XM MLB Chat

Monday, November 30, 2009

Climategate-Criminal collusion and conspiracy to defraud citizens-IBD

"ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data

  • that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication?

In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released

  • to prove this is much ado about nothing.

Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is

  • seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying climate data

Mr. Holland filed a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office last week after the leaked e-mails included several Freedom of Information requests he himself had submitted to the CRU, requests that went nowhere, and the CRU scientists' private responses to them.

  • In one e-mail dated May 26, 2008, one CRU scientist writes to a colleague who received one of Mr. Holland's requests: "Oh MAN! Will this crap never end?" Not only is it not about to end, it is hitting the fan as we speak.

The CRU scientists, and we use that word reluctantly, had no fondness for transparency and full disclosure. In a December 2008 e-mail to Ben Santer, himself responsible for a controversial rewriting of the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, CRU director

  • Phil Jones wrote: "When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half-hour sessions — one at a screen,
  • to convince them otherwise."

In regard to one particularly pesky FOI request, Jones said: "About 2 months ago I deleted loads of e-mails, so have very little — if anything at all."

  • Yet in an interview published last Tuesday in the Guardian, Jones told another story: "We've not deleted any e-mails or data here at CRU. I would never manipulate the data one bit — I would categorically deny that."

In one exchange, Jones tells Penn State's Michael Mann: "If they ever hear there's a Freedom of Information Act in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

  • He even asks Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about an IPCC assessment report: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re: (the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report)?"

So much has been deleted that it may be impossible to release all the data and reveal the tangled web of manipulation.

In a statement on its Web site, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenized) data." In other words,

  • only the manipulated and doctored data are available.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records.

  • "The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us.' So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.

Jones and his ilk even went so far as to seek suppression of contrarian evidence in those much beloved "peer-reviewed" journals. When Climate Research published a skeptic's paper, Jones demanded the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor."

  • Regarding another set of Gore disbelievers, Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report.
  • Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!"

This is not consensus, nor is it peer-reviewed science.

  • This is collusion and conspiracy to defraud,

not only those providing grant money and research funding, but governments and taxpayers, particularly our own,

  • These charlatans deserve to be locked up."

"The CRU's Criminal Conspiracy," Investors Business Daily, via Lucianne.com

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Your lifestyle is unsustainable--a locomotive expert atop UN food chain said so.

UK Guardian: "the world's leading climate scientist (UN's IPPC Chairman Pachauri) has told the Observer.... "The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable.""
  • The man isn't a trained climate scientist. His degrees are in industrial engineering and
  • economics:
"Education: M.S. (Industrial Engineering), Ph.D. (Industrial Engineering), Ph.D. (Economics)... Similar to the so-called "climate scientist" who hondles MLB, Dr. Allen Hershkowitz received his PhD in 'political economics.' Translation: Redistribution of the ordinary American's time and earnings.
  • a B.A. (cum laude) from the City College of New York in 1978, and; a Certificat D’assiduite from the University of Grenoble in 1975."
Reference: Guardian, "Western Lifestyle Unsustainable, says climate expert Rajendra Pachauri" getty photo, via Drudge

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Dibs on Selig's future

At the open of their show today Dibs and Jody discuss the announcement that Bud will step down after 2012. Jody says he'll reserve judgment until that time. Dibs says Bud may have other avenues he'd like to follow, for instance,
  • "He may want to go back to owning a ball club."
Dibs doesn't suggest he has inside info on such a happening.
  • All this time I thought I just had to wait out his term as commissioner to be free of him. The idea of him never leaving baseball, eg owning a team again, hadn't crossed my mind.
  • There has to be a law against this.

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Pitchers and catchers due Feb. 17-Yankees release 2010 spring training schedule

Update: Yankee Spring training pictures 2010
  • Phillies rematch March 26 in Tampa.
"The Yankees on Wednesday released their 33-game spring training. The defending World Series champions play the first of 16 home games on March 3 against the Pittsburgh Pirates at George M. Steinbrenner field in Tampa, Fla.
  • They end the Grapefruit League season April 3 with an exhibition against an all-star team comprised of their own minor leaguers. All fans in attendance will receive a commemorative championship ring.

The schedule features six night games, including a Mar. 26 World Series rematch with the Phillies.

