Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Omitted variable fraud: vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5
Cross-posted at WUWT
"Expert review" of the First Order Draft of AR5 closed on the 10th. Here is the first paragraph of my submitted critique:
My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call "the omitted variable problem" (or when it is intentional, "omitted variable fraud"). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included. This problem is manifest at the very highest level of AR5, and is built into each step of its analysis.Like everyone else who participated in this review, I agreed not to cite, quote or distribute the draft. The IPCC also made a further request, which reviewers were not required to agree to, that we "not discuss the contents of the FOD in public fora such as blogs."
Given what I found—systematic fraud—it would not be moral to honor this un-agreed to request, and because my comments are about what is omitted, the fraud is easy enough to expose without quoting the draft. My entire review (4700 words) only contains a half dozen quotes, which can easily be replaced here with descriptions of the quoted material. Cited section numbers are also easy to replace with descriptions of the subjects addressed, so here is the rest of my minimally altered review:
Read more »
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Comedy gold: APS president attacks "inaccurate characterization" of APS position, doesn't realize he's attacking an APS quote
When German ex-climate-alarmist Fritz Vahrenholt came out last week as a climate skeptic, he related his moment of epiphany, when he was firsthand witness to the alarmists' sheer disregard for error:
Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”For a comedy of errors, witness American Physical Society president Robert Byer's response to the 16 climate skeptics who recently criticized his organization's statement on climate change in the Wall Street Journal. It should serve as a Vahrenholtian moment for APS members. Here is Byer's complaint:
The APS statement is unequivocal. It notes that "global warming is occurring." ... The statement does not declare, as the authors of the op-ed suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible.See how up-to-speed the APS is? Byers is aware that climate skeptics don't deny global warming—that they only question whether this warming is attributable to human action—and so he assumes that the critics must have accused the APS of claiming that human attribution is incontrovertible. But if he had actually read the skeptic article that he presumes to correct, he would know otherwise. They explicitly questioned the statement that "global warming is occurring." How did Byers miss this sentence:
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.It may be incontrovertible that the planet WAS warming, past tense. But the claim that the planet is incontrovertibly STILL warming is nothing short of bizarre.
It's not just little news items like: "Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years." It's the very idea of making an unequivocal statement about the content of incoming data, about the direction that our ever-changing climate is currently heading. Byers really doesn't see the problem?
Byers attacks the APS statement itself
Of course the sixteen critics also took the APS to task for its presumption that warming is primarily caused by humans, but they did this entirely with quotes. When Byers attacks the claim that APS attributes warming to human activity, he is blissfully unaware that he is attacking the APS statement itself.
Here is the full skeptic paragraph on the APS:
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"Giaever is directly quoting the APS statement. The quote is not out of context. There are no omitted ellipses. It is APS itself that jumps directly from the claim of incontrovertible warming to the claim that greenhouse gases must be reduced, implicitly attributing the proclaimed warming to human GHG production. Nobody can blame Byers for taking this quote to imply that APS also considers human attribution to be incontrovertible, but it is quite amazing that he somehow fails to realize that it is in fact a quote.
Byers is all het-up about this scurrilous aspersion. How dare the skeptics accuse the APS of such perfidy! It is a ludicrous concatenation of error, all in a mere 200 word response to a 1200 word op-ed.
Who can write 200 words for a national newspaper without bothering to check the few facts addressed? Does Byers even know what the APS statement says? He can't have bothered to read the WSJ op-ed. And he is clearly unaware that there is some leeetle bit of doubt about whether the planet is in fact still warming.
Witness your naked president, APS members. He actually thinks he is wearing clothes. Maybe you could just shuffle him out the door, and that egregious APS statement with him.
(Crossposted at WUWT)
Monday, February 06, 2012
You lie! Obama claims that Islam teaches the law of love
At last Thursday's National Prayer Breakfast, Obama claimed that his policies are motivated by "God's command to 'love thy neighbor as thyself'." He then conflated this law of love with the golden rule, and made a blatantly dishonest claim about Islam:
When Jesus was asked "who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29), he answered (via the parable of the good Samaritan) that everyone is everyone's neighbor. Islam, in contrast, instructs Muslims to be good only to other Muslims. Koran, verse 48.29:
Read more
"That" Golden Rule vs. "The" Golden Rule
I guess Obama can call the law of love "that Golden Rule" if he wants, but there actually is a corollary of the law love (implied by the law of love but not implying it) that is called THE Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12). There is a hadith in Islam (a reported saying of Muhammad) that is similar in form to the Golden Rule, but opposite in substance. It only calls for goodwill towards other Muslims:
Islam rejects even the idea of cooperation. Koran, verse 9.28:
Not loving: the Koran's endless instructions to subjugate and kill infidels
Verse 9.29:
Well meaning left-wing multiculturalists convince themselves that these verses are no worse, and no more relevant, than God's Old Testament instructions to the Jews to annihilate one people after another on their mission to conquer the promised land, but those were not universal instructions to conquer everybody. They are framed as specific permissions from God to attack a specific people at a specific place and time. In accordance with this specificity, these Bible verses have rarely if ever been used as a justification for aggressive conquest.
