Left Attacking the Tea Party with Dodgy Numbers

Russ Steele

Our local left is crowing about the latest Pew Research Center Study showing Americans interest in the  Tea Party has flip and is now in decline. According to Pew:

More Americans now say that they disagree than agree with the tea party, and even those who live in districts represented by tea party members are split over the movement, according to a new survey.

Twenty-seven percent of those surveyed say they disagree with the tea party movement, compared with 20 percent who agree with it, the Pew Research Center found.

Opinion on the issue has flipped since a year ago, when 27 percent agreed and 22 percent disagreed with the movement.

Now lets get to the core of the issue. The margin of error was very high +/- 7%.  Not mentioned by our local left.  So you can see how accurate the poll is check out this graphic.

While this study may be an indicator, why is it that every time our local Tea Party meets there are 8-10 new members. I would not give a poll with a +/- 7% error much credibility. The article does not tell us what the error was in the original study. See you at the next Tea Party event.

Prop 23 Update: Silicon Valley Not Saving CA Economy

Russ Steele

I hope that you all remember the Prop 23/AB-32 debates, when our local left who were promoting AB-32, told us that going green in Silicon Valley would be the engine that would save the California economy.

Forbes magazine ranked the nation’s 51 largest metro areas for high tech employment.

TOP TEN BEST CITIES FOR HIGH TECH JOBS IN THE NATION
1. Seattle, WA
2. Baltimore, MD
3. Columbus, OH
4. Raleigh, NC
5. Salt Lake City, UT
6. Jacksonville, FL
7. Washington DC
8. New Orleans, LA
9. San Bernardino-Riverside
10. San Diego

Where is Silicon Valley? San Jose is at 17; San Francisco at 29;  and Sacramento at 43.

According to Forbes,  Silicon Valley remains the `biggest loser’ among the nation’s tech regions, surrendering roughly one quarter of its high-tech jobs — about 80,000 — in the past decade.

Now let’s hear from our local lefties, what happened? Could it be that AB-32 and similar regulations are squeezing the life out of the Silicon Valley and the innovators have moved to more business friendly states and regions in California? Just asking?

Your mobile phone is logging your every action

Russ Steele

There is a mobile phone app that is embedded in your cellphone that records every keystroke, every site you visit, and the police can get this information from the phone company without a search warrant.

Though the software is installed on most modern Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart of Connecticut analyzed its workings, revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user’s phone experience — ostensibly so carriers and phone manufacturers can do quality control.

But now he’s released a video actually showing the logging of text messages, encrypted web searches and, well, you name it.

ooo

The company denies its software logs keystrokes. Eckhart’s 17-minute video clearly undercuts that claim.

You can read the rest of the article at WIRED. The article concludes:

Cringe as the video shows the software logging each number as Eckhart fingers the dialer.

“Every button you press in the dialer before you call,” he says on the video, “it already gets sent off to the IQ application.”

From there, the data — including the content of  text messages — is sent to Carrier IQ’s servers, in secret.

By the way, it cannot be turned off without rooting the phone and replacing the operating system. And even if you stop paying for wireless service from your carrier and decide to just use Wi-Fi, your device still reports to Carrier IQ.

If you are watching porn on your smartphone, or if you have a secret girl friend, or are accessing your bank accounts, or investment accounts on your cellphone STOP!  Your whole life is being stored in your service providers data base, which the government can access with out your knowledge.

Are Penn State lectures on “climate ethics” an oxymoron?

Russ Steele

As you all may recall, it is Penn State that is hiding Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann e-mails, data, and research logs from FOIA requests.   This hockey stick research was conducted with public grant money and is in the public interest. So, I was dumbstruck when I read about about Penn State giving climate ethics lectures at the UN COP Meeting in Durban South Africa at WUWT.

An Ethical Critique of the Climate Science Disinformation Campaign

Dear Attendees of COP-17:

On Tuesday, November 29th, in a seminar organized by Penn State University and the University of Washington on the ethical dimensions of climate change join us to look at two issues.

