You want evidence of a warming trend? Let me "adjust" it for you ... here you go!

As somebody who has followed the science behind global warming for a long time, I've discovered that there are several ways that it doesn't really qualify as "science" in the true sense of the word.

One of the most important ways is surely the temperature data itself. It's highly manipulated in various ways, which is a very ponderous question all by itself, because why exactly would there be a need to adjust temperature data? What exactly are you doing to it, and why? The data is the data. In what sense can we apply "adjustments" to raw data without essentially corrupting it?

Then there is the question of revising older temperatures to establish trends that do not really exist. From the article above:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Check out these animated comparisons of historical data over the last 100 years or so: raw, unadjusted data overlaid with the adjusted data. Note that in every case, the raw historical data was adjusted down, but less so as it moved towards today, and so it turned what was a somewhat chaotic, real-world overall cooling trend into a nice smooth warming trend.

When the temperature data is inconvenient, and you as a climate scientist need evidence of a warming trend to justify your existence and compete for the buckets of cash handed out by governments and NGOs to climate scientists who can show evidence of warming, well, what do you do? You adjust it.

Presto! What was a cooling trend instantly becomes a warming trend instead. All due to the magic of "adjustments" to raw data. Again: why does it need adjusting in the first place? It is by nature empirical data, recorded by the instruments available at the time. It is what it is. The practice of adjusting it brings up obvious credibility questions, as demonstrated by those animated gifs at the link above.

If this practice is widespread, then we know that most or all of the evidence establishing warming trends is essentially garbage. Which means the conclusion is garbage. And so are all the speeches, the carbon cap-and-trade legislation, the carbon financial markets, the carbon "offsets" and all the shady businesses spawned by them, etc.

I think we can all figure it out from here.

ISIS burns a Jordanian Air Force pilot to death - but let's not judge them because people who are not us were mean hundreds of years ago

See, this is exactly why people need to understand history, to call bullshit when and where necessary.

President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday:

As we speak, around the world, we see faith inspiring people to lift up one another -- to feed the hungry and care for the poor, and comfort the afflicted and make peace where there is strife. We heard the good work that Sister has done in Philadelphia, and the incredible work that Dr. Brantly and his colleagues have done. We see faith driving us to do right.

But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge -- or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon. From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism -- terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.

We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion.

So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities -- the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India -- an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity -- but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs -- acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhi, the person who helped to liberate that nation.

So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try. And in this mission, I believe there are a few principles that can guide us, particularly those of us who profess to believe.

I literally cannot believe my ears, that an allegedly Christian American president stands before a Christian group at a prayer breakfast and instead of attacking the despicable actions of ISIS, he defends them by invoking comparisons to the Crusades and slavery. This is both sloppy and disingenuous, not to mention historically inaccurate and morally indefensible. Is it really necessary to pick this apart? Apparently so. On we go.

The Crusades were a series of wars of retaliation, not aggression, waged by Christians to retake territory conquered by Islamic forces over centuries across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, essentially since the rise of Mohammed. Islam was certainly no "religion of peace" then, it was all about warfare and conquest. Christians fought back and retook some, but not all, of this territory; most of it remained under Muslim control until the Battle of Vienna in 1683. So why is this viewed by so many people today as some sort of unjust war, a killing spree in the name of religion? This is an anti-Christian lie dressed up as history.

The Crusades were also 700-800 years ago -- bringing up a war fought in retaliation to Muslim aggression, in comparison to the acts of today by radical Islamists, is a sure sign that you've got no compelling argument whatsoever. It's counter-productive historical cherry-picking. It's well beneath the office of President to offer this kind of weak tea and expect people to believe a word of it, much less to accept it as morally equivalent to burning a man alive and filming it.

What about slavery and Crow laws? Well, slavery was abolished first in Great Britain, driven by a Christian named William Wilberforce, who served an enormous role in world history in re-shaping attitudes about human rights and what was permissible in Western culture. In the U.S., the abolitionist movement was largely driven by Christians as well. We should also note the courage and leadership of President Lincoln, a Christian who regularly referenced religion as a force for good in his calls to moral authority in his legendary speeches and writings. Wilberforce was a personal hero of Lincoln's. Meanwhile, the Jim Crow era was the legacy of a racist Southern Democrat power structure, codified by a racist Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson, that endowed the "separate but equal" concept with the force of settled law, until overturned by Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. None of this was the legacy of any Christian doctrine. I'm not quite sure what his point was there, except to throw in a gratuitous anti-Christian slam for fun.

