Politics-Federal

IPCC Debunked

Mulder

Last night, on CFRA, John Counsel took it upon himself to invite paleo-climatologist Dr. Tim Patterson and Tom Harris from the National Resources Stewardship Project onto the show to discuss global warming. It was one of the most entertaining and informative assessments of Climate Change. It is not Al Gore spewing myths, it is true science at it’s best. I encourage everyone to listen to these audio files.

(Note, I managed to get my call in as the first caller (Steve) on part III discussing the increased plant life due to higher co2 concentration and temperature rise. Pardon me sounding like I am slurring speech, I called from my cell phone and was driving at the time.)

CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part I
CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part II
CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part III
CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part IV
CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part V
CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part VI
CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part VII
CFRA Call In Show On Climate Change Part VIII

Now for the real info. The IPCC report which claims to have input form hundreds, if not thousands, of experts and scientists was only written by 30 people and that this policy maker’s report has been written to coincide with the beliefs of the group and not necessarily directly due to scientific information. Then they come out and say they will release the full report in several months and that it will be changed to reflect the information that this preliminary policy maker’s report says.

This is called “Ass Backwards Science” or ABS for short. You can read a great commentary on it by David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen (H/T to Dudley DoRight, a commenter for this)

Listen to Dr. Patterson and Tom Harris. For those interested, Tom Harris is the one who took the ad hominem attacks galore on the John Duffy climateliberal website. Tom, as I have pointed out has a Masters of Engineering in Thermofluids. He also had a great article published on climate change.

I guarantee you will come out far smarter for having listened and read info by these two men.

Law Professor Allegations Meant To Remove Canadian Forces From Afghanistan

Mulder

Amir AttaranOttawa University Professor Amir Attaran appeared on Canada AM this morning to discuss the possible abuse by Canadian troops of Afghani prisoners.

I have been doing some light reading this evening and I am wondering why Mr. Attaran would be so interested in the possible abuse of these men.

The information which will be presented in an investigation look pretty clear cut to me.

The three Afghans were captured near Dukah by a small group of Canadian soldiers.

One of the detainees was seen observing the soldiers but escaped, only to be captured the next day. In a field report, the soldiers described him as “non-compliant.”

Another is described as being “extremely belligerent” and “it took four personnel to subdue him.”

In the most serious instance, it was said that only “appropriate force” was used and that the suspect was an alleged bomb maker.

And what did these men suffer? Remember, one that they were “non-compliant”, “extremely belligerent” and one was an alleged bomb maker.

All three of them had a similar set of injuries to their face, to their head and the most seriously injured man had his eyes swollen, cuts on his eyebrows, a slash across his forehead and a cut on his cheek.

So in other words, these men looked like this.

Rocky

Big Deal. It took 4 men to subdue one of them. How do you expect these guys to look?

Right now it seems to me that most of this is still speculation, hearsay, and allegations by Mr. Attaran. Apparently, the men were returned to Afghan authorities and “never seen again.” (cue Twilight Zone music).

So what is this really all about?

Well we can tell you that Dr. Attaran has conveniently brought up these cases (with one file missing) when only a year ago he was criticizing Canada’s Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Afghanistan.

Professor Amir Attaran of the Faculty of Law fears that the agreement between Ottawa and Kabul on prisoner transfers makes Canadian soldiers complicit to torture.
He made this assertion during the conference on the “Canadian Legal Response to Torture” that took place on March 24, 2006 at the University of Ottawa.

This event, organized by the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Human Rights Research and Education Centre and the Faculty of Law, attracted more than two hundred people from different government departments, human rights organizations and lawyers interested in the subject.

So after criticizing the agreement almost a year ago, Mr. Attaran has been reviewing report after report after report on the Afghani prisoner transfers and has finally found 3 that can make his criticism valid. How many prisoner files did he need to review before he found these? How many hundreds of prisoners were processed properly without issue before three “Belligerents” took a couple of shots to put them back in line?

Mr. Attaran should produce a bit more evidence before making allegations as he has.

Judge him for yourself. Mr. Attaran has written for the Globe and Mail (left leaning), The Washington Post (left leaning), The New York Times (VERY left leaning) and his previous employer was the “Sierra Legal Defence Fund” (Granola crunching, left leaning, tree hugging, legal action group).

I think Mr. Attaran should come clean. His actions indicate he wants Canada out of Afghanistan. Just like his buddy Jack Layton.

ADDENDUM: Actually, Mr. Attaran is quoted on page 3 of one of Alexa McDonough’s “Global Perspectives” flyers from 2003. e

Liberal Senators Not Getting Job Done Either

Mulder

Bill S4 has been in front of the Senate for 261 days. The Bill is 66 words long. That’s 4 days for every word. (thanks Pierre Poilievre for this info).

