Error Theory

Click thumbnail to view high rez flyer (300dpi). Fits letter size paper. Suitable for flyering your town or campus.

It looks like USA Today (and Anne Althouse) need to issue corrections. USA Today claims that Obama's Kenya photo (right):

...sparked snarky headlines in many conservative blogs about the supposed "Muslim" outfit (which it was not)...

But the outfit is Muslim (verified yesterday by Sweetness and Light, Astute Blogger, and the accused Gateway Pundit).

Anne Althouse, subbing for Instapundit, swallows the USA Today disinformation and incorporates it into her editorial line:

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME. The Clinton campaign stooped so low circulating a picture of Barack Obama in African dress.

What makes the story significant is that the garb is Muslim, not just African. Althouse was not calling it shameful to circulate the photo. Her "SHAME, SHAME, SHAME" headline is facetious, making fun of both the Obama and Clinton campaigns for accusing each other of shameful behavior. Althouse's error is in buying the USA Today cover-up of the one fact in the story that needs to be taken seriously, and on that basis presenting the whole thing as much ado about nothing. I don't visit Instapundit to find whitewashes of important information. Protect the brand!


The Muslim garb DOES matter

Obama's early childhood was Islamic. His father and his step-father were both Muslim . Obama was taught Islam with the other Muslim children at the Catholic school he attended, and he attended mosque. Today, Obama's nominally Christian pastor and spiritual advisor is a supporter of Nation of Islam leader and militant racist Louis Farrakhan. In return, Farrakhan enthusiastically supports Obama. At the same time, Obama wants to hold unconditional talks with Iran and Syria, without telling us what he wants to talk about.

[Obama's explanation for unconditional talks:

If we think that meeting with the president is a privilege that has to be earned, I think that reinforces the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time.

He is talking specifically about meeting with our enemies. It is Ahmadinijad and Assad who Obama does not see America as standing above at this point in time. My take on this is severe.]

In this context, the Muslim garb DOES matter. Obama most certainly knows that, in the Islamic world, there is no such thing as playing at being Muslim. A Muslim can play at being a Christian. Strategic dissimulation is allowed in Islam (Koran, verse 16.106). But having been raised Islamic as a child, if Obama is not still a Muslim, then he is an apostate, which is a death penalty crime under Sharia law. This is very serious stuff in the Islamic world, and Donning Muslim garb is a serious statement indeed. To pretend otherwise is to say that Obama knows nothing about Islam.

So who told USA Today that the Obama's costume is not Muslim? Did the Obama camp issue this disinformation? Did USA Today concoct it on their own? I sent an email to USA today reporters Mark Memmott and Jill Lawrence asking for their source. Will update on any response.


UPDATE: Got an answer from Mark Memmott at USA Today:

We've followed the lead, at this point, of the AP -- which is referring to the garments as "traditional" and "local," and not as Muslim. But I probably should not have said it defintely is "not" Muslim apparel.

Either AP reporter Jim Kuhnhenn did not know that the dress was Muslim, or he was trying to cover it up by describing the dress as “traditional” and “local” instead. If he was trying to fool people, it seems he succeeded in fooling Memmott, who adds in a second email that he has posted an update. Here it is:

Clarification at 3:15 p.m. ET: Earlier, we said the garments were not Muslim. To be fair, though, many Muslims in Somalia would certainly wear such clothes. Obama, however, is a member of a Christian church in Chicago.

That is a pretty half-hearted clarification. This is the costume of a "Somali Elder," and Somalis are 100% Sunni Muslim. The correct statement, from the information that Memmott has at his disposal, is that this is specifically Muslim garb, unless he is just waiting to verify that non-Muslim Kenyans and Somalis (if there are any) don't go around dressed as Somali elders.

The costume of a “Somali Elder” would seem to be a mark of high Islamic status. This is not mufti (civilian clothes), though it might be the dress of a mufti (an interpretter of Islamic law). That ought to be easy enough for a newspaper to clarify (if they just avoid the word "mufti").


UPDATE 2: Realipundit reminds that we have seen this headress before. There really isn't much excuse for reporters not knowing that this is symbolically Muslim attire:


Kind of amazing that no one noted the similar headress back in September 2006. The Obama picture was first published just one day before Adam Gadahn's "Convert or Die" video was released (9/2/2008).

Of course there is an argument to be made that donning this costume was an innocuous courtesy, and Obama makes it, but only in the context of this being some generic "traditional" garb, completely eliding the fact that this is Muslim garb:

Everybody knows that whether it's me or Senator Clinton or Bill Clinton that when you travel to other countries they ask you to try on traditional garb that you have been given as a gift.

But Islam is not just any "tradition." It is a tradition that regularly erupts in paroxysm of violence (against which dissenting voices are vanishingly rare) over the merest symbolic gestures. The ascendant claimants to this tradition (the "revivalist" Wahhabists and Kohemini-ists) regularly commit acts of war agianst the United States. Can this really be ignored? Obama does not even have to face the fact of his donning Muslim garb?

Presented with the opportunity to wear traditional Islamic dress, Obama could have said:

I am sorry. Though my father was Muslim, I am a Christian. I don't want to mislead anyone. So thank you for the offer, but it would not be appropriate for me to wear Islamic dress.

If he were confronted today with the fact that he did put on the Muslim garb, he might tell us that something like this is what he should have said. Or maybe he would say that he was being ecumenical, and we would learn that he does not see a big gap between Christianity and Islam. Or maybe he would deny that he saw any religious connotation to the costume at all.