YANKEES SCHEDULE
  • (All times are Eastern and subject to change, ss denotes split squad, home games in caps)
  • March 3 PITTSBURGH 1:05 p.m.
  • March 4 Philadelphia at Clearwater 1:05 p.m.
  • March 5 TAMPA BAY 1:05 p.m.
  • March 6 TORONTO 1:05 p.m.
  • March 7 Minnesota at Ft. Myers 1:05 p.m.
  • March 8 PHILADELPHIA (ss) 1:05 p.m.
  • March 8 Pittsburgh at Bradenton (ss) 1:05 p.m.
  • March 9 PITTSBURGH 1:05 p.m.
  • March 10 Detroit at Lakeland 1:05 p.m.
  • March 11 ATLANTA 7:05 p.m.
  • March 12 Washington at Melbourne TBD
  • March 13 BALTIMORE (ss) 1:05 p.m.
  • March 13 Detroit at Lakeland (ss) 1:05 p.m.
  • March 14 Pittsburgh at Bradenton 1:05 p.m.
  • March 15 Off Day
  • March 16 HOUSTON 7:05 p.m.
  • March 17 Philadelphia at Clearwater 1:05 p.m.
  • March 18 TAMPA BAY 7:05 p.m.
  • March 19 DETROIT (ss) 1:05 p.m.
  • March 19 Tampa Bay at Port Charlotte (ss) 1:05 p.m.
  • March 20 Houston at Kissimmee TBD
  • March 21 DETROIT 1:05 p.m.
  • March 22 Philadelphia at Clearwater 1:05 p.m.
  • March 23 Off Day
  • March 24 WASHINGTON 7:05 p.m.
  • March 25 Baltimore at Sarasota TBD
  • March 26 PHILADELPHIA 7:05 p.m.
  • March 27 Detroit at Lakeland 1:05 p.m.
  • March 28 DETROIT 1:05 p.m.
  • March 29 Baltimore at Sarasota TBD
  • March 30 TORONTO (ss) 7:05 p.m.
  • March 30 Atlanta at Lake Buena Vista (ss) TBD
  • March 31 MINNESOTA 1:05 p.m.
  • April 1 Toronto at Dunedin 1:05 p.m.
  • April 2 BALTIMORE 1:05 p.m.
  • April 3 YANKEES FUTURE STARS 1:05 p.m.
From Newark Star Ledger, 11/30/09, Marc Carig

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

BBC reporter had ClimateGate emails for weeks and said nothing

"The BBC has become tangled in the row over the alleged manipulation of scientific data on global warming.
  • One of its reporters has revealed he was sent some of the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
  • more than a month ago
  • but did nothing about them.

Despite the explosive nature of some of the messages – which revealed apparent attempts by the CRU’s head, Professor Phil Jones, to destroy global temperature data rather than give it to scientists with opposing views –

  • Paul Hudson failed to report the story....
It was only after the same emails were published on a blog called Air Vent that Look North climate correspondent Mr Hudson owned up in his own blog to the fact he had also had the material."...
  • The BBC has long supported the view that man was destroying planet Earth.
"BBC Weatherman ignored leaked climate row emails," Daily Mail Online, 11/28/09, via American Thinker, via Lucianne.com

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Two Canadians brought down the global warming racket

11/28: "Two of Canada's greatest and most unsung recent heroes These men have been prominently mentioned in the hacked emails that have just revealed the outrageous lengths the scientific propagators of the Great Green Fraud have gone to to suppress the facts.
  • The immensely respected former British chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, had great difficulty finding a publisher for his expose of these matters, An Appeal To Reason, A Cool Look at Global Warming,
He believes Green is the new Red, the anti-capitalists taking over the relatively inoffensive tandem bicycle of naturalists, and turning it into a nihilistic juggernaut, the treads having been blown off their great Red Marxist tank that careened through the world for most of the last century.
  • witless dupes and "useful idiots" (in Lenin's words), of the Communists.

As Lord Lawson wrote in his book, those worried about imminent environmental catastrophe, as compared, for examples, to nuclear terrorism or even large meteoric collisions, "need not worry about saving this planet. They are already living on another one ... We appear to have entered a new age of unreason ...

  • It is from this, above all, that we really need to save the planet.""
National Post, from article by Conrad Black, "The Great Green Fraud"
  • AP explains the main point is the US absolutely must give billions immediately and must continue giving every year for many years; that the
  • amount of money must be set in stone, binding, not subject to revision or renegotiation.

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Jerry Green in Panama thinks of Rod Carew and Mariano Rivera

  • Fuerte Amador, Panama -- "It is a tranquil Saturday morning riding the hook -- the anchor -- on the ship at this Pacific Ocean terminus of the Panama Canal. It is gray, humid, and off in the distance the skyscraper towers of Panama City are visible...

"The Panama Canal is the United States' second most important gift to Panama," I told a ship's audience the other day as we were sailing toward the canal.

  • "The first is ... baseball."
  • Nobody laughed.

Somewhere back there on land, along the edge of the canal, Rod Carew was born. The greatest hitter in the history of Panama, a Hall of Famer, a craftsman with a bat.