One, an ethical analysis of the climate change disinformation campaign. We will examine whether this is a new kind of crime against humanity?

Second, we will look at the piratical significance for negotiations in Durban if climate change is understood to create human rights violations.

 
Tuesday, November 29th, 1PM – 5PM,The University of Kwazulu-Natal,Howard College Campus Howard College Lecture Theater

Donald A. Brown
Associate Professor Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law,
Director,Collaborative Program on Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change, Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State University.

You see, if your are not on the warmer’s team’s message that the world is burning up from human CO2 emissions you are guilty of human right violations.  And, to mention that the science is not proven and there could be other causes for the warming, warming that is not happening by the way, you are participating in a disinformation campaign.  So, this is how science is done at Penn State. What ever you do not  send your kids or grandkids to Penn State, they have unresolved ethics issues.
 

Oh, by the way, big oil is 96 months behind in sending me my first check. It will arrive some day I am sure as Professor Brown keeps telling me I am on the payroll.

Competing World Views of Tea Party and OWS – The Video

Russ Steele

NY University law professor Richard Epstein has developed a particularly helpful video to assist readers understand the real differences between the Tea Party and the Occupy Crowd.

Competing worldviews of the Tea Party and OWS

Prop 23 Update: AB32 will drive up food prices

Russ Steele

I spotted the paragraphs below in an article by Steven Greenhut in The City Journal:

. . . members of the California Assembly’s rural caucus and a California Air Resources Board member met with San Joaquin Valley food processors regarding implementation of AB 32, California’s anti-global-warming law. The law will impose a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions—something the assembled farmers and food processors said could put them out of business. Eventually all manufacturers will have to purchase emissions credits, but CARB is rolling out the program slowly to minimize damage to employers. Using typical bureaucratic language, CARB placed various industries into categories based on their risk of “leakage”—a euphemism for job losses. The food processors, who depend heavily on natural gas to dehydrate and can vegetables, were put in the “medium-leakage” category, to which they objected: they’ll have to pay for credits sooner than businesses in the high-leakage category. Because their products are traded globally, the food processors argued, there’s little chance that consumers will absorb the extra costs.

It seems clear that Central Valley jobs and businesses are being sacrificed as part of a utopian environmental scheme to lower worldwide temperatures. Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions will not clean up pollution in the bad-air areas of Fresno County, given that global-warming gases are not—despite President Obama’s insistence—a pollutant. But more land will go fallow as farm-based industries shift south of the Mexican border and even to China.

CARB attempting to solve a problem that does not exist. There is no proven case for human caused global warming. As we discovered in Climategate I and II the CO2 science is flawed and a small group of UN IPCC climate scientist rigged the data to continues to get grants to study the problem.

For readers truly interested in understanding the the problem the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) has series of links to commentators who have analyzed the Climategate II emails:

• You can search the Climategate I and II emails here: http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php
• Watts Up With That: the emails are real, and they are spectacular; a huge amount of information here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0/
• Steve McIntyre: One of the main themes of the emails is scientists admitting privately what they won’t admit publicly:http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/23/private-expressions-of-uncertainty/
• Terence Corcoran, action on the IPCC is needed more than ever: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/11/22/terence-corcoran-climategate-2-0-reveals-familiar-cast-of- characters-blundering-glory/
• Climategate, Part Duh! Alan Caruba: http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2011/11/climategate-part-duh.html

Payday on Grant Avenue

Russ Steele

As I am reading the most recent batch of the Climategate e-mails it occurred to me that many of climate scientist in these e-mail are just scientific hacks on the government grant payrolls. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, and Keith Briffa, who starred in the first set of Climategate e-mails are front and center in the current set of e-mails.

These e-mails demonstrate that these climatologist are very aware what they must do to keep the grant revenue stream flowing in their direction. They need to provide their government paymaster what they are looking for — another good reason to tax citizens. The paymasters were looking for a crisis that citizens cannot ignore, and run away global warming seemed to fill the bill.

