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Post by angra on Jan 18, 2013 8:27:31 GMT 10
AB seems to be back on track and keeping up his skills in some post-Christmas cherry picking. "Even Hansen concedes a pause in the warming" and he links to (yes you probably guessed it) Wattsupwiththat yet again which claims that NASA scientist Hansen says "The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, " Actually visit the NASA site and you read this "This summer people are seeing extreme heat and agricultural impacts," Hansen says. "We're asserting that this is causally connected to global warming, and in this paper we present the scientific evidence for that." Hansen and colleagues analyzed mean summer temperatures since 1951 and showed that the odds have increased in recent decades for what they define as "hot," "very hot" and "extremely hot" summers. www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warming-links.htmlKeep up the good work Andrew!
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 18, 2013 13:14:39 GMT 10
... and if the bolts wanna snipe, you better let 'em.
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Post by angra on Jan 18, 2013 14:41:27 GMT 10
Shit - just turned 45 degrees here and the trees are chasing the dogs.
But of course there's no such thing as global warming.
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Post by angra on Jan 18, 2013 14:55:41 GMT 10
Andrew does a Lance Armstrong. From last year...
"There is little evidence of an increase in severe weather events. At best, the claim is highly contentious among experts, and no strong trend is advanced as proof of global warming.
Pure alarmism. Increasing the temperature in Melbourne to closer to Brisbane’s will not end civilisation, even if it were to happen. "
And I've never taken drugs.
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Post by angra on Jan 18, 2013 16:19:39 GMT 10
"Murdochians split on whether lying is good"
News Ltd is split. Not all Murdoch's minions agree it is fine to lie and cheat people out of their savings to push their agenda. (I give Hildebrand the benefit of the doubt)
Is any other party led by people who publicly and brazenly defend lying? Odd, then, that the Murdochians pride themselves on being the moral alternative. Brazenly bribing police officers, hacking mobile phones, misleading grieving families, lying to public inquiries, deliberately misrepresenting scientific reports etc.
(refs. Blott, Divine, Acker, Alberichson, Little Timmeh, Hinders etc.)
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 20, 2013 10:42:15 GMT 10
Bolta's blogging links today to an article on WUWT by the birther from brenchley. wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/has-the-met-office-committed-fraud/He responds to a few comments from the UK met, made in the following post on the "met in the media" blog metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/First up, I think it's probably important to point out that, when monckton claims this: the Met Office responded to each article with Met Office in the Media blog postings that, between them, made the following assertions: ...
4. “Each of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.” The met itself actually said (or at least says) this: Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade. I gotta say ... that's a bit awkward. If you google what the met appears to have actually written, you'll find it all over the place - which suggests to me that it hasn't been modified. If you google monckton's quote, it's only visible on a few places that quote his article. That's awkward. Did monckton just verbal the UK met in order to score a point? And will anyone tell him? And if they do, will there be a "memory hole" effect, like the one he refers to at the guardian? And it's worth mentioning the title of his column, because, well, it's Has the Met Office committed fraud?Awkward. *shuffles feet* He makes a couple of other points. This one's nifty: 2. What is absolutely clear is that the assertion that “it is absolutely clear that we have continued to see a trend of warming” is absolutely, clearly false. The assertion is timescale-dependent. The Met Office justified it by noting that each of the last n decades was warmer than the decade that preceded it. A simple heuristic will demonstrate the dishonesty of this argument. Take a two-decade period. In each of years 1-2, the world warms by 0.05 Cº. In each of years 3-20, the world does not warm at all. Sure, the second decade will be warmer than the first. But global warming will still have stopped for 18 years. By making comparisons on timescales longer than the 18 years without warming, what we are seeing is long-past warming, not a continuing “trend of warming”. Nice try. No, really. Nice try. If the met was only talking about two decades, you'd have a point. But if that same example was repeated decade after decade after decade, I think you'd have .... this: But hey - I can see how somebody could point to that at the end of each decade and claim that it doesn't prove anything, that warming could still be over. He has a bit of a chuckle about the 1997/1998 baseline, and that's great while he can get away with it. Nobody denies that was an exceptional year. If that year wasn't exceptional, then the entire "warming has stopped" argument would be non-existent. Each year, we hear the same thing - there has been no significant warming since 1997 (or 1998). We never year that there has been no significant warming since 1999, or 1996, or any year previously or since. That's why it's called "cherry picking" Eventually there will be another exceptional year, and the "no significant warming" figure will tick back to one again. I'm not going to get into the statistical talk. I did do some stats at uni, but I never really got into it, so I'll stay out of it and not pretend. But some of the claims in that thread (and elsewhere) don't require honours-level statistics to realise as rubbish. I did have a hearty chuckle at mockton's attempt to argue (on one of his trips down under) that, because temperature is stochastic, we can't plot a slope on it. He showed diagrams and everything, and it was a brilliant piece of showmanship. I'm really impressed that he got away with that, because it meant a whole room of people were (however briefly) fooled into thinking that they can look at a graph like this, and claim that there's no slope on it: But I am curious to see how long the famously fact-oriented WUWT crowd let monckton get away with claiming that the Met said something that (it appears to me) it didn't say. Maybe it did say it. Maybe it's been silently edited. It seems odd, though, because what the Met site says now is a pretty common refrain - if they did type "each" instead of "eight" I suspect it was just a typo or an autocorrect glitch. Right now, I'm inclined to believe that monckton just misread it, and nobody's had the guts (or nous) to realise it or point it out.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 20, 2013 11:17:14 GMT 10
I just posted a comment on that thread as "Techno" (mostly I just didn't want to hand out my real name and email address - I can do without that grief).
