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Even weather.com promotes fake news, fake science

The other day President Trump mocked the anti-science “climate change” political activism crowd when he tweeted about the need for some “global warming” to offset the record low temperatures descending upon  America. He was joking, and mocking, but everything he does creates an opening for enemies of America to attack him.

So cue up the faux indignation and mocking responses in return.

Fake science and lame-ass blatant political activism miraging as news reporting came from everywhere: Business insider, Newsweek, The Independent (UK), CNN, New York Times, Yahoo, Vanity Fair, and many other political activism outlets that pose as news outlets, including, amazingly, weather.com.

Weather.com, you ask?

And the answer is sadly, Yes, even weather.com, which you would think is just about the weather. Turns out that even weather.com is fully in the tank for anti-scientific climate change political activism. The one article weather.com staff wrote actually seriously evaluated just what more “climate change” would mean for America and the planet, and how terrible it is that President Trump wants this.

Either leftist activists have no sense of humor, or they are such crazed activists that no matter what someone says, it must always be turned into a political debate and crisis and a nuclear bomb aimed at whomever it is they disagree with at that moment. I vote for leftists being crazed, because nothing else explains their behavior. And so, weather.com published a very serious-sounding article about Trump’s tweet worthy of something from that source of awesome satire, The Onion. The article actually purports to be about how Trump is both a bad person for wanting more global warming, and how global warming is nothing to laugh at.

So weather.com wants it both ways: Trump is bad, and stupid, and by the way, just in case he wasn’t serious, he shouldn’t joke, either.

Every other mainstream fake news outlet followed suit with variations on this same theme, Trump bad and stupid, and global warming must not be mocked.

What surprised me was just how politicized weather.com is (and Business Insider, for that matter, being that it is aimed at business people). So I submitted a comment on the weather.com feedback page:

Your ridiculous article about President Trump calling for “global warming” was 100% political attack on the president and zero percent science. The president was obviously, plainly joking about having “more global warming” and your decision to treat his joke as something serious worthy of real analysis is either stupid or political activism by your website. I am guessing your article is political activism, because it criticizes the president as if his joke was meant to be serious. I object to weather.com politicizing the weather. I also object to weather.com relying on the opinion of politicized climate activists posing as academics, and then failing to obtain a balanced or opposing view from actual scientists who dispute human-caused climate. You are promoting a religious view, not a scientific view. At the very least human caused “climate change” is a nascent scientific subject to review and debate. Presenting it as settled is a subjective choice weather.com makes and thus, your credibility is damaged. Please leave politics out of your weather reporting. It certainly alienates me from wanting to use your web page or service.

And then I went further into weather.com and discovered entire sections of the website devoted to climate change fraud, and slickly packaged.

Why is it fraud? Because their assertion of human-caused climate change rests almost entirely on the provably false notion that “all scientists agree” that climate science is “settled.”

A) There is no such thing as climate science, and what science there is about climate change is all over the place. Real science is hardly ever “settled,” and it becomes settled then only after a long, robust and transparent debate. This kind of debate has not happened with climate change, because a great deal of it being politicized (“everyone says this is settled, so shut up”).

B) Scientists who have studied weather, climate, forestry, ecology, meteorology etc have come down all over the place. There is no universal agreement among scientists. Asserting there is universal agreement is like politics or religion. Leap of faith, or leap of belief in political outcomes.

So, add weather.com to the long list of political actors masquerading as scientists and humble service providers.

Duly noted!

Politics over weather science:

You’re liberal? I’m sorry for you

Liberals used to be intellectuals.  They were people who thought things through, applied logic to stodgy old taken-for-granted conventional wisdom, and had new ideas as a result.

Then Political Correctness struck.  A laundry list of politically correct things to say and believe arrived, and liberals stopped analyzing, stopped thinking.

Instead, liberals sought to impose that politically correct list on every person, business, institution, and place they could reach.  Soon enough, liberals had captured academia, most foundations, and the media.  And soon enough, those outlets began replicating the same old politically correct list of issues.

Being a liberal became a quest for power, for domination, for absolute control, so that The List could be imposed without debate.  Debate became a shallow game: Mockery, sarcasm, a few dismissive remarks, and then the discussion is over.

And that is how liberals forgot how to think.

