text:
The Bishop Hill Blog has a summary of a lot of the more interesting emails.
A search engine of the content is here.
John Hinderaker here.
The Bishop Hill Blog has a summary of a lot of the more interesting emails.
A search engine of the content is here.
John Hinderaker here.
I thought this was one of the more interesting quotes unearthed so far from the Hadley CRU emails:
"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 showing them what CA [Climate Audit] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I've got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals."
I am not familiar with the ins and outs of the British FOI request process, but in the US such requests must be honored based on the content of the information requested, and NOT based on the views of the requester or the intended us of the information. Basically, what the FOI officer has determined here is that this was a perfectly legitimate request that had to be honored UNTIL it was learned that it came from a person or group who disagreed with the center's scientific conclusions and wished to use the data to try to replicate and/or criticize their work — then it could be ignored. In the US, this would be a gross violation of FOIA rules. I am willing to be that it is not too kosher under British law either.
From PHD Comics via Flowing Data, check out the lower left.
An interesting development you have probably seen at other climate sites already (I am pretty conservative about posting this stuff), apparently someone may have hacked the servers at the Hadley Center Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK and copied a bunch of data and emails and dropped it into the public realm (via links in a number of site's comment sections). I downloaded the file but have not checked it out. It is unclear if this is real or a skeptic spoof or even an alarmist-set trap, though initial reactions from the Hadley Center CRU seem to point to it being real. The ethics of the folks who grabbed this material are also seriously in question, though if it turns out to be real I have no problem using the material as it is public / government material that should have been in the public domain anyway (which is why I use the Pentagon Papers analogy).
Andrew Bolt has some background and excerpts from the material. The very first email he has from Phil Jones seems to confirm my suspicions about splicing thermometer data onto proxy series I expressed here. (Update: much more from Steve McIntyre here).
A lot of the stuff in Bolt's post is really stuff we in the skeptic community already know. RealClimate ruthlessly purges comments of any dissenting or critical voices? Who'd have thunk it.
I got an email today in response to this post that allows me to cover some ground I wanted to cover. A number of commenters are citing this paragraph from Tedesco and Monaghan as evidence that I and others are somehow mischaracterizing the results of the study:
"Negative melting anomalies observed in recent years do not contradict recently published results on surface temperature trends over Antarctica [e.g., Steig et al., 2009]. The time period used for those studies extends back to the 1950's, well beyond 1980, and the largest temperature increases are found during winter and spring rather than summer, and are generally limited to West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula. Summer SAM trends have increased since the 1970s [Marshall, 2003], suppressing warming over much of Antarctica during the satellite melt record [Turner et al., 2005]. Moreover, melting and surface temperature are not necessarily linearly related because the entire surface energy balance must be considered [Liston and Winther, 2005; Torinesi et al., 2003]."
First, the point of the original post was not about somehow falsifying global warming, but about the asymmetry in press coverage to emerging data. It is in fact staggeringly unlikely that I would use claims of increasing ice buildup in Antarctica as "proof" that anthropogenic global warming theory as outlined, say, by the fourth IPCC report, is falsified. This is because the models in the fourth IPCC report actually predict increasing snowmass in Antarctica under global warming.
Of course, the study was not exactly increasing ice mass, but decreasing ice melting rates, which should be more correlated with temperatures. Which brings us to the quote above.
I see a lot of studies in climate that seem to have results that falsify some portion of AGW theory but which throw in acknowledgments of the truth and beauty of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in the final paragraphs that almost contradict their study results, much like natural philosophers in past centuries would put in boiler plate in their writing to protect them from the ire of the Catholic Church. One way to interpret this statement is "I know you are not going to like these findings but I am still loyal to the Cause so please don't revoke by AGW decoder ring."
This particular statement by the authors is hilarious in one way. Their stated defense is that Steig's period was longer and thus not comparable. The don't outright say it, but they kind of beat around the bush at it, that the real issue is not the study length, but that most of the warming in Steig's 50-year period was actually in the first 20 years. This is in fact something we skeptics have been saying since Steig was released, but was not forthrightly acknowledged in Steig. Here is some work that has been done to deconstruct the numbers in Steig. Don't worry about the cases with different numbers of "PCs", these are just sensitivities with different geographic regionalizations. Basically, under any set of replication approaches to Steig, all the warming is in the first 2 decades.
1957 to 2006 trend
1957 to 1979 trend (pre-AWS)
1980 to 2006 trend (AWS era)
|Steig 3 PC
+0.14 deg C./decade
+0.17 deg C./decade
-0.06 deg C./decade
|New 7 PC
+0.11 deg C./decade
+0.25 deg C./decade
-0.20 deg C./decade
|New 7 PC weighted
+0.09 deg C./decade
+0.22 deg C./decade
-0.20 deg C./decade
|New 7 PC wgtd imputed cells
+0.08 deg C./decade
+0.22 deg C./decade
-0.21 deg C./decade
Now, knowing this, here is Steig's synopsis:
Assessments of Antarctic temperature change have emphasized the contrast between strong warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and slight cooling of the Antarctic continental interior in recent decades1. This pattern of temperature change has been attributed to the increased strength of the circumpolar westerlies, largely in response to changes in stratospheric ozone2. This picture, however, is substantially incomplete owing to the sparseness and short duration of the observations. Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 °C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive. Simulations using a general circulation model reproduce the essential features of the spatial pattern and the long-term trend, and we suggest that neither can be attributed directly to increases in the strength of the westerlies. Instead, regional changes in atmospheric circulation and associated changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice are required to explain the enhanced warming in West Antarctica.
Wow – don't see much acknowledgment that all the warming trend was before 1980. They find the space to recognize seasonal differences but not the fact that all the warming they found was in the first 40% of their study period? (And all of the above is not even to get into the huge flaws in the Steig methodology, which purports to deemphasize the Antarctic Peninsula but still does not)
This is where the semantic games of trying to keep the science consistent with a political position get to be a problem. If Steig et al had just said "Antarctica warmed from 1957 to 1979 and then has cooled since," which is what their data showed, then the authors of this new study would not have been in a quandary. In that alternate universe, of course decreased ice melt since 1980 makes sense, because Steig said it was cooler. But because the illusion must be maintained that Steig showed a warming trend that continues to this date, these guys must deal with the fact that their study agrees with the data in Steig, but not the public conclusions drawn from Steig. And thus they have to jump through some semantic hoops.
The phrase shaken baby syndrome entered the pop culture lexicon in 1997, when British au pair Louise Woodward was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Massachusetts infant Matthew Eappen. At the time, the medical community almost universally agreed on the symptoms of SBS. But starting around 1999, a fringe group of SBS skeptics began growing into a powerful reform movement. The Woodward case brought additional attention to the issue, inviting new research into the legitimacy of SBS. Today, as reflected in the Edmunds case, there are significant doubts about both the diagnosis of SBS and how it's being used in court.
In a compelling article published this month in the Washington University Law Review, DePaul University law professor Deborah Teurkheimer argues that the medical research has now shifted to the point where U.S. courts must conduct a major review of most SBS cases from the last 20 years. The problem, Teurkheimer explains, is that the presence of three symptoms in an infant victim—bleeding at the back of the eye, bleeding in the protective area of the brain, and brain swelling—have led doctors and child protective workers to immediately reach a conclusion of SBS. These symptoms have long been considered pathognomic, or exclusive, to SBS. As this line of thinking goes, if those three symptoms are present in the autopsy, then the child could only have been shaken to death.
Moreover, an SBS medical diagnosis has typically served as a legal diagnosis as well. Medical consensus previously held that these symptoms present immediately in the victim. Therefore, a diagnosis of SBS established cause of death (shaking), the identity of the killer (the person who was with the child when it died), and even the intent of the accused (the vigorous nature of the shaking established mens rea). Medical opinion was so uniform that the accused, like Edmunds, often didn't bother questioning the science. Instead, they'd often try to establish the possibility that someone else shook the child.
But now the consensus has shifted. Where the near-unanimous opinion once held that the SBS triad of symptoms could only result from a shaking with the force equivalent of a fall from a three-story to four-story window, or a car moving at 25 mph to 40 mph (depending on the source), research completed in 2003 using lifelike infant dolls suggested that vigorous human shaking produces bleeding similar to that of only a 2-foot to 3-foot fall. Furthermore, the shaking experiments failed to produce symptoms with the severity of those typically seen in SBS deaths….
"When I put all of this together, I said, my God, this is a sham," Uscinski told Discover. "Somebody made a mistake right at the very beginning, and look at what's come out of it."
Before I am purposefully misunderstood, I am not committing the logical fallacy that an incorrect consensus in issue A means the consensus on issue B is incorrect. The message instead is simple: beware scientific "consensus," particularly when that consensus is only a decade or two old.
A month or two ago, after Kevin Drum (a leftish supporter of strong AGW theory) posted a chart on his site that looked like BS to me. I posted my quick reactions to the chart here, and then after talking to the data owner in Washington followed up here.
The gist of my comments were that the trend in the data didn't make any sense, and upon checking with the data owner, it turns out much of the trend is due to changes in the data collection process. I stick by that conclusion, though not some of the other suppositions in those posts.
I was excited to see Dr. Mills response (thanks to reader Charlie Allen for the heads up). I will quote much of it, but to make sure I can't be accused of cherry-picking, here is his whole post here. I would comment there, but alas, unlike this site, Dr. Mills chooses not to allow comments.
So here we go:
Two blog entries [1-online | PDF] [2-online | PDF] [Accessed June 18, 2009] mischaracterize analysis in a new report entitled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The blogger (a self-admitted "amateur") created a straw man argument by asserting that the chart was presented as evidence of global climate change and was not verified with the primary source. The blog's errors have been propagated to other web sites without further fact checking or due diligence. (The use of profanity in the title of the first entry is additionally unprofessional.)
Uh, oh, the dreaded "amateur." Mea Culpa. I am a trained physicist and engineer. I don't remember many colleges handing out "climate" degrees in 1984, so I try not to overstate my knowledge. As to using "bullsh*t" in the title, the initial post was "I am calling bullsh*t on this chart." Sorry, I don't feel bad about that given the original post was a response to a post on a political blog.
The underlying database—created by the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration—contains approximately 930 grid-disruption events taking place between 1992 and 2008, affecting 135 million electric customers.
As noted in the caption to the figure on page 58 of our report (shown above)—which was masked in the blogger's critique—
First, I am happy to admit errors where I make them (I wonder if that is why I am still an "amateur"). It was wrong of me to post the chart without the caption. My only defense was that I copied the chart from, and was responding to its use on, Kevin Drum's site and he too omitted the caption. I really was not trying to hide what was there. I am on the road and don't have the original but here it is from Dr. Mills' post.
Anyway, to continue…
As noted in the caption to the figure on page 58 of our report (shown above)—which was masked in the blogger's critique—we expressly state a quite different finding than that imputed by the blogger, noting with care that we do not attribute these events to anthropogenic climate change, but do consider the grid vulnerable to extreme weather today and increasingly so as climate change progresses, i.e.:
"Although the figure does not demonstrate a cause-effect relationship between climate change and grid disruption, it does suggest that weather and climate extremes often have important effects on grid disruptions."
The associated text in the report states the following, citing a major peer-reviewed federal study on the energy sector's vulnerability to climate change:
"The electricity grid is also vulnerable to climate change effects, from temperature changes to severe weather events."
To Dr. Mills' point that I misinterpreted him — if all he wanted to say was that the electrical grid could be disturbed by weather or was vulnerable to climate change, fine. I mean, duh. If there are more tornadoes knocking about, more electrical lines will come down. But if that was Dr. Mills ONLY point, then why did he write (emphasis added):
The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992. The portion of all events that are caused by weather-related phenomena has more than tripled from about 20 percent in the early 1990s to about 65 percent in recent years. The weather-related events are more severe…
He is saying flat out that the grid IS being disturbed 10x more often and more severely by weather. It doesn't even say "reported" incidents or "may have" — it is quite definitive. So which one of us is trying to create a straw man? It is these statements that I previously claimed the data did not support, and I stand by my analysis on that.
And it's not like there is some conspiracy of skeptics to mis-interpret Mr. Mills. Kevin Drum, a huge cheerleader for catastrophic AGW, said about this chart:
So here's your chart of the day: a 15-year history of electrical grid problems caused by increasingly extreme weather.
I will skip the next bit, wherein it appears that Dr. Mills is agreeing with my point that aging and increased capacity utilization on the grid could potentially increase weather-related grid outages without any actual change in the weather (just from the grid being more sensitive or vulnerable)
OK, so next is where Mr. Mills weighs in on the key issue of the data set being a poor proxy, given the fact that most of the increase in the chart are due to better reporting rather than changes in the underlying phenomenon:
The potential for sampling bias was in fact identified early-on within the author team and—contrary to the blogger's accusation—contact was in fact made with the person responsible for the data collection project at the US Energy Information Administration on June 10, 2008 (and with the same individual the blogger claims to have spoken to). At that time the material was discussed for an hour with the EIA official, who affirmed the relative growth was in weather-related events and that it could not be construed as an artifact of data collection changes, etc. That, and other points in this response, were re-affirmed through a follow up discussion in June 2009.
In fact, the analysis understates the scale of weather-related events in at least three ways:
- EIA noted that there are probably a higher proportion of weather events missing from their time series than non-weather ones (due to minimum threshold impacts required for inclusion, and under-reporting in thunderstorm-prone regions of the heartland).
- There was at least one change in EIA's methodology that would have over-stated the growth in non-weather events, i.e., they added cyber attacks and islanding in 2001, which are both "non-weather-related".
- Many of the events are described in ways that could be weather-related (e.g. "transmission interruption") but not enough information is provided. We code such events as non-weather-related.
Dr. Mills does not like me using the "BS" word, so I will just say this is the purest caca. I want a single disinterested scientist to defend what Dr. Mills is saying. Remember:
Thanks to the efforts of EIA, after they took over the responsibility of running the Department of Energy (DOE) data-collection process around 1997, it became more effective. Efforts were made in subsequent years to increase the response rate and upgrade the reporting form.
Thanks, you just proved my point about the trend being driven by changes in reporting and data collection intensity.
To adjust for potential response-rate biases, we have separated weather- and non-weather-related trends into indices and found an upward trend only in the weather-related time series.
As confirmed by EIA, if there were a systematic bias one would expect it to be reflected in both data series (especially since any given reporting site would report both types of events).
As an additional precaution, we focused on trends in the number of events (rather than customers affected) to avoid fortuitous differences caused by the population density where events occur. This, however, has the effect of understating the weather impacts because of EIA definitions (see survey methodology notes below).
Well, its possible this is true, though unhappily, this analysis was not published in the original report and was not published in this post. I presume this means he has a non-weather time series that is flat for this period. Love to see it, but this is not how the EIA portrayed the data to me. But it really doesn't matter – I think the fact that there is more data missing in the early years than the later years is indisputable, and this one fact drives a false trend.
But here is what I think is really funny- — the above analysis does not matter, because he is assuming a reporting bias symmetry, but just a few paragraphs earlier he stated that there was actually an asymmetry. Let me quote him again:
EIA noted that there are probably a higher proportion of weather events missing from their time series than non-weather ones (due to minimum threshold impacts required for inclusion, and under-reporting in thunderstorm-prone regions of the heartland).
Look Dr. Mills, I don't have an axe to grind here. This is one chart out of bazillions making a minor point. But the data set you are using is garbage, so why do you stand by it with such tenacity? Can't anyone just admit "you know, on thinking about it, there are way to many problems with this data set to declare a trend exists. Hopefully the EIA has it cleaned up now and we can watch it going forward." But I guess only "amateurs" make that kind of statement.
The blogger also speculated that many of the "extreme temperature" events were during cold periods, stating "if this is proof of global warming, why is the damage from cold and ice increasing as fast as other severe weather causes?" The statement is erroneous.
This was pure supposition in my first reaction to the chart. I later admitted that I was wrong. Most of the "temperature" effects are higher temperature. But I will admit it again here – that supposition was incorrect. He has a nice monthly distribution of the data to prove his point.
I am ready to leave this behind, though I will admit that Dr. Mills response leaves me more rather than less worried about the quality of the science here. But to summarize, everything is minor compared to this point: The caption says "The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992." I don't think anyone, knowing about the huge underreporting in early years, and better reporting in later years, thinks that statement is correct. Dr. Mills should be willing to admit it was incorrect.
Update: In case I am not explaining the issue well, here is a conceptual drawing of what is going on:
Update #2: One other thing I meant to post. I want to thank Dr. Mills — this is the first time in quite a while I have received a critique of one of my posts without a single ad hominem attack, question about my source of funding, hypothesized links to evil forces, etc. Also I am sorry I wrote "Mr." rather than "Dr." Mills. Correction has been made.
I thought this article by Steve McIntyre was an interesting window on the IPCC process. Frequent readers of this site know that I believe that feedbacks in the climate are the key issue of anthropogenic global warming, and their magnitude and sign separate mild, nearly unnoticeable warming from catastrophe. McIntyre points out that the IPCC fourth assessment spent all of 1 paragraph in hundreds of pages on the really critical issue:
As we've discussed before (and is well known), clouds are the greatest source of uncertainty in climate sensitivity. Low-level ("boundary layer") tropical clouds have been shown to be the largest source of inter-model difference among GCMs. Clouds have been known to be problematic for GCMs since at least the Charney Report in 1979. Given the importance of the topic for GCMs, one would have thought that AR4 would have devoted at least a chapter to the single of issue of clouds, with perhaps one-third of that chapter devoted to the apparently thorny issue of boundary layer tropical clouds.
This is what an engineering study would do – identify the most critical areas of uncertainty and closely examine all the issues related to the critical uncertainty. Unfortunately, that's not how IPCC does things. Instead, clouds are treated in one subsection of chapter 8 and boundary layer clouds in one paragraph.
It turns out that this one paragraph was lifted almost intact from the work of the lead author of this section of the report. The "almost" is interesting, though, because every single change made was to eliminate or tone down any conclusion that cloud feedback might actually offset greenhouse warming. He has a nearly line by line comparison, which is really fascinating. One sample:
Bony et al 2006 had stated that the "empirical" Klein and Hartmann (1993) correlation "leads" to a substantial increase in low cloud cover, which resulted in a "strong negative" cloud feedback. Again IPCC watered this down: "leads to" became a "suggestion" that it "might be" associated with a "negative cloud feedback" – the term "strong" being dropped by IPCC.
Remember this is in the context of a report that generally stripped out any words that implied doubt or lack of certainty on the warming side.
A lot of skeptics' websites are riled up about the EPA's leadership decision not to forward comments by EPA staffer Alan Carlin on the Endangerment issue and global warming because these comments were not consistent with where the EPA wanted to go on this issue. I reprinted the key EPA email here, which I thought sounded a bit creepy, and some of the findings by the CEI which raised this issue.
However, I think skeptics are getting a bit carried away. Let's try to avoid the exaggeration and hype of which we often accuse global warming alarmists. This decision does not reflect well on the EPA, but let's make sure we understand what it was and was not:
What does appear to have happened is that Mr. Carlin responded to a call for comments, submitted comments per the date and process required, and then had the organization refuse to forward those comments because they did not fit the storyline the EPA wanted to put together. This content-based rejection of his submission does appear to violate normal EPA rules and practices and, if not, certainly violates the standards we would want such supposedly science-based regulatory bodies to follow. But let's not upgrade this category 2 hurricane to category 5 — this was not, as I understand it, an agency suppressing an official agency-initiated study.
I may be a cynical libertarian on this, but this strikes me more as a government issue than a global warming issue. Government bureaucracies love consensus, even when they have to impose it. I don't think there is a single agency in Washington that has not done something similar — ie suppressed internal concerns and dissent when the word came down from on high what the answer was supposed to be on a certain question they were supposed to be "studying."** This sucks, but its what we get when we build this big blundering bureaucracy to rule us.
Anyway, Anthony Watt is doing a great job staying on top of this issue. His latest post is here, and includes an updated version of Carlin's comments. Whatever the background, Carlin's document is well worth a read. I have mirrored the document here.
**Postscript: Here is something I have observed about certain people in both corporate and government beauracracies. I appologize, but I don't really have the words for this and I don't know the language of psychology. There is a certain type of person who comes to believe, really believe, their boss's position on an issue. We often chalk this up from the outside to brown-nosing or an "Eddie Haskell" effect where people fake their beliefs, but I don't think this is always true. I think there is some sort of human mental defense mechanism that people have a tendency to actually adopt (not just fake) the beliefs of those in power over them. Certainly some folks resist this, and there are some issues too big or fundamental for this to work, but for many folks their mind will reshape itself to the beaucracracy around it. It is why sometimes organizations cannot be fixed, and can only be blown up.
Update: The reasons skeptics react strongly to stuff like this is that there are just so many examples:
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming….
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea….
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".
Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".
I am late on this, so you probably have seen it, but the EPA was apparently working hard to make sure that the settled science remained settled, but shutting up anyone who dissented from its conclusions.
From Odd Citizen. More at Watts Up With That.
Though less subtle than I would have expected, this should come as no surprise to readers of my series on the recent government climate report. All even-handed discussion or inclusion of data that might muddy the core message have been purged from a document that is far more like an advocacy group press release than a scientific document.
Update: More here.
Update #2: I understand those who are skeptical of this, and feel this may have been some kind of entirely justified rebuff. I have folks all the time sending me emails begging me to post their articles as guest authors on this blog and I say no to them all, and there is no scandal to that. Thomas Fuller, and environmental writer for the San Francisco Examiner, was skeptical at first as well. His story here.
In the last post, I discussed forcing observations to fit the theory. Generally, this takes the form either of ignoring observations or adding "adjustment" factors to the data. But here is an even more extreme example from page 25:
A quick glance at this chart, and what do we see? A line historically rising surprisingly in parallel with global temperature history, and then increasing in the future.
But let's look at that chart legend carefully. The green "historic" data is actually nothing of the sort – it is simulation! The authors have created their own history. This entire chart is the output of some computer model programmed to deliver the result that temperature drives heavy precipitation, and so it does.
The first thing one needs to recognize about the GCCI report is that it is not a scientific document — it is a 170-page long press release from an advocacy group, with all the detailed, thorough science one might expect in a press release from the Center of Science and Public Interest writing about the threat to mankind from Twinkies. By the admission of the Obama administration, this is a document that has been stripped of its scientific discussion and rewritten by a paid PR firm that specialized in environmental advocacy.
I have not read every word, but it is pretty clear that there is no new science here on the causes or magnitude of warming. In fact, if I had to describe the process used to prepare the first part of the report, it was to take past IPCC reports, strip out any wording indicating uncertainty, and then portray future forecasts using the IPCC mean forecasts as the lowest possible warming and whatever model they could find that spit out the highest forecast as the "worst case scenario." Then, the rest of the report (about 90%) creates a variety of hypothesized disaster movie plots based on this worst case scenario.
You know that this is an advocacy document and not science right of the bat when they write this:
1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.
Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to humaninduced
emissions of heat-trapping gases.
Just look in wonder at the false religion-like certainty. Name three other scientific findings about horribly complex natural processes that have been studied in depth for only 20 years or so that one would use the word "unequivocal" for. OK, name even one.
If you can't read the whole report, read the list of disasters on page 12. If I had shown this to you blind, and told you it from from a Paul Ehrlich the-world-will-end-in-a-decade book from the 1970s, you would probably have believed me.
This entire report assumes global warming to exist, assumes it is man-made, and assumes its future levels are as large or larger than those projected in the last IPCC report. The first four or five pages merely restate this finding with no new evidence. The majority of the report then takes this assumption, cranks it through various models, and generates scary potential scenarios about the US and it would be like if temperatures really rose 11F over the next century.
For some months now, I have struggled with this site.
In the political and economics arena, there never seems to be any shortage of stuff to write about. That is in large part because when I and others take a position, folks who disagree will respond, and interesting discussions rage back and forth between blogs.
For some years on this site, I have endeavored as a layman to help other laymen understand the key issues in the science. When I first started, I had assumed my role would be pure journalism, simplifying complex arguments for a wider audience. But I soon found that my background in modelling dynamic systems (both physical and social) allowed me to spot holes in the science on my own as well.
But of late I began to run down. Unlike in the political / economic world, there is little cross-talk between blogs on different sides of issues. I could flood the site with stupid media misinterpretations of the site, but it is not what I am trying to do here and besides Tom Nelson has that pretty well covered.
As in the political world, I try to read blogs on all sides of the debate, but in the climate world there was far less interaction. There is only so long I can go on repeating the same arguments in different ways. The problem is not that these arguments and holes in the science get quickly dispatched on other sites, it is that they get ignored. Both sides are guilty of this, but alarmists in particular thrive on knocking down straw men and refusing to address head on the best skeptics' arguments (which is not to say that certain skeptic sites don't have the same problem).