  • And down there, off the starboard side, behind the tall buildings of Panama City, Mariano Rivera was born -- 40 years ago this Sunday. Another magical athlete, with his five World Series championship rings,
  • the greatest relief pitcher in the history of major league baseball.

It was over there that he learned his craft, the cut fastball that continues to mesmerize batters for the Yankees....

  • I have, for 70 years or so, aspired to make a transit of the Panama Canal aboard a ship. Jumping from port to starboard, forward to aft, with a camera in hand, with a GPS to fix the latitudes and longitudes, with a pair of binoculars to scope in on the other ships, the freighters. From Atlantic to Pacific.

I achieved this fantasy on Friday -- all day on deck, hither and yon. First entering the Gatun Locks. And after 229 snaps of my cameras, the Coral Princess, lowered, and emerged from the Miraflores Locks....

  • And throughout the day, my mind wandered to Carew and off to Rivera and back to Carew.

How could such a small country produce such ballplayers?

  • Carew was born on a railroad train along the shoreline of the Gatun Locks, in what then was the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone. His first baseball was learned in Panama, before the family moved to the United States.

Carew was one of my favorite people when he was playing. It seemed every time I went to Tiger Stadium when he played for the Twins and then the Angels he would ring out a double to right-center to start the game. Once I recall he changed the pattern. He hit a home run into the upper deck to start the game.

One year he was the only batting champion in history who did not hit a home run during the season.

  • He was a quiet man. Never flamboyant. He used a baseball bat as a tool. He was the type of batsman I especially admired.

I never cared for the beefy home run hitters who produce the highlights for ESPN's Baseball Tonight.

  • I preferred the hitters who transformed hitting a baseball into an art form. Ted Williams, the best hitter of my lifetime, and perhaps ever. George Brett, Tony Gwinn, Al Kaline.

Rod Carew did not care much for sports reporters after a while. The Minnesota and Los Angeles journalists told me he was sullen, that he seldom talked to them.

  • He talked to me a bit one day at Tiger Stadium. Not a lot. He was private and didn't reveal much except some thoughts about his craft.
  • I wrote in a column for The Detroit News that Rod Carew belonged in a museum. I wrote that he was a statue.

You're always told that athletes, especially baseball players, never cared to read the papers.

  • Well, I was in the American League clubhouse before an All-Star Game at old Comiskey Park in Chicago. Inside the cramped room, his back to his locker, Rod Carew smiled at me.

"Thanks for the column," Carew told me.

  • That in itself was special. A ballplayer thanking a journalist for his words.

I never had the pleasure of interviewing -- or trying to interview -- Mariano Rivera.

  • I learned that his first baseball glove was a cardboard milk carton. The batters used tree limbs. And the baseballs were old, scarred, torn and kept together by tape. His first field was the pavement of a city street.

In my imagination, I picture Rivera this Saturday returning to his playing grounds, a street in Panama City. I see him wearing a Yankees cap and teaching baseball to young Panamanians. The passage of the game that we Yanks exported to Panama,

It has not been my inclination to admire the Yankees. They were too smug, too arrogant. They were a ballclub built via George Steinbrenner's money.

  • Yet, for some reason, I've changed those opinions. The ballplayers and their professionalism -- Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada, and particularly Mariano Rivera -- are the reason for my renewed admiration for the Yankees and for their success."

"Trip to Panama brings thoughts of Rod Carew, Mariano Rivera," Jerry Green, Detroit News, 11/28/09

Happy Birthday to Mo.

Labels: ,

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Saturday, November 28, 2009

ClimateGate-key data thrown away; Unsettled science shaped UN propaganda. NBC, Pinchy, grab the Digitalis.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have been diverted, billions more hang in the balance based solely on the words of these few men. All political parties and major media are heavily invested. Prince Charles has compared climate change to fighting the Nazis in World War II. (5/2/07, speaking to a business conference at his St. James Palace residence).

"The storm began with just four cryptic words. “A miracle has happened,” announced a contributor to Climate Audit, a website devoted to criticising the science of climate change.

  • “RC” said nothing more — but included a web link that took anyone who clicked on it to another site, Real Climate.

There, on the morning of November 17, they found a treasure trove: a thousand or so emails sent or received by Professor Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

  • have been crucial in building the case for global warming.

What those emails suggested, however, was that Jones and some colleagues may have become so convinced of their case that they crossed the line from objective research into active campaigning.

  • In one, Jones boasted of using statistical “tricks” to obliterate apparent declines in global temperature.
  • In another he advocated deleting data rather than handing them to climate sceptics. And in a third he proposed organised boycotts of journals
  • that had the temerity to publish papers that undermined the message.