Not all Christians have always heeded the law of love in its properly universal Christian form, but that was no fault of the Bible, while to Christianity's great credit its various churches have all long since dedicated themselves to understanding and following the law of love as well as flawed human beings are able, and Judaism has done the same.
Decades before Jesus declared that the commandments to love God and to Love your neighbor are all the law and the prophets, Rabbi Hillel had said the same about the golden rule:
Our taqiyyist president
Obama quite obviously "don't know much about history," and "don't know much about a science book," but he does know the Koran. He studied it for years as a child and even took classes in "menjaji," or Koran recitation in Arabic, which is the gold standard of fundamentalist Islamic education.
Hatred of the infidel is not hidden in Islam. It is the essence of it. No one can study Islam at all without comprehending this, and Obama surely does comprehend it. His claim that Islam embraces the law of love can only be a strategic lie, what in Islam is called taqiyya, and the fact that he seems to be engaging in taqiyya is pretty good evidence that Barack Hussein Obama actually is Muslim and is using the Oval Office to promote Islamic supremacism.
Obama's claim that he is Christian, not Muslim, is not probative because Islam's very first instruction to converts is that they should lie about their religion. Tabari 8.23 (one of the hadiths, or reported sayings of Muhammad):
In one set of hadiths, Muhammad asks who will murder a man whose poetry Muhammad finds offensive. He then grants a volunteer (Muhammad bin Maslama) permission to lie to the victim in order to get close enough to do the deed, and the volunteer proceeds to pretend that he has turned against Muhammad (i.e. that he is no longer a Muslim). This is regarded by orthodox Islam as model behavior.
In sum, Obama is certainly lying about Islam, and hence is almost certainly an orthodox Muslim who embraces the Islamic law of hate. So what else is new? Honestly, we knew this before the 2008 election.
How to FORCE Islamic reform
Well here's something new, for those who are interested: Part III of this commentary on Obama's Prayer Breakfast [Will add link when I get it posted.] continues with a demonstration that if we take the Koran seriously, there is no way that Muslims can ever escape the Ten Commandments, making the orthodox Islam of today, with its relentless murder lust, a definite non-contender for the title of "true Islam."
I attach this discussion as a Part III here because presupposes the above documentation of the hateful and murderous character of orthodox Islam. In other words, you've already read the introduction. The conflict between this murder-cult Islam and the Ten Commandments provides an opportunity for the West to FORCE Islamic reform.
They aren't going to reform themselves. They use blasphemy laws to intimidate or kill anyone in their jurisdictions who criticizes orthodox Islam in any way, but now they are challenging societies that are built on liberty and free speech, and WE can hold them to the Ten Commandments. Their only choices will be comprehensive reform (matching the comprehensiveness of their violations of the Ten Commandments) or they can deny that they need to abide by the Commandments, and reveal themselves as marching their followers into Hell. Very doable, if we will just do it.
(Part I points out the sheer destructiveness of the policies that Obama claims to be required by love: "You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet".)
I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs — from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of PlatoIn fact, Islam repeatedly and explicitly rejects the law of love, teaching instead a law of hate.
When Jesus was asked "who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29), he answered (via the parable of the good Samaritan) that everyone is everyone's neighbor. Islam, in contrast, instructs Muslims to be good only to other Muslims. Koran, verse 48.29:
Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and those with him are firm of heart against the unbelievers, compassionate among themselves.Verse 3.28 says that Muslims can only pretend to befriend infidels:
Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah: except by way of precaution, that ye may Guard yourselves from them.Of course we are very familiar with this in practice, as one revealed terror-plotter after another is described by surprised neighbors and co-workers as the nicest guy.
Read more
"That" Golden Rule vs. "The" Golden Rule
I guess Obama can call the law of love "that Golden Rule" if he wants, but there actually is a corollary of the law love (implied by the law of love but not implying it) that is called THE Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12). There is a hadith in Islam (a reported saying of Muhammad) that is similar in form to the Golden Rule, but opposite in substance. It only calls for goodwill towards other Muslims:
None of you will have faith till he wishes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.Preceding hadiths back up Kahn’s non-universalist translation of the Muslim version of the Golden Rule. Bukhari 1.2.10 reads:
Bukhari 1.2.13, translated by M. Muhsin Khan.
