What a asshole.

Seriously, it is awe-inspiring watching the wingnuts grasp for any straw they can.

BTW, I was referring to Dennis Avery.

And they keep on coming. The Science and Public Policy Institute—Lord Monckton’s outfit—is now peddling “Peer Review? What Peer Review? Failures of Scrutiny in the UN’s Fourth Assessment Report” by John McLean (pdf of complete paper).

It’s kind of interesting that they still talk about solar energies arriving to the Earth’s atmosphere and the reflectiveness of the cloud cover (albedo) as though these are theoretically derived instead of measured.

And that’s apart from the fact that theories about cosmic rays affecting cloud cover are far, far, far less theoretically sound, far less empirically proven, and apparently far more contradicted by available evidence as the supposedly questionable theories of anthropogenic contributions to global warming which their enthusiasts aim to displace.

While, the U.S. right wing and mainstream society bicker on whether or not AGW exists, the uber-wealthy of the world make sure that you & I proles pay for all of their need to protect themselves from the Global Warming they already accept as reality, and indeed, to best profit from such investments as they can.

Sort of a bait & switch, while we & the knuckleheads dispute the science, those who most profited from GW in the first place make sure they’re at the head of the line for all the anti-GW innovations which you & I will pay for — while all the while the flying monkey right denounces GW as a socialist plot!!

Gary Rupperto or whoever is in charge right now: Check link one in the post.

Look, I can prove there’s no global warming consensus with this miraculous banana.

Gary Rupperto or whoever is in charge right now: Check link one in the post.

Fixed now, thanks!

And, as we know, each scientist coming out against global warming represents 10 million scientists. That means that 5 billion scientists believe that global warming is fake.

See, no one claims that the Earth doesn’t go through natural shifts in temperature. The important differentiation is that the natural kind varies over thousands of years, where as what we’re seeing is the same range over afew hundred.

Think of it kind of like if we’re all chilling in our spiffy tree fort, chilling and doing whatever it is people do in social situations. Suddenly, the tree lurches, and tilts over 5 degrees.
“Look,” they say, “Trees move. They change their angles naturally. It’s what they do. Nothing to worry about. Happens all the time. Pass the Ho-Hos.”

I miss Bruce…

I wonder how many of these “global warming skeptics” would train their penetrating gaze on Bible stories? Or rigorously test the hypothesis that G.W. Bush can even spell “competence”?

I LOVE the part with the thing….

Back it up and play it again, ok?

mikey

El Cid: “Sort of a bait & switch, while we & the knuckleheads dispute the science, those who most profited from GW in the first place make sure they’re at the head of the line for all the anti-GW innovations which you & I will pay for — while all the while the flying monkey right denounces GW as a socialist plot!!”

El Cid,

you have no idea how right you are!
Case in point: Mitt Romney, who as governor pulled Mass. out of the Northeastern States Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. “Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has caved to pressure from large corporations that own dirty coal-fired power plants and see the program as a threat to their profits, and from Washington-based deniers of global warming. ”
http://www.clf.org/programs/cases.asp?id=341

Yet, take a lookie at who is hosting a fundraiser this month for Romney in Silicon Valley, a certain Jennifer Fonstad:
http://www.svgop.com/files/Romney%20Event.pdf

who is a lead investor and Board Chairman of alternative energy startup GreenFuel Technologies:
http://www.greenfuelonline.com/about.html

If you don’t have any discernible talent, the only way to amass $200M like Romney is by being a manipulative scumbag, very much like his classmate from HBS…

It’s always the same Shorter, really: “Clap HARDER, dammit!”

Bryan, well I am (scientific), and my responce to you is:

and

so

what

You can make fun of the new study, but because of our society’s Presumption of Truth, you have to disprove it before it becomes false. Until nobody on Earth denies global warming, global warming won’t be true. I’m an engineer, you know!

Bryan, you’re trolling. Please stop.

Also, we are educated. If we SadlyNauts were gathered together in one room, I venture to suggest that we could muster enough sheepskins (academic degree certificates, for you) to bludgeon even a Republican skull into unconsciousness. We could also muster boundless experience and worldly wisdom such as you may not even imagine, mostly in the poetic person of Mikey, among many others.

In short, you’re way, waaaay, out of your depth here, sausage. I suggest you fuck off now, and save yourself some grief.

