must Follow The Road Called Hope Or Something

By William Teach March 25, 2015 – 8:04 am

There’s a very interesting, and unintentionally ironic, reference within this article at The Nation by Cult of Climastrology member Rebecca Solnit

The Most Important Thing We Can Do to Fight Climate Change Is Try
The future will follow an unpredictable route, but we must still follow a compass called hope.

Of course, by “try”, she and other Warmists mean forcing Other People to comply with the CoC’s unhinged requirements, something Warmists refuse to do themselves.

Most forecasts of the future presume that something in the present will continue to grow and increase its power or influence. It’s as simple as doing a math problem on compounding interest or multiplication tables.

Orwell did this intentionally in 1984, creating the vision of a postwar Stalinist Britain circa 1948 that was taken to its absurd and appalling conclusion. Less imaginative people, however, genuinely believe that history moves in a straight line. Alarm about the “population bomb” arose from the assumption that women would continue to have babies at the rate they were worldwide in the 1960s. But thanks to reproductive rights and other factors, birthrates have plummeted so dramatically that some nations, from Germany to Japan, are now worried about a steep population decline.

Wikipedia’s opening blurb on 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four, sometimes published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949.[1][2] The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government’s invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as “thoughtcrimes”.

Other than the perpetual war part, the rest is very much the type of governmental system that Progressives are shooting for, and the CoC is very much a part of the Progressive program. Call them socialists, Marxists, Leftists, whatever, the Far Left wants that big, domineering type of governmental system, one where all aspects of life are controlled. Climate change is about control, about big centralized government. Divergent thought and opinions are not allowed.

The same is true of the younger divestment movement as it spreads even farther around the world. Hundreds of investment portfolios, from college endowments and pension funds to church holdings, have been divested of their fossil-fuel stocks—but that’s far from the only thing the divestment movement has done. Like the resistance to Keystone, the movement has called attention to the broader issue of climate; generated activism and networks, particularly around universities; and shed considerable light on the financial risk of investing in what is now called “the carbon bubble.” With this, it has become possible to see not only that we live in the Age of Fossil Fuel, but that this age is coming to an end.

Yet, these same people refuse themselves to give up their use of fossil fuels. Divestment is a requirement for Someone Else, simply an exercise in forcing compliance.

Among our few certainties about the future are the following: climate change is here, it will get worse, and it is essentially irreversible. What’s uncertain is whether, through extraordinary effort, we will meet the crisis as we should, with a speedy exit from the Age of Fossil Fuel, or whether that age will drag on and foreclose the possibility of our choosing the least rather than the most terrible future. We are now essentially hostages to the small group of people who benefit most from the fossil-fuel industries, as well as the politicians in their pay—although remarkable victories have been won against them in recent years, from Ecuador to Nigeria to New York State.

Au contraire. Said group is anything but small, since most people who are agitating against fossil fuels are consumers of the same. Personally, I’m all for replacing fossil fuels with truly cleaner alternatives that provide the same power for the same or lower cost. The environmental damage is real. Climate change caused mostly/solely by Mankind is not. What the Cult of Climastrology is advocating is, again, compliance with their pseudo-religious tenants while refusing themselves to eliminate fossil fuels from their own lives.

The world of 2115 is unimaginable, and so is the road there. That world may be better than we can now imagine, and in some ways—ecological ones—it may be worse. It may have corrected oppressions we do not yet recognize. But if we are clear about our lack of knowledge, we can move forward, acting on what we believe. The theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.” Memory itself is a subjective thing. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices; or we can tell of a lovely golden age now irretrievably lost; or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story—one that has room for the best and the worst, for atrocities and liberations. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past produces hope.

What is being done in much of the article is mixing Leftist tropes with “climate change”, as the two are entirely connected, being part of how Leftists get to their Progressive utopia. In 2115, people will either be living in a world that laughs about what rubes and fools people were when it came to the hysteria of “climate change”, or it will be a sullen world of Progressive ideals, where freedom is limited and thought crimes rampant, George Orwell’s book come true.

BTW, include in the article is this painting by Eric Drooker

Open spaces look very appealing in the CoC’s world, eh?

