YY2Kyoto: Don’t Forget To Recycle!

Climate Cult 62 Comments

The Guardian, April 2009 ……………………MSNBC, March 2008
wilkins_recycled.jpg
WUWT: “The real question is, how often are we going to see the Wilkins Ice Shelf be a lead news story as poster child for “global warming” to illustrate ice loss in Antarctica that is actually growing. I guess as long as we have NSIDC’s Ted Scambos to help the media, it will be “something we get to see fairly often”.”

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult 15 Comments

The Australian;

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast.
Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.
However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.
East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.
[…]
Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia’s Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.
A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

But never you mind, silly little deniers. Real scientists know that freezing is just another worrying sign of temperature escalation.

“Canada, by contrast, is taking the lead.”

The One 27 Comments

Is there nothing that Obama can’t apologize for?

“Too often, the United States has not pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors,” he said. “We have been too easily distracted by other priorities and failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress through the Americas.”
Having never set foot south of our border nor paid much attention to the region until this week, he should speak for himself.
A critical goal of the Summit of the Americas when it was founded in 1994 by President Clinton and other democratic leaders was a great free trade zone of the Americas, enabling America and its neighbors to move from Barrow, Alaska, all the way to Tierra del Fuego, Chile, in a great free exchange of people, trade and ideas.
Today, Obama is paying only lip service to that trade goal while two finished free-trade treaties with friendly American allies Panama and Colombia sit in his desk drawer, unvoted-on in Congress.
He speaks of the U.S. being “distracted by other priorities” but in reality he’s only “distracted” by listening to Big Labor, which has tried to shut Colombia and Panama out of free trade.
In the same way, he’s distracted by the Farm Lobby’s campaign cash and won’t think of ending the senseless tariffs on Brazil’s ethanol — another major free-trade, and energy policy, issue.
He has yet to expend political capital to muscle Congress to put those tariffs and treaties to a vote. If he did, he would show leadership. It’s not going unnoticed by democratic leaders of our hemisphere, who, from Brazil to Chile to Mexico to Peru, are urging him to take action. This is the one issue he should be showing strong leadership on. But he isn’t.
Canada, by contrast, is taking the lead. Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his top priority at the Summit is to champion free trade, in line with the will of the region’s real democracies.

h/t Bourque

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 44 Comments

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here is behavioural economist Dan Ariely presenting his talk, Why We Think It’s OK to Cheat & Steal (Sometimes) (2009, 18:24).

TED says that “Dan studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we sometimes think it’s ok to cheat or steal. Clever studies help make his point that we’re predictably irrational — and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp.”

That’s ok so far as it goes, I s’pose, but, pace TED, I’d say that Dan: explores the ways in which we titrate the measure of our sense of what counts as cheating, and I think you may find that the results he finds are more interesting than you may think you would have thought, especially considering the parts where he talks about how all this influences market bubbles and government misbehaviour.

Lastly, I would suggest, for those interested, the Published Works section of Dan’s Wikipedia page; one of my favourites is: Try it, you’ll like it: The influence of expectation, consumption, and revelation on preferences for beer (PDF).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Hell Hath No Fury

Media 19 Comments

Like a CNN reporter scorned…

Roesgen got snippy with a crazy interviewee while trying to cover the tea partiers, and the crowd turned on her. “I think you get the general tenor of this,” she said. “It’s anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox.”
Back in 2005, though, according to a Fox News source, Roesgen really wanted to work for that right-wing conservative network. She sent a tape of her on-air work to Fox’s then-programming chief Kevin Magee in January 2005, and followed up with another reel to Magee’s successor Bill Shine in September 2005. Needless to say, she didn’t get the gig.

The Green With Envy News Network

Media 27 Comments

Upon receiving an email tip from a reader, I checked out Tom Clark’s new show Power Play out of curiosity at how Liberal Party Of Televsion cast members were reacting to McChevygate …. and stayed with the news coverage that followed just long enough to witness Rosemary Thompson take another gratuitous swipe at Fox News.
Thanks, Rosemary, for reminding me of the level of professionalism we’ve come to expect of you, and why I haven’t tuned to CTV Newsnet since Mike Duffy retired.

Liberal MP Narrowly Escapes Burning Trousers

The Libranos 96 Comments

Witnesses on the scene say moving lips ignited the blaze…

After telling reporters that a Liberal government would have sounder and more aggressive economic policies than the Conservative government, McCallum, who arrived at the gathering as a passenger in a VW Jetta, was asked what kind of car he drove.
McCallum stammered for several seconds before responding: “I drive a North American-made car.” Asked to be more specific, he responded: “I drive a General Motors car.” Asked again to be more specific, he said it was “a Chevrolet.”
McCallum phoned The Star about an hour later to retreat from those comments, offering this explanation in a voicemail: “I said the wrong thing without thinking. The fact of the matter is that I do not own a North American-made car.”
He followed with an e-mail sent from his Blackberry that said: “To confirm message I left on your voicemail, to clarify, I do not own a North American made vehicle.”
McCallum never divulged what kind of car he owns.

h/t Orville.

They Took All The Rights, Put ‘Em In A Rights Museum

Great Moments In Socialism 93 Comments

Trouble brews for Winnipeg’s shrine to identity politics…

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is set to tackle the thorny issue of whose story to include and whose to leave out — a process that is causing controversy before it’s even begun.
Construction of the $265-million project in Winnipeg is now underway and the museum will soon announce a cross-country “story gathering process.”
“We will be talking to community groups, individuals, academics and researchers, to really start identifying what the stories are, and who the storytellers are as well,” said museum spokeswoman Angela Cassie.
But some groups are already raising concerns their stories will be excluded.
[…]
“It needs to be inclusive and equitable. If it focuses disproportionate attention to some cases over other cases, then what it is actually teaching us is that there is a hierarchy of human suffering, and that some human suffering is more important than other cases of human suffering; and on that basis, the museum would not be teaching us anything about human rights, it would be teaching us about racism,” Kafieh said.

Here’s hoping they tear each other apart.

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