Climate Change Deniers Get Paper Through Peer Review, Confirm AGW In Antarctica!

A couple years back, Eric Steig published a paper showing, contrary to much previous work, that Western Antarctica had in fact been warming over the past several decades. Jeff Id of The Air Vent ( one of the guys close to the center of the CRU Hack), as well as several buddies of his, threw together a response which has made it through peer-review. It's called Improved methods for PCA-based reconstructions: case study using the Steig et al. (2009) Antarctic temperature reconstruction and, guess what?

Rather than finding warming concentrated in West Antarctica, we find warming over the period of 1957-2006 to be concentrated in the Peninsula (≈0.35oC decade-1). We also show average trends for the continent, East Antarctica, and West Antarctica that are half or less than that found using the unimproved method. Notably, though we find warming in West Antarctica to be smaller in magnitude, we find that statistically significant warming extends at least as far as Marie Byrd Land...

Eric Steig even shows up in the comments to congratulate Jeff and Co. on confirming his basic result Here:

I appreciate also Ryan’s comment that “I would hope that our paper is not seen as a repudiation of Steig’s results, but rather as an improvement” and his emphasizing that their results (evidently) back up our most important point – -the significant warming West Antarctica.

And here:

Jeff: (and Kenneth Fritsch): Given that you guys have apparently demonstrated much greater warming that we found (!), in the most critical area glaciologically (the Amundsen Sea embayment), I’m afraid you may well find that the media you complain about will indeed emphasize the red even more than last time...

"But wait! This is denial-land!" you say: "They must have something to bitch about...you know, hiding the decline and the great AGW Hoax and all that!"

Well, its true that the new paper shows a pattern of warming somewhat different in degree and extent that Steig's, and purports to have identified a couple of methodological problems in the original that ought to be corrected. I will leave the scientists to figure out whether these are substantive issues or quibbles. But what's really set off the denialist crowd isn't the substance of the paper itself, but (as hinted at in Steig's second quote)...wait for it....the colour scheme used by Nature to illustrate the paper on its front cover (see above). McIntyre is outraged...OUTRAGED!

In the Nature article, the lurid blotch of red over the Ross Ice Shelf and the land area abutting it (where Harry is located) was prominently featured. Now Steig says that this doesn’t “matter”.

And here's Jeff Id bashing that same cover:

The S09 authors never said the Antarctic will melt but the implication to the layperson was ‘big red plot’. Now the plot has an appropriate amount of blue but if I recall there were many dozens of mainstream papers which carried the ‘red’. Can anyone guess which mainstream papers will carry the ‘blue’.

Gawd! The sheer genius of these guys! They're not just scientists up to the level of Galileo, they do graphic design as well!

He Did What?

He continued his party’s stance of getting tough on crime.

“We’re embarrassed that criminals are released back on the streets before officers can even finish the paperwork,” he said.

I'm sorry, Hudak has said hardly a word on crime in all the time he's been leader, and certainly never made it a policy centrepiece. In fact, if you take his own words seriously, he doesn't even have a position on crime yet. You, dear citizen, are supposed to tell him his position on crime when you take his Have Your Say Ontarians Survey.

But don't worry; the quotes above represent his policy on November 24th. These day's he's got a new obsession: keeping the next election race clean on twitter. You can't say the man isn't a big thinker.

PS. Yeah, I'm ripping off Warren, but it sooo fits the bill.

He Said Whilst Wearing His Hard Hat

"I have never been called upon to respond to a dominatrix before.”

We all get the call eventually, buddy. All of us.

Revolution Rebuffed?

Actually, I got it wrong: last night's meeting of the Carleton-Mississippi Mills PCPO riding association was to choose the riding executive, not their provincial candidate. In any case, Ontario Land Owner's ex-President and rural revolutionary Jack Maclaren got hosed. In fact, he is calling foul! on the whole selection process:

MacLaren said the party’s head office denied membership to many people he and his supporters signed up as party members. He put the number of disputed members at 150.

Metroland Media spoke to multiple people who showed up to vote, only to find out their names weren’t on the list of eligible members. MacLaren said the disqualifications targeted only those people he or his supporters signed up as party members.

