A small note: Mike is ill with eye troubles so has been unable to keep up his chronicle of erring ladies. I have decided therefore that I should try to fill the gap to some extent so have put up a few reports of that sort of thing -- until Mike is back on deck. I do however have a lot of other commitments so it would help if people were to send me links to any such reports that they come across... My email is jonjayray@hotmail.com JR

Pa.: Trial begins for Allentown woman, 40, accused of molesting boy, 13


Rachel Warris

Warris, now 40, of the 600 block of Dixon Street in south Allentown is charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a person under 16 years old, statutory sexual assault, corruption of minors and indecent assault.

If convicted, Warris could be sentenced to more than 10 years in a state prison.

On the witness stand Tuesday, Warris told the jury that the boy was the aggressor. She said she admitted telling police that she initiated sexual contact with the eighth-grader, but said her confession was coerced. "I just wanted to go home already," she said.

The sex assault is alleged to have occurred Feb. 11, 2015, at Warris' home. The boy told an investigator that Warris touched him inappropriately, took off his pants and sexually assaulted him, according to court records.

The boy's mother testified for more than an hour Tuesday morning. She said her son and Warris' son were close friends, and they usually got together at the Warris home after school to play video games or sports.

On the day of the alleged sex assault, the mother said she picked up her son from the Warris home and noticed a change in his demeanor. Her normally talkative child was quiet, and would not make eye contact with her, she told the jury.

Before the boy left for school the next morning, he gave his mother his prepaid cellphone, so that she could hook it up to the family computer and add minutes to it.

The mother said she was curious when she saw the heart message on her son's phone, but hesitated before clicking it, because she didn't want to invade his privacy. "But I wanted to see who the girl was," she said.

The family then drove to the Allentown Police Department, where the boy was interviewed by members of the Special Victims Unit.

Warris admitted in court Tuesday that she exposed her breast to the boy and her son, but said it was a joke. She also admitted writing sexually explicit messages to the boy, but insisted that she did not invite the sexual contact between them that she described.

During cross-examination, Deputy District Attorney Anna-Kristie Morffi Marks showed Warris the Facebook message thread, pointing out that Warris sent the boy an "I love you" cartoon the day after she said the boy tried to sexually assault her.

Warris' attorney, David Ritter, asked jurors to keep an open mind. He said child molester prosecutions are a "machine that must keep cranking on," and suggested that police do not always have proof when they charge someone.

SOURCE  

No matter how warm or cool a year is, it always proves global warming

As we all know, Warmists have seized on the slight warming in 2015 as "proving" Warmism to be right.  El Nino is ignored. So the year 2011 must have been hard for them.  I downloaded the 2011 chart from CRU in 2012.  It is below.  That was only the 12th Warmest year on record.  So did such a dismal figure shake their faith in Warmism at all?  No way!  They went on proclaiming their twisted gospel as before

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).  

Arctic news

Sea ice was down a bit for most of March but it has now popped back up to a level similar to that in other recent years.  The graph tells all:


2016 is the black line


How awful for the Warmists.  The Arctic is all they've got.  I imagine they will console themselves by saying today is the 15th lowest or some such.  You have to be creative with the truth to be a Warmist -- which mostly means taking refuge in trivialities

SOURCE for the graph


UPDATE:

The following is amusing.  It looks like the upswing began on 25th.

"Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)  said that the sea ice cover attained an average maximum extent of 14.52m sq km (5.607m sq miles) on 24 March, the lowest winter maximum since records began in 1979. The low beats a record set only last year of 14.54m sq km (5.612m sq miles), reached on 25 February 2015".

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Arctic sea ice reaches a record low: Scientists say 'disturbing' data points to a long-term trend in global warming

Arrant nonsense.  Arctic temperatures increased FAR more than global temperatures.  So this is a local effect, not a global one.  It is Arctic-specific with no demonstrable relevance to CO2 emissions or the alleged effects of CO2 emissions. Since CO2 emissions were in fact flat overall in 2015 and into 2016, it is DEMONSTRABLE that they did not cause the Arctic warming. Non-change doesn't cause change.  The warming could have been caused by oscillations in ocean currents, oscillations in air currents or subsurface vulcanism.  Nobody knows


The growth of Arctic sea ice this winter peaked reached another milestone.

It recorded the lowest maximum level of ice on record, thanks to extraordinarily warm temperatures.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center says ice covered a maximum of 5.607 million square miles of the Arctic Ocean in 2016.

That's 5,000 square miles less than the old record set in 2015 — a difference slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut.

It's also some 431,000 miles less than the 30-year average. That difference is the size of Texas and California combined.

Records go back to 1979 when satellites started measuring sea ice, which forms when Arctic Ocean water freezes.

This year's ice didn't break the record by much, but it's 'an exclamation point' on a longer-term trend, said Nasa scientist Walt Meier, who helped calculate the data.

The sub-par showing doesn't necessarily mean that the minimum extent this summer will also break a record, scientists said.

The summer minimum is more important for affecting Earth's climate and weather.

Data center scientist Julienne Stroeve says winter temperatures over the North Pole were 16 degrees warmer than normal, while other parts of the Arctic ran 4 to 11 degrees warmer than normal.

Data center chief Mark Serreze said: 'I have never seen such a warm, crazy winter in the Arctic.' 'It was so warm that the Barents Sea was 'pretty much close to ice -free for almost the whole winter, which is very unusual,' Meier said. Stroeve said early indications show that the sea ice is thinner than last year.

A leading but still controversial theory says loss of sea ice in the Arctic may change the jet stream and bring more extreme weather to the US, Stroeve said.

The new report reveals 'just the latest disturbing data point in a disturbing trend wherein climate changes are happening even faster than we had forecast,' Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann said.

However, Nasa adds that the cap of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean is always changing.

Each winter it grows dramatically, usually reaching its maximum in March.It melts just as dramatically each summer, reaching its minimum in September.

In 2015-16, that winter growth got off to a leisurely start due in part to a month of unusually warm weather in the region.

They link this to a phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation. This involves differences in air pressure over the Arctic and lower latitudes.

Scientists say a shift in the Arctic Oscillation likely weakened the atmospheric barrier between the polar latitudes and the mid-latitudes

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

British woman started relationship with underage boy after marriage breakdown

A 35-year-old woman from a rural Nottinghamshire village has been jailed for having a sexual relationship with an underage boy.



Lauren Swindin, of Grovewood Road in Misterton, began the relationship with the teenager in 2013, following the breakdown of her marriage.

Police became involved after an anonymous tip-off in early 2014 and Swindin was arrested.  At a previous hearing Swindin pleaded guilty to two counts of engaging in sexual activity with a boy.

She was sentenced at Nottingham Crown Court on Tuesday to two years and six months in jail.

She is also subject to an indefinite Sexual Harm Prevention Order and is required to sign the Sex Offenders' Register for life.

Sergeant Nathan Thomas from Nottinghamshire Police said: "Swindin manipulated this boy into a sexual relationship, knowing full-well the legal implications of her actions. "She now has two-and-a-half years in prison to reflect on this.

SOURCE

Fenton woman accused of having sex with teenager



JEFFERSON COUNTY, MO (KTVI) – A 32-year-old Fenton woman is facing multiple felony charges for allegedly carrying on a months-long sexual relationship with a teenager, the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said.

According to a report appearing in The Jefferson County Leader, Randi Benedick, who’s listed as a mental health therapist for Comtrea, had sex with the victim at least 40 times between November 2014 and May 2015. The victim was 16 years-old at the time. She also continued to have sex with the victim after he turned 17.

Prosecutors charged Benedick with five counts of second-degree statutory rape and five counts of second-degree sodomy.

Benedick was released from jail February 18 after posting a $40,000 bond, but she’s been ordered to wear a GPS monitor and cannot go within a mile of the victim’s home. She’s also been forbidden from having any contact with anyone under the age of 18, other than her own children.

Benedick is due back in court April 12. If convicted, she faces up to seven years in prison on each charge.

SOURCE  

A vegan who loves nukes

There is a HUGE rant by Geoff Russell on "New Matilda" about  global warming being caused by farm animals.  It bemuses me to see how many words the Green/Left usually take to make their points and this is an example of that. The article seems to go on forever.  The Green/Left must be boiling with rage to pour out so many bile-filled words.

And despite all those words absolutely nothing is said about how humans have evolved to be omnivores and that any attempt to take meat off our dinner tables would be so widely and strongly resisted as to make the attempt futile. He seems to think it is only a "conspiracy" that keeps us eating meat.  What a wacko!

