CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

170 Years of Earth Surface Temperature Data Show No Evidence of Significant Warming Charles Rotter

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/11/14/170-years-of-earth-surface-temperature-data-show-no-evidence-of-significant-warming/

Author: Thomas K. Bjorklund, University of Houston, Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Key Points

1. From 1850 to the present, the noise-corrected, average warming of the surface of the earth is less than 0.07 degrees C per decade.

2. The rate of warming of the surface of the earth does not correlate with the rate of increase of fossil fuel emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere.

3. Recent increases in surface temperatures reflect 40 years of increasing intensities of the El Nino Southern Oscillation climate pattern.

Abstract

This study investigates the relationships between surface temperatures from 1850 to the present and reported long-range temperature predictions of global warming. A crucial component of this analysis is the calculation of an estimate of the warming curve of the surface of the earth. The calculation removes errors in temperature measurements and fluctuations due to short-duration weather events from the recorded data. The results show the average rate of warming of the surface of earth for the past 170 years is less than 0.07 degrees C per decade. The rate of warming of the surface of the earth does not correlate with the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The perceived threat of excessive future global temperatures may stem from misinterpretation of 40 years of increasing intensities of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern in the eastern Pacific Ocean. ENSO activity culminated in 2016 with the highest surface temperature anomaly ever recorded. The rate of warming of the earth’s surface has dropped 41 percent since 2006.

Caltech recently announced the start of a 5-year project with several other research centers to build a new climate model “from the ground up” (Perkins, R. 2018). During these five years, the world’s understanding of the causes of climate change should be greatly improved.

The scientific goal must be to narrow the range of uncertainty of predictions with better data and better models until human intervention makes sense. We have the time to get it right. A rational environmental protection program and a vibrant economy can co-exist. The challenge is to allow scientists the time and freedom to work without interference from special interests.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

What If They Gave an Impeachment and Nobody Came? Kurt Schlichter

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/11/18/what-if-they-gave-an-impeachment-and-nobody-came-n2556617?

So, while that human troll doll of an ambassador was back east dancing for Adam Schiff’s pleasure and I was out in a glitzy blue Los Angeles-area city at a nice restaurant to score some munchables and people were talking and chatting and interacting and how many were talking about impeachment? 

Here’s a hint: It’s the same number as the average dates per decade for a Weekly Standard writer. 

Just kidding – there is no such thing as a writer for the Weekly Standard because it destroyed itself by sucking.

The number is “Zero.”Nil.Nada. 

Even less than the amount of Indian in Chef Sitting Bolshevik’s DNA.

No one cares.

Well, not no one. People in Washington care. After all, Donald Trump’s real crime is not deferring to the same D.C. geniuses who were so relentlessly awful that they caused us to elect Donald Trump in the first place. The meme is going around that “I hired Donald Trump to fire people like you,” and boy – is it ever on point. That the president – yeah, he’s our president and he’s going to keep being our president for five more long years – refuses to submit to the bureaucrats of the ruling caste on foreign policy is not a bug. It’s a feature – the feature that closed the sale.

See, our ruling class is utter garbage, as the televised circus on the Potomac proved. But no one goes to circuses anymore.

What is the name of the person who watched Adam Schiff’s festival of political onanism and said, “Why yes, these startling revelations that a bunch of over-credentialed glorified DMV clerks heard from their pal who heard from another pal who heard from his manicurist that Donald Trump wanted to investigate Hoover Biden, the Tony Montana of cheesy nepo-graft, over his $50K+ a month bribe, has made me want to undo the election.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama Granted Clemency to Terrorists and Traitors, But We’re Supposed to Be Angry at Trump’s Pardons By Matt Margolis

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-granted-clemency-to-terrorists-and-traitors-but-were-supposed-to-be-angry-at-trumps/

Last week, President Trump granted full pardons for Army First Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who’d been accused of war crimes. Lorance had served six years of a 19-year sentence, and Golsteyn was facing trial for killing an alleged Taliban bombmaker. Navy SEAL Edward R. Gallagher, who was found not guilty of war crimes, but still had his rank reduced, was granted clemency and restoration of rank.

Lawmakers had been pushing for pardons for Lorance and Golsteyn because they’d taken actions to defend themselves on the battlefield and were charged with war crimes for it.  Yet, when President Trump pardoned them, it immediately sparked controversy and outrage. Pete Buttigieg joined in the outrage chorus, claiming Trump “dishonored our armed services.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Drive-By Media Cash In on Impeachment Hysteria . By Frank Miele

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/18/drive by_media_cash_in_on_impeachment_hysteria_141751.html

An unhappy coincidence Thursday morning was, for me, the perfect metaphor for the mass (media) hysteria engendered by the televised impeachment hearings the nation was burdened with last week.