Whatever he would say, we all deserve to hear it. He is running for president after all. It is absurd to say that Obama wearing Muslim garb is not newsworthy.


AP reporter Kuhnhenn engages in other whitewashing as well

Faced with conflicting claims about whether Obama was raised Muslim (Obama denies it, while lots of evidence suggests that he was), Kuhnhenn declares that the muslim ties are "false rumors," without citing any source but Obama himself:

Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ and says he has never been a Muslim, but false rumors about Islamic ties are circulating on the Internet.

That looks like a clear cut case of shilling for Obama instead of sticking to the facts. At the very least, Obama would seem to be differing with traditional Islam on what makes a person a Muslim. He seems to be saying that since he did not practice Islam up to the age of competency, he does not consider himself as ever having been a Muslim. But traditional Islam certainly does. Children raised Muslim, who on reaching the age of competency choose Christianity instead, are threated with death.

In his second email to me, Mark Memmott opined that Kuhnhenn was just being conservative when he only described Obama's dress as "traditional":

I doubt AP was trying to cover up anything or fool anybody. More likely, it was being conservative and only saying as much as it knew.

This "conservative" explanation does not hold up when it comes to Kuhnhenn's blanket dismissal of Obama's Muslim ties. The consistent explanation is that Kuhnhenn is just a typical left-wing hack, filtering the news for maximum partisan advantage.


UPDATE 3: Obama wearing another Muslim hat:


The man holding the photo of Barack Obama in this AP shot is supposedly Barack's older brother Malik Obama. The Fez like hats that both are wearing are identified by Sweetness and Light as Muslim "topi or kopiah." This suggests a test for Obama's explanation that:

...when you travel to other countries they ask you to try on traditional garb that you have been given as a gift.

Are there any pictures of Obama wearing traditional garb that is not Muslim?

Phyllis Chesler over at Pajamas Media has heard from Bat Ye'or on the sea change that an Obama presidency would create:

Bat Ye’or told me that if Obama is elected, America will become dhimmified even faster than Europe.

Flight 93 is the symbol of our woken vigilance. We are supposed to be alert now, to jihadist enemies that hide amongst us, pretending to be trustworthy friends.

Those charged with the memorialization of Flight 93 have instead embraced an anti-spirit of Flight 93, regarding vigilance as somehow beyond the pale even of contemplation.

Listen to the words of Clay Mankamyer, one of the founders of the Flight 93 Memorial Project, describing the Project's reaction to warnings of Islamic symbolism in the Crescent of Embrace design. They asked the accused architect Paul Murdoch about it. They agreed with him that it was "too big a stretch" to think that he had conspired to intentionally include Islamic symbolism, and so they decided that: "we're just not going to address the issue." They made an up-front decision NOT to look at the facts.

Here is the audio (50 seconds) followed by a transcript:

The controversy then arose. When I first heard it, it was a street preacher who had drawn attention to the similarities to the red crescent, and when you heard what he had to say about it, and looked at the design, there were without a doubt some striking similarities. He went to, I went to, Paul Murdoch and expressed some concern and wondered what they were going to do about it. Their decision was that, well, certainly everybody is going to see that any similarity is going to be just coincidental and it's too big a stretch to think that anybody conspired to create anything but a memorial to the heroes who WON the battle that fateful morning, and so they decided that, 'we’re just not going to address the issue.'

Mankamyer is not ideologically disposed to be politically correct. He is a conservative Christian patriot, speaking in this instance to a Christian Coalition meeting (recorded by Bill Steiner, with the knowledge and permission of those in attendance, 9-18-2007, Greensburg PA). What seems to be operating here is a generous spirit of goodwill, unwilling to believe anything bad about this architect they had all worked with and put their trust in.


Goodwill only towards the man accused of an enemy plot

The problem is that Mankamyer et al. failed to similarly give the benefit of the doubt to those who were issuing warnings about the design. If they had treated the critics as credible people too, they would have let the facts decide, and Murdoch's dishonesty would have been quickly exposed.

When the controversy over the crescent name and shape first erupted, Murdoch denied that his giant crescent had the same shape as an Islamic crescent:

Theirs is a lunar crescent. Ours isn't based on that.

Oh yeah? Zombie posted a "throbbing crescent" animation (no longer active) that showed otherwise, and Michelle Malkin broadcast it to the online masses. Here is a three panel re-creation:


"Throb on" shows the Tunisian crescent, matching the geometry of the Crescent of Embrace almost exactly: about 2/3rds of a circle of arc, with a circular inner arc. (Most definitely NOT a lunar crescent, which covers half a circle of arc and has an elliptical inner arc.) "Throb off" shows bare crescent site plan. (Click pic for larger image.)

All that people like Mankamyer had to do was actually look at what people were telling them and they would have known immediately that Murdoch was deceiving them. Instead, they explicitly decided that they were NOT going to look at the facts. They extended good will only to the man who was accused of perpetrating an enemy plot, while extending nothing but ill will towards his accusers.


"A shrine to Micky Mouse"

Mankamyer's presentation includes some wrenching examples of just how willfully blind he and others have become as they continued down their chosen fact-free path. Listen to the crazy excuse he comes up with for not being concerned about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent (ten seconds):

You see what we are up against though. I could come in here and say... I could draw a point from this window to that window, and it goes right to Orlando Florida and this is a shrine to Micky Mouse. [laughter]

This is clever? A Mecca-oriented crescent or arch shape is the central feature around which every mosque is built. A line across two windows does not orient anything, and the scumbags who hijacked Flight 93 did not pray to Micky Mouse five times a day.

