Stupid Or Lying: An Analytic Case Study
Hey, let’s see what new pot of foolishness they’ve got cooking over at Newsbusters:
Will Media Ignore Harsh Winter of 2008 to Preserve Global Warming Myth?
By Noel Sheppard | February 25, 2008 – 12:43 ETAs people that actually pay attention to weather are aware, the winter in the Northern Hemisphere this year is following the same pattern as last year’s extraordinarily frigid conditions in the Southern Hemisphere.
In fact, all kinds of cold and snow-related records are occurring all over the supposedly warming planet this winter despite continued claims by climate alarmists that the world will come to an end if we all don’t immediately reduce our emissions of that awful — naturally occurring and necessary for most life on earth! — gas, carbon dioxide.
Makes one wonder how climate alarmists will spin the winter of 2008 so as to keep alive their precious global warming myth. Fortunately, as NewsBusters has reported for many months, foreign press outlets are much more honest with their citizens than America’s, as observed in this fabulous article in the Canadian National Post Monday[.]
Huh. That doesn’t seem quite right. Let’s look at the fabulous article — or, rather, opinion column — in Canada’s right-wing National Post:
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”
[…]
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
Hmm. Okay, let’s look at the report by the National Climatic Data Center.
Damn, wait a second: Sheppard only linked to Gunter, and Gunter didn’t link to the report. What shall we do?
[Zeerp] “Hello, dum-dums.”
Oh Great Gazoogle, just like Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters, we are apparently confounded in the task of checking and citing this source without a link. How can we… Oh wait, what’s this?
Climate of 2007 – in Historical Perspective
Annual Report
National Climatic Data Center
15 January 2008The year 2007 the 10th warmest year for the contiguous U.S., since national records began in 1895, according to preliminary data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The year was marked by exceptional drought in the U.S. Southeast and the West, which helped fuel another extremely active wildfire season. The year also brought outbreaks of cold air, and killer heat waves and floods. Meanwhile, the global surface temperature for 2007 was the fifth warmest since records began in 1880.
[…]
The greatest warming has taken place in high latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Anomalous warmth in 2007 contributed to the lowest Arctic sea ice extent since satellite records began in 1979, surpassing the previous record low set in 2005 by a remarkable 23 percent. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, this is part of a continuing trend in end-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent reductions of approximately 10 percent per decade since 1979.
Analysis:
Note: With Sheppard, as with John Hinderaker, ‘mistakes’ and points of ignorance nearly always work in his argument’s favor. Thus, ‘stupid’ and ‘shrewd’ may enjoy a complex and non-exclusive relationship. Gunter, we don’t know about — but a conservative has to be pretty slovenly indeed, in this Internet age of ours, to write a column pretending that a publicly-viewable document says the opposite of what it actually says, while not even bothering to confound the issue, attack the messenger, or twist common English terms of fact into tortured balloon-animals.
It’s almost charming in its naiveté. We sort of like the guy.
Add’l note: His sea ice quote comes from here, btw. Here’s what the guy actually said:
The cold is also making the ice thicker in some areas, compared to recorded thicknesses last year, Lagnis added.
“The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that’s a significant increase,” he said.
If temperatures remain cold this winter, Lagnis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.
But he added that it’s too soon to say what impact this winter will have on the Arctic summer sea ice, which reached its lowest coverage ever recorded in the summer of 2007.
Maybe Gunter belongs in the Stupid quadrant after all; the distinction between ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ seems genuinely to be confounding him.
Update: Yes, no, I’m sorry; we were wrong. He’s actually Stupid and Feckless.
This is the National Climatic Data Center document he used as his source. Yes, that’s the entire thing.
Our analysis is ruined, alas, due to experimenter error. We’ll try again soon with better methodology, including appropriate positive and negative controls.
[Great thanx to J— and Sagra]
Citizens of Georgia, rejoice! The long drought is over! We know this because Lorne Gunter and Noel Sheppard have said so!
Wait, it isn’t over? We’re still starved for water? Ok, back to praying then.
Shrewd and stupid in the same quadrant?
I would marry The Great Gazoogle in a heartbeat.
Hmm…well documented trends vs. what I see out my window? The choice is obvious, especially after receiving a check from oil exec buddies!
Someone please, please, please explain to these eejits (or rather the eejits who listen to these oil company shills) that weather and climate are not the same focking thing.
If there’s global warming, then why does it snow in the Arctic, hm?
What do you mean, the Arctic is melting?
Uh, No.
Let’s apply this logic elsewhere:
Government intelligence analysts say that there are terrorists all over the world plotting our violent demise, but there were no mushroom clouds when I woke up this morning!
