Hiccup!

I am switching an unexpected double post over to an open thread.

At some point we need to get back to the IPCC bashing - people are perusing the footnotes to their 2007 report and finding citations to the World Wildlife Fund everywhere.  C'mon, what happened to that Nobel-winning peer-reviewed science?

Hey, it looks like the IPCC opted for lots of tedious science seasoned with headline grabbing speculations passed off as science.  Cool for them, utterly dastardly if done by Evil Big Oil.

Comments

[Thomas Collins]

TM must have inadvertently started the Specter thread twice. So, why don't we make this thread about our favorite bureaucracy, the IPCC. See LUN (via Instapundit).

I know, JMH and Porchlight, you want this extra thread to be a Michelle fashion thread, but I posted first!!! :-))

[narciso]

How about when a pollster tries to cast doubt on the findings of his own poll, in the LUN

[Thomas Collins]

Jensen's thoughts, narciso, reflect much of the current liberal (so-called) Establishment thinking. Under this view, there is no need to try to examine folks' reasons for preferring Fox. It must be that such folks simply prefer slanted news. I guess we're all bitter clingers now!

The reference to Cronkite demonstrates that the liberal Establishment is below the stage in Plato's cave in which folks stare at the reflections on the wall of the images. The liberal Establishment is in a subcave, and it would be a step up for them to see the reflections of images. Cronkite's coverage of Vietnam has been demonstrated time and time again to be hopelessly biased.

[steroids]

Tom Collins and Jack Daniels throwing sand at each other and crashing their toy trucks into each other.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

I suspect Obama's dangerous illusion of control has nothing whatsoever to do with the D's number of seats.

[Thomas Collins]

TM is saving that thread for St. Patrick's Day!

[Porchlight]

I know, JMH and Porchlight, you want this extra thread to be a Michelle fashion thread, but I posted first!!! :-))

That's okay, as long as it's an iPad-free thread! So far that's confined to the previous Specter post... :)

[Neo]

... and here I thought the meant the Worldwide Wrastling Federation when they talked about the WWF.

[Barry Dauphin]

The wrestlers could do a better job of going through the scientific evidence--- he's off the top ropes with an elbow drop to Michael Mann!!!

[daddy]

TM,

I will be happy to bash the IPCC in a moment, but first I think we need to all take a moment and give long overdue thanks to a man who died 100 years ago yesterday, the guy who invented the toilet, ">http://www.wateraid.org/uk/about_us/newsroom/8131.asp"> Thomas Crapper.

"To celebrate the anniversary, we present ten incredible (sometimes sobering) toilet-related facts for you to amaze your friends with...

1) The average person spends three years of their life going to the toilet

2) When it comes to toilet paper, woman are more likely to be grabbers, while men tend to be folders

3) The first toilet cubicle in a public washroom is the least likely to be used: it is also the cleanest

4) One gram of human faeces can contain 10,000,000 viruses, 1,000,000 bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs

5) Most toilets flush in the key of E flat (yes, really!)

6) According to a recent Halifax housing survey, an estimated 40,000 homes in the UK still have an outside toilet

7) Children living in households with no toilet are twice as likely to get diarrhoea as those with a toilet, causing more deaths every year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined

8) The technology for the disposing of solid waste aboard a shuttle in space costs $23.4 million

9) Meeting the Millennium Development Goals on water and sanitation would cost an estimated $10 billion every year until 2015 (about as much as Europeans spend annually on ice cream)

10) You can join the attempt to break the record for the World's Longest Toilet Queue in March 2010 at www.wateraid.org/queue

Which fun fact is your favorite?

[Neo]

… but the science is “settled” .. like crap solids in a cesspool

[narciso]

Along the same lines, sort of, I guess it wasn't a surprise as Rich would say, in the LUN

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

...the guy who invented the toilet, Thomas Crapper.

If you look at your own cited source, you'll see he didn't.

The flush toilet goes back at least as far as Elizabethan England, since her scribes document a demonstration of such for her.

[rse]

I'm just wondering if the high schools that offer AP Environmental Science will have to reclassify it as a religion course next year.

[Thomas Collins]

My favorite, daddy, is 5. I guess every toilet is a singing toilet!

[Neo]

Three years ago, when the IPCC report was issued, we wrote: "Let there be no mistake: all the signs suggest the need for action . . . but cool heads are essential." We noted the big story from the report was the "higher level of implied scientific certainty" about anthropogenic warming and predicted the debate would be pushed out of the laboratory and into the political arena.

It has proved to be so, with politicians unwilling to manage the uncertainties and gaps in science as they push their constituencies to action. Still, nothing prepared us for the sloppy reporting, including the extraordinary process by which claims on the melting of glaciers were based on a third-hand news report. Our planet deserves better than that.

[Neo]

I hope I'm not alone, but I keep getting a feeling that the whole AGW schtick is a "happy face" painted on an otherwise unhappy scenario.
Sure, fossil fuels will run out one day, global oil production will (or has) peak(ed), and we are sending bucket loads of cash overseas to countries that don't like us, but if this is the underlying story why can't policymakers be square with us ?

