I've seen it worded another way.Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon
Perhaps the pre regeneracy part of the crisis should be understood as the time to try everything else.
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Americans!
I've seen it worded another way.
Perhaps the pre regeneracy part of the crisis should be understood as the time to try everything else.
I believe it was Winston Churchill who said that we Americans have to try every wrong way first before to do things the right way.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
I think Eric's two Americas post on another thread hit on the underlying reasons:
- We can't agree easiily. We're just too divided by philosophies that predate us by centuries.
- When people can't agree on a course of action, the default position is alwasys to do nothing.
- Once change is undeniable, doing little is an easier putt than doing much
- We've institutionalized this thinking in our nearly-impossible-to-amend Consitution
- We're proud to be who we are.
If anything, item 5 is the one we can blame the most.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
He is right. America is severely divided on lines of class, region, ethnicity, and religion.
The religious difference between Biblical fundamentalists against everyone else is almost between those who accept Pascal's wager and those who do not. Give all to God -- and if there is a pleasant, eternal, and exclusive Afterlife one will enjoy it. If there is no Afterlife, then any sufferings and any indulgence are for naught because they are obliterated in the nothingness of insensate death. If there is an Afterlife and God fails to judge people harshly for denying Him in full or in part then all is forgiven anyway. Hell, in contrast, may be real and no less eternal, so failure to live in crushing poverty and other denial in This World
Pascal's wager can apply as readily to Protestant fundamentalism as to the Catholicism that Blaise Pascal so cherished. Maybe Catholics no longer believe that repression and poverty on behalf of exploitative elites is no longer a desirable end. Catholic social teaching is decidedly left-leaning by American standards. Protestant fundamentalism, in contrast, holds that This World is an illusion and the Afterlife is real.. and exclusive... to those who believe the Bible to the fullest end. OK, the prohibitions against pork, shellfish, and cheeseburgers (meat and dairy together) no longer apply -- but one had better believe that the Universe is roughly six thousand years old, the Earth was created in six literal days, that there was a literal worldwide flood... and that Biblical prophecies of Last Judgment are literally true. Poverty and pain are trivialities in This World when one considers what awaits a heretic (including a rationalist).
Protestant fundamentalists are heavily concentrated in the large band of America that extends from the Appalachians from the Pennsylvania-New York state line to northern Alabama to the Ozarks in Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. They have found political allies in some other parts of America (like Mormon country and some areas of Lutheran and Reformed majorities, and of course economic elites who want to impose mass poverty upon all but themselves) and that has been close to a majority.
Religion? Protestant fundamentalists are largely descended from the Borderlands (the rough and lawless frontier between Scotland and northern England) wave of settlement -- the last wave of colonial-era settlement that found its way to the hills. Disorderly, unrefined, and unlearned they could never fit in among the orderly Puritans of New England, the hierarchical and slave-owning planters of Tidewater and farther south, or among the repressed Quakers or German Pietists of southeastern Pennsylvania. Add to them the romantic admirers of the gentry world of the Cavaliers and one gets a big chunk or the American populace.
Ethnicity? Much of the middle class now consists of successful ethnic and religious minorities. These people often own small businesses that compete in the interstices with corporate America or are middle-class government employees (Hoo nedes schoolin' win yew can send the kiddies to the mines and factories?) -- and the lust by our economic elites for complete dominion if it is ever achieved will require the ruin of such people who can never accept such 100%-American beliefs as creationism and Manifest Destiny for the 21st Century. The Gilded Age was great for economic elites in both the North and the South if for almost nobody else.
Region? The GOP is extremely unpopular in urban America.
We are all too often proud to not be "the Other". That is the flip side of the record.If anything, item 5 is the one we can blame the most.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
How many of you would consider The Old Farmer's Almanac to be a purveyor of right-wing propaganda?
Well their 2013 edition includes an article about how sunspots impact global warming/cooling.