In the Climate 2.0 batch of emails the scientists admit that the evidence behind man made global warming is paper thin, and the apocalyptic climate story is being pushed for political rather than environment reasons.

For example there was this message from the British Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which points out how scientists are selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse the scientific information.

Humphrey who is reported to work for DEFRA writes:

‘I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. ‘They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’

In other words, reminding the scientist what it is they are being paid to do — support the government paymasters agenda.

Professor Phil Jones, IPCC Author writes:

 ‘Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.’

Well it turns out the reason they could not provide the station data is that it does not exist. See this post at WUWT in an An Open Letter to Dr. Phil Jones of the UEA CRU by Willis Eschenbach

Another UN IPCC lead author Jonathan Overpeck writes in an e-mail:

 ’The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.’

In other words cherry pick the data and only publish that which supports  the government paymasters agenda.

The amazing thing, well maybe not, is the lack of interest by the main stream press in the substance of the e-mails. Google Climategate 2.0 and see how few stories come up in the lame stream press about this issue. They seem to be adopting the attitude “nothing new here, move along.”

Here is an example from Discovery Magazine Bad Astronomy blog:

So, with the Noise Machine ready to blast into full gear, let me be very, very clear:

Global warming is real. Independent studies confirm it. Vast amounts of evidence support it. 97% of climate scientists who study it agree with this. It’s almost certainly caused by human activity.

Got it?

Yet, those of us who follow the issues day to day, know that there is much more that is being hidden behind the curtain. Global warming stopped in 1998, those independent studies were pal reviewed, the 97% was 77 scientists who were asked only two questions and there are over 800 qualified scientists who are disagree that the science is not over, and as yet no scientist has proven that human activity is responsible for global warming.  I have bought my last issue of Discovery, as they are not discovering anything, they are just another government propaganda tool.

I think it was “Deep Throat” during the Watergate investigation that said “Follow the money.”  It is time we follow the Climategate money to the root of climate science corruption – grants to support government mandated study results — human caused global warming is a danger to the planet.

Durban and the Carbon Slush Funds

Russ Steele

Misguided political leaders, fraudulent climate scientists, global warming activists, lobbyists, and hopefully a few real climate scientist to hold these crooks feet to the fire, will be meeting in Durban, South Africa on Monday, all in an effort to squeeze more money out of the wealth nations for the UN’s carbon slush funds. The climate change grant whores will all be there with their hands out.

Luboš Motl, Pilsen, Czech Republic, posted this on the Reference Frame:

Swiss banking giant UBS has calculated the costs of the European emission ponzi scheme. It’s being said that the European consumers have only paid $287 billion for the existence of the scheme; the impact of the scheme was zero. Well, more precisely, it was negative: in the most recent year, the annual production of the greenhouse gases has jumped by the greatest amount yet. (I don’t even have to discuss that any drop, if real, would have no detectable impact on the climate, and even if the influence became slightly detectable sometimes in the future, the influence would be negative.) If you extended the fees from the European Union to the whole world economy, the mankind would have paid something over $2 trillion so far.

Those $287 billion is less than a third of a trillion of dollars so it hasn’t killed the Old Continent so far. Still, for this money that’s been completely wasted, one could pay most of the giant Greek debt. Alternatively, every single inhabitant of the EU (including babies) could have received an iPad or something along these lines. Imagine what you could do with this particular investment – or hundreds of others. Instead, we have failed to stop the global warming bigots and crooks so all we got are worthless carbon permits. The markets with them is expected to collapse and be phased out in 2012. Let’s hope that we will be able to deal with the criminals who have co-created this outrageous wasteful framework to share the fate of their invention.

You can read the rest of the post HERE.

If going green to reduce CO2 cost he liberal bastion of the EU $284 billion what is it going to cost the citizens of California when CARB continues to push AB-32, The Global Warming Solution Act of 2006 on us?  The EU efforts were a huge failure, at a great cost to their economy.  What makes CARB think that their efforts in California will have a different outcome?  Oh, it is all about the slush fund, California politicians want their own carbon slush fund. How nice to know that, it is not about saving the planet, it is about carbon slush funds.