Read: When It Comes To “Climate Change”, We Must Follow The Road Called Hope Or Something »

Posted in Climahypocrites, Global Warming, Progressive Goals | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

As Obama Rushes To Nuclear Deal With Iran, Iran Refuses To Provide Information

By William Teach March 25, 2015 – 7:29 am

As the sands of time run down on the Obama administration, he and his peeps are dead set on creating a deal with Iran, any deal, doesn’t matter what. They’re working hard to cement Obama in the same mold of foreign policy incompetence as Jimmy Carter and Neville Chamberlain

(Washington Post) The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran has failed to provide the information or access needed to allay the agency’s concerns about the weapons potential of the country’s nuclear program.

With the deadline nearing for international talks on constraining Iran’s nuclear program, Yukiya Amano, director general of the IAEA, said in an interview that Iran has replied to just one of a dozen queries about “possible military dimensions” of past nuclear activities.

Amano said that Iran has provided only “very limited” information about two other issues, while the rest have not been addressed at all.

Is it any wonder that the White House will not promise to let people know the details before it is signed?

(Weekly Standard) In an interview this evening on Fox News, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki would not promise that Americans would get to see the details of a nuclear deal with Iran before it’s “signed, sealed, delivered.”

Fox host Greta Van Susteren asked, “When there is a proposed deal, will the American people get sort of a real strong briefing on it before it’s actually signed, sealed, and delivered so that we can have our thought whether it’s a good deal, bad deal, so we can have some input? Or is this going to be signed and then we are going to hear about it?”

“Well, I think it’s not about it signed — it’s negotiated between countries and it’s negotiated between leaders of countries. That’s traditionally and historically how international negotiations have worked,” said Psaki.

In other words, the American public can piss off, because the Obama administration will be as secretive as usual. We’ll be lucky if Congress is informed. More likely, the deal will be leaked to a foreign news outlet from one of the negotiating partners. Team Obama, which blew off the Iranian green uprising, seems to really be enthralled by the hardcore Iranian regime

(Breitbart) On Monday, the White House dismissed Ayatollah Khamenei’s “Death to America” rhetoric, telling CNN that it was “intended for a domestic political audience.” That comment came on the heels of White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explaining that such rhetoric provided even more reason for negotiating a deal with the Iranian regime.

At the same time that the White House essentially blew off Ayatollah Khamenei’s “Death to America” routine, the White House deliberately misinterpreted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments the day before and the day of his re-election in Israel. Apparently the things said during an election do not constitute electioneering; the things said in a country that has not had free elections for three decades constitute electioneering. Welcome to the delusional anti-Semitic world of the Obama administration, where Palestinian diplomats can refuse to disassociate from Hamas, and Iran can openly embrace the destruction of America and Israel, but it’s the Jews who need to be clubbed into line.

Obama embraces enemies and, at best, dismisses allies. If this coming deal with Iran was so great, information might be shared. That it is being kept relatively secret, without even briefings of Congress, should say quite a bit. Fortunately, it will have no force of law past Obama’s time in office.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Spring Snow Is Totally The Fault of Climate Change

By William Teach March 24, 2015 – 3:29 pm

Here’s yet another disciple of the Cult of Climastrology

(Huffington Post) It was a lovely spring day in Chicago. Last week it hit a balmy 60 degrees as the season began to move off of winter. Opening Day of the baseball season is just around the corner, less than a mere two weeks away on April 5. I look my morning constitutional, and some of it was even outdoors;

photo 2015-03-23-1427126158-4521324-Snow-thumb_zpsh5ngm3wu.jpg

And the elves back at the homestead are all laughing.

Yes, this is Chicago on Monday morning, March 23. That’s three days after the official beginning of Spring. It was 29 degrees when I set out on my early morning walk. By 10:30, the snow was coming down even harder. And yes, the first game of the baseball season will be at Wrigley Field is only 13 days away. I expect to hear Cubs announcer Pat Hughes call out that the runner sleds into second base for a double.

Where is Sen.James Inhofe (R-OK) when you really need him? Now’s when you’d love to see him on the Senate floor with that snowball, ridiculing the concept of Climate Change…

photo d1051060_zps5bb58f32.gif

Read: Spring Snow Is Totally The Fault of Climate Change »

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If All You See…

By William Teach March 24, 2015 – 1:00 pm

…is a field overgrown from too much carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Nice Deb, with a post on the difference in the way the White House treats Netenyahu’s and Khamehnei’s “words”.