Of course Mankamyer was intentionally offering the stupidest example he could concoct as a way of suggesting that it is just as stupid to be concerned about planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. If he had said that directly everyone in the room would have been disgusted, so instead he made the most disingenuous comparison he could come up with.

This is what their spirit of goodwill has degenerated into: pure malignant bias.


They all know about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent

Notice that Mankamyer does not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. This squares with what Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird told me in July 2007: that everyone involved in the Memorial Project is fully aware that the giant crescent does in fact point within two degrees of Mecca. They all just have excuses for why they are not concerned about it.

"I won't be concerned unless you can prove intent," Baird said, "and it is impossible to prove intent." i.e. Baird does not care what the facts are. There is absolutely nothing that could ever wake him up from his anti-vigilant slumber.

They all know that the public would never accept a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the crash site, regardless of whether it was intentional or not, so they lie about it. One project spokesman after another keeps declaring that factual claims like the Mecca orientation of the crescent are false and "preposterous."

How long before one of these fine upstanding citizens recognizes that it is wrong to keep lying to the public about explosive information that they all know to be true?


Mankamyer says that he would like to see a Congressional investigation

The scenes are quite astounding. Clay Mankamyer, a conservative Christian, manages to get a Christian Coalition meeting laughing about the Mecca orientation of the Flight 93 crescent. How do you ever live that down?

You start by trying. In the question and answer part of the meeting, Bill Steiner asked for an independent investigation, and Mankmyer said he would join Bill in that (10 seconds):

Bill Steiner: "The only concerns we have is that this design be fully vetted by a Congressional investigation before it goes any further."

Bill talks over Mankamyer's reply, but Mankamyer repeats himself enough to be heard: "And I would like ... I would join you in that."

If Mr. Mankamyer would insist publicly on a Congressional investigation, it would go a long ways. So would admitting to the public that he and others in the Project are aware of the factual accuracy of the Mecca-orientation claim.

Tom Burnett Sr. is asking everyone to help him get state and Congressional investigations started. It would certainly help if at least a few people from inside the Memorial Project would start telling the truth.


"I came into this world to be a witness for truth"

The heroes of Flight 93 did not obfuscate. They faced the harsh truth of their situation and acted as love required. Mankamyer understands that. He is a genuine patriot, who dedicated himself to the memorialization of Flight 93.

Somehow--apparently at the urging of architect Paul Murdoch--he let himself be guided by presumption, finding excuses to avoid unpleasant truths. (It was in talking to Murdoch that Mankamyer and others decided it was "too big a stretch to think anyone conspired" and they should therefore "not ... address the issue.")

Facing threat of death, Jesus told Pilate that he "came into the world to be a witness for truth" (Jn 18:37). This is his most fundamental instruction to his followers: trust in truth. Never EVER put presumption ahead of witness. For those who make this mistake, it is never to late to undo it.

Every climate scientist in the world has known beyond any doubt, for at least several years now, that late 20th century warming was driven almost entirely by the very high levels of solar activity between 1940 and 2000 (details below). They also know the corollary: that when solar activity drops into a down phase, the earth will get cold, possibly even precipitating the next ice age (due any century now).

Not only is this the real and impending threat, but solar activity has been low for several years now, and sharp global cooling is already being detected. At the same time, the current lull between 11 year solar cycles is unusually quiet and long, reminiscent of earlier downturns in solar activity that led to dramatic global cooling.

It seems certain at this point that we are in for at least a substantial dip in global temperature. In addition to the weak sun and the already falling temperatures, this winter's record snow cover is reflecting an unusual amount of solar radiation back into space, and we are also in the middle of a major La Niña event (where cold pacific waters rise to the surface).

Warming hysteria is religion, not science

If global cooling is known to be the real and impending danger, why is it that even with the onset of cooling, most climatologists are raising hysterical alarms about global warming? Because they are not actually concerned about global temperature at all. They are environmental religionists who believe that human economic growth is gobbling up the natural world.

Blaming late 20th century warming on fossil fuel burning was just an opportunity for these religionists to try to impose restrictions on economic activity, and in that way “save the planet” from human encroachment. Global warming alarmism never did have anything to do with climatology.

If only the sun had stayed aboil for one more solar cycle, the religionists would have succeeded. When the inevitable cooling did come, it would still pull the curtain off of their global warming hoax, but by then it would be too late. Economic restrictions would already be fixed in place, under UN bodies that the religionists control.

Alas, it was not to be. The fake bride was almost to the altar, but mother nature put her foot down on the bridal veil, leaving the hairy ogre standing in front of the congregation in his stuffed bra and BVDs. Fake minister Al Gore must be furious, but to no effect. Their game is up.

Even a temporary dip in global temperatures will be enough to expose the scare about human and CO2 based global warming as a fraud. There hasn’t been any dip in CO2, so a dip in temperature will explode the alarmist claim that global temperature is CO2 driven.

Sleeping like a baby

SOHO sunspot scan, 2-18-2008. Scientists have been waiting almost a year for solar cycle 24 to begin. A blip in August 2006 and a blip in January 2008 raised hopes, but all remains quiet. [A peep on 2/25/08. Wake up dragon.]

If we are lucky, solar cycle 24 will still fire up soon and solar activity will regain its 20th century intensity, giving us a reprieve from the next ice age, hopefully for hundreds of years yet. One NASA prediction scheme suggests cycle 24 ought to be strong, despite its slow start. Solar dynamo theory, in contrast, predicts a weak cycle 24 (p. 14).

