I have no proof to support my opinion on this….read on and let me know what you think.
Iraq's defence ministry has said that the army will be on high alert this Christmas. It said it had received intelligence indicating Christians could be attacked. On Wednesday, two people were killed when a bomb exploded outside a church in the northern city of Mosul, one of the latest in a series of attacks against Christians there in recent months. According to some estimates, half of Iraq's Christian minority have left their homes since the American-led invasion in 2003.
The Financial Services Authority is poised to announce it has closed its investigation into Royal Bank of Scotland and will take no further action against any of its former directors – including chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin – despite the £45bn bailout of the Edinburgh-based bank.
The City regulator appointed accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a detailed analysis of the events that took place in the run-up to the near-collapse of the bank in October 2008. They are understood to have concluded that while management made poor judgments, there are no grounds to take enforcement action against the individuals involved.
The cables sent from the US embassy in London, report that [RBS Chairman Philip] Hampton told a visiting delegation of politicians that one of the biggest mistakes made by the bank was its takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro just as the credit crunch began in the autumn of 2007. This acquisition left the bank with a wafer-thin capital cushion and ultimately led to the £45bn taxpayer bailout of the bank in October 2008.
The post-Soviet state of Uzbekistan is a nightmarish world of "rampant corruption", organised crime, forced labour in the cotton fields, and torture, according to the leaked cables.
But the secret dispatches released by WikiLeaks reveal that the US tries to keep President Islam Karimov sweet because he allows a crucial US military supply line to run into Afghanistan, known as the northern distribution network (NDN).
WikiLeaks has never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted for one or convicted of one. A consensus of legal experts agree that prosecuting the organization or Julian Assange for any of its leaks would be difficult in the extreme. Despite those facts ... Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them -- all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They've blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange's legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them "Terrorists" even though -- unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things -- neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.
[George Mason University] spokesman Daniel Walsch confirms that the university, located in Fairfax, Va., is now investigating allegations that the Wegman report was partly plagiarized and contains fabrications. Last month, a 250-page report on the Deep Climate website written by computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif., raised some of these concerns. Mashey says his analysis shows that 35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report contain plagiarized text (with some of the wording taken from a book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, by Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts) and contain erroneous citations of data, as well.
Stephen Williams, MP for Bristol West, accused Aaron Porter, the NUS president, of playing partisan politics rather than engaging in the debate, as it emerged that students planned to try to oust him from his seat.
“It is not going to change my mind on any issue,” said Mr Williams, who has yet to say which way he will vote on the issue of increasing tuition fees.
“I don’t think students are impressed with it either. Rather than the NUS engaging with the issues and talking about what we are doing, they are playing partisan politics, and Aaron is playing to the Labour party gallery rather than standing up for students.”
He added: “I don’t recall them having a decapitation policy against Labour MPs who introduced tuition fees in the first place.”
His comments came as the NUS said it would make use of a coalition idea for holding MPs to account, dubbed the “right to recall” initiative, to try to force by-elections in targeted sets.
In July of this year, U.S. citizen Jacob Appelbaum, a researcher and spokesman for WikiLeaks, was detained for several hours at the Newark airport after returning from a trip to Holland, and had his laptop, cellphones and other electronic products seized -- all without a search warrant, without being charged with a crime, and without even being under investigation, at least to his knowledge. He was interrogated at length about WikiLeaks, and was told by the detaining agents that he could expect to be subjected to the same treatment every time he left the country and attempted to return to the U.S. Days later, two FBI agents approached him at a computer conference he was attending in New York and asked to speak with him again. To date, he has never been charged with any crime or even told he's under investigation for anything; this was clearly a thuggish attempt by federal officials to intimidate any American citizen involved with or supporting WikiLeaks.
That campaign of intimidation is now clearly spreading to supporters of Bradley Manning. Last Wednesday, November 3, David House, a 23-year-old researcher who works at MIT, was returning to the U.S. from a short vacation with his girlfriend in Mexico, and was subjected to similar and even worse treatment. House's crime: he did work in helping set up the Bradley Manning Support Network, an organization created to raise money for Manning's legal defense fund, and he has now visited Manning three times in Quantico, Virginia, where the accused WikiLeaks leaker is currently being detained (all those visits are fully monitored by government agents). Like Appelbaum, House has never been accused of any crime, never been advised that he's under investigation, and was never told by any federal agents that he's suspected of any wrongdoing at all.
