Ode to Deflected Dialogue

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Ode to Deflected Dialogue

28 May 2013

George Rebane

Posted in Culture Comments, The Liberal Mind

80 responses to “Ode to Deflected Dialogue”

Michael Anderson

30 May 2013

I will contend that both Gore and Kerry would have been a whole heck of a lot better than Bush2 in 2000 and 2004.

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Ben Emery

30 May 2013

Gregory,
You’re a republican who likes to pretend he is an independent thinker, that’s all.
Paul,
I bash Obama and Clinton almost as much as Bush II and Reagan. In reality if we look at what they have actually supported by their signature or by their executive orders there really isn’t much difference at all. I like Obama and Clinton’s inclusion of homosexuals and brown people better but after that there isn’t much difference. I voted for Obama in 08′ because he was the better candidate of the big two to handle the absolute sh!# storm Bush was leaving behind. The Greens ran Cynthia McKinney who is a democrat and the Libertarians ran Bob Barr who is a hypocrite republican. So I decided to vote for history sake.
Gore won the election but lost the white house because he ran a horrible campaign and has no passion towards the rhetoric of small d democracy he and the Democratic Party claim to support. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html
Here is a great clip of Nader explaining why democrats lose.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxIxXj5K_M

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Gregory

30 May 2013

“I am contending that Obama’s governance is a whole lot better than what Bush2 cobbled together. Maybe this will help the conversation along.”
-MA
What governance?
“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the Congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press. What part does he like?… He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere. [But] what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. … He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”
-Chris Matthews, MSNBC
The tingle up his leg is gone.

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Todd Juvinall

30 May 2013

Re: Michael Anderson | 30 May 2013 at 12:53 AM
It’s OK MichaelA, there are medications available for you who have BDS. I and many of those I know did very well in the economy of Bush and other than a few things I would rate his governance as above average given the 9/11 and banking issues. When Pelosi/etal took Congress in 2006 and we learned Kerry dodged taxes on his yacht by registering it in Rhode Island, we saw the collapse they caused.
You liberals are too funny. Bush is in your craw and you can’t get up.
What a hoot.
Gregory did an excellent wrap on PaulE’s BS reviews of Bush’s years.

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Ben Emery

30 May 2013

Lets follow the partisan logic.
2006- 2008
House of Representatives- Democrats
Senate- Republicans
Executive Branch- Republicans
Judicial Branch-controlled by Republican appointees.
Yep is was Pelosi and the bills she got passed the house to die in the senate that caused all the problems. Nice critical thinking skills.
The problems we face today are a accumulation of a totally dysfunctional two party system, both parties have become advocates of the same foreign, financial, and trade policies. All of which has crippled the ability for the working class of America to afford the basic necessities of life we have agreed upon as a society.

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Gregory

30 May 2013

“Lets follow the partisan logic.
2006- 2008
House of Representatives- Democrats
Senate- Republicans”
-Ben
Nope. Harry Reid has been the Senate Majority leader since January, 2007, and in general you’re off by a year. Congressional and Presidential elections are in even years but take office in odd years.
Sorry Ben, but Bush’s party controlled neither the House or Senate for the last two years of the Bush presidency.

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Todd Juvinall

30 May 2013

Here is a wiki for the clueless BenE regarding who was in charge in the second half of the Bush term. You just can’t make up your own facts BenE. You and PaulE do that all the time.
“The One Hundred Tenth United States Congress was the meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, between January 3, 2007, and January 3, 2009, during the last two years of the second term of President George W. Bush. It was composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The apportionment of seats in the House was based on the 2000 U.S. census.
The Democratic Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995”

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Paul Emery

30 May 2013

Actually the Senate in Bush’s last two years was a tie 49-49 with two independents and, of course, Cheney who could vote to break a tie. The loss of the house and decline of Pubbers in the Senate and house was a reflection of the loss of public support for Bush who at times was in the mid 20’s in performance polling.

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George Rebane

30 May 2013

PaulE 1048am – Actually it wasn’t a tie at all Paul. Following the 2006 elections, the party balance for the Senate stood at 51-49 in favor of the Democrats (including independent Bernie Sanders and Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman, who caucused with the Democrats). Reid was elected Majority Leader by the de facto Democrat majority in the Senate.

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Russ Steele

30 May 2013

Well Bush was smart enough not to say something stupid like this outright lie from our favorite climate hoax promoter — President Barack Obama yesterday:
“Climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago”
Really, . . . it hasn’t warmed in 16 years.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/rose-_16yrs_hardcrut4.jpg

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George Rebane

30 May 2013

RussS 1218pm – To the sheeple any lie repeated often enough becomes received truth. In any event, that lie is really a doozy.