Local left is attempting to deal with Climategate 2.0

Russ Steele

Unable to come to grips with the facts in the Climategate 2.0 emails our local left is attempting to find a solution that continues to support their religious belief in human caused global warming. While some warmest are lamenting that Climategate 2.0 maybe devastating, our local left is in denial.

The Warmists’ seven stages of grief. Our locals are currently at Stage 2.

• ‘Stage 1: they aren’t real emails
• Stage 2: they are real emails but they aren’t in context’
• ‘Stage 3: they are in context, but that’s how scientists work
• Stage 4: ok, this isn’t really science, but you guys stole the emails!
• Stage 5: this is old stuff
• Stage 6: this is nothing
• Stage 7: look everyone! Winter storm!
  See, we have proof of our theories now’

Thanks to http://www.climatedepot.com/ for this list

Another Green Fail: Chinese Solar Industry Goes Belly Up

Russ Steele

One of the big arguments proponents of ‘green jobs.’ often recited during the Prop 23 debates by our local left, was that China will own the future while the United States is left behind if we did not provide subsides to the VCs  ’green jobs’ initiatives.  Really, they  were that naive?  Read on, my emphasis added?

According to a report on Bloomberg, the Chinese solar power industry is on the ropes; massive over investment has run up against flat demand.  Margins have turned negative at some companies where solar panels can only be sold below cost.

“Demand has not lived up to expectations and pricing has collapsed over the last three quarters,” Aaron Chew, an analyst at Maxim Group LLC in New York, said today in an interview. “Most of the major cell, wafer and module manufacturers are poised to report four quarters in a row of losses and this is just the first one.”

The alternative energy market is still an artificial market; except for a handful of novelty customers rich enough to afford inefficient green tech, firms and households only choose green tech when subsidies bring the price within range or regulations force people to choose expensive green products.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

UN IPCC: Fix it or fold it

Russ Steele

Ever since Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre exposed Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick as a fraud I have been following their writings with a Google Alert. This morning I was alerted to an article Ross McKitrick in the Financial Post: UN IPCC: Fix it or fold it

Here is an extract from Ross’s article [emphasis added]:

Most people would not consider themselves sufficiently well-trained to adjudicate conflicting claims on the science of global warming. But you don’t have to be a scientist to be capable of understanding when an investigative procedure is biased. The IPCC assessment process has material defects, which are sufficiently serious and numerous to put into question the soundness of some of its most heavily promoted claims.

What are some of the flaws? IPCC report-writing teams are cherry-picked in an opaque process by a secretive bureau in Geneva, with no effective requirements to ensure representation of diverse viewpoints. Environmentalist campaign groups are heavily overrepresented in the resulting author lists. Conflicts of interest abound throughout the report-writing process, whereby select authors are asked to review their own work and that of their critics, inevitably concluding in their own favour. The expert review process has become little more than elegant stagecraft, creating an illusion of adversarial cross-examination while concealing the reality of unchecked author bias. Unlike in regular academic peer review procedures, IPCC authors are allowed to overrule reviewers, and even to rewrite the text after the close of the peer review process.

In his article Ross uses some of the Climategate 2.0 e-mails do demonstrate the level of corruption that exists in the selection of IPCC Report authors and contributors.

In a pair of emails (nos. 0714 and 3205), ­IPCC lead author Phil Jones goes through lists of possible CAs with his IPCC coauthor Kevin Trenberth, declaring “Getting people we know and trust is vital.” He then categorizes his recommendations based, not on whether the person is the most qualified but on whether the person is “on the right side” (namely agrees with him), or whether he “trusts” him or not. At one point he dismisses a particular expert who “has done a lot but I don’t trust him.” This kind of cronyism is shown by the emails to be rampant in the IPCC.