Making it worse is that liberals today are surrounded by a cocoon of academic and media sources that tell them over and over that they are right and politically correct.  That these sources cannot win a fair fight in the market place of ideas, and instead resort to brute force from the get-go, should alert any thinking person that there is a problem.

Here in central Pennsylvania, a few years ago PennFuture tried to get a local weather man fired because he did not repeat the politically correct mantra on “global warming.”  That’s right, they tried to fire him, silence him, punish him for his views, and thereby intimidate others who might share his views.  The same thing has happened with Brendan Eich at Mozilla, Chautauqua Institution, and at countless other places.  The mainstream media (ABCCBSNBCNPRMSNBCNYTWPLATimes etc.) is incredibly transparent in their partisan activism.

PennFuture, Mozilla, and Chautauqua Institution are not alone, nor are their actions brand new for liberal politics.  But they do spell the end of liberal intellectualism, whereby leftists once sought to persuade others with logic and facts.  Those days are long gone.

If you are a liberal today, I feel sorry for you.  You have my sympathy, because you have forgotten how to think, especially  for yourself.

Questions you were told not to ask, #1

Why does global warming feel so record-setting cold?

Climate change claims can’t ever be wrong

If you haven’t done so already, pay attention to global warming/ climate change claims.

Whenever the weather is hot, or cold, or windy, or in a lull, the vacuous claims are bandied about that these occurrences are evidence of “climate change” or “global warming.”

We’ve had an unusually cold winter. Why, it reminds me of the ones I used to know in my childhood. Do you, too, recall the deep snows on roads and huge piles of plowed snow in parking lots of the 1970s?

That snow was considered normal back then. Then we had twenty years of warm winters. Now we’ve had two years of cold winters. It’s certainly not global warming! Why, could it not simply be the natural variation of a complex, large weather system in a complex planet?

No matter what, people claiming that current weather is evidence of some bigger trend cannot ever be wrong. No matter what the weather is, they ascribe it to their favorite sky-is-falling environmental crisis du jour. It is a pretty ingenious way to argue, you have to admit: They just cannot ever be wrong. No matter what the evidence is – black or white, Saturday or Wednesday, Mars or Venus, cold, hot, very cold, very hot, lukewarm, tepid, accurate or inaccurate – or when it occurs, it all proves the same thing to promoters of human-caused climate change.

And the fact is that there are real environmental quality issues that need to be addressed and resolved. One that is near to my heart is the high grading of private forests, where the best commercial trees are removed and the junk trees are left behind. This creates huge swathes of forest with little habitat value for animals, and little present or future commercial value for landowners and the surrounding society that needs their forest products.

How sad that high grading forests is accomplished with such simple emotional appeals: “Why Mabel, we will just take the big trees, and leave the little ones for later. There’ll be lots of green left in your woods,” goes the high-grader’s sales pitch.

Because western clearcutting was so damaging to western ecosystems, clearcutting got a bad name back east. Back here most of our private forests are at a point where it’s either clearcutting most of our private woods, or allowing forest fire to shape them. Most of our private forests need to be re-set to zero. That will provide maximum diversity and the broadest habitat and commercial values.

But like claims of global climate change, clearcutting is another false boogey man whose opponents are driven by emotions, and not science. And the real damage is allowed to go on under the false guise of “protecting” the forests.

Burst pipes? You were in good company

Ten days ago, weather across the country was bitterly cold. Polar vortex, solar lull, regular winter weather…seems there’s a bunch of possible causes. One defining characteristic of that week-long deep freeze was the amount of burst pipes across the country, and around central Pennsylvania. Our home had burst pipes, and a property I manage had burst pipes, and the plumbers at both jobs told me they had spent days from six in the morning until late at night working on nothing but burst pipes. The big box stores were either short on or out of key plumbing components, which caused further delays in getting homes and businesses functioning again.

Which is all to say, I have never heard so many creative reports about where families washed their clothes and dishes. Many went to neighbors, friends, or nearby families. Some went to churches. Some used water from nearby creeks. As damaging as that freeze was, it only bolstered people’s spirit and resolve to carry on, and it cemented a feeling of community and caring among many people who normally just say “Hi” to each other coming home from work.

I found that refreshing.