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Ken Jones

30 May 2013

Russ you seem to have tunnel vision and selected hearing when applied to the real hoax and lies of the previous administration. President Bush made this statement, talk about lies, in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2002, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” He was referring to WMDs in Iraq.
History has shown no WMDs were found, no Iraq involvement in 911, no Iraqi threat to the US and no justification for an attack on a sovereign nation.
Furthermore the climate is changing and denial, like the consistent denial by so many of Bush on this blog is comical. And screw the BDS BS that stinks up this blog. I still laugh at the whining of the right on Clinton for much longer than President Bush. I prefer to think there is a real Climate Derangement Syndrome that stems from lame-stream junk science. I prefer the vast majority of scientists that agree on a systemic change in climate.

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George Rebane

30 May 2013

Nobody in these parts denies that “systemic change in climate” is taking place. It’s the direction and cause that are matters of scientific debate. Only the science-deprived take comfort in consensus science which history shows has invariably been wrong when working at the edges of knowledge. And I notice that the KenJ’s of the world never refer to data like the recent temperature record. The only thing that no one “anticipated five or 10 years ago” was that we may be re-entering a new Maunder Minimum, a systemic change indeed.

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Ryan Mount

30 May 2013

Regarding climate change…
This just came to me from someone I respect with MIT credentials. Would someone care to comment on this and provide some perspective:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-january-2007-to-january-2008.htm
Specifically this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

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Scott Obermuller

30 May 2013

Nice try Ben.
“The FBI did an investigation and 80% of the loans made were predatory or were considered “fraud for profit”.”
Of that 80%, what was the percentage of criminal fraud and what was the percentage of ‘predatory’ loans? That term is pretty loose. Can you imagine a loan officer turning down high numbers of blacks applying for loans and being able to shrug and say “it would have been predatory”? You and every progressive would have been screaming for his head over that.
Of course there were some fraudulent loans made, always have been. That wasn’t what got the whole mess started. It was the fed govt that bullied the banks into making loans to folks that couldn’t afford them. I remember the ACORN ads on the radio urging on folks that couldn’t afford a ‘conventional’ loan on how to buy a home. Show me the evil banksters with guns forcing people to sign the papers. People were admitting they were signing papers that had fraudulent info about their income.
Takes two to tango. The vast majority of people that bought homes with a balloon payment due or got short term interest only loans were just greedy and/or stupid.
I’m not letting anyone off the hook, here. We have on video Barney Frank and Maxine Waters defending criminal activity by Frank Raines. Raines was committing fraud to inflate his pay check yet never was prosecuted criminally and only paid a small amount of his ill gotten gains back to the tax payers. He got stinking rich with fraud against the tax payers and walked away laughing. Plenty of people lived for years in houses they never paid a dime for and cried “boo hoo – I’m a victim”. Why aren’t they going to jail?
This whole mess was started by the fed govt and there are all manner of people that should have gone to prison, but the bigots on the left can only see evil from white males at financial institutions. Wake up!

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Gregory

30 May 2013

Ryan, I’m going to guess the person with MIT credentials that you respect isn’t an atmospheric physics or meterology Phd that spent any quality time with Lindzen. I’m going to hope it wasn’t someone like the bigot Chris Mooney (English major from Yale) who touts their Knight Science Fellowship to MIT, a program which puts them on campus for a few weeks and hones their skill at cranking out politically correct science by press release pieces but does not impart anything close to a real science education.
Other observations… the “what skeptics think” is classic straw man as I don’t know of any “skeptic” who thinks in that ladder caricature, and the entire “skepticalscience” website is purely warming activist polemics by a guy with arguably fewer science credentials than even me or George, just a BS in Physics, and Cook never actually made a living applying that technical knowledge; he’d been a cartoonist, now apparently a grad student in psychology trying hard to figure out how to remove the fallacies in argumentums ad verecundiam and populum in climate science writing and convince them “deniers”.
That ladder cherrypicked endpoints; warmists generating figures to impress the weak minded tend to pick chart segments that start on a low and end on a high, and there was a local maximum circa 2010.
The current UAH dataset is graphed here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
BTW he UAH dataset closely mirrors the RSS dataset, it isn’t an outlier, and unlike the land temperature record that has been greatly fudged over time, is a measure of the lower atmosphere of the entire planet, including over the seas.
Finally, even the alarmist-in-chief James Hansen wrote in a journal in January this year that the five year smoothed terrestrial land temperature average (HadCRUT4 I think) has been flat for a decade, which basically means temps have been flat for about 15 years. Of course, Hansen thinks it will be roaring back real soon now, no time to lose but you might consider that not a single one of his predictions has come true, going back to the graphs he used to scare the Congress back in the 80’s.
Care to share a bit more about this mystery person with the MIT “credentials”?

