Hard hitting global and local news
Visit site: Trans Canada’s Humpty Dumpty wrote Obama’s environmental review of Keystone. Nothing unusual about it, sadly.
Third Fool From the Left Ethon was looking hungry yesterday. Eli asked him (cautiously and from a distance) what was up. Turns out that he took a moving contract from Scrotum , to deliver Chris Monckton around the world where he could advance Mycroft’s Agenda 21. As the bunnies may recall, Joe Bast and the Heartland Mob had finally cottoned onto Chis’ unwitting, but effective, role in the UN plan to subjugated the world. Being from Chicago, and well funded by Bankroll Barry, they had sent some associates to London to terminate the annoyance. Fortunately, Mycroft had gotten a message from Peter Gleick (the matter having been discussed at the Heartland board meeting last winter, one of the memos held close) and was able to take measures to spirit Chris to safety and a world wide lecture tour, keeping one step ahead of the competition. Unfortunately, there had been no time to commission a transportation module from W&H Giddon, Saddlers and they had to make do with what Scrotum could scare up at the Extreme Restraints Bondage store deep in the East End. There were chafing consequences accounting for several pictures taken recently Eli kept adding pins to the map as Ethon flew Monckton from Scotland, to Rio to Qatar to the Antipodes, assuming that the bird was being well fed and was quite surprised by the rather thin appearance of his friend.  The scam doesn’t work anymore Eli, Ethon sadly told him. Monckton is discovering that you can’t get to the edge of crazy, there is always someone a bit further on the edge than you. Supporting a globe trotting lifestyle, a hunting lodge here and there, and the tailor is an expensive business and Chris has had trying times as funding for his main gig, denial of climate change, dries up. Scrotum has been furloughed and is looking for work in Washington, it is so bad. His Lordship has been trying birtherism, snake oil cures for everything from HIV to Graves disease, getting a gig in the House of Lords. Poor lad, he got tossed out of a crazy Brit right wing party for being " semi detached " Well Ethon, Eli replied, surely, somebunnies, somewhere, maybe at the ends of the earth have a need for more Monckton. Sadly, yes, said Ethon, but they don’t pay very well;)
This one was new to me : Fresh off a wave of success in the state Capitol last year, animal welfare groups are taking aim at a new target this year: hunting with lead ammunition. The Humane Society, Audubon California and Defenders of Wildlife are behind a major push to make California the first state to ban lead ammunition for all types of hunting…. ….environmentalists say a statewide ban is needed because overwhelming scientific evidence shows condors, bald eagles and other birds are still dying from lead poisoning when they eat dead deer and other animals shot by hunters…. “These people want to ban hunting
I’ve really enjoyed Chris Mooney’s Point of Inquiry podcasts, so it’s too bad the latest one with pro-GMO activist Mark Lynas failed to wrestle significantly with real arguments about GMOs (Chris, you talk about GMOs too much to say you don’t want to delve into technical issues). One interesting issue did come out of the podcast – at one point Lynas says the Union of Concerned Scientists’ rejection of the National Academy of Sciences position on GMOs is a contradiction of UCS arguments that we should rely on the consensus opinion on climate change
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional
News recently announced that China plans to enact a carbon tax , along with its longstanding commitment to never match US per-capita emission rates, and India’s greater commitment to never match OECD rates , all suggest a need to look at emissions a different way. What matters is total emissions over the modern time period from the recent past until several generations (at least) into the future
There appears to be a lot of Bayesian thumb sucking going on, maybe the first was Eli’s duo with Socrates , and, of course the bunnies know that James has been going on about uniform priors , and there is always Andrew Gelman . Now some, not Eli to be sure, might think that the recent election also gave a strong push to priors and p values and such. Nate Silver of the NYTimes blog five thirty eight has a book out which is reviewed in Science by Sam Wang and Ben Campbell, who also are in the election prognostication business. Silver, of course, is another guy with a Bayesian hammer looking for statistical nails and finding them all about. Eli thought a couple of paragraphs towards the end capture what the Rabett has been trying to beat into bunnies heads. Our biggest criticism of the book is that although statistics and Bayesian inference are powerful ideas, they are not a cure all. In his enthusiasm for the good Reverend, Silver has stuffed a fair bit into the same Procrustean bed. Silver uses the old fox-hedgehog analogy, saying that foxes (including himself) use many ideas, whereas hedgehogs focus on one subject only. But here he is a hedgehog with one big idea:statistics.
California cap-trade passes second test better than first California’s cap-and-trade passed, barely, its first test last fall with an auction price that just barely exceeded the $10/ton minimum price. The second auction of carbon allowances last week went better, with all carbon allowances selling at $13.62/ton , right in the middle of the expected range of $11-15/ton. The amount of carbon allowances released for auction isn’t so big that regulated buyers figured they only needed to pay the minimal amount because it would only take minimal effort to comply with or buy allowances later, nor was it so little that buyers were forced to pay top dollar and would then come screaming that the political system is demanding more change than is economically feasible. Coming in at another $3/ton also means more money available to fund the other important parts of California’s climate mitigation plan. Finally, half the 2016 allowances were sold, which is fine – the market has another way to satisfy the same demand by selling them as futures . So far, the California system seems to be doing a lot better than Europe’s. Probably not a huge surprise – we got to see what didn’t work.