by ilene - December 7th, 2009 10:10 pm
James Kunstler writes on climate-gate as another distraction on the way to societal collapse, as is the baloney sandwich we’re trying to make with Iran as baloney and Afganistan as a slice of white bread. - Ilene
Courtesy of James Howard Kunstler
Against a greater welter and flow of incoherence jerking the nation this way and that way en route to collapse comes "ClimateGate," the latest excuse for screaming knuckleheads to defend what has already been lost. It is also yet another distraction from the emergency agenda that the United States faces – namely the urgent re-scaling, re-localizing, and de-globalizing of our daily activities.
What seems to be at stake for the knuckleheads is their identity, their idea of what it means to be an American, which boils down to being an organism so specially blessed and entitled that it is excused from paying attention to reality. There were no doubt plenty of counterparts among the Mayans when the weather changed and their crops failed, and certainly the Romans had their share of identity psychotics who doubted reality even when Alaric the Visigoth was hoisting off their household treasure.
Reality doesn’t care if we are on-board with its mandates or not. The human race has to get with whatever program reality is serving up at a particular time. Are we shocked to learn that scientists fight among themselves and cheat as much as congressmen? Does that really change the relationships we understand about parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and the weather?
What the people of the world can do or will do about a change in climate is something else. My guess is that the undertow of entropy is now too great to provoke any meaningful unified change in behavior. The collapse of the US economy is too close to the horizon, and the so-called developing nations will have problems equally severe. In the meantime, it is unlikely that any of the major players will burn less coal and oil, or not cheat on each other even if they pledge to burn less. People who are not knuckleheads will make the practical arrangements that they can. These will, by definition, be localized, small-scale, and non-global communities, doing what they would have to do anyway.
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Tags: afganistan, America, climate-gate, consumerism, Economy, Goldman Sachs, green shoots, Iran, Oil
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by ilene - December 7th, 2009 12:53 pm
Courtesy of John Carney at Clusterstock
The fall out from climate gate is much deeper and broader than hoped for by the global warming network--the web of corporate interests, academics and bureaucrats exposed as rigging the climate change debate. But it is also more fun than anyone anticipated.
Regardless of where you fall on the climate debate, this jib-jab style video is fun.
Tags: climate change, climate-gate, Economy, Energy, environment, Global warming, hide the decline, Scandals
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by ilene - December 7th, 2009 3:35 am
Courtesy of Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock
He just says it under his breath, right as he’s going off the air, but at the 2:36 mark of this video, you can hear University of East Anglia professor Andrew Watson saying "what an a**hole" in reference to a critic.
Yes, the embattled scientests just keep digging. (via CBS News and Drudge)
See Also:
Skip Copenhagen, Obama, And Investigate Those Lyin’ Climategate Scientists

Even Jon Stewart Is Mocking The Climategate Researchers
Climategate Claims First Casualty As Top Researcher Steps Down
Tags: climate change, climate-gate, Global warming, Scandals
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by ilene - November 21st, 2009 4:39 pm
Here’s more on the climategate story, from a few different perspectives. – Ilene

By Andrew Leonard at Salon
Climate skeptics claim hacked e-mails prove, once and for all, that global warming is a hoax
The climate-change obsessed blogosphere — including both those who accept the science behind anthropogenic climate change and those who deny it — is in an absolute uproar today after the revelation that an unknown party hacked into the computer system of an important climate research center and posted hundreds of private e-mails to a Russian FTP server.
To climate skeptics, the e-mails prove that global warming is a conspiracy theory. At Wonk Room, Brad Johnson rounded up the politicized reaction:
- If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW," says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.
- Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss "repetitive, false data of higher temperatures."
- The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, "The blue-dress moment may have arrived."
- "The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century," blares Michelle Malkin.
- The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are "proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in modern [sic] science."
RealClimate, a blog maintained by real climate scientists, is busy doing damage control. This story will no doubt rage for weeks, so I’m just going to pick one example of the back and forth before trying to take some time to go deeper, if merited…
So what’s going on here? Put aside the question of whether the words "trick" or "hide" have nefarious or innocuous meanings. The scientific problem is that in attempting to reconstruct temperatures in the past, climate scientists are often faced with the problem that there were no humans standing around holding thermometers and writing down temperatures. So scientists use "proxies" — tree rings, or ice cores, or fossilized clams, or lake pollen trapped in sediment…
Overall, the more data we have, the more clear it has become to the vast majority of scientists working in this field that the earth has gotten significantly hotter at an alarming rate in the last century, most likely due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And if there really is a smoking gun in the…

Tags: 'Anthropogenic Global Warming', climate-gate, emails, Global warming, Hadley CRU files, realclimate, Scandals, science
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