When fear-mongering about Anthropogenic Climate Change just does not rake in enough attention any more

April 17, 2015 — xanthippa

First, it was Global Warming.  Back in the 1920’s.

Then, it was Global Cooling.  Back in the 1970’s.

Then it was Global Warming – again, in the 1990’s.

Then it was Anthropogenic Climate Change – when the scientific predictions on effects of carbon-forced Global Warming did not actually happen, thus disproving (or, as scientist say, falsifying:  meaning it is conclusively proven to be false) the hypothesis of carbon-forced Global Warming.

Then it got out that much of these predictions were intentionally faked by a group of scientists who got money and fame from their false claims….

…and then people smartened up and began to tune out all this noise.

And here, I truly mean people: neither the politicians, journalists and their sycophants who would loose a lot if they admitted they got suckered in, nor the Cultural Marxists who saw the whole man-made doomsday scenario as an excellent opportunity to impose their brand of social engineering onto the rest of us.

But now that most people are ignoring the scientists and the journalists and only obeying the politicians because we have lost any semblance of accountability by elected representatives to their constituents in our society, what are poor scientists looking for the next grant-train to do?

How can they bully people into giving them more and more money when the people are  no longer scared?

Gotta go bigger!!!

At least, that is the only plausible explanation I can think of for this Mail Online Headline:

Will a volcanic eruption destroy humanity? Scientists warn that world must begin preparing for explosive global catastrophe

  • Scientists at the European Science Foundation estimate there is a 5-10% probability of a large explosive volcanic eruption by the end of the century
  • They warn it could have global impacts that will devastate human society and send humanity back to a state that existed pre-civilisation 
  • Experts have called upon world leaders to spend £2 billion a year to monitor volcanic activity and to increase the ability to respond
Yeah, sure – give ‘the scientists’ 4 Billion Dollars – or a volcano might just blow up in your neighbourhood, yeah, and you want to be prepared, right?
Because giving the money to scientists instead of leaving more of it in the taxpayer’s pocket so they can have reserves and be prepared for most kind of catastrophic events just makes much more sense:  to those ‘scientists’.
Shame, such shame that some ‘scientists’ have turned into such blatant shake-down artists!
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IPCC moves to plug its ‘Secret Santa’ leak to Donna Laframboise

January 9, 2013 — xanthippa

Donna Laframboise is an investigative journalist who has investigated the IPCC’s claim that their findings are based solely on peer-reviewed scientific literature.  She has found that far from basing their findings on solid scientific studies, the IPCC heavily relied on so called ‘gray literature’, composed mainly from activist propaganda with a dash of government policy papers thrown in for good measure.

Disclosure:  I was one of the citizen reviewers who volunteered to go through the IPCC’s references as part of the citizen’s audit Donna Laframboise organized and then reported in her book, ‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken For The World’s Top Climate expert, and am acknowledged as such in the book.

What Donna Laframboise did was unique:  rather than challenge the science behind the IPCC’s  report or its conclusion, something which is difficult and open to dispute, she took the testable statement made by the IPCC regarding the sources on which they drew their conclusions.  And, she proved that the IPCC lied about the sources on which they based their very report.

Since then, she has been speaking out about IPCC and the untrue statements she could prove they had made, in addition to publishing her book and blogging about the issue.  It is therefore not surprising that a whistle-blower from within IPCC itself had sought her out to leak some information to her regarding the next IPCC report.

Donna Laframboise has gone public with this material yesterday, January 8th, 2013, by publishing a long post on her blog ‘No Frakking Consensus’ as well as a guest post on WUWT (Watts Up With That, world’s leading ACC-skeptic site) with links to the data from the three memory sticks with information from the so-termed ‘Secret Santa leak’.

Today, she had been served with legal notice by IPCC to take the data down or else…

So, if you’d like to get a hold of the data (I know I’ve been busy reading over it – fascinating stuff), better download it fast…or look for some of the many torrent sites distributing the information.  Like Donna’s post concludes:

‘But really, the cat is out-of-the-bag. The damage is done. Thousands of copies of these documents are now out there. They can’t be recalled.’