He also dosn't question global warming orthodoxy but that is unsurprising. It gives him a hook to hang his vegan crusade on.

That he is actually capable of critical thought is revealed by the second oddity about him.  He likes nuclear power.  That's perfectly rational if you believe in the evils of CO2 and CH4 but is rare on the Green/left.

And speaking of CH4, the usual swipe that Warmists take at farm animals is at their farts, which do have a lot of CH4 in them.  But CH4 intercepts warming in certain wavelengths only and water vapour also absorbs those wavelengths so the theoretical effect of CH4 on global warming translates in practice to a nil effect. So that part of Mr Russell's argument is a washout.

It's amusing, though, that Mr Russell aims primarily at fellow Greenies.  He thinks they are conveniently overlooking  a major source of global warming. Just a few excerpts:

The makers of the US eco-ethical-documentary “Cowspiracy” are attempting to explain why the world’s largest environmental organisations have ignored the role of meat in both climate change and more generally in trashing the planet.

They use the well-worn tactic of simply asking them… or trying to. When it comes to slandering people for buggering the planet, Greenpeace apparently thinks it’s more noble to give than to receive, so they aren’t keen on being asked inconvenient questions.

This doco has lots of Michael Moore moments. People knocking on doors, asking pointed questions and getting sheepish looks. All the big US players get a mention: The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC, Rainforest Action Network, Amazon Watch, and more.

These groups all love asserting the high moral ground and aren’t used to being questioned about their submersion in a deep trench of cattle excrement.

The inconvenient truth is that none of these environmental icons care enough about their beloved planet to order the vegan option, let alone make the whole menu vegan.

In the case of Greenpeace, their PR people did the old “turn that camera off” shuffle and refused to be interviewed; … priceless!

But after all the fun and games… does Cowspiracy actually explain the inaction of at least the US environmental movement on the meat and dairy industries? Is it really a conspiracy? Is it organised and funded?

US Professor of Nutrition, Marion Nestle blew the whistle years ago with “Food Politics” on how the meat industry stacked and bullied US Government nutritional advice committees.

Cowspiracy lacks Nestle’s academic rigor, but still delivers a few hits.

When asked if the meat and dairy industries donate to environmental organisations, the Animal Agriculture Alliance spokesperson looked like a kid caught with both hands and feet in the cookie jar, and said she couldn’t comment. She refused to answer a direct question about funding Greenpeace.

In Australia, the funding link is clear and a matter of public record. As is the lack of any major campaign against meat by the big green groups (ACF, FOE, AYCC, Greens to name but a few) getting this funding. Tim Flannery is also a recipient of pastoral largess from the bovine broverhood.

Let’s be clear here: different meats have different impacts. It gets tiresome to differentiate constantly, so I’ll do it once now.

Ruminants are the primary climate culprits by way of methane and deforestation, while pigs and chickens primarily pollute air, water and other foods while diverting deforested land from food to feed, while also killing people directly via new diseases (e.g. Swine Flu) while adding to our risk of losing antibiotics.

The cattle barons supporting our big green groups obviously don’t care that their funding is common knowledge. Why? Probably because our mainstream media don’t give a damn. Aussie BBQ culture is at least as strong here as in the US; and don’t forget meat industry advertising.....

Environmental tribalism has our environmental groups automatically anti-GM and anti-nuclear as a matter of ideology. This illustrates a profoundly anti-science bias. They simply don’t get it.

You can’t credibly accept climate science but reject any other science which contradicts your policies. All the science of the last 30 years on the causes of cancer and the mechanism of DNA repair contradict the radiophobia behind green anti-nuclear policy.

When science conflicts with your policy, you may wait a little to make sure the science is solid and well supported, but if it is, then you change your policies. Any high school student can understand this, except perhaps those in AYCC.

When your science is shallow and you don’t really understand the process, you tend to pick and choose what you like. But science isn’t like that.

The human population, even the 9 billion of us expected by 2050, could actually live without doing too much environmental damage if we ate at the bottom of the food chain (vegan) and used nuclear power for all our energy needs.

Energy doesn’t have to have a large adverse footprint on the planet, unless we go with sources having a low power density, like wind, solar and biofuels. It is ironic that our environmental movement has opted for the sources of energy that will have the most impact on wildlife habitat, and therefore biodiversity.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Fracking, methane and Bill McKibben

Well-known Warmist preacher Bill McKibben has an article out under the heading: "Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry".  He is easily terrified in the hope that we will be too. Like a lot of articles in Leftist publications, it is VERY long-winded.  I sometimes wonder about that.  If they had purely factual statements to make there would surely be no more than a few paragraphs needed.  Readers will note that my posts are very short.  If you know what you are talking about, it doesn't take long to say it.

Anyway, I will not attempt to reproduce any of the huge rant concerned.  The point of the article can indeed be presented with great brevity.  McKibben says that fracking releases methane into the atmosphere and that methane there will soon fry us with global warming.  So he wants to stop fracking!

Such a simple story and so wrong.  It's probably true that atmospheric methane levels have increased as a result of leaks from fracking but does that matter?

No.  It is true that methane can absorb some heat from the electromagnetic radiation that we get from the sun.  And molecule for molecule, it absorbs a lot more heat than does CO2.

Warmists normally stop the discussion there.  But the atmosphere is a complex thing and we have to look at methane in the context of what normally goes on in the whole atmosphere. And it so happens that water vapour absorbs the same wavelengths that methane does.  And there is a heck of a lot more water vapour in the atmosphere than methane.  So the water vapour will already have intercepted most or all of the wavelengths that methane might -- leaving no heating effect due to methane. The effects of CH4 are completely masked by H2O.  So methane is a POTENTIAL warming gas but not an ACTUAL one.  No foreseeable increase in methane would generate any increase in warming.

Isn't it strange that in his long article Bill McKibben found no space to discuss that matter?  Just another climate crook.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Former married teacher, 33, found guilty of kidnapping his student, 17, to have sex despite her testimony in his defense



A married teacher was found guilty of kidnapping his 17-year-old student in order to have sex with her.

Jason Lofthouse, 33, of Las Vegas, Nevada was convicted after the jury deliberated for two hours over a statute that forbids an adult from enticing a minor in order to commit an unlawful act against him or her, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal.

The father of three will now be facing a minimum of 20 years in prison to a maximum of life, according to News 3.

The trial cantered on whether or not Lofthouse forced or coerced the student, who was 17 at the time, to perform sex acts on him in his classroom and have sex with him twice in hotels during school hours, the Las Vegas Review Journal reports.

'You can’t use the word ‘consensual’ as a defense, so you just have to go by the law,' Lewis said. 'As a teacher he should have known better.'

But the teenager, now 18, insisted to jurors at Clark County District Court that she wasn’t hoping for a better grade in the class and didn’t even consider her former teacher to be her boyfriend. Describing the relationship as ‘nothing serious’, she told the court: ‘I thought of it more as a thing.  ‘I didn’t need a good grade. I wasn’t trying to get a better grade. I was just doing it because I wanted to.’

She insisted that both she and her teacher initiated physical contact – and that she never felt trapped when they visited two hotels for sex in May last year.

In Nevada, while the age of sexual consent is 16, state law forbids employees and volunteers at schools from engaging in sexual contact with students.

The student told jurors that she did not get her parents’ permission to visit the hotels – which is important in relation to the kidnapping charges it is a first-degree felony to take a minor somewhere without parental permission and commit a crime against the minor.

Lewis and other jurors agreed that the kidnapping statue was 'too broad' and that it should be re-worded despite finding him guilty.

Lofthouse is due back in court for sentencing on May 17.

SOURCE

Credulous woman believes the doomsters

Leftism sure messes up minds.  A small excerpt below.  An apparently normal woman hesitated for years before getting pregnant because of all the doom that Warmists predict.  She apparently had no natural skepticism so didn't think to doubt the predictions.  So she felt she did not want to bring kids into a world plagued by natural disasters.  And, by the time she allowed her natural instincts to take over, it was pretty late and all she has had so far is a miscarriage.

The article below is very long.  She obviously wrote it to soothe her feelings.  But on the whole I support the decisions of fruitcake women not to have children.  It means that those like them will tend to die out. It's called natural selection


By Madeline Ostrander

The librarian was nondescript in the way that everyone standing behind a counter is, probably in her 30s, with straight, fox-colored hair. When she took my stack of books, I noticed the way her sweater draped over a conspicuous melon-shaped belly, and I felt a tug in my chest and warmth rise in my stomach. It took a moment to recognize this sensation as envy. Then came another feeling: shock. I had never been jealous of any woman for carrying what looked like an uncomfortable load, or for what would come next: the messy, exhausting job of mothering an infant. Something unfamiliar had come over me.

