Is There A Climate Crystal Ball Or Something?

By William Teach April 9, 2014 – 10:02 am

Live Science’s Graham Wayne wonders if there is one. He’s also one of those Warmists who think Someone Else should act locally, preferably at the barrel of a government regulation (if he’s like most Warmists), while thinking globally, which is really a copout for making no changes within ones own life. Anyhow, here’s the first of two money quotes

It is often said that climate models are like crystal balls. Scientists can gaze into them, but due to the basic constraints of any modeling, the results are cloudy. Scientists know the basic physics of the atmosphere well enough to capture the big trends, but the smallest atmospheric features are still being fine-tuned. So unlike soothsayers and fortune-tellers, climate scientists don’t make bold pronouncements, but instead couch their projections in caveats and careful language to be honest about the uncertainty involved.

Except, they do. They’re constantly making bold predictions of doom and gloom.

Here’s the most important quote

Studying short-term climatic responses (TCR), Shindell found that a number of assumptions about the way the atmosphere responds may be skewing the models to underestimate climate sensitivity. So, in essence, this study is polishing the crystal ball, finding that previous TCR findings might be too low.

So, a prediction of more doom. Furthermore, we were supposed to make past policy predictions on things like fossil fuels, economic conditions, taxation, cap and trade, limitations on personal freedom, etc, in crummy assumptions and skewed data, of which they were telling us previously that “the science is settled”.

They’re saying their old crystal balls were flawed, but now we’re supposed to trust that their Crystal Ball 2.1 is fixed? What happens in 10-20 years when they come back and say “um, guys, the 2.1 version was skewed, sorry about that, please give us more money for CB 3.0.” Will they apologize for all the economic and personal freedom damage?

BTW, if anything, their findings seem to be drastically over-estimating the effects of man released GHGs.

Read: Is There A Climate Crystal Ball Or Something? »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Say, What Did Afghans Use During Their Historic Vote?

By William Teach April 9, 2014 – 7:05 am

Good question, if I don’t say so myself

(IBD) About 7 million Afghans turned out to vote in Saturday’s presidential election, many proudly brandishing a photo ID that our Department of Justice claims is a symbol of racism and voter intimidation.

In perhaps the most ironic tweet of all time, former Obama adviser David Axelrod noted concerning Saturday’s presidential election in Afghanistan: “Afghans defied threat of death to vote. Here’s hoping that Americans vote in large (numbers) this fall, despite efforts to make voting harder.”

Axelrod may not have noticed, but millions of Afghans also defied the threat of death when they lined up earlier to obtain the same photo voter IDs they could carry as they voted in an election that will produce the first peaceful transition of power in that beleaguered nation’s history. Afghans proudly showed their photo voter IDs, just as President Obama did when he voted early in Chicago in the 2012 election.

If people in some countries, as Axelrod notes, will risk death to vote, it is hard to see the intimidation in requiring people who vote to prove they are who they say they are — especially when voting results in America show that minority voters turned out in greater numbers in states that adopted voter ID requirements.

That’s a heck of a thing, eh? The White House praised the Afghan elections, and Allen West had a few choice words

But as you can see in this video, the people of Afghanistan will not be cowed, and will do what they can to ensure democratic elections — even if it means getting a photo for a voter identification. You cannot tell me citizens of the United States face a hardship in getting photo IDs to show at their polling place. How do the people of Afghanistan manage it, when they don’t have a CVS, Walgreens or Duane Reade at every corner?

When liberals in this country talk about “voter suppression” they really mean “fraudulent voter suppression” — yes, requiring a photo I.D. will suppress fraudulent votes. If you don’t agree with me, come on down to Florida and we’ll chat about it. But first, try getting on the plane without your repressive photo IDs.

Boom. Democrats are worried about having to show something that most people in the U.S. already have in order to vote, because they really want to commit fraud.

Read: Say, What Did Afghans Use During Their Historic Vote? »

Posted in Democrats, Election Fraud, Elections | 5 Comments | Trackback URL

Mark Levin On Obama: “This Man Is A Disgrace”

By William Teach April 9, 2014 – 6:45 am

What has Mark Levin so vexed? We pretty much know that Obama is a disgrace in general. Here’s in specific

(The Blaze) Conservative radio host Mark Levin on Tuesday said he is “ashamed and disgusted” that President Barack Obama plans to hit a fundraiser on Wednesday, hours after attending a memorial service to honor the slain military heroes who were killed in the recent Fort Hood shooting.