And even the out of the window test doesn’t work. The winter so far has been incredibly warm on the East Coast, and here in Philadelphia last Friday saw the first real snow with accumulation & there have been quite a few days in the 60s. So my anecdotal claims beat your out-of-ass statistics!
Oh totally. Sheppard is very good at knowing what he needs to remain ignorant about.
Oh totally.
Isn’t there some kind of lobe-separating brain surgery involved with that?
run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early,
Um, I’m pretty sure that if this is happening on a regular basis something is broken. Ya might want to check in to that.
Tweet
Ahh, a fine example of what I like to call Pullin’ A Sowell:
Lie- completely, absolutely, non-negotiably lie- throughout a column, act snooty, exeunt. Don’t even hope that no one catches you on it because there’s always next week’s column, in which you will lie- completely, absolutely, non-negotiably lie.
By the way, in Canada we call it the Notional Pest. It was a Conrad Black vehicle that is a sad, sad excuse for a newspaper and never cracked the (establishment Tory) Globe and Mail—we call it the Grope, or Grope and Flail—or Toronto Star circulation numbers, because it was so obviously a wingnut welfare vehicle and even business readers only read it for the ego stroking and the weeklong AGW denial celebration.
Tune in next time, when Noel Sheppard will say:
If there’s global cooling, then why isn’t there a brisk breeze in the summer air?
What do you mean we’ve had the harshest winter of ever?
Uh, No.
Global warming is a farce, y’all. There are places on this planet that have simply never gotten warmer in decades. Like my freezer. Or my ex-girlfriend’s heart.
Take that, liberal whine-ateologists.
They couldn’t wait much longer to publish an article about the arctic sea ice re-freezing.
Ahem. My version of the Great Gagoozle provided the dotgov link: here.
The stoopid part is that the “49th coolest January in 114 years” (in other words, the 65th hottest?) disproves anything. Didn’t they see the Day After Tomorrow?
Geez, it’s almost as though they’re deliberately ignoring all those people who said that climate change, aka global warming, would cause extremes in weather — like (duh!) hotter summers followed by colder winters! Lessee if Gunter of the National Pissed or the eejits at the Global Male (so called because of its extremely limited demographic appeal) figger it out when summer temps in their swanky Toronto neighbourhoods start hitting 50C on a regular basis but they’re still freezing their asses off all winter long. (“Uh, duh, Gunter, I wuz gunna grow ornges!”) The weather related short-term memory of some Canadians (car skidding through intersection during December blizzard, driver thinking, “Uh, duh, gee, Bob, it looks like it’s snowing! Who’d’a thunk, hyuk hyuk!”) never ceases to amaze me.
Does denialism make you cool? Sadly, no. A crank is a crank, especially when they work for a crank tank.
Ahem, if I may be pedantic for just a moment here…
“Global warming” is a misnomer. The proper description is “global climate change”.
The term “global warming” came into play because of the observation that the Earth, on average, is getting warmer. The key part there, of course, is “on average”. As the Earth’s climate changes some places will get warmer, but some places will get cooler. Some will get drier, others wetter. And some (Florida, Bangladesh) will be underwater.
In other words, any local observations of climatic trends cannot be used in and of themselves as proof about the global climate.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled hallucinations.
The coldest winter in almost fourteen years
Could never, never change your mind
Oooh,
Oooh,
Oooooh.
I don’t think a personality matrix has ever made me laugh until it hurt…until now. Gavin, you have GOT to copyright that bad boy, create a scaled test and start us all playing place the politician in the Matrix–I’m betting dumya ends up in the crosshairs, smack in the middle.
“Thus, ’stupid’ and ’shrewd’ may enjoy a complex and non-exclusive relationship.”
Just awesome.
Lorne Gunter = Urgent Loner
That looks like a crude PhotoShop of the Great Gazoogle. Anyone with any sense of how the little green men work at all would immediately sniff this out as a false image. I’m less than impressed.
It looks like Gunter & Sheppard are talking about only 2008 — he reports temperature data from only January and February. So they didn’t need to Gazoogle the 2007 statistics — they were actually making the case that ~6 weeks of weather data were enough to ignore a several century trend. I think you might need to replot that graph with more of teh stupid and teh feckless.
BTW, Ozy is importantly correct — “global warming” is a slight misnomer. The real problem is increased variance and catastrophic change (e.g., the jet stream moving or other things that make currently habitable places less habitable). But it’s hard to fit “Fight Increased Global Weather Variability” on a bumpersticker.