In my late 20s and early 30s, I was terrified of becoming the sort of woman who was “baby crazy,” afraid motherhood would circumscribe my life. I politely admired but didn’t gush over my friends’ new babies. Compared with many women, I was under little pressure to procreate; neither my nor my husband’s parents had ever expressed more than a tentative longing for grandchildren. But six years ago, when I first held my 2-month-old niece, wrapped in a flower-print onesie and murmuring delicious baby noises, I felt a rush of joy, an indescribable feeling of human closeness.

My husband and I had made a home in Seattle for several years, and my friends of childbearing age tended to be writers and activists, scientists and scholars. When considering kids, they weighed not only their desires and finances but the state of the world. Many of them had read grim prognoses of what climate change would do to life on Earth. Even in the restrained language of science, the future holds unprecedented difficulties and disasters. For many people, these problems were an abstraction, but as an environmental journalist, I knew enough to imagine them in front of me. Driving across the bridge to my house, I pictured city beaches drowned by the rising sea. Watching the news, I wondered when the next colossal hurricane would strike the Gulf of Mexico or the mid-Atlantic. These thoughts are not paranoid. According to scientists’ predictions, if society keeps pumping out carbon dioxide at current rates, any child born now could, by midlife, watch Superstorm Sandy–size disasters regularly inundate New York City. She could see the wheat fields of the Great Plains turn to dust and parts of California gripped by decades of drought. She may see world food prices soar and water in the American West become even scarcer. By 2050, when still in her 30s, she could witness global wars waged over food and land. “It does make me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have kids,” one of my friends whispered to me.

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick (‏@sarahinscience) makes a brave attempt to prove that  February heat was caused by CO2


There she is.  Isn't she gorgeous?  She looks fairly young -- which may be why she has stepped in where wiser heads have not.  She works in the climate change department of an Australian university.  There's good gravy in global warming for some.

Old campaigners like James Hansen and Michael Mann have claimed the February temperature uptick as a sign of anthropogenic global warming.  They admit that El Nino had something to do with it but just dismiss the El Nino contribution as "minimal" with a wave of the hand.  They don't argue for a particular number, as a real scientist would.

But Sarah has risen to the challenge.  She has attempted to give a figure for the El Nino influence!  And the way she does that is fine in principle.  She takes the rise due to El Nino in 1998 and uses that to reduce the 2016 figure.  So she gives a quarter of one degree as the El Nino contribution -- which still leaves a fair bit of warming available for explanation as caused by a CO2 rise.

Just how your derive the 1998 figure for the influence of El Nino is not totally clearcut.  It depends on what you compare the 1998 figure with.  But I will not cavil about that.  I just want to point out the observed warming COULD NOT have been caused by a CO2 rise.  Why?  Because CO2 did not rise in the relevant period.  Cape Grim shows CO2 levels stuck on 398 ppm for the whole period of late 2015 and early 2016.  Sorry, Sarah!  You should have looked that up.

Now it may not be El Nino only that caused the temperature rise.  There are other possible natural factors that could have had an effect. And Sarah points to one:  The Arctic.  She is enough of a scientist to know that melting sea ice does not raise the water level but she points out that less ice may lead to more heat absorption from the sun.  Fair enough.

But what caused the Arctic melt?  In the absence of a CO2 rise we know it cannot be that.  It was partly El Nino and partly subsurface vulcanism, probably.  A few years back it was  discovered that there was furious underwater volcanic activity in the Arctic, particularly along the Gakkel ridge.  But volcanoes are uneven in their eruptions so they should give rise in random ways to melting in the ice above them.  And that accounts for the uneven pattern of Arctic melting and its lack of synchrony with temperatures elsewhere.  But Warmists act as if the volcanoes cause NO melting.  They need to be that crooked.

And here's some other pesky news 2015 was only the SECOND hottest year on record for Europe.  They must not have got much effect from El Nino -- which is as you expect.  Europe is a long way from the Pacific, where El Nino reigns.  Give up, Sarah!  What you have been taught is WRONG.  You are living off a lie!


Most people know by now that last month was the hottest February since modern records began. It was also the hottest overall month on record, and by the largest margin.

The global average temperature anomaly was 1.35ºC above the 1951–80 average and 1.21ºC above the entire twentieth-century average. For temperatures over land, the deviation almost doubles to a whopping 2.31ºC above the twentieth-century average. Other records broken by February 2016 include the fact that it was the tenth consecutive month in which the global average monthly record was broken and that it completed the hottest three-month period on record (December 2015 to February 2016).

Normally, climate scientists don’t get too anxious over a single month; our blood pressure tends to rise a bit more when record-breaking temperature anomalies are consistently smashed. But February is a special case – not only did it set a new record in an increasingly concerning upwards trend, but the magnitude of the record is terrifying.

So what led to this monster of a month?

First, let’s take a look at the possible influence of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation. The 2015–16 El Niño was one of the earliest and strongest on record, easily comparable to its brother in 1997–98. At the global level, El Niños can cause measurable increases in temperature. We saw this in 1998, in our hottest year on record at the time: thanks to climate change, 1998 would have been a warm year without the El Niño, but the record set would have been smaller.

While the latest El Niño is weakening, its legacy is likely to have had a similar effect on our most recent hottest year on record (2015) and the monster February – increasing the anomaly by just a little bit more than what climate change could achieve on its on. But there is no possible way that an observed El Niño, however strong, could solely explain such a huge monthly temperature deviation. Past El Niños have only intensified global average temperatures by up to 0.25ºC, though the measured influence is usually smaller.

The second factor is the state of the Arctic, where the sea ice extent was more than 7 per cent below the 1981–2010 average, and the ice coverage the smallest since records began in 1979. Over relatively short timescales (monthly-seasonal) a lack of sea ice drives up temperatures. Ocean water is much darker than ice, so radiation from the sun that is normally reflected by the sea ice is absorbed, thus increasing temperatures.

Over longer timescales (years and decades), this sea ice/temperature interaction drives itself – increasing temperatures melt more ice, driving further increases in temperature – through a process known as a positive feedback. Record-low Arctic sea ice during February 2016 and the associated extreme temperatures are consistent with the positive feedback interaction triggered by anthropogenic climate change.

This basic physical interaction drove regional temperatures to well over 11.5ºC warmer than the 1951–80 average. These alarmingly warm conditions were not just confined to the Arctic waters. Because of the influence of sea ice (or the lack of it) on atmospheric circulation, similar temperature extremes were measured well south of the Arctic Circle – over Northern Europe, Russia, Alaska and western Canada.

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

High school teacher and cheerleading coach, 42, is arrested for 'having a sexual relationship with two students'



A 42-year-old Alabama teacher and cheerleading coach is accused of having a sexual relationship with two students at her school.
Carrie Cabri Witt was charged on Monday with two counts of a school employee engaging in a sex act or deviant sexual intercourse with a student under the age of 19.

Witt teaches history, psychology and social studies at Decatur High School, where she is also a coach for the varsity girls’ golf team and and junior varsity cheerleading.

Witt has been put on administrative leave with pay by Decatur High while the school investigates the situation.

Officials began an investigation on March 17, when the police department received information that a teacher in the Decatur City School system was having a sexual relationship with at least one student.

While interviewing people, investigators discovered a second victim, according to AL.com. The genders of the victims is unknown.

Witt was arrested on Monday after police contacted her at her home and took her to the Decatur Police Department for questioning.

Witt was booked into Decatur City Jail and later transferred to the Morgan County Jail in lieu of $10,000 aggregate bond.

Though the age of consent is 16 in Alabama, a law was passed in 2010 that made it a felony for a school employee to have sex with a student under 19 years old.

SOURCE

The BS never stops:  "New York and London could be underwater within DECADES"

And pigs might fly. It's all just theory -- and all Warmist prophecy has been wrong to date so this will be too.  Note that even Michael Mann does not believe this one

And the theory is extreme.  It starts out: "Researchers claim the initial melting of the great ice sheets will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland"

Maybe so but where is there any evidence of "melting of the great ice sheets"?  It hasn't happened and Antarctic ice is in fact growing

And what's this business about fresh water putting a "cap" on salt water?  Salt diffuses very rapidly in water so any cap would be very temporary -- lasting only a few days at most.  I would like to see any argument or evidence to the contrary.  It's just another implausible theory as far as I can tell but I am open to enlightenment


Most scientists agree that sea levels will rise, but some say it won't happen for centuries.  Now, a new study suggests sea levels will increase several feet over the next 50 years.  It claims the world's coastal cities, including New York and London, could be underwater by the end of the century.

