I'd seriously like to make a Wall Street Journal Daily LaughAlong App

This information on environmental stupidity in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages since 1976 should be expanded into a smartphone app.  Each day you could find out what obvious reality was denied on that day of the month in the WSJ in the past, as a balance to whatever new nonsense will be showing up.

LaughAlong at the Journal, though, not with the Journal.  Beats crying, anyway.

Two climate shorts - Phil Jones joins Tautology Club, and a new blog debuts

1.  Refer to this XKCD comic on Tautology Club.  Climatologist Phil Jones got a little sloppy and joined the Club when he said this to the BBC:

Of course, if the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

Tautologies like that are a waste of space, but that's a minor sin.   BBC should've pressed him on it, but they were halfway into Tautology Club themselves through the preceding question asking if the MWP was global then does it become the precedent.  The geographic reach of the MWP is one of the major unresolved questions about that period.

Of course, the mortal sin is from lying rightwing journalists whose lines are parroted elsewhere, and twist the tautology into an admission that the MWP "may have been" warmer than today.


2.  A new enviro blog from some friends, particularly relevant to Californians and Bay Area folks, called Green/the New IPO.  Good stuff about climate change evasion by the California GOP, among other issues.  Also on the same target is how California's AB32 law to fight climate change, the one now being targeted by the bad guys, is crucial in the fight against California's significant air pollution problems.

Wall Street Journal uses POV fork to gives denialists an uncontradicted platform

(Sorry about the incomprehensible notes I accidentally published here earlier - I will now attempt a real post.)

Wikipedia prohibits content forks and Point of View (POV) forks in its articles, but the Wall Street Journal news section seems to think those techniques make the writing easier.  Content forks are multiple articles on the same subject, and POV forks are attempts to avoid the neutral viewpoint requirement of wiki by creating an article that just focuses on one side of an issue.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal has an article called "Controversies Create Opening for Critics" about climate change denialists and their attacks on the IPCC.  I can only guess the refusal to discuss the mainstream position and counterarguments to critics is because the article is about the critics.  It contains the uncontradicted lies that claims about effects on African agriculture and Amazonian rainforests were found to not have a scientific basis.  The only "defense" of the IPCC is from Bjorn Lomborg of all people, who says warming is real but we shouldn't cut emissions.

A paragraph on the frivolous Texas lawsuit against the EPA's finding that greenhouse gases endanger Americans actually performed journalism by talking to both sides of the issue.  Too bad the rest of the article doesn't.

The remainder is expositions on the beautiful denialist theories of Christy, Lindzen, Soon, and Kukla (last one's new to me) on how they're right and everyone else is wrong.  Nothing at all is written about how their theories have gained no support and why they haven't.  An article that wouldn't make it through wiki sails the Journal.

Many denialists I debate on blogs have an open contempt for wikipedia, so much so that they refuse to go there to get the linked references that wiki provides.  I think neutrality and reality are the real problems they have with it.

Sandwich theory says I should say something nice about Dana Milbank and his global warming column

You're supposed to sandwich your critique with praise on either ends to make it more palatable.  So, I actually liked some of Milbank's previous attempts at humor back when he was doing video.

Now, I'll try to summarize the pain from reading through Milbank's I-blame-Algore-and-climatologists-for-denialist-lies:

Paragraph 1:  Al Gore's crusade is inconvenienced by the snow.

Par. 2, Par. 3, Par. 4, Par. 5:  quotes of wingnuts attacking global warming and Al Gore because of snow.

Par. 6:  first acknowledgment of science, that the snow isn't even mildly contrary evidence to climate change theory.  Newspaper readership drops off the further down you go in a column so putting truth after five paragraphs of misdirection isn't helpful.

Par. 7 and 8:  incoherence.  This stuff is bad enough to quote.  "some rough justice in the conservatives' cheap shots. In Washington's blizzards, the greens were hoisted by their own petard.

For years, climate-change activists have argued by anecdote to make their case. Gore, in his famous slide shows, ties human-caused global warming to increasing hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought and the spread of mosquitoes, pine beetles and disease. It's not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heat wave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle."

So it's not that Gore was wrong or misleading,* it's that somebody interpreted climate change to mean no more snow, and therefore Milbank finds that greens have hoisted themselves on petards.  That makes lots of sense.

I'll interrupt this nonsense for someone who handled the issue much better, Repower America and Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Unusually Large Snowstorm
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

(Not sure if the video works here - if not, it's at the link.)  Skip to minute 3:30 for the good stuff and a minute later for a comparison about Al Gore that contrasts strongly with Milbank blaming Gore for people's misinterpretation.  Note that Stewart leads off, before the clips of denialists on Fox, with a comparison of them to children that keeps the denialists from getting free advertising.

Okay, back to nonsense. Paragraph 9:  Milbank uses Heritage Foundation as a source of what some enviro, any enviro anywhere, has said about the effects of climate, with the assumption that everything said was inaccurate.  The shrinking feral sheep thing, by the way, really is an effect of localized climate change.  And some (inconclusive) evidence ties climate change to more El Ninos, and El Nino is definitely the cause of the lack of snow in Vancouver and the likely cause of all the snow on the East Coast.  But yes, I will concede that some one or even more than one person out of 6 billion on the planet has indeed overstated the effects of climate change.