It was a powerful and controversial mix — far too powerful for some. Real Climate is a website designed for scientists who share Jones’s belief in man-made climate change.

  • Within hours the file had been stripped from the site.

Several hours later, however, it reappeared — this time on an obscure Russian server. Soon it had been copied to a host of other servers, first in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and then Europe and America.

  • What’s more, the anonymous poster was determined not to be stymied again. He or she posted comments on climate-sceptic blogs, detailing a dozen of the best emails and offering web links to the rest. Jones’s statistical tricks were now public property.

Steve McIntyre, a prominent climate sceptic, was amazed. “Words failed me,” he said. Another, Patrick Michaels, declared: “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”

  • Inevitably, the affair became nicknamed Climategate. For the scientists, campaigners and politicians trying to rouse the world to action on climate change the revelations could hardly have come at a worse time. Next month global leaders will assemble in Copenhagen to seek limits on carbon emissions. The last thing they need is renewed doubts about the validity of the science.

The scandal has also had a huge personal and professional impact on the scientists. “These have been the worst few days of my professional life,” said Jones. He had to call on the police for protection after receiving anonymous phone calls and personal threats.

  • Why should a few emails sent to and from a single research scientist at a middle-ranking university have so much impact? And most importantly, what does it tell us about the quality of the research underlying the science of climate change?

THE hacking scandal is not an isolated event. Instead it is the latest round of a long-running battle over climate science that

(Continuing, TimesOnline): "That was when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the group of scientists that advises governments worldwide — published its first set of reports warning that the Earth faced deadly danger from climate change.

  • A centrepiece of that report was a set of data showing how the temperature of the northern hemisphere was rising rapidly.

The problem was that the same figures showed that it had all happened before. The so-called medieval warm period of about 1,000 years ago saw Britain covered in vineyards and Viking farmers tending cows in Greenland. For any good scientist this raised a big question: was the recent warming linked to humans burning fossil fuels

  • or was it part of a natural cycle?

The researchers set to work and in 1999 a group led by Professor Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, came up with new numbers showing that

  • the medieval warm period was not so important after all.

Some bits of the Atlantic may have been warm for a while, but the records suggested that the Pacific had been rather chilly over the same period — so on average there was little change.

  • It showed northern hemisphere temperatures as staying flat for hundreds of years and then rising steeply from 1900 until now.
  • The implication was that this rise would continue, with potentially deadly consequences for humanity.

That vision of continents being hit by droughts and floods while the Arctic melts away has turned a scientific debate into a highly emotional and political one. The language used by “warmists” and sceptics alike has become increasingly polarised.

  • George Monbiot, widely respected as a writer on green issues, has branded doubters “climate deniers”, a phrase uncomfortably close to holocaust denial.

Sceptics, particularly in America, have suggested that scientists who believe in climate change are part of a global left-wing conspiracy to divert billions of dollars into green technology.

A more cogent criticism is that there has been a reluctance to acknowledge dissent on the question of climate science. Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned green campaigner, has

  • described the climate debate as “settled”.

Yet the science, say critics, has not been tested to the limit. This is why the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia is so significant.

Its researchers have built up records of how temperatures have changed over thousands of years.

  • on which Mann’s hockey stick and much else in climate science depend.

Some critics believe that the unit’s findings need to be treated with more caution, because all the published data have been “corrected” — meaning they have been altered to compensate for possible anomalies in the way they were taken.

  • Such changes are normal; what’s controversial is how they are done.
  • This is compounded by the unwillingness of the unit to release the original raw data.

David Holland, an engineer from Northampton, is one of a number of sceptics who believe the unit has got this process wrong.

Others who made similar requests were turned down because they were not academics,

  • among them McIntyre, a Canadian who runs the Climate Audit website.

A genuine academic, Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, also tried. He said: “I was rejected for an entirely different reason.

  • *The [unit] told me they had obtained the data under confidentiality agreements and
  • so could not supply them. This was odd because they had already supplied some of them to other academics,
  • but only those who support the idea of climate change.”

IT was against this background that the emails were leaked last week, reinforcing suspicions that scientific objectivity has been sacrificed. There is unease even among researchers who strongly support the idea that humans are changing the climate. Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said: “Over the last decade there has been a very political battle between the climate sceptics and activist scientists.

  • “It seems to me that the scientists have lost touch with what they were up to. They saw themselves as in a battle with the sceptics rather than advancing scientific knowledge.”

Professor Mike Hulme, a fellow researcher of Jones at the University of East Anglia and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, said: “The attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organisation within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

  • There could, however, be another reason why the unit rejected requests to see its data.
  • **This weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data.

Tucked away on its website is this statement: “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites ...

If true, it is extraordinary. It means that the data on which a large part of the world’s understanding of climate change is based can never be revisited or checked.