'We're in danger of handing young people a situation that's out of their control,' James E. Hansen, a retired Nasa climate scientist who led the new research, told The New York Times.

The paper was released this morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

'Current assessments place emphasis on practical effects such as increasing extremes of heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, floods and encroaching seas,' reads the study.

The consequences would include killer storms, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise in sea levels that would exceed that worlds coastal cities before the end of this century, claim researchers.

The paper talks about a specific mechanism that will provoke this abrupt climate shift.

Researchers claim the initial melting of the great ice sheets will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland.

This will slow down or even close the system of the ocean currents that provides heat throughout the planet, allowing some of it to escape into space.

The deeper areas of the ocean will experience warming, which will ultimately accelerate the melting of the part of the ice sheet that sits above sea level.

And the extreme temperature difference between the tropics and the poles will produce powerful storms, which will mirror those that happened 120,000 years ago when Earth experienced a natural warming, according to the paper.

Some experts see this paper as a step in the right direction to understanding when the climate experienced sudden, drastic shifts.

But others still remain hesitant about the claims made in the draft paper, released last year, and are still on the fence with the final version. 'Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary,' said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.  'They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high.'

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Will plants' response to increased CO2 make heatwaves more intense than thought?

The report by Peter Hannam below seemed like a possible real concern if ever we do get global warming.  But I somehow knew that they would have ignored something important so I looked up the underlying journal article -- abstract thereof also reproduced below.  It is all just modelling rubbish.  When Warmist models show predictive skill will be the time to take notice of them.  It hasn't happened yet.

But there is something amusing in the article nonetheless. They seem to base their claims on how an individual leaf stoma reacts to higher CO2 but forget to look at  the whole plant.  That higher CO2 levels will produce bigger plants and hence more stomata seems to be overlooked.  With more stomata the overall water release may remain unchanged.

Warmists are such a laugh!  Junk science all the way.  It's such junk that even a humble social scientist like me can see through it.  And shifty old Peter Hannam swallows it all hook, line and sinker.  He must never ask any questions



Peter Hannam

Heatwaves in the northern hemisphere may become as much as 5 degrees warmer than previously estimated by mid-century because plants' response to higher carbon dioxide levels has been miscalculated, according to new research by Australian scientists.

As atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas increase, plant stomata – the tiny pores on leaves that open to take in CO2 and let out water vapour – won't need to open as much.

"There's less water vapour being lost so you have a net warming effect," said Jatin Kala, a lecturer from Murdoch University and lead author of the paper that was published Monday in Nature Scientific Reports.

The researchers used data from 314 plant species across 56 field sites to examine how plants responded. Existing climate models had assumed all plants would trade water for carbon in exactly the same way.

Needle-leaf forests, tundra and agricultural land used for crops would likely suffer the biggest temperature increases. Heatwaves from Europe to China were likely to become 3-5 degrees hotter than the already higher base expected from global warming, Dr Kala said.

"These more detailed results are confronting but they help explain why many climate models have consistently underestimated the increase in the intensity of heatwaves and the rise in maximum temperatures when compared to observations."

The results do not necessarily apply to southern hemisphere regions to the same extent. "We don't have an observation of how Australian vegetation will respond to rising CO2," he said.

CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science developed the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) model used in this study.

SOURCE

Impact of the representation of stomatal conductance on model projections of heatwave intensity

Jatin Kala et al.

Abstract

Stomatal conductance links plant water use and carbon uptake, and is a critical process for the land surface component of climate models. However, stomatal conductance schemes commonly assume that all vegetation with the same photosynthetic pathway use identical plant water use strategies whereas observations indicate otherwise. Here, we implement a new stomatal scheme derived from optimal stomatal theory and constrained by a recent global synthesis of stomatal conductance measurements from 314 species, across 56 field sites. Using this new stomatal scheme, within a global climate model, subtantially increases the intensity of future heatwaves across Northern Eurasia. This indicates that our climate model has previously been under-predicting heatwave intensity. Our results have widespread implications for other climate models, many of which do not account for differences in stomatal water-use across different plant functional types, and hence, are also likely under projecting heatwave intensity in the future.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Dear Naomi revisited

I had a very nice Naomi in my early life -- Naomi Holbeck. I sometimes wonder where she is now.  But the Naomi I want to talk about here is a much less pleasant Naomi:  Naomi Oreskes, one of the many climate frauds.



Something that often gives liars away is that they exaggerate.  They seem to believe Dr. Goebbels' dictum that big lies are more credible than small ones.  The classic example of that is the many elections that various Communist dictators ran in the 20th century.  They would always claim that  they won 98% or thereabouts of the vote.  Nobody believed them of course.

So when Warmists claim that 97% of scientists believe in global warming, historically aware people know how to view that.   It's not even a sophisticated lie.  Some industrious person has put together a list of 97 published rebuttals to John Cook's 97% claim but it was hardly necessary. One wonders how Cook feels to have his work so swingeingly attacked. I suppose he just wears the usual Leftist carapace of Freudian denial.

But the biggest liar of all was Naomi Oreskes. What she claimed in 2004 was TOTALLY unbelievable. In an article in "Science" magazine she claimed to have done a study of the scientific literature on climate change and found that "none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position".  In other words she claimed 100% agreement.  She was less truthful than even a Communist dictator.  There were already known in 2004 some prominent scientists who were vocal climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer.  So Oreskes was plainly wrong in claiming that she could find none of them.

The reason I am raking over such old history now is that her work falls neatly into a modern area of scientific concern.  In both the social and biological sciences there has been lately a lot of heartburn about unreplicable results.  Replication is the test of a scientific claim and it is the central reason why academic articles are so turgid.  A believable scientific claim has to go into great detail about how it reached its conclusion so that others can do exactly the same thing to test those conclusions.  If someone repeats exactly what an author did and gets DIFFERENT conclusions, a great lightning bolt falls from the heavens and incinerates the original author.  Just joking!  But the effect is not much less than that.  Nobody believes the original claim any more.

And in recent times there have been many attempts to do such exact replications.  And the results have been terrible.  Around two thirds of established scientific findings in the social and biological sciences have been found to fail replication.  Much of what we thought we knew is false.

And the Oreskes claim failed replication.  Benny Peiser was one of many who found the Oreskes claim laughable but he was the one who put his money where his mouth was and actually made an attempt to replicate the Oreskes procedures.  He got vastly different results.  So by modern scientific standards, the Oreskes findings are wrong and should not be quoted as support for anything.

So if anybody now quotes the Oreskes finding without attaching the word "unreplicable" to it, they thereby show that they are out of step with modern scientific standards.

But Warmists abandoned science long ago, of course.  In their major papers they withheld details that would allow replications of their work.  And when other scientists asked for the withheld details, the Warmists refused point blank to assist.  They branded such reqeusts as "harassment".  Their response actually made replication unnecessary.  It revealed that they themselves knew their work to be fraudulent.

But Naomi has won great honor and glory for her work.  Far from being discredited, she has risen greatly in the world.  She is now a professor at Harvard.  With almost total Leftist control of the media, the bureaucracy and the educational system, the modern world floats on a sea of lies and Naomi is just one of many frauds -- which is why you get Donald Trump, the only prominent figure bold enough to trash completely the Left-led consensus.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Woe is me!


I forgot that it was Earth Hour in Australia on 19th.  You "save the planet" by turning off all your lights for one hour, allegedly.  In my evil planet-destroying way, I normally make a point of turning on every light in the house on Earth hour but missed doing that this time.  I had some lights on but not enough

Another personal gripe I have mentioned a few times concerns the fact that Warmists are having orgasms about the recent rise in average temperature in some places on earth.  This has been translated to give a global average that is higher than usual.  But that higher temperature is NOT global.  How do I know that?  My Crepe Myrtle (botanically "Lagerstroemia") trees tell me that.  Crepe Myrtles produce a great mass of blossom in various colors when they flower and Brisbane people really like flowering trees.  They are everywhere in Brisbane: Jacarandas, Poincianas and Crepe Myrtles, plus others.

