Climate Change has Nothing to do With Today's Weather

A blurb of a story here in my neck of the woods:

It snowed, but they still came. A heavy snowfall blanketed a global warming protest outside the State House in Annapolis this morning, but it did not dampen the shouts of about 400 activists who urged lawmakers to pass the nation's toughest greenhouse gas control law.

As supporters waved signs, chanted and banged drums, 18 legislators walked down a symbolic green carpet to sign up as co-sponsors to a bill that would mandate that all businesses in Maryland cut emissions of global warming pollution by 25 percent by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050.

"We are going to pass this bill this year," said State Sen. Paul Pinsky, a Democrat from Prince George's County and chairman of the senate's environmental matters subcommittee. "We are not going to rest, we are not going to stop....We are going to keep going until we pass this
bill."

Does this need to be pointed out? Weather and Climate Change have virtually nothing to do with each other. The weather is what's outside right now. The weather forecast covers the next few days. Usually, we get it right.

Climate change is completely separate--our climate is still changing and the average highs and lows are changing and the amount of ice on the ice caps on both ends of the planet are changing and the size and volume of the glaciers are changing. You don't "feel" climate change because climate change evolves slowly, over time. You feel weather, because weather is what's hitting you in the face.

Here are the usual comments from the story, and these are the people who likely found the story at Drudge:

Dr. Cindy Parker is mistaken if she really believes that "global warming is a health issue. Warmth and temperance in weather terms accounts for good health and less compromised patient base with terminal or chronic illnesses. I know that in every locale I have lived in, deaths because of the weather were elevated more in winter than summer. In fact, I found that many of my clients in AZ moved there to have the more temperate climate even if having to brave the summer heat because it was so hard to get warm in winter but a cool bath or a fan could cool in summer. Please end the hystronics and lets discuss the cycling of weather in a real time appropriate and historically correct way. Remember, Greenland was named that for its beautiful green valley and its lush flora (National Geographic' IMAX movie-"The Vikings")
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The consensus has spoken! The world is flat and is coming to an end! Beware Maryland! More filth then China! More filth than India. It’s Maryland that is to blame! The 7 of us have a consensus. 6 to 1 Maryland will end the world as we know it! Vote Democratic to save the world from Maryland!! Dopey thinks we are wrong! He said Maryland climate change is natural! The Dope!
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These folks look really brain dead...biggest scam on the planet propped up by politicians looking for YOUR money. Reminds me of Nick Berg. Nick was a peacenick who felt we, the USA misjudged the terrorists..lol...until the brutally sawed his head off on tv!!! Wake up you guys are these politicians rubes...I hope you didnt freeze your butts off toomuch during your global warming protest...you were probably wishing for a little global warmin in that weather...which is exactly what most of us would like anyway...a bit warmer temperatures...LOL!
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The morons in my state never cease to amaze me. It's almost like they want to create a Michigan-esque one-state recession by driving all the jobs out of the state. These people are extremists. They are like jihadists in this religion they've embraced on the faith they call "scientific 'consensus.'" When all is said and done, we are going to be living under the despotism of environmentalism and the truly fascist policies that are presented to the American people as being for a cause that is beyond reproach. ...Insallah, right?
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And so on and so forth.

It kind of makes you wish you lived in a smarter country, doesn't it?

Well, at least they are consistent, right?

Then again, maybe not...

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian statistician and longtime global-warming skeptic had discovered a slight error in NASA's surface temperature records for the United States. He sent off an email to NASA, and James Hansen fixed the problem, crediting McIntyre for the good catch. Right-wing blogs went nuclear and said this shows that climate science is all a bunch of hokum.

But how big an error was it? Well, 1998 went from being listed as 0.01 degrees warmer than 1934 to being listed as 0.02 degrees cooler. That means 1934 is back to being the "official" hottest U.S. year on record, although it's still a statistical tie. Some of the other U.S. years in this decade were also downgraded slightly. This all had virtually no bearing on the global temperature record, in which 2005 still appears to be the hottest year on record, and Al Gore's claim that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995 is still operative. Check out RealClimate for some graphs.

0.03 degrees - hundredths of degrees are piffle when the climate scientists point to them, but reason to scrap thirty years of scientific research and consensus when it goes their way?

GMAFB.