The Democrats aren't preparing to stand up for anything, either. They're already talking about backing down on the repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military. I didn't vote for the Democrats so that they could turn tail at every Republican whim: they're supposed to work for the policies Democrats claim to stand for.
Thirteen years ago, I had my defence epiphany on the lay committee for Labour's first and only strategic defence review in 1997. This was under George Robertson. I vividly remember our first meeting when we were given our terms of reference. Such was the radical mood of those euphoric early Blair days that were told to think the unthinkable and discuss everything, no holds barred.
This lasted about five minutes. It turned out we could not discuss the nuclear deterrent; we could not question the Trident programme and its submarines; we could not discuss the Eurofighter contract; nor could we discuss the need for two or perhaps three new aircraft carriers. I remember the smug look on the faces of service chiefs in the room. Our excluded items had nothing really to do with Britain's defence. They were political. Robertson and his colleagues were under instructions not to give an inch to the Tories on defence procurement, lest they be seen as soft on defence. We could think the unthinkable – but not the thinkable.
It must be wonderfully liberating to be a hard-core conspiracy theorist, casting off the limiting constraints of reality - common sense and facts be damned! [climate scientist] Mike Mann is plotting the socialist takeover of the globe using tree-rings and obscure statistical techniques to control the UN while naive, mind-their-own-business, successful capitalists are in danger of being tossed out of their hard-earned mansions just because they want all of us to be as wealthy as they are. Or something.
...one case in which he claimed a British rifleman had shot dead an eight-year-old girl who was playing in the street in Basra.
"For some reason the tank stopped at the end of the street, she's there in her yellow dress, a rifleman pops up and blows her away."
Leaked Pentagon files obtained by the Guardian contain details of more than 100,000 people killed in Iraq following the US-led invasion, including more than 15,000 deaths that were previously unrecorded.
British ministers have repeatedly refused to concede the existence of any official statistics on Iraqi deaths. US General Tommy Franks claimed in 2002: "We don't do body counts."
The mass of leaked documents provides the first detailed tally by the US military of Iraqi fatalities. Troops on the ground filed secret field reports over six years of the occupation, purporting to tot up every casualty, military and civilian.
This is the impact of Frago 242. A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".
Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.
It’s the same tiny bunch of skeptics being quoted by right-wing blogs. None are doing new research that casts the slightest doubt on the scientific consensus that’s been forming for two decades, a set of conclusions that grows more robust with every issue of Science and Nature and each new temperature record.
This is an interesting carbon calculator, which lets you see the consequences of possible actions to hit the 'scientific minimum' target for reduction of UK emissions of 80% by 2050.
http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk
I tried the following scenario:
Reduce domestic power consumption by 50%;
Major shift from road transport to low carbon;
Halving of all road freight;
50 new nuclear power stations;
New desert solar project;
20,000 new onshore wind turbines;
24,000 new offshore wind turbines;
Sequestration of 30 million tonnes of carbon underground.
With all of that, plus a lot of other measures, I could only get a reduction of 57%!
“…I’ve come to view “denial” as reflective of an individual values, rather than an emotional state they pass through. It is a culture war issue, in the same way abortion, stem cells, Sharia law and creationism have become litmus tests for conservative Christians, Muslims etc.
…Creationist reject evolution because it contradicts their literal reading of the bible. Ergo, thus *must* reject the science in order to affirm their tribalism and confirm their membership to the creationist “tribe”. It’s about outward signs of orthodoxy and inwardly managing ones identity.
Free market libertarians, culture warriors and ultra-conservatives see climate change mitigation as deeply threatening to their “choices” within the market and individual “liberty”.
If your committed to small government and limited intervention in the market, then things such as a carbon tax, ETS or regulation are anathema. After all, the “market” will fix this.
The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones. ... Just for the record, when the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences last reviewed the data this spring, it concluded: "A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems." Not only William Hague but such other prominent European conservatives as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have embraced that widespread scientific conviction and supported vigorous action.
Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."
When a formal research or professional misconduct complaint is received, universities are required to open an inquiry. This is a less formal procedure, usually conducted by administrative personnel with or without academics taking part. it is very confidential. Only when the inquiry finds strong evidence of misconduct is a formal investigation opened. In this regard what Penn State did with respect to charges against Michael Mann was exceedingly irregular. First, they opened an inquiry without a formal complaint (which can be anonymous) on the basis of the uproar fed by friends of Judy (and no one else). Second they published their report, something that can be done but usually is not. Third they started a formal investigation without the inquiry finding grounds for it.