The catch is that Crepe Myrtles originate in warm regions of India and are heat sensitive.  They blossom reliably only in the tropics.  When I lived in the tropics, we called them Christmas bushes because they came out just before Christmas in December.  In the subtropics where I now live, however, the warm weather is slower to arrive and they normally blossom in January.  And this year my eight trees did not blossom at all. So my locality experienced COOLING at the same time that global warming was being proclaimed.

So does that show anything?  It does.  It shows that the "smashing" temperature rise proclaimed by Jim Hansen was in fact so weak that it coincided  with cooling in some places.  It was not a "global" temperature rise at all.  It was only a rise in some places.  That is all one can accurately say about it

Below is part of what I saw when I looked out my backdoor in January, 2015:  17 metres of blossom right across my backyard




Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

More evidence that the recent global temperature uptick is not the result of human activities

The Cape Grim figures show that CO2 levels have been static during the recent temperature uptick and these new figures below show the same thing. But if CO2 figures have been static, they cannot have been driving a temperature uptick. These latest CO2 emission figures are probably a bit shaky, but no more so than other climate-related figures. At least there seems to be no evidence that they are massaged, unlike temperature data from NOAA and GISS

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions held steady for the second year in a row while the economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency.

In a simple, two-column spreadsheet released yesterday, IEA showed that the world’s energy sector produced 32.14 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2015, up slightly from 32.13 metric gigatons in 2014. Meanwhile, the global economy grew more than 3 percent.

Analysts credited the rise of renewables—clean energy made up more than 90 percent of new energy production in 2015—for keeping greenhouse gas emissions flat.

“The new figures confirm last year’s surprising but welcome news: we now have seen two straight years of greenhouse gas emissions decoupling from economic growth,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a press release. “Coming just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change.”

IEA, an energy cooperative and research firm with 29 member countries, has tracked global greenhouse gas emissions for 40 years and in that time witnessed only three other periods when global emissions fell, each associated with an economic recession.

The findings challenge assumptions that billowing smokestacks are harbingers of growing economies. They also indicate that a similar report last year was not a fluke but part of a larger trend of decoupling emissions from growth.

Mixed reactions greeted the findings.

Doug Vine, a senior energy fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said IEA’s announcement echoes past trends within many developed nations in which gross domestic product grew much faster than greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is the first time it’s showed up at the global level,” he said.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

February global temperature rise proves nothing


The shrill article below is panicking over February temperatures so I suppose I should point out a few obvious things.  I have really dealt with this nonsense before but a few comments anyway.

For a start, hanging anything on the figures for one month is dumb.  You can have unusually hot months in a year where there is no overall change.  Even figures for one year are rubbery.  Figures for years can go up and down but still show no overall trend.  You need a trend over a period of years to conclude anything.  2015 was a touch warmer but 2016 could be a touch cooler overall.  If we get an early return of La Nina, the later months of 2016 could be cool in the same way that the early months were warm.  That's all elementary stuff -- even if it is conspicuously overlooked below.

It was a bit boring writing all that freshman-level stuff above but I was listening to some Stravinsky while I wrote it so that kept me alert and happy

But now to get onto the specifics about February 2016:  According to NOAA (See here) The February 2016 temperature was 5.69°F above the C20 average.  That seems a lot.  One can understand it being called "whopping".  But wait a minute.  2005 was 4.12°F above the same average.  Was that "whopping" too?  Did that presage climate catastrophe?  Ten years later we can say that it clearly didn't.  And February 2015 was -0.85°F -- BELOW average.  Did that warn of an oncoming ice age?  Clearly not.  Hanging your hat on one month is brick thick. I really shouldn't have to point out what excreta the article below is.  Temperatures fluctuate but there is no statistically significant long-term trend.

So Feb 2016 was a bit higher than 2005. Why?  Easy:  El Nino. Despite what is said below, it was in fact TOTALLY due to El Nino. How do I know that?  Because it was NOT due to a rise in CO2.  The recent temperature rises did not fit neatly into any one year.  They were concentrated in late 2015 and early 2016,  And that is PRECISELY a period over which CO2 levels plateaued.  From August 2015 to February 2016, CO2 levels have been stuck on 398 ppm, according to the Cape Grim data.  CO2 levels over that period only varied by less than one part per million.  Annual changes before that were around 2 parts per million.

The big Warmist story is that warming is due to CO2 levels.  If that were so, the recent rise in temperature would be a mirror of rising CO2 levels.  But the CO2 levels belie that. They didn't rise.  Once again temperature and CO2 are disconnected. So El Nino is the only explanation left for the recent temperature uptick.  It is an entirely natural fluctuation with nothing to do with human actions.  That's what the data tells us.  Do look up the Cape Grim data yourself to check it


February shattered climate records, scientists worried we could see 2C warming within months.

Does everybody still believe global warming is a hoax? Yet more data confirms what scientists have feared for a long time, the planet is warming, and it may have passed a tipping point. The latest data now reveals that February 2016 was the hottest February on record, and it blew that record by a wide margin.

February is a cold month, especially in the northern hemisphere, so it's surprising to see that it was so hot. And hot is the right word to use. According to climate data, the entire northern hemisphere was 2.43 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average, and a full  third of a degree hotter than the record.

Whens peaking of climate records, it is common to deal in tenths or even hundredths of a degree. To see a third of a degree, or, in this case, nearly two-and-a-half degrees, overall, is literally unprecedented. February 2016 is the first month in history that global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5 degree (Celsius) average.

Scientists also noted that the warmth was unusually concentrated in the Arctic, contributing to record ice melt and likely weather anomalies.

While El Nino can be blamed for some of the weather anomalies for 2015-2016, global warming also has a major role to play in both El Nino and overall temperature rise. Also, EL Nino, despite its hype, is  only responsible for a tenth of a degree Celsius rise in years when it occurs, which means the additional 1.2C degrees of warming cannot be attributed to the Pacific weather phenomenon.

The heart of the problem is simple thermodynamics. The planet is absorbing more radiation from the Sun than it is putting back out into space, resulting in a slow warming trend. The additional radiation is stored as heat, both in the atmosphere and in the oceans. Part of the reason for this imbalance appears to be rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, which traps heat. The increased heat increases evaporation, and water vapor is an even better store of heat energy, which causes yet more warming.

Scientists are alarmed because it has taken over a century to see the planet warm a full 1 degree Celsius. Now, in the past five months, the planet has warmed another half degree. Will we see 2 degrees before the summer is though? It's an alarming thought.

According to the most pessimistic global warming hypothesis, once the planet sees 2 degrees Celsius of average global warming, the climate trend will be virtually irreversible. The polar ice caps will melt, resulting in sea level rise and destroying cities. Shifts in weather patterns, as well as more extreme weather will destroy food crops and render some regions nearly uninhabitable. Mass extinctions of many species could occur.

These changes will impact humanity by forcing mass human migration, while also disrupting food and water supplies. This means more conflict and chaos overall.

Indeed, we have already seen the beginning of polar ice melts with Arctic ice now the lowest it has ever been recorded for a winter season. Animals, especially in the Arctic, are facing famine as food supplies run low. Polar bears are dying off in large numbers. And people are being impacted too. The warmer temperatures mean less snow and ice, which is hurting people whose lives depend on the snow and ice. As coastal villages thaw, erosion as well as a lack of food available for hunting is creating challenges all around the Arctic.

In the tropics, scientists are alarmed because around the world, they're observing the single greatest coral bleaching event in history.

Despite these well-documented changes, a hardcore of deniers continues to dispute that anything unnatural is happening, insisting that either humans are blameless, or that nothing unusual is happening at all. However, to believe this requires the denial of the nearly unanimous consensus of the scientific community.

Even climate skeptic Roy Spencer characterized the warming as "whopping."

Thousands of climate scientists around the world have no reason to lie about this basic truth: humans are pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere with predictable effect. If we are to survive the future without extreme climate disruption and mass extinctions, we need to curtail emissions. Scientists are not getting rich off these discoveries. However, the fossil fuel lobby, has been implicated in pushing climate change skepticism. The scandal is such that authorities in the U.S. have even discussed bringing suit against prominent deniers, much the same way the government sued those who claimed cigarette smoking wasn't harmful.

While few Americans would support such harsh action against climate deniers, their work is producing a discernible harm, as our nation fails to decisively tackle its own problems with CO2 emissions.

How hot does it have to get for us to see that the scientists are right? How many species need to go extinct before we start to care? How high does sea level need to rise before we act? How bad does global warming have to impact your life before you change your attitude?

SOURCE


Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

A libertarian Warmist?


