The Devil's Chaplain

Are we nothing more or less?

2012-01-23T18:52:00.000-08:00

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Astonishing Molecular Machines
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Prompt criticality explosion @ Fukushima Unit 3 spent fuel pool? JHC!!!

2011-11-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

New TEPCO Photographs Substantiate Significant Damage to Fukushima Unit 3 from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ...

2011-11-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

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"A Is For Atom" Redux

2011-04-04T20:48:00.000-07:00

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The film shows that from very early on - as early as 1964 - US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But that their warnings were repeatedly ignored.
The film tells the story of the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union. It shows how the way the technologies were developed was shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And how that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants.
Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric.
Adam Curtis__The Medium and the Message
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How the news media is damning us all to climate purgatory.

2011-02-22T19:57:00.000-08:00

As a reasonably well-educated and literate lay person (corporate lawyer specializing in large real estate projects) I feel compelled to observe that I, on a regular basis, depend on the news media for information as to what matters I should be concerned with (economic trends, new technologies, health risks such as seasonal flu outbreaks, new medical treatments, new scientific developments, etc.).
This information heavily influences my opinions, decision-making and voting preferences. In all of these areas, I depend very heavily on reporters to evaluate, summarize and communicate accurate information — and not to simply serve as stenographers for nitwits. Thus, while I can’t look to financial reporters to provide investment advice, I do expect them to be familiar enough with their area of supposed expertise to call out or cull out information (propaganda?) that is obviously false, misleading or incomplete in light of objective evidence.
I am dumbfounded that climate science is somehow seen as some special sort of bizzaro world where what I see as the normal expectation of news consumers (factual vetting, providing context and assessing implications based on discussions with real authorities) is thrown out the window in favor of he-said/she-said. In what universe do we expect particle physicists to be personally responsible for communicating the scientific implications of their research directly to the public, and then blame the physicists if the public doesn’t “get it”? Ditto for genetic researchers, astronomers, biologists, etc.
I came late to the party regarding AGW – until 2008, the issue was on my radar as a “century away” theoretical problem — it seemed like for every “this will be a big problem” article there was a “no problemo” article. I was accordingly floored in 2008 when I had to do due diligence research for a proposed investment in renewable energy to start reading primary materials and discovering that my media derived “understanding” was grossly in error. (And yes, in an effort to evaluate “the other side of the argument”, I did wind up visiting most of the prominent internet skeptic sites and looked at materials from Singer, Lindzen, Spencer, etc. – I concluded they were virtually useless in providing accurate information.)
I conclude that the views expressed by the moderators, Dr. Curry and others as to the lack of responsibility of journalists in this arena is directly contrary to the (apparently misplaced) assumptions and expectations that lay folk such as I bring to the table – that journalists will provide factual vetting, context and implications based on information in their respective field viewed as most authoritative. If this is the case, and if the former view is correct, media are just “filling space” with random noise and are effectively useless (or worse) in helping ordinary people assess risks, make decisions and make sense of the world.
The Press and Climate: An Anti-Testimonial
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Somebody, kick the dog.

2011-02-22T19:39:00.000-08:00

When the planet warms a lot in a relatively short period of time, a particularly nasty condition can develop in the oceans, known as anoxia. Since the polar regions warm more than the equator, the temperature difference between latitudes decreases. As global ocean circulation is driven by this temperature difference, ocean currents weaken significantly and the water becomes relatively stagnant. Without ocean turnover, oxygen doesn’t get mixed in – and it doesn’t help that warmer water can hold less oxygen to begin with. As a result of this oxygen depletion, bacteria in the ocean begins to produce hydrogen sulfide (H2S) instead. That’s what makes rotten eggs smell bad, and it’s actually poisonous in large enough quantities. So if an organism wasn’t killed off by abrupt global warming, and was able to survive without much oxygen in the ocean (or didn’t live in the ocean at all), it would probably soon be poisoned by the hydrogen sulfide being formed in the oceans and eventually released into the atmosphere. Extinction and Climate
That can't be good, can it?
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Fly ... er ... float like the wind.

2011-02-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

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First deployment of a commercial semi-submersible floating platform
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In just 3 human lifetimes.

2011-02-11T16:53:00.000-08:00

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100% renewable energy in Europe [& America] by 2050

2011-02-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

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Now we're talkin!
Once upon a time, long ago, some people had a wonderful dream, of a Europe [& America] running on green, renewable energy. However, there seemed to be no way of doing this, so they were mostly dismissed as idealists and hippies.
However, many years later in 2011, renewable energy technologies had developed so much and become such a normal part of life that a 100% renewable energy economy was considered an economically and technologically realistic vision for Europe [& America] in 2050 [if not sooner] and supported by 200 companies.
The case for 100% renewables is plain. In July 2009, the G8 leaders agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% before 2050. The EU countries have already unilaterally agreed to cut emissions by 80% in 2050 and by 95% if other countries sign up to similar action. Given that transport and agriculture will still produce emissions the power sector will need to be 100% carbon free.
Supporting 100% renewable energy in 2050

Past time for all patriotic red-blooded Americans to sign a Declaration of sustainable prosperity, employment & technological leadership:
The answers to today’s challenges do not lie beyond our reach – they lie in the palm of our hands. By promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, we will be able to tackle both security of energy supply and climate change, while at the same time creating a future-oriented sustainable economy with high-quality green jobs.
The availability of renewable energy sources is vast enough to meet our energy needs many times over, while respecting ecological limits and social justice. In one day, the sunlight which reaches the earth produces enough energy to meet the current global power needs for eight years.[2] Numerous studies demonstrate the technical and economic scope of the EU’s energy efficiency and renewable energy potential: 100% renewable energy is entirely feasible in 2050 if the right measures are taken today!

Tour de France 2011 - Le parcours

2011-01-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

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Wheels roll, samedi 2 Juillet, Passage du Gois.

Le Tour 2011
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Global Warming is becoming more & more extreme.

2011-01-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

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Isaac Asimov on the Greenhouse Effect: 1989

2011-01-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

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Or in 1989?
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Isaac Asimov on the Greenhouse Effect: 1977

2011-01-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

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What were you doing in 1977?
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Where we gonna go?

2010-12-17T12:24:00.000-08:00

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Supercar

2010-12-16T23:18:00.000-08:00

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Wind Power 1 & 2

2010-12-16T23:12:00.000-08:00

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The Runaway Greenhouse Effect

2010-12-16T20:04:00.000-08:00

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Big Gay Devils

2010-12-07T02:10:00.000-08:00

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Crimen sollicitationis
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Ark Encounter: There be dragons.

2010-12-02T20:20:00.000-08:00

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Ride 'um, Guvnah. Weehah!

So what happened to all the dinosaurs, daddy?

For even more Creationist fun, take the whole family to see Barefoot and Progressive.

"I want to be in Kentucky when the end of the world comes, because it's always 20 years behind." ~ Mark Twain.

If we wanna grow, we gotta go were the customers are.

2010-11-24T11:14:00.000-08:00

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Rebirth of the American Auto Industry

2010-11-22T22:55:00.000-08:00

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Shine, baby, shine!

2010-11-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

In [the] future, German solar module makers will not only be forced to export more but also rely on their image when they expand their international presence. This works for some industries. The question is whether it will work for the solar sector.

Is there a "Made in Germany" premium for solar?
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The Greatest Threat to the Planet

2010-11-05T23:27:00.000-07:00

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The Wind Power of Exponential Growth

2010-10-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

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And 22.8% annual growth rate (CAGR) over 5 years to 447.7 GW by Dec 31, 2014. That's equivalent to approx. 447 nuclear plants worth of generating capacity.
BTM estimates that global installed cumulative capacity will increase at a CAGR of 22.8% between 2009 and 2014, reaching 447,689MW by the end of 2014.
45 GW more projected for 2011 alone.
Wind turbine installations will bounce back in 2011 after stalling this year, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Turbines with an electricity-generation capacity of 45 gigawatts are likely to be erected next year, up from about 37.7 gigawatts this year.
Wind Power Turbine Installations Forecast to Rebound in 2011 After Slump
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Feed-in Tariffs USA

2010-10-25T21:27:00.000-07:00

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And the walls come tumbling down.

In a ruling 21 October 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) effectively cleared the way for multi-tiered feed-in tariffs for various renewable energy technologies, like the programs found in Ontario, Canada and across Europe. FERC's ruling "clarified" an earlier decision that had roiled proposed feed-in tariff policies at the state level in the US.

"The FERC decision clears the way for State utility regulatory commissions to implement FITs and we look forward to working with California utilities to implement FITs in a responsible way that creates local jobs and clean renewable generation."

Federal Regulator Blasts Open Door to Differentiated Feed-in Tariffs in USA
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Keep Texas Oil Money Out of California Politics

2010-10-21T02:26:00.000-07:00

NO on Proposition 23: Proposition 23 is the Dirty Energy Proposition sponsored by Big Oil that would halt implementation of AB 32. Because California establishes economic and social trends for the nation, this election will tell the world whether the US is ready to lead the clean global economy of the 21st Century.

NO on Proposition 26: Proposition 26 is a dangerous initiative that eliminates the ability of state agencies and the legislature to hold polluters accountable for harm caused by their activities. Prop 26 would redefine environmental and health fees as "taxes" and requiring them to pass by a two-thirds supermajority.

YES on Proposition 21: When it comes to state park protection, NRDC Action Fund supports Proposition 21, a measure that will help keep our state parks open and accessible to all.

YES on Proposition 25: We support Proposition 25, which would help end budget gridlock by removing the two-third vote requirement to pass the state budget, making it a simple majority vote.

NRDC Action Fund Recommends: NO on Props 23 & 26; YES on 21 & 25
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Wind Energy 101

2010-10-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

Energy 101 - Wind Turbines from U.S. Department of Energy on Vimeo.

The Tides of Wind Power

2010-10-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

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Good to see somebody over at NEI Nuclear Notes has his thinking cap on.

None of this should be construed as objections or as a way to sow doubt over a wind project on a nuclear site. Quite the contrary – an infrastructure project this big raises innumerable questions that will find answers as it moves along, but that doesn’t mean it should be stopped or unnecessarily hindered.

After all, we’re all electricity buffs, aren’t we?

You betchum!

The Wind and the Tide
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Global warming, where?

2010-09-23T23:53:00.000-07:00

This is what Global Warming looks like from NRDC Broadcast Videos on Vimeo.

Hot, Hot, Hot!

2010-09-13T22:34:00.000-07:00

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Consistent with widespread media reports of extreme heat and adverse impacts in various places, the latest results from ERA-Interim indicate that the average temperature over land areas of the extratropical northern hemisphere reached a new high in July 2010. May and June 2010 were also unusually warm.
2010 Russian wildfires
2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia
2003 European heat wave
2003 San Diego Cedar wildfire
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Death is the Road to Awe.