But the new Global Climate Change Impacts Report (pdf) released yesterday has re-energized me. This document represents such an embarrassment that it simply begs to be critiqued in depth. So over the coming weeks I will work through the report, in semi-random order, picking out particularly egregious omissions and inaccuracies.
Today's release of the study, titled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, was overseen by a San Francisco-based media consulting company…
The nearly 200-page study was scrubbed of the usual scientific jargon, and was given a high-profile release by Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, and the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Jane Lubchenco.
Wow, that's sure how I learned to handle a scientific report back when I was studying physics – scrub it of the science and give it to an activist PR firm! Do you need any more evidence that climate science has become substantially dominated by post-modernist scientists, where ideological purity and staying on message is more important than actually having the science right?
I saw a draft of this report last year, but I am still trying to download this new version. I expect to be sickened. Here is a taste of where they are coming down:
If today's generation fails to act to reduce the carbon emissions that cause global warming, climate models suggest temperatures could rise as much as 11F by the end of the century.
11F is about 6.1C. I don't know if they get this by increasing the CO2 forecast or by increasing the sensitivity or both, but it is vastly higher than the forecasts even of the over-apocalyptic IPCC. I think one can fairly expect two things, though — 1) More than 2/3 of this warming will be due to positive feedback effects rather than Co2 acting alone and 2) There will be little or no discussion of the evidence that such positive feedback effects actually dominate the climate.
Apparently the report will make up for having all the science stripped out by spending a lot of time on gaudy worst case scenarios:
That translates into catastrophic consequences for human health and the economy such as more ferocious hurricanes in coastal regions – in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, punishing droughts to the south-west, and increasingly severe winter storms in the north-east and around the Great Lakes.
The majority of North Carolina's beaches would be swallowed up by the sea. New England's long and snowy winters might be cut short to as little as two weeks. Summers in Chicago could be a time of repeated deadly heat waves. Los Angelenos and residents of other big cities will be choking because of deteriorating air quality.
Future generations could face potential food shortages because of declining wheat and corn yields in the breadbasket of the mid-west, increased outbreaks of food poisoning and the spread of epidemic diseases.
This strikes me as roughly equivilent to turning in a copy of Lucifer's Hammer in response to a request for a scientific study of the physics of comets.
I thought this post by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit was pretty amazing, even by the standards of climate science.
We begin with a felt need by fear mongers to link CO2 and global warming to bad stuff, in this case a decline of growth or calcification rates on the Great Barrier Reef. So, abracadabra, some scientist-paladins generate this, which is eaten up by the media:
Wow, that looks bad. And if we stop there, we can write a really nice front-page article full of doom and gloom. Or we can do some actual science. First, lets pull back and look at a longer trend:
Hmmm. That looks kind of different. Like the recent decline is by no means unprecedented, and that in fact one might call the 1850-1950 levels, rather than the recent drop, the anomaly. This latter is a tough question, of course, in all of climate science. Just what is normal?
Anyway, we can go further. McIntyre notices the plot looks awfully smooth. What if we were to move out of USA Today mode and look at the raw data rather than a pleasantly smooth graph. This is what we would see:
Wow, that looks really different. That must be some amazing smoothing algorithm they used. Because what I see is a generally increasing trend in reef growth, with a single low number in 2005. Rather than being some change in slope in the whole trend, as portrayed in the smoothing, this is a single one-year low data point. (It turns out there are several smoothing approaches one can take that put inordinate value on the end point — this was a trick first found in Mann's hockey stick trying to make hay of the 1998 high temperature anomaly).
I think just looking at the raw data would cause any reasonable person to shake their head and determine that the author's were grossly disingenuous in their smoothing and conclusions. But, as they say on TV, "Wait, there's more."
Because it turns out the 2005 drop seems to be less a function of any real drop but in fact due to serious gaps in the data set. The black line is a close-up of the raw growth data, while the pink area is the size of the measurement data set used, with its scale on the right.
Just by the strangest of coincidences, the large drop in 2005 occurs at the same time the number of data points in the data set drops down to 2! While most of the data has been driven by measurement of 40 or more reefs, the key two years that drive the entire conclusion come from just 2 reefs? This is the worst possible science. Most real scientists would have dropped out the last several years and probably would have dropped all the data since about 1990. Or else go out and get themselves some more freaking data. It is easily possible, in fact quite likely, that the 2005 drop was due to mix, as high growth measurement site were dropped out of the data set, leaving only lower growth sites in the average. These changes in mix say absolutely nothing about underlying growth rates.
I am just visually integrating the pink curve, but its reasonable to guess that there are about 600 measurements in the post 1980 period when the averaged trend in the first chart above turns down. Somehow these guys have come up with a methodology that allows 4-5 measurements in 2004-5 to grossly outweigh the other 600 and pull the whole curve down. Unless there is something I do not understand, this borders on outright fraud. This can't be accidental – the authors simply had to understand the game they were playing here.
Update: Here is another interesting one — An apparent increase spike in ocean heat content:
Just coincidentally turns out to exactly coincide with a change in the source for the data. The jump occurs exactly at the splice between two data sets. And everyone just blithely accepts this jump as a physical fact??
This is particularly hard to accept, as the ARGO data set (the newer data) has shown flat to declining ocean heat content since the day it was turned on. So what is the justification for the spike at the splice?
I try really, really hard not to get pulled into the ad hominem attacks that fly around the climate debate. So the following is just for fun on a Friday, and is not in any way meant to be a real climate argument. However, since so many alarmists like to attack skeptics as being anti-science, I thought I would have a bit of fun.
This diagram was spurred by this post from Reason's Radley Balko:
The Science Blogs are having fun with the "wellness editor" at the Huffington Post, a woman who claims to have a "doctorate in homeopathic medicine." An odd choice for a lefty website that makes such hay of the right's hostility to science. I like this comment: "…a doctorate in homeopathic medicine would be a blank piece of paper soaked in a 1:10,000,000 tincture made from the ink of an actual doctor's diploma."
Just to head off the obvious, I have no doubt a similar Venn diagram could be created for skeptics and people who believe the world is only 4000 years old. Both arguments are equally meaningless when it comes down to whether the science is correct.
This could easily be a business case: Two managers. One sits in his office, looking at spreadsheets, trying to figure out if the factory is doing OK. The other spends most of his time on the factory floor, trying to see what is going on. Both approaches have value, and both have shortcomings.
Shift the scene now to the physical sciences: Two geologists. One sits at his computer looking at measurement data sets, trying to see trends through regression, interpolation, and sometimes via manual adjustments and corrections. The other is out in the field, looking at physical evidence. Both are trying to figure out sea level changes in the Maldives. The local geologist can't see global patterns, and may have a tendency to extrapolate too broadly from a local finding. The computer guy doesn't know how his measurements may be lying to him, and tends to trust his computer output over physical evidence.
It strikes me that there would be incredible power from merging these two perspectives, but I sure don't see much movement in this direction in climate. Anthony Watts has been doing something similar with temperature measurement stations, trying to bring real physical evidence to improve computer modellers correction algorithms, but there is very little demand among the computer guys for this help. We've reached an incredible level of statistical hubris, that somehow we can manipulate tiny signals from noisy and biased data without any knowledge of the physical realities on the ground ("bias" used here in its scientific, not its political/cultural meaning)
Any number of folks have achnowleged that, nowadays, the surest road to academic funding is to tie your pet subject in with climate change. If, for example, you and your academic buddies want funding to study tourist resort destinations (good work if you can get it), you will have a better chance if you add climate change into the mix.
John Moore did a bit of work with the Google Scholar search engine to find out how many studies referencing, say, surfing, also referenced climate change. It is a lot. When you click through to the searches, you will find a number of the matches are spurious (ie matches to random unrelated links on the same page) but the details of the studies and how climate change is sometimes force-fit is actually more illuminating than the summary numbers.
I have no idea what is driving this, whether it be a crass payback for campaign contributions (as implied in the full article) or a desire to stop those irritating amateur bloggers from trying to replicate "settled science," but it is, as a reader said who sent it to me, "annoying:"
There are some things science needs to survive, and to thrive: eager, hardworking scientists; a grasp of reality and a desire to understand it; and an open and clear atmosphere to communicate and discuss results.
That last bit there seems to be having a problem. Communication is key to science; without it you are some nerd tinkering in your basement. With it, the world can learn about your work and build on it.
Recently, government-sponsored agencies like NIH have moved toward open access of scientific findings. That is, the results are published where anyone can see them, and in fact (for the NIH) after 12 months the papers must be publicly accessible. This is, in my opinion (and that of a lot of others, including a pile of Nobel laureates) a good thing. Astronomers, for example, almost always post their papers on Astro-ph, a place where journal-accepted papers can be accessed before they are published.
John Conyers (D-MI) apparently has a problem with this. He is pushing a bill through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers, forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big deal, but journals are very expensive. They can cost a fortune: The Astrophysical Journal costs over $2000/year, and they charge scientists to publish in them! So this bill would force scientists to spend money to publish, and force you to spend money to read them.
I continue to be confused how research funded with public monies can be "proprietary," but interestingly this seems to be a claim pioneered in the climate community, more as a way to escape criticism and scrutiny than to make money (the Real Climate guys have, from time to time, argued for example that certain NASA data and algorithms are proprietary and cannot be released for scrutiny – see comments here, for example.)
Last week, while I was waiting for my sandwich at the deli downstairs, I was applying about 10% of my consciousness to CNN running on the TV behind the counter. I saw some woman, presumably in the Obama team, defending some action of the administration as being based on "peer reviewed" science.
This may be a legacy of the climate debate. One of the rhetorical tools climate alarmists have latched onto is to inflate the meaning of peer review. Often, folks, like the person I saw on TV yesterday, use "peer review" as a synonym for "proven correct and generally accepted in its findings by all right-thinking people who are not anti-scientific wackos." Sort of the scientific equivalent of "USDA certified."
Here is a great example of that, from the DailyKos via Tom Nelson:
Contact NBC4 and urge them to send weatherman Jym Ganahl to some climate change conferences with peer-reviewed climatologists. Let NBC4 know that they have a responsibility to have expert climatologists on-air to debunk Ganahl's misinformation and the climate change deniers don't deserve an opportunity to spread their propaganda:
NBC 4 phone # 614-263-4444
NBC 4 VP/GM Rick Rogala email: rrogala(ATSIGN)wcmh.com
By the way, is this an over-the-top attack on heresy or what? Let's all deluge a TV station with complaints because their weatherman has the temerity to have a different scientific opinion than ours? Seriously guys, its a freaking local TV weatherman in central Ohio, and the fate of mankind depends on burning this guy at the stake? I sometimes get confused about what leftists really think about free speech, but this sure sounds more like a bunch of good Oklahoma Baptists reacting to finding out their TV minister is pro-abortion. But it is we skeptics who are anti-science?
Anyway, back to peer review, you can see in this example again the use of "peer review" as some kind of impremateur of correctness and shield against criticism. The author treats it as if it were a sacrament, like baptism or ordination. This certification seems to be so strong in their mind that just having been published in a peer-reviewed journal seems to be sufficient to complete the sacrament — the peer review does not necessarily seem to even have to be on the particular topic being discussed.
But in fact peer review has a much narrower function, and certainly is not, either in intent or practice, any real check or confirmation of the study in question. The main goals of peer review are:
That latter is a follow-up article, not a peer review comment.
Further, the quality and sharpness of peer review depends a lot on the reviewers chosen. For example, a peer review of Rush Limbaugh by the folks at LGF, Free Republic, and Powerline might not be as compelling as a peer review by Kos or Kevin Drum.
But instead of this, peer review is used by folks, particularly in political settings, as a shield against criticism, usually for something they don't understand and probably haven't even read themselves. Here is an example dialog:
Politician or Activist: "Mann's hockey stick proves humans are warming the planet"
Critic: "But what about Mann's cherry-picking of proxy groups; or the divergence problem in the data; or the fact that he routinely uses proxy's as a positive correlation in one period and different, even negative, correlation in another; or the fact that the results are most driven by proxys that have been manually altered; or the fact that trees really make bad proxies, as they seldom actually display the assumed linear positive relationship between growth and temperature?"
Politician or Activist, who 99% of the time has not even read the study in question and understands nothing of what critic is saying: "This is peer-reviewed science! You can't question that."
Postscript: I am not trying to offend anyone or make a point about religion per se in the comparisons above. I am not religious, but I don't have a problem with those that are. However, alarmists on the left often portray skepticism as part-and-parcel of what they see as anti-scientific ideas tied to the religious right. I get this criticism all the time, which is funny since I am not religious and not a political conservative. But I find parallels between climate alarmist and religion to be interesting, and a particularly effective criticism given some of the left's foaming-at-the-mouth disdain for religion.