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Ted Cruz Responds To Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown On Climate Change

By William Teach March 24, 2015 – 9:44 am

I mentioned California governor Jerry Brown’s silliness regarding Ted Cruz and “climate change” yesterday. Cruz fired back

(Think Progress) Responding to California Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) remarks on Meet the Press on Sunday that Cruz was “absolutely unfit” to run for office because of his “direct falsification of the existing scientific data” on climate change, Cruz said Sunday that “global warming alarmists” like Brown “ridicule and insult anyone who actually looks at the real data.”

Speaking on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Sunday, Cruz said that Brown and other proponents of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change engage in “ad hominem attacks” and “don’t want to confront the data” on climate change. Cruz said that satellites are showing that warming isn’t happening, even though “apocalyptic computer models said that we would see substantial warming.”

Sadly, Ted missed a salient point: the people, especially the leaders, in the Cult Of Climastrology are massive hypocrites within their own lives. Of course, TP deflects Ted’s point about the satellite data

About 90 percent of the warming over the last 17 years has occurred in the oceans, the impacts of which will start to be felt more acutely in the near future. Greenland’s ice melt has increased five-fold since the mid-1990s. Another recent study found that sea level is rising 60 percent faster than projected.

We’re back to “the oceans ate my warming”.

Read: Ted Cruz Responds To Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown On Climate Change »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Global Warming | 18 Comments | Trackback URL

Science Museums Urged To Cut Ties With Fossil Fuels Companies, Koch Brothers

By William Teach March 24, 2015 – 7:20 am

This is the soft tyranny of the Progressive Left, whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as “nice fascists”. In their world, voluntary associations that they disapprove of must be cut. And they’ll take long fossil fueled trips in order to make sure you know it

Science Museums Urged to Cut Ties With Fossil Fuel Donors
Letter from Nobel laureates and other scientists goes to 330 institutions urging them to cut ties with the industry responsible for climate misinformation.

Hundreds of museums across the country––including some of the most prestigious––are being asked by more than 30 scientists to cut their ties to the fossil fuel industry.

In a letter sent to more than 330 science and natural history centers on Tuesday, the researchers said that when “some of the biggest…funders of misinformation on climate science” give millions of dollars to science-focused museums, it acts to “undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions.”

“Museums are feeling budgetary crunches, and these donors bring in large sums of money,” said Beka Economopoulos, co-founder and director of the Brooklyn-based Natural History Museum, a new educational organization that coordinated the letter. “Museums, even unintentionally, are unlikely to bite the hand that feeds them. There is a threat of self-censorship where the philanthropy serves to make museums more reticent to offend the donor, or certainly to critique the practices of the donor.”

The Cult of Climastrology would prefer their version of censorship. Not to be outdone, here’s what the NY Times, the “Paper of Record”, runs. Same story, different tenor

Science Museums Urged to Cut Ties With Kochs

Dozens of climate scientists and environmental groups are calling for museums of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers.

A letter released on Tuesday asserts that such money is tainted by these donors’ efforts to deny the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.

The Koch brother, long a liberal bugaboo, have a long history of donating vast sums of their own money to help other people and institutions out in a charitable manner. No one has been able to show any sort of association for a quid pro quo or “self-censorship”. Rather than being lauded for their humanitarianism and philanthropy, they are insulted and assaulted. By people who a) do not give their own money to help out and b) refuse to give up their own use of fossil fuels.

Read: Science Museums Urged To Cut Ties With Fossil Fuels Companies, Koch Brothers »

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Ted Cruz Presidential Announcement Brings The Liberal Moonbattery Out In Force

By William Teach March 24, 2015 – 6:59 am

It was rather wise for Ted Cruz to announce early that he’s officially running for president: it brings that bat guano insane from Liberals out into the open early, so it can be knocked down. Ezra Klein provides one of the more laughable “articles”

Imagine Ted Cruz as president

If you guessed Sen. Ted Cruz would launch his presidential campaign by remixing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” well, you win the pool.