Continuing.  Paragraph 10:  filler.  Paragraph 11 and 12 are precious:  "Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center's Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that 'the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature' points to human-caused warming and that doubters 'don't understand the science.'
The science is overwhelming -- but not definitive. Romm's claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, who confessed that "there's a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system" and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what's going on. 'Unfortunately we don't have that data so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data.' 

Sounds like Masters is just saying we can't nail down the exact connection between AGW and any one weather incident.  That doesn't contradict or shoot down climate science, which of course is about general climate and not specific weather incidents.  A little too complex for Milbank to understand, however.  I blame Masters for not gearing the info down sufficiently to Milbanks' level.

But wait, there's more!  Par. 13:  "....there were the hacked e-mails of a British research center that suggested the scientists were stacking the deck to overstate the threat. Now comes word of numerous errors in a 2007 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear in 25 years."

Funny how critiques of one scientist, Phil Jones, and his unsuccessful attempt to exclude two bad papers from consideration by the IPCC becomes "scientists" generally, as well as being magnified to being an overstatement of the threat.  The latest "numerous errors" are mostly poor citation jobs, not actually errors (or in the case of current damages from climate change and risks of Amazonian droughts, areas where the IPCC is likely correct but not completely proven).  Milbank couldn't be bothered with providing a link to back up his claims of numerous errors, which apparently reached him from through the ether.

Paragraphs 14 through 16:  standard Village conventional wisdom, which is to forget talking about climate change, and talk about clean energy jobs.  Milbank improves his batting average here from generally wrong to possibly right.  What he fails to understand is that it's a shame to have to downgrade emphasis of the main issue of climate change.  Maybe if people like him were more accurate, that wouldn't be necessary.  He also misses what effect hot weather has on short-term changes in political views, or the wisdom of Al Gore's suggestion to move the next major climate conference to summer in Mexico City.

In summary, I did enjoy some of the political humor videos that Milbank produced.



*I think Gore can be accused of some relatively minor cases of cherrypicking studies, but Milbank is attacking the generally true statements as being misinterpreted by somebody.  Not sure who, maybe it's Milbank.

Washington Week in Review doesn't care much about truth as a value

I normally like listening to the Washington Week in Review podcast as a way to catch up on news I might have missed and hear some analysis, but the critique of the mainstream media being morally empty has some application to their May 15th show. First, they were mystified as to why Pelosi and CIA would get in such a bitter public fight over whether she had been misled in the torture briefings. I can help out with that - it's because at least one of the two parties involved is lying, and the other party could be expected to be angry in that situation. I don't know who it is yet, but that circumstance justifies a public fight.

The other issue is Obama's reversal on releasing torture photos. The show participants describe it as a "nick" in his promise of transparency and can't see any reason to release them. It's interesting that the press has so little interest in the truth.

One thing that might help this show is if they encouraged posting comments on their website. Left, Right, and Center is a weekly news review that does exactly that, and I think they do a better job overall - even Tony Blankley on the right has become more accurate over time.

Final thought about Obama and the torture photos - the national security argument he's making has already been rejected by the courts, and he's never described how he could improve it. I think he's counting on the courts to force him to release the photos, so it's not his fault. I don't give a lot of credit to this type of behavior but it's not quite as bad as it could be.

Omaha killer: "Now I'll be famous"

That was his motivation for killing strangers.

So I'll just repeat this post from April 19th after the Virginia Tech killings:

One small way to help in the case of massacres

Somewhere I had read an idea that sounded pretty good to me in helping to handle the phenomenon of mass killers looking for glory - the media should, as a matter of self-restraint, not publish their names. This isn't a call for government censorship, and I'm sure somebody somewhere will publicize their names, but we could still deprive them of the glory they're looking for on the front pages of the major newspapers and websites, and keep their names off the television networks.

I think it might also make sense to obscure their faces in some way when photos are shown in the media, so they can't anticipate that the image will go down prominently in history, either.

I don't know if this will actually restrain a killer from going on a rampage, although who knows - if someone's balancing on the edge between checking himself into a mental hospital or going out in a blaze of glory, maybe it could sometimes be decisive. If nothing else, though, it would help media and the public focus on the names and faces of the victims in the aftermath, where the attention belongs.

One small way to help in the case of massacres

Somewhere I had read an idea that sounded pretty good to me in helping to handle the phenomenon of mass killers looking for glory - the media should, as a matter of self-restraint, not publish their names. This isn't a call for government censorship, and I'm sure somebody somewhere will publicize their names, but we could still deprive them of the glory they're looking for on the front pages of the major newspapers and websites, and keep their names off the television networks.

I think it might also make sense to obscure their faces in some way when photos are shown in the media, so they can't anticipate that the image will go down prominently in history, either.

I don't know if this will actually restrain a killer from going on a rampage, although who knows - if someone's balancing on the edge between checking himself into a mental hospital or going out in a blaze of glory, maybe it could sometimes be decisive. If nothing else, though, it would help media and the public focus on the names and faces of the victims in the aftermath, where the attention belongs.