I have long been something of a climate-change sceptic, but my views in recent years have shifted. For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic. Because while across most of the world evidence for current climate change is often inconclusive and anecdotal, the huge ice sheet which sits atop this, the largest island in the world, appears to be cracking up before our eyes. And on a timescale of decades rather than the millennia many predicted.
Just five days ago, a 'superberg', measuring 100sq miles broke off the Petermann Glacier in the north-west of the island and floated into the ocean - the largest chunk of ice to break off Greenland for nearly half a century.
Ramadan wants to replace this practice with a high-minded attitude of mutual respect. Each of us, he writes, must accept that "the presence of the other within my own conception of the world is both a fact and a necessity". I am not sure what this means – assuming it means anything and is not just hot air – but if Ramadan is suggesting that in order to tolerate repugnant views one must empathise with those who hold them, he is plainly wrong.There is a conventional view that says we can despise someone's beliefs while respecting them as individuals, but there are plenty of people who deserve contempt. If we tolerate the hateful views of Holocaust deniers, the reason is not that we think such people have any kind of moral worth. It is because free speech is much too important to be compromised for their sake.
...
Mesmerised by this empty dream, he is scornful of talk of civilisation. "The definition of the term 'civilisation', he writes, "is very relative." But stoning women and gay people is an atrocity no matter how many cultures have sanctioned the practice. Torture is abhorrent whether it is inflicted by the Taliban or by Americans in Guantánamo. Civilisation comes in many forms, but barbarism is always the same.
In reports in December 2009 we said that Tata had used the carbon trading scheme to transfer steel production from Redcar to India, pocketing £1.2 billion in carbon credits at the cost of 1700 jobs. We accept this was wrong. ... We also accept Tata’s assurance that it has no relationship with the Chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
We apologise for these errors.
So what happened? A Journey is a re-writing of history, events seen through the rear-view mirror from a man who hitched his wagon to the Bush neocons and learned some of their tunes.
Lomborg's latest book, published by CUP next month, is likely to reignite these passions, because it appears to contradict so much of what he has said before and because he is straying into newly controversial territory. He is advocating that much more attention and money be lavished on climate engineering methods, such as whitening clouds so that they reflect back more of the sun's heat.
Heat is something he is resigned to. When he gives talks, he says, he often meets "people who come up and say: 'I thought I'd hate you.'"
But Lomborg's record on climate change is more nuanced than the stereotype suggests. From the beginning, he has said global warming is happening and is largely caused by humans. However, he has been consistently critical of what he sees as exaggeration of how much this matters, and of policies to tackle the problem. These would achieve too little and cost too much, he argues, meaning the money would be better spent on, say, reducing malaria and HIV/Aids, or extending clean water and sanitation.
In December, an article in the Sunday Telegraph had claimed that the UN climate chief was "making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies" and that payments from his work for other organisations "must run into millions of dollars". The article has since been removed from the newspaper's website.
Last weekend it issued an apology to Pachauri. "[The article] was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made 'millions of dollars' in recent years. We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused."
He is one of the global warming liars and is scum. I will apologise when hell freezes over.
The Climate Sceptics Party attracted just over 18,000 votes across the country. If their presence was designed to embarrass the Greens, which by definition must be a climate change acceptor’s party, then they failed. The Greens received 1.26 million votes in the Upper House.
The Greens, as noted before, attracted the biggest swing of 3.9 per cent. This was followed by the Sex Party and the Shooters Party. The electorate has spoken and this might be its plan: tackle climate change, make love and, then shoot the lights out.
They need to note that most of the votes they chased so desperately ended up with the Greens, who picked up a substantial swing of 3.9 per cent. And they need to realise why, which is because both mainstream parties failed to deliver a long term vision or address the difficult long-term policy issues.
Climate change, of course, is one of these. This should not come as a surprise to either party. Howard lost in 2007 because the electorate did not trust him to move on climate change, Rudd triggered his precipitous decline when he backed away from the ETS, and Gillard’s honeymoon came to an abrupt end when she trotted out the idiotic idea of a citizen’s assembly.
Denial: “It’s the sun”
Answer: The sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 and is irrelevant to recent global warming.
Denial: “Climate’s changed before”
Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time, which now is dominated by humans.
Denial:“There is no consensus”
Answer: 97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.
Denial:“It’s cooling”
The last decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record.