You go, Donna!

Exposing corruption in unaccountable bureaucracies which increasingly try to regulate our freedom out of existence is the duty of each and every one of us!!!

UPDATE:  The good IT fairy has made the leaked documents into a searchable database.

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Author Elizabeth Nickson Discusses Eco-Fascists

October 22, 2012 — xanthippa

 

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The Magic Sandwich on genetically modified foods

September 24, 2012 — xanthippa

I don’t usually post the Magic Sandwich Show because though there is sometimes good stuff there, it is not a great fit with this blog – at least, most of the time.

And – it is a full hour long.

Yet, in this episode, there is a most illuminating discussion regarding genetically modified foods.  But, it is not your run-of-the-mill discussion – it actually gets into the nitty-gritties of the process and explains it in a way that I suspect most people who have finished basic highschool biology can follow.

The discussion opens with a discussion of one creationist’s position, a creationist with a scientific education…and around the 13 minute mark they first mention DNA, but the interesting ‘genetically modified food discussion’ does not really get started until after the 16-minute mark:

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Statistics Done Wrong

July 5, 2012 — xanthippa

One of my most frustrating pet peeves is when scientists don’t understand what it is they are measuring.

And, let me assure you, this is a much bigger problem than anyone is willing to admit.

My background – going way, way back, before my ventures into the business world or even into parenthood, I studied Science.  And, while I never sought a doctorate or any such thing (I had done my due diligence on child-bearing statistics in preparation for parenthood and realized that if I wanted to optimize for my children’s intelligence, I had to conceive my first child at no older an age than 25 – and my last one at no older an age than 30:  and since my then fiance – now husband – agreed that we did not approve of the ‘daycare’ model of child-rearing, somewhat to my now hubbie’s chagrin, I chose not to pursue further studies), I do have a degree in Physics in there somewhere….

What I specialized for (though I did not realize at the time that this was ‘soooooo Aspie’) was data acquisition, test and measurement.  I made a career out of helping other scientists (and industry, military etc.) figure out how to measure what it was they were really trying to measure, from designing the data acquisition systems to telling them if they were actually measuring what they thought they were measuring.

As such,  am somewhat sensitive to ‘sloppy science’.

Which is why I so happy that my son has forwarded me a link to an absolutely excellent essay about how statistics – especially in the medical field -(where, when I was finishing my degree, I was heavily lobbied to go into post-grad, so that I could ‘clean-up’ the methodology in a prominent Canadian immunology University lab – so I really, really understand the criticism here…) are misunderstood not just by the public, not just by the media people who are reporting on it, but especially by the scientists themselves who are carrying out the studies/experiments!

‘Open a random page in your favorite medical journal and you’ll soon be deluged with statistics: t tests, p values, proportional hazards models, risk ratios, logistic regressions, least-squares fits, and confidence intervals. Statisticians have provided scientists with tools of enormous power to find order and meaning in the most complex of datasets, and scientists have embraced them with glee.

Many of these tools are misapplied or misinterpreted.

In fact, most published research findings are probably false.’

Aye, aye.

The essay is written with the layman in mind:  it explains things, from first principles, without jargon but with examples of just how easy it is to manipulate results, even without realizing one is doing so.

IF you are interested in science…

IF you have not taken a lot of courses in statistics – but want to understand the real-life meaning of statistics…

IF you want to keep ‘science honest’ ….

IF you question ‘politicized science’…

…you would benefit from/enjoy reading this simple essay.

H/T:  Tyr

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Robert Zubrin: Radical Environmentalists and Other Merchants of Despair

May 25, 2012 — xanthippa

 

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New Study: Windfarms Actually Cause Warming of the Environment

April 30, 2012 — xanthippa

We have known for a long time that wind farms – those large fields filled with spinning turbines which harness wind energy and turn it into electricity have problems.