Either way, long term solar cycles are predicted to bottom out in 2030 and 2200, and it is certainly possible that serious cold is coming up fast. (Solar "conveyor belt" theory predicts that the drop off will come in cycle 25.) What is certain is that whatever happens, global temperature will be a function of solar activity, compared to which even very large changes CO2 have a negligible effect.

The geological record proves that 20th century warming was driven by solar activity

Past levels of solar-magnetic activity can be measured in the geologic record by the isotope residues of Galactic Cosmic Radiation (GCR). High levels of solar wind block GCR from reaching earth, so the GCR isotope signatures serve as a proxy for solar activity.

Temperature also leaves a geologic signal in the form of temperature related isotopes. These geologic records have been examined going back thousands of years, and on every time scale, the level of GCR “explains” statistically about 90% of contemporaneous temperature variation. (The geological evidence is amassed for laymen in Fred Singer’s 2007 book Unstoppable Global Warming, every 1500 years, but none of this is new to professional climatologists.)

Between 1940 and 2000, solar activity was at the highest levels seen in the geologic record. Given the known effect of solar wind on global temperature, that means that late 20th century warming was driven largely if not entirely by high levels of solar activity, and every climate scientist in the world knows it.


What? You mean THIS makes a difference? Who’da thunk it?

The leading theory says that it is the GCR rather than the solar wind that directly affects global temperature. High energy Galactic Cosmic Radiation ionizes the atmosphere, inducing the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight back into space. Under this theory, the warming effect of the solar wind is indirect. By sweeping away some of the GCR, the solar wind in-effect blows the clouds away, giving the earth a sunburn. (See Henrik Svensmark’s 2007 book The Chilling Stars.)

But whatever the mechanism, the geologic record leaves no doubt that 20th century warming was due almost entirely to high levels of solar activity. Five years ago the geologic evidence that the solar wind drives global temperature was just beginning to mount. Now it is overwhelming, but the religionists are doing their best to suppress it. So close to their goal of using warming hysteria to impose draconian economic restraints, they are not about to admit that human activity has negligible effects on climate.

There is NO evidence for CO2 driven warming

While the geologic record provides clear proof of the effects of solar activity and GCR on global temperature, there is absolutely no evidence anywhere in the geologic record for CO2 ever having any significant effect on temperature. Maybe if you go way back to before there was plant life to gobble up the CO2, allowing CO2 to reach a hundred times what it is today, but not since. Carbon dioxide is plant food, so the advent of plant life made CO2 levels self-moderating. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the lusher the biosphere grows. Our burning of fossil fuels has created one of the lushest biospheres that planet earth has ever seen.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so additional CO2 will trap some heat, but apparently not enough to have any significant effect on global temperature, probably because it traps the same wavelengths of infrared as the much more abundant water vapor. In his Nobel Prize winning movie, A Convenient Lie, Al Gore points to the correlation over the last 650,000 years between CO2 and temperature, but neglects to mention that increases in CO2 lag behind the increases in temperature by about 800 years. CO2 is not driving temperature, but is driven by it. As periods of high solar wind warm the oceans, the oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere.

One ineluctable prediction of the greenhouse gas theory of 20th century warming is that the greatest warming would occur in the lower troposphere (the bottom eight miles of atmosphere). This is where greenhouse gasses do their heat-trapping work. The warmed up lower troposphere would in turn warm the surface.

In this sequence, the lower atmosphere, being the source of warmth for the surface, would be warmer than the surface warm up more than the surface (PP. 6). But the observed pattern is just the opposite. The surface has warmed, but the lower atmosphere has not, just as we would expect if the solar wind had blown the clouds away, giving the earth’s surface an extra dose of sunlight.

Too bad that CO2 does not have more of a warming effect. On the cusp of the next ice age, it would be nice if all of our fossil fuel burning could afford us a bit warmer jacket of insulating atmosphere, but apparently there is little we can do to warm ourselves up in this way. It is going to get cold, and while quite a bit more warming would have been perfectly benign, cold is brutal. Cold is actually something to worry about.

The original climate science fraud: Stephen Schneider

In the 1970’s when the earth seemed to be cooling, Dr. Stephen Schneider, now at Stanford, blamed cooling on human burning of fossil fuels. Particulates were blocking the sun, he suggested, calling for dramatic pullbacks in human population and economic activity. (Schneider’s 1976 book The Genesis Strategy is an apocalyptic neo-Malthusian fantasy.)

When the temperature signal changed from cooling to warming in the early 80’s, Schneider again blamed the human burning of fossil fuels, and again called for drastic restraints on economic activity. As cooling becomes apparent this year, expect him to again blame cooling on fossil fuel burning, and again call for drastic restraints on economic activity.

In 1997 Senate testimony, Schneider objected to any presumption that the warming of the earth after the Little Ice Age (1600-1850) was natural:

…we know that humans started changing the land surface and started changing the atmosphere, which we began to do significantly in the 18th Century, so we cannot actually rule that potential influence out yet.

Dr. Schneider’s fellow global warming alarmist, Dr. Eric Barron of Penn State, jumped in to clarify their position:

The objection occurs when [it is said that] the world is bouncing back from an unusually cold period. It's just as possible, because of the way natural variability works, that it was in the midst of bouncing to an even colder century and therefore we have an even bigger problem than we're thinking.

