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Global what now?

I called home and spoke to the folks last night. My dad informed me it was 107° in Nashville. Been over 100° for ages and no rain for weeks. They put out bowls of water for the birds.

And I’m thinking, “oh, hell, I bet the AGW crowd is making all kinds of hay out of this.”

So, please to be taking a good, hard look at my weather up there. That’s for reals, and that’s what it’s been all Summer: days in the mid-sixties, nights in the mid-fifties.

And I know what you’re thinking: the weather famously blows in England, but this is something special. Particularly the temperatures.

(That thing on Friday, with the sun and clouds and lightning and rains of fish and hail shaped like Winston Churchill’s pizzle? That’s totally typical for the seaside).

They’ve reached out for “CO2 causes every kind of scary weather!” in a panic, and we mustn’t let them go back to warmening just because it’s hot in July sometimes.

July 3, 2012 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 15

Dear Mr Myfartstink

I opened your stupid Russian dating spam because you made me laugh. There’s a lesson in there, and if you weren’t a spammer, you might be capable of learning it.

Changing the subject…how much do you think the Christian tradition has made the West more susceptible to the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis?

You know, original sin (humans are a cancer on the planet), mortification of the flesh (turning down the thermostat, not eating meat, riding a bike or walking). Penance (recycling).

Oh, I know lefties aren’t usually religious, but these sorts of ideas work their way down into the bones of a culture. I’m just wondering if the Chinese or the Indians will find it easier to walk away from the theory when the evidence doesn’t pan out.

I think about these things. It’s why I walk into telephone poles.

March 20, 2012 — 10:58 pm
Comments: 16

I don’t usually like sequels…

…but I am LOVING Climategate 2.0.

Yep, it’s the anniversary of Climategate 2009, and the anonymous benefactor who released the first batch of purloined emails has released another 5,000. Also, he’s put a zip file of 250,000 more into the public domain encrypted with a strong password which he claims he won’t release — an insurance policy, a piñata for hackers and the Sword of Damocles, all in one delightful package. (Note to Julian Assange: anonymous leakers not in jail). Same deal as before: dropped on a Russian server linked to comment threads on well-known skeptical blogs.

Follow along, won’t you? The four blogs who were the recipients of largesse:

Watts Up With That
Tall Bloke
Climate Audit
Air Vent

The BBC is already spinning it like a very spinny thing indeed.

I confess, I have a weakness for Scientists Behaving Badly stories. This one is my favorite.

November 22, 2011 — 8:36 pm
Comments: 35

Funny old internet

It’s a funny life. When I woke up, I was sure I’d spend the day making fun of the Climate Reality Project, but I wound up spending the day making fun of Attack Watch instead.

To recap: the Climate Reality Project is Al Gore’s latest attempt to this-time-for-real, SRSLY, I’m not kidding, don’t make me turn this car around, shut DOWN the deniers. Starting at midnight GMT (in Mexico City in Spanish, for some reason) they’re going to go around the globe every hour on the hour saying words.

About the only place I’ve heard of it is Watt’s Up With That (where they will be making fun of the CRP in synch, which should be gobs and oodles of harmless denialist fun). So maybe the guys pretending to be real scientists are finally too embarrassed by Fat Al to get on the bandwagon.

Attack Watch, in contrast, is a bad idea from a loser.

Ho ho ho.

Somebody on Obama’s team set up a website so his followers can report misinformation about the awesome job he’s doing. Actually, to make a report, you have to make a donation, so it’s really just a cheap fundraising gimmick. But hilarity ensued when they set up a Twitter hashtag for #attackwatch.

A hashtag, dear non-Twits, is sort of like the comment thread on a blog, except anybody can post there and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Yep. You can see where that would inevitably go. Why couldn’t they?

Shoo! Go play with the links! I’ve finally come down with Uncle Badger’s cold, so I’m feeling a bit — how you say? — really shitty.

September 14, 2011 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 23

It is the East and Algore is the Sun

Oh, man — have you seen Walter Russell Mead’s recent devastating two-part takedown of Al Gore? I don’t know much about Mead, except that he’s a “respected internationalist” (whatever that is) and I’ve seen his byline in papers on both side of the philosophical divide.