We need some new rules

For starters, we need to rename our policy institutes to more accurately reflect the product that comes out of those fever-swamps. They push agendas, reality be damned and critical thinking be suspended.

When agenda-whoring is the major gist, call them what they are – Belief Tanks. And call their "analysts" what they are, too – Agenda Whores.

With September looming, and the true believers having difficulty moving the goalposts to November, the Idiots from Brookings™ are back. Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack take to the op-ed pages of the New York Times today to proclaim that “we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms.”

O’Hanlon and Pollack bill themselves “as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” They are very quick to point out that they are ‘two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq’ but they fail to mention that they were frothing hawks who poo-pooed those of us who were fucking right before hand. Pollack wrote an entire damned book laying out “the case for invading Iraq,” and took the case for war to the Cheetos-and-Hot Pockets crowd on Oprah in 2002, where he enthusiastically beat the war drum and pushed the false intelligence about Iraq as justification to war.

O’Hanlon is nearly as odious as Pollack. He has shared Pollack’s zeal for war with Iraq. Prior to the invasion, he predicted a “a rapid and decisive” victory. Now, he is intent on flipping war critics to the “surge supporters” column, and his plans revolve around a long-term occupation.

Now that these pathetic fools who have been wrong around everything are back from another “fact finding” trip to Iraq, they are off on a PR junket touting “stay the course.” This weekend on CNN, the hapless O’Hanlon claimed that the war “is going brilliantly at this point.”

CNN correspondent Arwa Damon refuted his claim in an interview with Tom Foreman: .

FOREMAN: Arwa, is there a sense in Baghdad on the ground that that’s exactly what’s happening?

ARWA DAMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Tom, actually not when you speak to the Iraqi people. In fact, most of those that I’ve spoken to will not really say that they feel that the situation is getting better. Remember, they’re not measuring their own security in terms of numbers of U.S. casualties or numbers of bodies that were found unidentified throughout the entire capital. They are measuring their sense of whether or not things are getting better by the level of comfort with which they can leave their homes. For most Iraqis, they are still just as petrified of falling victim of sectarian violence or any other sort of attack that could take place in the capital today as they were before the surge began.

O’Hanlon breathlessly points to some non-existent metrics to bolster his puffery and support for this failed war:

He is excited about the delivery of “basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people,” and he sings Hosannas to the ‘reliability‘ of Iraqi security forces, and he is simply wide-eyed over “how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working.”

Too bad none of these things that have him so tickled are actually, you know, happening the way he says. In reality, residents of Baghdad now get only one or two hours of electricity each day, the Iraqi security forces are deserting in large numbers, and reconstruction has stalled.

Only a died-in-the-wool idiot would look to these never-right morons for advice.

So I guess they find a ready audience in aWol.

[H/T Think Progress & Glenn Greenwald]

[Cross-posted from Watching Those We Chose]

Wanker of the Night: Faux Filibuster Edition

I have been listening all night long, and I am getting ready to turn in.

But before I do, I have to anoint John Thune the biggest wanker in the Senate.
The Junior Senator from South Dakota has secured the title. That is quite an achievement when one has both of those double-digit I.Q. chuckleheads representing Oklahoma, Lieberman and Mad Jack Insane to battle for that dubious honor.

Thune is obliviously willfully ignorant if he is unaware of the Military Times poll from last winter that shows only one in three members of the armed services approve of the president and his conduct of the war.

That would almost seal the deal for him all by itself. But there is more...

He actually said to Jim Webb, a combat veteran himself, and the father of a Marine who served in Iraq...that he knows better what the boots on the ground think, because he has been there (and disrupted operations like visits by potentates always do) and Webb hasn't!

Really!

He said that!

Let me just clear something right the hell up...Visits by potentates are a pain in the ass stateside during peacetime. In a war zone they are an obscenity.

Webb has a very good source. The best source available...He has a son who fought there, recently. He is also a combat veteran.

Jim Webb has the decency to not subject the troops in harms way to the added strain of a dog-and-pony show that is always precipitated when a potentate comes a-calling.

Stateside, during peacetime, it's a gigantic pain in the ass when those pricks come to visit. In a war zone, those little juggernauts are an affront to decency.

