If the science were real, they wouldn’t have to be so tricksy
The Associate Press published this interactive map today. You click the little buttons at the top, and you get to see the map turn from cool blues and grays to scary-hot oranges and yellows as average global temperatures get warmer.
Then I read the key.
They are comparing warm seasons (May to October) of four recent periods (1891-1900 to 1945-1954 to 1970-1979 to 1997-2006) to the averages for 1951-1980. Prithee, allow me to inquire — what the fuckity fuck? Here that is on the calendar:
Why those four particular nine-year clusters? And why compare them against that particular overlapping 29 year stretch? And why just the warm seasons? They don’t explain, but we suspect we know why, don’t us?
Comparing four random chunks of time to another random chunk of time may make for a colorful, scary-looking picture, but it sure as shit isn’t science, folks.
But wait! There’s more! Remember our old friend the Greenland ice cores from a while back? Taking the earliest period versus the latest period on their map, this is what their cunning stunt looks like plotted on that:
Pff! Lovely settled science there, guys.
Oh, and the little stars on the map? You’re supposed to click them — all six of them — to learn what adorable, doe-eye animals are endangered by this obvious runaway warmening. Click the star for Sweden and you discover that climate change means filthy, disease-carrying ticks can survive there now.
So it’s getting warmer in Sweden, and the most striking consequence of that is…ticks!?!
December 22, 2009 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 12
More bloggy boringness…
Sorry, y’all. I got wadded up tonight trying to figure out what’s wrong with my RSS feed. I think the hinky feed my be screwing me up with some listing and tracking sites.
I got, like, twelve thousand hits on the WordPress support forum for “broken RSS feed” but none seem to match my conditions exactly (no error message, okay in some readers but not others). I’m working my way down the list.
So far, the most common problem seems to be that blank lines at the beginning and end of some .php files kill the feed and must be removed, file by file. WordPress is made up of dozens of .php files. Somebody wrote a plug-in that cleans up everything automagically, but that person let his or her domain registration lapse at the beginning of December, so it’s undownloadable.
Why does fixing glitches always go like this?
The main problem is, I find the whole business unbearably dull. And my brain is like Teflon™ for boringness.
December 21, 2009 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 36
Nopenhagen
The hippies, they are not happy.
John Lanchbery, Birdlife International: “It sounds very vague. There’s no next step, nothing to link through to how to get a final deal done.”
Heh heh.
Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club: “President Obama and the rest of the world paid a steep price here in Copenhagen because of obstructionism in the United States Senate.”
Say what?
Kate Horner, Friends of the Earth: “This is the United Nations and the nations here are not united on this secret backroom declaration. The US has lied to the world when they called it a deal and they lied to over a hundred countries when they said would listen to their needs. This toothless declaration, being spun by the US as an historic success, reflects contempt for the multilateral process and we expect more from our Nobel prize winning President.”
But he means well. And he’s got a fabulous crease in his pants.
From what I can glean, they’ve agreed that the earth shouldn’t be allowed to warm more than 2°C, but how they’re going to bully the planet into that unclear. There’s no set target, oversight or enforcement involved. It’s less a treaty than a serving suggestion.
I love this quote from Obama: “We are confident that we are moving in the direction of a significant accord.”
We’ve agreed to take the first steps toward talking about a framework for considering the implications of actually doing something.
Thank you, O Lord, for the incompetence of our enemies.
December 18, 2009 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 25
Say no to the Turkish delight!
I got it! Al Gore is the White Witch!
That’s why it snows wherever he goes. That’s why he’s desperate to make us cool things down, even though the climate is manifestly not getting warmer.
They’re snowed in in Copenhagen. It’s predicted in D.C. They’re predicting snow for us tonight, too, so I’m making cookies in case that means Al’s dropping in unexpectedly.
I’m not just saying this to be nasty: have you ever noticed there’s something drag-queen-y in Gore’s face? It’s partly that his eyebrows look shaved, but it’s something else about his eyes. And his high nostrils.
Why would drag queens have high nostrils? Shut up is why.
December 17, 2009 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 25
Those barbaric bastards!!!
I took French in High School. I didn’t want to. I wanted to take Latin or, failing that, maybe German or something. But I had to take a language, and French was the only class with open seats. I ended up actually enjoying the reading and writing part (and being pretty good at it) but sucking royally at speaking. I gots the performance anxiety.
Anyway, that’s neither ici nor là-bas. Point is, somehow, I never mentally translated Alouette until Uncle B brought it up yesterday.
Dude. It’s about skinning skylarks! Those lovely little songbirds! Wikipedia says the song is French Canuckian, where they used to eat skylarks. Check it out:
Little skylark, lovely little skylark
Little lark, I will pluck your feathers off
I’ll pluck the feathers off your head
I’ll pluck the feathers off your head
Off your head – off your head
Little lark, little lark
O-o-o-o-oh
Then they go on to pluck Off your beak, Off your neck, Off your wings, Off your back, Off your legs and Off your tail. Jesus ke-rist, you people!