Schneider and Barron correctly identified the only possible circumstance in which fear of global warming could conceivably be rational. They know that for the last million years the earth has alternated between ice ages of about 100,000 years and interglacials of 10-12 thousand years. Our current interglacial started about 11,500 years ago so it is reasonable to think that at any time, natural temperature effects could carry us into the next ice age.

If Schneider’s speculation is right--that if not for human interference the next ice age would already have started--then human warming influences really are dominating natural influences, and if they remain unchecked, they really could create runaway warming. But this speculation is absurd. We know what the main natural driver of global temperature has been doing since the little ice age. Solar activity has been through the roof!

Telling the Senate that natural forces might have been in the cooling direction since the Little Ice Age was professional malfeasance, but this was the only way it could possibly make sense, on the geological eve of the next ice age, to worry about humans causing the observed global warming, so this is what Schneider pretended.

Schneider stated his attitude towards scientific honesty in a 1989 interview with Discover Magazine:

So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. … Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

This calculated dishonesty does not apply only to the magnitude of alarmist claims, but also to their direction. The alarm that Schneider is looking to raise is not over any particular climate change. Neither cooling nor warming actually matters to him. The alarm he wants to raise is over human activity.

Original climate science fraud #2: James Hansen

Other leading climate religionists indulge in similar demagoguery. A later but more central figure is NASA climatologist James Hansen, who took the global warming scare public by testifying to congress in 1988 that:

global warming is now sufficiently large that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.

Hansen just assumed that whatever warming was taking place was due to human release of CO2. That was bad enough in 1988, before the effects of solar weather on global temperature had been much studied, but Hansen was still pulling the same scam in 2005, when competing theories of natural warming were well established.

When ocean temperature data amassed in 2005 showed a warming trend, Hansen declared the data to be a “smoking gun” that proved human production of CO2 was heating the earth. In fact, the data did absolutely nothing to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic warming. Hansen deliberately misrepresented the implications of the data in order to advocate for his actual objective:

[Hansen] calculated the energy retention could be eliminated only by halting all human-caused emissions of methane or by somehow removing half of all the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere.

Of course this prescription would require drastic curtailment of human economic activity, which in Hansen’s mind is what justifies all the disinformation. Hansen couldn’t care less about the minuscule temperature effects of CO2. His goal is to stop economic advance from gobbling up the earth.

As Ronald Baily put it in his 1993 book Eco-Scam:

Freeze or fry, the problem is always industrial capitalism, and the solution is always international socialism. (p. 80)

The Goracle

How did the field of climatology come to be dominated by environmental religionists, glad to promote what has at this point become a full fledged hoax? There have always been plenty of environmental religionists in academia, but Al Gore is the one who gave them billions of dollars to play with, while excluding all “contrarians” from his largesse. As vice president over the eight years when global warming hysteria first made climate science a funding priority, Al Gore allocated every dime. This was his portfolio as President Clinton's climate science czar. With over ten billion dollars to spend (a huge amount for academia), Al Gore created the current climate science industry almost from scratch, transforming what had been a small backwater discipline into a juggernaut of his own framing.

The funding amounts have since multiplied several times, all of it channeled through the religious ideologues that Al Gore originally empowered, men like NASA scientists James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, two of the most self-conscious frauds in the history of science, all for what they truly believe to be the best of all possible reasons: saving the environment from human economic activity.

Of course they are wrong about that too. These men are not economists, and their neo-Malthusian presumptions are childishly ignorant. The absolute best thing for the health of our natural environment is economic growth. As we advance economically, we learn to do more with less, and the quickest way to get that advance is to have more babies, because it is people who create advance.

In addition to being neo-Malthusians, “green” ideologues are also against economic liberty. They see capitalism as placing private gain ahead of public interest. But what is really gobbling up the environment, where it is being gobbled up, is lack of capitalism. Despoilation occurs in those places where property rights are not existent or not enforced, creating what has long been known as “the tragedy of the commons.” No one has an economic incentive to preserve commonly held resources like the oceans because, without ownership, no one can capture the value of the preserved resource. Their only incentive is to grab what they can today, leaving none for tomorrow.

You can’t find an economist in the America who supports the socialist stupidity of the environmental religionists, but because they pretend they are doing climate science instead of economics they are able to get away with it.

How the alarmists pull off their fraud: the omitted variable

When a regression model is “fit to the data,” the explanatory power of any omitted variables will get attributed to any correlated variables that are included in the model. This “omitted variable” problem has long been used by dishonest ideologues to practice statistical fraud. A prominent example is income studies purporting to show that women earn less than equally qualified men.

Such “advocacy statistics” are generated by leaving out important explanatory variables that are correlated to sex, such as hours of work. Since women on average work substantially fewer hours than men, the effect of fewer work hours on income gets misattributed to sex.

Properly done studies show that, when variables like hours of work are accounted for, women actually make more than similarly qualified men, just as one would expect in a society where there is tremendous legal pressure to grant preferential treatment to women. Yet the fraud has been effective. Feminists have succeeded in using their phony “advocacy statistics” as a club to push for yet more legal advantages, and their media allies keep up the fraud by only reporting the statistically biased studies.

This is exactly what is happening with claims of human caused global warming. The alarmists simply leave the dominant natural effect out of their models. The UN’s IPCC model, constructed by NASA climatologists James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, and their cronies, includes direct solar effects (changes in luminosity) but explicitly excludes indirect solar effects (the solar wind) on the grounds that the impacts of this solar weather are too speculative to warrant inclusion.