The link below is not to that article, but does give an outline on the subject nonetheless:
http://www.almanac.com/sunspotupdate
"Essentially, the Sun has been buying us time" - as in time to poke holes all over the U.S., and off its shores, to mitigate the impact of the Middle East oil embargo that will surely result if the Republicans regain the White House and launch World War III against the "Persian Empire"?
But maybe if the putative Robin Hoods stopped trying to take from law-abiding citizens and give to criminals, take from men and give to women, take from believers and give to anti-believers, take from citizens and give to "undocumented" immigrants, and take from heterosexuals and give to homosexuals, they might have a lot more success in taking from the rich and giving to everyone else.
Don't blame me - I'm a Baby Buster!
Freakonomics & Nate Silver on the issue:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/09/...and-the-noise/
http://www.freakonomics.com/2009/10/...my-of-a-smear/
People who know they're right don't have to commit fraud:
No comment on what the Heartland Institute papers actually showed? Why not?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...ng_631915.html
...the strategy memo is a fake...
Next time, read the article before commenting.
No. Heartland is claiming it's a fake. There is a huge difference.
Regardless of the strategy memo, any comments on the other documents that Heartland admitted are genuine?
BTW: Citing a story written by a known denier in support of a denier organization is the entire goal of the denier propaganda machine.
-It is. Again, you didn't read it, did you?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...ng_631915.html
...Making a direct accusation as Kaminsky and Mosher did is a strong and potentially libelous move, and the green blogosphere closed ranks quickly around Gleick. One poster wrote: “I hope that Mr. Kaminsky will be prepared [to] fully retract and apologize to Dr. Gleick once he is ruled out as the possible culprit.” But then the other shoe dropped: Gleick confessed on Monday, February 20, that he was the person who had deceived Heartland into emailing their board documents...
...Gleick’s story doesn’t add up, given that many of the details in the phony “strategy memo” could only have been composed by someone with prior access to the complete board materials that Gleick says he subsequently sought out. So far Gleick is the only person known to have had access to the Heartland internal board documents. And he has not been forthcoming about the details of the phony memo...
Then there is the content of the memo itself, which tellingly is written in the first person but bears no one’s name as an author. One is supposed to presume it came from Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, but it is not quite his style. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic sums it up nicely: “It reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”
...the reference to Andy Revkin is more intriguing. Revkin is a New York Times science blogger who reports climate issues fairly straight up, though his own sympathies are with the climate campaign. Perhaps because he is basically sympathetic, Revkin’s occasional departures from the party line have been a source of annoyance for more ardent climate campaigners... Revkin wrote for the Times that “Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others,” and that his actions “surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary [strategy memo].”
...IOW, only a moron with a cartoon vision of AGW skeptics could have written it.
...Heartland’s board documents reveal seven-figure contributions for their climate work from one “anonymous donor,” but environmental organizations take in many multiples of Heartland’s total budget in anonymous donations washed through the left-wing Tides Foundation. The Environmental Defense Fund thanks 141 anonymous donors in one recent report. “Well-funded”? Heartland’s total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, is around $4.4 million, an amount that would disappear into a single line item in the budget for the Natural Resources Defense Council ($99 million in revenues in 2010). Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million just on “public education.”
The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources—and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do...
You really should read. This is the sort of "open mindedness" which allows you to believe silly nonsense about those who disagree with you.
Enjoy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gleick
I did read it. I've also read other articles that flatly refute the claims of Heartland's "computer experts".
Or, deniers really are cartoon versions of what a true skeptic is.http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...ng_631915.html
...Making a direct accusation as Kaminsky and Mosher did is a strong and potentially libelous move, and the green blogosphere closed ranks quickly around Gleick. One poster wrote: “I hope that Mr. Kaminsky will be prepared [to] fully retract and apologize to Dr. Gleick once he is ruled out as the possible culprit.” But then the other shoe dropped: Gleick confessed on Monday, February 20, that he was the person who had deceived Heartland into emailing their board documents...
...Gleick’s story doesn’t add up, given that many of the details in the phony “strategy memo” could only have been composed by someone with prior access to the complete board materials that Gleick says he subsequently sought out. So far Gleick is the only person known to have had access to the Heartland internal board documents. And he has not been forthcoming about the details of the phony memo...
