I was going to wish you all “Happy” Memorial Day, but I don’t think that’s protocol.
Anyway, bloggers get the day off too — especially after all that Bat Mitzvah action. (It was wonderful! Such nachas!)
This seemed like a great day to re-visit this dLife success story of an Army Sergeant on active duty who was [...]
There are many wonderful things that happen when you are expecting a child. Your heart swells in anticipation, you feel your baby kick for the first time, and you gain a few pounds knowing it is for a very good reason. However, there are also some more annoying things that happen during pregnancy that can [...]
The whole point of reading the latest health news these days seems to be about the sensational connections scientists make between the worst diseases, and innocent things in your life that you just don’t expect to have an effect on your health. One day you read about how you can get a miscarriage from using [...]
When I was studying psychology in college, we saw a film in one of my courses on people that suffered from obsessive compuslive disorders. It was something that I will never forget, because it helped me to recognize the disorder in people I meet in everyday life.
Since most of us were new to psychology [...]
Make no mistake – your new baby is going to cry. Without the ability the cry, babies would have no way of letting their caregivers know that something is wrong, that they are hungry, or even that they are in need of some cuddling and love. All babies cry, but not all of them cry [...]
Being a parent for the first time is scary and exciting at the same time. Your family is about to grow, and you may have been waiting for this for a very long time. On the other hand, you may have no idea what you are doing and you may be afraid that you have [...]
Your baby may come roaring into the world and appear to be perfect. It is, of course, love at first sight. The doctors may have given your baby high Apgar scores, and they are sleeping peacefully in your arms. A bit later though, you may notice a problem with your baby that needs medical attention. [...]
NPR’s Juan Williams on Sunday spoke an astonishingly inconvenient truth about the Gulf Coast oil crisis: "[President Obama] just hasn’t conveyed that he really cares about this issue, and that he’s not off to the side watching."
This was in stark contrast to Time’s Joe Klein who said this weekend, "This is more Bush’s second Katrina than Obama’s first," and New York Times columnist Frank Rich who on Sunday blamed the oil spill on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Rand Paul.
No, Williams, participating in bonus online coverage of "Fox News Sunday," made it crystal clear that unlike many of his colleagues in the Obama-loving media, he’s not carrying the administration’s water on this critical issue facing the nation (video follows with partial transcript and commentary, relevant section at 5:50):
JUAN WILLIAMS, NPR: I look at it from the position of a journalist, and what I see is that, you know what, the messaging is just wrong. He’s just not been fully engaged. He just hasn’t conveyed that he really cares about this issue, and that he’s not off to the side watching. And, to me, that’s, and I come back to the communications office. I come back to the idea that he’s supposed to relate to the American people. He is supposed to be, as [James] Carville said, somebody’s daddy on this. He’s supposed to say, "I’m your daddy, I’m in charge, I’m going to tell you what’s happening." He hasn’t done it.
No, he hasn’t. If only more of Juan’s colleagues would be so honest.
Parts of the U.S. establishment press have acknowledged "climate science" reality, six months late.
The fallout from ClimateGate (link is to the NewsBusters tag), the name eventually given to the scandal resulting from the unauthorized posting of over 1,000 emails and dozens of documents obtained from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK, goes back a full six months to November of last year.
On November 20, Australia’s Andrew Bolt crisply described the contents of the aforementioned items as providing substantial evidence of: "Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more."
Six long months later, as the American Thinker’s Marc Sheppard observed, both the New York Times and Newsweek have recognized the fallout while still not conceding the argument. The Times does so in an article by Elisabeth Rosenthal about crumbling public support in Great Britain and elsewhere, while Newsweek’s Stefan Thiel addresses "The backlash against climate science."
What a difference three years makes, says Sheppard:
Of greater note — the same powerhouse publication that in its August 2007 cover story — The Truth about Denial — described climate skepticism as “an undermining of the science” now challenges the same AGW orthodoxy it once preached.
The Times’s Rosenthal bitterly clings to settled-science silliness in her first paragraph, and shortly thereafter notes a plunge in public support that has been present for three months:
Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
… A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.