  • Pielke said: “Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch.
  • [The unit] is basically saying, ‘Trust us’.”

WHERE does this leave the climate debate? While the overwhelming belief of scientists is that the world is getting warmer and that humanity is responsible, sceptical voices are increasing.

Lord Lawson, the Tory former chancellor, announced last week the creation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank, to “bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant”.

  • Lawson said: “Climate change is not being properly debated because

It has turned climate change from being a political issue into a secular religion.”...

  • This weekend many of Jones’s colleagues were standing by him. Tim Lenton, professor of earth system science at UEA, said: “We wouldn’t have anything like the understanding of climate change that we do were it not for the work of Phil Jones and his colleagues. They have spent decades putting together the historical temperature record and it is good work.”

The problem is that, after the past week, both sceptics and the public will require even more convincing of that."

***Billionaire Maurice Strong is seeing his 1990 plan come to fruition:

This group then created a plan to get the rich countries to "sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment." When the rich countries refused, the group decided "the only hope for the planet"

  • Two years later, he helped lay the foundation for the Kyoto Protocol at the Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro.
  • His name is Maurice Strong, and he would love to see America collapse....
From The Telegraph by Christopher Booker:
  • "The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics.
  • Their importance cannot be overestimated,

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports.

  • Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors,
  • his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely –

not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless

  • trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

  • Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today,
  • the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre,

  • an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case....
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes
  • their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results."...
"Climate Change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation," by Christopher Booker, 11/28/0, Telegraph UK, via Lucianne.com

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Top 10 Annoyances about climate 'debate,' apologies to Wayne's World

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

"Awash in primordial guilt, primed for sacrifice,' baseball fans are easy target for climate profiteers and thought police"

"On opening day of the 2007 baseball season, the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays stood in front of the giant jumbotron, an electronic extravaganza, encircled by a ring of dancing corporate logos and advertising,
  • and exhorted every person in the crowd, preposterously, to go out and
  • buy an energy-efficient light bulb.
  • They applauded."...
"If the corporate climate change campaign has fuelled a fevered popular preoccupation with global warming, it has also accomplished much more. Having arisen
  • it has restored confidence in those very faiths and forces which that movement had worked so hard to expose and challenge: globe-straddling profit-maximizing corporations and
  • their myriad agencies and agendas;
the unquestioned authority of science and the corollary belief in deliverance through technology, and the beneficence of the self-regulating market with its panacea of prosperity through free trade,
  • and its magical powers which transforms into commodities all that it touches, even life.
All the glaring truths revealed by that movement about the injustices, injuries, and inequalities sowed and sustained by these powers and beliefs have now been buried, brushed aside in the apocalyptic rush to fight global warming.
  • Explicitly likened to a war,
this epic challenge requires single-minded attention and total commitment, without any such distractions. Now is not the time, nor is there any need, The blame and the burden has been shifted back again to the individual, awash in primordial guilt, the familiar sinner facing punishment for his sins, his excesses, On opening day of the 2007 baseball season, the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays stood in front of the giant jumbotron, an electronic extravaganza, encircled by a ring of dancing corporate logos and advertising, and exhorted every person in the crowd, preposterously, to go out and buy an energy-efficient light bulb. They applauded."...

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Forging a... consensus. Get the media to do the heavy lifting.

Sports Illustrated cover, March 2007, appears to use the game of Major League Baseball and its fans to preach junk and self loathing. This cleared the path for buying and selling carbon credits in a global commodities casino. Wall St. Journal: "It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you get to decide what counts as science.
  • The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view,
  • theirs is still the best climate science we've got.
The proof for this is circular.
  • It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is.

  • And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim.
  • If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it."...**********

"But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game

  • has been rigged from the start.
  • According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough,
  • any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from outside this clique are routinely
  • dismissed and disparaged.

This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted."

  • on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having
  • forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several colleagues in an email from March 2003, when the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal!"

  • The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed literature," by the way, are Mr. Mann's. He went on in the email to suggest
  • that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, re-define what constitutes a respected journal

  • to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.
  • It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you get to decide what counts as science.

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got.

  • The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder

  • why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it."
From Wall St. Journal, "How to Forge a Consensus," 11/26/09, via Lucianne.com; graph from CarbonPositive
  • The media helped, yes, but they had politicians too. Now we're talking serious money. (framus)
P.S. Their case is so weak they have to drag out the Queen of England and the Prince of Wales.
  • "AGW is about raising taxes; increasing state control; about
  • a few canny hucksters who’ve leapt on the bandwagon fleecing us rotten with their taxpayer subsidised windfarms and their carbon-trading;
  • about the sour, anti-capitalist impulses of sandal-wearing vegans and lapsed Communists who loathe the idea of freedom and a functioning market economy.

