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Absolutely hilarious. Pay attention to the part where Sarah criticizes Obama for using a teleprompter, followed by a close-up of something very peculiar on her left hand.

FAIL.

Oh, and what does this mean?

To win that war, we need a Commander in Chief, not a professor of law standing at the lecturn.

Huh? And people were actually shouting:

Run Sarah run!

Hopefully they meant “out of the country”.

In 2007, Anthony Watts, a meteorologist, blogger, and global warming denier, launched the website surfacestations.org. It was created in response to “a massive failure of bureaucracy to perform something so simple as taking some photographs and making some measurements and notes of a few to a few dozen weather stations in each state”. The primary purpose is basically to expose supposed biases in the land temperature record, due to improperly placed measurement devices, thereby proving that the planet is not really warming. According to this theory, the supposed warming is due primarily to errors in temperature measurement.

Nevermind for a minute that NASA corrects for various anomalies in their analysis of raw data, or that satellite measurements match nicely with land data. A recently released study has analyzed the data from the sites recorded at surfacestations.org, and found something very interesting:

Poor sites show a cooler maximum temperature compared to good sites. For minimum temperature, the poor sites are slightly warmer. The net effect is a cool bias in poorly sited stations.

Exactly the opposite that is insinuated by Watts. FAIL.

h/t Tim Lambert

I’ve often seen cap and trade legislation bashed for various reasons, and from both sides. Granted, it’s not a panacea for our planet’s environmental problems, but it seems to be a workable solultion that most people can agree on, and is therefore our best shot at tackling the problem of global warming. Take a look at this video and see what you think:

The Facts of Cap-and-Trade from Clean Energy Works on Vimeo.

I figured the point about cap and trade working would be a sticking point for many here, so I’ll go ahead and link straight to the MIT paper upon which that point was based:

http://web.mit.edu/ceepr/www/publications/DDCF.pdf

Full bibliography here:

http://ga3.org/campaign/cew_facts/forward

I know there are intelligent conservatives out there, so I’m not trying to generalize here. However, I think this does say something about Glenn Beck’s effect on political discourse on the right side of the aisle. It’s scary, actually.

This post is my first attempt at retrieving my old posts from the internet archives. In May of 2007, I posted this rebuttal to a speech by Michael Crichton.

Recently, my attention was directed to a speech by Michael Crichton, given at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, on January 17, 2003. I was told that, while this speech contained some of the usual fallacious skeptical arguments, there were also somewhat convincing ones. So, I’ve given it a read, and I’d like to address Crichton’s arguments.

In his lecture, Crichton spoke against “pseudoscience” and against science being too closely linked with politics. Crichton then provides several examples of what he considers to be bad science being accepted by the scientific community and the public. He starts with the the SETI project, which he considers to be a “religion”, saying that it opened the door for other “pernicious garbage”. Next, he tackles previous claims about a nuclear winter, second-hand smoke, and computer models, all of which he claims were foolish. Having established, in his mind anyways, that all of these previous examples were false, he then correlates the acceptance of these to the acceptance of global warming and provides his own remedy for the problem, which is separating each of the phases of scientific research, so as to avoid corruption of the process.

Crichton approaches this subject as though it were a trial in which humanity were being charged with causing global warming. If this were the case, he would make a great defense attorney, because he provides plenty of doubt. However, I think the case should be turned around. It is the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists whose work he is attacking who are on the defense. Therefore, Crichton is required to provide some detailed scientific arguments against the work of these scientists, which he has failed to do. At one point, he actually admits that he does not intend to do so:

And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science or non-science is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this more magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established.

I find it unfortunate that he decided to abandon the only method by which he could truly convince the world of his argument. Regardless of Crichton’s lack of any substantive scientific argument, I would still like to address many of the assertions made in his speech, as I believe that they are many times not grounded in fact.

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In her recent article at Salon, Joan Walsh lamented the level of discourse, or lack thereof, from the right at town hall meetings. She complained that “Democrats are being shouted down by angry mobs inflamed by corporate interests spewing lies about healthcare reform”. The rhetoric has continued to worsen in recent days, and it’s mostly being fueled by lies and distortions about what is in the House bill:

At Blue Dog Rep. Mike Ross’ town hall, he was shouted down by a woman insisting Obama supports a single-payer (government) insurance plan, which is simply not true. Another woman began sobbing, talking about what her country has become, ending, “I’m scared!” They’re being terrified by false claims that Obama is promoting mandatory end-of-life “counseling” (read assisted suicide), mandatory gender-change surgery (!) and aiming to eliminate private insurance.

Some of the misinformation I’ve encountered on the internet is a result of the work of a man named Peter Fleckenstein. Apparently, he has been causing quite a stir about how the current health care bill in the House is a horrendous idea, by tweeting about specific sections in the bill that would be, in his view, particularly damaging to our way of life. These tweets then made it onto a couple of small time conservative blogs, and from there, they spread all around teh intertubez. It seems that they’re everywhere.

Well, I’ve taken the time to compare all of these tweets to the actual bill, and what I found was very interesting. Apparently, every single one is wrong. In EVERY case, Fleckenstein either didn’t understand what he was looking at, or he deliberately misrepresented the section of the bill being addressed. So, in an effort to stem the tide of ignorance that is quickly sweeping the web, I’ve provided my responses to Fleckenstein’s tweets. Feel free to copy and paste at any location where you see the original tweets. Also, feel free to compare these tweets to the bill for yourself.

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