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, Thailand Official Info - U.S. Department Of State information for The Kingdom of Thailand.
, Thailand Photography - seven days traveling through Thailand. Went from Bangkok to Koh Samui.
Travel articles, books, maps, photography & travel information. Where to go, what to do & great tips and tricks, as well as what to watch out for.


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Results 1 to 2 of 2
Thread: Silly Thing - They Fight Crime!
November 1st, 2010 #1
Silly Thing - They Fight Crime!
He's an underprivileged alcoholic grifter who knows the secret of the alien invasion. She's a mistrustful African-American bounty hunter who hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!
Alright so I have recently discovered the hilarious website They Fight Crime! - which randomly gives you a description of two adjective laden individuals that fight crime.
These tend to trigger rather amusing mental images and I thought it might be amusing if folks tried to illustrate some of these.
This is open to anyone - no real deadline no rules or limits or winning or losing. Just take a generated description from the website - and illustrate in any way you feel like and post the description you used.
- Similar Threads
- Art: Optimus Crime
- Art: Queens of Crime
- Silly sketch thing?
- Art: I Fight Crime
Hide this ad by registering as a memberNovember 2nd, 2010 #2
"She's a time-travelling French-Canadian schoolgirl on the trail of a serial killer."
"He's an all-American gay filmmaker with a winning smile and a way with the ladies."
"He's an immortal zombie assassin whom everyone believes is mad."
"She's an artistic goth traffic cop with a flame-thrower."
This is awesome, I might just have to do one of these!