We know it’s all a crock and we’re not going to take it."

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

New Zealand facing climate-gate on inspection of raw data

"The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there.
  • The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:

From NIWA's web site — Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on

between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the

1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909

to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:

Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.

The revelations are published today in a news alert from The Climate Science Coalition of NZ:

Straight away you can see there's no slope—either up or down. The temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s. Of course, the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays level—statistically insignificant at 0.06°C per century since 1850."...

TBR blogger comment: "MY COMMENT AS BLOGGER: Without the baseline comparisons between the weather sensors at one site and then the other, the public and researchers remain in the dark as to whether the adjustments fairly reflect the changed locations. We don't even know when the adjustments were finally applied. There is nothing wrong with making adjustments, but without transparency it is largely meaningless and unable to be peer reviewed."

TBR.cc blog, "NZ's NIWA Accused of CRU-style temperature faking," 11/26/09, via Free Republic

MLB promotes global warming and carbon offset purchases. Following cover Sports Illustrated, March 2007. (framus)

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Key remarks removed from NY Times article about 2005 AL Cy Young voting and the Total Save Stat

The original article has recently been changed and I can no longer find it in the Times' archives. An article with the same title, date, and much of the same material still exists but with the subhead,

I discovered the change after recently trying to access the article and finding the most interesting words had been deleted. From what I can tell it was altered sometime between August 7 and Nov. 5, 2009. Fortunately, I saved the original article containing all the words.

  • Four days later (4/1/08), I decided to copy the 11/9/05 article realizing it could meet a similar fate. It apparently has. (posted below).

I linked to the original article as recently as August 6, 2009. The "corrected" article removes meaningful quotes or analysis from

My 8/6/09 post linked to a Sheldon Ocker statement from the 11/9/05 article. It was titled, "BBWAA Voters: DO NOT PANIC" and was a minor roast of treatment the "Regular Season Total Save Stat Alone" sometimes receives. I pointed to the Times'
  • quote from 2005 AL Cy Young BBWAA voter (Sheldon Ocker) described in the article as one of
  • 6 who left Rivera's name off their ballot:

Sheldon Ocker said of Mariano Rivera:

  • "''For him (Rivera) to get anybody's attention
  • he'd probably
Ocker's entire remarks were preceded by a statement from NY Times writer, Mr. Kepner,
  • which has also been removed from the 'corrected' article.
From original article by Tyler Kepner: Followed by Sheldon Ocker comments:
  • ''That's probably another thing that hurts him: he's had so many good seasons that, well,
  • it's just another good season for Rivera,'' Ocker said.

***''For him to get anybody's attention

Statements from 2005 AL Cy Young winner Bartolo Colon in the original article have also been removed.
  • Included in Colon's remarks was a reference to the regular season
  • "total save stat" and how that stat alone could have been enough to sink Rivera:
(NY Times, 11/9/05): (Bartolo Colon): "''Mariano had a great year, but because there were other pitchers that
  • that might have changed things a little bit,'' Colón said."...
Following is the original article which I saved on 4/1/08. Portions near the end in red (or surrounded by red asterisks***) were deleted from the Appended Version.
  • The quote from Ocker about saving 65 games is in purple because I made it all a link when I copied it.
(NY Times, 11/9/05, "Award Eludes Rivera" Original article): "Only eight relief pitchers have won a Cy Young award, and for all he has accomplished with the Yankees, Mariano Rivera is still not among them. Rivera was the runner-up this season, the highest he has ever finished in the voting. But Bartolo Colón of the Los Angeles Angels won the American League prize yesterday.
  • ''You can't even imagine what the scenery is around here,'' said Colón, speaking through an interpreter on a conference call from his home in the Dominican Republic. ''People stopping by and honking horns -- it's been crazy, crazy, crazy. There's going to be a lot of partying around here.''

Colón led the league in victories with a 21-8 record, including a 10-2 stretch drive that helped lift the Angels to the West title. He was named on every ballot in voting by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, receiving 17 first-place votes and 11 second-place votes.

  • Rivera received eight first-place votes, seven second-place votes and seven third-place votes, finishing ahead of Minnesota's Johan Santana, who was named on more ballots but received just three first-place votes.

Rivera, who finished third in 1996, 1999 and 2004, was left off six ballots.

  • Sheldon Ocker of The Akron Beacon Journal cast one of those ballots,
  • putting Colón first, Cliff Lee of the Indians second and Mark Buehrle of the White Sox third.

''I kind of put relievers in the M.V.P. race rather than the Cy Young race, because they have a little more in common with everyday players, getting the opportunity to be in a lot of games,'' Ocker said.