The Prophet said, "A Muslim is the one who avoids harming Muslims with his tongue and hands…”In Islam the principle of reciprocity is extended only between Muslims, which makes it a principle, not of reciprocity at all, but of bigotry and prejudice. Islam is the only religion of any significance that does not embrace a universal principle of reciprocity.
Islam rejects even the idea of cooperation. Koran, verse 9.28:
O ye who believe! Truly the Pagans are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach the Sacred Mosque. And if ye fear poverty, soon will Allah enrich you, if He wills, out of His bounty, for Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.i.e. Go broke rather than have dealings with infidels.
Not loving: the Koran's endless instructions to subjugate and kill infidels
Verse 9.29:
Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.Another murderous verse (Koran 9.5) is the infamous “verse of the sword,” so central to traditional Islamic doctrine:
Slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush.Etcetera ad nauseum.
Well meaning left-wing multiculturalists convince themselves that these verses are no worse, and no more relevant, than God's Old Testament instructions to the Jews to annihilate one people after another on their mission to conquer the promised land, but those were not universal instructions to conquer everybody. They are framed as specific permissions from God to attack a specific people at a specific place and time. In accordance with this specificity, these Bible verses have rarely if ever been used as a justification for aggressive conquest.
Not all Christians have always heeded the law of love in its properly universal Christian form, but that was no fault of the Bible, while to Christianity's great credit its various churches have all long since dedicated themselves to understanding and following the law of love as well as flawed human beings are able, and Judaism has done the same.
Decades before Jesus declared that the commandments to love God and to Love your neighbor are all the law and the prophets, Rabbi Hillel had said the same about the golden rule:
"What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary."Orthodox Islam, in contrast, is aggressively carrying its law of hatred and violent aggression to every corner of the globe.
Our taqiyyist president
Obama quite obviously "don't know much about history," and "don't know much about a science book," but he does know the Koran. He studied it for years as a child and even took classes in "menjaji," or Koran recitation in Arabic, which is the gold standard of fundamentalist Islamic education.
Hatred of the infidel is not hidden in Islam. It is the essence of it. No one can study Islam at all without comprehending this, and Obama surely does comprehend it. His claim that Islam embraces the law of love can only be a strategic lie, what in Islam is called taqiyya, and the fact that he seems to be engaging in taqiyya is pretty good evidence that Barack Hussein Obama actually is Muslim and is using the Oval Office to promote Islamic supremacism.
Obama's claim that he is Christian, not Muslim, is not probative because Islam's very first instruction to converts is that they should lie about their religion. Tabari 8.23 (one of the hadiths, or reported sayings of Muhammad):
en Nu'aym came to the Prophet. 'I've become a Muslim, but my tribe does not know of my Islam; so command me whatever you will.' Muhammad said, 'Make them abandon each other if you can so that they will leave us; for war is deception.'If Obama is Muslim, he would lie about it. Muslims who live amongst Christians are supposed to pretend that they are Christian, if by doing so they can advance the cause of Islamic conquest.
In one set of hadiths, Muhammad asks who will murder a man whose poetry Muhammad finds offensive. He then grants a volunteer (Muhammad bin Maslama) permission to lie to the victim in order to get close enough to do the deed, and the volunteer proceeds to pretend that he has turned against Muhammad (i.e. that he is no longer a Muslim). This is regarded by orthodox Islam as model behavior.
In sum, Obama is certainly lying about Islam, and hence is almost certainly an orthodox Muslim who embraces the Islamic law of hate. So what else is new? Honestly, we knew this before the 2008 election.
How to FORCE Islamic reform
Well here's something new, for those who are interested: Part III of this commentary on Obama's Prayer Breakfast [Will add link when I get it posted.] continues with a demonstration that if we take the Koran seriously, there is no way that Muslims can ever escape the Ten Commandments, making the orthodox Islam of today, with its relentless murder lust, a definite non-contender for the title of "true Islam."
I attach this discussion as a Part III here because presupposes the above documentation of the hateful and murderous character of orthodox Islam. In other words, you've already read the introduction. The conflict between this murder-cult Islam and the Ten Commandments provides an opportunity for the West to FORCE Islamic reform.
They aren't going to reform themselves. They use blasphemy laws to intimidate or kill anyone in their jurisdictions who criticizes orthodox Islam in any way, but now they are challenging societies that are built on liberty and free speech, and WE can hold them to the Ten Commandments. Their only choices will be comprehensive reform (matching the comprehensiveness of their violations of the Ten Commandments) or they can deny that they need to abide by the Commandments, and reveal themselves as marching their followers into Hell. Very doable, if we will just do it.