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Realtime Foreign Exchange › US Dollar/Russian Ruble (FOREX:USDRUB)
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Free Instant Analysis: Let our Trade Triangle technology, brought to you courtesy of our premium service MarketClub, instantly analyze any stock, futures or forex market for you. It's free, It's informative, It's on the money. View our complimentary trend analysis for US Dollar/Russian Ruble (USDRUB) now.
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Grexit: Hope For The Worst?
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3 Niche Technology ETF's You Don't Know About and Are Worth Owning
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Today's Financial News
APNewsBreak: Vermont completes move of prisoners from Kentucky to Michigan
5 hours ago
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — The transfer of 280 Vermont prison inmates from a private prison in Kentucky to one in Michigan has been completed, a state Department of Corrections official said Tuesday. The inmates were moved from the Lee Adjustment Center in Beattyville, Kentucky, owned by the Corrections Corporation of America, to the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan, owned by another private prison firm, GEO Group Inc.
Greeks struggle with headaches and anxiety of cash shortages _ as tourists head to the beach
5 hours ago
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Gamal Takaway has turned up the hustle, to no avail. The popular waiter who goes by the nickname Jimmy often steps out into the pedestrian street in front of the Taverna Plaka restaurant to cajole strollers into taking a table. But even his epic charm has failed since the Greek government shut the nation's banks and imposed strict capital controls over the weekend.
Greece and creditors to discuss new proposal as bailout to expire, Athens to default on IMF
5 hours ago
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece's European creditors were assessing a last-minute proposal Athens made for a new two-year rescue deal, submitted just hours before the country's international bailout program expires and it loses access to billions of euros in funds. The crisis worsened over the weekend after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called a referendum for Sunday on creditors' proposals for reforms in return for bailout loans. That increased fears the country could soon fall out of the euro currency bloc and Greeks rushed to pull money out of ATMS. Tsipras is advocating a "no" vote.
Eurotunnel service resumes after striking French ferry workers block traffic for 2nd time
5 hours ago
CALAIS, France (AP) — Eurotunnel traffic has resumed after striking ferry workers blocked the railroad tracks leading to the Eurotunnel linking France and England, and train service across the Channel was suspended Tuesday. Service was resumed at 1700 CET (1500 GMT). Torching tires and blocking traffic, the French workers protested expected job cuts in the French port city of Calais linked to Eurotunnel's sale of its ferry service. Both freight and Eurostar passenger trains suspended their services.


