h/t Alan
Y2Kyoto: Sponsored In Part By Greenpeace
Donna Laframboise asks, “Where does Greenpeace stop and the IPCC begin? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell.”
The idea that 2,500 “scientific expert reviewers” provided feedback about [the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report] during its pre-publication phase sounds awesome. But many of those people aren’t scientists at all. They’re professional activists in the employ of environmental organizations.
The expert reviewers who had input into just one portion (Working Group III) of the IPCC report are listed in this 8-page PDF. They include three Greenpeace employees, two Friends of the Earth representatives, two Climate Action Network reps, and a person each from activist organizations WWF International, Environmental Defense, and the David Suzuki Foundation.
Read it all, plus this one on the WWF if you missed it earlier.
California: Not Dysfunctional Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose
BBC – California ‘protects’ Apollo 11 landing site on Moon
Mercury News – California controller: State will run out of cash before April
Bonus link. (h/t Robert B.)
Can You Say “Nobel Peace Prize”?
I knew you could!
Michael Ignatieff, Call Your Office
“The standard by which all future attack ads *must* be judged.”
(In the unlikely event that you want to know more…)
Via Ed Driscoll
Barack Obama: Not “quitting” enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Carol Platt Liebau (Harvard Law Review), February 2009 – “[Tom Pirelli] did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he’d leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.”
Byron York (National Examiner), January 2010 – Many observers have remarked that, even when dealing with the most momentous issues facing the country, Obama has seemed oddly removed from the hands-on work of making policy.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Donovan performing Mellow Yellow ¤ §, in 1966 (3:22). Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments. |
Y2Kyoto: Meltdown
Paul Shirley Hits A Nerve
I haven’t donated to the Haitian relief effort for the same reason that I don’t give money to homeless men on the street. Based on past experiences, I don’t think the guy with the sign that reads “Need You’re Help” is going to do anything constructive with the dollar I might give him. If I use history as my guide, I don’t think the people of Haiti will do much with my money either.
In this belief I am, evidently, alone. It seems that everyone has jumped on the “Save Haiti” bandwagon. To question the impulse to donate, then, will probably be viewed as analogous with rooting for Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, or the Spice Girls.
My wariness has much to do with the fact that the sympathy deployed to Haiti has been done so unconditionally. Very few have said, written, or even intimated the slightest admonishment of Haiti, the country, for putting itself into a position where so many would be killed by an earthquake.
h/t SDH, who states the commentary cost him his job at espn.com.
Update: For some of our readers, this cold splash of reality.
Blink
The White House ordered the Justice Department Thursday night to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.
Congress wasn’t going to give him the money to pay for it, anyway.
No More, Omar
The Supreme Court of Canada has refused to order the Harper government to seek Omar Khadr’s repatriation from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a unanimous ruling Friday, the court said that Mr. Khadr’s constitutional rights were violated, but concluded that it would intrude on the government power over foreign relations to force officials to ask the U.S. to send the accused terrorist home.
“The appropriate remedy in this case is to declare that Khadr’s charter rights were violated, leaving it to the government to decide how to best decide in light of current information, its responsibility over foreign affairs and the charter,” said the 9-0 ruling.
The decision overturns two earlier rulings that ordered the government to request Khadr’s return to his birth country, as payback for its maltreatment of the 23-year-old.
Mr. Khadr has been detained at the U.S. military compound at Guantanamo since 2002, where he was sent after allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier following a shootout between American forces and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.
He faces five charges, including murder as a war crime, and is scheduled to be tried in July before a military tribunal.
Researcher “acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” ?
Why, such a thing is hard to believe; (link fixed!)
…the UK’s General Medical Council has found that Andrew Wakefield — the founder of the modern antivaccination movement — acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” when doing the research that led him to conclude that vaccinations were linked with autism.
Despite this and other sarcastic headlines, I’m not suggesting all scientists are unethical and/or incompetent. But I do believe peer review systems (not to mention, hiring standards) are failing us when those who engage in political activism are permitted to even remain within the walls of research institutions.
I was going to write that the bullying, obfuscation, data manipulation, public activism (and shoddy science journalism) we’ve witnessed in the name of “climate” research is just the tip of the iceberg, but that’s not quite accurate. It’s more like a template.
Environmentalists “knowingly mislead the public” ?
Why, such a thing is hard to believe;
A group representing dozens of lawn care companies trying to bring charges against Ontario’s environment minister and senior bureaucrats over the province’s controversial pesticide ban is now calling for charges against 23 activists.
Group spokesman Jeffrey Lowes of MREP Communications said Wednesday that information has been laid for criminal charges against 23 individuals.
