Criminal World

Here is the original version of the song "Criminal World" written by Duncan Browne and Peter Godwin and performed by their band "Metro" in the late 1970s.



Here is Bowie's version of that song, from his "Let's Dance" album of 1983.



Background music whilst I busy myself with writing other things: another reservoir posting (quite large; good picture weather has been a problem) and a piece on Taiwan's multi-layered air defenses (the problem is trying to ascertain a measured sense of their likely effectiveness, or otherwise, based on publicly available information).

Meanwhile...

Life's a bitch: as if I didn't have enough problems of my own already, another one fell into my lap after 11pm on Thursday night; whilst walking the dog at the park, I found a tiny little pedigree spaniel curled up shivering in a ditch.

She had no eyes.

I don't mean she was blind - I mean she literally had holes where her eyes should have been. Anyway, I fed her and called my Taiwanese friend who came to pick her up and then took her to the vet's on Friday afternoon. I had initially suspected extreme cruelty (or perhaps an unfortunate encounter with a cat) but apparently the vet believes she has congenital blindness, which I'm not sure about because it wasn't that her eyes didn't work, it was that she had no eyes. Aside from that however she had no other problems. The vet's story is that it's likely she was used by one of Taiwan's many professional breeders to give birth to as many spaniel puppies as possible and then once she'd performed this function, she was ejected: to die alone in the darkness, shivering in a ditch.

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 10

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 9

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 8

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 7

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

A Question On Hitchens

Here is a question for those on the Left with any brains: why did Hitchens defend the positions of his "comrades" with such weak... not even arguments, but mere prejudicial psycho-babble?

This was a journalist, no less of the Left than of anyone else, who could describe in detail - and without flinching - the monstrosity that was Bill Clinton during the latter's time in office. That has to be celebrated, because so many people (including on the Right) seemed to cower under Clinton's stare at the time.

And yet, over a decade later, in the face of the obsese monetary and fiscal flop that the U.S. government had become, and at the long instigation of the Left, Hitchens seemingly lost his nerve and had nothing substantive to say.

I have three* hypotheses (the third being a null) to account for this: either Hitchens was guilty of an intellectual failure, or, and this is somewhat more adventurous, he was playing Nietzsche's old joke on his remaining friends on the Left (i.e. I will not publicly give you up, but I will defend you with the weakest arguments possible).

Which is it?

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 6

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 5

Via "Commonsense Capitalism". Tom Sowell again in this one.

Parsing The GOP Candidates

Electoral politics is absurd. There is however no question that the current President of the United States is the worst in living memory. Andrew McCarthy inculpates the editors of National Review for journalistic flippancy in respect of their dismissal of Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann and their turn toward Jon Huntsman:

"I don’t want to cringe reading an editorial written by friends of mine any more than I want to wince hearing Newt talk about Bain Capital."

The temptation to laugh is sad. Of all the invited candidates, it is only Ron Paul who seems to be on nodding terms with the gravity of the Statist stupor the U.S. is in - but it is also only Ron Paul who seems to have nodded off on foreign affairs some time ago. Anyway, back to the circus. The highlight of McCarthy's piece was his snide remark on Jon Huntsman's under-reported comments on neo-Keynesian stimulus:

"In 2009, Huntsman opined that the problem with Obama’s failed Keynesian stimulus was that it wasn’t big enough — it should have been $1 trillion (gee, I wonder why President Obama figured he’d be a good fit)."

I seem to recall making this same point elsewhere some months ago. Then there is the small matter of Huntsman's somewhat less-than-fluent Mandarin: I can recall, after the story broke on Slate, Gingrich pointedly remarking on Huntsman's "fluent" Mandarin during the November 9th Michigan debate - at which point the cameras showed Huntsman looking obviously pained. That being said, McCarthy's defence of Gingrich will merely keep the juggling act going. Perry is even more inarticulate and gaffe-prone than Bush was and does not have clear limited-government qualifications. Bachmann does not really have a political record to measure her against. Gingrich would murder President Obama in a debate - of that there can be little doubt - but his record alone indicates he would be a terrible President and is no more trustworthy than Romney or Huntsman, as Avik Roy made abundantly clear.