2010-09-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

Timescapes: "Death is the Road to Awe" from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Огонь? Какой пожар, друг? [нажмите]

2010-09-06T23:47:00.000-07:00

Fire? What fire, mate? [click]

2010-09-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

What life-forms might we expect to find on a water planet?

2010-08-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

How hot is it?

2010-08-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

Let's try & keep this simple.

2010-07-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

Doctor Feynman, I presume?

2010-07-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

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Have you heard this one? It's a tale, full of sound & fury, told by & about Dr. Judith Curry at Climate Progress and RealClimate and elsewhere upon the stage...

Curry jumps the shark
Hey JC, JC, that's not alright by me
How the mighty have fallen

If climate blogs can be believed, Dr. Judith Curry of GIT has been selectively mining intellectual, if not elitist, quotables like Steven Chu, Peter Gleick, and Richard Feynman in defense of some d[r]aft tribalistic notion of hers or, just as likely, somebody else's.

Should this all be very likely, before she makes her entry for Act 3, Dr. Curry may want to go back to the basics and ask herself, what would a sober, ever-thoughtful Dr. Feynman have to say about her manic cherry-picking?

Or, if God be of her tribe, maybe hook up with Jimmy Swaggart south of the border somewhere to repent & beg forgiveness.

Thus go brief candles & walking shadows.
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"We're insulting our global environment..."

2010-07-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Oil, oil everywhere, but not a drop to drink. (click)

2010-07-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

What oil? [click slick]

2010-06-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore...

2010-06-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

Unabashed, undeterred, ungulated sperm machine.

2010-06-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

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This'll deflate a few egos.

And the winner is...

2010-06-07T09:33:00.000-07:00

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Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution Is True, with too much travel time on his hands, shared with all the infidel world his twenty all-time favorite movies.

So, at Jerry's invite, we shared twenty-some of our own:

The Ten Commandments (Charlton Heston & Yul Brynner) [1956]
North by Northwest (Cary Grant) [1959]
Cool Hand Luke (Paul Newman) [1967]
The Graduate (Dustin Hoffman) [1967]
Easy Rider (Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper & Jack Nicholson) [1969]
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (Newman & Robert Redford) [1969]
Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) [1970]
Patton (George C. Scott) [1970]
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (Newman) [1972]
Godfather I (Brando & Pacino) [1972]
Godfather II (Pacino & DeNiro) [1974]
Three Days of the Condor (Redford & Faye Dunaway) [1975]
Shogun (miniseries) [1980]
Excalibur (Uther Pendragon & Igrayne) [1981]
Blade Runner ("All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.") [1982]
The Terminator ("I'll be back.") [1984]
Dead Poets Society (Captain, Oh Captain!") [1989]
Godfather III (Pacino's silent scream) [1990]
A Few Good Men ("You can't handle the truth!") [1992]
Reservoir Dogs (Mensroom with German Shepard) [1992]
Unforgiven ("Deserves got nothing to do with it.") [1992]
Forrest Gump ("Run, Forest, run!") [1994]
Jerry McGuire ("Show me the money!") [1996]
Good Will Hunting ("How do you like them apples?") [1997]
Band of Brothers (miniseries) [2001]
Man on Fire (Denzel Washington) [2004]

And there be a legion of others.

The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made [thru 2003?]
IMDb Charts: IMDb Top 250
ALL-TIME 100 Movies
ROTTEN TOMATOES: Best Reviewed Movies of All Time
100 Must See Movies: The Essential Men’s Movie Library
Wiki List of films (by year)

Surely, you've got a couple in there somewhere, no?
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Gov. Haley Barbour, got toothpaste? [click dying seabird]

2010-06-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

BP CEO Tony Hayward, que pasa? [click top-hat maneuver]

2010-05-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

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Live feeds from remotely operated vehicles (ROV)

The Oil Drum: Deepwater Oil Spill
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Beach Closed: Eco-disaster in the making... [click beach sign]

2010-05-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Oilmageddon: It ain't pretty... [click oil-soaked pelican]

2010-05-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

2010-05-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Everything dies. Live with it!

2010-05-07T18:27:00.000-07:00

China outpaces the U.S. in wind power, too.

2010-05-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

A graveyard for religions:

2010-04-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

Extreme ice loss, no sh*t!

2010-04-28T14:16:00.001-07:00

All roads lead to Rome.

2010-04-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

Vatican's new theme song.

2010-04-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

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If there's something strange
in your neighborhood
Who ya gonna call?
JEFF LENA

If there's something weird
and it don't look good
Who ya gonna call?
JEFF LENA

An invisible man [Hey, we didn't write the g*ddamn lyrics]
sleeping in your bed
Who ya gonna call?
JEFF LENA

I ain't afraid of no ghosts
I ain't afraid of no ghosts
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Smartest man in the whole world... Par Deux

2010-04-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

Praise the Lord & pass the pedophilia.

2010-04-16T01:14:00.000-07:00

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Fr. René Bissey got 18 years for buggering 11 boys over 7 years. Good on him!

In October 2000, Father René Bissey was sentenced to 18 years in jail for sexually abusing 11 boys between 1989 and 1996. Bissey's bishop, Pierre Pican of the Diocese of Bayeux-Lisieux, had known of the abuse but refused to report Bissey to French authorities and instead sent him for psychiatric treatment.

And his Bishop Pierre Pican got 3 months for not reporting Pere René's rampage of mass child rape. Too goddamn lenient, if you ask the enraged mothers.

Pican's actions resulted in his own conviction in 2001 for "failure to report a sex crime against a minor younger than 15 years old." The bishop was sentenced to three months in prison. That sentence led Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, then head of the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy -- the department overseeing Catholic clergy policies around the world -- to write Bishop Pican a letter effusively praising his actions in shielding the abusive priest. At the time, Castrillon Hoyos was a colleague of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- now Pope Benedict XVI.

But then, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos rejoices & congratulates Bishop Pican for hiding the rape crimes from the police.

"I congratulate you on not having reported a priest to the civil authorities," Castrillon Hoyos wrote to Pican on Sept. 8, 2001. "You have done well, and I rejoice at having an associate in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all the others bishops of the world, will have chosen prison rather than speaking out against his priest-son."

And then copied all his other bishops to keep them all on the same vows-of-silence page.

Castrillon Hoyos added that he would send a copy of the letter to all the bishops' conferences "to encourage the brothers in the episcopate in this very delicate area."

God only knows what other iniquities & crimes against children Cardinal Hoyos has hidden from French authorities all these years.

Top Vatican Official Praised Bishop Who Covered For Child Molester
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Earth to Houston: The heat is on!

2010-04-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

As writer Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the current issue of the New Yorker, “The message from scientists at this point couldn't be clearer: the world's emissions trajectory is extremely dangerous. Goofball weathermen, Climategate, conspiracy theories — these are all a distraction from what's really happening.”

Hurricanes are heat engines, and the ocean waters are already hot, hot, hot.

For those of us living in hurricane-vulnerable areas, keep in mind this ominous measurement: Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic main development area for tropical storms last month were the warmest ever recorded for March, already reaching levels typical of late June. The conjunction of several climate patterns combined with ongoing overall warming of the world's oceans is thought to be the cause.

This is deadly serious stuff. Deal with it!

Despite all the spinning and hot air, the science is solid and global warming is a real, deadly serious concern. It's time to deal with it.

The heat goes on: After a blitz by climate change skeptics, hard science vindicates their targets
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When money talks, God listens.

2010-04-12T13:36:00.000-07:00

In his time, the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado was the greatest fundraiser of the modern Roman Catholic church. He was also a magnetic figure in recruiting young men to religious life in an era when vocations were plummeting. Behind that exalted façade, however, Maciel was a notorious pedophile, and a man who fathered several children by different women. His life was arguably the darkest chapter in the clergy abuse crisis that continues to plague the church.

What's this? For decades, a powerful pedophile bought the silence & protection of the Vatican?

The saga of the disgraced founder of the Legion of Christ, a secretive, cult-like religious order now under Vatican investigation, opens into a deeper story of how one man's lies and betrayal dazzled key figures in the Roman curia and how Maciel's money and success helped him find protection and influence. For years, the heads of Vatican congregations and the pope himself ignored persistent warnings that something was rotten in the community where Legionaries called their leader Nuestro Padre , "Our Father," and considered him a living saint.

The charismatic Mexican, who founded the Legion of Christ in 1941, sent streams of money to Roman curia officials with a calculated end, according to many sources interviewed by NCR: Maciel was buying support for his group and defense for himself, should his astounding secret life become known.

Ordination, pedophilia, bigamy, bribery, criminal conspiracy. What next, canonization?

This much is well established from previous reporting: Maciel was a morphine addict who sexually abused at least 20 Legion seminarians from the 1940s to the '60s. Bishop John McGann of Rockville Centre, N.Y., sent a letter by a former Legion priest with detailed allegations to the Vatican in 1976, 1978 and 1989 through official channels. Nothing happened. Maciel began fathering children in the early 1980s -- three of them by two Mexican women, with reports of a third family with three children in Switzerland, according to El Mundo in Madrid, Spain. Concealing his web of relations, Maciel raised a fortune from wealthy backers, and ingratiated himself with church officials in Rome.

Money paved way for Maciel's influence in the Vatican
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Smartest man in the whole world... NOT!

2010-04-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

Holy sh*t runs down hill too.

2010-04-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

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What's Ratzinger up to today?

In 1980 as archbishop of Munich and Freising, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger unwittingly approved housing for a priest accused of child abuse. A former deputy later said he made the decision.
Cardinal Ratzinger failed to act over complaints during the 1990s about US priest Lawrence Murphy, who is thought to have abused some 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin.
Cardinal Ratzinger allowed a case against Arizona priest Michael Teta to languish at the Vatican for more than a decade despite repeated pleas for his removal.
Cardinal Ratzinger resisted the defrocking of California priest Stephen Kiesle, a convicted offender, saying "good of the universal Church" needed to be considered.

So who does he blame?

The Pope's supporters say he has been unfairly blamed for cases handled by junior staff, and that he has been proactive in addressing child abuse.

Hey, Your Eminence, whatever happened to those Golden Rules?
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
Doesn't that mean that a top Vatican Cardinal is supposed to protect God's innocents from child rapists of the cloth?

Doesn't that mean that the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for some 20 odd years answers to the Almighty for the safety & well-being of sexually abused innocents under his watch, and for the compassion & justice & recompense they so rightly deserve?

And how exactly does facilitating the systematic cover-up of ordained pedophiles reaffirm the historic doctrine and mission of the Church to proclaim the Gospel, Cardinal Ratzinger?