  • ''It's just a whole different animal from starting pitchers,'' he added. ''If the best starting pitcher in the league only won 15 games and Mariano Rivera or someone else saved 45, I'd vote for Rivera. But in a season with a 20-game winner and an 18-game winner, I felt the starters should get my vote.''

Corey Brock of The Tacoma News Tribune voted Colón first, followed by Santana and Buehrle. To Brock, the image of a Cy Young winner is of a starter, not a reliever.

  • ''I think of the Cy Young as a workhorse, a successful pitcher on a good team,'' Brock said. ''Those are the kinds of guys I envisioned. The relief thing doesn't really enter into it. I definitely looked at Rivera and what he did, and it was very impressive. But these guys as starters are shouldering a lot of important innings for their teams.''

Colón had a 3.48 earned run average and worked a team-high 222 2/3 innings, with 157 strikeouts. But he did not rank in the top five in the league in any of those categories, and the Angels averaged six runs a game when he pitched. That bolstered the argument for Santana, who was 16-7 with a 2.87 E.R.A. As Jayson Stark of ESPN.com pointed out, Santana held opponents to a .250 on-base percentage, while opponents had a .254 batting average off Colón.

  • Kathleen O'Brien of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram said she gave Rivera her first-place vote partly because she did not think Colón had been exceptional enough.

''I felt Rivera's season was so dominant that he had really been the best pitcher in the American League this season,'' O'Brien said. ''He's been fairly outstanding every year of his career, but this was the best year he's had. That, combined with the fact that I didn't feel Colón was as dominant as some of the Cy Young winners of the past, made Rivera first for me.''

  • Only one reliever has won a Cy Young award in the last 13 years: Eric Gagne of the Dodgers in 2003,
  • when he converted all 55 of his
  • save opportunities.

Others to win the award include Sparky Lyle of the Yankees in 1977, Bruce Sutter of the Cubs in 1979, Rollie Fingers of the Brewers in 1981, Willie Hernandez of the Tigers in 1984, Steve Bedrosian of the Phillies in 1987, Mark Davis of the Padres in 1989 and Dennis Eckersley of the Athletics in 1992.

but Francisco Rodriguez of the Angels and Bob Wickman of the Indians with 45 apiece. Of the eight relievers to win the Cy Young award, only Lyle and Hernandez did it without leading their league
  • in saves.
''Mariano had a great year, but because there were other pitchers that
  • that might have changed things a little bit,'' Colón said.
''But I have a lot of respect for Mariano Rivera, and I'd like to thank him for all he's taught me in the past.''
  • Colón said he learned his cut-fastball grip from Rivera. Rivera's success with the pitch has put him on the path to the Hall of Fame,
  • but his plaque might have
  • no mention of a Cy Young.

His dominance seems to have had a numbing effect on voters.

  • ''That's probably another thing that hurts him: he's had so many good seasons that, well,

***''For him to get anybody's attention

Correction: November 11, 2005, Friday A sports article yesterday about the voting for the Cy Young award in the American League misstated the number of relief pitchers who have won the prize in either league. It is nine, not eight -- including Mike Marshall of the 1974 Los Angeles Dodgers, the first reliever so honored."

  • By Tyler Kepner, "Award Eludes Rivera"*******
Following is the "corrected" story as of 11/5/09.
  • Missing are remarks by Ocker, Colon and one by the writer Mr. Kepner:
NY Times, "Award Eludes Rivera; Colon Wins the Cy Young," (Corrected version) by Tyler Kepner: "Only eight relief pitchers have won a Cy Young award, and for all he has accomplished with the Yankees, Mariano Rivera is still not among them. Rivera was the runner-up this season, the highest he has ever finished in the voting. But Bartolo Colón of the Los Angeles Angels won the American League prize yesterday.
  • ''You can't even imagine what the scenery is around here,'' said Colón, speaking through an interpreter on a conference call from his home in the Dominican Republic. ''People stopping by and honking horns -- it's been crazy, crazy, crazy. There's going to be a lot of partying around here.''

Colón led the league in victories with a 21-8 record, including a 10-2 stretch drive that helped lift the Angels to the West title. He was named on every ballot in voting by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, receiving 17 first-place votes and 11 second-place votes.

  • Rivera received eight first-place votes, seven second-place votes and seven third-place votes, finishing ahead of Minnesota's Johan Santana, who was named on more ballots but received just three first-place votes.

Rivera, who finished third in 1996, 1999 and 2004,

  • was left off six ballots.

Sheldon Ocker of The Akron Beacon Journal cast one of those ballots, putting Colón first, Cliff Lee of the Indians second and Mark Buehrle of the White Sox third.