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Ryan Mount

30 May 2013

Well I’m super happy this stimulated discussion.
I just am looking for feedback. Not caustic ethos argumentation, sans my regrettable (and innocent) named-dropping of my MIT colleague (actually a boss, whom I almost never agree with). It was solely an adjective to describe someone who is way beyond the pay grade of this blog. So please accept my retraction of “MIT.”
I generally don’t give a rat’s ass either way on Climate Change. I just want the facts, like everything else, so I can plan.
1) do I need to move? (are the waves gonna drown me in Alta Sierra? Is the Well going dry? Note: I have no well.)
2) how much is this going to cost me? (new taxes? more al gore movies to suffer through?)
3) when will the end of the world come (or not) so I can stop listening to the constant back and forth about climate change? I seriously would like something to end, and I appreciate your (Greg) observation that “all this non sense will just melt away if AGW is wrong” line. I pray, you’re correct.
4) when will everyone STFU about it? I’m serious, can we talk about something else like an Oprah comeback?
5) Why is Al Gore such an asshat? why is he making so much money on everyone being so stupid?
6) How can I start a 501 3c and get people to give me money and grants? I’m thinking about starting up a 501 3c to help parents get rid of their spoiled teenagers in climate change re-education camps. Maybe I should just make an iPhone app for this? I’ve read the 990 forms of these outfits, and consulted with a tax person. It seems a 501 3c is a great way to bury expenses and assets.
So many questions. That’s just the short list.
Anyhow, I was looking, and I’m still waiting, for criticism of the data and the trends. And perhaps a considerate and disciplined [heh] discussion beyond “that guy doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about” or “he’s getting lots of grant money, so he can’t be trusted” or whatever. That line of thinking, which is generous to call it thinking, is about the sophistication I would expect from my 17 year old. (see #6 above)

That ladder cherrypicked endpoints; warmists generating figures to impress the weak minded tend to pick chart segments that start on a low and end on a high, and there was a local maximum circa 2010.
Obviously that criticism is just as arbitrary as the actual chart itself. Which is what I was assuming: that the data was picking points that supported their perspective. But so what? It’s still data? Are you (Greg) disputing the data now? Care to expand? I bet we could throw the data into excel and make our own graph with equally snarky snipes at the opposition.
However, I appreciate your attention to detail, Greg. It’s a skill sorely lacking these days.

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Ryan Mount

30 May 2013

BTW, I shared your comments with him and his tribe, Greg. I’ll let you know what they comment.
Cheers.

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Gregory

30 May 2013

The chart that so impressed you is not a reasonable starting point. If you really want to talk about the science, actually picking reviewed journal articles with data that’s traceable would be better.
“Are you (Greg) disputing the data now? Care to expand?”
And have you stopped beating your wife, Ryan? Let’s leave the informal fallacies behind, shall we?
“I bet we could throw the data into excel and make our own graph with equally snarky snipes at the opposition.”
What data is that?
I really don’t think drawing snarky trend lines on raw temperature data tells anyone a damned thing, Ryan, and am at a loss to understand why you would think it would. Correlation with CO2 tells you nothing about causality, and John Cook’s misnamed SkepticalScience blog isn’t about the science, it’s about polemics, with comments among the most censored in the climate blogosphere.
The IPCC was formed to discover how bad CO2 was and to get treaties in place to get the first world to pay the 3rd world for the damage before the real work of actually understanding climate without politics messing it up was undertaken. The possible role of galactic cosmic rays, modulated by the heliosphere, in producing aerosols involved in cloud generation as an idea is less than 20 years old and real data is only about 10. The existence of the Pacific Decadal and Atlantic Multidecadal oceanic Oscillations is only about 10 years old.
The unbridled alarm of the IPCC AR4 is currently being dialed way back. There’s a wave of papers with estimates of the sensitivity to CO2 being closer to 1.5 degrees than the scary 3, 4 or 5 or more degrees for a doubling of CO2 that the unverified models that drove the IPCC AR4 predicted, and below 2, really no one expects any sort of a tipping point. All the temperature changes to date are within historic natural variations and to become alarmed about them is about as rational as Chicken Little’s concern about raindrops.
Chill out.
It’s just not as simple as the alarmists have made it out to be, Ryan, and you really aren’t helping things with your snark.
The UAH and RSS datasets, derived from satellite measurements, are sliced and diced less than the HadCRU products, but Hansen’s NASA GISS data has been ‘adjusted’, and the plots of the adjustments over the years sure look like a monotonic thumb on the scale increasing most every year.
If you boss has a physical science degree, turn them onto “Celestial driver of phanerozoic climate?” by Shaviv & Veizer (2003) and, just to make it clear, the simplified version of SV03 shown in Figure 8 of the Svensmark Cosmoclimatology paper (Astronomy & Geophysics, March ? 2007). The Solanki letter to nature, “Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years” of 2004 is also on my short list. If this cabal of yours wants to chat about it, filtering words through you might not be the most efficient communication method. Have them write here.