“I want to tell you something that I’m ashamed of and disgusted about,” Levin began. “This is just so appalling.”

He explained that, according to the schedule on the White House website, Obama and the first lady leave at 9:05 a.m. on Wednesday and arrive in Killeen, Texas, at around 11:30 a.m. CT.

The president and Michelle Obama will attend the Fort Hood memorial service on Wednesday and then take off for a Democratic National Committee fundraising event about an hour and a half later. The fundraiser reportedly starts at 5 p.m. CT.

The Associated Press reportedly obtained an invitation to the April 9 event “where tickets start at $16,200 a person and go up to $64,800 for a couple.” Obama is expected to be joined by Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

After that fundraiser, Obama will then go to a Democrat dinner event, which means he will spend more time at partisan fundraising events than at Ft. Hood.

“The president is actually spending more time fundraising in Texas than honoring those who were murdered at Fort Hood at the memorial ceremony,” Levin said, clearly angry but speaking with a somber tone. “I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, I believe this man is a disgrace.”

“I don’t know how you leave such a solemn event and then within hours you’re glad-handing you’re fundraising as if you can turn it off and turn it on,” he continued. “No, I’m sorry, that’s a disgrace and he’s a disgrace.”

As one of the commenters notes

If he didn’t have to justify the travel he would have skipped the event at Fort Hood.

Making an official stop at Ft. Hood allows Obama to only pay for the short trip from Ft. Hood to the fundraiser, rather than the full trip to Texas, per campaign laws.

Let’s not forget that Obama hit the campaign trail the day after 4 Americans, including our Ambassador, were murdered by Islamic jihadis in Benghazi, along with all the US compounds attacked on September 11, 2012.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

Read: Mark Levin On Obama: “This Man Is A Disgrace” »

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Surprise: Premiums Spiked In Recent Years

By William Teach April 8, 2014 – 2:49 pm

A good chunk of this is directly related to the “Affordable” Care Act

(Forbes) Health insurance premiums are showing the sharpest increases perhaps ever according to a survey of brokers who sell coverage in the individual and small group market. Morgan Stanley’s healthcare analysts conducted the proprietary survey of 148 brokers. The April survey shows the largest acceleration in small and individual group rates in any of the 12 prior quarterly periods when it has been conducted.

The average increases are in excess of 11% in the small group market and 12% in the individual market. Some state show increases 10 to 50 times that amount. The analysts conclude that the “increases are largely due to changes under the ACA.” (snip)

For the individual insurance market (plans sold directly to consumers); among the ten states seeing some of the sharpest average increases are: Delaware at 100%, New Hampshire 90%, Indiana 54%, California 53%, Connecticut 45%, Michigan 36%, Florida 37%, Georgia 29%, Kentucky 29%, and Pennsylvania 28%.

For the small group market, among the ten states seeing the biggest increases are: Washington 588%, Pennsylvania 66%, California 37%, Indiana 34%, Kentucky 30%, Colorado 29%, Michigan 27%, Maryland 25%, Missouri 25%, and Nevada 23%.

Congratulations, Democrat states, you are the proud recipients of the majority of the pain. Ironic, wouldn’t you say?

(Daily Caller) Individual policies saw a much starker jump after the Obamacare exchanges launched, in anticipation of the health care law going live in 2014. Morgan Stanley’s September 2013 survey, like the previous three quarters, found a fairly constant growth rate around 2 percent — but in December, the rate had shot up to above 9 percent.

Morgan Stanley’s results echo what consumers are already seeing: the Affordable Care Act’s intensive regulation of the insurance market is driving health care premiums up strikingly.

Well, fortunately, those who enroll in Obamacare can get Someone Else to pay a good portion, if not all, of their premiums. Funny thing is, Obamacare, and the rules from Team Obama and HHS, focused on controlling costs, rather than expanding service. What they got are higher costs for premiums and deductibles and reduced provider networks, all while achieving a net increase in those with health insurance of only about a million consumers. Wasn’t a main point of this whole exercise to provide the 30-45 million Americans without health insurance that health insurance?