  • Infrasound – which activates the fight/flight reflex of many vertebrates, flooding the body with adrenaline and thus causing long term health damage (in addition to disrupting sleep).
  • Killing bats and endangered birds – by exploding their lungs as they fly in the low-air pressure pockets caused by the air turbulence they create.
  • Rain-shadows – those areas ‘behind’ the farm – as the wind blows – which now receive much less wind as a consequence of the wind harnessed by the wind farms also receive much fewer clouds which are pushed in by the winds, resulting in lands that receive significantly less precipitation than they would naturally, which destroys their ecosystems and may even make them too dry for farming.

Now, a new study led by Liming Zhou from the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New Yorks says there is an additional harm wind farms cause:  they actually increase the temperature in the whole region in which they are located.

According to the study, because the turbines are high above the ground, they mix air higher up and prevent the mingling of the cooler air currents near the ground at night with the warmer air above.  This mechanism interferes with the natural cooling of air cycles and, the study found that as a result of this,  the local temperatures went up by about 1 degree Celsius over a decade!

That beats the pants off anything carbon dioxide has managed to do!!!

H/T:  SlashDot

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Get all the smart kids together – then expose them to lead, mercury and asbestos

March 21, 2012 — xanthippa

Oh, sometimes, I just want to give up…

Broadview Avenue Public School in Ottawa is one of the best schools around.  It is one of only 3 locations in Ottawa which has a program for students who have been identified as not just gifted, but exceptionally gifted.  Broadview houses both the English and French language versions of this most excellent program.

The school also houses exposed asbestos, lead paint and rich mercury deposits….along with exposed wires which are a fire hazard.

Now, I am not saying that super smart kids are better than other kids and deserve better conditions.  No kids should be exposed to these conditions!

However, to select kids specifically for intelligence and then put them into a school filled with chemicals known to decrease intelligence…that is not the most constructive course of action…

While my older son attended that school, he developed chronic fatigue – and environmental factors were suspected.  We even had our house tested for everything, from heavy metals to mold – and came up clean.  After years of this, with no way to help him, I was close to despair!

The problem resolved itself once he started high-school. Now he is away at University and his health is perfect!

I guess now we know what had made him sick…

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If you are looking for a book to read…

September 5, 2011 — xanthippa

…‘A Cloak of Green’ cam be read online here.

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Ottawa’s ‘green-bin’ program and Orgaworld: an open letter to journalist Rob Snow

December 23, 2010 — xanthippa

Hi Mr. Snow!

There are some very important questions we need to learn about Orgaworld – how they got awarded the contract and what type of due diligence was or was not done leading up to this.  Forensic audit should only be one step in this process.

I wonder if there is a clause in the Ottawa ‘deal’ with Orgaworld which would permit us to cancel the contract without penalties (to us):

  • IF Orgaworld fails to produce ‘usable’ compost?
As per The Toronto Star, the compost Orgaworld produces from the Toronto ‘diversion program’ is so toxic, it would kill any plants growing from the soil it was used to ‘enrich’.
The sole reason for the green-bin program is to produce compost that can be used as fertilizer. 

If independent tests show that the compost Orgaworld produces is so toxic that it cannot be used as fertilizer, would this constitute ‘non-compliance’ and/or ‘breech of contract’ by Orgaworld?

  • IF Orgaworld is caught shipping some of the materials from the green-bins to be disposed of as garbage?
In Toronto, whose program is admittedly different from ours, they estimate that up to 22% of the materials Orgaworld accepts is not composted, but burned or dumped in landfills.
Is this standard practice here? 

What percentage of the ‘Ottawa green-bin materials’ we think is being composted does Orgaworld dispose of as ‘garbage’?

We are paying much more for ‘composting’ than we would be for ‘garbage disposal’:  if Orgaworld does not actually compost a certain percentage of the material, should they not refund us that percentage of the fees we pay them?