Christianity measures itself against an impossible standard - Jesus Christ himself. So the criticism that it is imperfect is spot on. So what? Lots of things are imperfect ... just about everything, in fact. This is not a true criticism, when you really stop and think about it for a few minutes. And on the list of questions about how to live in today's world, and the choices we make every day, the Crusades, the Inquisitions, slavery, and Jim Crow laws do not appear anywhere, because they are all pretty much irrelevant. Old news, all of it. Everybody with an ounce of common sense knows that. And to the very limited extent that these things do matter in today's world, at some point we have to move on and stop obsessing over things that we didn't do, and that we can't undo. It's a giant waste of everybody's time, to be perfectly frank.

Why would the president, who is ostensibly a Christian, engage in such silly, easily debunked anti-Christian rhetoric? His words, and more importantly his actions, give the uncomfortable but unavoidable impression that he is an unrelenting apologist for radical Islam. This would have been very good to know in 2008.

If burning a man to death and filming it for the world to see is not enough to make him admit that the world has a radical Islam problem, when even Muslim Arabs in Jordan and elsewhere can see it, then nothing ever will. And that indicates, to me, that he is actively working the other side -- with radical Islam -- against America and the rest of the civilized world.

The Unemployment Rate is Just One of Several Big Lies, Brought to You Every Day by the Political Class

Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO at Gallup, wrote an interesting piece about unemployment numbers called "The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment" yesterday.

He makes the somewhat obvious point that the government, by refusing to count people in the unemployment statistics who want a job but have stopped looking after several months is, well, telling a Big Lie. Some government bureaucrat, in an appalling lack of judgment and honesty, decided it was OK to assume that some guy in his late 40s who got laid off and now can't find a decent job, but who still has a wife and kids and a mortgage, is somehow no longer in trouble after he stops paying his mortgage and moves in with extended family. Right. That would be news to him, his family, and his mortgage company.

You still need to eat, even after the BLS decides you are no longer "unemployed".

Likewise it strains belief to suppose that a 27 year old college graduate who can only find work as a coffee house barista, part-time, is starting on the path to success that we all picture in our heads after graduation: moving out into the world and into their own apartments, buying their first car, and starting their young adult lives. A big part of that is having financial leverage: a solid job and a good income. Working 29 hours - or even 49 hours - at an hourly rate cannot really move you forward in that journey. Such a job is a place-holder, nothing more, and was never intended for college graduates in the first place. We should quit pretending there is anything normal about it. There isn't. It's a big picture, long term disaster in slow motion.

There are millions and millions of these types of people out there, and all of them are probably pretty damn angry when the White House and the media carry on about how unemployment is not high any more. And they have a right to be. Because that 5.6% number is just not valid. It's insulting to everybody affected by joblessness over the last 6 years, to be truthful. These are people's families, houses, and lives we are talking about.

In a real recovery, hiring and income grow quickly, and people either never end up in the situations above, or quickly move out of them. That's what a recovery *is*. Take away either hiring or income, and you cannot really call it a recovery any more.

And that's what we have today, hiring without rising income. Incomes and wages are stagnant or declining for the middle class, and that is because the middle class needs economic growth in order to thrive, unlike the bottom 50% and the top 5-10%, who can rely on government freebies and existing capital respectively.

It's nice that Mr. Clifton spoke up, but I question why it took so long. I suspect that having Mr. Obama rather than Mr. Bush in the White House explains most, or all, of it.

The Line Between Civilization and Mayhem

The line between civilization and mayhem is being tested every day lately:

But this double assassination is also a moment of clarity about how thin the line in any society is between order and anarchy. America is full of Brinsleys who no longer abide the norms of civilized behavior, if they even know what those norms are. They need but the slightest excuse to take justice into their own hands and go on a rampage.

Especially in urban America, the police walk that line between civilization and mayhem every day. Yet since the Garner and Brown episodes, the progressive leaders in New York and Washington have talked and behaved as if the police are society’s main problem.

They have honored with joint public appearances and private meetings such racial agitators as Al Sharpton who want to stop the “broken windows” policing that has done so much to reduce crime in poor minority neighborhoods. Mr. Holder has sent federal agents to second-guess grand juries and “reform” local police as if he assumes these police chiefs and prosecutors are biased. The New York City Council staged a “die-in” as fallen victims of police.