It's made it through moderating, so I'm impressed so far.
I should just say that, if I'm right and monckton really did just misquote the met (and nobody noticed), I'm willing to chalk this one up to the bolt curse.
I'm not saying it's deliberate - I just think he's unlucky.
Listening to a really interesting podcast from the "american history guys" about the US historical attitude to drugs. It's ... surprising.
They've got a couple of podcasts now. There's another one about the civil war, but I haven't listened to any episodes yet.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 20, 2013 11:55:10 GMT 10
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Post by angra on Jan 20, 2013 18:06:01 GMT 10
Our favourite campaigner against "ethnic diversity" strikes again. This time the target is 'Latinos' in the US whoever they are.
"Back from America
Filed under: Culture wars, The politics of race, US politics
"In Miami-Dade County, just 16 per cent are now whites of non-Latino descent. In Los Angeles, non-Latino whites comprise fewer than 40 per cent of the population of a city now seemingly being retaken by the very peoples from whom the US stole it some 160 years ago. "
Well not quite right. The Spanish/Mexicans stole it from the indigenous peoples. The Spanish were like-minded colonialists. And the land of the free stole it from the Mexicans. So stealing vast areas of land is OK as long as the conquering race stays in the ascendency.
So is he complaining that one colonial group seems be be out-breeding another? Does he have some problem with 'latinos'?
Oh and the Yanks in Florida are too fat. "Never have I seen so many grossly obese people as I have in Orlando, Florida."
He should visit Lakehaven sometime.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 20, 2013 18:56:17 GMT 10
That article is breathtaking.
I see that disagreeing with somebody that bolt approves of is more than just a disagreement, or criticism - it's being "punished in the elite media for it". Ooh, it's all so unfair.
And the LA curfew had nothing in particular to do with the rodney king riots - it was enacted in 1988. Yes, curfews were extended during and after the riots, but that might have happened anyway.
As for the 2011 gold cup final - a few people have been upset about that, but the basic problem is that mexicans (even the ones living in the US) are mad about soccer, much more so than americans are (or most people for that matter), so when the mexican team plays on US soil in a cup final it's not too surprising that lots of mexicans turn up. It's not like they were somehow favored in the selling of tickets - more non-mexicans COULD have gone, they just don't seem to have wanted to.
The crowd's behavior might or might not have been as bad as his daily mail article suggests (seriously - he's getting his references about an US home-ground soccer final against mexico from a UK tabloid?) but it's (apparently) not true that the after-game was entirely in spanish. It was _mostly_ in spanish, but that's because the spanish-speaking team won. The emcee was, apparently, bilingual. These things are, after all, first and foremost a television spectacle - ratings trump everything.
Blog posts from US-supporters who were actually at the game don't seem to be quite as strident as the coverage from the daily mail. The mexicans might have been loud, but there's not even the faintest hint anywhere that any sort of trouble occured. It was madness, loud, rude and messy, but ... isn't that soccer?
And as one mexican supporter told a reporter - they weren't booing america, they were booing its soccer team.
I have to chuckle at his "race (or ethnic identity and culture) clearly affected the result of the last presidential election". Basically, it appears that every single reported ethnic group favored obama. Jews, "asians", hispanics, african-americans - all (statistically) favored obama. Same goes for women, and the younger voter - they favored obama. It would seem that the only conspicuous group which preferred mitt to oby was the older-white-male demographic. Everyone else preferred obama. So race played a part ... how? Are older white men more racist than everyone else? Or was everyone ELSE wrong?
And again - his article about US voting patterns comes from a UK tabloid.
Overall, odd article to read, given that we know he prefers not to focus on the things which divide us.