Since Gary Johnson is being deliberately excluded, and Ron Paul is unlikely to win the nomination, I'm wondering whether Rick Santorum may yet get a mention as an alternative candidate to Romney...

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 4

Via "Commonsense Capitalism". Check out Tom Sowell!

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 3

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 2

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 1

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

"And I Challenge You To Produce One..."

The key question is brought up at the five minute mark by Peter Jay; notice how Milton Friedman answers it. Jay may have thought that Friedman was blustering there and trying to worm his way out of answering the question. He wasn't.

I am not paying much attention to Taiwan's electoral politics and the various electioneering gimmicks and smears and all the rest of the nonsense in advance of the legislative and presidential elections next month. The DPP has to win. However, the DPP is, as their name suggests, infested with democratic-progressive policy aims such as the unjustified pursuit of reducing inequalities of economic outcome.

A Second Iranian "Accident"?

Following up on the story of this blast which took place sometime between September 9th and November 22nd, there are now confusing reports of another explosion having occured in a nearby salt mine on November 28th. There is no visible explosion damage in the satellite images, though a before and after shot shows that some buildings have disappeared sometime between August 27th and December 5th.

小白 ("Shao Bai") After Surgery

Shao Bai (小白) - flat out on the sofa next to my dog. The funnel collar is to stop him licking the stitches on his left shoulder where the tumor had been*. His coat looks manky because now that he has a big open scar with stitches on his left shoulder, I'm reluctant to wash him, although I had to put him in the shower last night after he wet himself without warning (I was careful to only wash his legs, tail and underside and to stop him from shaking himself dry so as to prevent his stitches becoming wet). As with my dog, he didn't like the hairdryer.

Since I got him back from his surgery yesterday afternoon, he's done almost nothing but sleep. All day today he's been flat out on the sofa and shown little interest in food and drink. It wasn't until a few hours ago, when giving him his medicine, that I managed to coax him into eating a few bits of cold chicken and a drink of water. He seems quite happy enough though, and certainly he's warmer and more comfortable here than he would be outside now that winter has set in. The only problem is that with the two of them on the sofa, there isn't really enough room for me! So other than putting my dog out on the balcony for a while, I've had to pick Shao Bai up and let him lie on top of my stomach at times, which is a bit awkward when I'm trying to drink coffee or reach for the keyboard (off image to the right). Coincidental with Shao Bai's surgery this weekend has been my coming down with cold now that the weather has finally changed to Taiwan's winter. It was already chilly enough that I had to wear my long coat or leather jacket, but now that I'm loaded up with headcold and mucus, I'm wearing a scarf when I go out too.

*The tumour was about the size of the meat ball inside a small 餛飩 (wonton); I'll get the pathology results later this week, though I won't be surprised if it was cancerous.

Animal Protection 2

Previous entry on this subject here.

"Dogs that I saw being tested for distemper, already showing clear signs, were left in the intake area next to puppies and other dogs being adopted out. We tried to explain to the staff that dogs testing positive for distemper need to be quarantined, but no one would listen."

I'm not surprised: a trip to the animal "shelter" can be as good as a death sentence for a dog in Taiwan, and canine distemper is very common. Shao Bai (小白) came down with canine distemper two months ago - but he recovered because he was very lucky to have me on his side and some very hepful Taiwanese friends of mine (although recently he has been wheezing, which could be a sign of relapse - I will take him in again and put him back on the vitamins).

A Taiwanese friend of mine does voluntary work at a "shelter" in Tainan County (I say "shelter" in inverted commas because actually they are little more than a means for parents to save face in front of their children when throwing away their dog) and he tells me they are simply overwhelmed by irresponsible Taiwanese people dumping their dogs because they can't be bothered to look after them anymore. This happens every day. So when Larisa Duravetz writes...

"It is time for the government to recognize this problem and make serious changes to the conditions of their shelters."