And progressives have failed to denounce protestors who have disrupted civic life, rampaged through stores, and even assaulted police who tried to arrest law-breakers. All of this has contributed to a public climate of suspicion and hate against police in which a man like Ismaaiyl Brinsley can in his deranged mind think it is justified to stalk and execute two cops on the beat.

New York’s police certainly believe this, as they turned their backs on Mr. de Blasio in an astonishing show of contempt when the mayor visited the hospital where the slain officers were taken. This is what happens when a mayor who is responsible for public order treats Al Sharpton with more respect than he does his own police force. The progressive campaign against police must stop before it has even uglier consequences.

A war between the police and urban blacks is not something that anybody could really want. A return to the chaos of urban America 1965-1979 is really not such a good idea.

So it might be wise for Holder, Obama, de Blasio, and Sharpton to shut up on all of this stuff and quit inciting people -- ostensibly in support of disaffected urban black youths -- to loot, destroy, and murder. But we all know they won't, even though that is a path guaranteed to lead to more disaffected urban black youths dying at the hands of other disaffected urban black youths, as we already see today.

Compare and contrast, PBS and Ferguson edition

Recently PBS put together a chart to be helpful to those too busy -- or too dim-witted -- to actually read and process the Ferguson grand jury testimony.

It helpfully explained that Michael Brown was, of course, murdered in cold blood while surrendering. Of course. Look at the chart - it's right there in the column entitled "Did MB put his hands up when fired upon?". Facts, bro.

Just glance quickly at a table of unknown veracity, and you are an instant expert on a case that took months and involved 60 witnesses!

Oddly enough, other summaries of the testimony that I read indicated that a certain segment of the witness testimony -- those who testified that "MB" was surrendering -- were deemed untrustworthy, since the forensic and autopsy evidence fully contradicted their version of events. The witnesses that corroborated Officer Wilson's story, however, told versions that matched the forensic and autopsy evidence.

Which seems pretty important, eh?

Later I encountered another chart that seems to pretty much pull the plug on the PBS chart:

Now I have not read the testimony yet either, so caveat emptor on this. Those who want to really know what they're talking about are pretty much required to read a lot about it. Relying on tables compiled by the media, or by others you might not necessarily be able to trust, is a bad idea.

Detail does complicate our lives, but it also informs us. It keeps us from turning into drooling morons who know nothing of any value except what others tell us to think. If you're too busy to read the testimony, but you have time to spend texting and trolling Facebook, you might want to quit pretending that your opinions on this matter are worth a bucket of warm spit.

Anyway, compare and contrast the tables yourself, but remember that people who filter out and condense details into neatly-compartmentalized story lines are making a lot of decisions on what is important to the story on your behalf. They might not be all that careful, or objective, and to the extent they remove or obscure key details, you, the consumer of that information, pay the price.

The media has spent decades trying to dumb down America - don't help them.

via Second City Cop

Mark Levin says to states: "take your power back" from "runaway" Obama

Examiner.com:

The building national movement for a constitutional convention of states to block President Obama’s executive orders got a huge boost Thursday when leading advocate Mark Levin urged state lawmakers to throttle all of Washington, including Republicans.

“Take your power back,” he demanded of the hundreds of lawmakers attending the American Legislative Exchange Council convention on Capitol Hill. “You are the last line of defense of liberty.”
Levin got star billing because a focus of the winter meeting of the limited government group is pushing for a convention of states, a project of the Citizens for Self-Governance, who sponsored the top talk show host who recently wrote a book laying out constitutional amendments the nation should consider. The process is offered in Article V of the Constitution.

He described a nation that is morphing into a “post-constitutional” crisis where state legislatures are “irrelevant,” and the president and Congress do whatever they want, and nobody in Washington provides checks and balances.

“We have a president of the United States who says, ‘Hey, Congress won’t act. I will.’ Excuse me? Well what’s that? Sounds like a runaway convention to me,” he said.

Ditto for Republicans. “Throw out the establishment Republicans and others who are stopping you from doing what you need to do,” Levin urged.

This does seem like a natural next step for those who value and defend liberty. Washington sure as hell doesn't. Exactly the opposite, in fact.

via Instapundit