Well, they do say that travel broadens the mind ...
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Post by angra on Jan 20, 2013 19:57:59 GMT 10
'Latino' is one of those meaningless descriptions that applies to a whole bunch of people regarded as 'other'. It does not denote any race or ethnic group. It's commonly used in the US to refer to people whose ancestors came from a Spanish (or maybe Portuguese in the case of Brazil) colony in Central/South America. The original indigenous locals and the imported African slaves don't appear worthy of a separate definition.
Now apply the same definition to The Netherlands, or Holland (yep, not quite the same).
Didn't the Spanish rule the low countries for many years? And so by right Dutch people should also be regarded as Latinos - just like those from Mexico or Columbia or Peurto Rico.
So the Bolta is a Latino!
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Post by jack on Jan 20, 2013 21:16:52 GMT 10
"I see that disagreeing with somebody that bolt approves of is more than just a disagreement"
Possibly the Wolfe critique he quoted reminded him of someone else whose work tends to "a call to alarm, an unconscious peal of fear."
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Post by angra on Jan 20, 2013 21:36:16 GMT 10
Look at Bolt's article. Replace 'Latinos' with 'Jews' and see where that gets you.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 20, 2013 21:57:32 GMT 10
"'Latino' is one of those meaningless descriptions that applies to a whole bunch of people regarded as 'other'. It does not denote any race or ethnic group. It's commonly used in the US to refer to people whose ancestors came from a Spanish (or maybe Portuguese in the case of Brazil) colony in Central/South America. The original indigenous locals and the imported African slaves don't appear worthy of a separate definition" Yep. I remember one local commentator expressing dismay at the "new appellation" of "white latino", as applied to one george zimmerman. To wit: Zimmerman is now called a “white Latino”, a strange new hybrid appellation of the kind now banned in Australia that’s meant to transfer racial guilt from the Hispanic community to the more useful “white” one. After all, who cares about Hispanic racism against African-Americans, even if this were an example? I didn't realise at the time, but bolt was way, way off base with that assessment. I didn't know how backward the US "categorisation" of race is until I started looking into the nonsense peddled by howard neremov over at PJM and dug into the UCR reports, and tried to make sense of the claims being variously made (not by howard, to be fair) about crime and race. According to US law enforcement, black means descended from africans and white means descended from europeans. I have no idea how they categorise people of afro-european descent. Maybe they have a colour chart? Some sort of system of filtered lenses? At least according to the FBI and law enforcement statistics, there is no "latino" or "hispanic" race. Apparently there's some FBI crime reporting handbook in circulation, and it explains hispanic as an "ethnicity" - something which cuts across black or white (I found a blog post where somebody explained this). But basically you're on the money - it refers to people who've descended from people in new-world latin-language-speaking colonies. And spain, in a pinch. But black and white still take precedence. So when somebody describes george zimmerman as a "white hispanic", they're not actually trying to be racist, and it's not "meant to" to transfer guilt - they're simply following an apparent long-standing US nomenclature that is utterly alien to australians. If/when zimmerman ever gets written up in the FBI UCR, he would be counted as a white hispanic, because he's not african-descent. It doesn't make it an objective fact - it's just how the FBI records it, and therefore how the press reports it. Within the US vernacular, there are actually black hispanics - something that even the gun-totin' right seems to forget. Anyone from the island of hispaniola, for example (a big hint, there) - overwhelmingly descended from africa, but otherwise hispanic. From a legal reporting point of view, I think this stuff was codified in the 1920's, along with their quaint notions of what constitutes rape or assault, and I suspect the categorisation reflected the sorts of things which concerned the dominant sociopolitical group at the time - i.e. white europeans. And it simply hasn't been tinkered with since. If it was being rewritten today, here's betting "hispanic" would get a category, all its own. Gosh, what a fun job THAT would be. If ever there was an example of the way language shapes ideas and reality, that's a good one right there. Anyhow, apologies if I've made a right hash of all of that. I don't claim to have studied it in depth, it was just something I ran into when looking into some specific claims about race and crime. I don't think americans particularly understand the way the terms are used either - at least not from a law enforcement point of view. I don't blame them, the terms are backward and bizarre. The PJM crowd like to howl their outrage that "hispanic" isn't considered a race, and therefore doesn't appear in a column of its own in the FBI statistics. To them, it's an obvious conspiracy to hide the truth about latino violence. Some of them are even convinced that there was a time when it was otherwise, but I can't find any evidence of that and they refuse to provide references to back up anything they say.
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Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 20, 2013 21:58:19 GMT 10
"Replace 'Latinos' with 'Jews'"
No, let's not. Please.
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