Pope Benedict hit by new Church child abuse allegations
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Holy Money of Christ!

2010-04-09T00:19:00.000-07:00

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Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado (March 10, 1920 – January 30, 2008), the grand-nephew of a recently canonized Mexican saint & a prodigious pederast, pedophile, & bigamist, operated a powerful fundamentalist cult, the Legion of Christ & its bastard child Regnum Christi, deep within the culpable hallowed bowels of Holy Mother Church for over 65 years. God bless his buggering soul.

One of the critical legacies of Pope John Paul II was his unwavering support for the biggest institutional force in the greater conspiracy to commit and hide sex abuse in the Catholic Church. I'm referring to the Legion of Christ, a creepy, vast, enormously wealthy church within a church, run by pederast, pedophile, bigamist and con artist, Marcial Maciel. Maciel, who was addicted to morphine, abused (at least) twenty seminarians and had (at least) two wives, and several children. The Legion at its peak had resources of $33 billion. His chief enablers and supporters were, of course, the theocons, who got a thrill up the leg observing this strictly orthodox leadership cult, combining the political and social attitudes of the 1950s with the oomph of modern day evangelical growth and money.

Compulsive child-rapist Fr. Maciel was also a favorite of Pope John Paul II and the theocons, Richard John Neuhaus, Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Bill Bennett, Bill Donohue, & Mary Ann Glendon.

Richard John Neuhaus was a staunch supporter and dismissed all the charges against Maciel with "moral certainty." Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum spoke at Legion conferences. Bill Bennett spoke at Legion events and said, "I am fortunate enough to know and trust the priests of the Legionaries of Christ. ... The flourishing of the Legionaries is a cause for hope in a time of much darkness." Bill Donohue supported Maciel against now-substantiated charges of abuse. But in some ways, Maciel's most disturbing enabler was Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law Professor and former ambassador to the Vatican.

With the Legion's $33 billion, this ordained mass molester, in the name of Christ, bought sacrosanct silence for his crimes, if not absolution for his abominations, from consecrated Cardinals. Holy Mother of Christ, where's the Wrath of the Almighty when you need Him?

So this multiple rapist and bigamist essentially got away with his crimes because he bought silence from key Vatican officials, at the very least by ingratiating himself by donating huge amounts to the church and at the very most by directly bribing key officials with envelopes stuffed with cash.

And Cardinal Ratzinger knew it and waited another 4 years? Ya gotta be kidding me, Il Papa!

Benedict XVI knew all of this. To his credit, he was clearly troubled by it, and never accepted its compromising money. But given the authority to pursue Maciel in 2001, Ratzinger held off for four years until Maciel's protector, John Paul II, was incapacitated and near death. Which means to say: Ratzinger knew what had gone on, and allowed a clear molester and bigamist to remain a pillar of John Paul II's church for years.

Jesu H. Christe, is nothing sacred?

The Vatican's Watergate: Follow The Money

VowsOfSilenceFilm.com

Vatican Communiqué regarding the current circumstances of the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi Movement

Vatican Communiqué on Legionary Founder
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It's global thermo-carbon war!

2010-04-05T20:23:00.000-07:00

Our global industrial and energy systems are built on carbon-based technologies and unsustainable resource demands that threaten to destroy our society and our planet. Massive loss of wealth, expanding poverty and suffering, disastrous climate change, water scarcity, and deforestation are the end results of this broken system.

This business-as-usual system represents the greatest threat to the security and prosperity of humanity – a threat that transcends race, ethnicity, national borders, and ideology.

Systems do not change themselves – the same stale, business-as-usual thinking that has driven us to our current state of emergency will continue to endanger our safety, our livelihoods, and our planet. We need new thinking, new leadership, and innovation to create a post-carbon economy. Our goal is not to undo industry, but to remake it into a force for sustainable wealth generation.

It is time to reinvent our economic systems – It is time to act – It is time to implement solutions. We can no longer afford to be intimidated by the scope and magnitude of the climate crisis. It is essential that our most talented and driven individuals come together to win this war.

Carbon War Room
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"The coverup of vile, criminal acts." ~ Bob Schieffer

2010-04-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

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Where's the moral highground?

Where's the outrage?

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The violated bodies of Christ. Amen!

2010-04-04T23:29:00.000-07:00

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Ever wonder what honest, sober Catholics say about the deliberate, systematic Vatican denial & cover-up of what pedophile priests do to innocent 8 year-old-boys?

The focus now is on Benedict. What did he know? When did he know it? How did he act once he knew?

The questions arise not only about his conduct in Munich, but also, based also as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A March 25 Times story, citing information from bishops in the United States, reported that the Vatican had failed to take action against a priest accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school from 1950 to 1974. Correspondence reportedly obtained by the paper showed requests for the defrocking of the priest, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, going directly from U.S. bishops to Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican secretary of state. No action was taken against Murphy.

Like it or not, this new focus on the pope and his actions as an archbishop and Vatican official fits the distressing logic of this scandal. For those who have followed this tragedy over the years, the whole episode seems familiar: accusation, revelation, denial and obfuscation, with no bishop held accountable for actions taken on their watch. Yes, there is a depressing madness to this story. Time after time, this is a story of institutional failure of the deepest kind, a failure to defend the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a failure to put compassion ahead of institutional decisions aimed at short-term benefits and avoiding public scandal.

The strategies employed so far -- taking the legal path, obscuring the truth, and doing everything possible to protect perpetrators as well as the church's reputation and treasury -- have failed miserably.

Credibility gap: Pope needs to answer questions

Ah yes, the comments.

I must tell you, and it is well known, that many many thousands of families, children and others complained to Bishops and pastors when these crimes were occurring, and they were completely ignored, at best. Frequently, they were accused of being scandalous and sinning for the very act of bringing up the topic. Bishops and supervising priests lied about 'doing something about it', committing further criminal acts by failing to report the crimes to police and moving the perpetrator to another parish where they could abuse more kids.

And Who was it said,
"Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do also unto Me!".
So, ordained priests who rape & bugger boys, also rape & bugger God? One can only imagine an Almighty who enjoys that.
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Not what Charlie & Dave Koch would call a good week.

2010-04-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

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Word's out that a couple of billionaire Koch brothers just got caught funneling $25 million tax-free to dozens of front groups & hired-gun "experts" who peddle anti-science disinformation & denial to the American public, not to mention a few mil to a whole slew of senators & congressmen who help spread the lies & deception. Climate change denial brought to you by Koch Industries

Ain't there laws on the books against all that somewhere?

Climate criminals come in many shapes and forms including many corporate executives and politicians who fail to take meaningful action to reduce carbon emissions or other climate mitigation action despite being aware of the climate science.

But a step above the many who fail to take action, are the few who actively engage in the concerted campaign against climate scientists, climate science and intensively lobby against emissions reduction or mitigation action on climate change. The executives of Exxon-Mobil are part of this elite criminal fraternity, but eclipsing even them are Charles and David Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately-held company in the USA.

Koch Industries is a conglomerate of more than twenty companies with $100 billion in annual sales, operations in nearly 60 countries and 70,000 employees. Koch’s industry areas span petroleum refining, fuel pipelines, coal supply and trading, oil and gas exploration, chemicals and polymers, fertilizer production, ranching and forestry products. There are few brand names in their portfolio.

Their investments include multiple leases on the polluting tar sands of Alberta, Canada since the 1990s and the Koch Pipeline Company operates the pipelines that carry tar sands crude from Canada into Minnesota and Wisconsin where Koch’s Flint Hill Resources owns oil refineries.

The Koch brothers and other executives in the company work behind the scenes against climate action by contributing to a combination of foundation-funded front-groups, big lobbying budgets, Political Action Committee (PAC) donations, and direct campaign contributions overwhelmingly favouring Republican candidates at both State and Federal level in the US.

Koch foundations contributed over $48 million to climate opposition groups in the US from 1997 to 2008. With the debate over climate action heating up since 2005 with increasing calls for Government action on carbon emission control and climate mitigation measures the volume of funding has increased significantly. Over one half of this funding - $24,888,282 - was contributed in the three years between 2005 to 2008. Koch Industries top funder of Climate denial and Obstruction

Oh, & did we fail to mention the money connection between the Tea Party & the Cato Institute?

• More than $5 million to Americans for Prosperity Foundation(AFP) for its nationwide “Hot Air Tour”3 campaign to spreading misinformation about climate science and opposing clean energy and climate legislation.

• Over $1 million to the Cato Institute, which disputes the scientific evidence behind global warming, questions the rationale for taking climate action, and has been heavily involved in spinning the recent ClimateGate story.

Now, please don't tell us there's a money connection between Koch Industries & EXXOM, too?

The Green Peace article also points to a connection between Koch and ExxonMobil. Exonmobil was heavily invested in disputing climate change during the last administration. They have since been out spent by Koch. Koch incidentally is one of the largest private companies in the United States. Climate change article accuses Koch industries of orchestrating climate denial machine

Not acid rain, too? From Promoting Acid Rain To Climate Denial: Over 20 Years Of David Koch’s Polluter Front Groups

Who knew? Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine

Billionaire oilman David Koch likes to joke that Koch Industries is “the biggest company you've never heard of.” But the nearly $50 million that David Koch and his brother Charles have quietly funneled to climate-denial front groups that are working to delay policies and regulations aimed at stopping global warming is no joking matter.

Koch Industries Outspends Exxon Mobil On Climate Denial

Executive Summary - Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine
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ClimateTV Debut 4/1/10

2010-03-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

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Be there. ClimateTV
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EXXOM SCANDAL EXXPOSED! So where's the news media?

2010-03-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

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The exposure of the EXXOM-backed, tobacco-like, anti-science disinformation & denial conspiracy is finally getting some overdue coverage on the blogosphere.

Ask yourself why SciGuy or the Houston Chron is not reporting this potentially globally hot scandal that directly involves EXXOM, the, if not a, biggest employer & contributor & sponsor in So. Texas?

Could it be allegiance to, if not fear of, one of the biggest authoritarian carbon polluters this side of the Ganges, if not Yellow, River?

Or simply an uber-conservative sense, if not a history textbook full, of revisionist history & creationist ideology?

Or just news media business-as-usual that caters to fundamentally anti-science, anti-democratic sentiments in the libertarian bible belt?

Smacks of a major scandal, if not complicit coverup, to the rest of Colbert Nation.

Climate Science Watch: Dealing in Doubt: New Greenpeace report reviews 20 years of the climate change denial machine

The Cost of Energy: Greenpeace exposes those “dealing in doubt”

Hot Topics New Zealand: Dealing in doubt: 20 years of attacks on climate science

Post Carbon Institute: A Confederacy of (Climate) Dunces

The new report succinctly explains how fossil fuel interests used the tobacco industry’s playbook and an extensive arsenal of lobbyists and “experts” for hire in order to manufacture disinformation designed to confuse the public and stifle action to address climate change.