“The Progressive Conservative party thinks democracy isn’t important in this riding,” he said. “We didn’t even know the format of the meeting until we got here.

“We had to find out from (PC party headquarters) in Toronto when the meeting would be. They did everything they could to be unco-operative. It’s a goddam farce.”

The candidate gets nominated sometime in March-April of 2011, so there will be all sorts of "Tory Turmoil" to come, I imagine.

The Revolution Begins Today?

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Carleton Mississippi Mills Provincial Progressive Conservative association (CMMPCA) will be held at Sacred Heart High School, on Wednesday Dec. 1. Registration will start at 6 p.m.

And when it ends we will know if rural revolutionary and former Ontario Landowners Association President Jack MaClaren has unseated sitting Tory MPP Norm Sterling. I've written about the consequences of a MaClaren candidacy before...the provincial Tories slide off the right side of the political spectrum...but if you want to know the cut of a man's jib, I say look at the web-design of the sites they're associated with. Mr. Maclaren was just elected a director of the Canadian Justice Review Board; here's their "articles" page. When I look at the colour scheme, the old "kookometer" hits about a 6.8. So, not as nuts as they could be but, yeah, nuts.

Ezra Vs. The Indians

Chief Alphonse Lameman weighs in on Ezra's anti-First Nations comments at a public debate hosted by the Wilderness Committee in Vancouver, BC on November 18, 2010:

“Mr. Levant’s words are ugly and mean-spirited and add nothing to the tar sands conversation in Canada,” said Chief Lameman. “He takes the level of discussion on important issues like the destruction of the boreal forest by tar sands to a new low, denigrating the importance of our beliefs and the stand we have taken as stewards of our traditional lands. His negative and sweeping comments on First Nations people are, unfortunately, the sad expression of an attitude we deal with every day. Mr. Levant paints himself as a great defender of rights like freedom of speech, while telling us that we should not defend our own rights.”

Meanwhile, in related news, we're almost two weeks out from the decision against Ezra in Levant v. Vigna, and the defamatory posts all appear to be there still. An appeal in the works? We'll know in a day or two.

Meanwhile, in somewhat related news, amendments to the Saskatchewan human rights code have been introduced that would abolish the role of the provincial rights tribunal and send cases previously heard by the tribunal to the regular court system. As with the current system, complainants costs would be borne by the province.

What He Must Have Gone Through!

The shorter Christian Paradis: in rural Quebec, when a Minister loses his garment, the plebes purchase him another. What's wrong with these uppity cityfolk?

The Most Important Political Numbers You Will Read Today

...have nothing to do with last night's by-elections. They're the qaurterly and monthly GDP numbers from Stats-Canada:

Real gross domestic product (GDP) rose 0.3% in the third quarter, following a 0.6% gain in the previous quarter.... On a monthly basis, real GDP by industry declined 0.1% in September.

And, in short, they stink: under-performing both for the month and the quarter. This is the kind of drip-drip of bad economic news that eventually sinks a government. Eventually being the operative word.

Wha Happened, and Whas It All Mean?

Well, not much, but if you had to summarize in a few lines:

The governing Conservatives and opposition Liberals each narrowly picked up a seat from their next weakest opponent in Monday's by-elections, in a set of results that confounded many pundits, took the pressure off Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, and will be sending NDP strategists back to the drawing board.

There's more there, but nothing I can really contest. Most confounded among the pundits was clearly John Ibbotson, whose piece on the topic sounds like it was written days ago and then hastily revised as last night's results came in. But, make no mistake, while the quantity of Michael Ignatieff's "woes" didn't change much in either direction with these by-elections, they certainly did not--as per Mr. Ibbotson-- increase. And the results are neither a sign of an impending, GTA based Tory majority or a Western breakthrough by the Libs. They are, more or less, random shit that happened.

The Vaughan story is probably the most interesting. PG offers these thoughts on that unusually close race:

Mr. Fantino was not as « imbattabile » as first thought, or was limited in his growth potential by the controversies surrounding Caledonia, his non-participation in an all-candidates meeting, and his refusal to grant media interviews to the CBC and Toronto Star...