... she fails to grasp the root of the problem; the rotten condition of shelters is merely a symptom, and having the government spend money to clean them up and impose fines on the people who dump their erstwhile pets isn't going to work (for several reasons: the money will not be made available and is stolen in any case; the fines will be unenforceable since people will just dump their dogs on the street instead of taking them to the "shelter"; and the steady flow of abandoned dogs will just continue to overwhelm the shelters anyway even if they are cleaned up because there aren't enough people willing to adopt).

The root of the problem is the absence of personal responsibility. In the first place there are various economic and psycho-cultural reasons for why Taiwanese people abandon their dogs (basically, owning a dog is a low priority and is therefore easy to abandon when money becomes tight). For many Taiwanese people, a dog is a status marker as much as it is a pet, hence the relative popularity of small and "cute" pedigree breeds whilst the shelters, streets and parks are invariably teeming with mongrels. That is why so many dogs cannot find owners and are abandoned - nobody wants a mongrel except for the few people (such as myself) who already have one (or several). Moreover, there is a strong tendency among the older generations in Taiwan to regard dogs (even pedigrees) as pests. Another friend of mine, who has since moved to Taipei, told me many stories of her parents being upset and uncooperative when she came home with a puppy at her daughter's request.

In fact, it was just this afternoon that another Taiwanese friend of mine was telling me that the old people who occupy my local park in the morning have called the government to come and take away the remaining strays at the park whom I have looked after for a long time now*. Their complaint is that they can sometimes see the dogs defecate and that they tear open the garbage bags. Of course the dogs shit, what else are they supposed to do? I'm already going to the park three times a day and cleaning up after them, but I cannot be there 24/7. As to garbage - I'm the one who has to clean it up! Last night I had the bamboo rake and dust pan out because there were nappies (diapers) covered in baby excrement lying around in front of the garbage can! And why? Because the lazy bastards who dump their garbage in the park late at night can't even be bothered to put the black bag into the garbage can because that would involve lifting the lid. And why does this even happen at all? Because the people dumping their garbage in the park do so because the garbage collection service arrives in their neighborhood whilst they are still at work (newsflash: not everybody works the 8-5 shift). The answer to that would be to privatize the garbage collection to let people choose from a menu of different times and to pay a monthly bill accordingly. But no... it's more convenient to just dump stuff in the park like other people dump their dogs - and if the dogs make a problem, oh well we can just murder them can't we?

Needless to say, I am not going to allow that to happen.

*Picky for three years, Black & White for two plus change, and the three pups Coco, Shao Bai and his brother Wan Wan (Coco's brother Da Bao has since died whilst at the vet, which is another story).

I, Heathen

"Ugh. I understand the historical reasons behind why the Aborigines typically vote blue, but to me it seems as incongruous as a working American mom supporting the GOP. There's a logical disconnect when one thinks about who is actually acting in one's interests."

Jenna Cody - in the comments section to this item at Turton's place. I picked that quote out because it captures two very important points of epistemology and social psychology.

1) The first point, the epistemological one, is that Cody's comments offer an illustration of confirmation bias. Rather than interpreting the incongruity between other people's behaviour and her understanding of their interests as evidence that her understanding of their interests might be mistaken, she instead supposes that this incongruity arises from the failure of other people's intellect rather than her own. Now you might think Cody's opinion is extremely arrogant (and it is), and you might think it fails Occam's Razor (and it does), but it also seems to involve the presupposition that other people's "interests" are seperable from the people themselves. To grant that assumption is to deny the agency of the person in selecting values, and is the necessary first step toward justifying political tyranny since it then becomes possible to argue that such and such a policy is "for the good" of those oppressed by it. Cody is herself every bit as patronizing as she supposes the KMT government is toward the Aborigines.

2) The second point, on social psychology, is that the effect of confirmation bias is to protect the believer (and by extension, those with whom she shares this belief) from the exposure of their beliefs to error. Since beliefs inform evaluations and priorities for action, overturning them can be significantly painful since they are typically inter-related in a hierarchical fashion and underpin our relationships and associations with others. A mistaken belief can persist in the mind of the believer simply because it has become "too big to fail", i.e. overturning it would lead to a collapse of the broader belief structure that would be psychologically difficult to deal with*.

