The Jobs Are Always Greener.... - Business - The Atlantic

...green jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you

Knowledge Laundering | Climate Skeptic

Does [Hansen] really think he has a better answer because he has extrapolated station measurement by 1200km (746 miles)? This is roughly equivalent, in distance, to extrapolating the temperature in Fargo to Oklahoma City. This just represents for me the kind of false precision, the over-estimation of knowledge about a process, that so characterizes climate research. If we don’t have a thermometer near Oklahoma City then we don’t know the temperature in Oklahoma City and lets not fool ourselves that we do.

I had a call from a WaPo reporter today about modeling and modeling errors. We talked about a lot of things, but my main point was that whether in finance or in climate, computer models typically perform what I call knowledge laundering. These models, whether forecasting tools or global temperature models like Hansen’s, take poorly understood descriptors of a complex system in the front end and wash them through a computer model to create apparent certainty and precision. In the financial world, people who fool themselves with their models are called bankrupt (or bailed out, I guess). In the climate world, they are Oscar and Nobel Price winners.

2010: The Year Global Warming Froze Florida - by Art Horn

Floridians have suffered through the coldest winter in almost 30 years. In some parts of South Florida, it’s been colder than anytime in the last 83 years. So many records were smashed that if they were stacked, they would rival the thickness of Al Gore’s investment portfolio. In fact, Gore’s claims that global warming will produce dramatic and cataclysmic warming appear to be melting faster than any glacier.

New study debunks myths about Amazon rain forests

They may be more tolerant of droughts than previously thought

(Boston) -- A new NASA-funded study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought," said Arindam Samanta, the study's lead author from Boston University.
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The IPCC is under scrutiny for various data inaccuracies, including its claim – based on a flawed World Wildlife Fund study — that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically and be replaced by savannas from even a slight reduction in rainfall.