If that Dogstar dude comes back, I’m biting him.

Assume for a moment that this study is actually honest, the methodology sound. I tried assuming that as I read it. Then I looked at who authored it – “Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery.”

I add “Senior Fellows at some think tank/institute” to my list of people who have to get real jobs after all this is over. Since Mr. Avery likes to discuss climate and farming issues, he can pick crops, dig ditches, and shovel cow shit and like it.

This is the same fellow who had a commentary piece published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune Sept. 6th castigating farmers, especially organic farmers who lost their crops in the torrential rains that dumped over 15″ of water within 24 hours on areas of MN, IA, and WI in August this year.

Here are some of his scintillating analysis…

Mr. Avery starts off:
“Hundreds of organic farms in southwestern Wisconsin and southeastern Minnesota were drenched by a foot of rain in late August. The heavy downpour washed out plantings, eroded soil, and damaged fences and buildings.”
A true statement as far as it goes, but at least here, in flyover country, the rain falls on everything; including, but not limited to organic farms.

Then, taking a quote from the Ag Extension about the topography of the flooded region out of context, this fellow asks:
“Now let me get this straight. Organic farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota have concentrated themselves on steep, hilly land that is prone to mudslides?”
Rhetorical, I suppose, since he then goes on:
“It sounds to me as though the organic farmers have chosen the wrong land. Disasters like this won’t happen often, but mudslides even one year out of 50 is too much for good soil health.”
And it sounds to me like this Hudson Institute, or whatever you call it is paying you far too much to produce arm-chair “observations” like this one. But points go to you for using the, “It’s your fault and you’re stupid” tactic, to malign victims of natural disasters.

Elsewhere, he implies that the organic farmers are a particular breed of Luddite, refusing to, “…use the low-till farming systems that protect soil most effectively. The low-till systems depend on herbicides to control choking weeds, but the organic farmers won’t use “synthetic” pesticides.”
His condescending attitude aside, he is correct that organic farmers don’t use much synthetic herbicides – but that’s why they are organic. I also have a gift for the obvious. Can I write for your Institute?

What he doesn’t know, or bother to think about is that you can’t grow most vegetables with low-till methods. Low-till farming is mostly for corn, soy and other cereals, by the way. Yes, erosion is bad and dangerous to farming sustainability, but I know of no farmers, organic vegetable or otherwise who sit back and lament just how little soil washed away last year, regretting they weren’t down to bedrock yet. Implying that organic farmers didn’t consider this is disingenuous.

The question I had was after reading this was: why would Mr. Avery take it upon himself to warn us of the dangerous practice of organic farming?

Perhaps in this time of massive budget surpluses, plenty and prosperity, he would like to make the Department of Agriculture, flush with cash, police farmland usage better. Or maybe he just wants other crops planted up in them thar hills. At any rate, he says:
“we need a code of conduct for organic farmers that would bar organic plantings on steep slopes likely to produce mudslides after heavy rains. The county extension agents should readily be able to identify the classes of land suitable for the increased risks of organic production.”
I think we need a code of conduct all right. You don’t get to make inane statements about topics that you know nothing about and we won’t tell you how to do you’re job, Mr. Avery, whatever that is. Since that hasn’t happened as of yet, I will point out that your assumption that organic farmers are primitives eking out a living on an “steep hillsides” and thus enabling erosion is an distorted one. And let’s say, what if instead of the crazy organic farming techniques you deride, we planted these hillsides your way with corn and soy and low-till and herbicides? You would lose those crops too. Remember, that torrential rain fell everywhere, not just on those organic farmers. Corn took a loss in this region like everything else. But ignore that if you think it will help your case.