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A client of mine has been running a WP Multisite set-up, but wants to decouple one of his websites and have it on a separate top-level domain.
I have been pointed towards this plugin as a means of managing the various redirects we will need to set up to redirect current traffic to this network website to the new separate website.
I'm not 100% sure that we can use this plugin to redirect from a WPMU sub-blog to an external website without it affecting the main WPMU website.
Any help/advice greatly appreciated.


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Great segment of new rules by comedian Bill Maher. I miss seeing him on comcast but you guys need to watch this its hilarious that is if your a democrat. We all know the political games both sides play but Bill is a genius at political comedy.
Bill Maher New Rules Bipartisianship?
For off-topic and non-football related topics such as life, TV, movies, women, video games, etc. If you want to talk other sports, such as MLB, NBA, soccer, etc. this is also the right place.
Moderators: Capologist, dirtybirdnw, thescout
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- thescout
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Bill Maher New Rules Bipartisianship?
Sometimes running the Mularkey offense makes me feel like I'm in a prison.
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Re: Bill Maher New Rules Bipartisianship?
haha good clip, makes me wanna get hbo again
When life gives you lemons, find some salt and tequila then invite me!
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Saint Johns, Ohio
Saint Johns is a census-designated place located along the border between the Union and Clay townships of Auglaize County, Ohio, United States.[1] As of the 2010 census it had a population of 185.[2]
It is located between Indian Lake and Wapakoneta at the intersection of U.S. Route 33 and State Route 65. Served by the Wapakoneta City School District, the zip code for Saint Johns is 45884.
|This section does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007)
The area consists of a post office, a Methodist church, a volunteer fire department, and a grain elevator. In the center of Saint Johns, on the corner of Center Street and Walnut Street, is a memorial recognizing this place to be known as Blackhoof's Last Home.[3] It was once inhabited with Indians, mostly Shawnee. Artifacts, such as arrow heads, can still be found along creek beds and in wooded areas.
- ^ U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Saint Johns, Ohio
- ^ "Geographic Identifiers: 2010 Demographic Profile Data (G001): St Johns CDP, Ohio". U.S. Census Bureau, American Factfinder. Retrieved July 11, 2013.
- ^ http://www.shelbycountyhistory.org/schs/indians/chiefblackhoof.htm
Coordinates: 40°33′20″N 84°04′49″W / 40.55556°N 84.08028°W
|This Auglaize County, Ohio state location article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.


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YIELD: Makes 4 servings
ACTIVE TIME: 20 minutes
TOTAL TIME: 20 minutes
Whisk lemon juice and minced garlic in medium bowl. Gradually whisk in olive oil. Season dressing to taste with salt and pepper. Arrange mushroom slices on serving platter, overlapping slightly. Sprinkle mushrooms with salt and pepper. Pour dressing over (mushrooms will soak up dressing). Sprinkle parsley, chives, and tarragon over mushrooms. Garnish with shaved Parmesan cheese and serve.


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Bridget Brosnihan, PhDTanYa Gwathmey-Williams, PhD
The Hypertension and Vascular Research Center Core Laboratory performs radioimmunoassays (RIAs) and enzyme-immunoassay (EIAs), and enzymatic assays for clinical and research purposes. The laboratory is certified by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) program. The laboratory serves as a reference laboratory for Pathology, and conducts measurements for research investigators in the institution and nationally. It also performs radioimmunoassays, enzyme-immunoassay and enzymatic assays for clinical and research purposes. To renew certification every two years, laboratories must demonstrate proficiency in immunoassays and ensure quality testing. More information about the CLIA program can be found on the FDA website.
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Disclaimer: The information on this website is for general informational purposes only and SHOULD NOT be relied upon as a substitute for sound professional medical advice, evaluation or care from your physician or other qualified health care provider.


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Legislation would protect Illinois consumers against air conditioning disconnection when temperatures may reach 95 degrees or above
SPRINGFIELD, Ill., May 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AARP today commended the Illinois House of Representatives for its unanimous passage of House Bill 5086, which will increase protections for consumers by preventing utility companies from shutting off cooling service if the temperature is forecasted to reach 95 degrees or above.
HB 5086, sponsored by State Representative Bob Flider (D-Decatur), passed the House unanimously on Thursday. It will now move to the State Senate under the sponsorship of Sen. Mike Jacobs (D-Moline).
The legislation provides cooling disconnection protection to residential customers, for non payment of bills, if the temperature is forecasted to reach 95 degrees or above, on any day when the National Weather Service has predicted that temperature for the following 24 hours; it also prevents disconnection on any day preceding a holiday or weekend when the forecast indicates that a temperature of 95 degrees or above will be reached during the holiday or weekend.
"Consumers need protections from having their electricity shut off during extreme summer weather - for older people to be without air-conditioning in the heat can be fatal," said Bob Gallo, AARP Illinois State Director. "AARP commends Rep. Flider and the House for their commitment to protecting Illinois consumers who might be facing hard times, and we urge the Senate to pass this legislation."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention excessive heat exposure caused 8,015 deaths in the United States from 1979-2003. These were more deaths than those caused by hurricanes, lighting, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined.
Current state law provides protections for customers from having their
electric or natural gas service disconnected for non payment during the
winter months. Ho
|SOURCE AARP Illinois
Copyright©2008 PR Newswire.
All rights reserved