Of course the claimed scientific consensus has never really existed. But the CRU e-mails showed that there wasn’t even confident consensus among scientists who presented a public front of being entirely in lockstep. This is best illustrated in a memorable passage from a Kevin Trenberth e-mail (Trenberth is head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado):
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.
This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on Saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather). …
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Newsweek’s Thiel is even harsher on the warmists’ conduct and temperament:
The backlash against climate science is also about the way in which leading scientists allied themselves with politicians and activists to promote their cause. Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports—including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been refuted by academic studies.
Just as damaging, many climate scientists have responded to critiques by questioning the integrity of their critics, rather than by supplying data and reasoned arguments. When other researchers aired doubt about the IPCC’s prediction that Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, the IPCC’s powerful chief, Rajendra Pachauri, trashed their work as “voodoo science.” Even today, after dozens of IPCC exaggerations have surfaced, leading climate officials like U.N. Environment Program chief Achim Steiner and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research head Joachim Schellnhuber continue to tar-brush critics as “anti-Enlightenment” and engaging in “witch hunts.”
In a delicious piece at the American Interest, Walter Russell Mead asserts how totally unacceptable the Times’s attempt at "better late than never" is. In a critique that could equally be applied to Newsweek and the vast majority of the establishment press, Mead writes:
Who knows, in a few more months or years, somebody may write a story about the damage that the culture of cocooning and coddling did to a movement that only slowly learned that it had lost the public trust. Somebody might even interview the editors and journalists involved to find out why the collapse of the climate change movement’s political momentum was too unimportant to print while the news was still fresh. Somebody else might look at that journalistic culture and write a story about how failures of aggressive reporting and news editing undermined the credibility of some of the greatest news gathering organizations on earth.
But I wouldn’t publish any of that stuff too quickly. Stories this big and this rich need to be properly aged.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
CNN founder Ted Turner said Saturday that if we don’t prepare for global warming, we’ll be extinct.
In a multi-part interview with CNN Newsroom anchor Fredricka Whitfield, Turner spoke about his own devotion and dedication to environmental causes.
"Have you altered all your life, all your living so you are what one would call energy responsible?" asked Whitfield.
"What we really have is a choice whether we want to do the right things from an energy standpoint or the wrong thing," said Turner.
"And if enough of us choose to do the wrong thing and we don’t prepare for global warming and we don’t make the changes that we know we should make, then we’ll be extinct" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Have you altered all your life, all your living so you are what one would call energy responsible?
TED TURNER: Yes, yes I am.
WHITFIELD: Tell me about that transition. Was it a difficult one to make?
TURNER: I did it over a period of time over the last 30 years. I’ve been cutting the lights out for a long time.
WHITFIELD: So how do you convince people, what would you say to those who say, you know what, the way I’m living right now is just fine. I’m happy with the light bulbs I choose. Convince me this is the way I would want to go.
TURNER: Anybody that watches CNN would know pretty well. They would already be convinced, because we’ve run thousands of stories about it, everything from light bulbs to saving fuel and automobiles to recycling. It’s everywhere.
WHITFIELD: Is it the cost that’s the barrier?
TURNER: It’s the big story of our time.
WHITFIELD: It’s the big story, but not everyone is onboard. That’s why you’re spending time on Capitol Hill and others are lobbying and arguing for it. What’s the obstacle?
TURNER: It’s a combination of things. There’s reluctance on some people’s part to cope with change very well, and want things to stay the way they were.
And really what we really have is a choice whether we want to do the right things from an energy standpoint or the wrong thing. And it’s our choice.
And if enough of us choose to do the wrong thing and we don’t prepare for global warming and we don’t make the changes that we know we should make, then we’ll be extinct. And when that happens, we’ll be sorry, but it will be too late. And I’m trying to avoid that by getting the people to take action now while there’s still time.
So, there it is, folks. You better change the kind of light bulbs you use and start driving a hybrid vehicle or our species is doomed.
After all, if the alarmists are right, and temperatures do continue to rise for the foreseeable future, there’s absolutely NO WAY homo sapiens could possibly adapt.
That’s how fragile we are as a species, you see.
We CAN’T POSSIBLY adjust to changes in temperature despite most people on the planet experiencing roughly 100 degree variances in their highs and lows each and every year.
But Ted’s got to be right – he founded CNN, you know.