The exact mechanism may be speculative, but the existence of some such mechanism is not speculative at all. Far more speculative is the theory that climate is driven by CO2, for which there is absolutely no evidence. Variations in GCR “explain” statistically 90% of all global temperature variation, and it is omitted as speculative. CO2 “explains” 0% of temperature variation statistically, yet it is included.

Hansen and Schmidt know full well the statistical consequences of this bias. Solar activity and CO2 have both reached historic highs in recent decades. When indirect solar effects are omitted, the warming due to these effects gets misattributed to the concurrent increase in CO2, which Hansen and Schmidt then project forward to create their false alarm. Pure statistical fraud.

They pretend to be using super-sophisticated climate models to determine which explanation is supported by the evidence--man made warming or natural warming--when in fact they are rigging their models in the most obvious way to fraudulently attribute natural warming effects to CO2. (My commentary on the 4th IPCC report, tracing the omitted solar variable through their analysis, here.)

Fraudulent counter-evidence

For the last several years, the CO2 warming climatologists have been offering the most absurd evidence against the endlessly documented GCR-temperature link. They look at brief periods where the cosmic ray count is rising (due to diminished solar wind) and claim that if the GCR-temperature link were real, this should cause temperature to fall. As British climate religionist Mike Lockwood put it last year:

Since about 1985,… the cosmic ray count had been increasing, which should have led to a temperature fall if the theory is correct - instead, the Earth has been warming. … This should settle the debate.

Rasmus Benestad, a crony of NASA frauds Hansen and Schmidt, made similar claims in 2004 and 2007. If warming since the 1960’s was due to the absence of cloud inducing GCR, said Benestad, then GCR should have shown a downward trend during the period when temperature was rising, but it didn’t.

Morons. Nobody can be that stupid. It is the levels of solar activity and GCR that matter, not whether they are going up or down. Solar activity jumped up to “grand maximum” levels in the 1940’s and stayed there (averaged across the 11 year solar cycles) until 2000. Solar activity doesn’t have to keep going up for warming to occur. Turn the gas burner under you pot of stew to high and the stew will heat. You don’t have to keep turning the heat up further and further to get heating!

This is how intentionally oblivious our climate religionists are. Anything to avoid acknowledging the obvious, even pretending they don’t know the difference between level and trend. They are self-lobotimized logical idiots, speaking as the voice of science.


But it hasn't continued to get even more furious. THAT can’t cause warming!

What we would actually expect to see from fluctuations between very-high and medium-high solar activity is not fluctuations between warming and cooling, but fluctuations in how rapidly warming occurs. To examine these fluctuations, Henrik Svensmark constructed a temperature record with the warming trend taken out. The remaining temperature “anomaly” (showing whether warming was faster or slower than average) correlates well with solar activity and GCR:


Svensmark graphic (via the reference frame ), shows impressive correlation between GCR and the temperature “anomaly,” which abstracts from the temperature trend (.014K/decade), the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino, and volcanic aerosol effects.

This fine degree of correlation between GCR and the rate of temperature change is nuance. No nuance is necessary to comprehend the basic correlation between solar-activity and temperature, consistent over many thousands of years, as confirmed by hundreds of studies of the geological record (with no doubt about which is causing which).

Morally blind

Academia and the press--our primary information industries--are dominated by people who think that it is moral to avoid and suppress the truth in order to advance what they presume to be right or in their interest. Somehow it does not dawn on these moral imbeciles that because they avoid the truth, their presumptions about what is right can only be wrong.

Supposed scientists in academia are doing the exact same thing with the Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial, covering up the Mecca orientation of the giant Crescent of Embrace by telling the public and the Families of Flight 93 that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca!

Will global cooling wake the rest of society up to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our left-wing elites? What greater shock could there be than to discover that this supposed “scientific consensus” on human-caused global warming was all a self-conscious lie?

The duped had better wake up, because the liars never will. No matter how much harm the Gores and the Hansens and the Schneiders do, they will never feel any compunction, because they never see themselves as acting for any but the best purposes: their presumptions about which side they should be on. Such is the banality of evil: willingly blind and morally self-satisfied about it.

California Democrats want to introduce climate change into the state's high school science curriculum. Hurry up and say “yes,” Republicans, because as soon as the cooling earth is common knowledge, Democrats will be spinning madly to cover up this left-wing debacle. Include climate science by law, and by the time it goes into effect, the unavoidable subject matter will be the global warming hoax. Awesome.


Related posts:

August 26, 2004
Global warming alarmists still running gov. bureaucracy

January 28, 2005
Greenhouse alarmists fight the new sunspot understanding

February 11, 2005
Is Realclimate part of the "reality based" community?

April 21, 2005
Earth Day 2030: "A new eye blinked open upon the world"

April 30, 2005
NASA global-warmist James Hansen is a LIAR

February 14, 2007
My commentary on the draft IPCC report, submitted last spring

Got a call from my friend Keith on Thursday (carrying the "Marines are the answer" sign). The Old Ladies in Funny Hats were going to protest the Iraq war at the Marine recruiting station in Mountain View the next day. Sorry old hippie girls, but a lot of people around here actually want to defeat our enemies. That is me with the "Kill al Qaeda" sign. Photos are from the Mountain View Voice. Apologies to all the folks out there who have to deal with real winter weather.

Here are the funny hat ladies:


Caption: "The Raging Grannies sing protest songs in front of the military recruiting center. Photo by Marjan Sadoughi."

