Thinking of Oklahoma

Tough times. Lives lost. Dreams delayed.

“Tornado Alley” is called that for a good reason. It’s up to folks to make sure that when they rebuild, that they provide ample shelters to withstand future extreme weather. While we do not need to build everything to withstand all extreme weather, it is vital to build enough shelters and warning systems to prevent almost all deaths in future.

Don’t rely on the government to do that for you.

Learn from what happened. Future storms can’t be prevented but lives can be saved by learning from what went wrong this time.

Hopefully the government can stay out of the way. even though the natural disaster has already been politically exploited; even in the US Senate.

When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas.

Here’s a reminder about what happens when people accept that people could be “responsible” for extreme weather. In more superstitious times, it used to be called “weather cooking”.

Cook's 97% consensus study falsely classifies scientists' papers according to the scientists that published them

Reblogged from Watts Up With That?:

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UPDATE: More inconsistency:

http://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/337126632080957441

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When asked about the categorizations of Cook et al, - "It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming"

Guest essay by Andrew of Popular Technology

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW.

Read more… 1,330 more words

We all knew that the paper was Cook-eyed because of the treatment of statistics. Now we see that his raw data are rubbish.

Our need for hydrocarbon and nuclear industries is growing

Colin McInnes writes in The Herald Scotland

There’s a new meme running wild on the internet.

The idea, spread virally, goes something like this: The world’s energy majors are valued by the market on the basis that coal, oil and gas reserves can be turned into real economic value, making them an attractive punt for investors. … If it bursts, investors will lose their shirt.

But there are two problems with this argument. First, as economist Richard Tol points out, from the valuation of coal, oil and gas companies it’s clear that the market expects us to be burning fossil fuels for some time to come. …

However, a second, largely ignored point is this: We don’t extract hydrocarbon fossil fuels for their carbon, we extract them for hydrogen.  …

Read it all at The Herald Scotland or Colin McInnes’ Perpetual Motion blog.

It’s quite unsurprising that FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is being used to dissuade the use of cheap, abundant and available resources to support the well-being of modern life.

Paris has the Seine. Brussels the Insane

Mary Ellen Synon writes about Brussels:

Anyone who asks ‘Why were you in Paris?’ has never lived in Brussels

For reasons lost in history, or at least beyond comprehension, the Manneken Pis has become the symbol of Brussels.

Rome has the Trevi Fountain, Paris has the Arc de Triomphe, Berlin has the Brandenburg Gate, Brussels has a statue of a boy urinating. Says it all, really.

Don’t stop there… Read it all.

Seizing the People’s Sovereignty from the Overlords

Richard North lays out revolutionary plans against the slow-motion coup d’état of the EU.

But, if it is revolutionaries we are, then we must behave like them. And that means we must have a plan – a strategic plan. No revolution has ever succeeded without one. And, like the Harrogate Agenda, my suggested plan has six points, which I conveyed to the CIB on Saturday. These are:

1. A credible exit plan
2. Reassurance for business
3. An alternative to the EU
4. A network for dissemination
5. Agitation
6. A coalition of allies

Read the rest at the link.

A Tale of Two Steves

Reblogged from Geoffchambers's Blog:

Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, formerly of the University of Western Australia, now of Bristol University, England, recently published a paper establishing a causal link between climate denial and belief that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax. This link was based on four anonymous responses (out of a total of more than 1300) to a faulty on-line survey.

Read more… 1,853 more words

Lewandowsky will no doubt be "missed" by everybody in Western Australia.

First they came for …

With apologies to Niemöller:

First they came for Greece,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Greek.

Then they came for Spain,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Spanish.

Then they came for Cyprus,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Cypriot.

Then they came for my country,
and there was no one left to speak for my country.

DWN provides two pithy quotes on the principles of EU policy by former ECB chief Jean-Claude Juncker, now “ably” replaced by Jeroen Dijsselbloem:

• Man müsse lügen, wenn es ernst wird.
• es sei Praxis der EU, etwas in den Raum zu stellen, dann zu sehen, ob es überhaupt jemand versteht oder Geschrei aufkommt – und dann zu marschieren.

Translate to:

• One has to lie when things get serious.
• It is a modus operandi of the EU to put something in the room to see if anybody understands it at all or if there’s uproar – and then to proceed.

Cyprus: The Template

It’s not easy to get a clear picture of what’s going on in Europe, under the mis-management of the European Union (EU) and its European Central Bank (ECB) in what looks like a deliberately induced collapse of Cyprus’ banking system and economy. The EU’s news-fog-machine was running at 120%, spinning stories of Russian mafia, etc. using Cyprus as a safe haven for ill-gotten gains.

Cyprus’ banks offered good interest on investments in a country with low taxes. Which is why their banking sector was large. Cyprus had significant exposure to Greek debt..

When the ECB’s Jeroen Dijsselbloem affirmed that what was going to happen to Cyprus was a template for future actions, he unleashed a torrent of abuse and fury against the EU and the ECB. He made it even worse by denying, just hours later, that he’d said any such thing.

Lawful protesters against EU “austerity” policies were arrested in Brussels; allegedly without having broken any laws. Arbitrary arrests are unlawful in Belgium and the EU.

Some commentators have described the “rescue” as The Morgenthau Plan for Cyprus.

Passive Eating Causes Obesity Epidemic

Governments are preparing to protect the public from food that seems to be producing the obesity epidemic via passive eating. We all understand that we can gain weight simply by seeing others eat. There are many parts of the world, populated by billions of people, who do not have any problems with people being obese, let alone overweight; simply because they do not regularly see others eat.

Celebrating(?) 21 Years of Lies

An article in Tallbloke’s Talkshop reminds me that the lies have been going on for 21 years.

The link to the (archived reprint) of Gregg Easterbrook’s questioning of environmentalist rhetoric that would have us believe our planet is on its last legs at the Independent (UK) provides a historic perspective.

Friday 7 August 1992
… in the conferences that preceded Rio, environmentalists and diplomats from developing countries relentlessly hammered Washington about the greenhouse effect, because this is where the United States can be made to seem the wolf, all others gentle ewes.

Such overstatement managed to convince everyone, including the White House, that global warming was the main issue to be addressed at Rio – although artificial warming is strictly a speculative threat, secondary or even tertiary compared with confirmed problems such as species extinction or, in the Third World, unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation. …