Higgins: It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Joe Turner: Ask them?
Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!

Did the 1975 film, "Three Days of the Condor" so scare polymakers that they believe that they can't level with the American people, or is it that their current strategy requires fooling the current OPEC countries until they exhaust their supply ? The latter would explain the failure to develop domestic sources and concentrate on "renewables" like bio-fuels, that are carbon based an would add to AGW sources (an AGW paradox).

[Rob Crawford]

I hope I'm not alone, but I keep getting a feeling that the whole AGW schtick is a "happy face" painted on an otherwise unhappy scenario.

No, it's just the latest in an unending series of excuses for putting people beneath the boot. And never forget herd instincts -- Gingrich undoubtedly bought into AGW because it's a class marker for the "Educated Class".

[bgates]

"renewables" like bio-fuels, that are carbon based an would add to AGW sources

I don't think that's right. There is some amount of carbon that gets shuttled between incorporation into plants and animals and release into the seas and atmosphere as organisms respire and expire. If part of that ostensibly stable pool gets shunted into crops of any kind, that's different than taking carbon that's been sequestered beneath the earth's surface for millions of years and burning it.

Different in terms of the first-order effect of the amount of carbon in circulation, that is - I don't mean to suggest that the CO2 Monster will eat us unless we revert to 16th century living standards.

[daddy]

"The flush toilet goes back at least as far as Elizabethan England, since her scribes document a demonstration of such for her.

Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan"

You got me there Patrick. I apologize.

This ">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8481283.stm"> BBC Story on Crapper's Anniversary takes a video tour through a toilet museum and confirms your point. What surprised me though is that supposedly a "crap" is not named for Mister Crapper, but was instead an old English word, exported to the American colonies in the early days, and then reintroduced centuries latter by Yanks returning to the ancestral loo's and thunder-pots of bloody ol' England.

[cathyf]

daddy, I have another "fact" for your list, which should be of special professional interest to you.

When the blue toilet water from an airplane lavatory leaks at high altitude, it instantly freezes forming blue icicles on the plane. If the chunk of ice breaks off and hurtles to the ground, it can be a scary hazard to anyone below.

...thereby proving that, even if you live far away from a missile emplacement, you can still get killed by an ICBM.

[Rick Ballard]

bgates,

I thought the CO2 Monster was going to bake us if we didn't pay our Air Taxes? We're supposed to contrast him with the Peak Oil Monster who will freeze us unless we pay ever increasing amounts for oil and gas products.

I continue to read about the Tupi field and increased production estimates from the Iraqi fields and marvel at people's ability to believe in the truly fantastic creations of those willing to exploit ignorance and gullibility on such a grand scale.

[bgates]

I thought the CO2 Monster was going to bake us

Baking us and then not eating us would be wasteful. You're not calling the CO2 Monster wasteful, are you Rick?

[windansea]

the crook who runs IPCC will soon be gone, and IPCC credibility is pretty shattered

but that's just a start, the real battle yet to won is over the temperature record

Here is a new paper with all you need to know.

6mb pdf

[Old Lurker]

I understand your confusion, Rick, and appreciate that there are a number of monsters looking for you. I have an advance copy of a prospectus from GS that will be offering a new derivative based product for folks in your predicament. After your check clears, and you have passed the minimum net worth requirement and have been qualified as an knowledgable investor, this product will address all your concerns.

Trust me.

[Jane]

Daddy,

Half of the University of Colorado is dedicated to Mr. Crapper, IIRC - CHaco would know. At any rate I think the dining hall is named after him.

[Thomas Collins]

All this talk about, ahem, one of the toilet functions, reminds me of the swimming pool scene in Caddyshack (I still enjoy Baby Ruth candy bars notwithstanding that scene).

[daddy]

Icy B M

Nicely done cathyf:)

Spoken like a gal who grew up In Kingsville, Texas, my old stomping grounds as a young yahoo!

Just FYI, On approach to Narita (Tokyo International) we are required to drop the gear prior to hitting the coastline in order supposedly to have the blue ice get shaken off and fall in the ocean instead of on some-bodies house. At least thats what they tell us.

[Rick Ballard]

"You're not calling the CO2 Monster wasteful, are you Rick?"

Oh, no. Never, never ,never. It wouldn't do to make him mad...

OL,

Thank goodness that such intelligent and thoughtful people such as those thieves who would steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes gentlemen at GS exist. What would we ever do without them? And what I wouldn't pay to find out.

[Old Lurker]

That also dumps the frozen stowaways too, doesn't it Daddy?

[daddy]

Jane,

As coinkydink would have it, for about 6 months back in 1977-78 or so, I was living in a house in Boulder and 1 of the house mates was a chef on Campus at The Alfred Packer Grill. Alfred Packer was the cannibal that in I think about 1870 got caught in a snowstorm and ate 5 or 6 Democrats to survive, and then they hung him for that.

Not disputing you had to take a crap after eating there, but are you sure it was The Thomas Crapper instead of The Alfred Packer, or have I got my toilet history mixed up again?