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How Not To Answer The Question "What Are You Doing For The Latino Community Today?"
Here's the actual answer to that actual question from the mayor of East Haven, Connecticut, Joseph Maturo. Not that this answer is ever appropriate, but it was even less appropriate as it came in the wake of a scandal where four police officers were arrested for harassing Latino residents of East Haven. The Mayor of East Haven, everyone…putting the "mature" back in "Maturo."
The Honorable Joseph Maturo, Mayor Of East Haven And Respected Statesman
Preview Your Response


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4 days, 1100 miles- Colorado June Tour
View Single Post
ya' mon
Joined: Sep 2006
Location: The Peoples Republic- Rocky Mountain Edition
Oddometer: 266
We picked up a quick lunch in Vernal and did a couple miles of pavement south to get us back on the east side of the Green River. We made our way through some oil fields and over the White River till we came to the turn off for Dragon Road and Baxter Pass.
Now we were really getting into some remote areas.
The further south we got the terrain changed from the dry desert and sage brush to mountains and juniper.
The road up to Baxter Pass had these signs along the way. Anybody know the story behind these? I did some searching but came up empty. I'm guessing it is for a bike touring route, but you better be damn sure to bring a lot of water with you.
At some point, we slipped back into Colorado as we made our way up the pass. The route follows an old railroad grade the twists and turns up the mountains. At the top, we were greeted with amazing views to the south and west.
At this point, we had been riding since 7:00am and had logged over 250 miles. We were both looking forward to a hot meal and cold beer down in Fruita, but we had some dirt in front of us before that would happen.
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July 25th, 2013
Today we look back and celebrate the first year of FundersClub. It is humbling to think about what the FundersClub community has accomplished in just one year. We are privileged to be on this journey together and look forward to the years to come. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has helped make this possible.
Sincerely, The FundersClub Team


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The Making Of… Kimchi
Sunhui Chang is the owner of FuseBOX, a tiny jewel of a restaurant in an unlikely industrial neighborhood in West Oakland. Sunhui's passion is for making kimchi.
We heard about this story thanks to Sunhui's wife who sent us an email:
Kimchi is at least 4000 years old — I am proposing the making of kimchi by sunhui chang offusebox in west oakland — kimchi has traditionally been women's work — men rarely entered the kitchen and were usually not even allowed in the area when women make kimchi a time for them to share knowledge and gossip. sunhui (this is a female name chosen for him after his grandfather visited a fortune teller) is breaking many traditions with his name, and his work with kimchi absolutely hands on and hands deep in the process which takes hours he makes his own gochu jang also time intensive and a lost art — korean women are now coming to try his kimchi and remark how wonderful it is — in korea kimchi is spoken when taking a picture to get the big smile like us saying cheese — kimchi is it a pickle or a salad? sunhui is a humble but amazing storyteller especially about kimchi — kimchi in west oakland, ca.
-ellen sebastian chang (Sunhui Chang's wife)


text:
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Results: 241 - 250 of 1056
GQ Men Of The Year - Michael Sam Never Wants to go Through the NFL Draft Ever Again
Its been a big year for Michael Sam. Currently a free agent, the 24-year-old first openly gay NFL player was drafted by the St. Louis Rams, an experience he considers an honor and a privilegeand one hes glad he never has to go through again. read more
November 2014
GQ Men Of The Year - If Dave Chappelle Wasnt a Comedian Hed Be...
If Dave Chappelle wasnt a comedian, what would he be doing? Find out from the man himself, plus whats on his comedy bucket list, and why he may be having a mid-life crisis. read more
November 2014
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- Men's Fashion,
- Men's Style,
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GQ Men Of The Year - Forget Jeggings, Steve Carell Wants a JONG
When you can count Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey, and Zach Galifianakis among your inner circle, its hard not to feel like the least funny one in the room. Steve Carell tells us why his comedy pals make him feel bad about himself, why he wouldnt last 45 minutes on an Alaskan crab fishing trip, and why hed like to wear a jong (jean + thong, duh) on his next GQ Men of the Year cover. read more
November 2014
Food + Travel
America's Bartender - Making Delicious Cocktails with Americas Best Bartender
Ran Duan knocked out the competition to become this years most imaginative bartender. Now, the leading mixologist shows you how to make his winning cocktail, the Monarchya refreshing drink with apple liquor, lemon juice and cardamom tincture. read more
November 2014
GQ Men Of The Year - Shailene Woodleys Next Role? Riding in the Tour de France
OK, so she isnt actually racing in the Tour de France, but for next year, Shailene Woodley has her sights set on conquering the land of baguettes and wineon her bicycle. Our Crush of the Year reflects back on the highs of 2014, and tells us what's up next. read more
November 2014
Most Expensivest Shit - This is What Happens When You Dont Know Who 2 Chainz Is
2 Chainz stops by Cooper Classic Cars in N.Y.C. to check out rare and exotic rides. See what happens when the owner tells 2 Chainz he has no clue who the rapper is. read more
November 2014
GQ Men Of The Year - Divergent Star Ansel Elgort is Pretty Stoked He Moved Out of His Parents' House
This year Ansel Elgort grew up. He starred in two hit films, Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars, he was named one of our Men of the Year, and, most importantly, he moved out of his parents house. Find out what else rocked the actors world in 2014. read more
November 2014
The GQ Eye: GQ on Style
Ryan Gosling Surfaces, Continues to Ride for Creepwave
Creepwave Lives! Ryan Gosling was seen at the airport on Saturday with the beginnings of a Fu Manchu and a bonus flavor savor. It appears he may be concealing a wifebeater under his cardigan,... read more
Monday, 11/17/2014 at 1:45PM
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My First Job - John Mulaney Threw Up and Blamed It on a Kid Once
When he was a young kid himself, John Mulaney worked as a camp counselor watching after children not much younger than himself. He made a lot of memoriesmaking enemies with a kid named Ezra, throwing up on a bus and blaming it on one of his campers, and making a whopping $800 in one summer read more
November 2014
GQ Men Of The Year - Chris Pratt Thinks The LEGO Movie is the Best Film of 2014
This year was seismic for Chris Pratt. His favorite football team won the Super Bowl, he hosted Saturday Night Live, and he starred in two of 2014s highest-grossing films (The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Lost Galaxy). The 35-year-old actor tells us his favorite things from 2014 which, somehow, doesnt include his being named one of our GQ Men of the Year& read more
November 2014
Results: 241 - 250 of 1056
News + Politics
- Meet David Ellison, the Tech Scion Taking Over Hollywood
- Best Swimsuits for Men of Any Body Type - GQ Style
- 14 Slip-On Sneakers Perfect for Travel
- How to Blue Up Your Boring Tie Collection
- Chris Pratt on His Late Father and How He Feels About Him Now
- How Chris Pratt Became a $200 Million Leading Man
How To
Food + Travel
- The Sick-of-Winter Guide to Spring Cooking
- How to Make Tacos for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
- David Chang's Kitchen: Don't Get All "Fresh" with Me
- David Chang's Kitchen: Your Idea of Bologna is Total Baloney
- Chart: The Family Tree of Bourbon Whiskey
- Recipe: Semi-Summer Salad - Chef Jeff Taibe of Oak + Almond


