August 06, 2011

How F*cked Are We?

My my...

That about sums it up.

Posted by LindaSoG at 06:32 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 11, 2009

Presented without commentary

none needed.

That's today's Day by Day Cartoon by Chris Muir. Click here to donate and help keep it going. (If the link doesn't cooperate for you, go to the Day by Day main site, and hit the donate button, it's on the upper right. Thanks)

Posted by LindaSoG at 03:40 PM | Comments (4)

July 10, 2009

Meet Ian Plimer

He's an Australian geologist, and the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick:

The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.

...

So go on then, Prof. What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong? ‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.

All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.

‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’

The article is a fascinating read, the story behind the publishing of the book is no less than amazing on its own. It made me sit up a little straighter, it made my fingers twitch, the activist in me was re-activated and I once again wanted to do something to stop this stupidity. And that's just from reading the article. I'd probably go nuts if I read the book.

Reading Plimer’s Heaven And Earth is at once an enlightening and terrifying experience. Enlightening because, after 500 pages of heavily annotated prose (the fruit of five years’ research), you are left in no doubt that man’s contribution to the thing they now call ‘climate change’ was, is and probably always will be negligible. Terrifying, because you cannot but be appalled by how much money has been wasted, how much unnecessary regulation drafted because of a ‘problem’ that doesn’t actually exist. (South Park, as so often, was probably the first to point this out in a memorable episode where Al Gore turns up to warn the school kids about a terrible beast, looking a bit like the Gruffalo, known as ManBearPig.)

Has it come in time to save the day, though? If there’s any justice, Heaven And Earth will do for the cause of climate change realism what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change alarmism. But as Plimer well knows, there is now a powerful and very extensive body of vested interests up against him: governments like President Obama’s, which intend to use ‘global warming’ as an excuse for greater taxation, regulation and protectionism; energy companies and investors who stand to make a fortune from scams like carbon trading; charitable bodies like Greenpeace which depend for their funding on public anxiety; environmental correspondents who need constantly to talk up the threat to justify their jobs.

Does he really believe his message will ever get through? Plimer smiles. ‘If you’d asked any scientist or doctor 30 years ago where stomach ulcers come from, they would all have given the same answer: obviously it comes from the acid brought on by too much stress. All of them apart from two scientists who were pilloried for their crazy, whacko theory that it was caused by a bacteria. In 2005 they won the Nobel prize. The “consensus” was wrong.’

What a dose of reality that is. We do have that magical number 60, and all the activism in the world is not going to get around it. Why? Because there are too many idiots out there:

Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’

What will the United States of America be like after 30 years of cap and trade, socialism and spreading the wealth? Take a good hard look at Cuba, I fear therein lies the answer.

Posted by LindaSoG at 06:50 AM | Comments (10)

March 09, 2009

1933 looms ever closer

During the Great Depression, unemployment was at 25%, and the not so funny thing about that statistic, it was a non-farm job statistic. It didn't include farm workers.

Just the thought of double-digit unemployment is enough to strike panic through the heart and soul of America, and 8.1% unemployment reported last week was enough to send us reeling.

Last month, hundreds slept on the streets of Miami hoping to keep their place in line for a open firefighter's position, and at last week's local community college job fair, they turned away over a thousand hopeful participants.

8.1% national unemployment? Hmph. Here in Florida, they say it's 8.8%, Metro Orlando is reporting 9%, Brevard County is reporting over 9%, in California, they say it's over 10%. and... according to Shadowstats... if we used the same methodology to track unemployment today that we used in 1933... the U.S. unemployment rate would at 19%. Now, take it easy, I know all the controversy that a mere mention of Shadowstats will generate, but before you go off the deep end, there are other things to consider before you run with the 8.1% national average the government claims. Remember, trust... but verify.

So... when it comes to verification of national unemployment numbers, where else do you go but to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yes? Well, it turns out that BLS releases unemployment statistics under six separate numbered categories every month, U-1 through U-6. U-3 is the Official Unemployment Rate, the 8.1% number the newspapers gave us for February, 2009, which is up from 7.6% in January, and which was up from 7.2 in December, 2008.

But U-3 on it's own ain't much. You see, it doesn't reflect the total unemployed in this country.

U-3 includes only a percentage of the unemployed and it's not immediately clear what that percentage includes. What is clear is that it specifically excludes several categories of unemployed Americans, including those defined as "marginally attached workers" who are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past, the recent past being defined as 4 weeks. It also specifically excludes "discouraged workers" which are a subset of the marginally attached, those who have given a job-market related reason for not looking currently for a job.

So. What's the real unemployment rate in the United States, the total unemployed? For that, you gotta go to U-6, and it's clear. It's very clear.

If you add everyone in, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the real unemployment rate in this country is currently at 14.8%.

Not quite the 19% that ShadowStat is claiming, but it's far cry from 8.1% claim the government is telling you about and well into the double-digit unemployment we are all so afraid of.

Posted by LindaSoG at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)