Denial:“Other planets are warming”
Answer: The other planets in our solar system do not support life. Lets focus on planets that do.
Denial:“Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy”
Answer: Then the Pacific oyster must be part of the conspiracy as it’s breeding in now warmer waters that only a few years ago it could not survive in.
Denial:“Polar bear numbers are increasing”
Answer: Polar bear encounters are increasing around human settlements as widen the search for food due to ice loss, but sadly overall numbers are on the decline.
Denial:“Pluto is warming”
Answer: That idea is based on 2 measurements 14 years apart whereas Pluto’s orbit is takes 248 Earth years; it proves nothing about nothing.
T.S. Eliot wrote in “Hollow Men,” that “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” And so too does the US combat mission in Iraq, initiated by George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney in March, 2003 to promises that US troops would be garlanded and greeted as liberators by exultant Iraqis. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the US troop strength would be down to about a division, some 25,000 men, by fall of 2003. Even in September of 2010, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, over 3000 dead US troops, over 30,000 seriously wounded ones and over a trillion dollars later, there are still going to be twice that number.
The US did not ‘win’ the Iraq War. It simply outlasted it. It was strong enough to remain, during the Sunni guerrilla war and the Sunni-Shiite Civil War, until the Iraqis exhausted themselves with fighting. But the massive violence provoked by the US occupation so weakened the Bush administration that it was forced to accept a withdrawal timetable dictated by the Iraqi parliament, in part at the insistence of deputies loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and others connected to Iran.
...
The main thing to remember is that the US military, all the time it was in Iraq, was never really in control at a neighborhood level and that tens of thousands of US troops could not prevent the Civil War from killing so many Iraqis. So there is no reason to think that keeping a large US combat force in Iraq could eliminate political violence. In fact, since the guerrillas used to lay roadside bombs for US convoys, and often missed and killed civilians, the end of active US patrols in the cities actually contributed to a fall in violence.
Moreover, US combat troops cannot help anyone form a government and are irrelevant to Iraq’s stalled political process. ...
Last January, the Met Office announced that it believed this year would, indeed, be a record scorcher. Given that Britain was then coated in thick snow, the prediction was brave.
It was accurate nevertheless. Western Europe and eastern America may then have been going through a grim, cold winter but other areas – including Asia and western America – were experiencing unexpectedly hot weather. The overall trend was a warming one. Few took notice, however, and the Little Englander's myopic view of the world – that only local events matter – continued to dominate newspaper columns and blogs. Global warming was nonsense, they insisted.
Thus the deniers got it wrong while climate scientists got it spectacularly right. Indeed, we should note just how prescient the latter have been. In 1999, the Met Office's head of climate modelling Peter Stott – working with Oxford University's Myles Allen and other meteorologists – published a paper in Nature on the likely impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, the paper estimated future global temperatures and included a graph of a range of predicted outcomes for 2000 to 2040 with a dotted line indicating the most likely path. Crucially, for the year 2010, that dotted line showed there would be a rise of 0.8C since the Second World War– which is exactly what we are experiencing today.
So scientists not only predicted how hot this year was likely to be six months ago, they forecast a decade ago just how much the world would heat up 10 years later. Bear this in mind when deniers tell you climate science is a conspiracy or the work of charlatans. They are talking rubbish.
One of my favorite Jerry Seinfeld episodes is the one where George Costanza tells Jerry that every decision he has ever made has turned out to be wrong. Jerry suggest that George should then “do the opposite” and maybe his luck would change. When George does the opposite, he begins dating a beautiful woman and lands a job with the New York Yankees.
S. Fred Singer is a lot like George Costanza.
S. Fred Singer is one of the notorious Merchants of Doubt described by Oreskes and Conway in their new critically acclaimed book titled Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. S. Fred Singer has been on the wrong side of the scientific consensus on important issues such as:
1) Smoking and cancer
2) DDT
3) Acid rain
4) Ozone depletion
5) Manmade climate change
It is truly absurd that ANYBODY listens to this guy because his position is usually wrong. He is the George Costanza of science.
We are fighting a war here folks,s--t happens in war. If we have a group targeting our worst enemies,good for them,and i wish them much success. We already know Pakistan cannot be trusted,and that Iran assists our enemies,so what's new? Get out of the way Mr. President,and liberal anti-war activists,and let us win this war! Otherwise, Afghanistan will indeed be O'bama's Vietnam,and another of many blights on his legacy. Imagine being a worse President than Jimmy "pea-nuts" Carter.