Isn't he pretty?

It seems that Jerry Taylor is one.  He must be the only libertarian advocating a new tax.  He advocates a carbon tax in exchange for wiping all other State and Federal Warmist regulations.  And he states clearly that he believes in urgent action to limit CO2.  He is a Warmist.

When he was at Cato he was a climate skeptic.  He once compared Warmists to Maoists. Now he calls skeptics "denialists". So how come the big change?  He set up his own thinktank in 2014 called the Niskanen center.  It's stated objectives give the game away.  An excerpt:

Established in 2014, the Niskanen Center is a libertarian 501(c)(3) think tank that works to change public policy through direct engagement in the policymaking process: developing and promoting proposals to legislative and executive branch policymakers, building coalitions to facilitate joint action, and marshaling the most convincing arguments in support of our agenda.  The Center’s main audience is the Washington insiders – policy-oriented legislators, presidential appointees, career civil servants in planning, evaluation and budget offices, congressional committee staff, engaged academics, and interest group analysts – who together decide the pace and direction of policy change

He is getting on in years and he wants to be an insider.  Warmists are in power so he wants to be in there.  The sniff of power is what he wants.  He wants to feel significant before he dies.  He wants to feel important.  Ego has got the better of him.

His proposal to wipe all other Warmist regulations in exchange for a carbon tax  sounds like something that could be attractive to the Left and there may even be some sense in it but since we know what he really thinks it would seem that he has sold his soul for 30 pieces of silver.

There's some background on Taylor here and an interview with him here

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Cherrypicking is bad  -- except when I do it

That seems to be the Warmist idea.  The amusing Phil Plait has praised to the skies a long article by Tamino, an inveterate Warmist, which sets out incontrovertible evidence that global warming is real.  So I had a look at that article.  Tamino says:

"The satellite data for temperature in the troposphere is what senator Ted Cruz likes to use when he claims global warming isn’t happening. But he doesn’t show all of it — just the part after 1997. That way, he can start his graphs with that big fluctuation in 1997-1998, so that fluctuation will look like it’s part of the trend. It isn’t. But Ted Cruz wants you to think it is, so he won’t show you what happened before that — proper context would reveal how shallow his argument is."

So it's bad to choose  your starting points for a graph.  But Tamino himself does exactly that. His first graph starts from 1880 and his next one starts in 1970.  And so it goes.   He has many graphs and many different starting points for them.  They start wherever he needs them to start to make his case.  I won't reproduce anything further from his article but you can log on and see for yourself.

Tamino is very good at lying with statistics.  It would be amusing to see him start all his graphs from 1880.  In fact, if you look at his graph that does start from 1880, you can clearly see that warming levelled out from around the year 2000.  There was a rise last year but that was  due to the El Nino weather cycle. So there was some slight warming in C20 but none in the present century.  Will it resume?  Nobody knows.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Woman Accused of Removing Husband's Penis

(Kuala Pilah, Malaysia)

A 51-year-old woman who was accused of slicing off her husband's penis today changed her plea to 'not guilty' at the Sessions Court.

Fatimah Abdullah pleaded not guilty to slicing off her husband's genitals at Batu Kikir, Jempol, near here.

Fatimah made the plea after the interpreter indicated the charge against her before Judge Sazlina Safie.

Fatimah was charged with committing the act at a house in Batu Kikir, Jempol at 1.20am on Jan 20.

The accused was charged under Section 326 of the Penal Code for intentionally causing injury by a dangerous weapon to her Pakistani husband, Umar Rahman, 44, with a knife.

OK

Leftist projection and inability to learn

The concept of "authoritarianism" as an explanation for conservatism has been like catnip to Leftist psychologists.  They cannot leave it alone.  It first arose among a group of Jewish Marxists in the late 1940s and was published in a 1950 book called "The authoritaian personality" under the lead authorship of a prominent Marxist theoretician, Theodor Wiesengrund, who usually used as his surname the stage name of his Spanish dancer mother -- Adorno.

The theory underlying it failed in all sorts of ways so it fell out of favour after the '60s, though it still got an occasional mention. For more on the Adorno work see here

In the first half of his first book in 1981, "Bob" Altemeyer gave a comprehensive summary of the problems with the Adorno theory and submitted that it had to be discarded.  He then went on to put forward a slightly different theory and measuring instrument of his own that rebooted the concept of authoritarianism as an explanation of conservative thinking.

That theory and its accompanying measuring instrument (the RWA scale) also soon ran aground, however.  Altemeyer himself admitted that scores on the RWA scale were just about as high among Leftist voters as Rightist voters -- which rather ruined it as an explanation of conservatism.  The death knell came when it was revealed that the highest scorers on the RWA scale were in fact former Russian Communists!  Right wing Communists??  For more on Altemeyer's confusions see here

So the RWA scale lost most of its interest after that, though it is still cautiously used on some occasions -- e.g here.

But, as I mentioned yesterday, Leftist psychologists did not give up.  A group of them including Karen Stenner, Stanley Feldman, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler revived the old ideas and invented a new questionnaire to measure the concept.  And reading their "new" theory is like a trip back into the 1940's.  Conservatives are still said to be sad souls who live in a state of constant and unreasonable  fear.

The amusing thing is that there is some reality behind their theory.  The key word is "unreasonable".  How much fear is "unreasonable"?  Is all fear "unreasonable"?  Obviously not.  Fear is an important survival mechanism.  We would all be eaten by lions etc. without it.  And conservatives do fear the probable results of the hare-brained schemes put forward by Leftists.  Conservatives are nothing if not cautious but to the superficial thinkers of the Left, that caution seems like fear.  So from a conservative viewpoint Leftists are not fearful enough.  They do not fear the "unforeseen" and adverse side effects that invariably accompany any implementation of their schemes.

So, despite the laughable psychometric characteristics of their new measuring instrument, which I set out yesterday, they have in fact achieved some grasp of reality.  They have just not grasped that caution can be a good thing and have not thought deeply enough about the distinction, if any, between caution and fear.  So all their writings amount to little more than an adverse value judgment of things that are in fact probably desirable.

So why all the mental muddle from them?  Why does the old "authoritarianism" catnip keep them coming back to that dubious concept?  Why have they not learnt from its past failures?  Easy:  It's all Freudian projection.  They see their own faults in conservatives.  The people who REALLY ARE authoritarian are Leftists themselves.  Communist regimes are ALWAYS authoritarian and in democracies the constant advocates of more and more government control over everything are the Left.  The Left are the big government advocates, not conservatives.  What could be more authoritarian than Obama's aim to "fundamentally transform" America? It is the Left who trust in big brother while conservatives just want to be left alone.

But somehow Leftist psychologists are blind to all that.  They appear to know nothing about the currents of day-to-day politics.  They are the sad souls who are so out of touch with reality as to be pitiable.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).  

Medical journal editors make fools of themselves

The major British medical journals are heavily politicized -- both Lancet and BMJ.  Lancet even criticized the Iraq intervention under  George Bush II.  When they stick to their knitting -- medical research -- they do publish some good studies and are prestigious because of that.  But the people running the journals are obviously Left-leaning -- like most academics -- so they can't help misusing the platform they have to hand in order to promote their Leftist views.

That is of course bound to be an amusing exercise.  Leftist claims are so counter-factual that a political study is bound to require all sorts of distortions and evasions to make any case at all.  And the political studies they do publish are so unscholarly that the editors have obviously put their brain into  neutral before publishing them.

The latest such study in Lancet ("Firearm legislation and firearm mortality in the USA: a cross-sectional, state-level study") is a good example of that.  It purports to show that some gun control laws do reduce deaths from guns.  But the methodology behind the  article is so naive that no such study would normally get published in a good academic journal.

What the researchers did was to look at gun deaths in the various States of the USA and compare the death rates with the various gun control laws in the various states.  And they found that States with strict laws (e.g. Massachusetts) had fewer deaths per head than did States with more relaxed laws (e.g. Louisiana). And from that they concluded that certain gun control laws should be implemented nationwide.  And if that were done gun deaths would drop dramatically nationwide.

Can anybody see something wrong with that reasoning? I am inclined to think that anyone with an IQ over 100 could.  The study is an example of a fallacy that is all too common in the medical research literature:  The fallacy that correlation is causation.  If you ever do a course in logic, one of the first things you will be told is that correlation is NOT causation.  To prove causation you need a strictly controlled before-and-after study.