Of course, if you plotted global temperatures on a stock market graph, and showed it to these people, they’d be all-in over that investment. It’s obviously tending up! Little dips like this aren’t affecting the trend line!
Nah, one cold winter and “Oops, global warming is all over! Ha-ha, we win”.
1. they were actually making the case that ~6 weeks of weather data were enough to ignore a several century trend.
Oh, no. Gunter’s got those several centuries and any other temporal frame covered:
Unspecified anthropological and geological data is his ace in the hole!
2. Check your Newsbusters link.
Douche-hound Pantload has linked to this; BTW, did anyone see The Load on Glenn Beck last week? And by see, of course, I mean that rhetorically, since no one actually watches. These may be the two douchiest white guys in captivity.
They can’t be in captivity if they’re running through the wilds of cable news. Time to capture them and drag them back to the zoo.
Just updated — the Newsbusters link is fixed, and I added a bit about the smaller NOAA document, which does seem to be the one he used.
Speaking of Goldberg and the National Post:
From Liberal Fascism, the blog about the book Liberal Fascism, February 25, 2008.
They can’t be in captivity if they’re running through the wilds of cable news. Time to capture them and drag them back to the zoo.
It’s a pity Steve Irwin is dead.
More pedantry:
Global warming means that the planet as a whole is radiating less energy away into space than it used to. This is not the same as climate change.
The climate of our planet is affected by how much energy is available. More energy means higher overall temperatures AND more variability.
People who say “It’s fucking cold out today, therefore GW is just so much bullshit” are the modern Flat Earthers.
xo,
mongo
Steve’s best mate Wes is still available. And if they’re snakes, that’s his specialty.
Or Bindi could cute them into submission.
The fact is, you all better shut the hell up!!
Yep, we’re having a good amount of snow this winter here in Michigan. Which serves to remind me that when I was a kid, every winter had this much snow, but these days heavy snowfall is pretty rare.
As a Minnesotan, the change I’ve noticed is that that the snow is passing 500 miles to the south of us (“us” being “where all the snow used to fall”).
And yes, this seems like more of the Denialists’ tactic of Deliberate Ignorance, which can be hard to separate from Actual Stupidity.
They site every afternoon that’s cooler than average as evidence that Global Warming (aka Global Climate Change) is fake. Never mind that weather is a complex global system, and the averages must be taken over long periods – no, no, no, if science isn’t simple then to them the science is wrong. It was cold today, therefore it will never be warm, the end.
Idiots.
In the end Nature will take care of all of this. When civilization collapses and the water and food supplies run out, the smart people will prevail over the stupid people. But there will still BE stupid people, because smart people know that statements like ‘smart people will prevail’ are broad statements of average performance, and that SOME stupid people will sneak past Nature’s ruthless winnowing knives.
Hopefully Gunter and Sheppard won’t understand that.
mongo said: “….More energy means higher overall temperatures AND more variability.”
Apparently these carrot-cuffers didn’t watch “Home Improvement.” Or maybe didn’t get the running joke.
Where I am on the coast of Maine, we’ve been averaging over 3F above normal since the first of the year, in spite of having the most substantial snowcover in 30 years.
Wingnut Welfare = the Witless Protection Program.
I must confess I just don’t understand the message on climate change the wingnuts are pushing.
All I hear is “We must do absolutely nothing. To do anything else would be immeasurable folly!”
To stridently DEMAND complete and utter inaction. That, regardless of topic or ideology, is a weird position.
mikey
What a bunch of dooshes. They don’t call it global warming anymore, anyway. It’s called “global climate change” because that more accurately reflect the fact that while some people will see enormous spikes in temperatures, others will see moderate, barely noticeable changes.
But it’s not like the weather isn’t being affected, or the climate.
The fact is, you all better shut the hell up!!”
Classic.
‘ “Shut up,” he explained.’
Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
Oh… wait, what? Well, umm… Antarctica was tropical back when it was part of the Gondwana supercontinent. Dinosaurs and rainforests and everything. So yeah, there is probably geological evidence that it had less ice in the past. I doubt that there is much anthropological evidence though, since the Antarctic part drifted south and froze over about 10 million years before humans evolved.
Or are we using the 6,000 year earth/ 6-days-and-then-he-rested model? Because I still call bullshit that he found anthropological evidence in Antarctica.
It’s a pity Steve Irwin is dead.
[Welcome to another episode of “Wingnut Hunter” with Steve Irwin. Today we find Steve deep in the sewers of MSM]
Crikey. Look down in this hole. Further down in the slime at the bottom! See ‘im?? Thats a BECK! They’re incredibly rare, and to find one in it’s natural habitat is amazing! See, they are attacked by virtually every virtabrate creature, and their only defense is fling their feces at their attacker. But they’re not even particularly good at that, so they end up getting it all over themselves.