Then there is the content of the memo itself, which tellingly is written in the first person but bears no one’s name as an author. One is supposed to presume it came from Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, but it is not quite his style. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic sums it up nicely: “It reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”
...the reference to Andy Revkin is more intriguing. Revkin is a New York Times science blogger who reports climate issues fairly straight up, though his own sympathies are with the climate campaign. Perhaps because he is basically sympathetic, Revkin’s occasional departures from the party line have been a source of annoyance for more ardent climate campaigners... Revkin wrote for the Times that “Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others,” and that his actions “surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary [strategy memo].”
...IOW, only a moron with a cartoon vision of AGW skeptics could have written it.
...Heartland’s board documents reveal seven-figure contributions for their climate work from one “anonymous donor,” but environmental organizations take in many multiples of Heartland’s total budget in anonymous donations washed through the left-wing Tides Foundation. The Environmental Defense Fund thanks 141 anonymous donors in one recent report. “Well-funded”? Heartland’s total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, is around $4.4 million, an amount that would disappear into a single line item in the budget for the Natural Resources Defense Council ($99 million in revenues in 2010). Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million just on “public education.”And yet CO2 still absorbs more photons in the IR range. No matter how much fake skeptics wish that it wasn't true, the laws of physics can't be denied.
The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources—and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do...
You really should read. This is the sort of "open mindedness" which allows you to believe silly nonsense about those who disagree with you.
Enjoy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gleick
-Let's see them. You're obvioulsy missing the implications. Gleick got caught stealing and he's the obvious source of the forgeries.
-It's the implications which are at issue. All the GW bedwetters have are computer modles that don't work when tested against reality, and the will to deny susnspot activity and the little ice age.
Forgeries? Heartland only claimed that the strategy memo was forged. Now you are implying that more of the documents were forged? Do any deniers ever do anything honestly?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...artland-expose
The models work just fine. Sunspots are relevant only in that they are correlated with solar output. Solar output has been relatively low recently and the planet still continued to warm up. Want to take a guess about what will happen as solar output increases over the next few years?-It's the implications which are at issue. All the GW bedwetters have are computer modles that don't work when tested against reality, and the will to deny susnspot activity and the little ice age.
Oh please, can you tell me all about the little ice age? I haven't heard a denier tell me all the lies they know about it in such a long time! [/snark]
BTW: CO2 still traps infrared radiation and fossil fuels increase CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
For those actually interested in learning how deniers lie about the climate check this out:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/...eet/#more-5830
Four Short Term Factors
The solar cycle thing seems to be coming up quite a bit lately. I usually throw in a bit of a rebuttal, and might as well try again, though in my experience anything I say in one rebuttal will be forgotten a few weeks later when someone else suddenly discovers (surprise!) that solar cycles exist.
I'll start with a chart showing fairly recent temperatures.
The chart is explicit about two of the four major short term mechanisms that effect climate. The Pacific Oscillation (El Nino / La Nina) is shown. During El Nino, more heat is in the atmosphere less in the ocean, while La Nina is the opposite. Global air temperatures thus surge somewhat during El Nino years.
Very major volcanic eruptions, such as Pinatubo shown above, cause cooling. Pinatubo was roughly as significant as a solar minimum or a La Nina. Pinatubo was small, however, compared to some eruptions that occurred around the beginning of the Little Ice Age.
I'd note that five year rolling average of the red line is just about perfect for showing the 11 year solar cycle. If you just eyeball the red line, you can see a sine wave series of peaks and valleys that correspond to the solar cycles. The creators of the above chart chose not to label the solar cycles, but they are clearly visible in the red 5 year rolling sum.
This chart makes it clear why a denialist would want to cherry pick 1997 - 1998 to indicate the start of an alleged cooling trend. There was a really big time El Nino on top of the peak of the last solar cycle. Last I knew 1998 was still the warmest year on record, though last I knew something like 9 of the 10 most recent years are the warmest on record.