Probably a bit of all those things accounted for Fantino's relatively poor performance. It was certainly an interesting fact that the Tories ran a guy that many Tory partisans were uncomfortable with. For example, this Conservative blogger demanded they be pulled from the BT blogroll to protest the Fantino candidacy.

It was also interesting that they were able to win without the support of their hard-cores.

I Spank You, Ezra Levant, I Spank You Spank You Spank You Very Much!

Pearl Eliades on HRCs in the news:

Ontario's Superior Court of Justice ruled on Nov. 18 that Giacomo Vigna, a lawyer for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, had been defamed by blogger Ezra Levant. According to the Court, Levant was on a campaign to discredit human rights commissions.

While that was in itself not inherently problematic from the perspective of the libel case, seeking to achieve that goal by defaming others was not a lawful objective. The court said that Levant showed "reckless disregard" for the truth in publishing the posts in question.

This does not make the Superior Court of Justice a "censor." What it does is to remove the "rights-shield" from defamatory speech, thus protecting Vigna's rights and, for that matter, the rights of anyone similarly situated. The point, to borrow a phrase, is that people's reputations and rights should not become roadkill on the path to free speech.

It is completely unacceptable that commission staff in Canada and human rights defenders here or anywhere else should be harassed, defamed and threatened simply for doing their jobs. Having worked in and with commissions before (and, by the way, having also represented respondents), I am acutely aware of the foibles and limitations of these institutions. But this does not justify the inaccuracy and lack of fairness to which they and their staffs have been subjected.

And lets just repeat: the Vigna defamation case was triggered as a result of White Nationalists leaving him phone threats and following tribunal security staff to their homes after a Warman V. Lemire-related hearing. This was something that none of the reporters who covered the defamation case that followed even bothered to mention until the judge's ruling made it impossible to ignore.

There's a pattern here, also illustrated in NP's coverage of the "hacked wifi" incident. Any allegation against the CHRC, however ridiculous, was treated seriously. Any news that cast the HRC staffers in a better light was judiciously ignored.

Christian Activist Group Goes TU

The ECP Centre has never run with a large surplus, and we anticipate that there will continue to be a small deficit. We have arranged for the deficit to be covered so that anyone who is owed funds will be fully paid.

And so Canada's far-right loses its sexxxiest pair of side-burns. Farewell, Tristan, may Neil Young never find out that you swiped 'em.

Bad News For Sun Chain Employees

When the big boss is taking his own pics, you are soon going to be asked to clean your own toilets.

h/t

Another Year, Another War On Xmas

This year I'll up to my usual holiday antics: going to Walmart and harassing their store clerks by telling them they've only only got one menorah up on the wall for every two crucifixes and if they don't fix that pronto in the name of multiculturalism I'll never shop there again and maybe sue them.

See if I can't score myself a free gift-card or two.

h/t

By Day They Deny, Part II

The Dominion has an interesting story on what is becoming a common tactic:

The “greening of hate” is a phrase coined by Betsy Hartmann, director of the US-based Population and Development Program. In her 2010 essay, "The Greening of Hate: An Environmentalist's Essay," she writes about the anti-immigration lobby's growing tendency toward “the scapegoating of immigrants for environmental degradation.”

The first time I read about this kind of thing, the group referenced was Californians for Population Stabilization. By digging around, I was able to find that one of the members of their advisory Board was the well-known Conservative pundit and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Victor David Hanson. So while by day Mr. Hanson was trashing the science of AGW, by night he was using that same science to argue for a more restrictive immigration policy--damn those Mexicans and their outsized carbon foot-prints!

So I thought I would do the same thing with the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform, a Canadian group mentioned in the Dominion article. And low and behold , NP columnist Barbara Kay and occasional Sun writer Salim Manusr are on their advisory board. Given the tendency of Kay and Mansur to trot out denialist talking points, it is the height of hypocrisy that these two should turn around and suggest that we keep out immigrants because they "inhibit efforts to reduce the extraordinary size of our ecological footprint."

Why would anyone possibly imagine, given their previous writings on the topic, that these two gave a shit?

That is all.