[Old Lurker]

Rick, you saw the short blurb the other day that Timmy will have a home there when he is called away? I guess so!

[Jane]

Yeah Daddy I bet you are right. It must have been another school I was at for a while. I always took the names of the dining halls into consideration on my application.

I was in Dillon that year and skied 167 days in a row. You should have visited.

[Danube of Thought]

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

--H. L. Mencken

We can take comfort from the fact that the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. There'll still be plenty of oil around when it's hardly being used at all. And maybe the stupes in Three Days of the Condor would have been comforted to know that if we run low on plutonium we can always gin up another batch using U-238.

Surely poor Higgins must have been delighted to see 1990 come and go with food still grazing on the hoof, swimming in the seas and growing across the fruited plains.

[daddy]

Well wonder of wonders, a BBC story critical of AGW.

If I am reading this story correctly, written by the BBC's
environment analyst Roger Harrabin, he is telling us new significant flaws in the Settled Science have just been discovered.

">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8483722.stm"> Temperature and CO2 feedback loop 'weaker than thought'

The subhead reads: "The most alarming forecasts of natural systems amplifying the human-induced greenhouse effect may be too high, according to a new report."

In plain English I think he's saying their prognostications that CO2 would cause a massive warming were unwarranted alarmist BS (excuse me, crap--to stay on topic)

For the BBC to report this is to me simply stunning.

However to not veer whole hog over into common sense, the BBC Science/Environment page also has a link to a new science story, that has a picture of a Chimpanzee with the following description of the story if you choose to click on it:

"Monkeys prefer not to use long 'words', scientists conclude"

[daddy]

Jane,

The other day Sunday, I missed the first Playoff Game entirely because I took the girls skiing. Little chilly, 15F or so, but the sky was clear and beautiful and McKinley and the range at 160 miles distant was just beautiful. Actually worth missing the game.

[daddy]

DoT,

Recently came upon this old English Prayer in a book, and thought it wonderful and apropos:

"God help in my search for truth, and protect me from those who believe they have found it."

[Jane]

The other day Sunday, I missed the first Playoff Game entirely because I took the girls skiing

I haven't skied in years. Having grown up skiing in the East I was nicknamed Jane Claude Killy when I got out west - because it's just so much easier to ski in the West. But sadly skills not used are lost, so skiing in the East was a lot less fun when I got back here.

That snowboarding thing looks fun tho.

[daddy]

Great new ">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece"> Climate-gate story up at the Times On Line. Authorities have determined the East Anglia AGW profs(Phil Jones) broke the Law by deliberately hiding their stuff during the FOIA requests. Unfortunately they won't be prosecuted because of a loophole---:

“There is an apparent Catch-22 here. The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university’s complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months.”

Anyhow, the stink continues and these guys reputations should be dead meat and obvious to anybody with eyes and ears and a nose.

[windansea]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/27/AR2010012704502_pf.html

A politically divided Securities and Exchange Commission voted on Wednesday to make clear when companies must provide information to investors about the business risks associated with climate change.

The commission, in a 3 to 2 vote, decided to require that companies disclose in their public filings the impact of climate change on their businesses — from new regulations or legislation they may face domestically or abroad to potential changes in economic trends or physical risks to a company.

[windansea]

wanna see what global warming looks like when you delete the "estimated" temperatures where they don't have thermometers

clic the link
, then clic on the globes

[caro]

Is anyone else gonna think of daddy every time you go into a public restroom and choose the first stall?

[Melinda Romanoff]

Rick-

Here's the Chart, from the FT. LUN.

[Melinda Romanoff]

AIG here. LUN.

And sorry, I have to figure out the hyperlink, this is a pain for you and me. My apologies.

[Rick Ballard]

Mel,

The Deutsch Bank/AIG story is interesting. I think Issa may shred a little of the Wall Street whore's chemise before this is over. I'd like to know a little bit about who did the Max 2008-1 'packaging' for Deutsch Bank. Which Wall Street hooker dumped the dreck that stunk too badly to put in their own CDO/MBS scam packages on Deutsch Bank (and Credit Suisse, IIRC)?

I'd say the horses are out of the barn. Even the dolts at BusinessWeek are catching on and Seeking Alpha has a few pieces up on our "three monkeys" Treasury Secretaries and Fed Chairman.

The facade isn't holding up as well as the banksters had hoped. They should have bought a higher grade of paint.

[Melinda Romanoff]

This what everyone on the street was doing. DbK, and everyone else, created their own CDO's the twist is how they used CDS' to boost the nominal, scrub the AAA tranche, and repackage it. All under the protective umbrella of the AIG CDS, who was on the hook for ALL of this. How many times were things "repackaged" and re-sold, for a fat fee? That's what I want to know. The mopes who I worked their pricing hedges are the theives here, with their bosses who ran the bond desks at these houses.

All of it was OTC and, therefore, unregulated, and rich with fees (> 8.5%, the purported legal limit).

The other part of the crime? The customers they sold them to, mostly public pensions.