  • ''I kind of put relievers in the M.V.P. race rather than the Cy Young race, because they have a little more in common with everyday players, getting the opportunity to be in a lot of games,'' Ocker said.

''It's just a whole different animal from starting pitchers,'' he added. ''If the best starting pitcher in the league only won 15 games and Mariano Rivera or someone else saved 45, I'd vote for Rivera. But in a season with a 20-game winner and an 18-game winner, I felt the starters should get my vote.''

  • Corey Brock of The Tacoma News Tribune voted Colón first, followed by Santana and Buehrle. To Brock, the image of a Cy Young winner is of a starter, not a reliever.

''I think of the Cy Young as a workhorse, a successful pitcher on a good team,'' Brock said. ''Those are the kinds of guys I envisioned. The relief thing doesn't really enter into it. I definitely looked at Rivera and what he did, and it was very impressive. But these guys as starters are shouldering a lot of important innings for their teams.''

  • Colón had a 3.48 earned run average and worked a team-high 222 2/3 innings, with 157 strikeouts. But he did not rank in the top five in the league in any of those categories, and the Angels averaged six runs a game when he pitched. That bolstered the argument for Santana, who was 16-7 with a 2.87 E.R.A. As Jayson Stark of ESPN.com pointed out, Santana held opponents to a .250 on-base percentage, while opponents had a .254 batting average off Colón.

Kathleen O'Brien of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram said she gave Rivera her first-place vote partly because she did not think Colón had been exceptional enough.

'I felt Rivera's season was so dominant that he had really been the best pitcher in the American League this season,'' O'Brien said. ''He's been fairly outstanding every year of his career, but this was the best year he's had. That, combined with the fact that I didn't feel Colón was as dominant as some of the Cy Young winners of the past, made Rivera first for me.''

Only one reliever has won a Cy Young award in the last 13 years: Eric Gagne of the Dodgers in 2003, when he converted all 55 of his

Others to win the award include Sparky Lyle of the Yankees in 1977, Bruce Sutter of the Cubs in 1979, Rollie Fingers of the Brewers in 1981, Willie Hernandez of the Tigers in 1984, Steve Bedrosian of the Phillies in 1987, Mark Davis of the Padres in 1989 and Dennis Eckersley of the Athletics in 1992.

  • Rivera converted 43 of 47 save chances. His 1.38 E.R.A. was the best among A.L. closers and the best of his career,

but Francisco Rodriguez of the Angels and Bob Wickman of the Indians

with 45 apiece. Of the eight relievers to win the Cy Young award, only Lyle and Hernandez did it without leading their league

  • in saves."
"Baseball; Award Eludes Rivera; Colon Wins the Cy Young" by Tyler Kepner, 11/9/05

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

Monday, November 23, 2009

Rivera will not win Cy Young or MVP-Joel Sherman, 9/1/06

  • September 1, 2006, Joel Sherman, NY Post writes the following:
"Now consider that (Mariano) Rivera is doing this for an 11th straight year,
  • though there is no doubt he is both the Cy Young and MVP of the last 11 years."...
A month before the voting, Sherman knew what would happen. Fascinating cesspool, the BBWAA. One might more accurately say "Bud Selig's BBWAA," as awards are extremely important to him. He knows winners are determined by the person who selects the voters. (A good lawyer similarly chooses jurors he favors). As has been documented, media members will hear from Selig or his stooges if they stray from a preferred version of events. Voters know he can hire some of them at MLB.com when they need a job. Well behaved ones find themselves appointed to various Hall of Fame committees. Selig has been quite outspoken promoting a certain pitcher for the Hall of Fame-someone not named Mariano. Not to worry kid--you're in. Verducci said so.
  • A person goes into this line of work-baseball writing and BBWAA membership-knowing it's corrupt, sees the corruption, does nothing about it, and remains in the job. I call it white collar crime.

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon

AL MVP vote: More proof voters don't stay up late enough to watch west coast games

Rob Dibble comments on AL MVP vote that Chone Figgins clearly should have ranked higher than Arod (they were tied for 10th).
  • Dibs: It 'shows that people might have missed those west coast games.' Heard around 4:10pm.
On August 21 this year, Dibs expressed the same concern that west coast players may be slighted by voters who don't stay up late enough. As I posted that day:
  • "Dibble says the Angels have better MVP candidates and
Assuming the argument were true, it presumes the overlooked player who has played mostly on the west coast is doing only good things and that voters would care about that. In New York city, some players get little attention during the regular season unless something bad happens. Then they get the back page. That's the reality. Even if more people see your games, it doesn't mean they'll think favorably of you. And, even if they do think favorably of you, they may very well not vote for you.

Labels:

Stumbleupon StumbleUpon