I had an extended conversation with the black haired fellow below. He was rational in his complaints--the CIA knocking off Iran's first democratically elected government in 1953, and the failure to knock off Saddam and install democracy in Iraq after the first Gulf war--but he was irrational in his conclusions. Why isn't he FOR finishing the job in Iraq now?


Caption: "Karim Mansouri, left, from the De Anza College group Students for Justice, debates the war with Alec Rawls of Dialogue Across the Divide. Photo by Marjan Sadoughi."

Don't know where that "Dialogue Across the Divide" name came from, but I guess it fits, as this picture shows. Leftists on the left. Conservatives on the right. The sign carried by the pretty Vietnamese gal behind me says: "No more Vietnams: Intentionally losing a war is EVIL!"

The scene on the street-corner was amusing. A little gray protester-man stood in front of me with a "Honk for peace" sign. I towered over him with my "Honk if you want to Kill Al Qaeda" sign. About every third light, a few drivers would honk, then they would all start honking. I think they were laughing.

The recruiters thanked us for coming out. The mother of a Marine even gave me a donut. Thanks Marines.

Dr. Daniel Griffith ("anything can point to Mecca, because the earth is round") is still trying to convince the press that the Flight 93 crescent does not point to Mecca. In an email to the Park Service and the press this week, he tried to make it sound as if I am calculating the orientation of the crescent by using techniques that can be manipulated to achieve any desired result:

Based on Alec’s arguments, one could claim that the memorial is oriented toward the Vatican.

The Flight 93 crescent can indeed be seen as pointing to the Vatican, for the simple reason that the Vatican sits on the great circle line between the crash site and Mecca.

This is what Griffith represents as some concocted method for calculating the orientation of the crescent: the great circle method!

This "shortest distance" or "straight line" direction to Mecca (curving only in the over the horizon direction) is the relevant direction because this is the way that Muslims calculate the direction to Mecca. (There was a debate about it in the 1980's and 90's, largely settled by this nondescript looking analysis.)

Here is the great circle line from the Flight 93 crash-site to Mecca:


(Click-pic for larger image. Great circle calculator here.)

Here is the great circle line from the crash-site to the Vatican:


This calculator rounds to the nearest degree, so Mecca and the Vatican both are presented as lying on the great circle line that, from the crash site, proceeds 55° clockwise from north.

Of course a person who faces Mecca is also facing everything else that happens to lie in the direction of Mecca. When Griffith acknowledges that the crescent points to the Vatican, he is not debunking of the Mecca-orientation of the Flight 93 crescent, but confirming it.


Reductio ad Hitlerum

Griffith pulled the same trick last July, telling reporter Kirk Swauger of the Johnstown Tribune Democrat that the crescent can be seen as pointing to a Nazi concentration camp if you want:

Griffith said Rawls suggested memorial organizers would be outraged if the crescent pointed to a Nazi concentration camp instead, the professor said it actually could be done.

Of course I never suggested that anyone should care if the crescent points at a concentration camp. Is there a worldwide religion of facing Nazi concentration camps for prayer? Was Flight 93 hijacked by people who face Nazi concentration camps for prayer?

An unpublished report that Griffith wrote for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review in 2006 clarifies his concentration camp reference. It notes that there was a Nazi concentration camp (Drancy) located just outside of Paris, which as you can see on the maps above is also (like the Vatican) on the great circle line between the Flight 93 crash-site and Mecca. In his 2006 report, Griffith acknowledges that the crescent points to the Drancy camp, yet is still unwilling to acknowledge that it points to Mecca. Somehow, the crescent points to everything on the line to Mecca except Mecca.

When Griffith told Swauger that you can see the crescent as pointing to a Nazi concentration camp if you want, he was clearly trying to mislead Swauger into thinking that you can see the crescent as pointing wherever you want. This dishonest intention was made clear by another statement that Griffith made to Swauger (not reported by Swauger, but related by Swauger to me at the time). Griffith told Swauger that: "You can face anywhere to face Mecca."

He is doing the same thing when he tells the Park Service now that the crescent can be seen as pointing to the Vatican, without being clear that this is because the Vatican sits on great circle line to Mecca.


Pecksniff

In his email, Griffith complains that I have been trying to bully him into changing his analysis. Nobody is trying to bully Griffith into changing anything. We are trying to expose him as a fraud.

Griffith is practically in tears about being called a Pecksniff (a character from Martin Chuzzlewit "who lies and cants whether he is drunk or sober"). It is the perfect epithet. Look in the dictionary under Pecksniff and you will see Daniel Griffith's picture.

Not that anyone should bother to read Griffith's email, but if anyone wants to, it puts front and center another astounding example of Griffith's free-form dishonesty.

Griffith quotes my January 2006 report to the Memorial Project as saying that:

...the orientation to Mecca “take[s] a short cut over the North Pole … even though Mecca is south of Shanksville.”

From this supposed quote, Griffith goes on to construct an elaborate fantasy about how, since the great circle line between the crash-site and Mecca does not actually go over the North Pole, it was really me, not him, who started this idea that you can face different directions to face Mecca.

But my report to the Memorial Project did not say that a person facing the north pole from the crash site is facing Mecca. Rather, it includes an aside explaining why the shortest-distance line to Mecca “points in a northeasterly direction” (not due north), even though Mecca is south of Shanksville. The reason is because both are in the northern hemisphere. To illustrate, the report includes the simplest possible example: “The shortest distance between points on the opposite sides of the northern hemisphere will take a short cut over the North Pole.”