Read: Surprise: Premiums Spiked In Recent Years »

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If All You See…

By William Teach April 8, 2014 – 1:00 pm

…is a sacrificial pedestal perfectly suited to kill all deniers and please Gaia, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Scared Monkeys, with a post on jihadis going all splodey-dope.

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“Climate Change” Is Dangerous Just Like The Occupy Movement

By William Teach April 8, 2014 – 10:10 am

No, really. Here’s Rebecca Solnit

Call climate change what it is: violence

Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth

Interesting. The Occupy movement showed us far left violence, rape, murder, theft, pooping on police cars and doorsteps, attempted bombings, mayhem. Fascinating.

Anyway, here we go:

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.

So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

Or so I thought when I received a press release last week from a climate group announcing that “scientists say there is a direct link between changing climate and an increase in violence“. What the scientists actually said, in a not-so-newsworthy article in Nature two and a half years ago, is that there is higher conflict in the tropics in El Nino years, and that perhaps this will scale up to make our age of climate change also an era of civil and international conflict.

The message is that ordinary people will behave badly in an era of intensified climate change.

All this makes sense, unless you go back to the premise and note that climate change is itself violence. Extreme, horrific, longterm, widespread violence.

Climate change is anthropogenic – caused by human beings, some much more than others. We know the consequences of that change: the acidification of oceans and decline of many species in them, the slow disappearance of island nations such as the Maldives, increased flooding, drought, crop failure leading to food-price increases and famine, increasingly turbulent weather. (Think Hurricane Sandy and the recent typhoon in the Philippines, and heat waves that kill elderly people by the tens of thousands.)

Climate change is violence.

So much bat-shit crazy, so little time. She even partially blames the Arab Spring on “climate change”, and blames “climate change” solely on humans. I suggest full legalization of marijuana, the better to keep these people heavily medicated. They are in desperate need.

Read: “Climate Change” Is Dangerous Just Like The Occupy Movement »

Posted in Global Warming, Unhinged Tools | 4 Comments | Trackback URL

UK Government Report Whines About Giving “Climate Change” Skeptics Air-time

By William Teach April 8, 2014 – 7:11 am

Why yes, yes, climate change believers are all about the fascism and restriction of speech

(Wired UK) The UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee has recently delivered a report on the state of climate knowledge and communication in the country. Although it doesn’t spare the government from criticism, the report notes that most of the public looks to the BBC to provide authoritative coverage on science. The report concludes that in this case, the BBC’s news division is failing its readership and viewers. Rather than providing authoritative information, the BBC is succumbing to false balance, and its director of Editorial Policy and Standards gave testimony on science coverage that appears to be incoherent.

Warmists really do not like when Citizens are allowed to hear contradictory facts when it comes to “climate change”, as this undermines their political science and ability to dictate how Citizens will live their lives.

In the UK, the major political parties largely accept the scientific evidence for climate change; official skepticism is limited to a few parties on the conservative fringe. As such, the report starts with the acceptance of the conclusions reached by the majority of scientists: the Earth is warming, and humans are the main factor driving that warming.

Fascinating, especially the part where the elected officials haven’t given up their own fossil fueled lifestyles and gone “carbon neutral”.

The UK does not have the same press freedoms we have here in the US, yet the report is heavily upset that skeptics are given any time in the news.

“It is not clear to us,” the committee concluded, “how a ‘journalistic point of view’ which presumably emphasises accuracy, can be at odds with a scientific approach whose prime objective is the establishment of empirical fact.”

Yet, Warmists are expressly giving their point of view, quite often based on hysteria and scaremongering, not scientific fact. A prognostication using failed computer models is not science. Nor is constantly changing past data.

The committee also examined the country’s newspapers, where it found that most of the inaccuracies appeared in opinion columns rather than news pieces. But the two most frequently mentioned offenders, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, declined to send anyone to meet with the committee. Both papers sent written statements indicating that they counted on their readers to note which pieces were reporting and which were opinion, a stance that left the parliamentarians “very disappointed.”

Really, this is just a part of the Warmist campaign to shut down debate. Here in the US, many papers refuse to publish anything that goes against the “consensus”. In the UK, it is the government attempting to shut down debate.

And, certainty, what is debatable is the policies that result from or are proposed due to Warmists prognostications and (unscientific) reports.