He doesn’t appear to doubt the science. At least, he doesn’t go there at all. That’s partly what makes it devastating.

Part one is about the boneheaded bad optics of zooming around between your five mansions in private jets while scolding the peasants that they really must cut back on wicked indulgences like eating and being warm.

Part two is about the ham-handed idiocy of the proposed global cap-and-trade treaty. How in the Sam Hill are you going to measure the carbon output of, like, everybody and how are you going to punish nations that don’t play fair?

Mead teases a third article he calls “what Al Gore doesn’t understand about the development of American democracy.” How long he’s going to use poor Al as a punching bag is anyone’s guess. Loving it.

Thing is, though, what kicked him off was Al’s latest essay in Rolling Stone, of which Mead says, “few American politicians could write an essay this eloquent or this clear.”

Shit, really? We need new politicians. That thing was so dumb — at least the first page was. I quit after that; I was leaking IQ.

It starts with an extended comparison of the climate debate with a professional wrestling match.

In one corner of the ring are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing Ideologues.

He carries on capitalizing Science and Reason and Polluters and Ideologues. Oh, and the media is the referee who always seems to be looking the other way when the bad guys throw chairs. I guess that makes us the toothless hillbillies in the cheap seats.

This is eloquence, comparing your ideological battle to the biggest long-drawn low-rent money-spinning hoax since the invention of television? I’m not getting the smart here.

Oh, hey — y’all know what algor mortis is, don’t you? It’s one of the three basic signs a forensic pathologist uses to estimate the passage of time since death. Rigor mortis — the stiffness of death. Livor mortis — the discoloration of death. Algor mortis — the chill of death.

Poifect!

June 29, 2011 — 10:48 pm
Comments: 16

And now a public service announcement…

Ah. I knew this imagery reminded me of something.

October 6, 2010 — 9:13 pm
Comments: 47

A faceful of hot, wet ugly

I know, I know — all the cool kids have blogged this PSA already.

It’s an eco fantasy snuff film, where true believers calmly murder those not willing to cut energy consumption by ten percent. And it’s an extraordinarily ugly piece of work. That’s my favorite bit up there — right at the end, when they blow up Gillian Anderson and her eyeballs slowly squee down the glass.

The blowback was instant and HUGE and not all from the right. They’ve pulled it down already. Repeatedly. As of now this copy is still working and, if all else fails, I’ve downloaded the .flv (drop me a line if you want it — my blog uploader choked on it).

I think I can explain where this thing comes from, though. I mean, besides scary evil eco-psychosis. Raw, ugly and in your face is a very common style of charity and public service advertising in the UK.

There was that anti-smoking TV ad I found so hard to watch; dragging a guy down the steps and out the building by a giant fish-hook stuck in his face (“hooked” on cigarettes, uh-huh uh-huh). Or the man slumped bleeding in the driver’s seat while his wife screams his name down the phone (cell phones distract drivers, see?).

Because of my IP, I even get British adverts while surfing my good old true-blue American web sites. Most common are the tragic children; the perennial starving African babies, the tight close-up of an Asian child with cleft palate, the little girl with the stumps for legs. Picture of sad-eyed child with horrible parental insults superimposed in text. Scared teenager on the streets with shadowy figures closing in. Oh, and the animal charities — ye gods! All those filthy one-eyed puppies and mangy bears.

I’m sure the advertising agencies would say that shocking imagery is real and we should be forced to confront it — and that awful images get the desired response. But there are two huge disadvantages to this approach.

The first is for me, a consumer of media. It makes my world a relentlessly horrible place; a place of perpetual emergencies and nagging ugliness. It is, in a word, a downer.

And the second flows from the first: I get jaded. To shock me, agencies have to up the ante continually. Dream up more and more horrible imagery. This isn’t the first time green campaigns have evoked jihadi/September 11 imagery to sell the urgency of their cause. To the people who made the “No Pressure” video, this seemed like a perfectly natural next-step progression in the ratcheting up of edginess.

But to all of you who aren’t exposed to this ugly shit all day, it was like, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THOSE PEOPLE?!

October 1, 2010 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 52

Badge of honor

Over at the excellent Watts Up With That blog (which I read and would surely put on my blogroll if I weren’t such a banana about updating my blogroll), they’ve got a thread going on a recently published ‘blacklist’ of climate skeptics.