Let’s see if we can get the little blighter out of that hole. Watch out. They bite…
mikey
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early
See, this is the part I don’t remember, Guntar.
It seems to me that the environmentalists, rather than running around shrieking, presented factual scientific evidence.
So, Guntar, do you have any factual scientific evidence to offer?
No?
Then why don’t you just STFU, asshole?
The fact is, global warming, global climate change, whatever, is all wet and not based in facts and logic, only a biased need, typical of liberals and the hard left to remake the world in the mold of the UN and take away our competitive advantage and socialize everything.
Natural cycles. The sun. Not mankind. Al Gore is a hipocrit.
Nothing to see here but bashing Bush and oil companies.
Al Gore is a Hip guy according to Gary, consider that his endoresemnt of Gore in 2012
Check it out. It looks like Steve-O caught a Goldberg. You can tell it’s a Goldberg by the way it ties itself in knots.
Damn, let me do that link thing again.
Of course, if you plotted global temperatures on a stock market graph…
Now that is a very, very good idea.
I’m waiting for D. Sidhe to leap to the defense of hag-fish after J–‘s attempts to malign them.
[…] February 25, 2008 The Genius Of The Conservatives Posted by John O under Political | Tags: conservative bloggers, conservative intellectuals, conservative morons, conservative vultures, GOP base homophobia, GOP base racism, GOP base scaredy cats, GOP based fascism, No!, Sadly | As usual, nicely documented by the actual geniuses at Sadly, No! […]
That looks like a crude PhotoShop of the Great Gazoogle. Anyone with any sense of how the little green men work at all would immediately sniff this out as a false image. I’m less than impressed.
WNUT is now running with the story, and a reader states in the comments that the cartoon character shown in the S,N! story appears to be the Great Gazoo from approximately 40 years ago.
Global warming is impossible because the Sun is very hot.
I have ice in my freezer, therefore Texas can’t be warm.
It couldn’t have 81 degrees today.
Not!
Global warming is impossible because the Sun is very hot.
Yeah. And what about volcanoes?
Huh? Gotcha there, eh?
mikey
The fact is, my real name is Apu Patel, and I work in a really great Internet advicasy company in Bangalore. The fact is, it’s very vry hot here right now, but we get to smoke inside, so there is no problems.
The very prominent mushroom scientist (retired from his promising career only due to “mental pain”) Gary Novak disproves the whole game:
Now, if you don’t instantly believe him and you should, he links to a 5 page paper published in a global security newsletter which has two whole graphs in it!!!
The stupid big-head scientists have not found any of these hot spots which have been changing all of our ocean temperatures and weather too but fortunately we have not-stupid scientists who have survived “mental pain” like Gary Novak to take us beyond the dumb-head scientists who can’t see what is so obvious.
El, I would just like to point out that at the minimum, the idea that the temperature of subterranean water is used for geothermal heating is waaaayyyy over there on the stupid side of the scale.
Obama’s efforts to connect to the Republican Party, specifically Bush, and Dick Chaney, of the Halliburton Company, dates back to the Presidents Grandfather, Prescott Bush, and indeed Chaney was once an executive officer of Halliburton.
The American military pounds Iraq with Artillary, bombs, and the like, destroying large sections of cities, and infra-structures, then Halliburton comes in to rebuild. Halliburton and Halliburton associated companies have raked in ten’s of billions.
Obama is just like the BIG HALIBURTAN. Haliburton has contracted to build detention centers in the U.S. similiar to the one in Quantanammo Bay, Cuba. Halliburton does nothing to earn the Two Dollars for each meal an American Serviceman in Iraq eats.
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/
Halliburton was scheduled to take control of the Dubai Ports in The United Arab Emiirate. The deal was canceled when Bush was unable to affect the transfer of the American Ports.
Now we see what some might suspect as similiar financial escapading from the Democrats.
Two years ago, Iraq’s Ministry of Electricity gave a $50 million contract to a start-up security company – Companion- owned by now-indicted businessman (TONY REZKO) Tony Rezko and a onetime Chicago cop, Daniel T. Frawley, to train Iraqi power-plant guards in the United States. An Iraqi leadership change left the deal in limbo. Now the company, Companion Security, is working to revive its contract.
Involved along with Antoin “Tony” Rezco, long time friend and neighbor of Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, and former cop Daniel T. Frawley, is Aiham Alsammarae. Alsammarae was accused of financial corruption by Iraqi authorities and jailed in Iraq last year before escaping and returning here.