Why is this article important to California readers of this post? The IPCC reports were the main justification for the development of AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Justification that was developed by cherry-picked science team permeated by cronyism to “give government a strong message” that global warming was a clear and present danger, when in fact the team had some serious doubts. However, their paymasters wanted a strong message and they got what they paid for. Now we are paying the price for this scientific deception.

Why do we continue to put up with this crap?

Nevada County Labor Market Profile

Russ Steele

Earlier this week the ERC re-launched their Newsletter.  In the report was profile of Nevada County. To grasp the significance of the graphic you needed to read the whole NoRTEC Report: INDUSTRY SECTOR, ENTREPRENEUR, AND GREEN SURVEY ANALYSIS.

To help readers understand the graphic I have added the missing sector labels. 

 The link the full report in the ERC Newsletter is broken and here a well. The full  report:nortec_industry_sector_report.  This report should give local leaders some insight in to where they should be focusing their economic development time and money.  It is interesting when you look at the other Counties and compare how closely clustered Nevada County business are relative to the others Counties.  I am not sure why, except that Nevada County more closely mirrors the CA economic distribution.   I need to spend more time with the full report.

Happy Thanksgiving

Ellen and I are going to spend Turkey Day with the family.  To you and your family,  Happy Thanksgiving!

How Far Will they Carry the Going Green Farce?

Russ Steele

I have been reading the Climategate 2.0 e-mails and needed a palate cleaner, a sip of wine between the bites of steak.  Here is one that came in over the e-mail transom:

WHEN Denmark’s new government ministers presented themselves to Queen Margrethe II last month, the Development Minister established his green credentials by rolling up to the palace in a tiny, three-wheeled, electric-powered vehicle. The photo opportunity made a powerful statement about the minister’s commitment to the environment but probably not the one he intended. 

Christian Friis Bach’s electric-powered vehicle was incapable of covering the 30km from his house to the palace without running out of power. So he put the electric mini-car inside a horse trailer and dragged it behind his petrol-powered Citroen for three-quarters of the trip, switching back to the mini-car when he neared the television cameras. 

The stunt produced more carbon emissions than if he had ditched the electric car and horse trailer and driven a regular car the entire distance.

Hat Tip to Dixon. Here is link to the story

Climategate 2.0 is here!

Russ Steele

By request of a moderated comment, not displayed,  here is a list of the more devastating Climategate e-mails released yesterday. Read ‘em all. They validate EVERYTHING the skeptics have been saying in the warmers own words.

• Jones says media, especially BBC, has alarmist bias
• Wigley knows why paleo-reconstructions are junk science
• Jones says 2-degree C limit ‘plucked out of thin air’
• Alarmists looked to ally with Goldman Sachs
• Climategate 2.0: Phil Jones complains about omnipresent deniers
• Ducking confrontation on ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’
• Alarmist introspection admits dishonesty on hockey stick
• Jones laments blogsites as allowing deniers to find one another/a>
• Systematic deletion of e-mails
• How Phil Jones misleads journalists
• Santer angry over not being able to silence skeptics
• Mann says true temp anomaly not known well
• Silence of the alarmists
• Wigley accuses ‘Mike’, other IPCC-ers of deception, dishonesty
• Spun science isn’t going to end well
• Department of Energy involved in hiding temperature data?
• Jones advises e-mail deletion to avoid FOIA
• Mann says Curry not helping ‘the cause’
• ‘All models wrong’
• IPCC models not worth a darn
• Hulme hired to be the hand of God
• Praying for the ‘Day After Tomorrow’ to work
• Catholicism an ‘extreme’ religion?
• Mann a dead-ender
• Mann paper slammed by colleague as ‘pathetic’
• ‘Hockey stick’ debunking confirmed
• Hide the dissent
• Feelings more important than truth
• Kjellén has a better name for global warming
• Jones bans dissent on extreme weather
• Medieval Warm Period tough to erase
• Mann said skeptics ‘losing’
• Climategate 2.0?

Hat Tip to Junk Science.