Eh. The pomme doesn’t fall far from the pommier. The old Ripley’s Believe it or Not Show — the one with Jack Palance, which really should have been called “Believe It Or Not, Foreigners Eat Some Really Weird Shit” — did a whole segment on ortolan prepared and eaten in the traditional French manner.
Bon appetit!
December 16, 2009 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 28
Done!
First time EVER I’ve finished Christmas this far ahead. Probably because it’s the first time in a decade I haven’t been falling off an airplane right before the big day.
We sent our cards, put up the tree, did all our shopping. We’re having a Very Amazon Christmas this year. Even our Christmas goose is coming by special delivery.
Yep. Goose this year. I hesitated because they’re so large and not very nice cold the next day, but we found a Waitrose that was selling half geese.
This is our bestest tree ever, too. It’s the first time we’ve spent any money on one. Our usual MO was to drive all around the county on the 23rd scavenging for a hunchback reject nobody else wanted. Two years running, we got a pretty decent tree for £1 at the Spar shop (think 7-11). One year, we had to fashion a tree toupée from twine and surplus branches.
And what did I get YOU for Christmas? This crappy post!
December 14, 2009 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 19
Ecokitsch
Ugh. I just watched the opening film for the Copenhagen climate summit for the first time. It’s awful. No, don’t bother — it’s not fun awful, it’s just bad.
Surprisingly bad. I mean, it’s not even a good example of tear-jerking child exploitative propaganda. It’s perfunctory. It doesn’t connect. It could be titled Girl Makes Mildly Distressed Faces In Front Of a Green Screen.
And, yes, her teddy bear is a polar bear. And, yes — of course she drops it into a huge crevice that opens in the earth. And, sure, we get a shot of her hand reaching for it. Languidly. The way you might reach for the potato chip you dropped. You’d like it, but on second thought, you know it’s probably better to let the dog have it.
I thought the left was supposed to have all the clever creative types on board?
Good weekend, everyone!
December 11, 2009 — 5:21 pm
Comments: 34
Pitchers!
The fabulous Watt’s Up With That ran a series of charts a few days ago showing temperature variation over time in Greenland ice cores. And by “over time” I mean going back over 400,000 years.
I thought it would make a cracking animation, with the fades and the arrows and the background music. But WordPress doesn’t play nice with Flash (which, in any case, is on my desktop machine in semi-exile). So I thought I’d do a simple Javascript dingus where you could click the picture to see the next one. Turns out, WordPress plays even less well with Javascript. Finally, in despair, I cut together a badly-paced lame-o animated .gif file that sucks ALL KINDS of ass.
Eh. Sorry. I really need to uncrate some of my old, professional tools and build some spiffier visuals. Reload the page to rewind.
Anyhow, do go read the article in the original Geek (not all the increments are in my retardimation). When he zooms all the way back to the longest view, it’s obvious that the earth’s most comfortable resting place is deep, deep cold. The last ten thousand years — you know, the period when our species crawled out of the muck and flourished — have all been much, MUCH warmer than the preceding umpty-ump hundreds of thousands.
And the 20th Century doesn’t come close to being the warmest of the warm.
December 10, 2009 — 7:06 pm
Comments: 37
So where do newts come in the plague hierarchy?
Man, that’s like the fifth little dude I’ve had to scoop up and put outside. Mostly from the same spot on the carpet. Nowhere near a door, so I can’t work out where they’re coming from. We haven’t had a frost yet; I’m guessing their hibernation instincts are messed up this year.
This isn’t the ever-so-fucking posh crested newt, it’s the common or garden smooth newt. Or possibly a palmate newt. The difference is Mr Smooth has spots on his throat, but this little feller was having a shit enough day without me flipping him over and giving him an anatomy exam.
What? Yes. Yes, this WAS the most interesting thing that happened to me today.
December 9, 2009 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 39
Number crunching…
I used this calculator to estimate our combined household carbon dioxide output at 6.76 tonnes per year. That’s “tonnes” with a “nes” on the end, on account of it’s some gay European thing. Then I worked out the super-mathemagical guzintas in 41,000 tonnes — the estimate for the Copenhagen Summit in this Telegraph article.
The same article estimates the summit will include:
1,200 limousines
140 extra private jets
15,000 delegates and officials,
5,000 journalists
98 world leaders
The usual celebretards
(Plus 50,000 protesters, I read somewhere else)
The hotels, menus and entertainments don’t bear thinking of
All this to tell ME I’ve been living too high on the hog and I have to cut way, way back on my selfish lifestyle to save the world. FUCK YOU, you oily, dimwitted, sanctimonious, shit-eating kleptocrats. If there’s going severe belt-tightening, YOU FIRST.
The Telegraph article hilariously concludes, “The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus.”
No, really? YA THINK?
GAH! <thud>
December 8, 2009 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 27