Although Chairman Adam Schiff had only scheduled hearings before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday and Friday, the programming department at CNN apparently decided to maximize their ratings by touting “Special Coverage” of the impeachment on Thursday as well. At least, that was the message that had been sent to YouTube TV, whose channel guide promoted “Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage” on CNN from early morning till mid-afternoon on Thursday.

No doubt, the hosts at CNN (under the tutelage of Never Trump boss Jeff Zucker) were prepared to give their last full measure of devotion to a cause that was conceived in hatred, and dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump is unworthy of the presidency and must be impeached, so help us God.

But on that Thursday morning, a true tragedy intervened in the form of a mass shooting at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif. Therefore, for YouTube TV viewers at least, we were treated to the spectacle of CNN circling the shooting scene like carrion-hunting vultures under the banner of “Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage.”

The shooting, and more particularly CNN’s fascination with it, reminded us (if we needed reminding) that cable news is built on a business plan of sensationalism, shock and outrage. It also resulted in a palimpsest of comments by CNN host Anderson Cooper and others that were equally applicable to the shooting and to the impeachment coverage that it had replaced.

“There is a numbness to this, I think, in some orders” — quarters? — “as well,” Cooper intoned solemnly. “It’s a horrific numbness of people looking up at a TV screen, seeing this yet again, and it just seems like it goes on and on and on.”

He was talking about the school shooting, and yet his words could just as easily have been about the reaction that many voters have to the latest incarnation of a Democratic impeachment push that has been underway literally since the day after the 2016 election.

Now, we must be careful not to compare the actual tragedy of an act of violence such as a school shooting with the potential destruction of the civil order through an act of political sabotage. They have nothing in common except that both are fodder for our rubber-necking news media, and that is the warning I want to impart.

We already know from the Project Veritas undercover investigation of CNN that the news channel’s president, Jeff Zucker, has a blatant anti-Trump bias, which he has passed on to his employees.

In recordings of daily phone calls captured by the Project Veritas whistleblower, Zucker directed staffers to push the impeachment narrative above all else.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE PROFITS OF DOOM

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

My mailbox is full of late year requests for donations from organizations, institutions, publications, the arts and politicians.

 Warning about the growing epidemic of Anti-Semitism is always good when mining the pockets of donors. Take the Anti Defamation League whose avowed purpose is: : “Fighting Anti-Semitism and Hate-The mission of the ADL is to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”

So, given this lofty purpose how is it that the ADL, in 2017 published an excellent overview on the outsize antisemitic violence, hatred, sermons and school lectures in Moslem nations, and has now simply air-brushed it?

See and hear Charles Jacobs in this video explain it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=255&v=jVqqPx-Cq8k&feature=emb

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Wages of Trump Fixation The strange case of a reborn Max Boot and the folly of impeachment. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/17/the-wages-of-trump-fixation/

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

Most recently Boot declared—and then quickly retracted it only in embarrassment after popular outrage—that chief ISIS mass-murdering psychopathic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not kill himself in cowardly fashion as Trump had described: “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.”

When Baghdadi was cornered by American forces, he chose to murder three innocent children rather than surrender—consistent with his entire venomous career of ordering the beheading, burning, and mutilating of innocent captives from a safe distance. The murder of defenseless children is cowardly.

No one should know better the horrific crimes of a mass-murdering Josef Stalin than the Russian-born Boot. Stalin’s purges, orchestrated famines, gulags, show trials, liquidation of the officer class, and atrocities during World War II perhaps accounted for over 20 million Russian deaths. So how could Boot write, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump”? Twenty million dead souls don’t quite match Boot’s hatred of Trump.

After the former Republican Boot saw Trump elected, by defeating his own particular favored Republican primary candidate, and Hillary Clinton, he seemed a bit embittered: “For the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

European Court Applies Double Standard against Israeli Products by Soeren Kern

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15165/european-court-israel-labels

The Court of Justice ruling, which effectively encourages the strict French labelling requirements to be applied across the European Union, has been roundly condemned as reflecting the EU’s anti-Israel bias. Many commentators noted that of all the world’s many territorial conflicts — from Crimea to Northern Cyprus to Tibet to Western Sahara — the EU has singled out Israel as the only country subject to special labelling requirements.

“There are over 200 ongoing territorial disputes across the world, yet the ECJ has not rendered a single ruling related to the labeling of products originating from these territories. Today’s ruling is both political and discriminating against Israel.” — Israeli Foreign Ministry.

“It also goes against the international standard of trade set by the World Trade Organization… This is the worst kind of fiddling while Rome burns. The European court quoting Israel for its ‘breach of the rules of international humanitarian law’ whilst Hamas and its acolytes are bombing innocent civilian populations in Israel is one of the most perverse ironies I have witnessed in quite some time.” — Menachem Margolin, Chairman, European Jewish Association, Brussels.

The Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s highest court, has ruled that food products made in so-called Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights must be specifically labelled as such and may not carry the generic label “Made in Israel.”

The ruling, which singles out Israel, was presumably motivated not by concerns over food safety or consumer protection but by the EU’s anti-Israeli foreign policy preference. It has been roundly criticized as biased, discriminatory and anti-Semitic.

The labelling case has its origins in questions regarding the interpretation of EU Regulation 1169/2011, dated October 25, 2011, concerning consumer information on food products. The regulation was ambiguous on the issue of the labelling of food products from Israel.

On November 12, 2015, the European Commission, in an effort to clarify existing EU legislation on origin information of products from Israeli-occupied territories, issued a so-called Interpretive Notice. This directive stated that food products sold in the EU may not be labelled as “Made in Israel” if they are produced outside of Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The document explained:

“The European Union, in line with international law, does not recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967, namely the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and does not consider them to be part of Israel’s territory, irrespective of their legal status under domestic Israeli law.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Radical Persecution Must Be Eradicated by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15160/radical-persecution

The captives, some as young as five years old, were reportedly “tortured, starved and sexually abused.”

“The government of Pakistan failed to adequately protect these groups, and it perpetrated systematic, ongoing, egregious religious freedom violations; this occurred despite some optimism about the potential for reform under the new government of Prime Minister Imran Khan.” — United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s, 2019 Report.

A first step towards eradicating this threat might be establishing an international interfaith coalition of Muslims, Christians and other religions, with chapters in every country, to stand up against religious persecution and on behalf of the right of every individual to harbor beliefs and engage in practices of his or her choosing.

On September 26, Nigerian soldiers liberated more than 300 men and boys — some as young as five years old — from what could be called a prison masquerading as an Islamic school in the city of Kaduna in northwestern Nigeria.

“Most of the freed captives seen by a Reuters reporter in the city of Kaduna were children, aged up to their late teens. Some shuffled with their ankles manacled and others were chained by their legs to large metal wheels to prevent escape…

“Reports carried by local media said the captives had been tortured, starved and sexually abused…

“One young man, Hassan Yusuf, said he had been sent to the school because of concerns about his way of life following a few years studying abroad.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Good Liar – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

The real measure of a clever script in a suspense film is the aha moment at the end when the viewer realizes that there were clues scattered throughout the film which were either missed or more likely misinterpreted. In other words, the writer or director’s talent was in pulling you in the direction he orchestrated and doing that so well that you failed to connect the dots that were there all along. Hitchcock spoke about providing the audience with a suggestion and sufficient information to figure out the rest. This is a challenge in film since the audience only sees what the director allows us to see but frequently, on second view, you will realize that a line of dialogue, or something in the background, on the night table or hanging on the coat rack might have helped to solve the puzzle.

The Good Liar is the opposite of this – it belongs in the tradition of the entire plot turning out to have been a dream. Its success is solely a tribute to STAR POWER, the ability of two senior actors who are so comfortable in front of the camera that we could watch them having dinner in real time without getting bored. The plot is so farfetched that neither the action in the present, nor the flashback to the past makes any sense. The denouement is so unrealistic that we are left with just a one word comment: whatever. Since it’s impossible to prove this to you without giving away all the connivances, I can only say that it’s not unpleasant to spend some time with Helen Mirren and Ian Mckellen, even at the expense of being had.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Cuomo’s Carbon Casualties Ban pipelines and fracking and then blame business for shortages.

Posted By on November 18th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomos-carbon-casualties-11574033835

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a proud opponent of fossil fuels. But now that the consequences of his policies are harming people in the real world—those who can’t afford to escape to Florida—the Governor is blaming others.

Mr. Cuomo has blocked shale fracking upstate and several pipelines delivering natural gas from Pennsylvania in the name of protecting waterways. But this is an excuse. Natural-gas production in Pennsylvania has increased 60% since Mr. Cuomo banned fracking five years ago, adding $6 billion to Keystone State GDP and its waterways are fine.

Mr. Cuomo’s real purpose is to eliminate natural gas as part of his political commitment to “carbon neutrality” by 2050, and this isn’t a cost-free promise. Upstate New Yorkers struggle economically and pay among the highest energy costs in the U.S. A quarter still rely on heating oil, which costs about $1,000 a year more than natural gas and emits nearly 40% more CO2. New Yorkers pay about 40% more for electricity than Pennsylvanians and 15% more than in New Jersey.

The utility Con Edison in March halted natural gas hookups north of New York City due to pipeline constraints. National Grid, the gas utility that serves Long Island, this fall imposed a moratorium on new hookups after the Governor vetoed a 23-mile gas pipeline beneath New York Harbor. National Grid said it couldn’t guarantee uninterrupted service without the pipeline. New oil-to-gas conversions could cause future gas shortages and outages.