Of course, the social psychology of confirmation bias occurs on an institutional scale also as when the individuals comprising that institution all share similar opinions. The fact that genuine spending cuts (carrying, of course, the implication of privatization) to State socialized welfare, health and education services is still considered taboo or otherwise "unrealistic" among U.S. Democrats in spite of the ongoing fiscal crisis is a current example of this. Look at how people on the Left seem to be desperate to try to pin the blame for the U.S. fiscal crisis on the defense department (20% of the Federal budget), rather than the social programs (60% of the Federal budget).

The Republican primary debates offer another example. Not a single candidate, other than Ron Paul and the excluded Gary Johnson, have had anything substantial to say about monetary reform (although that may simply be because they don't understand the subject).

I would have responded to Cody's remark (and Turton's), but I have been made unwelcome at Turton's blog (and elsewhere) precisely for my criticism and skepticism.

*I went through this as a postgraduate at Edinburgh.

"Science Is The Belief In The Ignorance Of The Experts"

"So if you don’t believe scientists, do you believe poor people struggling to survive? Or you just care about your corporate fossil fuel sponsors, you spineless astroturfer, when you refute climate change?"

This is the sort of "guerilla comment" I regularly get from the anonymous "reporter" at the Taipei Times. Corporate fossil fuel sponsors? Well I don't know about anybody else, but I never get my cheques on time...

Anyway, I was moved to write this post today after stepping back into the subject of climate change; I want something on my blog to refer back to in future so that I don't have to keep repeating myself (at least, until such time as new facts come to light).

***

I have to say, following the recent Spectator article by Nils-Axel Mörner and his subsequent savaging by Monbiot and others at the Guardian and elsewhere, I find it difficult to believe anything Mörner might say on sea levels. Now it may be that Mörner was correct about the 2.3mm adjustment he alleges, and certainly Monbiot didn't refute that, but I am now disinclined to believe what Mörner has to say. It's not just the fact that he got booted out of INQA and is into dowsing and other nonsense, but it was this email exchange with the Australian scientist Robert Hunter that just made me wince. Mörner sounds like a naughty schoolboy trying to keep up the lie that he did his homework but can't find it, and Hunter sounds exactly like I have sounded in the past when going after people whom I just knew were wrong.

Fraser Nelson made a big mistake in publishing that piece, and I made a mistake in trusting him that this guy's work was kosher.

That being said, sea levels at the Maldives are akin to cold or hot weather here or there in that of themselves they say nothing definitive as to whether climate change has a significant anthropogenic element. If Mörner is wrong, that only means that the scientists measuring sea level through tidge guages at the Maldives and through satellite telemetry are not guilty of manipulating their data and deserve an apology. Mörner being either wrong or untrustworthy however, does not mean that all skepticism of anthropogenic climate change is bunk.

Let's review the subject.

The Greenhouse Effect

The very first thing to note is that the subject has been cursed with a confusion spreading misnomer from the beginning - "the greenhouse effect". In an actual glass greenhouse, an increase in temperature is brought about by preventing convection from working; the air and ground beneath are exposed to sunlight but the heat is unable to escape. What happens in the earth's atmosphere is not quite the same thing at all. The heat does in fact escape by radiating into space. The convection of atmospheric gases in the earth's atmosphere is regulated by pressure. As a column of warm air rises in altitude, it expands due to the lower air pressure and this brings about a drop in temperature; as the now cooler column of air descends, it recompresses due to the increased air pressure and thus increases in temperature. That is why, in the troposphere, temperature is higher closer to the surface of the earth, and drops the higher in altitude you climb. Because some of the heat from the warm air columns in the troposphere is lost through radiation into space, the heat cannot be said to be "trapped" as in a greenhouse.