Canadian Tea-Baggers Go For Own Jugular

Former OLA (Ontario Land-Owners Association) President Jack MacLaren has been threatening to go after Norm Sterling, Tory MPP for Carleton-Mississippi Mills, since February. It looks like he is finally making his move, signing up OLAers as PCPO Members in an attempt to take over the local riding association:

MacLaren said he has signed up 700 members to the party, which if true would virtually ensure he wins the nomination for next fall’s provincial election. Sterling is privy to the numbers and said MacLaren has about 350. Sterling won’t say how many he has signed.

And, yeah, MacLaren does indeed specifically compare himself to the U.S. Tea-Party movement.


Bad news for PCPO leader Tim Hudak; he can either snuff out the dissidents and leave himself open to the charge of ignoring the grassroots (a very popular accusation these days), or he can saddle himself with a candidate that wants to pull the PCPO even further right and whose greatest hope for his leader is that he is indeed harboring a secret agenda:

...MacLaren also called PC leader Tim Hudak a “good leader” who is keeping his cards close to his chest. He looks forward to Hudak defending conservative principles as the race grows near.

Also bad news for PCPO MPP Randy Hillier, who MaClaren views as his spiritual leader. Should Hudak move to squash the insurgents, whose side will Hillier be on? Hudak's...the leader of a party that still has some claim to the mainstream? Or MacLaren's, a prominent figure in the rural death cult Hillier founded so many years ago? Its decision time for Ontario`s best known rural separatist.

2010 Hurricane Season

The number of named Atlantic storms (19) and number of hurricanes (12) was twice the long-term average and higher than almost all of the predictions. The difference this year is that no powerful storms struck the U.S. thanks to the response of the upper-level air flow to the El Nino / La Nina oscillation in the Pacific...

And here's Judith Curry (before she went loopy) on what it all means:

We conclude that global data indicate a 30-year trend toward more frequent and intense hurricanes, corroborated by the results of the recent regional assessment (29). This trend is not inconsistent with recent climate model simulations that a doubling of CO2 may increase the frequency of the most intense cyclones (18, 30)...

Sarah Palin Is Hot In Leather

Nutty as a fruit-cake, and a bit fascist-y, but hot nevertheless.

That is all.

H/t

In Vaughan, Its That 70s Show

I know who I'd vote for today (Dryden's guy--Genco), but back then I hated Dryden's guts, just as I hated the guts of everyone on the Montreal Canadians teams from the 1970s. Chicago should have won that game 7, goddamnit! And it was Dryden was the only reason that they didn't.

I cried on the bus to school next morning. I'm not ashamed to say it.

PS. D'you know how hard it is to find a picture of Don Cherry actually playing hockey? Back in the day, nobody had ever heard of him. Lot's of pictures from later on though, of him wearing pink ties. Which is OK. Some men look good in pink. I'm just saying.

Inspired by this.

Fox News North: Coming Soon (And Leaving Soon After)

Sun TV News – Competitive mainstream national news service
The Commission approves an application by TVA Group Inc., on behalf of itself and Sun Media Corporation, partners in a general partnership to be constituted and to carry on business as Sun TV News General Partnership, for a broadcasting licence to operate Sun TV News, a national, English-language Category 2 specialty service that will be subject to the standard conditions of licence, expectations and encouragement for competitive mainstream national news services set out in Broadcasting Regulatory Policy 2009-562-1.

Now I get to use some of my Ezra Levant jokes! Hopefully, he doesn't get sacked or the whole thing go TU before I reach the 400 series. They're especially cutting.

So let the Culture Wars begin, and let them not end until the Canadian air-waves are cleansed of this Conservative Menace!

Hudak Promises To Have A Plan

From his Thornhill speech:

First, a PC Government will deliver a plan to govern.... It’s clear, Ontario families need relief.

However, Hudak does not currently have such a plan. It's in development. He's getting "feedback":

…. In the months ahead, we will use the feedback we are getting to develop our plan to govern.

Well, hang on, it's not quite true to say that Hudak is entirely bereft of vision. He's revealed at least one of the arrows in his quiver:

To help reign in spending and get government focused on the basics families need most, I am calling for a mandatory Sunset Review process....

Yeah. You got it. He's going to initiate a process. That got my heart beating a little faster. What's he got to do about the HST, though, other than bitch about it?

[....]

Which is to say that his position is unchanged.