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Pleasant Home
John Farson House
historic view of front elevation of "Pleasant Home", which was built for John Farson.
|217 Home Avenue, Oak Park, Cook County, Illinois
|41°53′7″N 87°48′2″W / 41.88528°N 87.80056°WCoordinates: 41°53′7″N 87°48′2″W / 41.88528°N 87.80056°W
|4.7 acres (19,000 m2)[2]
|George W. Maher
|Architectural style
|Prairie style
|Governing body
|Pleasant Home Foundation
|NRHP Reference #
|Significant dates
|Added to NRHP
|June 19, 1972
|Designated NHL
|June 19, 1996[3]
Pleasant Home, also known as the John Farson House, is a historic home located in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, United States. The large, Prairie style mansion was designed by architect George Washington Maher and completed in 1897. The house was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on June 19, 1972. Exactly 24 years later, in 1996, it was declared a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior.[3][4]
Pleasant Home, historically known as the John Farson House, derives its common name from its location, at the intersection of Pleasant Street and Home Avenue in Oak Park.[5] It was built and designed by prominent Prairie School architect George W. Maher in 1897.[6] The house was constructed for John Farson, who lived in the house from 1897 until 1908. In 1908 the home's most recent private owner, Herbert S. Mills, bought the house and stayed there until he sold it to the Park District of Oak Park in 1939.[6]
Restoration began on the house in 1966 with a US$26,000 rewiring project.[6] In 1970, at a cost of more than $40,000, a number of tasks were completed in the restoration process. On the home's exterior, the fascia and soffit were rebuilt as needed and the roof was repaired as well. Also on the exterior, the wood surfaces were repainted. The repairs were conducted in a manner consistent with the original design and construction of the building.[6]
Pleasant Home is an important example of early Prairie style. The house is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places; it was added on June 19, 1972.[1] In addition to the structure's individual listing on the National Register it was listed as a contributing property to the Ridgeland-Oak Park Historic District when the district was added to the National Register in 1983.[1][2] On June 19, 1996 Pleasant Home was declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark.[7] Two days prior to the National Historic Landmark designation the village of Oak Park's village board declared the John Farson house an Oak Park Landmark.[5] The Farson House is among the earliest of the Prairie style buildings. The house is considered the finest surviving example of Maher's work.[7]
- ^ a b c "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2010-07-09.
- ^ a b "Pleasant Home," Property Information Report, HAARGIS Database, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. Retrieved 27 May 2007
- ^ a b "John Farson House". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Retrieved 2007-10-09.
- ^ Kathleen Cummings (January 13, 1992). "National Historic Landmark Nomination: John Farson House / Pleasant Home" (PDF). National Park Service.. Accompanying 16 photos, exterior and interior, from c.1901-1905, c.1920 and 1972. PDF (5.87 MB)
- ^ a b "Pleasant Home/John Farson House," Oak Park Landmark Nomination Form, HAARGIS Database, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, pp. 12-31. Retrieved May 27, 2007.
- ^ a b c d "Pleasant Home," Illinois Historic Sites Survey, HAARGIS Database, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, pp. 1-11. Retrieved May 27, 2007.
- ^ a b "John Farson House," NHL Database, National Historic Landmarks Program. Retrieved May 27, 2007.
External links[edit]
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Farson House.
- George Washington Maher - architect of "Pleasant Home"
- Pleasant Home Foundation
- Historical Society of Oak Park & River Forest


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Hiring a reliable Humboldt County property management company is an essential part of real estate investing. In order to find a firm that can properly take care of your asset, you will have to do a little bit of research. Normally, these asset managers take over all the responsibilities of the owner, and they get a commission in return. These commissions are never fixed, so it is important to negotiate with the company to ensure that you get the lowest commissions. Read on to learn more about finding the right company.
Before you hire any company, you may want to first find out the types of property they normally deal in. You may be surprised to know that there are some firms that cannot take care of residential properties because they only specialize in commercial and industrial real estate. Therefore, the are of specialization of a service providers must be considered during the search for a reliable service provider.
Most real estate managers can handle different types of rental properties. However, there are some firms that only handle commercial properties like high rise office buildings. Some companies also handle residential units only. When looking for an asset manager, it is important that you find out the types of rental units that a company deals with before you commit yourself. These managers normally deduct all the expenses, like cost of repairs and their commission, before they forward the proceeds to the investor.
Constructing a rental building is only that first part of real estate investing. All that would be for nothing if there are no tenants to rent the units. For this reason, it is safe to say that real estate managers are the second most important people in the industry, after the investor. Their responsibilities include ensuring that the asset appreciates in value, ensuring that repairs are done in a timely manner, finding tenants, rent collection and regular maintenance among other things.
Some real estate managers nowadays use management software to keep track of the accounts of their clients. Investors can access their accounts remotely to see how money is coming in or going out. They can also get information about the types of repairs that have been done on the property. This is known to boost customer confidence by promoting transparency and accountability.
Management of real estate can be a little bit challenging. This is because the manager needs to deal with tenants who default on rent in a legally acceptable manner. Another task is finding paying tenants to move into vacant units. This may involve marketing on the internet among other platforms.
When you hand over your rental properties to a professional manager, you will be able to have enough time to spend with your family. If you want to go on vacation, you can do so without worrying about your assets. Furthermore, this will give you a chance to look for more lucrative business opportunities.
Just like any other business in the country, Humboldt County property management firms are required to register with the state. Furthermore, they are required to acquire a license from local authorities before they can start offering their services in the county. If a company has met all the requirements, it is important that you ask your attorney to read the terms of engagement before you sign any binding contract.
If you are looking for Humboldt county properties click this link here. Jacques Debets Real Estate offers listing and selling of rural ranches and properties throughout Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties, and you can contact us at http://www.debetsrealestate.com/humboldt-county-rural-properties.html now.


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because I can
Joined: Sep 2010
Location: San Francisco Bay area
Oddometer: 9,116
Originally Posted by
I wonder if the flywheel and crankshaft are balanced together or balanced Independently.
My goal is to reduce the flywheel mass as much as possible by using the post 80's clutch and "flywheel".
Personally, if I rode a pre-'81 model swapping over to a late model clutch would be the first thing I would do to it. Well, that and converting my snowflakes to tubeless. Swapping over to a simplex timing chain would be a close third. The '81 on clutch is light years ahead IMO both in weight AND function. They can easily handle way more than stock power unlike the earlier units. The earlier units have enough trouble holding stock power!
They are balanced independently. They can be balanced as a unit but I see almost no advantage to it.
I have never shortened an input shaft and clutch rod. I have swapped many input shafts. That includes the later cover plate, clutch rod, lever, the whole deal from cable end to clutch. I recommend someone with experience if you swap shafts. Remember that with modifications supposedly most all transmissions interchange but their parts do not. They will fit together and work for a few thousand miles but then you will have a mess on your hands. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the changed helical gear pressure face angle is the angle of the helical. That is the same for both PFA's. The difference is in the shape of each individual tooth and it is hard to see just by looking.
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In the explanation phase of the investigation, students should describe to each other and to the class the conclusions drawn from the data. They then should construct plausible explanations that can account for the observed data. In developing these explanations, students should explore the limitations of the data in providing complete explanations and consider what additional kinds of evidence might be gathered to support their hypotheses.
Student Objectives
Students will continue to rely on the Student Reading, the map of the Hawaiian islands, and the data in Table 1 to provide the raw material for their narratives.
Teaching Strategies
Constructing a narrative gives students the opportunity to relate easily understood events—such as the journey of an individual fly from one island to another—to data that may seem to have little relevance to the everyday world. Such accounts can make abstract concepts such as speciation concrete and accessible. Putting the conclusions they draw from the data in the form of a story allows students to demonstrate their understanding of important concepts in their own words, emphasizing the understanding of the idea rather than their knowledge of facts or terminology.
To initiate this part of the investigation, teachers could assign the following task: Write a narrative describing how the four species of picture-winged flies may have evolved from a common ancestor.
The entire class, working together, could write the narrative, with the teacher guiding the class in selecting conclusions consistent with the data. Or the teacher and class could work together to begin the story, with students finishing the story working in groups. Alternately, the students could write the stories individually or in small groups.
One way to begin the writing of narratives would be to provide students with all or part of the following sample narrative:
About four million years ago on the island of Kauai there lived an inter-breeding population of picture-winged flies. Every member of this population had the four chromosomal inversions i, k, o, and b. About three million years ago a storm on Kauai resulted in a large number of flies being swept off the island and carried over the sea. Most of the flies