Would ‘not-composting’ materials we pay them to ‘compost’ constitute ‘non-compliance’ and/or ‘breech of contract’ by Orgaworld?

  • IF any of the materials (finished or not) Orgaworld releases from their plant is found to contain active pathogens which should have been rendered inert in ‘properly produced compost’?
The Toronto Star had found that some of the compost produced from the Toronto program which had been sold as ‘finished product’ actually still contained some live germs which should have been killed in a ‘proper’ composting process.  (To be fair – it does not specify if it was Orgaworld’s product or another manufacturer’s.) 

In an separate incident, it was found that Orgaworld had dumped tons of semi-processed bio-matter – ‘unfinished’ and in various stages of decomposition in places like gravel pits, farm fields and city-owned land without preparing these places to accept bio-waste.

This is an active threat to public health!

Rotting food contains bacteria and other micro-organisms which are toxic to us, humans.  The composting process kills these infectious agents, so that by the time the finished compost is spread on land, the deadly pathogens are neutralized and cannot enter the drinking water system and/or cling to the produce grown in that soil (like, say, e-coli contamination of spinach…).  Some pathogens can become airborne, causing people who inhale them to become ill.

The ‘accelerated’ processes in use in the modern ‘composting factories’ rely on a highly controlled and regulated environment to achieve the composting process which kills these deadly germs. (In the natural, non-accelerated composting process, this takes years and this is why our ancestors had exact composting practices instead of just dumping rotting food on their fields.)

If the bio-matter is dumped outside of this controlled environment before it is completely turned into compost, these pathogens will still be active and pose a serious danger. 

(In addition to the ‘leaching’ and ‘airborn pathogen’ dangers, this could lead to a type of decompostion during which Nitrous Oxide (N2O) is released:  this ‘greenhouse gas’ is 240 times ‘stronger’ than Carbon Dioxide (CO2)!)   😉

Would endangering public health through disposal of only partially-neutralized bio-waste constitute ‘non-compliance’ and/or ‘breech of contract’?

Which brings me to some questions:

What is the quality of the compost Orgaworld produces from the Ottawa ‘Green-bin program’? 

Has anyone tested it?

If so, who?

And where?

How independent are the testing facilities?

The Orgaworld’s Ottawa composting factory had a fire a few months ago.  Fire/smoke is an indicator of ‘improper composting practices’.  Has there ever been an investigation to ascertain which ‘best practices’ were breached in the composting process and caused the fire and how the resultant product will be impacted?

What are the provisions in the Ottawa-Orgaworld contract for non-compliance/breech of contract?  What are the penalties specified?

Are these provisions/penalties ‘similar’ to the ‘industry standard’?

How does this compare to the ‘standard’ for other ‘City contracts’?

How does this compare to the ‘standard contracts’ in the private sector?

Who is responsible for the oversight?  What are the terms and conditions?  Are they being fulfilled?

Who is responsible for any action should there be non-compliance/breech of contract?

Where/how can citizens (especially taxpayers) monitor this process?

Mr. Snow:  you are an excellent journalist who often interviews our City Officials as well as all kinds of other interesting people.  Would you, please, find the answers to these questions?

If you do find any answers to these questions – or any other relevant information – I would be very happy to publish all of it on my blog.

Sincerely yours,

Alexandra,
blogging as Xanthippa

References (in case the links get stripped out from the text):
http://www.thestar.com/iphone/article/660864
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/660862
http://www2.macleans.ca/tag/orgaworld/

Click to access 382500-11.pdf

http://www.ehow.com/list_7313994_hazards-composting.html
http://www.pma.com/resources/issues-monitoring/food-safety/key-learnings-real-world-terms
http://www.extension.org/article/28585
http://www.owma.org/committees/members.asp?mode=d&org=244
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Smouldering+compost+sends+firefighters+Orgaworld+plant/3427666/story.html

Posted in corruption, debate, politics, science, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »
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