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Russ Steele

30 May 2013

Gregory
Here is another paper your might want to check out that supports the influence of cosmic ray on clouds and the climate: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/4/1215.full
Midlatitude cooling caused by geomagnetic field minimum during polarity reversal
Abstract
The climatic effects of cloud formation induced by galactic cosmic rays (CRs) has recently become a topic of much discussion. The CR–cloud connection suggests that variations in geomagnetic field intensity could change climate through modulation of CR flux. This hypothesis, however, is not well-tested using robust geological evidence. Here we present paleoclimate and paleoenvironment records of five interglacial periods that include two geomagnetic polarity reversals. Marine oxygen isotope stages 19 and 31 contain both anomalous cooling intervals during the sea-level highstands and the Matuyama–Brunhes and Lower Jaramillo reversals, respectively. This contrasts strongly with the typical interglacial climate that has the temperature maximum at the sea-level peak. The cooling occurred when the field intensity dropped to <40% of its present value, for which we estimate >40% increase in CR flux. The climate warmed rapidly when field intensity recovered. We suggest that geomagnetic field intensity can influence global climate through the modulation of CR flux

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Russ Steele

30 May 2013

Ryan,
Here is a compendium of papers on SOLAR INFLUENCE ON CLIMATE: COSMIC RAYS, with links to the paper mentioned by Gregory
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/cosmic_rays.pdf
Would like to hear your feedback and from your MIT friends.

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Gregory

31 May 2013

Russ, Ryan’s associates would probably look at that SPPI paper, unsigned and with anonymous authorship, about as seriously as I look at any “skepticalscience” screed. While I think it does a reasonable job of surveying the subject, it’s made to appear like a paper in the peer reviewed literature.
Yes, that “Midlatitude cooling caused by geomagnetic field minimum during polarity reversal” is interesting but the pieces I picked to throw at Ryan were chosen because I found them particularly interesting when I was in my journey from warmer to scoffer. Suffice it to say to Ryan’s betters that there are many reasonable papers out there that support GCR theory with real observation and not scary computer models that are not only unverified but have actually been shown to be wrong.

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Gregory

01 June 2013

Ryan… while we’re waiting, since you were considering the pay grade of those MIT guys, you might ponder this ranking of colleges by ROI that is being touted by former Ed Sec’y Bill Bennett:
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013/full-list-of-schools
And here it is by pay grade:
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013/full-list-of-schools
There are a lot of great schools out there, and MIT is but one.

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Gregory

01 June 2013

Damn cut and paste flub… the ROI list is here:
http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013

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Bill Tozer

02 June 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37OWL7AzvHo

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Bill Tozer

02 June 2013

Opps. Sorry Gregory. I too did a cut and paste flub. This short one is what I wanted to post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFldSKSCTkk

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Gregory

02 June 2013

With luck, Ryan will follow the sounds of the crickets here that are awaiting his return back to this thread.

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Gregory

04 June 2013

Ryan… ?

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Gregory

05 June 2013

Ryan… ?
Bueller?
…
Bueller?

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Gregory

16 June 2013

Ryan never did come back with his MIT educated better’s opinions. Here’s some more fossil fuel on the fire…
It isn’t looking good for the IPCC vision. Here’s one reason why, graphs by John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT.png
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-observations-for-tropical-tropospheric-temperature/
Learned and pithy comments that seem appropriate to me are:
“One clean experiment is worth a thousand dirty equations”, J.Arthur Campbell, founding Dean of Faculty and founding chair of the chemistry department at Harvey Mudd College,
and
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”, Richard Feynman.

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