To show how fallacious the reasoning is in the Lancet study, let me cautiously suggest that there are other factors that could lie behind the correlation between gun control and gun deaths.  Let me suggest, for instance, entirely hypothetically, of course, that Massachusetts might have fewer gun deaths, not because of its laws but because they have fewer people there from a certain population segment that is more prone to gun deaths and crime generally.  I am not going to nominate the population segment concerned because that does not affect the argument.  But if the thought "Massachusetts has fewer blacks" pops into your mind, who am I to correct you?  Entirely as a matter of academic interest of course, Mass. is less than 2% black and Louisiana is about a third black.

The study might have been of some interest if it had controlled for other factors. So I read the study carefully looking for that.   But in fact they controlled for unemployment rate only.  Control for race would be politically incorrect, of course.  All men are equal, don't you know?  It would be a compliment to call the study sophomoric. It is a disgrace to the journal.  By normal scientific standards, it should never have been published.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

New Report Says Science Can Estimate Influence of Climate Change on Some Types of Extreme Events

"For years scientists have given almost a rote response to the question of whether an instance of weird weather was from global warming, insisting that they can't attribute any single event to climate change. But "the science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unqualified blanket statement," the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has reported".  So says good ol' Seth Borenstein of AP.  The Academy press release below tells more.

But the whole thing is just climate theology: untestable guesswork.  The most basic element of science is testability. If a proposition is not testable, it is not science.  When the Warmists can make accurate predictions, their propositions will have been successfully tested, but they have never managed to do that. The estimates below can be challenged by other estimates but that is still proof of nothing


It is now possible to estimate the influence of climate change on some types of extreme events, such as heat waves, drought, and heavy precipitation, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  The relatively new science of extreme event attribution has advanced rapidly in the past decade owing to improvements in the understanding of climate and weather mechanisms and the analytical methods used to study specific events, but more research is required to increase its reliability, ensure that results are presented clearly, and better understand smaller scale and shorter duration weather extremes such as hurricanes and thunderstorms, said the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report.

“An increasingly common question after an extreme weather event is whether climate change ‘caused’ that event to occur,” said committee chair David W. Titley, professor of practice in meteorology and founding director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at the Pennsylvania State University.  "While that question remains difficult to answer given all the factors that affect an individual weather event, we can now say more about how climate change has affected the intensity or likelihood of some events.”

Extreme event attribution is a fairly new area of climate science that explores the influence of human-caused climate change on individual or classes of extreme events compared with other factors, such as natural sources of climate and weather variability.  The science typically estimates how the intensity or frequency of an event has been altered by climate change and provides information that can be used to assess and manage risk, guide climate adaptation strategies, and determine greenhouse gas emissions targets.  For example, in the wake of a devastating event, communities may need to make a decision about whether to rebuild or relocate and need input on how much more likely or more severe this type of event is expected to become in the future.

Some extreme event attribution studies use observational records to compare a recent event with similar events that occurred in the past, when the influence of human-caused climate change was much less.  Other studies use climate and weather models to compare the meteorological conditions associated with an extreme event in simulated worlds with and without human-caused climate changes.  The report finds that results are most reliable when multiple, different methods are used that incorporate both a long-term historical record of observations and models to estimate human influences on a given event.

The most dependable attribution findings are for those events related to an aspect of temperature, for which there is little doubt that human activity has caused an observed change in the long-term trend, the report notes.  For example, a warmer climate increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and decreases the likelihood of extremely cold days.  Long-term warming is also linked to more evaporation that can both exacerbate droughts and increase atmospheric moisture available to storms, leading to more severe heavy rainfall and snowfall events.  However, temperature alone does not fully determine the probabilities of extreme events.  Attributing specific extreme events to long-term climate change may be complicated by factors such as natural long-term fluctuations in the ocean surface temperatures.

Statements about event attribution are sensitive to the way the questions are framed and the context within which they are posed, the report says.  For example, choices need to be made about defining the duration of the event, the geographic area impacted, what physical variables to study, what metrics to examine, and what observations or models to use.  These assumptions and choices can lead to large differences in the interpretation of the results, and should be clearly stated.

The committee supported continued advancements in weather and climate modeling, and noted that focused research on weather and climate extremes would improve event attribution capabilities.  In addition, community standards for attributing classes of extreme events would make it easier to compare results from multiple studies.  Objective event selection and definition criteria could reduce potential selection bias and help elucidate how individual events fit into the broader picture of climate change.

Event attribution is retrospective, but the report calls for the development of predictive weather-to-climate forecasts of future extreme events that account for natural variability and human influences.  This could be based on concepts and practices within the Numerical Weather Prediction framework, including routine verification of forecasts using observations and rigorous approaches to improving the forecast system.

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Should political lies be prosecuted as libel?

The Israeli writer below is unthinking.  He says "Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech".  But it is.  If we allow that hate speech can be banned, anything you disagree with can be banned.  It is the ultimate slippery slope.

A more sophisticated writer might have argued that political lies should be prosecuted, as Donald Trump argues.  Lies are are an essential feature of libel and libel has never been protected speech.  And the words deplored below are clearly libel.  The Israeli government could well launch a lawsuit claiming that Israel has been libelled by the lies concerned.

Israeli lawyer Nitsana Darshan-Leitner already does some of that in a private capacity.

It is not hate speech that should be prosecuted.  It is lies


University professors enjoy the benefits of academic freedom and free speech. These cherished concepts are essential ingredients in the unhindered exchange and flow of ideas.

Joy Karega, a non-tenured assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, a liberal arts institution in the state of Ohio, made an utter mockery of these hallowed principles by spewing out a toxic torrent of antisemitic screeds on her Facebook page.

Let’s be absolutely clear.

These rants could have been written by a neo-Nazi foaming at the mouth. They certainly have no place in civilized discourse. That they were posted by a woman of color is surprising and disappointing. African Americans, having been the victims of prejudice and violence, should be aware that racism is a malignancy that undermines and demeans society at large.

Has Karega fallen under the baneful influence of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan?

With her eyes wide open, she crossed a dangerous line and entered the realm of antisemitic incitement. Not for a second can she claim that her vile and ignorant comments are protected by the sanctity of the First Amendment.

She should be severely reprimanded, if not punished.

In a series of posts in the past few years, which she has since taken down, Karega issued a litany of baseless and absurd accusations.

She claimed that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015. These are the kind of accusations that come from the filthy mouths of antisemites and Islamic radicals, who have a lot in common.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Another coverup: NOAA Radiosonde Data Shows No Warming For 58 Years

In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included a  graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.

Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming.

I combined the two graphs at the same scale below, and put a horizontal red reference line in, which shows that the earth’s atmosphere has not warmed at all since the late 1950’s


(Bigger graph here)

The omission of this data from the NOAA report, is just their latest attempt to defraud the public. NOAA’s best data shows no warming for 60 years. But it gets worse. The graph in the NOAA report shows about 0.5C warming from 1979 to 2010, but their original published data shows little warming during that period.

Due to Urban Heat Island Effects, the NOAA surface data shows nearly one degree warming from 1979 to 2010, but their original radiosonde data showed little warming during that time. Global warming theory is based on troposphere warming, which is why the radiosonde data should be used by modelers – instead of the UHI contaminated surface data

More HERE. (See the original for links and more graphics)

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

The Real Matt Lynch

Commercials against Matt Lynch, candidate for Ohio's District 14 US Representative, are now prevalent on TV. They show a cartoon version of the conservative Republican running for Congress and suggest that he is anything but conservative and will spend taxpayer money irresponsibly. Whoa! What?

Never believe what you hear without doing your own research! When Googling "Matt Lynch," the very first entry is an ad for a website called "The Real Matt Lynch." The website is "Paid for by Friends of Dave Joyce" (his incumbent opponent) and is wrought with inaccurate statements about Mr. Lynch's record. For example:

The website says with respect to his Pro-Life stance:

"Voted against heartbeat informed consent requirement"

Hmmm, where did they get that? Matt Lynch actually co-sponsored HB-248 "Prohibits Abortions After Detection of Fetal Heartbeat."

Matt Lynch also co-sponsored and voted FOR the budget bill (HB-59) that he supposedly voted AGAINST. There are other strange statements (i.e., lies) attacking Matt Lynch on "The Real Matt Lynch" website.

Also, check out Matt Lynch's ratings compared to Dave Joyce's ratings on the Vote Smart website.

Comparing voting records and ratings by various evaluating organizations, Matt Lynch appears to be "The Real Conservative."