The Bill simply changes the term of all new Senators from ending at age 75 to being limited to a 8 years for each time appointed.

With 94 sitting Senators (63 of which are Liberal), and an annual Salary of over $122,000 per Senator this means we have paid approximately $8.25 Million dollars to Senators since this Bill was brought forward and the meter is still running.

Talk about getting Officially Screwed!!

Dion Takes Another One On The Chin

Mulder

I thought that Randal Denley dealt a blow. It seems Michael Coren has dealt the blow no one wanted to be the first to deal.

There is an elephant sitting in the corner of the room and the political elites are pretending it isn’t there. Or to put it more directly, the Tory attack ads on Stephane Dion are missing the point. The most obvious problem about the leader of the Liberal party is that his English is appalling and he is often entirely unintelligible.

There. That which we are not supposed to mention. It’s okay to lambaste English-Canadian politicians for their lack of French, even if they represent completely English-speaking ridings, but never point out that a man who wants to rule Canada and speak to and for 20 million Anglophones has an often-impenetrable accent and a bewildering vocabulary.

But in a similar fashion to Randal Denley, Coren also thinks Dion is not going to make a good leader. He concludes his piece with the following:

Is this a man who is qualified to govern a country as great and diverse as Canada? The question is rhetorical and the answer is obvious in any language.

Liberals all across Canada must be wondering what the options are. Many of their leadership candidates are still digging themselves out of the financial holes they fell in during the last leadership convention. The party couldn’t afford a single Superbowl commercial to battle the numerous ones the Tories are airing, let alone afford another leadership convention which they obviously need desperately.

Citizen Columnist Randall Denley Bitchslaps Stephane Dion … And Good!!

Mulder

Typically, articles like this one get people fired within the Asper empire. I am glad someone like Randall Denley has the reputation and popularity to not care. In this article, Denley is like a chop shop for Liberal leaders.

I’ve just met Liberal leader Stephane Dion for the first time and I have to say, it was a frightening experience. The thought that this fellow could become the prime minister of Canada ought to alarm us.

That quote isn’t even the half of it. You may need a Citizen account to read the whole thing but here is the closing line.

I’m not a natural consumer of the Liberal brand, but as a voter, I like to feel that I have two valid choices. With Stephane Dion as Liberal leader, that’s not the case. Dion would have us believe he’s qualified to be prime minister. If he thinks that, he’s kidding himself. Let’s not let him kid us, too.

And in between those two quotes is paragraph after paragraph of Dion taking it on the chin from Denley on every issue under the sun.

H/T to my friend J.P.

GroupThink – We Are Borg, Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated

Mulder

What happens when someone who is considered a leader switches sides? Should his followers shun him or follow him?

This question is being asked again by many on the left after Nick Cohen, infamous leftist protester and activist has come out with his new book What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.

I was pointed to an interview Nick Cohen gave and he has clearly not left his roots, but he is questioning the current state of affairs among what he calls “Guardianistas”.

“Serious people on the left I have no trouble with. They may not agree with me but they know something is going wrong. An Oxford don has told me, ‘I’m against the war but I hate going on a demo with anti-semites and Trotskyites’. It’s the soft left liberal intelligentsia, those bloody comedians we get these days — they want to feel righteous, they dislike all ambiguity. They want to think they are good. They swear at me.”

Auntie gets it on the chin too. “I support the BBC but I think our problem is the concentration of media in London. When there is an absolute liberal consensus, everyone they meet, eat or sleep with thinks the same damn thing.” So in Iraq’s case this groupthink didn’t come in the hard questions they asked the other side, but the soft questions they asked their own side. “For years,” he writes, “the BBC’s attack dog presenters couldn’t manage to give one opponent of the war a tough interview. Not even George Galloway.”

Auntie got her “impartial, balanced” revenge; on Radio 4’s Start the Week last Monday Cohen was politely monstered by every other left-liberal guest. The Guardian also came up with a novel way of pigeonholing Cohen’s politics as unworthy of serious discussion. “The Guardian online talkboards carried a discussion with me and another supporter of the war from the left with a Jewish name, which was entitled: ‘David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen Are Enough to Make a Good Man Anti-Semitic’.” Not funny, not clever. He has also been pilloried on the paper’s op-ed pages by an apologist for the communist dictatorship in Cuba.

