Hard hitting global and local news
Hard hitting global and local news
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
James Fallows thinks about the ten year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. He says he’d like to hear from the liberal war hawks and what they’ve learned. I don’t quite fit that category – not always a liberal for one thing, and was undecided rather than a supporter of the war.
While no one was looking the sun has gone cold, more precisely the sun gods have decreased total solar irradiation by about 4 W/m 2 to 1360.8 + 0.5 W/m 2 from 1365.4 + 1.3 W/m 2 ERB is the Earth Radiation Budget instrument, ACRIM is the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiation Monitor, SORCE is the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment carrying the TIM, Total Irradiation Monitor. The rest is left to the industrious reader. What happened was that apertures in earlier instruments were not properly chosen, allowing excess light to be scattered into the sensor (right side of the figure below) resulting in higher TSI being measured. The magnitude of the effect was determined in a purpose built testing facility at LASP. The error is not without consequences As Kopp and Lean point out, A nonzero average global net radiation at the top of the atmosphere is indicative of Earth’s thermal disequilibrium imposed by climate forcing. But whereas the current planetary imbalance is nominally 0.85 W/m 2 [Hansen et al., 2005], estimates of this quantity from space‐based measurements range from 3 to 7 W/m 2 SORCE/TIM’s lower TSI value reduces this discrepancy by 1 W/m 2 [Loeb et al., 2009].
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
Tuesday, March 05, 2013 Posted by EliRabett Rabett Run Subscribe Rabett Run Posts Posts Comments Comments Contributors 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