The Conspiracy Theory Top-10

http://www.truth-out.org/patriot-paranoia-a-look-top-ten-conspiracy-theories62368?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Chemtrails, Martial Law, FEMA Concentration Camps, Foreign Troops on US Soil, "Door-to-Door" Gun Confiscations, 9/11 As A Government Plot, Population Control, HAARP, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy and the North American Union.

Did I leave anything out?

Is Lindsey Williams telling the truth?

Yes, yes, the man who wrote "The Energy Non-Crisis" insists there's giant pool of oil sitting under Alaska's Gull Island.

However, petroleum industry experts beg to differ.

http://blog.mlive.com/readreact/2008/07/not_yet_ready_look_at_k_colleg.html

http://wilco278.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/mr-williams-and-gull-island-oil/

http://www.petroleumnews.com/pntruncate/690171677.shtml

I'll be blunt: The "Gull Island reserves" are a myth, and Rev. Williams could not have had any access to the material he claims.

Climate Denial Crockery - Heatwave Edition

Part 1:



Part 2:

How do you deny the deniers?

From New Scientist magazine:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.100-living-in-denial-why-sensible-people-reject-the-truth.html?full=true

To quote the article:

Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see "How to be a denialist"). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism.

...

Similarly, global warming, evolution and the link between tobacco and cancer must be taken on trust, usually on the word of scientists, doctors and other technical experts who many non-scientists see as arrogant and alien.

Many people see this as a threat to important aspects of their lives. In Texas last year, a member of a state committee who was trying to get creationism added to school science standards almost said as much when he proclaimed "somebody's got to stand up to experts".

It is this sense of loss of control that really matters. In such situations, many people prefer to reject expert evidence in favour of alternative explanations that promise to hand control back to them, even if those explanations are not supported by evidence.

Sorry folks! No U-Turn here!

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/daily-mangle/#comment-160092

To quote directly:

Yesterday, the Daily Mail of the UK published a predictably inaccurate article entitled “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″.

The title itself is a distortion of what Jones actually said in an interview with the BBC. What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.

The article also incorrectly equates instrumental surface temperature data that Jones and CRU have assembled to estimate the modern surface temperature trends with paleoclimate data used to estimate temperatures in past centuries, falsely asserting that the former “has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’”.

Finally, the article intentionally distorts comments that Jones made about the so-called “Medieval Warm Period”. Jones stated in his BBC interview that “There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia” and that “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.”

These are statements with which we entirely agree, and they are moreover fully consistent with the conclusions of the most recent IPCC report, and the numerous peer-reviewed publications on this issue since. Those conclusions are that recent Northern Hemisphere warming is likely unprecedented in at least a millennium (at least 1300 years, in fact), and that evidence in the Southern Hemisphere is currently too sparse for confident conclusions. Mann et al in fact drew those same conclusions in their most recent work on this problem (PNAS, 2008).

Unfortunately, these kinds of distortions are all too common in the press nowadays and so we must all be prepared to respond to those journalists and editors who confuse the public with such inaccuracies.

So there!

More on "those e-mails" about "Climategate"...

From "The Real News"...

Part One of Two:



Part Two of Two:

REVEALED: There IS no "Climategate"!

The Associated Press has read and re-read the 1,047 e-mails that were stolen (not "leaked" or "released" but STOLEN!) from the servers of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

Their findings? Lots of intellectual bitch-slapping, but no fraud or mis-truths.

To quote the article:

The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven by a cause "that unless you're with them, you're against them," said Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also reviewed the communications.

Frankel saw "no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very 'generous interpretations.'"

Some e-mails expressed doubts about the quality of individual temperature records or why models and data didn't quite match. Part of this is the normal give-and-take of research, but skeptics challenged how reliable certain data was.

Read it here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34392959/ns/us_news-environment/

So, there you have it folks. No smoking gun, no evidence of cooking the books, no fraud. Just of a bunch of scientists who let their egos get the best of them.

And, yes, the planet is getting warmer. And we're the cause of it, despite what the denialists are saying.

Let's see if Alex Jones and his ilk will backpeddle on this one...

So, just for a wrap-up on what was meant by "trick" and "hide the decline", please watch the following video (9 minutes and 54 seconds well spent):