General opinion in the comment thread: it’s an honor to be on the list, rather irritating to be left off of it and, on the whole, it would be awfully gratifying to have some kind of actual badge that one could wear signifying one is a member of the skeptocracy. A blacklistophile.

That’s when my name came up.

I agreed to take some of the rough ideas and smooth them off a bit. And then we’re going to…umm…I’m not sure, actually. Take the best and put them on buttons? Take all the damn things and put them on buttons?

I don’t know. We can work that out later. For now, let’s kick around some ideas. In this thread, I’ll post pics of some of the stuff I’ve done from some of the suggestions from WUWT. Feel free to chime in and claim your idea, if you spot it — it was a long thread and I didn’t take names. If you’ve created artwork to illustrate your idea, email it to stoaty@ (I wish you could post pictures into the thread yourselves, but WordPress won’t allow it).

If you want to create artwork that’ll actually be usable, it needs to be about 900 by 900 pixels for a 3″ button and more like 2400 pixels for a t-shirt. I know what you’re thinking — it looks great on my screen and it’s only 150 pixels! — well, it won’t look great in print without all them extra pixels. I swears.

Ready? Begin.

June 24, 2010 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 77

Machs grün!

Oh, now this is rich. German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

So what you’re supposed to do is, you write a blog post about this, you put a link to them in the sidebar using their “my blog is carbon neutral” graphic, they plant a tree in your name, it soaks up 11 pounds of CO2, and — violoncello! — your blog IS carbon neutral.

So let’s point out the utterly fucking obvious, shall we? There is no relationship between blogs and trees. Nobody is waiting around for a pingback before they go stick a spruce in the ground. This is an ongoing reforestation program (by the Arbor Day Foundation in the Plumas National Forest. In California) and these German greenie-weenies have just latched onto to display, once again, their weak (or dishonest) grasp of cause-and-effect.

The trees will be planted regardless.

Do you know, China is set to pass the US this year as the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide? I say, let’s get on board that campaign! For every blog displaying a colorful “my blog belches carbon” icon (small sidebar version here, pointlessly large version here), China will build another inefficient coal-fired electricity plant or smoke-belching industrial smokestack. Why, your humble blog could be responsible for spewing thousands of extra tons of carbon dioxide (along with unknown quantities of other, real pollutants) into the atmosphere every year!

Okay, not really, but it makes as much sense as that Green bullshit.


Spotted via the excellent EU Referendum. Don’t miss the post on Germany’s green jobs. Germany is way far further down the Green path than any of us — far enough for the (lack of) results to begin showing themselves.

UPDATE: whoa! Small Dead Animals ‘lanche! That’s one of Weasel’s favoritest blogs. Y’all be sure to come back Friday for the Dead Pool. Everyone’s welcome — and you might be the lucky winner of Aunty’s Spotted Dick!

March 11, 2010 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 44

Okay, this post has a title now — happy, Gromulin?

Check this out. I make that three 24-inch computer monitors and a thirty-inch television. Behind him. Where he can’t even see it.

Oh, yeah…the fat fuck in the middle is Al Gore.

You know, I have a brand new 23-inch monitor, and I find I can watch a movie, surf the web and do Photoshop on it, all at one time, no problemo. And if I believed CO2 emissions were swiftly destroying the whole fucking planet, I could probably do it on a 15-inch monitor. Or, even more convincing, not at all.

The picture? From Time magazine‘s 2007 profile of Gore, from when they made him Man of the Year. And how did I find it? Al uses it in the sidebar of his own blog.

Yeah, see, that’s what gets me. I expect the hypocrisy — I expect celebrity boneheads to live like gods while scolding me about the lavishness of my pretty damned modest lifestyle. But I am always stunned — every single TIME — that they don’t even realize there’s an issue there.

Al thinks it’s a really cool picture that makes him look all science-y and super-smart and stuff, with the stacks of paper and the globe and, like, FOUR monitors and shit! And the fact he’s a giant useless electricity suck who got rich warning other people to cut back on electricity or we’re all gonna DIE…just does not compute.

My old mother used to say, it’s like taking the back off the television and explaining the innards to the dog.

February 23, 2010 — 5:40 pm
Comments: 39