This is where much popular misconception comes in. The claim is that greenhouse gases "trap" the heat in the upper atmosphere and prevent some of it from radiating into space. That is an oversimplification; if the heat really was "trapped", then the upper atmosphere would not be so very much colder than the lower atmosphere. What actually happens is that the greenhouse gases retard the rate at which heat is radiated into space; over time, this means that the average altitude from which heat is radiated into space must increase, and therefore the pressure differential between the surface and the upper atmosphere at which heat radiates must undergo a marginal increase also.

The increase in global temperatures attributed to the "greenhouse" effect is actually a consequence of a change in the atmospheric pressure at which heat is radiated out into space.

However, the mere presence of greenhouse gases by themselves are insufficient to support the predictions of catastrophic global warming. Those predictions are based upon the supposition of positive feedback effects (e.g. increased water vapour, or higher altitude cloud cover) and the comparative absence of negative feedback (e.g. low altitude cloud cover). This is where the scientific controversy is (or isn't, if you dismiss all skeptics).

Climate Change Models & Trust

Here there is a problem.

The first point is that many of the alarming predictions of both scientists and others involved in the AGW field have been falsified by the actual facts. Recently, the IPCC's fourth assessment report contained the famously erroneous claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In 2005, the UN predicted that there would be up to 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010 - which claim has proved false (and which, according to this report in Der Spiegel, has subsequently been removed from the UNEP's website). And of course, James Hansen's temperature predictions of 1988 which informed his Senate testimony of the time have been falsified by actual temperatures in the succeeding two decades since then. Here is the chart (via Jo Nova):


If you want people to trust you, you have to tell the truth and be seen to be telling the truth, together with all the uncertainty. If you attempt to hype, scare, bully or otherwise manipulate people into believing what you want them to believe - and then get caught out by facts - it should come as no surprise if people regard you as a hyperbolic, scare-mongering, manipulative bully.

Because that will be what you actually are.

One line of defense to this, is that those false predictions were made by people at the fringes of the AGW network rather than by the professional climate scientists themselves. Yet the leaked email cache of 2009 and 2011 appears to reveal otherwise. In the 2009 cache* we learned about how they denied FOI requests by third parties to replicate their temperature record, how their coding was poorly programmed, how they tried to prevent other scientists from publishing in certain journals, how they deleted emails once they knew there was a leak and so on. In the 2011 cache we learn more about their own uncertainties about their climate models and internal disagreements with one another. One such chap writes of Michael Mann for instance:

"I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead."

Another writes:

"What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably."

It is against this background of private doubt and possible deceit, that the certainty with which climate predictions are made in public appear so cynical and manipulative. As Lord Turnbull put it earlier this year:

"The Really Inconvenient Truth is that the propositions of the IPCC do not bear the weight of certainty with which they are expressed."

That is not the same thing as a catagorical denial that there may be some truth to the AGW hypothesis, just that the IPCC's claims ought to be regarded with caution - which is a very far cry from the manner in which they have been advanced in the past.

We would also be remiss however, in failing to note that climate science has been politicized for over two decades now, and that - suprise, surprise - it was politicized by those who have tirelessly sought to expand the power of the State: the Left**. Here is Andrew Orlowski on the destructive effects of politicization on climate science:

"While in private, the scientists despair of their lack of understanding of the chaotic physics of climate, and are scathing about the quality of temperature reconstructions (for example), they are faced with constant demands from the bureaucracy and the media to tell a convincing story. Groupthink takes over, and evidence to the contrary is shunned, and scientists who advance it ostracised or smeared."

The confirmation bias Orlowski refers to here is (although I must admit I am somtimes guilty of it myself, most recently in regards to Nils-Axel Mörner's piece in the Spectator) also noted by Matt Ridley in his recent Angus Millar lecture in Edinburgh. Following his introduction to the subject, Ridley describes how he himself changed his mind on AGW. In his own words:

"In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick*. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine. Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick."

He goes on...

"I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before."