Read: UK Government Report Whines About Giving “Climate Change” Skeptics Air-time »

Posted in Global Warming, New Climate Deniers | 6 Comments | Trackback URL

Eric Holder Wants Us To Consider Linking Guns To Something Wearable

By William Teach April 8, 2014 – 6:54 am

What do you think of this idea? I can see the good and bad

(The Blaze) It’s stuff straight out of a Bond movie. And now it’s being trumpeted once again by the Obama administration, specifically Eric Holder, to talk about gun issue.

What is it? Technology that prevents a gun from being fired by anyone but the lawful owner.

“I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and talked about how guns can be made more safe,” Holder told Congress on Friday.

“By making them — either through finger print identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, — how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon,” he added. “It’s those kinds of things that I think we want to try to explore so that we can make sure that people have the ability to enjoy their Second Amendment rights, while at the same time decreasing the misuse of weapons that lead to the kinds of things that we see on a daily basis, where people where, kids especially, are struck down.”

The Blaze goes on to note that there is very little out on the market for this type of technology. One thing I’m seeing is an automatic response of people saying “hell no!” Having this technology available would not be a bad thing. For parents, this could be a great way to limit children’s ability to grab the gun and have something Bad happen without having to lock the weapon up and stick it on the top shelf behind the winter sweaters. Not particularly accessible if someone breaks in, eh? What if it could be left in the dresser drawer without fear?

I’m not particularly thrilled with the notion of the gun being linked to a fingerprint. It would certainly make it damned difficult in case someone steals the weapon, but it would also make it difficult to sell it, or let someone use it at the firing range. What if the spouse is the one who needs to grab it? I suppose it could be programmed to accept more than one fingerprint, but, more important, do these prints end up in government hands? More intrusion?

Some type of bracelet, ring, something wearable that uses a code would be the best. The biggest problem is not legal guns, but illegal guns. Many of those guns are stolen. According to the DOJ, 1.4 million guns were stolen from homes between 2005 and 2010. Roughly 25,000 guns are stolen from dealers every year. If there is a way to make them virtually unusable every year, would that not be a Good Thing? 2nd Amendment advocates constantly state that the issue is the criminals, not the law abiding citizens.

But, would this be mandatory? Would Los Federales require registration of the tech? Would they have a way to shut the link down, meaning you could not fire the weapon? What’s your opinion?

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Bummer: Butterfly Defies Warmist Predictions Of Extinction

By William Teach April 7, 2014 – 3:56 pm

Stupid butterfly! How dare you adapt!

(Guardian) A butterfly species whose population collapsed because of climate change and habitat loss has defied predictions of extinction to rapidly move to cooler climes and change its food plant.

The quino checkerspot (Euphydryas editha quino), found in Mexico and California, has shifted to higher altitudes and surprisingly chosen a completely different species of plant on which to lay its eggs, according to research presented at the Butterfly Conservation’s seventh international symposium in Southampton.

In reality, the quino checkerspot butterfly was mostly endangered by habitat loss. But, hey, like every real environmental issue, the nutballs have to make it about “climate change”. And they throw their belief in Darwinism out the window. Fortunately, the butterfly is smarter than the Warmists, and simply adapted. Like it surely did when the climate turned colder during the Little Ice Age. The Medieval Warm Period. The Dark Ages. The Roman Warm period. Etc.

Several other butterfly species have been changing habitat or diet to cope with a changing climate but the quino checkerspot is the first butterfly known to science to change both so rapidly.

Many environmentalists fear that climate change is happening too quickly for species to adapt but, according to Parmesan, this surprising example shows that some apparently doomed species may be more resilient than we imagine.

Of course, the Warmists have to continue to push doom and gloom for species.

But the international symposium also heard strong scientific evidence that climate change will create more losers than winners because unspoilt habitat is so fragmented, preventing many butterflies, moths and other insects from moving to more suitable places. Tom Oliver of the Centre for Hydrology and Ecology told the symposium that scientific modelling predicted a number of UK butterfly extinctions by the middle of this century.

If the models are anything like the temperature models, butterflies should be just fine. Most life has adapted throughout the Holocene and the back and forth climates.

Read: Bummer: Butterfly Defies Warmist Predictions Of Extinction »

Posted in AGW Scaremongering, Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 18 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach April 7, 2014 – 1:39 pm

…is an ocean that will cover all the land because of the evil United States and its massive carbon footprint, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Wake Up America, with a post on the Police State USA.

Read: If All You See… »

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