Griffith quotes only the second half of this sentence, omitting the part about connecting points "on the opposite sides of the northern hemisphere.” That allows him to pretend that the points referred to are the crash-site and Mecca. Of course Shanksville and Mecca are not on opposite sides of the hemisphere. Mecca is about 2/3rds of the way around the hemisphere from the crash-site.

Having Misrepresented me as saying, not just that a person facing into the giant crescent is facing Mecca, but also that a person facing due north from the crash site is facing Mecca, Griffith then writes:

I fail to be convinced that only 2, rather than the infinity of possible, arcs are acceptable to Muslims.

Bwahahahaha! Griffith just finished saying how wrong it is to think that a person facing north from Shanksville is facing Mecca. Then he turns around and uses this face-north-to-face-Mecca claim (misattributed to me) as justification for saying that a person facing any direction is facing Mecca. Just how much peck has this idiot been sniffing?


Related

Where is the lizard army? (push it)

A plea from Tom Burnett Sr. (push it)

The fraudulent Park Service investigation of the Flight 93 memorial (push it)

Pennsylvania is on fire. Tom Burnett’s color advertisement in the Somerset Daily American, asking the people of Somerset to protest the crescent memorial to Flight 93, raised a great deal of awareness. At least four television stations covered the controversy, and there were two news stories in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review alone.

Those who went on to read my more detailed advertisement (exposing the fraudulent Park Service investigation of the giant Mecca-oriented crescent) are burning mad, and are taking up Tom Sr.’s call for state and Congressional investigations. Word is that two Pennsylvania state representatives, one Democrat and one Republican, are hot enough to co-sponsor a resolution initiating a state investigation.

That is a long way from actually getting an investigation. The hurdles are still huge, and it would sure be a big help if the high traffic conservative bloggers were pitching in. Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin played a critical role in raising the initial alarm when the Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled in September 2005. Both also helped to expose the phony redesign, which leaves every particle of the original design completely intact.

But since 2006, nothing. For two years, as the revelations about the Memorial Project have become ever more explosive, the fire-hoses have ignored what will undoubtedly become one of the biggest scandals in American history.

This is a difficult story for our high traffic bloggers. With Flight 93 family members on both sides, no one can weigh in without checking the facts, and our high traffic bloggers are all stretched too thin to check the facts. Charles Johnson only has two eyes and two ears. No one can say he ought to do anything, when there is no way he ought to even be able to do a quarter of what he does.

Johnson’s lizard army, on the other hand, has thousands of eyes and thousands of ears. The question is whether this sensory system is connected to the lizard brain. Is there any trickle-up at LGF?

To try to establish this trickle-up connection, Charles recently installed a new link-rating system at the top of his main page. Let’s see if we can get it to work! Come on lizards. Time to rejoin the fight. Please take the links to the two advertisements that are now setting Pennsylvania on fire and see if you can rally your fellow lizards to push these links up into the collective consciousness of the lizard army.

Over the next two weeks, these ads will continue to be published in the free weeklies for the cities of Somerset and Johnstown. We are putting tinder to the first licks of flame, and maybe even have a couple of sticks in the fire, but we are still a long way from an established blaze, never mind the bonfire of awareness, and the firestorm of awareness, that it will take to stop Murdoch’s plot.

We need lizard help to stop architect Paul Murdoch from stabbing a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America! (That’s what a Mecca-oriented crescent is: the central feature of a mosque.)

This is YOUR story lizards

It was five lizards who discovered, almost immediately after the Crescent of Embrace was unveiled, that the nearly one mile wide crescent points almost exactly to Mecca (kifaya, khamr, Edgren, bluemerle, and Etaoin).


Etaoin Shrdlu’s Mecca orientation graphic, posted by Ace of Spades September 11, 2005 (three days after the crescent design was unveiled).

Charles stayed with the fight until July 2006, when he rallied the lizards to participate in the Park Service’s open comment period.

Then he and Michelle and all the other high traffic bloggers disappeared.

No links when Tom Burnett Sr. publicly protested the memorial by refusing to allow Tom Jr.’s name to be inscribed on one of those 44 glass blocks on the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew AND terrorists).

No links when the crescent design was discovered to memorialize, not just the 4 hijackers of Flight 93, but also the full complement of 19 9/11 terrorists. (There are two sets of 19 nested crescents in the crescent design.)

No links when Tom Sr. and I protested the crescent and star flag configuration of the memorial on national television.

No links when an academic fraud told the Park Service not to worry about the similarity between the giant Mecca oriented crescent and the Mecca oriented mihrab around which every mosque is built because there has never been a mihrab anywhere near this BIG before.

No links when Congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo called in November 2007 for the Park Service to scrap the crescent design entirely.

The usual difficulty for the blogosphere is to get the mainstream media to cover our discoveries. This has been inverted for the memorial story. Dozens of mainstream news stories have been written about the controversy, none of which were ever linked by any high traffic conservative bloggers. All the weight has been carried by a creditable collection of small and mid-traffic bloggers, starting with our three dozen blogburst participants.

The blogosphere has an Achilles heel. A controversial story that requires fact checking gets skipped over by our high traffic link-editors. Charles Johnson’s addition of a decentralized link-editing utility might be able to overcome this weakness, but it won’t happen automatically. For this tool to work, the lizard army has to step up and make it work.

Lizards who want to give ad #2 a bump on the LGF link-rating utility (ad #2 is the exposé of the phony Park Service investigation), you can do so here.

If someone will put up a link for rating Tom Burnett’s ad, I will post that here too.

If you want to participate in our weekly blogbursts, email Cao (caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com) with your blog's url.