Yodel-lay-hee-hooey

The implosion of the IPCC keeps getting better. Just the latest, from the Telegraph:

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [there'll be more--ed.], which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps. . . .

Professor Richard Tol, one of the report's authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes." . . .

Peer-reviewed anecdotes.

"Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.

"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense."

Peer-reviewed nonsense.

(via Tim Blair)

SOTU

I faded a few times, but did Obama say a word about Global Warming? I don't think so.

Update: I faded at the wrong point. He did mention it.

And I'm Angelina Jolie

The pirate whose parrot always says he (the pirate) oughta be in pictures (total suck-up) found this long-winded gem (pdf) from the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom on poor Wart. It goes off on tangents, but is worth skimming for a few funny quotes, such as describing Wart as a "lanky, long-haired fifty-eight-year old with movie-star good looks . . ."

One I liked, the author quoting a CU facultoid:

There just isn’t a lot of energy out there to mount the barricades for a guy [whom] everybody hates.

Don't know why they felt it necessary to insert the "whom," but, no kidding. And one more:

One can also question the severity of the sanction. Churchill did not have to be dismissed. Plagiarists and charlatans remain on other faculties.

'Deed they do. 'Deed they do.

Update: Wart is actually 62 or 63.

Anecdotal

Et lunch today at Tom's Diner on Colfax and Pearl. Old-timers will remember it as the Denver Diner, late-night home of prostitutes, trannies, morphodites, goths, punks, hippies and other assorted riff and raff.

Anyway, I was sitting in a booth a couple down from the cash register, and in the less than 45 minutes I was there, four (count 'em) guys came in and asked the waitress if there was any work. Nope.

Couldn't find December figures for Denver unemployment, but in November it was 6.9 percent (nationally 10 percent), while for Colorado it went from 6.9 in November to 7.5 last month.

Much better than the nation as a whole, of course, but after seeing that, I don't know that I trust the figures.

Update: Sorry for the nonsensical penultimate sentence, which I've fixed. Also, commenter Noel Sheperdson points out that the diner was called the White Spot back in the day, not the Denver Diner. Christ, I'm incompetent. Love, Barack.

Haloscan: Shutdown!

Well, isn't that nice. Alert: "Haloscan is being shut down on: Feb 10, 2010. The Haloscan hardware and software is physically failing, and we have no choice but to discontinue the service."

What would Kirk say? Somebody forgot to feed the squirrels.

Wart hits the campaign trail

Involuntarily. In a Youtube campaign ad, CU Regent Tom Lucero, who's running for Congress from Boulder's 4th District, goes somewhat nonsequituriously (?) from Bill Ayers to Wart ("Took care of that mess in Colorado"), to cleaning up Congress. Short, but weird:



The Colorado Independent (via) quotes a hunk of interview the Boulder Weekly did with Wart in 2005 at the beginning of the scandal:

This is transparently clear: Anything that [Lucero] doesn’t like, whether he knows anything about it or not, is to be gone. He has announced—telegraphed—the fact that he doesn’t like anything having to do with cultural studies, ethnic studies, dissident political studies, gay rights. None of that has anything to do with proper scholarship in his mind, not that he knows a goddamned thing about any of it. And it’s not that he’s a particularly malevolent individual. He’s representative of the whole. That’s the mentality that goes into this. This is a book-burning exercise. It’s a stifling of political discourse.

And here I am stuck in the First District. Lucero voted to fire Churchill, of course.

Just saw Glenn Beck

For the first time this afternoon, doing his hour-long takedown of Communism, which I heard about at Instapundit or somewhere. Eh. But he didn't cry, he didn't talk about being a drunk or his mother's (I think) suicide, and he didn't conspiracy monger (much). The only thing bugsome were the oblong hipster doofus glasses he wore.

It was a decent show with some good clips, and may well have been instructive to people who, you know, know nothing about history.

In short, he seemed perfectly sane. Am I wrong about that?

BTW, I don't watch Fox, I don't watch CNN, I don't watch network TV, and I especially don't watch local news. Local newsguy Kent Brockman explains.

Remember when . . .

Ohhhhhhhh--ohohbama! A pic from the good old days.



And more old-timey insanity.

Funniest comment

Over at Daily K:

This is what happens when the leader we elected as a progressive, fails to be progressive. He's become a leader of platitudes and no action. I'm sorely dissappointed with this administration myself. Ron Paul/Kucinich is starting to look like at least an honest option for 2012.

Ron Paul/Kucinich. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Read the thread. Besides the breastbeating, the contempt and hatred for people who voted the wrong way is huge. And I've always wanted to do a little compendium of the slogans they include at the bottom of their comments. Arrogance distilled. "without the ants the rainforest dies."

Couple of pics

From our friend Famous Potatoes, who recently and inexplicably came to in Central Illinois, where he took these:


Winter is good.

Had to happen

Danny Glover on the Haitian earthquake and global warming. He and Pat "True Story" Robertson ought to do "Dumb and Dumberer: The Singularity."

.

(via the great Tim Blair, who claims that, as opposed to the old days, he will fish the cig butt out of the drink he just asked you if he could finish. He's all about healthy living these days.)

Climategate stuff

A very, very long (I'm only about a quarter way through it) but utterly devastating chronological look at the Climategate e-mails by John P. Costella (not sure where I found it mentioned).

Another chronology, this one of the breaking of the Climategate story (via WUWT).

And finally, this laughable bilge appeared a few days ago in the Independent (even more AGW-rabid than the Grauniad, if you can believe it), but I haven't had time to make fun of it: "The end of consumerism: Our way of life is 'not viable.'" Read for yourself (no moving lips, please), but I just have to quote one comment on the piece:

Capital fought tooth and nail to destroy an economic system that held out the hope for real simplicity, viz, communism (a system centred around communes and notable for its lack of consumerables as was often pointed out as its failure vis-a-vis capitalism), what makes anyone think. (especially the naive Greens) that capital would be willing to make any concessions to anyone or anything, even the environment. It will take a reinvention of communism to put us on track to some sort of steady state but steady states and profit do not mix.

Update: Now I'm about halfway through Costella's disarticulation of the e-mails. Hey, he's got a pretty good sense of humor, something notably (and as always, significantly) absent on the AGW side.

Ain't that interesting . . .

Post: "Sources: Ritter expected to withdraw from governor's race."

I'm hongr--ack

Another thing to look forward to under Obamacare. Grauniad: "Care homes forcing elderly to have feeding tubes fitted." Subhed: "Thousands of dementia sufferers told they must have surgery to gain entry."

This is not a joke. I repeat, this is not a--what were we talking about?

Update: Well, as long as I can watch my shows.

How embarrassing

Nice pic on the Post's front page of the fireworks on the Mall last night:



Unfortunately, the caption reads: "Tens of thousands of people filled the 16th Street Mall on Thursday night for a New Year's Eve show worthy of Denver's status as the Big Apple of the High Plains."

Big Horse Apple, maybe. I got some pics too, but they all sucked.