[…]
The documents filed on Tuesday allege the activists knowingly presented false and misleading information about the health and environmental risks associated with pesticide products, knowingly misled the public, lawn care industry and government officials, and impeded access to Health Canada approved pesticide products through fraudulent means.
The legal manoeuvre, if endorsed by the court, could result in federal charges being filed against Gerretsen and others by police or by a private individual, and there may be sufficient grounds for a criminal charge of fraud, Lowes said.
Reader Tips
| Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Jonathan Winters performing his improvisational The Stick ¤ sketch on the Jack Paar Show (1964, 4:08). |
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
I Want One
When Kai Grundt announced his decision to build the ultimate snowblower from a discarded V8 engine, a friend of his just laughed. So a year later, instead of showing his buddy the finished product, Grundt showed him what it could do….
h/t Allen
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
# Context: Before 2009, the largest budget deficit recorded since the end of World War II had been 6.0 percent of GDP in 1983. The Bush Administration oversaw budget deficits averaging 3.2 percent of GDP.
# The 2009 budget deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP shattered the postwar record. Furthermore, the budget deficit is projected to remain above 5.8 percent of GDP indefinitely.
# By 2020, the budget forecasts a $1.9 trillion annual budget deficit, a public debt of 98 percent of GDP, and annual net interest spending surpassing $1 trillion.
“The CHRC was deemed in all three cases to have failed to comply with the law…”
Canadian Taxpayers Federation;
The Canadian “Human Rights” Commission (CHRC) has “placed itself in a position of deemed refusal” according to the Information Commissioner of Canada in response to complaints filed by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF). After months of wrangling with the federal government’s chief censorship body, the CTF was able to obtain records from the CHRC revealing that Chief Commissar Jennifer Lynch spent much more on flights and hospitality than she revealed online, and that what she disclosed was at times nearly half of the actual cost.
The CTF filed three separate Access to Information Requests in August of 2009 to obtain details on Lynch’s expenses. The CHRC refused to provide information within the legally allotted time frame as it would “unreasonably interfere with the operations of the [Commission],” but finally bowed to pressure and released the documents more than a month late.
h/t BCF, who has this highly related item.
Y2Kyoto: “Carbon Trade” And “Run For The Exits”
Not just synonyms anymore!
Banks and investors are pulling out of the carbon market after the failure to make progress at Copenhagen on reaching new emissions targets after 2012.
Carbon financiers have already begun leaving banks in London because of the lack of activity and the drop-off in investment demand. The Guardian has been told that backers have this month pulled out of a large planned clean-energy project in the developing world because of the expected fall in emissions credits after 2012.
Anthony Hobley, partner and global head of climate change and carbon finance at law firm Norton Rose, said: “People will gradually start to leave carbon desks, we are beginning to see that already. We are seeing a freeze in banks’ recruitment plans for the carbon market. It’s not clear at what point this will turn into a cull or a rout.”
Rent-seekers are disheartened…
“The lack of regulatory certainty in the post 2012 world affects the market’s view of what CERs [carbon credits from clean energy projects] will be worth and subsequently will constrain financing for projects. If you had an agreement at Copenhagen with a bit more detail, people would be more willing to take risk.”
On the other hand, since the carbon trade is based upon buying and selling nothing, it’s not like they’ll be stuck with warehouses full of it.
Blue Hors Matiné
1997 – 2010
(Shorter version)
Reader Tips
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) Late Nite Radio. In 2005, while strolling on a winter evening in their native Finland, Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta Kalleinen had a flash of inspiration:
In the Finnish vocabulary there is an expression “Valituskuoro”. It means “Complaints Choir” and it is used to describe situations where a lot of people are complaining simultaneously. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen thought: “Wouldn’t it be fantastic to take this expression literally and organise a real Complaints Choir!”
As complaining is a universal phenomenon the project could be organised in any city around the world…
After the first Complaints Choir formed in Birmingham England (“the participants…understood the concept instinctively”) dozens of Complaints Choirs sprang up all around the world, from Budapest to Hong Kong to Buenos Aires to Jerusalem. The best ones understand that quotidian kvetching about small things is the whole point; others, such as the
The Tokyo Complaints Choir – “The cat that lives near my house ignores me” – hits the mark, as does tonight’s featured choir from Sweden, whose complaints – “nobody wants to buy my sofa on Ebay,” “I’m so tired of headwind,” and “cupcakes are too big” – are the embodiment of pointless kvetching. Here they are then, for your amusement: the Complaints Choir of Sundbyberg. Enjoy.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in any format in the comments.