***

The qustion of how best to respond to climate change is separate from the question of why, and to what degree it is occuring. Naturally, those of a liberal/conservative mindset advocate market and technological solutions, whereas those on the Left might pragmatically accept some of those suggestions whilst nevertheless advocating a great expansion of the administrative-regulatory State into those few remaining un-politicized aspects and elements of social life. The fact that the Left have long advocated expanded State powers to deal with this or that social problem is the historical reason for why small government liberals/conservatives are skeptical about the politicization of climate science - we see it as an elaborate excuse for expanding the State (and for many people on the Left, it certainly is that).

To add to this, there is the fanatical zealotry of the media pundits and other politicizing figures on the Left (people like George Monbiot at the Guardian, and the blogger Michael Turton here in Taiwan). People who dare express skepticism about AGW are immediately branded as "denialists" and shunned in public, banned from journals, newspapers and blogs, subjected to vociferous ad hominem attacks, even so far as being called "liars" and "hate-mongers" and so on. As if that wasn't enough, skeptics are now routinely referred to as the "anti-science crowd", even though many of the skeptics are themselves scientists or otherwise have a scientific background.

I am however, uncertain as to how to judge the implications of the current poisonous political atmosphere concerning climate science. On the one hand, it has indeed provided yet another angle from which the Left can advocate the further expansion of the State toward what they idealistically think it should be. On the other hand, however, vociferous and bad-tempered debate can serve to concentrate the mind; the persistence of skeptics and critics of the Left - added to the manner in which we have been treated - has been, I think, absolutely vital. We are in a fight, for sure, but this is a fight which can only be won by reason and the discipline of finding, communicating - and admitting - the truth.

***

*The Russell inquiry did not take testimony from a single knowledgeable critic of the AGW hypothesis.
**I can still recall reading Al Gore's book "Earth In The Balance" many years ago before I became a skeptic.

"Looks Like We're In For Nasty Weather..."

I was nine years old when the Berlin Wall came down. I can vaguely remember it being on the six o'clock news on television. I took German as my second language at GCSE and A-level. I took part in a school exchange program with a school in Essen, near Dusseldorf. In my early twenties, I visited Berlin several times as well as other German cities including Munich (although I much preferred Vienna). In all that time I grew up with the sense that Germany had been, was, and would continue to be one of the world's richest, smartest, cleanest, best-run countries.

On the other hand, I knew about the second and first world wars and the distrust of the Germans that my grandparents generation had had. There were undercurrents of this distrust in football and TV comedies too.

So I grew up admiring Germany and the Germans, though I kept some sense of heavily conditioned wariness under wraps; sort of like the way you might regard a reformed ex-convict - you want to like them, but with the suspicion that there's something else there underneath it all.

And of course, there is...

"Men who look like Nazis, call themselves Nazis, blow up Jewish cemeteries and kill Turkish shopkeepers are not little boys playing cowboys and Indians. They're Nazis."

That's Claire Berlinski writing at Ricochet just a short while ago on the existence of actual, murdering neo-Nazis in Germany.

Given the financial crisis the European (i.e. French and German) banks find themselves in now, and given that Chancellor Merkel is openly talking about a European fiscal union, I think there's a good chance that they'll eventually have to start monetizing their debts through inflation in order to keep the Eurozone together.

That is not too dissimilar from the route the Weimar Republic took.

Iranian Accident Or "Accident"?

There is a very interesting piece up on Defense Tech comparing two google earth pictures of a missile lab outside Tehran. In the first picture, dated September 9th, the compound is intact. In the second picture, dated November 22nd, the compound has been destroyed. As commenters point out, the initial explosion seems to have occured at the top left corner (north west) of the compound, with the rest of the compound being either burned out or suffering blast damage (or both). Either this was simply an accident, or it was an "accident" with possible U.S., Israeli or British involvement.

Dellingpole In The Wall Street Journal

"Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public."

James Dellingpole, who is now - and good for him - writing for the Wall Street Journal, which is the only major newspaper in the U.S. whose circulation figures are not in decline, unlike the circulation figures of say, the desperately partisan, New York Times.

Mörner & Monbiot

From Nils-Axel Mörner's piece in the Spectator:

"In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’..."