In that quote we see the term “groupthink”. I recently came across this word in Paul Wells’ new book which I am reading now, but Paul elabourates on not only the meaning but some scientific study into “groupthink”. I will refrain from quoting Mr. Wells directly, but I will say that group think polarizes people according to the studies Mr. Wells quotes. It takes a bell curve where their are few at the extreme and shifts the mass of the bell towards that edge. This is clearly something our society is dealing with now on many issues. Americans and Brits in Iraq … polarized. Canadians in Afghanistan … polarized. Climate Change being unnatural … polarized, etc. etc. etc.

Cohen appears to be standing off from the polarized left on a few issues and as the quote says, he is being “pilloried … by an apologist for the communist dictatorship in Cuba.”?

Wow, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

The left and, in particular, Guardianistas, have made their bed by defending the rights of the minorities in their own nations. Yet only those hard core leftists, leave their own country to protest. The majority of that shifted Bell Curve crowd run and hide when push comes to shove and getting up off their ass is required. You never see the throngs protesting women’s rights in Kabul or Riyadh. You never see the throngs protesting the opening of a Chinese coal fired power plant in Shenzhen. Those not willing to go to the extreme are the ones that are polarized by GroupThink and not the idealogy itself. They just keep jumping on the bandwagon of the issue of the day and pick the left leaning side and champion it, keeping this GroupThink polarization mentality. After all, who wants to be pilloried by your “friends” over a Latte or a Chi at Starbucks?

According to Paul Wells, the Paul Martin government fell in large part due to GroupThink polarizing Liberals towards the idea of change and the extreme was too much change for Canadians. If we are lucky the leftist movement supporting Kyoto will fall because they are all pulling the rope in the same direction and it happens to be one heading towards a cliff that Liberal Environment critic David McGuinty said will cost us as much as $40 Billion a year. That’s a pretty steep cliff that even extreme left leaning Canadians may not want to get close to for fear of falling over.

If we can take anything positive from Nick Cohen’s defection, it is that resistance is NOT futile. We will NOT be assimilated. (If there is anything leftists can take from this, it is that polarization and groupthink will destroy them…but I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell them that before they make like lemmings.)

H/T to my friend Sandy for the Nick Cohen link.

Con"service"ative With A Smile

Mulder

Friday morning the news hit the airwaves that the planned expansion of Limebank Rd. (scheduled for completion next year) would not happen on time after the NCC refused to go ahead with the planned sale of some land for the widening of the road.

With a couple of Conservative MPs on the job, the plan is back on schedule less than 24 hours after the hiccup appeared. THAT’S Service!!

Nepean-Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre confirmed at about 2:30 p.m. that the NCC will no longer be blocking the sale of land.

“They (the NCC) are now out of the way,” said Poilievre. “They will no longer be blocking the sale of land needed for the expansion of the Limebank Rd.”

Poilievre said he and federal transport minister Lawrence Cannon, who is also responsible for the NCC, had two emergency meetings today to reverse the decision by the NCC.

How Many Times Is The Earth "Officially" Warming?

Mulder

Thanks to John Robson for these 6 historical quotes:

“It appears 1998 will go down as the year that atmospheric and scientific evidence finally put to rest any doubt that the planet is being subjected to global warming, with human activity the probable cause.”

– – Globe and Mail, 1998

“Now, what was once a hotly debated theory – that a vast layer of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other man-made gases in the atmosphere are causing the Earth’s envelope to heat up – has hardened into near certainty.”

– – Macleans, February 2000

“Scientists Now Acknowledge Role of Humans in Climate Change.”

– – New York Times, October 2000

“Scientists have dispelled most of the lingering doubts about the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with new evidence from satellites orbiting the Earth.”

– – National Post, 2001

“Consensus grows on climate change”

– – BBC, 2006

“In the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it.”

– – Time Magazine, 2006

Now let’s look at today’s headlines.

Science Panel Says Global Warming Is ‘Unequivocal’
– – NY Times, Feb. 2nd, 2007

Paris report calls climate change ‘unequivocal’

– – CBC, Feb. 2nd, 2007

Global problem – Climate-change report released in Paris

– – Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 2nd, 2007

Climate change: The DeniersStatistics needed — The Deniers Part I

Warming is real — and has benefits — The Deniers Part II

The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science — The Deniers Part III

Polar scientists on thin ice — The Deniers Part IV

The original denier: into the cold — The Deniers Part V

The sun moves climate change — The Deniers Part VI

Will the sun cool us? — The Deniers Part VII

The limits of predictability — The Deniers Part VIII

Look to Mars for the truth on global warming — The Deniers Part IX

Limited role for C02 — the Deniers Part X

Plenty of reading for fellow skeptics.