I say Obama himself is behind all this mess. Who else would have easy access to so many classified WAR documents? IMPEACH OBAMA, IMPEACH WIKILEAKS!
There is no doubt in my mind that this leak and others is a deliberate attempt by left wing liberals worldwide to undermine us in the USA. We should be concentrating the Justice Department force on this, NOT the Arizona Laws. As long as this administration is run by left wing radicals you can forget having ANY secrets as there are traitors in our midst at ALL levels. It is time for the truth to be told that the USA has been infiltrated by communists for many years just waiting for the opportunity to destroy us. The fact that SERVING members of our military forces are part of this illegal exposure of what are effectively SECRETS should be a warning to all real Americans who do NOT want to be part of the New World Order as espoused by many of our politicians.
[The] collective picture that emerges is a very disturbing one. We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported; of hundreds of border clashes between Afghan and Pakistani troops, two armies which are supposed to be allies; of the existence of a special forces unit whose tasks include killing Taliban and al-Qaida leaders; of the slaughter of civilians caught by the Taliban's improvised explosive devices; and of a catalogue of incidents where coalition troops have fired on and killed each other or fellow Afghans under arms.
Reading these logs, many may suspect there is sometimes a casual disregard for the lives of innocents. A bus that fails to slow for a foot patrol is raked with gunfire, killing four passengers and wounding 11 others. The documents tell how, in going after a foreign fighter, a special forces unit ended up with seven dead children. The infants were not their immediate priority. A report marked "Noforn" (not for foreign elements of the coalition) suggests their main concern was to conceal the mobile rocket system that had just been used.
In these documents, Iran's and Pakistan's intelligence agencies run riot. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is linked to some of the war's most notorious commanders.
It seems NASA has an agenda concerning Global Warming, and if you don’t believe the Cult, you’d better keep your mouth shut.
Please contact Father Dennis J. Dease, President of St. Thomas University, djdease@stthomas.edu, and invite him - even at this eleventh hour - to take down Abraham's talk altogether from the University's servers, and to instigate a disciplinary inquiry into the Professor's unprofessional conduct, particularly in the matter of his lies to third parties about what I had said in my talk at Bethel University eight months ago? That would be a real help.
So when the weather's hot, short-term fluctuations are totally irrelevant and we need to look at the picture over the very long term. When the weather's cold it disproves the reality of climate change. Basically AGW is false, and we know this because any evidence to the contrary must be wrong.
At short notice a number of individuals from various Bristol networks have pulled together to host this event about the strange arrest of US anti-war and justice activists arrested on the Iraq/Iran border. Come and find out about this tricky situation...
Info tour about US anti-war activists imprisoned in Iran
On July 31, 2009, Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer, and Josh Fattal - were arrested at the border of Iran. After nearly a year, they are still being held without charges, without a single visit from their lawyer, under allegations of espionage. The families still have no idea when they might be released.
A fourth member of the group, Shon Meckfessel narrowly avoided imprisonment himself and is kicking off a thirty city European tour in Bristol to publisise their situation and to call for their release. Shon will be speaking about the three activists, their work and their current situation at 7.30pm, Wednesday 14th July, at Kebele Social Centre, Robertson Rd, Easton, Bristol BS5 6JY.
The Metro has obtained a High Court injunction against “all persons responsible for the publication and/or distribution” of a Metro spoof paper that was distributed by campaigners at London tube stations on Friday morning. But since the spoof was produced and distributed anonymously, the injunction seems to have been served upon the wrong people, in what appears to be a guilty-by-association verdict.
The spoof paper, which has also been circulated on the web, has a similar masthead and layout to the free daily, with a zero instead of the O. The owners of Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, claim this is an infringement of the company’s trademark copyrights, while campaigners argue the company directors “do not have a sense of humour” and have “gone too far in suppressing free speech to protect their commercial interests.”
I guess the main question coming out of the Muir Russell report is: when is he going to be appointed to the House of Lords and his choice of appellation? Lord Muir of Holyrood? They adopted a unique inquiry process in which they interviewed only one side – CRU. As a result, the report is heavily weighted towards CRU apologia.
the report has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Inquiry had enough independent brains to reproduce the software code on the original information available in a short space of time.
Which in turn proves that all climate sceptics who complain about the code not being available are not particularly bright - at least when it comes to writing and/or understanding code.
