Rural Separatist Has Plan B: An Elected Ontario Senate

Conservative MPP Randy Hillier, who has in earlier times advocated that rural Ontario should separate from the rest of the province, now wants to achieve the same end through a back door:

What we need is a bicameral provincial government with a Senate of 50 elected representatives, one from each county, regional Municipality, and (in the north) district, to lessen this growing urban-rural chasm by tempering urban priorities that cause damage and harm to rural Ontario. Much like the federal Senate, this upper chamber ought to be able to amend or defeat most bills passed by the lower house, but be unable to introduce, alter, or defeat money bills. However, to ensure that they have a greater regard for their communities than for party discipline, provincial Senators ought to be excluded from cabinet posts.

Note that the point of all this is, quite simply, to avoid majority rule, for representation in any elected Ontario Senate is to be "based on communities of interest, not population". This deviation from the "one man, one vote standard" is apparently needed to free Ontario's rural minority from the yoke of the Urban elite, who are apparently responsible for everything that has ever gone wrong in the Province:

The priorities of Ontario's urban politicians and bureaucracy are bans and restrictions, and they are out of sync with the people of rural Ontario. This has resulted in Ontario going from first to worst in economic performance, a painfully dismal record in health care, high taxes, a ballooning bureaucracy, deficits, reduced individual responsibility and freedoms, and have-not status. This dismal performance is a reflection not of coincidence, bad luck, or external factors, but of the wrong priorities. In a democracy, people, politicians, and governments are the authors of their fortunes, good or bad. But institutions matter as well as personalities. An improved bicameral political structure is needed so that the urban drum is not always the loudest.

A bit of an eye-roller of an idea to begin with, as it would require the province to

... give constitutional recognition to the boundaries and legitimate jurisdictions of municipalities, counties and districts, just as the federal government does to the provinces.

And this will not happen.

More importantly, however, outside of a few rabble rousers at the OLA, I don't sense any vast discontent out in Ontario's rural communities, even those that typically vote Conservative.

Another interesting question for Mr. Tory when he's out on the campaign trail. Does he support a bicameral provincial government?

Climate Audit: Climate Science Or Political Semiotics?

I've been writing about Steve McIntyre's Denialist website, Climate Audit, a lot recently, especially the discussions that have been raging over the surface station data being collected by Anthony Watts. But now the discussion has taken a detour into the bizarre, as it is has become possible to perceive shards of political ideology poking through the miasma of charts and graphs at the CA site. Specifically, McIntyre and his readers seem to be promulgating a faux scientific version of your standard "Red State/Blue State" political symbolism under the guise of arguing climatological theory.

The heart of the question is: how are weather stations located in Urban areas, which can often be subject to the heat island and other micro site problems associated with the artificial city environment, worked into the broader United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) so that the network might deliver accurate regional and national temperature figures? The answer is twofold. Firstly, the urban stations are "adjusted" via reference to the nearest rural station (ie a station presumably unaffected by these various problems). Secondly, the information from them is not used to determine the overall temperature numbers; only data from rural, "unlit"stations is used for this end.

But, McIntyre asks, is this really the case? He suspects that in at least one instance--the Grand Canyon (rural) vs. Tuscon (urban) station-- it is not just the former station that is being used to adjust the latter, but that the information from both is being "blended", so that the rural station is no longer quite as rural as it once was:

It appears to me that the total adjustment process (including USHCN adjustments incorporated by GISS) result in “adjusted” stations becoming a type of blend of urban and rural stations, so that it is not actually correct to say that the overall trend results only from rural stations.

[...]

It looks to me like the USHCN adjustment process feeds back trends from urban sites to adjust rural sites and this contradicts the claim that only rural sites are used in GISS trends.

In other words, his argument is that the purity of the data produced by the rural station is compromised by its proximity to/interaction with data from the urban site.

...the Grand Canyon values are being blended up and the Tucson values are being blended down.

[...]

The net impact of this is that, if Grand Canyon neighbors have urban trends, then the USHCN adjusted Grand Canyon version will also incorporate some amount of urban trend.

This theme, of the dirty urban stations introducing an "urban bias", and therefore corrupting the "pure" rural stations, is then taken up in Steve's comments sections. For example, Sam Urbinto comments:

I’d say that taking a rural station and adjusting it with urban adjustments rather turns it into an urban station.

My God, the stations have been "turned" by their proximity to urban data! I'm surprised they haven't gone gay. In fact, I'm surprised Steve doesn't refer to these urban stations as "too damn Liberal", insinuating that they are in some sense "black weather stations". The symbolism of rural=good, urban=bad, permeates the entire thread...

...as it does in Anthony Watts analysis of station data, incidentally. In his world, uncompromised rural stations inevitably show a downward temperature trend, whereas the lying urban stations show evidence of global warming.

Yes, it sounds a bit loopy, but in fact McIntyre has explicitly employed Red State/Blue State terminology here and here to demonstrate that the Red States provide no evidence for AGW:

But the oddest pattern is surely the degree to which red and blue states on these maps match their political counterparts. There are a few exceptions - Arizona, Montana, Utah, but it looks to me like voting patterns would be a better proxy for the existence of a 20th century temperature trend (by state) than tree rings.

As to why you can see crude Conservative symbolism percolating up through what is supposed to by a discussion of pure science, well I think this has something to do with the audience McIntyre is trying to cultivate. His "argumentation" often resembles a random data dump of charts and graphs, and the only real movement in it is therefore less logical than symbolical. I think it is also significant that Anthony Watts has considered using his appearances on Hannity and the Rush Limbaugh show to scare of volunteers for the Surface Stations project.

In both cases, they're throwing raw meat to the Bubbas.