You call this global warming?

Not only is the northern hemisphere in a deep freeze, a bunch of “climate change scientists” looking for evidence to support their religion … Oops … I mean their theory, got frozen in the Antarctic ice. Their ship is immobilized because so much ice is not only not melting, but actually increasing. Rescue ships also got frozen.
Members of the crew said it was the most ice they’d seen in years.
Guess what? Planet Earth is a dynamic place, with dynamic weather patterns and a multitude of factors simultaneously influencing climate.
Trying to ascribe cause-and-effect to these factors, or even worse, claiming to know what’s really happening with all these factors, is not science.
It’s politics, for sure. We know how clean that is.
Its adherents behave as though they’re in a cult, or at least in some charismatic religion.
Too many environmental groups use crisis to whip up support for their causes and to fund raise. Climate change appears to be one more scare tactic. The evidence just isn’t there to support the claims. Today’s zero temperature is classic.
But if you want to talk about overfishing the oceans, loss of farmland, loss of critical wildlife habitat, good wildlife management, why then reasonable people are interested.
In the mean time, I’m shoveling loads of carbon…oops, sorry, I mean firewood, into our wood stove as we trade yesterday’s carbon for today’s heat. Seems like a good and sustainable trade to me.

“Climate Change” has a scientific consensus, alright

The NIPCC issued a report demonstrating that most earth scientists and meteorologists do not concur with the hypothesis of human-caused climate change or global warming: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/16/PLS-HOLD-FOR-TUESDAY-9-17-AFTER-11AM-ET-Climate-Study-Evidence-Leans-Against-Human-Caused-Global-Warming. In their report, the NIPCC point out that much of the climate change science is not rigorously or even scientifically evaluated. It’s more politics and money than actual real science.

A study shows that earth science and meteorological professionals are overwhelmingly skeptical of the big claim: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/

And this is my own beef: Why do all humans have to accept this new religion on faith? Why are we called names if we demand rigorous science? That does it for me. Once someone can’t make a strong argument, they’ve lost.

Freak snow. Does it mean global climate change?

Global climate change, caused exclusively by humans and especially Western democracies, has been a cornerstone article of faith among the most outspoken environmental advocates.

No matter what the weather is, it’s always too extreme, too variable, too much of an outlier for the activists. Wild and even moderate swings in weather are proof of global warming, they constantly say.

If it’s unusually hot for a day, a week, a year, why that is obvious proof of global warming, they say.

If the weather turns prematurely cold or snowy, then that unusual deviation becomes yet another proof of global warming. After all, goes the thinking of the advocates, all unusual weather is evidence. Their first baseline is the past 100 years since weather data has been collected. Their second baseline is the past few hundred years of relatively stable weather patterns around the planet. The past couple of thousand years have seen several long periods of drought and wet, long before human populations either grew significantly or developed modern technology and industrial processes.

Their third baseline is the past ten thousand years, a period of relative calm when compared to the hundred-foot-thick glaciers that covered huge portions of Earth for thousands of years.

Yesterday we had an unusual October snow storm that left an inch or two of wet, heavy snow clinging to trees, buildings, light poles, and lawns. Could this be more evidence of global warming?

Let’s compare this snow to a mid-April snow storm I experienced on the first day of trout season in 1986, in central Pennsylvania. That day I was casting flies on Big Fishing Creek to hungry trout while enveloped in a white-out fog of swirling, blowing snow flakes. At that time, experts claimed the freak snowstorm was evidence of the mini ice age the planet was entering. Not global warming, but global cooling.

Twenty-five years later the global climate change claim is the opposite.

The problem with all this talk of global warming and cooling is that no matter what the weather is, unusually hot or unusually cold, certain advocates claim it is more proof for their current pet end-of-the-world issue. With all weather types and the full spectrum of weather now used to bolster the claim of global warming or climate change, it becomes an un-disprovable claim. All weather is “evidence.”. There is no weather that can be used to prove the opposite claim.

The biggest problem with “global climate change/warming/cooling” is that its advocates steer limited resources away from solving real environmental issues, like water pollution and profligate land development patterns.

I’m going to enjoy this unusual, pretty snow laying out on my lawn, because although it felt like the sky was falling, I rest happily knowing that it really isn’t.