LIKE FATHER LIKE SON —
Obama should be vetted and disclose his connection to the criminal money generating underworld. Besides, his connections to the REZCO MAFIA types, his up-coming tax fraud charges — Obama needs to disclose why he is a MUSLIM “PATWANG-FWEEE” and stop suppoting our intervention in IRAQ. It’s time to introduce this false, fake Xerox – X box Obama and invite the self-indicting thief plagiarizing pipsqueke “GLORK” Xerox – X box to meet the Buffalo “GAZOWNT-GAZIKKA” Police Department Buffalo Creek. He is MAD!!! —
OBAM YOUR NO JFK —
“GLORK” Obama looks like Alfred E. Newman: “Tales Calculated To Drive You.” He is a MUSLIM “Glork” He’s MAD!!! Alfred E. Neuman is the fictional mascot of Mad. The face had drifted through American pictography for decades before being claimed by Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman after he spotted it on the bulletin board in the office of Ballantine Books editor Bernard Shir-Cliff, later a contributor to various magazines created by Kurtzman.
Obama needs to disclose why he is a MUSLIM “PATWANG-FWEEE” and stop suppoting our intervention in IRAQ. It’s time to introduce this false, fake “GLORK” Xerox – X box Obama and invite the self-indicting thief plagiarizing pipsqueke Xerox – X box to meet the Buffalo “GAZOWNT-GAZIKKA” Police Department Buffalo Creek.
its cold right now in my small locality therefore it proves that GLOBAL climate change is a lie.
Um. WTF is “Janet Reno”?
JanusNode?
One of my acquaintances is a water pollution specialist who is kind enough to keep reminding us that the correct term is “global climate change,” which will cause many “weather events.”
Hmmm, that might account for the six weeks of drought followed by 20 inches of rain in 10 days last summer, or the seven feet of snow this winter.
Let’s all repeat the phrase together: global climate change. Now just say that, alternating with banging your head real hard on the wall, until the wingnuts fade into a bad memory.
Why would you want to believe it’s the sun’s fault? Man-made = we can fix it! Sun-made = we’re fucking doomed.
It’s a pity Steve Irwin is dead.
Feh, pussy.
Noel Sheppard, slightly edited for clarity:
He’s not trying very hard. Whatever his bosses are paying him, they’re paying too much.
I think I’m in love. Do you realize how many of the noises in my head are in Janet Reno’s post?
Hell, it’s like she lives in my frontal lobes.
And that, my friends, is the definition of a soul mate…
mikey
according to preliminary data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Where the more conservative locals — the ones who hate out-of-towners and gays and hippies — will nod at Limbaugh’s ‘it’s cold, so global warming is a lie’ bullshit then tell anyone in earshot that they’ve seen the winter snowline creep further up the mountains, and the snow sometimes never settle at all, all in their lifetimes.
Do you realize how many of the noises in my head are in Janet Reno’s post?
I don’t know, Mikey; I thought her comment would have benefited from occasional punctuation with POTZREBIE at the end of every second paragraph.
Not to mention the glaring absence of SCHKLURT! SHKLORBBADORP! STROINGGOINK! GASHPLUTZGA! *
In fact I couldn’t make sense of her comment at all so I’m waiting for the Don Martin illustrated version.
* Yes, there is an on-line dictionary of Don Martin sound-effects.
Jeweler’s Angst-Butter
This story has two main characters. The first is Romeo, an unreal mechanic. The second is named Dorothea. Dorothea is a young lonesome jeweler. A lonely man of silent fiends
was fixing drugs for friendly queens
These random New York dreamy queens
were melting fear for silent beings
Hey Noel, I got something all natural and vital for plant light right here.
100% American made too…
WTF with the double negatives?!
I am confused by all this weather jargon. Doesn’t “-0.3 F cooler” actually mean that it was 0.3 warmer? Wouldn’t you just sensibly write “0.3F cooler” Anyway, that is what I recall from algebra.
Or that “-0.01 inches less” would mean the same as 0.01 inches more.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
One would think that their corporate masters are heavily invested in the status quo. Peak Oil profits are all the rage this year.
I just like the fact that a January that is statisticly average is being regarded as extremely cold.
[…] a longer analysis of Gunter’s hackery go here. To demand a refund if you foolishly bought a copy of the National Disgrace that contained […]
Fuck the grandkids, I’m cold now! *aerosol*
[…] instruments went awry with a Canadian pundit named Lorne Gunter yesterday, and it was a puzzlement. Ah, but a commenter […]