Belmont Club » Whitewash versus Paint

Watts’ presentation at the hall consisted of seemingly unending stream of slides from his volunteers showing not just US, but foreign weather stations sited in the most laughable of ways: in the path of jet exhaust, air conditioning heat dumps, fermenting sewage plants, concrete heat sinks, in close proximity to machinery, motors, engines, incinerators and even atop tombstones. He then proceeded to flash a series of infrared images of the same sites showing the surrounds of the temperature stations all lit up. Then he piled Google Earth image upon Google Earth image of the temperature collection sites in winter showing the snow stretching far and away but for the little islands of heat in which the gauges were located.

It was a tour de force. He understood the power of irrefutable reptition. Following the old rule of “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you told them”, Watts pitched his message to the denominator everyone could grasp. He had a weatherman’s instinct for making a complex subject concrete and in your face. But he could do this only because he had mobilized a legion of part time snoops, guys who would drive out to airports near them, walk around universities to snap photos of temperature stations, go down some dirt road to find an obscure little measuring device or spends hours on Google Earth zooming in on a known coordinate. He could do this because he had a dataset — a dataset not even the weather service had. His open source project gave him more information about the condition of their terrestrial network than the weather service had. He had power and they knew it. What happened next was extraordinary but entirely predictable. The bureaucracy fought back. The weather service pre-emptively used his data, over his objections they were incomplete, to refute him.

American Thinker: Blather in Kansas City

Perhaps the icing on the cake was not any of the words that the President uttered, but the location in which this speech was given. It was at the company headquarters for Smith Electric Vehicles, which received $32 million in government stimulus and produces electric moving trucks. The President proudly hailed that the company just hired its fiftieth worker -- but at quite a cost.

Obviously the company had some workers before the stimulus, but just to be kind, suppose they didn't. A little basic math tells us that each worker was produced with just over $600,000. Why would you brag about creating one worker for every $600,000? Again, this is being kind, as some of these individuals were already working for the company. If the stimulus actually only produced an additional twenty workers, then those workers were each added for about $1.5 million of taxpayers' money.

What it is is: Baron Prescott of Kingston-upon-Hull

Isn't that always the way with the most vocal proponents of environmentalism? Can anyone point me to just ONE high profile climate changer who has genuinely scaled down their own carbon footprint, who teleconferences instead of junkets, who eats local produce, who cycles or walks instead of drives, indeed who makes do with just the one house, because even this 'socialist' firebrand can't get by on less than two, uses a Jag instead of a Prius, flies all over the world and demands all the trappings of his role.

[Paging Tom Friedman] - Yahoo! News

AMSTERDAM – A leading climate change monitor says global carbon dioxide emissions held steady last year, as recession slowed industrial activities in rich countries while growth in China and India made up for the decline.

The Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency says last year was the first since 1992 that registered no growth in carbon emissions from fossil fuels, cement production and the chemical industry, the main sources of greenhouse gases.

It said emissions shrank in the leading industrial countries by 7 percent, or 800 million tons. That was compensated by a 9 percent increase in China and 6 percent in India.