Remember that a mile away from Lindsey “I bought five rugs for five dollars” Graham when he got such a killer deal on those rugs last April, six G.I.'s who did not have those Apache gunships and Blackhawks hovering overhead giving them cover, were killed.

Remind everyone of that.

And remind 'em that when a Republican says he is behind the troops - the bastard likely has one hand on his fly and lascivious intent.

You know how I am always saying I love the smell of roast wingnut in the morning?

Well! Feast on Jim Webb putting Lindsey “I bought five rugs for five dollars” Graham in his place.

Graham kept repeating that he has been to Iraq seven times (on taxpayer-funded junkets that serve no purpose and only accomplish disrupting operations to accommodate the potentates) – and Webb – whose son served as a combat Marine in Iraq – did not mention the fact of his son's service.

He didn't have to. We all knew he was the one with moral authority without him having to turn over that card.

Webb took the high road and everyone watching knows it. “You go and see the dog-and-pony shows.” Webb scolded Graham, “Don’t put political words into [the soldier’s] mouth.”

Graham came off looking like nothing so much as a petulant, obstreperous, delusional, kool-aid swilling jackass. He kept pounding his finger on the desk and saying “let them win.”

Which is total horseshit. The only way for an occupying invader to *win* is to commit random slaughter and war crimes. We know this. Is Lindsey Graham advocating that U.S. G.I.'s commit war crimes?

And by the way Lindsey, just let me air a grievance, and I say this as someone with long and strong Air Force association - I bleed Strata Blue - I just can’t equate your time as a JAG lawyer in the Air Force during peace time with Senator Webb leading a Marine rifle company in Viet Nam; Senator Webb received multiple service commendations, not the least of which was the distinguished Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts.

They don't give those out for paper cuts, or hangovers caused by too much German beer, unfortunately for Lindsey.

I’ve been to Rhein Mein – it was decidedly not a hardship tour. In fact, it was a very popular billet back then.

Oh, hell – just watch Webb eviscerate the little weasel:

For Dick Lugar, Party Trumps Principle

This is why I put a 24-hour-hold on reporting anything that comes close to looking encouraging if it comes from a party apparatchik Republican. They always backpedal and retract and spin and explain what they really meant to say – probably after a visit from Karl’s boyz, but that’s just speculation…

Yesterday evening, Think Progress posted the following:

In a major speech on the Senate floor, Lugar said that “victory” in Iraq as defined by President Bush is now “almost impossible.” The current course of the war “has lost contact with our vital national security interests in the Middle East and beyond,” he said.

Lugar warned that “persisting indefinitely” with Bush’s escalation strategy “will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.” He specifically rejected claims that withdrawing U.S. forces will increase instability. Downsizing the U.S. military presence in Iraq would “strengthen our position in the Middle East, and reduce the prospect of terrorism, regional war, and other calamities,” Lugar said.

And today, MSNBC tells us that I was smart to hold off on praising him, because he intends to take the sniveling cowards way out, and has no intention of backing up his bold rhetoric.

Lugar won't switch vote
However, [Lugar spokesman Andy] Fisher said the speech does not mean Lugar would switch his vote on the war or embrace Democratic measures setting a deadline for troop withdrawals.

In January, Lugar voted against a resolution opposing the troop buildup, contending that the nonbinding measure would have no practical effect. In spring, he voted against a Democratic bill that would have triggered troop withdrawals by Oct. 1 with the goal of completing the pull out in six months.

Next month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to force votes on several anti-war proposals as amendments to a 2008 defense policy bill. Members will decide whether to cut off money for combat, demand troop withdrawals start in four months, restrict the length of combat tours and rescind Congress' 2002 authorization of Iraqi invasion.

Expected to fall short of the 60 votes needed in the Senate to pass controversial legislation, the proposals are intended to increase pressure on Bush and play up to voters frustrated with the war.

…the proposals are intended to increase pressure on Bush and play up to voters frustrated with the war. Fisher says that like it’s a bad thing! In reality it is the only thing. Change ain’t gonna happen until this president is forced to deal with the reality that is “dealing with” ~30 Americans a week – and the only way he is going to be forced into facing facts is if members of his own party insist that he do so.

Dick Lugar should hang his head in shame. And he should also attend the funeral of every Indianan who falls and explain to the grieving family members why he puts party and politics above the lives of their loved ones.

