(h/t Maggie’s Farm)

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BTW, as i sit here watching the FoxBizNews lineup of Saturday morning business shows, the Climategate eruption is coming up over and over, and it appears the minimizers are planning to use the term “peer-reviewed” as their last-ditch debate-ender.

Too bad the other guests mostly haven’t seen the evidence that we blog-readers are seeing –of long-term wide-spread ”peer review” rigging, influencing, bribing, intimidating, and other employments of the the usual tools (excepting –so far –Torquemada’s ingenious toolkit) of installation of deterministic orthodoxy.

your narration is very funny

Well, our “oceanographes” are the persons that care the most for the planet pollution, and often do a useful work, they are not like the “greenies” mythomanes

Pascal, I shall investigate about the subject at the end of next week, when I’ll back to France, if you still come over the next days, I’ll share what I’ll find out

Yes, Mongoose, agree totally. The story of Galileo’s run-in with the Church is way overblown but is just too good a fit with postmodern belief of the Church as the enemy of science.

The classic Ptolemaic concept of a geocentric universe was accepted by many educated people of Galileo’s day, not because of Christian dogma, but because it seemed to be reasonably true according to the evidence they had at that time. Even so, there were some in the Church even then who favored Copernicus’s heliocentrism.

When Galileo was reported to the Inquisition (probably by an academic rival), Cardinal Bellarmine proposed that, as the evidence was inconclusive, Galileo should refrain from publicly promoting heliocentrism, to which Galileo agreed. But several years later, after Cardinal Barberini, who was considered a scientific progressive, was named Pope Urban VIII, Galileo apparently supposed it was okay to renege on his agreement with Bellarmine and published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. And maybe it would’ve been okay if not for the fact that this “dialogue” was between himself and a pope named “Simplicio,” which in Italian means “simpleton.” In addition to embarrassing the Pope and insulting the Church, Galileo’s Dialogue went beyond discussing scientific issues to asserting that the Bible was allegorical and required reinterpretation. It seems that Galileo enjoyed provoking the authorities or at least had little fear of them. He was, after all, famous in his own time and widely admired. His lack of fear seems to have been justified too because, after his trial, he was sentenced to house arrest for a period of five months at the palace of the archbishop of Siena. Some persecution. Alfred North Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern World, summed it up thusly: “…the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

Galileo was never charged with heresy. Although today there’s no such thing as a formal charge of heresy, there might as well be, with “climate-change deniers” treated as heretics.

Our ancestors sat around the campfire and told stories about elves and fairies, ghosties, ghoulies, and things tha’ gae bump i’ th’ night.

We sit around tables in bars telling stories about global warming, nuclear power disasters, and kids getting ADHD from their vaccinations. The only thing that’s really changed is the specifics.

Regards,
Ric

A lot of this stuff just defies logic immediately on the face of it. One of my favorites are those people who are in their 80′s who claim that they got cancer recently from asbestos exposure in WWII.

AGW is the mother of all such scams, and the inevitable result of the politicizing of everything.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

In light of the Hadley CRU expose, you need to take those numbers with a grain of salt. Your mileage (sea level) may vary.
I once did the rough calculation ( volume of Greenland and Antarctic ice masses divided by area of the planet’s surface times the percentage of that surface that is liquid ) and got .8 meters. That is quite a bit of difference from 80 meters. So do the math yourself. I could have made a mistake by adding or dropping a couple of decimals or the AGW crowd could have fudged the number to acquire more funding. Do the math and take your pick.

This source uses 24 million cubic Km’s as the volume of all glaciers;
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

USGN uses 32 million. So there is a large variation right there.

Taken together, this is another clue that the AGW thingie is bogus. Junk science if you will. Both numbers come from AGW tools, so it seems they have other agendas beside science. Otherwise they would have cooperated.

It was my first French experience; total immersion. The staffers tried not to speak English, even though all spoke it well enough, and even though all the 650 islanders did too. 3-bedroom condo w/electricity, facing west, built right over the water = $24K. Telephone – spotty. I thought about it. Paper matches don’t strike, it’s too humid.

On ClubMed grounds, no money changed hands, just pop-beads in exchange for hard liquor…starts out as a $20 necklace, then reduces to a bracelet, ending as a ring worth about 2 scotches – rehung about every other day.