ExxonMobil deservedly gets special attention for its role as the ringleader of the “campaign of denial.” As Greenpeace has documented meticulously over the years with its ExxonSecrets website, ExxonMobil is known to have invested over $23 million since 1998 to bankroll an entire movement of climate confusionists, including over 35 anti-science and right wing nonprofits, to divert attention away from the critical threat of climate disruption caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels.

The report ... calls out by name a number of key climate skeptics and deniers who have worked with industry front groups to confuse the public, including S. Fred Singer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen, David Legates, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Tim Ball, Pat Michaels and many other figures familiar to DeSmog Blog readers.

A number of the key “think tanks” at the forefront of the attacks on climate science — including the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Enterprise Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute — are also examined for their climate denial work on behalf of oil and coal interests.

Greenpeace explains how the network of denial was created in the early 1990s to dissuade politicians from taking action to prevent climate change. Chief among these early groups were the Global Climate Coalition, the Climate Council and the Information Council on the Environment (ICE).

The report also provides a brief history of the attacks launched against each of the IPCC’s scientific assessment reports dating back to 1990, noting the key players involved in each successive attack leading up to the present day attempts to tarnish the IPCC’s reputation and to falsely suggest that a debate still exists among climate scientists.

Personal attacks endured by climate scientists, especially key contributors to the IPCC reports, are also discussed in some detail, including the virulent attacks by the climate denial industry against reputed scientists like Michael Mann, Ben Santer, and Kevin Trenberth.

Greenpeace also calls out Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and other members of Congress who are beholden to polluting industries through campaign contributions, and who regularly aid and abet the climate denial industry by promoting the false and misleading claims of deniers and skeptics on Capitol Hill.

Finally, “Dealing in Doubt” notes the escalation of the denial campaign during the administration of George W. Bush, when key White House and regulatory agency positions were filled with polluter lobbyists.

The placement of Philip Cooney, a lawyer and lobbyist who spent 15 years at the American Petroleum Institute before he was picked as chief of staff in the Bush White House Council on Environmental Quality, serves as a key example. Days after the New York Times broke the story that Cooney had made extensive edits on government scientific reports on global warming, Cooney resigned to go work for ExxonMobil.

“Dealing in Doubt” is recommended reading for anyone looking for a brief primer on the history of the denial industry’s relentless campaign against science and reason.

DeSmogBlog: Greenpeace Releases 20-Year History of Climate Denial Industry
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Historic heathcare bill passes with nary a GOP vote or teabag.

2010-03-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

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Despite the industry lobbyists, despite the disinformercials, despite Glenn Beck & the FOXNEWS parrots, & despite the Teabagger Parades, the most important healthcare legislation for average & poor Americans since Medicare passed the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote.

Ask yourself why?

Ask yourself who the Republican Representatives are really representing?

Ask yourself why the medical insurance & pharmaceutical industries lobbied so long & hard against the bill and are bipolar now that it passed?

Best of all, despite the cocaphony of denial from the same business-as-usual suspects, many of the most pressing healthcare benefits kick in this year.

No more worrying about lifetime limits on health coverage, about whether your insurer will dump you when you get sick, or about whether your adult child will be booted off your plan when he turns 18.

Kids will be able to stay on their parents' plans until they're 26 if they want and new insurance policies will have to cover certain preventive-care measures with no out-of-pocket cost to the consumer. Insurers also will be barred from denying coverage based on people's preexisting health conditions for the first time. The ban on excluding kids because of illness takes effect six months after passage, but the full adult measure doesn't kick in until 2014. In the meantime, adults with preexisting conditions who've been uninsured for at least six months can enroll in a temporary high-risk pool and receive subsidized premiums, starting three months after the bill's passage.

The real beneficiaries of this landmark, if not historic, health-care bill are the American people, young & old, middle class & poor, black & white, employees & small businesses.

"While the new reforms won't solve all the problems in our nation's broken health-care system, they will go a long way toward achieving the goal of affordable, reliable health care for all Americans," Jim Guest, chief executive of Consumers Union, said in a statement after the vote.

If you have employer-sponsored coverage: lifetime caps ... eliminated;
If you have a small business: tax credits for health-insurance premiums;
If you're uninsured: extend[s] coverage to an estimated 32 million people;
If you're low-income: significantly expands Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor ... 16 million more people;
If you're a young adult: catastrophic coverage on the exchanges;
If you have Medicare: ... $250 rebate.... 50% discount on their brand-name drugs;
If you take advantage of preventive care: Full coverage ... in six months.

What health reform will mean for you - New consumer protections to take effect this year
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Witch Hunters & Grand Inquisitors of Biblically Mythed America

2010-03-22T10:27:00.000-07:00

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re: "Only extreme, well funded, cynical fanatics call for the criminalization of dissent."

You must mean the EXXOM-funded Grand Inquisitor, Jimmy "Joe McCarthy" Inhofe?

Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. A report released by Inhofe’s staff on February 23 outlines this classic Joe McCarthyite witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 “key players” in the “CRU Controversy” over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports.

And anti-science jihadist & witchhunter wannabe, Jimmy Nonsenseburger?

Sensenbrenner IPCC witch-hunt: Attempt to blacklist climate scientists must be rejected

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for scientists whose names appear in the e-mails stolen from the U.K. Climatic Research Unit to be blacklisted from participating as contributors or reviewers of the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Sensenbrenner is engaged in an outrageous McCarthyist jihad against the climate science community, making it abundantly clear that this controversy is not really about stolen e-mails, which have been misused and misinterpreted. Rather it is part of an aggressive campaign by the global warming denial machine to bully and intimidate the science community. Sensenbrenner shows no real interest in meaningful dialogue, nor in an honest examination of climate science findings. Denialists are throwing up a smokescreen of propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their refusal to come to grips with scientific evidence on global climatic disruption and its implications. This is a power play.

Climate Science Watch calls on the IPCC to rebuff this attack. We call on the Obama Administration and in particular the President’s science adviser John Holdren to fully support the U.S. climate science community in this matter. We call on Sensenbrenner’s colleagues in Congress to chastise him for this censorious anti-scientist behavior. And we call on members of the science community to understand what the denial machine is up to and not allow themselves to be divided by innuendo about and attacks on scientists who have been singled out as immediate targets of a larger predatory attack on the community as a whole. Seeking an IPCC purge is just the next step. This attack, using guilt-by-association and demagogy, will go as far as it can to delegitimize the entire climate science and assessment enterprise if it is not exposed and thwarted.

Climate Criminals at Large

2010-03-22T02:26:00.000-07:00

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WANTED FOR CLIMATE CRIMES, libertarian John Bircher oil-billionaires who fund anti-science denier front groups even more than EXXOM.

From 2005 to 2008, the Koch Foundations provided over $24.8 million in funding to climate denial groups; ExxonMobil provided about $9.1 million to similar organizations over the same period.

Some of the most determined opponents of action on climate change in the U.S. are so-called libertarians, motivated by an ideological commitment to minimal government and "free market" laissez-faire capitalism. Their efforts on behalf of unregulated corporate wealth and power have been funded heavily by patrons in the fossil fuel industry. While ExxonMobil has drawn much attention for its patronage of global warming denialist activity by such groups, much less public attention has been paid to the activities of the multibillionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries. Koch Industries is the second largest private company in the U.S., with estimated 2008 revenues of $100 billion. Started as a petroleum business by their father Fred Koch, who was also a founder of the right-wing extremist John Birch Society, Koch Industries has become a diversified enterprise that funds large-scale lobbying and a range of libertarian policy and activist groups that play a significant role in the global warming denial machine.

Koch Industries multibillionaire Koch brothers bankroll attacks on climate change science and policy
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Evolving in a land down under

2010-03-21T17:13:00.000-07:00

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And still yet another ungodly heathen blog for all you naturally evolving freethinking agnostic Yanks out there from a land down under:

I have often said that I want atheism to become a normalised aspect of modern society (and of course that implies also that I want religious belief and agnosticism, but not religious exclusivism, to be normalised). I take a “let a thousand flowers bloom” philosophy for social polity. So I want to suggest a term: Affirmative atheism. Atheists need to be able to affirm their right to exist, partake in civil society, and so forth without being prejudicially treated (as they were, to my shame, by the Australian media when the Atheism conference was held in Melbourne, and which is why PZ was here). Evolving Thoughts

And capitalism? God forbid we fuhgeddaboudit.

I get 10% of all profit from that term.

Denial with a capital 'G'

2010-03-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

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Dr. James E. Biechler, an emeritus professor of religion & member of board of directors of the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC) & longtime member of the Canon Law Society of America has an unholy thing or three to say about priestly celibacy & pedophilia as well as apostolic Denial with a capital 'G'.

Celibacy is not the cause of pedophilia. But celibacy as idealized, institutionalized and mandated by the church provides an ideal environment for those men whose sexuality (and personality) development has been arrested at an immature level leading to their inability to establish intimate relations with another adult. Surely we should ask whether the seminary system, especially the minor seminary, may not be a factor inhibiting the development of mature heterosexual personality. At a crucial stage of personal development the young seminarian is formed in a culture of denial. He must deny his natural feelings, he must downgrade the natural order which includes those feelings, he must deny the importance of his natural family, he must relegate marriage and the procreation of children to an inferior level of life, and so he must even see children in a diminished light. When the worth of children is diminished and sexuality is immature, the distance to pedophilia is short.

Celibacy also plays a role in the church's protection of the pedophile. Because celibacy is regarded as the highest and purest state of life it is easy to understand why the church must deny any connection between the "celibate" pedophile and the institution. Serving as an ideal cover for pedophiles, institutionalized celibacy also requires the cover-up of pedophilia. The church must protect and deny its pedophiles because otherwise it would stand revealed as a human institution. Then we should have to rethink hierarchy and papal monarchy. If celibacy is not of divine decree then what is the basis of priestly and hierarchical supremacy over the laity? The pure and uncontaminated celibate male stands in supreme difference over against every other person in his ambit. [When] there are priestly pedophiles, sodomites and fornicators (that word should also come to the fore in any discussion of contemporary clerical mores), and these were openly acknowledged, then perhaps we could begin to rethink the (blasphemous?) ascription to God of the superiority of the celibate way of life.

Pedophilia is not the only problem finding some connection with the celibacy myth. Because of celibacy's flimsy theological foundation many priests are experiencing identity crises. They are finding it difficult to be enthusiastic about their ministry. Denied the helpmate God created for them, they are experiencing deep loneliness and depression. Some have found companionship outside the norms of celibacy and are living in de facto marriages. This current state of affairs has to be known by the bishops. It is known by practically everyone else.

Sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests is and has been a problem known to every bishop in America. Many or most of these bishops and their chancery officials have been, unwittingly or not, accomplices of child abusers. To think that a person who had been "called" by God to a life of celibacy was guilty of a sexual "crime" was just not a part of the thought processes of hierarchs. The sexual abuse of children was simply not perceived as a "crime" by bishops or chancery officials. As unacceptable as they saw it to be, it was not a matter for civil prosecution. Besides, the civil authorities had no jurisdiction over the "spiritual" lives of priests. So, the priest pedophile was usually transferred to another locale with the hope that he would mend his ways. In general, clerical sexual abuse was regarded as spiritual weakness, rather than crime or psychopathology. Worst of all, the young victims of such priests were rarely considered. Their profound spiritual and emotional injury was hardly ever noticed.

Celibacy & Pedophilia, By James E. Biechler
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Confronting Deniers & Denialists

2010-03-18T01:12:00.000-07:00

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Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?

Black is white and white is black

HIV does not cause AIDS. The world was created in 4004 BCE. Smoking does not cause cancer. And if climate change is happening, it is nothing to do with man-made CO2 emissions. Few, if any, of the readers of this journal will believe any of these statements. Yet each can be found easily in the mass media. The consequences of policies based on views such as these can be fatal.

All of these examples have one feature in common. There is an overwhelming consensus on the evidence among scientists yet there are also vocal commentators who reject this consensus, convincing many of the public, and often the media too, that the consensus is not based on ‘sound science’ or denying that there is a consensus by exhibiting individual dissenting voices as the ultimate authorities on the topic in question. Their goal is to convince that there are sufficient grounds to reject the case for taking action to tackle threats to health. This phenomenon has led some to draw a historical parallel with the holocaust, another area where the evidence is overwhelming but where a few commentators have continued to sow doubt. All are seen as part of a larger phenomenon of denialism.

Defining and recognizing denialism

Denialism is a process that employs some or all of five characteristic elements in a concerted way.

The first is the identification of conspiracies. When the overwhelming body of scientific opinion believes that something is true, it is argued that this is not because those scientists have independently studied the evidence and reached the same conclusion. It is because they have engaged in a complex and secretive conspiracy. The peer review process is seen as a tool by which the conspirators suppress dissent, rather than as a means of weeding out papers and grant applications unsupported by evidence or lacking logical thought.

There is also a variant of conspiracy theory, inversionism, in which some of one’s own characteristics and motivations are attributed to others. For example, tobacco companies describe academic research into the health effects of smoking as the product of an ‘anti-smoking industry’.

The second is the use of fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed a Global Climate Science Communications Plan, involving the recruitment of ‘scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science [who can] help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases’.

A related phenomenon is the marginalization of real experts, in some cases through an alliance between industry and government, as when ExxonMobil successfully opposed the reappointment by the US government of the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The use of fake experts is often complemented by denigration of established experts and researchers, with accusations and innuendo that seek to discredit their work and cast doubt on their motivations.

The third characteristic is selectivity, drawing on isolated papers that challenge the dominant consensus or highlighting the flaws in the weakest papers among those that support it as a means of discrediting the entire field.

Denialists are usually not deterred by the extreme isolation of their theories, but rather see it as the indication of their intellectual courage against the dominant orthodoxy and the accompanying political correctness, often comparing themselves to Galileo.

The fourth is the creation of impossible expectations of what research can deliver. For example, those denying the reality of climate change point to the absence of accurate temperature records from before the invention of the thermometer.

The fifth is the use of misrepresentation and logical fallacies. For example, pro-smoking groups have often used the fact that Hitler supported some antismoking campaigns to represent those advocating tobacco control as Nazis (even coining the term nico-nazis).

Logical fallacies include the use of red herrings, or deliberate attempts to change the argument and straw men, where the opposing argument is misrepresented to make it easier to refute.

Other fallacies used by denialists are false analogy, exemplified by the argument against evolution that, as the universe and a watch are both extremely complex, the universe must have been created by the equivalent of a watchmaker and the excluded middle fallacy (either passive smoking causes a wide range of specified diseases or causes none at all, so doubt about an association with one disease, such as breast cancer, is regarded as sufficient to reject an association with any disease).

Responding to denialism

Denialists are driven by a range of motivations. For some it is greed, lured by the corporate largesse of the oil and tobacco industries. For others it is ideology or faith, causing them to reject anything incompatible with their fundamental beliefs. Fnally there is eccentricity and idiosyncrasy, sometimes encouraged by the celebrity status conferred on the maverick by the media.

Whatever the motivation, it is important to recognize denialism when confronted with it. The normal academic response to an opposing argument is to engage with it, testing the strengths and weaknesses of the differing views, in the expectations that the truth will emerge through a process of debate. However, this requires that both parties obey certain ground rules, such as a willingness to look at the evidence as a whole, to reject deliberate distortions and to accept principles of logic. A meaningful discourse is impossible when one party rejects these rules. Yet it would be wrong to prevent the denialists having a voice.

Instead, we argue, it is necessary to shift the debate from the subject under consideration, instead exposing to public scrutiny the tactics they employ and identifying them publicly for what they are. An understanding of the five tactics listed above provides a useful framework for doing so.

2009 Coldest Winter Ever?

2010-03-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

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Dave in SETX,

re: "Coldest. Winter. Ever."

We've always been big fans of NOAA & its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) & National Weather Service (NWS) & all the honest, dedicated scientists who work diligently to inform concerned citizens about the weather & climate change, Dave.

As far as the "coldest winter ever", as you say, Dave, you may want to check with your Texas State Climatologist instead of cherry-picking unnamed, unlinked sources again (puleez tell us it's not Scooter Libby).

The coldest winter ever came in 1977-1978, he said, which averaged 6.3 degrees below normal. Nielsen-Gammon said the 13-county southeast Texas climate region has averaged between 5 and 6 degrees below normal since Dec. 1. Second-coldest ever

Or try Dr. n-g @ his TAMU office.

February 2010 was a month of record breaking events for the state of Texas, and National Weather Service meteorologists believe this winter has been the coldest winter Texas has seen in 25 years. Current Texas Monthly Summary: February 2010

And while you're there, Dave, be sure to checkout the Societal Impacts of Climate on Texas.

NOAA: U.S. Winter and February Cooler Than Average

And you & your greenhouse furnaces & propane tanks can expect lots more extreme hot & cold weather events, floods & fires, & higher storm surges from stronger hurricanes as you continue to release carbon emissions into the atmosphere & hydrosphere which continue to heat up & destabilize SETX climate, if not the entire planet.

U.S. Climate Change Science Program: Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate

But fret not, Dave, as another notable local recently wrote in a SETX newspaper:

"Summer's coming. Some preliminary outlooks show July, August and September being a bit warmer than normal."

Back to the Dark Ages

2010-03-17T03:32:00.000-07:00

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re: The Dark Ages return: Texas Board of Education rewrites the Enlightenment

We should be very clear about this. Not only do many, if not most, deniers believe passionately & stupidly that changes can be avoided, but that they can return Texas, if not the rest of the continent, to the booming 1950's when a godfearing white America dominated the world. They believe fervently & partisanly that global warming is a hoax conjured up by socialist, if not communist, forces of anti-American liberal leftists funded by Soros' billions & proseytized by high priest AlGore to overthrow Texas' (aka ExxonMobil) energy supremacy & steal away their well-paid oil jobs along with their guns & god-given freedoms.

And make no mistake, to accomplish this, Texan deniers are willing to trash, if not secede from, this nation which to them has become hopelessly godless & all too colored, if not anti-white, esp. now with the blacks in control of the White House & the dems of Congress.

Texas deniers & their bronze-age god are willing to sacrifice science, education, & their children's standard of living to maintain the primacy of ultra-conservative, if nor fundamentalist, religious "family values", so-called free-market ideology, and, perhaps most importantly, white dominance, if not supremacy.

They have been hoodwinked & disinformed by their own self-serving, power-mad, religious & libertarian leaders and teabagged by Fox News, Glenn Beck, & Rush Limbaugh, all liberally -- excuse the expression -- funded by ExxonMobil foreign oil profits & taxpayer subsidies & other ultra-conservative & business-as-usual interests. God, guns, oil, & Texas.

So who needs education anyway?
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Hatred of knowledge, ignorance, & fear

2010-03-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

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Instead of hatred of knowledge, ignorance & fear, honest concerned citizens should try science, reason, & civility.

And educate themselves about the science & dangers of carbon emissions from coal & oil.

How much carbon dioxide (CO2) is produced when different fuels are burned?

Pounds of CO2 emitted per million Btu of energy:

Coal (anthracite) - 227
Coal (bituminous) - 205
Coal (lignite) - 215
Coal (sub-bituminous) - 213
Diesel fuel & heating oil - 161
Gasoline - 156
Propane - 139
Natural gas - 117

What are the largest sources of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by fuel?

United States (Million Metric Tons):

Total From Fossil Fuels - 5,833
Coal - 2,125 - 36%
Natural Gas - 1,272 - 22%
Petroleum - 2,436 - 42%

How much CO2 does the United States emit?

Metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted per capita in 2008:

United States — 19.2
China — 4.9
Europe — 7.8
World Average — 4.5

What are greenhouse gases and how do they affect the climate?

Carbon dioxide (82.8%)
Methane (10.5%)
Nitrous oxide (4.3%)
Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (collectively 2.5%)

These gases are transparent to incoming solar (short-wave) radiation but block infrared (long-wave) radiation from leaving Earth's atmosphere. Therefore, they trap radiation from the Sun and warm the planet's surface. As concentrations of these gases increase, more warming occurs than would happen naturally.
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MOST WANTED DENIERS

2010-03-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

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Virtually everyone with cable TV knows who & what Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, & Sean Hannity are & look like, but isn't it about time we had an updated most wanted deck of cards, akin to Monbiot's royal flush, to help the public actually see who the worst offenders are, their denial offenses, & the status of their prosecution, incarceration, or conversion?

Might we suggest the following list of anti-science offenders to get the deck a-shuffling?

James Inhofe - Ace of Spades
Rex Tillerson - King of Diamonds
Steve McIntyre - Queen of Hearts
Anthony Watts - Jack of Clubs
Roger Pielke Jr. -
Jonathan Leake - Joker
Timothy Ball
Richard Lindzen
Bjorn Lomborg
Ross McKitrick
Patrick Michaels
Steve Milloy
Christopher Monckton
Marc Morano
Ian Plimer
Frederick Seitz
S. Fred Singer
Roy Spencer

DeSmogBlog's Disinformation Database
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Open Letter from Scientists on IPCC

2010-03-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

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Deniers are gonna need a helluva lot more denial, if not EXXOM taxpayer subsidies, if they want to even remotely undermine the science these days.