Mörner may be a dowsing rod lunatic, but that is not the question - the question is whether the implication of what he is saying here is true, i.e. that the satellite altimetry record was adjusted in 2003 in order to show a trend. Here is George Monbiot's response to that claim:

"Mörner however chooses not to believe the published satellite record, probably because it shows a clear upward trend across the global oceans of 3.3mm a year. This conscious rejection of the established satellite data comes about, the Spectator reveals, because of something Mörner claims to have overheard several years ago at a scientific conference in Moscow which he interprets as evidence of a conspiracy."

[Emphasis added] Of course, but that is the point. Mörner is rejecting the established satellite data because he says it has been manipulated in order to show a trend, and Monbiot does not refute or even question this but simply passes over it as something Mörner "overheard" and "interpreted" as evidence of a conspiracy. Regardless of whether or not Mörner is a lunatic, if this particular claim of his is actually false, then Monbiot ought to attempt to refute it.

It may be more likely that the "manipulation" Mörner claims is actually measurement error leading to overestimation of sea level rise, although with the second release of emails, you'd have to be wary about such a charitable interpretation. Here is Andrew Orlowski quoting one such email message from a certain Peter Thorne:

“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run...”

Climategate 2.0

"In the short term, the issues raised by Climategate I, which subsequent inquiries failed to explore, are back with a vengeance. Parliament looked at several issues including transparency – withholding code and raw data to allow third parties to replicate CRU’s temperature work – corruption of the peer review process, poor quality programming, and the destruction of internal emails."

Andrew Orlowski at the Register on the second release of email correspondence from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

First order of business is a reminder: it was precisely my mention of just these things, particularly the poor quality programming, for which Turton banned me from his blog in October last year. He deserves all the discredit he can get.

Second, I recall my attempt in September last year to discuss with David Reid his claim about rising sea-levels due to climate change and the risk they pose to Taiwan. It's quite likely that David Reid had simply bought the IPCC line uncritically, since, in attempting to support his claim, he had to rely on reports citing local factors for the erosion of Taiwan's coastline. The extraction of sand from Taiwan's rivers by the construction industry has nothing to do with climate change - which is a point I put to him at the time with no reply. Bearing that exchange with David Reid in mind, consider this quote:

"... the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) tells a different story about sea levels worldwide and is worth quoting in some detail: ‘Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.’

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Reseach) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (of which I am a former president), not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an ‘inconvenient truth’: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries."

That is Nils-Axel Mörner writing in the Spectator*. Read the whole thing.

Oh and Matt Ridley has come out as a skeptic too, for which heresy he will now of course be continuously villified by the Left.

I am not surprised at all. The Left's obvious appetite for the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has been, at least since Al Gore's "Earth In The Balance" (which I can still recall reading), explicable as an "objective" justification to fuel the expansion of the State. That is not to say that meterological research on climate change is all false or unnecessary, just that it has been hijacked for political purposes and this has been obvious for at least two decades now.

*Update: George Monbiot has a piece in the Guardian about Nils-Axel Mörner and his Spectator article. Now, I don't know whether this stuff about Mörner being involved with dowsing rods and other nonsense is true, but Monbiot's piece, whilst a damning hack job, does not challenge Mörner's claim I quoted above, that sea levels have "oscillated close to the present level for three centuries". This is the relevant claim. Having said that, I do now feel sick at having quoted Mörner without checking his background.

The Warp Of Electoral Politics

"Living in a nuclear wasteland"

This is the headline to today's editorial piece in the Taipei Times after trace amounts (>30 Bq/kg) of radioactive isotopes (cesium 137 and cobalt 60) were found on Lanyu island (蘭嶼), where a low-level waste site is located. Essential context: there are legislative and presidential elections in January.

Reflect on the comparison once more:

"Nuclear wasteland"... >30Bq/Kg cesium 137 (trace).

Draw your own conclusions. Previous on this issue, here.

AH-1W

Not as sharp as I would like, but if you click on the image to enlarge, you should notice the gun turret and barrel underneath; the M197 has a jamming problem, but since the Army's AH-1Ws will soon be replaced by AH-64s, I doubt they will be bothered about upgrading it.