There is, of course, another factor visible on the above chart... as greenhouse gasses are added to the atmosphere the temperature increases. There is a clear up slope going left to right which cannot be explained by solar cycles, volcanos or El Nino / La Nina.
The thing to note is that the size of the solar cycle temperature effect is small as compared to the greenhouse increase. Even if one cherry picks to minimize the increasing temperature, measuring from the solar peak around 1982 to the solar minimum around 2005, the temperature is still clearly going up. A truer neutral measurement should be from peak to peak or trough to trough.
The effects of solar variation are simply smaller than the effects of greenhouse. If the sun suddenly went into a hard minimum, if we saw few to no sunspots for a century or so, there might be no peaks and valleys in the 5 year rolling average, but there is no reason to expect the long term slope of the line to change.
Now, you hear various denialist claims that the solar cycle is going to go into long term cool mode, that the sun is going to suddenly produce fewer sunspots. One might also hear that an intense series of volcanic eruptions might be about to start, which would halt global warming. I haven't heard anyone suggest that the Pacific is about to go into permanent La Nina mode, but that would be par for the denialist course.
Thing is, just eyeballing the above chart, the solar cycle, recent volcanic activity and the Pacific Oscillation are just noise. If one ran an 11 year rolling average, rather than a 5 year, the solar cycle and Pacific Oscillation effects vanish, and Pinatubo becomes a small down bump. The slow steady greenhouse rise dominates.
Ah, well. This wasn't why I visited the thread. I was going to suggest that the Left Coast, jealous of the eastern super storm, decided to draw attention to itself with an earthquake and tsunami.
If mother nature isn't out to get us, who is?
Last edited by B Butler; 10-28-2012 at 05:33 PM.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. JFK
Here is a discussion of a study that removed the statistical noise created by ENSO, volcanos, and the solar cycle.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/...oses-nonsense/
Guess what! The remaining pattern is a steady increase over the lifetime of all four different temperature records. Of course deniers don't want to discuss that at all.
Weather Channel’s Senior Meteorologist Issues Grave Warning
Stu Ostro calls Hurricane Sandy an historical event.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/...-grave-warning
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
Not sure how to take the Sandy warnings. I'm just south of Boston. The governor is taking the storm seriously enough that he did a press conference in conflict with Tom Brady's post game interview, taking Tom off the air. If I look at the NOAA predictions, though, I've got less than 50% chance of tropical storm winds and an estimated inch of rain over several days.
But I guess it wouldn't take much of a course change to make things wetter and windier.
I'm happy not to be down in New Jersey, though.
In the Washington, DC area, all the schools are closed tomorrow, as is the Federal Government. We're being told to prepare for losing power for a few days.
I want people to know that peace is possible even in this stupid day and age. Prem Rawat, June 8, 2008
Lots of schools closed in MA as well, and my town has put garbage pick up on the monday holiday schedule.
A New Normal?
A CNN contributor notes that Climate change raises stakes for New York.
It seems that Hurricane Irene last year came within a few inches of topping the nine foot sea walls in New York City that prevent storm surge from flooding the subway system. It's anticipated that Sandy will produce worse storm surge than Irene. It's not just the strength of the wind. The size of the storm is also important. Storm surge is greater with the strength of the wind, but the larger the storm, the longer the reach the wind wind is given to blow over the water, the greater the storm surge. The shape of the coast is also a contributing factor. The shapes of Long Island Sound and New York Harbor tend to funnel the surge in towards the city.
Thus, flooded subway tunnels are quite possible.
Professor Orlove also claimed climate change has contributed a one foot rise in ocean levels in the NYC area. Thus, if the subway flood is a near thing, climate change will be a direct contributing factor.
One is seeing the usual disclaimer. No one single weather event can be attributed to human caused climate change. Possibly true. Still, it is worth noting that no hurricane has hit New Jersey in historical time. Sandy is turning left into New Jersey only because of a very unusual combination with a cold front and an arctic high pressure system. There is disagreement on whether this should be called 'very unusual' or 'unique.' If it isn't unique, it's because the Halloween 'Perfect Storm' of a decade ago was somewhat similar, with a hurricane running into a northern style storm off the New England coast. Thus, we have recently seen two unique super storms, with hurricanes colliding with northern storm systems and being forced west with increased power.