An Open Letter from Scientists in the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Many in the popular press and other media, as well as some in the halls of Congress, are seizing on a few errors that have been found in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in an attempt to discredit the entire report. None of the handful of mis-statements (out of hundreds and hundreds of unchallenged statements) remotely undermines the conclusion that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

The significance of IPCC errors has been greatly exaggerated by many sensationalist accounts, but that is no reason to avoid implementing procedures to make the assessment process even better. The public has a right to know the risks of climate change as scientists currently understand them. We are dedicated to working with our colleagues and government in furthering that task.

Signed by:
- Gary W. Yohe, Wesleyan University and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
- Stephen H. Schneider, Stanford University
- Cynthia Rosenzweig, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University
- William E. Easterling, Pennsylvania State University

And Allah only knows how many more.
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Dr. Steven Chu: Climate Denial bigger than Tobacco Denial

2010-03-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

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Honest American citizens would be much better informed, if not well-versed in denial, to listen to dedicated, honest scientists who know what the hell they're talking about:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu discussed the stiff competition the United States faces from China, which is moving quickly to close down inefficient coal plants as well as nurturing its fast-growing wind and solar industries. He is charged with helping implement President Obama's ambitious agenda to invest in alternative and renewable energy, end our addiction to foreign oil, address the global climate crisis and create millions of new jobs.

"One can honestly say that if we don't do this, we will not be economically competitive. The debate for whether smoking causes lung cancer and emphysema was actually in the first decade among scientists, but they muddied the waters for 2½ more decades. Climate change, on a global scale, is a much bigger deal, and people are trying to muddy the waters, particularly people who think they might lose.

"A lot of businesses in Silicon Valley see the opportunity. The push back comes from more traditional businesses, like oil and gas, and energy-intensive businesses. Take agriculture: Rural America can benefit greatly from clean technology. They have land, so they can have wind turbines. They can have carbon offsets from planting trees. They can have biofuel from biowaste. Now you have three different income generators in rural America that could dwarf or at least be comparable to the cash you'd get from growing food crops.

And not from dismantled & unethical, if not fraudulently unmanly, hard-core scoundrels like Tony Watts:

"Anthony: Your use of false claims to accuse NOAA scientists of deliberate deception was not just mistaken, it was unethical. If you have any honor at all, you’ll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud. Are you man enough?" Tamino's Message to Anthony Watts

Same old song; same old denial talking points!

2010-03-13T01:44:00.000-08:00

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We've heard them all before, over & over & over again.

Simply ignore what dedicated climate scientists and world-renown scientific organizations have researched & reported:

The global climate is changing
Human activities produce heat-trapping gases.
Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century.
The higher the levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the higher the risk of potentially dangerous consequences for humans and our environment.

And what more recent scientific studies reveal about the dangerous impacts of anthropogenic global warming right here at home:

10°F temperature rise across the states
Dust bowls over much of the U.S.
50% loss of land & sea life
5 ft plus sea level rise
More destructive killer hurricanes along the Gulf
Much bigger storm surges along the Gulf
More rain & flooding & snow & other extreme weather events

Then parrot the debunked anti-science of EXXOM-funded denial front groups & hired guns to hide the truth about EXXOM foreign oil mega-profits and taxpayer mega-subsidies at the criminal cost of even more deadly carbon emissions & human suffering & death.

Yes, we've all seen the stages of denial before, over & over & over again.

Deniers don't like the idea of climate change, they don't believe it is possible for humans to change the climate, they don't like the implications of climate change, they don't like the things we might have to do to address it, or they just don't like government or science. The best argument against global warming

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming. Oil Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

Evidence Provided In UK Parliamentary Inquiry Into Climate Scientists Was Prepared By Oil and Gas Industry Consultant

Intelligent Designers Enlist Climate Skeptics in the War on Reality
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Talkin' the Walk

2010-03-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

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re: "Scientists and engineers are caught in a no-win situation... What can we do to turn this into a win-win situation?" @SciGuy

Hunter Cutting @ Talkin' the Walk has a great piece on reframing the debate on climate science.

And the savvy crew over at Joe Romm's Climate Progress offer some thoughtful comments, as usual.
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Sic semper tyrannis!

2010-03-11T14:40:00.000-08:00

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Now, it's become even more transparent that EXXONMOBIL foreign-oil subsidies are behind the tobacco-like propaganda campaign to deceive the American public.

Big Oil is using fake “Americans” to defend billions in tax subsidies. The American Petroleum Institute is running full-page ads in Politico and Roll Call that attack Congress for “new energy taxes”.

The target of this ad is the Obama administration’s effort to remove $36 billion in loopholes and subsidies for the oil industry. As it turns out, the “Americans” presented in the ad are stock photos from Getty Images.

Americans are paying the price for these subsidies with our tax dollars, our health, and our national security. Removing these subsidies would “ripple through the economy” by unleashing a clean-energy future.

This is just the latest in a stream of polluter front groups using stock photos in Astroturf campaigns against clean energy policy. API was recently caught trying to add diversity to its dirty ads by photoshopping minorities into stock photography. West Virginia’s “FACES of Coal” turned out to be from iStockPhoto.com. And Virginia’s “Coalition for American Jobs” is a stock-photo front group for the American Chemistry Council.

Big Oil uses fake “Americans” to attack fake “energy taxes.”

Americans red-white-&-blue need to stand up to these oil industry executive liars & deceivers, already drenched in our red blood from oil wars, before it's too late.

Remember when tobacco company execs in expensive suits & straight faces, all the while funding denier campaigns of no scientific connection between tobacco or nicotine-addiction & cancer, repeatedly told deliberate lies to the American people under oath? How many of our family & friends suffer from or have already died horrible deaths from smoking cancer, coronary & heart diseases, & related killers?

Remember the last time something like this happened in Germany when facts were subverted by lies? How many of our parents & grandparents paid the price for such power-mad manipulation & deceit?

Enough is enough! Sic semper tyrannis!
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Jebus in the sky.

2010-03-10T22:30:00.000-08:00

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Apocalyptic or dogmatic, canonical or apocryphal, the god message is all the same, pilgrim.

Believe as we say & do as we say. It's Allah's word, trust us, we speak for that spirit in the sky, all 1, 2, 3 or more of them. And you will be saved, you will have eternal life with Jebus & Daddy.

After all, He loves you.

You will once again be with your father & mother, spouse & child in paradise, perfect with no pancreatic cancer, no coronary heart disease, no high blood pressure or high cholesterol; no Parkinson's, no dementia, no Alzheimer's; no missing legs, eyes, fingers, or toes; no overdue bills, no home foreclosures, no unemployment; no alcoholic fathers, no dying mothers, no depression, no suicide; no brain-damaged children, no drug-addiction, no abuse or neglect; no wants, no worries, no sorrows, no pain; only eternal, everlasting, heavenly bliss.

After all, He loves you.

But only if you believe what we tell you to believe, do what we tell you to do, and, oh yea, put your savings & credit cards in the basket & envelope & direct deposit, attention to Jebus.

After all, He loves you.

And if you don't believe as we say, do as we say, &, in catholic cults, confess your transgressions, real or imagined, to us, well, it's to hell with you & yours, for all time, no ifs, ands, or buts. Burn, baby, burn!!!

After all, He loves you.

Remember, if you'll pardon the pedophilia, we are Jebus' holy ordained ministers & spokesmen on planet earth, we are the keepers of the truths revealed by Jebus & his Daddy & invisible messengers & dreams to our bronze age forefathers & blessed by the superpowers of Roman Emperors, holy or otherwise.

Nice, pleasant thoughts; all subservient, childish nonsense.

About time for rational men to grow up & grow a pair, pilgrim, esp. in a nuclear age.

In the 21st Century, a society or flock, who continue to place homage & deference to imaginary beings & perfunctory priesthoods ahead of science & technology & progress, will continue to suffer from ignorance & poverty, disease & malnutrition, bigotry & racism, wars & ethnic cleansing.

It's up to a more highly-evolved homo sapiens to apply science & reason to resolve the inequities & crises in the world, not some Jebus in the sky.
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Merchants of Doubt

2010-03-09T23:16:00.000-08:00

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Dr. Naomi Oreskes has an answer for Climate Change Skeptics.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.

Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is “not settled” denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one tobacco executive. These “experts” supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

Texas climate scientists stick it to EXXOM-funded deniers.

2010-03-08T20:38:00.000-08:00

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Bravo Zulu! Texas climate scientists stick it to EXXOM-backed deniers.

Texas' challenge to the EPA's endangerment finding on carbon dioxide contains very little science. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott admitted that the state did not consult any climate scientists, including the many here in the state, before putting together the challenge to the EPA. Instead, the footnotes in the document reveal that the state relied mainly on British newspaper articles to make its case.

Contrary to what one might read in newspapers, the science of climate change is strong.

The global climate is changing
Human activities produce heat-trapping gases.
Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century.
The higher the levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the higher the risk of potentially dangerous consequences for humans and our environment.

The national academies of science of 32 nations, and every major scientific organization in the United States whose members include climate experts, have issued statements endorsing these points.... In fact, to the best of our knowledge, there are no climate scientists in Texas who disagree with the mainstream view of climate science.

We are all aware of the news reports describing the stolen e-mails from climate scientists and the errors in the IPCC reports. While aspects of climate change impacts have been overstated, none of the errors or allegations of misbehavior undermine the science behind any of the statements made above. In particular, they do not alter the conclusions that humans have taken over from nature as the dominant influence on our climate.

On global warming, the science is solid
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Taxpayers subsidize global warming to the tune of hundreds of billions.

2010-03-08T01:13:00.000-08:00

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A Sept. 2009 study by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) confirms that:

Despite the national dialogue on energy use and climate change, the U.S. government has continued to subsidize greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuels to a significant degree, while directing substantially less support to renewable energy sources. A large portion of the $72 billion in fossil fuel subsidies derives from just a few provisions in the U.S. Tax Code. These figures raise the pressing question of whether scarce government funds might be better allocated to move the United States towards a low-carbon economy. Estimating U.S. Government Subsidies to Energy Sources: 2002-2008

The federal government provided substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewables. Subsidies to fossil fuels — a mature, developed industry that has enjoyed government support for many years—totaled approximately $72 billion [between 2002 & 2008], representing a direct cost to taxpayers. U.S. Tax Breaks Subsidize Foreign Oil Production

Applying a conservative approach, the study finds that Energy Subsidies are Black, Not Green:

The vast majority of federal subsidies for fossil fuels and renewable energy supported energy sources that emit high levels of greenhouse gases when used as fuel.
Subsidies for renewable fuels, a relatively young and developing industry, totaled $29 billion over the same period.
Subsidies to fossil fuels generally increased over the study period (though they decreased in 2008), while funding for renewables increased but saw a precipitous drop in 2006-07 (though they increased in 2008).
Most of the largest subsidies to fossil fuels were written into the U.S. Tax Code as permanent provisions. By comparison, many subsidies for renewables are time-limited initiatives implemented through energy bills, with expiration dates that limit their usefulness to the renewables industry.
The vast majority of subsidy dollars to fossil fuels can be attributed to just a handful of tax breaks... The largest of these, the Foreign Tax Credit, applies to the overseas production of oil through an obscure provision of the Tax Code, which allows energy companies to claim a tax credit for payments that would normally receive less-beneficial tax treatment.

