The Sound Of Settled Science – Rebuked

James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic
Via WattsUp (link fixed)

NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.
“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote. [Note: NASA scientist James Hansen has created worldwide media frenzy with his dire climate warning, his call for trials against those who dissent against man-made global warming fear, and his claims that he was allegedly muzzled by the Bush administration despite doing 1,400 on-the-job media interviews! – See: Don’t Panic Over Predictions of Climate Doom – Get the Facts on James Hansen – UK Register: Veteran climate scientist says ‘lock up the oil men’ – June 23, 2008 & UK Guardian: NASA scientist calls for putting oil firm chiefs on trial for ‘high crimes against humanity’ for spreading doubt about man-made global warming – June 23, 2008 ]
Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

Related – “The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
(Heh)

Democracy, Immigration, Multiculturalism

Pick any two.*

[N]o sooner had the unsuspecting baroness sent out her invitations, Lord Ahmed raised hell. It is reported that he ‘threatened to mobilise 10,000 Muslims to prevent Mr Wilders from entering the House and threatened to take the colleague who was organising the event to court’.
And so Fitna has been cancelled: it shall not now be screened in the House of Lords on 29th January.
The Pakistani Press is jubliant, and Lord Ahmed is praising Allah for delivering ‘a victory for the Muslim community’.
It is a sorry state of affairs indeed that a parliament whose liberties have been forged through centuries of religious intolerance should succumb to the threats of one intolerant Muslim. Lord Ahmed is manifesting a notion of Divine Right, and one suspects it is precisely the sort of defence of Islam that Prince Charles shall make when he is sworn ‘Defender of Faith’. The blasphemy laws are being re-forged to protect one god, one faith and one prophet; they no longer defend YHWH, Christianity, Jesus Christ or the Church of England. Lord Ahmed is not functioning as a Labour peer; he is the self-appointed khalifa of all things Islamic. He is not concerned to protect freedom of expression or freedom of speech, but to stifle debate and ensure that Parliament submits to the Dar Al-Islam.
It is for moments such as these that one might hope the Lords Spiritual might enter the fray and defend the right of the noble baroness to extend an invitation to a democratically-elected Dutch MP. Their silence is deafening. They no longer believe anything strongly for fear of causing offence; they no longer defend anything for fear of being abolished.

h/t BL@KBIRD

“There is nothing called Israel, neither in reality nor in the imagination.”

Far too many Westerners make the mistake of projecting their own views onto Palestinians without really understanding the Palestinian narrative. The “occupation” doesn’t refer to the West Bank and Gaza, and it never has. The “occupation” refers to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. A kibbutz in the center of Israel is “occupied Palestine” according to most. “It makes no sense to a Palestinian to think about a Palestinian state alongside Israel,” Martin Kramer from the Shalem Center in Jerusalem said to me a few days ago. “From the Palestinian perspective, Israel will always exist inside Palestine.”
“Making peace with the Palestinians is harder than making peace with other Arabs,” said Asher Susser, Senior Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University. “With the Palestinians we have a 1948 file as well as a 1967 file. With other Arabs we only have a 1967 file. The 1967 file relates to our size, but the 1948 file relates to our very being. It is nearly impossible to resolve because we cannot compromise on our being.”

The rest is here

Outbreak Of Sunni Violence

Heightens calls for an early withdrawal of US troops from Burnaby; (link fixed)

According to Buksh, the whispers and sideways glances at his boys not being Sunni turned to open hostility during the early stages of their second game of the tournament.
Both sons were attacked by the opposing players. One son took a stick to the head while another one took a stick to the mouth that broke one of his teeth.
“Before you know it, it was just a massive riot,” said Buksh. “I went in there as a father and tried to help.”
In addition to the opposing players attacking his sons, Buksh said spectators, some as old as 40, were also involved in the attack that left his boys bruised and battered.

h/t Gunney99

Tony Blair’s Britain

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and Papa Gord will take care of you;

Across the whole of the UK, 49% of the economy will consist of state spending, while in Wales, the figure will be 71.6% – up from 59% in 2004-5. Nowhere in mainland Britain, however, comes close to Northern Ireland, where the state is responsible for 77.6% of spending, despite the supposed resurgence of the economy after the end of the Troubles.
Even in southern England, the government’s share of spending is growing relentlessly. In the southeast, it has gone up from 33% to 36% of the economy in four years.
The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.

Is government too big? Depends how you look at it!

“It’s not that the public sector in the northeast is too big, it is that the private sector is too small,” said Malcolm Page, deputy chief executive of One North East. “The decline of traditional industries in the past means we need to establish more big private-sector companies in the region.”

Seems to me there’s a book about that.
h/t Michael K.

“all too often the United States starts by dictating.”

It’s going to be a Long. Four. Years.
More – “did anyone bother to check out the content on Al-Arabiya?”
Update: The end of “dictating” extends to Whitehouse press briefings;

It’s been four days since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ first (and widely panned) appearance before the White House press corps, but no transcript, summary, or video of the event has shown up on WhiteHouse.gov. The delay could be forgiven in a less tech-savvy bunch, but given the Obama team’s considerable online skill, the omission of the the transcript is clearly intentional.

h/t
Update – a pithy observation at Brutally Honest.

Reader Tips

The Civil Service and the Financial Sector have been playing footsie again (as they always do), this time resulting in the allowing of gross over-credit margins in public utility institutions, in order to finance gross over-consumption, naturally resulting in the inevitable collapse of a bubble, per the normal Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds (1841). And as usual, the Prime Minister is getting blamed for it.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight we have a special off-schedule Budget ’09 show. And tonight’s 64 followed by some number of zeroes question is: where before have we seen the statists and the corporatists band together to deal from the bottom of the deck, effectively forcing the Prime Minister to play a bad hand in favour of the oligarchists? Well, obviously, and here for your delectation: in the A Conflict of Interest, II, III, IV episode of Yes Prime Minister (1987, 1/2 hour).

So happy Budget Day, everyone, and now I’m going to go into an acoustically isolated chamber, in order to prevent my hearing from being damaged by the screeching of most everyone’s fingernails on the blackboards (on all sides of the aisle) after this budget is pronounced. Because this pseudo-crisis too shall pass, and I’ll still need my hearing after that.

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

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