Barrel Strength

Because the Bloc Québecois is dressing up like a policy-driven party focusing on governance.

As for their package of proposed cutbacks, you first, mes amis.

George W. Bush:

“I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

Michael Ignatieff:

“It is up to me to decide… I will decide at the appropriate moment.”

Based on an article by Andrew Orlowski in the Register.

He writes:

“At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC’s assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

“At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a “reconstruction” of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

“Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called “divergence”. The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples – a choice open to a scientist’s biases.

“Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.”

For the exposure of this fraud we have the Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre to thank. He has laboured for over a decade to get the underlying data that the IPCC has used for its “hockey stick” graph, the one that has erased the medieval warm period and the little ice age from the historical record.

McIntyre blogs at http://www.climateaudit.org/

Since it was McIntyre who exposed this mess and it was a certain Professor Briffa who has used this widely quoted data without showing how the sampel was derived, I shall let McIntyre have the last, more moderate word:

“On a closing note, as I said from the outset, I did not say or imply that Briffa had “purposely selected” individual cores into the chronology and clearly said otherwise. Unfortunately for himself, Briffa’s tactic of withholding data and obstructing requests for data has backfired on him, as some people (not myself) have interpreted this as evidence of malfeasance, as opposed to my own interpretation that this only shows stubbornness on Briffa’s part and ineffective compliance administration by funding agencies and journals.”

In short, funding agencies are buying swamp gas for science. For all that Wikipedia editors complain that commercial interests negate the value the opinions of global warming skeptics, has anyone asked why public sector money and peer-reviewed journals should be trusted more?

For the evisceration of global warming piffle, read Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science”. By the way, if you ever needed evidence for the unreliability of Wikipedia, try to read its condescending snippy article on Plimer. You will never read Wikipedia with confidence again. This is a good conclusion to arrive at.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past, according to the Daily Telegraph.

I think he was just warming up for Afghanistan. I wonder who’ll be hanging off our helicopter skids this time?

The shock of Chicago’s elimination was greater for the fact that it came in the first round. And greater for the fact that President Obama had taken valuable hours from his packed and tense political schedule to travel to Copenhagen. His legendary powers of persuasion will be said to have failed him, though in reality it will be Chicago’s bid that failed him.