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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Observations From the Back Row: 7-23-11


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“De Omnibus Dubitandum”

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality

Please follow this link to the Monckton - Denniss debate in Australia regarding Global Warming and their attempt to impose a carbon tax.  Please listen to the Q and A with journalists that follows.  Logical fallacies are repeated a number of times.  Can you spot the logical fallacies?  Who is guilty of them?


The next time you read that NASA declares this or that day, month or year the hottest since yadda, yadda, yadda — you might want to check the source. It’s a pretty safe bet that it came from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and probably quotes its director, James Hansen….And just how good is that CRU data?...... “[The] hopeless state of their [CRU] database. No uniform data integrity. It’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found…There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations…and duplicates…There truly is no end in sight. This project is such a MESS.

NASA GISS also uses NOAA data, applying its own adjustments. While all three databases suffer from the same flaws,……. NOAA and NASA have both received legal Freedom of Information Act requests for unadjusted data and documentation of all adjustments they have made in order to assess the reliability of their reports in keeping with a Data Quality Act requiring that any published data must be able to be replicated by independent audits. And both have resisted these requests despite promises of transparency and the fact that together they receive nearly a billion dollars in direct annual government climate research funding….

Dr. Theon also testified that: “My own belief concerning anthropogenic [man-made] climate change is that models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit”. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modeled in the observations, nor explain how they did it…this is contrary to the way science should be done.” “Thus, there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy”.

Many members of the newly reconstituted U.S. Congress who are determined to cut non-essential government spending are very likely to agree. Perhaps this circumstance will substantially chill the overheated atmosphere surrounding NASA GISS operations.

Through the Looking Glass with EPA!

House GOP hits EPA on collusion with enviros, tox assessments
House Republicans have opened up two long-overdue lines of attack on the EPA.
Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) believes that U.S. EPA has worked out a nifty way to make an end run around both Congress and the federal regulatory process when it wants to implement a new rule that may be politically sensitive.
All the agency has to do is get some green group to sue over some aspect of the desired rule, he said. Then EPA can roll over in the ensuing legal battle and head right to settlement proceedings, claiming it was “forced” by the court system and consent decrees to initiate the new rulemaking. It is a path devoid of both messy public comment periods and political accusations over whether EPA is moving unilaterally.

And if that wasn’t enough, the group that sues EPA can even get its legal expenses covered for its trouble, Whitfield said. Their attorney’s fees can be paid for out of federal government’s Judgment Fund, which is set aside to pay for settlements in lawsuits against the government.

“We have reason to believe … that EPA is out there encouraging these lawsuits,” Whitfield said at a hearing yesterday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the impacts of government regulations on the business and manufacturing sectors.
Next, Republicans have finally taken notice of the EPA toxicological fantasy known as the Intergrated Risk Information System (IRIS), the database where EPA “explains” its rationale for its regulatory standards for chemical exposures.

Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) said yesterday that recent reviews of the IRIS program by the National Academy of Sciences and Government Accountability Office have found IRIS’s scientific methodologies to be fundamentally flawed.

“Time and time again,” Broun said at a House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee for Investigations and Oversight hearing, “draft assessments were sent to NAS for review, only to be severely criticized. Rather than adopting the recommendations of the academy and updating their processes, EPA continued to churn out assessments that were summarily rebuked.”

Information enshrined in IRIS is often/usually/typically/almost always cherry-picked, based on unvalidated, arbitrary and default assumptions and otherwise wholly non-scientific.

Obama threatens veto of EPA budget cuts 
President Obama said today that he would veto appropriations legislation that,… undermines ongoing conservation, public health, and environmental protection efforts through funding limits or restrictions…

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax -
Of cabbages and kings,
And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings."

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