How many super storms before they have to be accepted as normal?
I'm sure the middle of the country would have appreciated all this water more than we will.
I'll note that family lore says that if a hurricane just misses Cape Hatteras, one should start buttoning up as it is apt to hit us near Cape Cod. That reflects the normal hurricane path. They tend to parallel the coast. New Jersey and New York city tend to be protected as if the storm path would naturally take the storm there, the storm comes ashore in the Virginia area instead and loses strength over land.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. JFK
Sorry to quote myself, but wanted to add that they've closed school and work tomorrow (Tuesday), also.
I want people to know that peace is possible even in this stupid day and age. Prem Rawat, June 8, 2008
Ahem, all this talk about how these new storms hitting the Northeast are the "new" normal...
What about Hazel (parents used to talk about this storm with a shudder)? Or The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944? Or The Great New England Hurricane of 1938? Or The New York Hurricane of 1893? Or The Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane of 1821? Or The Great September Gale of 1815? Or The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635?
Sure, it's a rare occurrence, but it's not completely unusual either.
~Chas'88
Last edited by Chas'88; 10-29-2012 at 05:06 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
When Storms Collide
Hitting New England isn't unusual. According to family legend, I was born between two hurricanes that hit Massachusetts within a few weeks of one another. Looking at Wikipedia, the family legend is apparently exaggerated. Hurricanes did hit New England that year, but before my birthday.
Hitting New Jersey is unique. If you look at the paths of the 1954 hurricanes, you will see why. Storm systems generally travel east to west near the equator, but west to east in the middle latitudes. Thus, the typical Atlantic hurricane starts out near the equator moving west, and slowly arches to the northwest, north, then northeast. By the time a storm gets near New Jersey, the normal course has it moving to the northeast, out to sea. Thus, up until Sandy, no hurricane in historical time hit New Jersey. The New York Hurricane of 1983 is an exception, an outlier. That one followed a reasonably traditional path, but the turn to the east happened much later, much further north, than usual.
What is new is hurricanes, or hybrid hurricane / northern storms, turning left and heading west as far north as the Perfect Storm and Sandy. Look at the path of Sandy. It turns hard left, as did the Perfect Storm. These two storm are very rare in doing this. (Does anyone know of a third?) The same forces which force the left turn also add energy to the storms. Hurricanes are driven by warm water causing thermals which begin to spin. Thus, they weaken as the come over the cooler northern waters. Northern storms are driven by collisions between hot and cold air. Sandy and the Perfect Storm are hybrids, resulting from north bound hurricanes with their warm humid air colliding with a potent cold northern storm.
How is it that the two major examples of this sort of storm happened very recently? I'm not enough of an expert to do more than guess. We're looking for collisions between northern and southern storms. Have there been more storms wandering around of late, enough so that the odds of a collision are changing? If so, someone might want to look at the weather records to double check it. If we have more of each half of the 'perfect' recipe occurring, the odds that they might collide would increase.
But this is more conjecture than fact. Someone would have to review the history to confirm it. If Sandy gets as ugly as the media is hyping it, somebody likely will.
If you want to dig a little deeper, check out NOAA's Hurricane Sandy’s Transition to a Post-Tropical Cyclone. It seems that Sandy isn't really a hurricane anymore, which might only be important to government bureaucrats as one bureaucracy tracks and issues warnings about hurricanes, while there is a separate bureaucracy that handle the big northern storms. There is apparently a minor pissing contest going on about who reports what and when to transition.
Most media outlets seem to be ignoring this, and just reporting Sandy as a hurricane.
Last edited by B Butler; 10-29-2012 at 07:25 PM.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. JFK
Superstorm?
Here's another spin on things, Is Hurricane Sandy a 'Superstorm'? The author knows a bit more about this sort of thing than I do, and came up with more historical examples, though not all involve hurricanes.