Posted by Note Taker

Hatred of Truth as Freudian denial

The following essay is by psychohistorian Richard Koeingsberg.  Psychohistorians are particularly interested in the Hitler episode and rightly see Nazism as a pursuit of the old Leftist dream of an ideal, Edenic society.  Greenies are the chief modern-day exponents of that.  What Koenigsberg says below is very relevant to the furious hatred that conservatives often encounter from Leftists these days

At the 1997 Annual Holocaust Conference, I attended a lecture by Dr. John Weiss on “The Ideology of Death” (he had just published Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany).
In the course of the discussion, he mentioned “the hated Goldhagen.” Apparently, the audience understood what he meant—because a substantial conversation ensued about “the hated Goldhagen.”

I wondered what this was about. I’d attended over 100 conferences by then and many presentations—and had never heard academics speak like this. Indeed, the reigning ideology of the time was “Everyone is entitled to his (or her) own discourse.”

Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published in 1996. Apparently, the book generated enormous controversy among academics in the United States as well as Germany. The book became a best-seller.

What was all the fuss about?

I read the book—all 656 pages. It’s the richest, most dynamic book I’ve ever read on the Holocaust—and I’ve read quite a few.

Apparently, people took issue with Goldhagen’s claim that there was a uniquely German anti-Semitism, and that many Germans killed willfully—responding to their hatred of Jews.

I won’t address the substance of Goldhagen’s arguments here. Rather, I’d like to discuss the issue of hatred—why someone might be “hated” for putting forth certain propositions or theories.

Of course, we’ve seen this occur many times. Freud was hated and condemned for his theory of sexuality: his discovery that sexual desire plays a profound role in shaping our lives.

Similarly, people did not take kindly to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution—showing how human beings have descended from “lower” forms of animal life. Darwin’s ideas, like those of Freud, generated disagreement that took the form of anger, even rage.

It’s not difficult to understand that the theories of Freud and Darwin generated hostility because many people found their ideas disturbing, or painful. People become angry when confronted with truths they find unpleasant. Anger or hatred serves in the name of pushing away—disavowing—certain ideas. Hatred is a form of denial.

This dynamic of hatred as denial is no less operative today than it was a century ago. Each culture (including each academic culture) embraces certain beliefs as if they are absolutes—and reacts violently to ideas that contradict their world view.

Can everyone be wrong? Can entire cultures embrace ideas that have no foundation in reality? Can many ideas that society puts forth turn out to be nonsense? I have found this to be the case.

I often ask people: “How many Jews do you think were in Germany in 1933—out of a population of 65 million?” I get answers of 5 million, 10 million, even 20 or 30 million. The correct answer is: there were approximately 500,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, half of 1%.

I no longer find it fruitful to debate the point that Jews were killed for no reason at all. People have difficulty with this idea. They insist there must have been some reason that the Nazis acted as they did.

There weren’t any reasons. Hitler and the many Germans were embroiled in a shared fantasy. Entire societies can be wrong. Many cultural ideas—that people fervently believe are true—turn out to have no foundation in reality.

On the surface, people challenged Goldhagen because they believed his theories were “wrong;” not supported by the evidence; or because they felt his scholarship was suspect. But why would someone be “hated” for a theory that was incorrect?

At the Holocaust conference, Goldhagen was invited to give the keynote address, “The Holocaust in the Context of the 20th Century.” I arrived early to set up the Library of Social Science Book Exhibit. Enjoying the sights of the Millersville campus, I spotted conference director Jack Fischel walking with someone at a distance. Perhaps he was taking Goldhagen out to lunch?

Ah, I reflected, that couldn’t. The person walking with Jack was a slight, unimposing young man. Could this be “the hated Goldhagen?” Based on the way people spoke about him, I imagined Goldhagen as having a commanding, threatening presence.


Daniel Goldhagen

The young man walking with Jack Fischel indeed was Daniel Goldhagen. I met him later when he came to check out the books in the exhibit room. He was a warm, gentle person. Nothing whatsoever to “hate.”

We began rapping. I explained to him why I thought many people were disturbed by his theories. I gave him a copy of Hitler’s Ideology (no charge). We were having a great conversation.

But then Jack Fischel was at the door. The lecture was about to begin (down the hall from the exhibit room). Goldhagen couldn’t tear himself away. Fischel called his name several times; finally, he departed. Time to go back to work, do his job, earn his fee.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

NASA study shows worst drought in 900 years may be behind Middle East upheaval

This is actually a rather old story but this time we are relying on dendrochronology.  Amusing that tree rings in other Warmist studies are said to represent temperature but below are said to represent water shortage. Versatile!  I wonder which button you push to get the two different readings? Obviously, what you make of them is very much open to interpretation -- and we can expect only one interpretation from Warmists: Doom!

But even if we take the study seriously, it's just guesswork that attributes the severity of the drought to global warming.  The Saharah was once lush but went into drought.  Was that because of all those ancient Egyptians running around in SUVs when they weren't building pyramids?  Climates certainly change but nobody so far has been able to predict it

And right in the middle of it is Israel, which has NO water shortages these days.  Clearly politics is the crucial difference in providing water to farmers.  Has Israel seized everybody else's water?  No. Only Israel desalinates

I am actually rather peeved at the moment over the cooling that has gone on in my neck of the woods. In January, I normally have a 17 metre long solid expanse of blossom from my eight Crepe Myrtle trees.  But they missed out entirely this year.  No blossom. They are temperature sensitive.  They need solid high temperatures for weeks to bloom.  And we just did not have that this year.  So does that indicate global cooling?  No.  Any more than drought in the Middle East indicates warming.  It just indicates unpredictable natural variability

And drought usually goes with cooling, not warming.  Warm oceans give off more water vapour which brings rain.  So are we saying that the Middle East has been really cool in recent years?  Could be

And are we allowed to mention that it's actually ISIS causing all the trouble over there -- and not global warming?


THE incredibly complex chaos of Islamic State and the upheavals of Syria and Iraq may have a very simple cause: The region’s worst drought in 900 years.

A NASA study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres shows the Middle East is in the grip of a mega-drought that began in 1998. It has taken hold in Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey.

The water shortage has been taking a steadily increasing toll on farmers and the region’s ecology, with crop failures, dust storms and record-breaking heat now an annual event.

But the true extent of the drought is only now becoming clear.

“The range of how extreme wet or dry periods were is quite broad, but the recent drought in the Levant region stands out as about 50 per cent drier than the driest period in the past 500 years, and 10 to 20 per cent drier than the worst drought of the past 900 years,” a NASA statement reads.

NASA climate scientists have been mapping a database of the Mediterranean and Middle East’s tree rings — the pattern in which a plant’s new growth is laid upon itself each season — spanning several thousand years.

Tree rings are a kind of ecological fingerprint.  Each band reveals how much water the tree has been taking in, and how optimal conditions were for growth.  When a tree goes through a period of drought, the bands get thinner. The more thin bands, the longer the drought.

Mapping when — and where — these trees were suffering water starvation offers an opportunity to understand the natural variation in the areas weather.

“If we look at recent events and we start to see anomalies that are outside this range of natural variability, then we can say with some confidence that it looks like this particular event or this series of events had some kind of human caused climate change contribution,” says lead author of the study Ben Cook.

In the case of the Middle East, a wide-reaching drought spanning more than 15 years has not been seen for more than 900 years.

Historical documents dating from 1100AD were used to corroborate the accuracy of the tree-ring map.

The flood of refugees out of the Middle East and into Europe is a natural consequence of the conditions, the study infers.

Historically, when there is drought in the Eastern Mediterranean, there is no escape to the west. Both ends tend to suffer at the same time. Which generates cause for conflict.

“It’s not necessarily possible to rely on finding better climate conditions in one region than another, so you have the potential for large-scale disruption of food systems as well as potential conflict over water resources,” says co-author Kevin Anchukaitis.

But the patterns established over thousands of years do suggest refuge: To the north.

When eastern North Africa is dry, Greece, Italy, France and Spain tend to be wet. And vice-versa.

From these patterns, the NASA scientists were able to identify the engines behind the Middle East’s weather: The North Atlantic Oscillation and the East Atlantic Pattern.

These regular wind patterns over the Atlantic are themselves driven by oceanic currents and temperatures. Periodically they push rainstorms away from the Mediterranean, instead causing long dry winds to circulate in their place.

The NASA research shows that this time, however, the drought is different. Its behaviour does not match the patterns clearly established over the past thousand of years.

“The Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected as going to dry in the future [due to man-made climate change],” climate scientist Yochanan Kushnir states in the NASA release.

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).