Earth Track is a primary sourse for understanding & monitoring environmentally-harmful subsidies.

Earth Track works to make government subsidies that harm the environment easier to see, value, and eliminate. There are thousands of environmentally-harmful subsidies throughout the world, contributing to global challenges such as overfishing, excessive clearing of forests, water depletion, and climate change. The subsidies alter market prices and investment incentives, distorting wide ranging market decisions on what to buy, what to build, and when and where to do it.

Subsidies 101: Gross subsidies to oil + Gross offsets = Net subsidies to oil

And, in Feb. 2010, the International Monetary Fund issued its Staff Position Note on the upward trend in oil subsidies:

Petroleum product subsidies have again started to rise with the rebound in international prices. In 2003, global consumer subsidies for petroleum products totaled nearly $60 billion. They are projected to reach almost $250 billion in 2010. Tax-inclusive subsidies, reflecting suboptimal taxation, are estimated to be much larger—$740 billion in 2010, or 1 percent of global GDP. Petroleum Product Subsidies: Costly, Inequitable, and Rising

Tea bags, no jobs, please.

2010-03-05T11:22:00.000-08:00

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re: "Do you simply hate our modern society? Are you feeling guilty about driving to work every day? I seriously don't get it."

Thanks to the Party of No-Way, No-How, & No-Jobs, & their Saudi billionaire foreign oil buddies, the U.S. economy is missing out on the biggest technological revolution since the electrification of America.
How Germany, Spain, and China Are Seizing the Energy Opportunity and Why the United States Risks Getting Left Behind.
Clean energy technology is becoming a $2.3 Trillion [that's capital 'T'] dollar industry in only 10 years.
By 2020, clean energy will be one of the world’s biggest industries, totaling as much as $2.3 trillion. Over the past year, other countries made huge investments to seize the economic opportunity provided by the historic shift from fossil-based energy to renewable, low-waste electricity and fuel. These investments weren’t made out of thin air, but were a result of intentional public policies, which in turn provided a strong stimulus for new public and private investment in new clean-energy markets, infrastructure, and human resources.
China, Germany, & Spain are already out of gates and heading down the stretch, while the obstructionist Republican Party of Tea-Bags-No-Jobs-Please has America still stuck in the stalls.
China, Germany, and Spain are early winners in the next great technological and industrial revolution. Many other countries such as Denmark, Japan, and South Korea that we do not discuss in this report are also forging ahead with ambitious clean energy economic strategies. The United States, which has yet to fully embrace a truly sustainable growth strategy for the low-carbon future, is not.
And so now, American renewable energy companies are relocating to the People's Republic of Communist China.
Less than two years after building a solar manufacturing plant in Devens, Massachusetts, Evergreen Solar—an early U.S. pioneer in solar photovoltaic technology—announced plans to move part of that operation to Wuhan, China.
So let's get the lead out & our horses out on the track & fire up those investors before the race is over & we go home even broker.
The race toward a clean-energy future is underway, and those nations that lead will reap enormous economic benefits. With the right investments and smart policies, the United States can be among them, a top player in the emerging global low-carbon economy.
Out of the Running?
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AWEA on Renewable Energy Standards & American Jobs

2010-03-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

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re: "Our economy is at risk, because these jobs are being created overseas."

Utter disinformed tea party palin-beck propagandic nonsense, pilgrim. Our economy is at risk because we haven't yet invested in sufficient manufacturing base necessary to produce the sheer volume of electrical components needed for wind turbine farms here & in foreign markets.

While the Bush/Cheney administration pumped trillions of our taxpayer dollars into foreign oil subsidies & foreign oil wars & foreign EXXOM mega-profits, Europe & China provided the necessary government regulatory infrastructure & stimuli to attract 100s of billions of investment dollars into renewable energy manufacturing capacity & demand.

So again, thanks to the utter stupidity of the Party of No-Way, No-How, No-Jobs criminal malfeasance & disgovernance to line the pockets of EXXOM Rex Tillerson's & Denier-in-Chief James Inhofe's Saudi billionaire buds, we're now relegated to playing catch up.

And catch up we'd better, else trillions more of our taxpayer dollars will flow to Prince Al-Walid & Prez. Chavez & EXXOM boardroom bonuses, instead of building a strong manufacturing base in renewable clean technologies to provide jobs for 100s of thousands of long-unemployed construction & industrial American workers.
"Rather than adopt policies that will kill American jobs, Congress should enact policies that will create jobs by encouraging manufacturers to invest in U.S. plants. That means passing a Renewable Electricity Standard now."
"The Recovery Act has been creating jobs by helping finance new American wind energy projects that have broken ground or been completed since the Act was passed. The proposed moratorium and legislation would kill this effort and destroy the momentum for one of the few industries that has been creating jobs and economic growth."
"It is unfortunate that the proponents of this moratorium and legislation are using a deeply flawed study as the basis for a policy that would destroy tens of thousands of American jobs."
"We support the goal of continuing the rapid expansion of U.S. wind manufacturing. More than half of the value of wind turbines used in U.S. wind projects is domestically produced, and that percentage is increasing every year as more turbine makers build U.S. manufacturing capability. We do not have the capability today to produce 100% of wind turbine components in the U.S., but we can grow our manufacturing base and add 274,000 American jobs if Congress passes a strong Renewable Electricity Standard." AWEA

To frac or not to frac?

2010-03-02T22:27:00.000-08:00

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Hydraulic Fracturing or "fracking" is a proven method for improving the productivity of natural gas or oil wells.
The technique of hydraulic fracturing is used to increase or restore the rate at which fluids, such as oil, gas or water, can be produced from a reservoir, including unconventional reservoirs such as shale rock or coal beds. Environmental concerns regarding hydrofracturing techniques include potential for contamination of aquifers with fracturing chemicals or waste fluids.
Animations:

Fracking was exempted from EPA regulation during the Bush/Cheney era.
A 2004 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study concluded that the process was safe and didn't warrant further study, because there was "no unequivocal evidence" of health risks, and the fluids were neither necessarily hazardous nor able to travel far underground.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 further strengthened the industry's regulatory position, specifically exempting hydraulic fracturing from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Since then, water supply contamination has been widely reported.
The increased use of hydraulic fracturing has prompted more criticism of its environmental dangers. A 2008 investigation of benzene contamination in Colorado and Wyoming led some EPA officials to point towards hydraulic fracturing as a culprit. One of the authors of the 2004 EPA report states that it has been misconstrued by the gas-drilling industry.
In June 2009 two identical bills named the FRAC Act were introduced to both the United States House and the Senate. FRAC stands for Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act. The FRAC Act has been heard in both the House and the Senate. It has been referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works, where it remains to this day.
And public awareness of the environmental issues related to fracking is growing.
The award-winning film Gasland addresses many of the issues that "fracking" presents. The film shows water that can be lit on fire and interviews people who all have startlingly similar health issues that have all arisen following the start of hydraulic fracture drilling near their homes.
Water that can be lit on fire right out of the sink, chronically ill residents of drilling areas from disparate locations in the US all with the same mysterious symptoms, huge pools of toxic waste that kill cattle and vegetation well blowouts and huge gas explosions consistently covered up by state and federal regulatory agencies. These are just a few of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND.

If only we could see the gases.

2010-03-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

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Partisan, anti-science tirades against respected scientists have no place in respectable mainstream news outlets including their editorials & science blogs. They only accentuate the lack of understanding & appreciation for what climate science tells us about our future on this planet.

Time to get back to the basics of empirical evidence.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing. This is measured by hundreds of monitoring stations across the globe, all finding the same increasing trend (NOAA). The rising trend is confirmed by satellite measurements conducted independently by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Combined with ice core measurements from Greenland and Antarctica, this tells us that atmospheric CO2 levels are the highest in over 15 million years (Tripati 2009).
Humans are emitting nearly twice as much CO2 as ends up remaining in the atmosphere. Measurements of carbon isotopes confirm that the rising CO2 originates from the burning of fossil fuel (Ghosh 2003). Further independent confirmation comes from observed falling oxygen levels caused by the burning of fossil fuel (Manning 2006).
Satellite measurements of outgoing longwave radiation find an enhanced greenhouse effect (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007).
This heat build-up is manifesting itself across the globe. Arctic sea-ice loss is accelerating beyond the worst case scenarios of model forecasts (Stroeve 2007).
Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are losing ice mass at an accelerating rate (Velicogna 2009).
This is speeding up sea level rise as observed by tidal gauges and satellite altimeters (Church 2006). Skeptical Science
If only we could see the gases.
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Not another goddamn Global Warming Denial thread!?!

2010-03-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

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Recent visits to Eric Berger's SciGuy blog @ the Houston Chronicle confirm what the climate science-minded have always suspected -- it's yet another MSM outlet infiltrated, if not yet overrun, by marauding denialosaurs that feed at EXXOM-funded anti-science websites like Steve McIntyre's Climate Fraudit & Tony Watts' UpHisB*tt.

In low-lying, hurricane-prone, parochial Houston, Anti-Science Deniers do what they do best -- desecrate the science when not busy manufacturing scientific scandals:
This is the real story exposed of "Climategate". It has been the most egregious and unfounded attack on the integrity of a profession we have ever seen.
It turns out that almost all of the mistakes are fabrications. ... The stories were all written by Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor of The Sunday Times. Leake has close links with deniers and in fact based these stories directly on wild and unsubstantiated claims by sceptic bloggers, as uncovered by Tim Holmes.
Leake’s stories have been reproduced in the other Murdoch broadsheets, The Australian and the Wall Street Journal and of course have been amplified on Fox News, and are themselves now being referred to as Leakegate.
Yet these alleged mistakes – non-existent or trivial – with no implications whatever for the robustness of climate science have been deployed in a sophisticated campaign to blacken the reputations of the scientists responsible for alerting us to the perils of global warming.
Just when we should be urging immediate and deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions, the public is being lulled into disbelief, scepticism and apathy by a sustained and politically driven assault on the credibility of climate science. For this we will all pay dearly.
Clive Hamilton, The Drum Unleashed
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CAPTIONS ON

2010-03-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

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Leave CAPTIONS ON for EXXOM anti-science deniers & FAUX NEWS "de liars":

It's so Cold, there can't be Global Warming
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The Symphony of Science & the cough cough Cacophony of Denial

2010-02-26T13:26:00.000-08:00

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Amidst our adventures on the blogosphere, we've found that a splash of metaphor here & there helps drag the rambunctious denial back down to planet earth. Enjoy.