As happens there was a convention (junket) of 25 “earth” scientists (avec fille / mistress) booked at that same time. Since this Club was so small (60 guests are called GMs – gentle members, 35 staff called gentle organizers, or GOs), it was difficult not to rub shoulders with’em everywhere, doing everything: drinking, reef diving, drinking, snorkling, drinking, volleyball, drinking, touring and drinking; especially thriceaday at mealtimes.

Over every meal, they’d discuss/argue about obscure/archane stuff like hydrology, atmospherics, salinity, etc. Meantime, all of their womenfolk and I were bored. Ha! Not being well-versed in any of those subjects and to change it so the other half of us could parley periodically, I asked what was the objective of their seminar. They said it was to better understand the global environment, so as to be able to control it. What? You mean like the weather? As an engineer type, it just spilled out “well you’re wasting your time and your sponsors’ money.” Mais non! Sir you are a skeptic?

In spite of that, I was invited to attend the main speaker’s schpiel. Get this. He’s a French PhD in oceanography, lives on the big island Tahiti and he’s got a Tahitian wife 20 years his junior, straight out of any Bounty film. Pick any one, all the way back to Laughton. They are truly exotic. This guy’s a Cousteau wannabe.

Now, everybody is listening while wearing nothing but a pareo and partaking of the unlimited cheap french wine, and the local Tahitian beer, Hinano. Yum. There are no screens, or windows, or doors. Thatched roofs. (Even for unisex lavatory enclosures, curtains suffice.) Very open and airy lifestyle.

Anyway, his project was about wrapping icebergs (broken away from the Antartic shelf) in BIG plastic baggies, and then towing them to – wait for it – the parched Middle East. 10s of Millions of tons each. I mean they’re fresh water and free, right? And they were already tracked by US satellites.

The speaker had precise estimates for most of the questions, like how much will melt on the way? Approximately 17.4569% will melt. Approx. that much huh, no matter the conditions on route? Also, these baggies would be constructed using the new (yet to be “produced”) solar cell technology to power electric OCEAN-GOING tugs. 8 of’em per 5,000 cubic-acre berg, 175 footers. To be built. Got me recalling what I’d read about the “roaring 40s” and towing large objects in heavy seas and weather forecasting and all. State funded scientists setting out to exploit the largest icecubes?

This guy had the cost to build enormous ice-crushers on oil-platform-like structures offshore down pat, plus the labor costs for 24/7/365 operation all calculated out. His handout was 60 double-sided pages of color charts and graphs and typeset verbiage. All this before Wordperfect or Visicals or even PCs.

I wish I’d kept my copy. The gilt-engraved leather cover was beautifully tooled and the images, oh my. Much nicer than the handouts I had just used to close on $15 million worth of mainframe sales to the Aussie airlines and gov’t.

The presentation itself was hilarious and although they all seemed seriously interested, I just burst out laughing when one of the learned assemblage asked: “What effect will zees iceberg’s temperature have on zee locale ecologie, and what will zee fishes do?” From the back came: “Bernard, zee fish will swim around.”

Might still be as amusing as it seemed back then, if things hadn’t changed so much. The irony is that the idylic paradise I so fondly remember and describe was completely destroyed by one of those yet-to-be-controlled pacific typhoons (IIRC in 82′) that sent 40′ waves surging across the lagoon, wiping out all the civilized part of paradise on the western shore. Including all those condos. Four Seasons Hotels has since anchored a new paradise, but now over on the lee side.

Happy Holidays to all.

As you learn more of him, I’d like to know if, indeed, his bust is not in the Hall of Champions. As I said above, it could have been out for cleaning or repair, or I simply missed it. There are a great many busts, and I could have missed it even though I searched for him. My not speaking French well made it hard for me to inquire properly.

Then, should you find he is not there, has never been there, or was removed from there, I think it would be very informative to hear from a personage in charge what reason is given for his exclusion.

Merci beaucoup.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

By Dr. Tim Ball and Judi McLeod in the Canada Free Press

(read it, and feel your skin crawl at the smarmy supercilious nastiness and cowardly double talk in this powerful czar’s –Mr. “Let’s Sneak Sterilants into the Drinking Water!” –campaign to ruin certain specific honest scientists, while appearing to be only having a bit o fun ”entertaining” [his word] his email list)

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LS/86; to your question, me, i’m just gonna shake my pitchfork higher. You’re gonna have to do a LOT better than that.