But the micromanagement of farmland seems to lead, rather indirectly, to a classic libertarian argument. Mr. Avery doesn’t disappoint to deliver. If we can’t stop these stupid organic farmers from causing all this erosion, “…the public is being set up to make all kinds of “emergency” payments to organic farmers who had been preparing to sell their produce for “organic premiums” on the high-priced shelves of Whole Foods Markets. The public shouldn’t be on the hook for such risky premium-seeking.”
Viola! The classic, not with my ton of money you don’t arguement. You cannot seek high profits if it might possibly cause me some iota of discomfort, real or perceived, sometime. The only thing that would make this argument more appealing to the idealistic libertarian would be working in some Europe bashing and again, the reader is not disappointed. Because these ignorant farmers wanted to go organic, they end up with weed problems, so says Mr. Avery:
“…too often the weeds took over the fields, choking out the crops. The farmer then had to plow down his crop to prevent the weeds from going to seed and ruining the next year’s crop as well. The association said this was “no problem for the farmer, because the EU government compensates the farmers for their weed losses.”
An extreme case to be sure. While reading this account of what another country supposedly does, remember that nothing ever damages harvests of the big money and cereal crops farmed with Mr. Avery’s tried-and-true low-till and herbicide method. Drought, no. Flooding, he’s already established that flooding destroys only organic farm crops. Blight, not a real condition. Lack of nutrients in soil? Never. But, by his argument, if we let these pig-ignorant, flooded out farmers try to earn a buck farming organic vegetables, and if we let them collect money from FEMA, Insurance companies., and the Dept. of Ag. for damages they sustained, soon we’ll be plowing up fields of weeds and then the welfare state, commie, organic farmers will have won. Throw in some dire warning about the future and the shortage of good croplands and the supposedly weedy yields of organic farms and you have the classic right-wing think tank argument used for any subject. These read like mad-libs sometimes.

Had Mr. Avery and his Hudson Institute wanted to debate the merits of organic farming versus “conventional” farming practices used for large cereal crop harvests, he could have (he could have picked a better venue and time) tried to compare metrics, like yields, nutrients, soil health to make a case for low-till and herbicide methods. As letter writers pointed out, he couldn’t score points with those so instead he chose to reduce the debate to invective and falsehoods. They also wanted to be as mean-spirited as possible. Look for their next installment after the next Hurricane, flood, earthquake, or volcanic eruption.

Letter writers responded to his armchair agriculture, informing him what organic agriculture actually entails; responsible soil use and maintenance.

The two strongest condemnations of Mr. Avery’s hit piece came days later in the Star Tribune. One reader cited some data from the U of Michigan:
“Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food on individual farms in developing countries as low-intensive methods on the same land.

Furthermore, organic farming can build up soil organic matter better than conventional no-till farming can, according to a long-term study by the U.S. Agricultural Research Service.”

The other pointed out a possible reason for his Kitrina-esque blame victims of disaster tact:
“…five minutes of research reveals that the Hudson Institute, of which he is a member, is funded by Monsanto, Dow, Conagra and a host of other chemical peddlers and agribusiness giants.”

Remember that when reading anything written by a shill named Dennis Avery.

I’m hoping this dogstar guy was being sarcastic, but I suspect I am wildly off the mark. I say let the B Cat bite him until he tells the truth.

Michelle Malkin and Senator Inhofe sit down and get to the bottom of this whole global warming hoax thing.

I note that throughout this entire page, comments and all, there is no science, just snide sarcasm, name-calling, and ad hominem non-sense. This is typical of the Global-warming crowd, mostly government educated “liberals” and “progressives” who hate industry and corporations because that’s who they want to have robbed so they can get lots of free stuff from the government.

24. John Howard said, September 15, 2007 at 14:48
I note that throughout this entire page, comments and all, there is no science, just snide sarcasm, name-calling, and ad hominem non-sense. This is typical of the Global-warming crowd, mostly government educated “liberals” and “progressives” who hate industry and corporations because that’s who they want to have robbed so they can get lots of free stuff from the government.

That is because people here are smart enough to go to actual sciencey scientistic scientastical websites when we want to read the actual scientifickery from the scientificalicious folks that do real science, and we come here to observe with amusing the pathetic wranglings of the anti-rational right precisely through the use of snide sarcasm, name-calling, and ad hominem non-sense

Since you’re stupid and thick, though, go HERE or HERE for real science information from the “global warming” types who actually give a sh*t about science, unlike the global warming “skeptics” who confuse unfocused rants from uninformed engineers with irritable bowel syndrome for “science”.

Sorry, linkery problem. Here’s where you can read a blog by real climate scientists on the science of the Earth’s energy systems, otherwise known as “global warming”.

http://www.realclimate.org

I enjoyed reading John Howard’s conflation of industry and corporations and government.

I find it ironic that supposedly educated . . .

ARSE

ARSE!

ARSE!!

ARSE!!!!!!!!!!!!

ARSE