The Symphony of Science & the cough cough Cacophony of Denial
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The House of Saud dictates FOX NEWS?

2010-02-24T01:04:00.000-08:00

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Well, we can all certainly give this a 50/50, rather, a 57+2/41.

FOX NEWS in bed with Saudi Arabia? Watts up with that?
[Saudi Prince] al-Waleed has formed multiple connections with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the owner of Fox News. In September 2005, he acquired 5.46% of voting shares in News Corp., and just a few months later, when Fox ran coverage of riots in Paris under the banner "Muslim riots," he allegedly phoned Murdoch and had him change the heading to "civil riots." Murdoch’s News Corp. cements ties with Saudi prince
So, that Saudi billionaire Prince tells Aussie billionaire Murdoch how to report the FOX NEWS. But surely, both these foreign-borns have America's best interests before their own Swiss bank accounts?
Now the partnership is growing even closer, with News Corp. acquiring a 10% stake in al-Waleed's media conglomerate, Rotana, along with an option for another 10%.
And that oil-billionaire Saudi Prince is now the biggest shareholder in FOX NEWS?
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns a 7 percent stake in News Corp — the parent company of Fox News — making him the largest shareholder outside the family of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch. Conservative Activists Rebel Against Fox News: Saudi Ownership Is ‘Really Dangerous For America’
Call us red-blooded American, but what were the nationalities of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers?
[Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal] owns a very significant percentage of the News Corp and has let the world know that he can get things taken off Fox News when he finds them objectionable and has in the past. And I really believe this is really dangerous for America.
Perhaps, we should all crank up the odds of a congressional investigation into FOX NEWS foreign ownership to a unanimous 100% of red-blooded American Senators, unless, of course, you're not interested in facts or truth.
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10,000 nuke plants worth of wind power.

2010-02-22T20:33:00.000-08:00

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New NREL studies show that the U.S. could generate 20% of our electric power with 300 GW (300 nuke plants worth) of wind power as early as 2024. And we are blessed with the wind resources to ultimately produce 10,000 GW (10,000 nuke plants worth).
The assessment of onshore wind energy potential found that the U.S. could produce almost 37 million gigawatt-hours yearly. According to the American Wind Energy Association, that’s nine times our current annual electricity consumption.
New Wind Resource Maps and Wind Potential Estimates for the United States
In a single year, the U.S. wind resource potential could produce 364.9 quadrillion btus, the energy equivalent of all proven oil and natural gas reserves in the U.S. as estimated by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). A renewable resource, wind resource will not be depleted and will continue to provide energy year after year.
U.S. WIND RESOURCE EVEN LARGER THAN PREVIOUSLY ESTIMATED
This new analysis confirms that America is blessed with vast wind resources that can energize our economy, create jobs, and avoid carbon for years to come -— if we give ourselves the policy tools to do so, including a strong national Renewable Electricity Standard with aggressive, binding near- and long-term targets. A national Renewable Electricity Standard would not only ensure that we tap our nation’s vast wind resources, but create thousands of new American jobs today, manufacturing the 8,000 component parts that go into a modern wind turbine. The wind resource is there, vast and inexhaustible, waiting for us. Meanwhile, the economy can’t wait, job creation can’t wait, and America can’t wait. We need Congress to act now and pass a comprehensive climate and energy bill that includes a strong national Renewable Electricity Standard.
Jobs, jobs, & jobs! What the hell are we waiting for? For China to take over Texas?
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I want my Bloom Box!

2010-02-22T01:47:00.000-08:00

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Betcha John Doerr & Colin Powell are happy as hell to see a 60 Minutes' story about their NASA scientist reaping the techno-rewards of going to Mars without actually going to Mars.

Dr. K.R. Sridhar took in the ballpark of $400 million of venture capital over 8 years & converted the technology he developed for NASA's Mars-mission bound O2 generator into a clean-tech fuel-cell that generates electric power on planet Earth. Bake a little beach sand, cut a stack of ceramic squares, coat with green & black "secret sauce" inks, then inter-stack with cheap metal-alloy plates. Add fuel & air &, voila, electric power 7/24.

Stick a bank of these $700-800K per babies into your local substation or neighborhood park & hook 'em up to nat gas or a local landfill, & tell it to the electric company. No nukes, no coal burners, no grid.

Of course, with a 20% California green subsidy & 30% fed tax break, you can get half off or a twofer.

Bloom Boxes are already being field-tested by 20 major companies in California: Google, Ebay, FedEx, Walmart, Staples, etc.

Wanna bet who buys out Bloom Energy? GE? Siemens? ABB? India? China?

The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?
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Clear & Present Danger to Public Welfare

2010-02-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

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If you haven't yet heard, the Texas State Climatologist, Dr. John Nielson-Gammon, is making his case over at The Wonk Room:

Texas State Climatologist Disputes State’s Denier Petition: Greenhouse Gases ‘Clearly Present A Danger To The Public Welfare’.

and at Joe Romm's Climate Progress:

Texas state climatologist disputes state’s anti-science petition: Greenhouse gases “clearly present a danger to the public welfare.”

Now those are some headlines we can all live by.
NIELSEN-GAMMON: Do I think that the EPA based its assessment on sound science? I think, by basing its assessments on the IPCC, USGCRP, and NAS reports, it was basing its assessments on the best available science. I have the expertise to independently evaluate the quality of these reports, and on the whole they constitute in my opinion the most comprehensive, balanced assessments of climate change science presently available.
WONK ROOM: Do you know of any particular reason to doubt that the planet is warming, that greenhouse gases are involved, and that sea levels are rising?
NIELSEN-GAMMON: No.
WONK ROOM: I’m also interested if there are any specific risks relevant to Texas.
NIELSEN-GAMMON: Potential Texas vulnerabilities include sea level rises, droughts, floods, estuarine ecosystems, and agricultural productivity. The possible adverse economic impact of future greenhouse gas emission control strategies on Texas industries also represents a risk associated with global warming.
Full text of email interview with Dr. Nielsen-Gammon

And please take note that the Texas State Climatologist is not the only South Texan to support the conclusions of the IPCC & the findings of the EPA.

Dr. Andrew Dessler, a climatologist at Texas A&M University and author of The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change, tells the Wonk Room in an email interview that the entire Department of Atmospheric Sciences agrees with the IPCC: "I, along with all of the other faculty in the department, agree with the main conclusions of the IPCC."
Dr. Kenneth P. Bowman, the head of the Texas A&M University Department of Atmospheric Sciences, writes: "I believe that EPA finding is based on good science, as do all of my colleagues in the Atmospheric Science Department here at Texas A&M."
UPDATES: Texas State Climatologist Disputes State’s Denier Petition: Greenhouse Gases ‘Clearly Present A Danger To The Public Welfare’

Dr. Nielson-Gammon also plays over at his Atmo.Sphere blog & sometimes, when a pleasant mood overwhelms him, the Houston Chron's SciGuy.

All you science savvy, biodiversity loving, intelligent citizens of planet Earth, bring friends, lots of 'em.
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The Hurt Locker

2010-02-18T23:22:00.000-08:00

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When you see it, you won't feel the same.

Opening Sequence

"That's a negative."

"Where ya going? ... Wanna back up? ... What the f*ck are ya doing?"

"If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die comfortable."

9 Academy Award Nominations
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Judg[e]ment Day: Climate Denial on Trial

2010-02-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

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Where's an honest Bush appointee when you really need one? Somebody get Judge John E. Jones III on the phone, right now.

Then, with a little science & good judgment, by this time next year we might see headlines across frontpages across the nation, if not the Daily Mail, along the lines of:

"JUDGEMENT DAY: CLIMATE DENIAL ON TRIAL"

That report an historic Memorandum Opinion like Dover's:
The proper application of both the endorsement and [smell] tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the [Texas Climate Change Denial] Policy violates the [Climate Science]. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether [Climate Change Denial] is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that [Climate Change Denial] cannot uncouple itself from its [Exxon Mobil money], and thus [Big Oil profits].
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of [Climate Change Denial] make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that the [Anthropogenic Global Warming] theory is antithetical to [Climate Science] and to [science] in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of [Anthropogenic Global Warming] represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of [Climate Change].
To be sure, the [Anthropogenic Global Warming] theory of [Climate Change] is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in [Anti-science denial & Exxon Mobil money] into the [peer-reviewed] science or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
The citizens of [Texas] were poorly served by the members of the [Governor's administration] who [promoted] the [Climate Science Denial] Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their [Anti-science] convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the [Climate Science Denial].
Now, that really would be American History!

re: "I trust climate scientiests more than I trust Texas politicians."
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China laughing?

2010-02-17T09:09:00.000-08:00

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What with all the global weirding hereabouts, a good guide to the latest climate science is undeniably the order of the day.

Let’s start with the basics, shall we?

Heat-trapping greenhouse gases are at unprecedented levels, and the paleoclimate record suggests that even slightly higher levels are untenable.
Since we have record levels of heat-trapping gases, it’s not surprising that we also learned that this was the hottest decade in the temperature record and that the Arctic is the hottest in at least two millenia.
We learned that the planet is warming from those GHGs just where climate science said it would — the oceans, which is where more than 90% of the warming was projected to end up.
Unexpectedly, even Antarctica appears to be warming.
This global warming is driving melting at extraordinary rates every where we look, including places nobody expected.
And given that unexpectedly fast ice melt, it’s no surprise the science now projects much higher and much faster sea level rise than just a few years ago.
We continued to learn about the dangerous positive carbon-cycle feedbacks that threaten to amplify the impacts of human-caused GHGs.
Indeed, the best evidence is that the climate is now being driven by amplifying feedbacks.
High emissions levels + positive feedbacks = climate catastrophe.
And the plausible worst-case scenario is even worse than this grim “business as usual” emissions case.
And this is not good news for human health and welfare.
So the time to act is most certainly now.
The anti-science crowd [& that's putting it politely] use smoke and mirrors to distract as many people as possible, but the rest of us need to listen to the science and keep our eyes on the prize — reversing greenhouse gas emissions trends as quickly and rapidly as possible.

And, for videophiles, The Science of Climate Change.
Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now. And Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other. Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming confused about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move toward clean-tech and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to oil. Yes, sir, it is morning in Saudi Arabia.
Amen to that, brother Thomas. Or rather, Allahu Akbar!
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