Which in turn also makes me openly wonder whether climate sceptics bleating about unavailability of the code would even have the faintest idea what to do with it if it was served to them on a silver platter.
Give it up mate. You guys are really starting to look like a flock of headless chooks now.
After each inquiry we all have heard the same calls long and loud from the denialosphere: "Whitewash, whitewash ..." but it can be shown to hold no water with a simple explanation. I have a coin (20c)and i'll flip it. If it comes up heads then you can have the coin. If it comes up tails then you give me $100. Will you take that bet? No? Why? Because it is a dumb bet. Only an idiot would risk $100 to win 20c. This is the case with these inquiries. If it were truly a whitewash then I do not know anyone who would risk their reputation and the reputation of an institution to which they belong to rescue the reputation of another. If there was even a hint of impropriety, Mann, Jones and the CRU would have been hung out to dry and the members of these panels would have distanced themselves quicker than you can pass wind. When the currency of these researchers and institutions is reputation, if dodgy deeds were done no-one would risk their reputation to ressurect another's. Why? Because it is a dumb bet.
To the untrained eye, University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Craig Lee's recent discovery of a 10,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon might look like a small branch that blew off a tree in a windstorm. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Lee, a research associate with CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who found the atlatl dart, a spear-like hunting weapon, melting out of an ice patch high in the Rocky Mountains close to Yellowstone National Park.
Lee, a specialist in the emerging field of ice patch archaeology, said the dart had been frozen in the ice patch for 10 millennia and that climate change has increased global temperatures and accelerated melting of permanent ice fields exposing organic materials that have long been entombed in the ice.
"We didn't realize until the early 2000s that there was a potential to find archaeological materials in association with melting permanent snow and ice in many areas of the globe," Lee said. "We're not talking about massive glaciers, we're talking about the smaller, more kinetically stable snowbanks that you might see if you go to Rocky Mountain National Park."
Realizing that conflict and debate is a proven learning tool in classrooms, we support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories, including evolution, Intelligent Design, global warming, political philosophies, and others. We believe theories of life origins and environmental theories should be taught as challengeable scientific theory subject to change as new data is produced, not scientific law. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.
Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
But March brought good news for the Polar Bears, and bad news for the Catlin Expedition and any others looking for bad news. Instead of ice extent declining through March like it usually does, it continued to increase through the month and is now at the high (so far) for the year. If it keeps this trend unabated, in a day or two it will likely cross the “normal” line.
One of our alleged sources, a young US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held without trail. Mr. Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscious and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani.
The Garani massacre, which we are still working on, killed over 100 people, mostly children.
Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy's engaging in abusive actions all over the world. We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true and we do have a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the United States government.
Mr. Manning was allegedly exposed after talking to an unrelated "journalist" who then worked with the US government to detain him.
Some background on the Manning case:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/06/11/transcript-daniel-ellsberg-says-he-fears-us-might-assasinate-wikileaks-founder/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/state-department-anxious/
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2010/06/143011.htm
[ note that there are some questions about the Wired reportage, see: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/13/video-wikileaks-foun.html#comment-809677 ]
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IPCC Shamed By Bogus Rainforest Claim by Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times
A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.
The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an "unsubstantiated claim" that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for WWF by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as "green campaigners" with "little scientific expertise." The article also stated that the authors' research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.
In fact, the IPCC's Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure had, in error, not been referenced, but was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that Mr Rowell is an experienced environmental journalist and that Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.
IPCCTelegraph Shamed By Bogus Rainforest Claim by Jonathan Leake, The Sunday TimesA startlingAn accurate report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based onan unsubstantiateda peer-reviewed substantiated claim bygreen campaignersan expert in forest management who hadlittle scientificlots of expertise.
I sometimes do a radio show; Parasite, Anakissed & 606 Goat Lab Radio on TheGoatLab - older shows & newer shows. Also you can find me on MySpace like every other f**ker!
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Schnews DIY Guide
Quotes - -
"If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: governments lie." I.F. Stone
"The State is an abstraction devouring the life of the people." Michael Bakunin
"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees." Jeremy Hardy
"¡Que Se Vayan Todos (They All Must Go)!" Argentinian Workers Cry
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Bristol Blogs - -
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nickleberry - Articles and reflections
oldpunksneverdie.com webzine
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A Blaise School Parent: Bristol UK
Founder of Bristolian and co-founder of Class War, Ian Bone's Blog
On the Level Blog, car free/eco campaigning.
Post Watch - Keeping an eye on the Evening Pest
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