[Crossposted at WTWC & OOIBC]

Bring on the mockery, it is richly deserved

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Oh good lord. They really are bringing out the d-string players here, everyone with three firing neurons having already retreated to lick their wounds and regroup, leaving the imbeciles standing sentry.

They are down to…Emily Yoffe – the “Human Guinea Pig” from Slate and “Day to Day” – whose claim to fame is humiliating herself for the amusement of others, and writing a book about a neurotic beagle. (So sure, I'll trust her expertise on matters of climate science...)

Not.

Why the fuck should I take this twit seriously on anything? Much less something so serious as Global Warming? What are her credentials that the Washington Post would give her a column to address a topic so serious as global climate change in the first damned place? (For the record, I don’t listen to Leonardo DiCaprio’s or Sheryl Crow's scientific pretensions either.)

She is just too precious. I fear I might have to spend a bit of time on this, so rich is the mock-worthy material. Let the fun commence!

It was a mild January evening, and people had filled the restaurant's outdoor patio. As our group walked past the tables, one of my friends said, "This terrifies me." I don't know if she was reassured later by the chilly April, but we are all supposed to be terrified of the weather now.

Hell, she shows her stupidity (ignorance can be helped, but stupidity is organic) when she doesn’t know the difference between climate and weather (hint: the former is an aggregate of the latter). It’s like expecting me to take a stem cell research opponent seriously when they can’t tell me what the hell a telomere is. I have already snorted.

In "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore tells us that unless drastic global changes are made, our cities will be inundated and those of us who haven't drowned will face a world wracked by cataclysmic weather and swarming with pestilence. One of his devotees, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming out with his own environmental horror movie warning of human extinction if we continue living as we are. This would have a negative effect on the box office, but extinction might be preferable to the future Gore envisions.

See? What did I tell you! She is just precious! Let me explain this for you sweet-pea. When the sea ice started melting, it took on a snowball rolling down the mountain quality. Its simple physics – dark colors (water) absorb energy (heat) that white (ice) reflected back to space. This raises temperatures. This melts more ice, and raises the temperature further. Besides the fact that melting sea ice kinda totally jacks the polar and aquatic eco systems, the rising temperatures cause ice sheets and glaciers on land to increase their melt rate, and that raises sea levels. It all boils down to four little words: No Ice, No Us. Silly girl – she only needs to think about a glass of tea…when the ice melts, you still have roughly the same volume. But you can’t add more tea to a full glass. Ice melting on land has that effect. Frankly, anyone too stupid to get this by now should make sure they are wearing a helmet before they leave the house. What size are you Emily? About a 6 ¾? Or smaller? (The picture is of the arctic ice cap, the top shot taken in 1979 and the bottom one taken in 2003.)

I, however, refuse to see the apocalypse in every balmy day. And I think it's wrong to let our children believe they'll be swept away before they get a chance to fret about college admissions. An article in The Post this spring described children anxious, sleepless and tearful about the end; one 9-year-old said she worried about global warming "because I don't want to die."

Hmmm. Remember the Cold War? I do. People like me, who crawled under our desks at school on a regular basis grew up and worked for a nuclear freeze. I don’t know if there will be a correlation in ten years like there was with us, but I would be willing to bet the kids who are scared today do something tomorrow. God knows the Emily Yoffe’s are worthless in that regard.

Usually we want to protect our children from awful events, adjusting the message to suit their age. Certainly we tried to do that after Sept. 11. But an essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change. Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one.

Again, air raid drills. Like wooden school desks would protect us from a nuclear blast. She acts like this is new. It isn’t. And while that was a possibility, or a potential, the probability of catastrophic damage because of climate change approaches 1.

That is worth getting excited about.

They sure seem to have a double standard for fear - if it can be used to whip up a military frenzy, they are all for it - but let it address something that can't have a gun pointed at it and it's just hysterical. I grew up in fear of nuclear holocaust. I grew up and did something about it, because my parents generation were not able to see the folly of their ways from their vantage point in history. And shutting up because it might upset the kiddies is a piss-poor excuse anyway.

And a recent New York Times profile of Gore tells that we are to be flooded with "An Inconvenient Truth." It is going to be shown in schools; book versions for children and young adults and a children's television show are planned. The global Live Earth concerts scheduled for July 7 are expected to raise millions, going to a three-year public relations effort, headed by Gore, to deluge us with bad news.