Cruz, a former national debater, is an excellent speaker. And he doesn’t just dish red meat. His announcement at Liberty University had the friendly, looping cadence of a megachurch preacher. He walked the stage confidently. He bantered with the crowd. He told stories. He was as comfortable talking Obamacare as he is layering on schmaltz. Liberals who have come to expect a conservative firebreather will be disappointed.

But there was an odd note twanging through his address, and it took to an anonymous student on the social networking app YikYak to point it out: “Imagining this guy actually fulfilling these promises.”

The word Cruz kept coming back to — “imagine” — was a bit of a dodge. He asked his audience at the evangelical Christian university to imagine a more conservative world. He asked them to imagine a flat tax, and the full repeal of Obamacare, and a government that stands against gay marriage and with Bibi Netanyahu. But he didn’t tell them how to achieve it — save for the implied vote for Cruz. The speech ended up feeling like a cross between CPAC and The Secret.

Which leads to this subhead

Imagination is not a plan

Really? Remember, Ezra Klein was and is a BIG supporter of Barack Obama, whose entire 2008 campaign was based on “Hope and Change”, and nothing more. Cruz has shown that he has plans. He has been active in the Senate. What did Obama do, other than avoid any difficult votes?

Vox’s Timothy B. Lee also makes a big deal out of the fact that the donation page doesn’t use SSL, but was forced to create a correction

Correction: This article originally stated that the site doesn’t use SSL encryption at all. In fact, the submission of the credit card data is encrypted, but the lack of encryption for the donation page as a whole creates unnecessary risks for user security, as explained above.

That is something that Team Cruz needs to fix, right? Oops. They already have. Again, remember that Obama’s website was barely using any security at all, and liberals poo poo’d it.

The NY Times’ Alan Rappeport weighs in on the Cruz birtherism meme, and, unsurprisingly, fails to 100% say “he’s eligible”. It’s not a big surprise, seeing as how the Times ran two “just wondering” articles, in February and July 2008, about whether McCain was actually eligible. Then we have moonbattery from Think Progress

Ted Cruz Just Laid Out The Most Anti-Woman Agenda Yet

The evidence supporting that assumption is rather thin, but, then, Liberals often do not tend to actually read beyond the headline, so the talking point will simply be that Cruz is part of the He Man Woman Haters Club. Despite doting on his wife and two daughters. Much of the evidence is simply that on some issues, women support it more than men, such as with repealing Ocare, and that women support the contraception mandate (ie, forcing Other People to pay for birth control) 65%. Which leads to

A Flat Tax And Abolishing The IRS

“Instead of a tax code that crushes innovation, that imposes burdens on families struggling to make ends met, imagine a simple flat tax. Imagine abolishing the IRS.,” he said.

There’s little polling on a flat tax or abolishing the IRS specifically, since it mostly hasn’t been a serious policy proposal from either party. The last candidate to propose a flat tax was Herman Cain with his 9-9-9 proposal in 2012. That proposal was 10 points more popular with men than with women.

So, no real evidence, but somehow that’s “anti-woman”.

On immigration reform, abortion and same sex marriage, gun control, government data collection, school choice and Common Core, and foreign policy, women poll different from men, so, this is the so-called evidence that Cruz is anti-women. Will this be the new dynamic, that a simple slight difference of opinion is part of the War on Women? Of course, it’s Democrats who want to disarm the law abiding population, especially women, leaving them more vulnerable to criminals, who do not care about the law.

Anyhow, Democrats are cheering for Ted, because

The launch of Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential bid Monday has prompted an outpouring of excitement and delight — from Democrats.

To liberal activists, the firebrand Texan is much too far to the right for the nation at large and too extreme to even win the Republican nomination.

But they want nothing more than for him to run strongly throughout the primary season. The more momentum he develops, they argue, the more likely he is to push the eventual GOP nominee further to the right than that person will want to go.

Be careful what you wish for. They said Ronald Reagan was too far to the Right, in both 1980 and 1984, and look how that turned out. Especially when you have someone who can speak and think as well on stage as Cruz can. Teleprompter? He don’t need no stinkin’ teleprompter!

Crossed at Right Wing News.

Read: Ted Cruz Presidential Announcement Brings The Liberal Moonbattery Out In Force »

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