Maybe, just maybe, that is because it presents a message that is scientifically sound and presented in a format that is accessible and easily understood by anyone with an I.Q. above that of burnt toast.

Why the fuck did the Washington Post give this twit any ink on this matter? Says a lot about how Mrs. Graham's paper has lost it's way under Fred-the-Feckless Hiatt.

All this is not to say that it's not getting warmer and that curbing our profligate environmental ways is not a commendable and necessary goal. But perhaps this movement is sowing the seeds of its own destruction -- even as it believes the human species has sown its own. There must be a limit to how many calamitous films, books and television shows we, and our children, can absorb.

Objection. Assertion not in evidence. I seem to recall a couple of TV movies having a hell of an impact on the nuclear disarmament movement in the wake of Reagan scaring the shit out of everyone by saying something so patently absurd as “winnable nuclear war.” (Amiable dunce was too kind by half.) The Day After and Threads were broadcast in 1983 and 1984 respectively, and the Freeze movement moved into the mainstream. I lived on Davis-Monthan AFB at that time. I used to ride my bike around the plane graveyard, and I saw the crews taking the wings off the mothballed bombers for photographing by the Soviet satellites with my own eyes. I lived that part of recent history in the first person. Frankly, you get results when you reach ordinary people. Why are the deniers so fearful of education?

It doesn't seem sustainable to expect people to remain terrified by such a disinterested, often benign -- it was so nice eating out on the patio! -- and even unpredictable enemy. (I understand we're the enemy, but the executioner is the weather.) Recall that the experts told us last year would be a record-setting hurricane season, but the series of Katrinas never materialized.

It doesn’t have to be perpetually sustainable. It just has to get the attention of most for a while and keep the attention of enough. Been involved in any political movements ever? My question is, is she really this obtuse, or is she playing at it? and just because last year wasn't worse than 2005 for hurricanes brings on a shrug and a "So? Do you have a point?"

Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: "NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer." But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

Well, pardon me, but she is quite literally a joke for a living, and I am more inclined to take the findings of this study by the National Research Council, or this heavily sourced article available at RealClimate, or anything posted at Gristmill, or any position espoused by my peers at the Union of Concerned Scientists - than her “hunch" and a pinch of wishful thinking.

There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I'm oddly reassured. We've seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.

What the hell is she talking about? Examples, please. And cite your sources. I’m not saying she wouldn’t be able find any, I am saying it is incumbent upon her to do so, having made the allegation and I am not doing her homework for her.

It's also hard to believe assertions that the science on the future of our climate is settled when climate scientists can't agree about the present -- or the past (there is contention about the dates, causes and even the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed). Now, Gore and others say that Katrina was a product of global warming and that we can expect more and bigger storms. But there is actually brisk scientific debate over the role global warming plays -- if any -- in the creation of hurricanes.

Who asserts this controversy, what are the sources of this claim? What are the credentials of the sources she elides to (but does not reference) that I should take them seriously? Where does the funding come from to conduct the studies she doesn't cite?

A study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last month, looking at 5,000 years of Atlantic hurricanes, found "large and dramatic fluctuations in hurricane activity, with long stretches of frequent strikes punctuated by lulls that lasted many centuries" -- with the stormier periods occurring during cooler ocean temperatures. But talking about Earth's constant, and still inexplicable, climate changes and cycles is not useful if you're trying to shock.

Does she have a point? Of course fluctuations have always happened. (El Niño ring any bells?) Thermodynamics, Darlin' - when we achieve equilibrium, it's over. The simple, inconvenient truth is that the pendulum has already swung farther than it has ever been known to go before, and it is showing no sign of reaching the breaking point and heading back.

Of the last twenty years, nineteen of them have set high temperature records.

In his new book, "The Assault on Reason," Gore denounces what he sees as today's politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion -- any such campaign -- is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It's about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

WHAT??? You will have to pardon me for a moment while I collect myself. I am educated, and I am scientifically literate. That last sentence? I can not get my brain to dumb down to a level of stupid to even mock that absurdity of this idiot child in so far over her head. That little polar bear only thought he was out of his depth.