(Part I points out the sheer destructiveness of the policies that Obama claims to be required by love: "You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet".)
Friday, February 03, 2012
Obama "love": You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet
Our President at yesterday's National Prayer Breakfast:
In Obama's mind, "love" commands this complete destruction of the very concept of an insurance market. Sounds more like the Stalinist dictum that "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Ditto for Obama's other example of his supposed love:
Why would the government have to order banks not to throw money away on bad credit risks? Because for years the government has been enforcing anti-discrimination laws that require banks to lend to bad credit risks. That's where the mortgage meltdown came from. Using the Community Reinvestment ACT for leverage, the Alinskyite "community organizer" group ACORN succeeded in forcing banks to lower their credit standards on the grounds that existing standards (standards that only lend to borrowers who are likely to repay their loans) had a disparate impact on blacks.
(Read the whole thing. In addition to forcing banks to make bad loans, ACORN also succeeded in forcing the quasi-government mortgate companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase these loans and implicitly guarantee them with taxpayer dollars, which is what turned the A-bomb into an H-bomb.)
Obama was intimately involved in all of this. He worked for ACORN as a lawyer and participated in a 1994 lawsuit against Citibank for having too discriminatory (too strict) a credit standard. The woman who pioneered ACORN's pressure tactics against the banks, Madeleine Talbot, also brought Obama in to teach Alinsky tactics to ACORN personnel. You may have seen the picture of Obama teaching Saul Alinsky's "power analysis" at the University of Chicago Law School:
Obama trained ACORN leaders and foot-soldiers in these commie pressure tactics for years. Here is Obama meeting with the ACORN in 2004:
Oops, I did it again
So Obama screwed everything up when, as "the senator from ACORN," he helped force banks to loan to bad credit risks, and now he thinks the answer is to force them not to lend to bad risks. But guess what? Title X of Frank-Dodd creates and entire new bureaucracy dedicated specifically to enforcing the very anti-discrimination laws that Title XIV of Frank-Dodd is trying to counteract!
Title X is Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to enforce The Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, and a mish-mash of other re-distributionist and anti-discriminatory lending laws. (When Obama helped sue Citibank, it was under the ECOA law.)
Each of these moves is in itself destructive. If banks are left alone they won't make bad loans and they won't leave profitable loans un-provided on account of anyone's race. Some individual bank might pass up profitable loans on account of race, but they would just be leaving money on the table for some non-racist bank to come in and pick up, which means some non-racist bank will come in and pick it up.
Remember what it took to stop such equal economic opportunity in the old south: a vast network of Jim Crow laws, working to outlaw the thousands of ways that free economic activity kept treating blacks as equals. Markets are an anti-discriminatory force. To maximize anti-discriminatory effect they should run free. There is no possible benefit to roping them down with anti-discrimination law, but there is vast potential to do any amount of harm, as the mortgage meltdown demonstrates.
Marvel at the sheer manic insanity, ordering one contradictory mandate after another when every single one of them is in itself destructive. We've got Moe Howard in the Oval Office.
You know Moe's gonna get mad, and Curly (should be Elizabeth Warren) is not backing down so: Egg fight!!!!!!! It's a Three Stooges breakfast party, with our lives hurtling like cream pies through the air. Smash everything! Leave no table unturned! Feel the Obama love.
Part II: "You lie!" (Obama claims that Islam teaches the law of love.)
When I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, I do it because ... I believe in God’s command to 'love thy neighbor as thyself.'Forcing insurance companies to cover people who are already sick (a key Obamacare provision) is like forcing automobile insurers to cover accidents that applicants have already been involved in. It is not insurance at all. It is confiscation, paid for by those who are actually trying to buy insurance instead of get a handout.
In Obama's mind, "love" commands this complete destruction of the very concept of an insurance market. Sounds more like the Stalinist dictum that "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Ditto for Obama's other example of his supposed love:
... making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us.What "advantage" have banks been taking? Why they have very cruelly been stuffing the pockets of bad credit risks with far more money then these people could ever pay back. This has been so advantageous for the banks that we had to bail half of them out with tax dollars. Nevertheless, Title XIV of the Frank-Dodd Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act does indeed "impose obligations on mortgage originators to only lend to borrowers who are likely to repay their loans."
Why would the government have to order banks not to throw money away on bad credit risks? Because for years the government has been enforcing anti-discrimination laws that require banks to lend to bad credit risks. That's where the mortgage meltdown came from. Using the Community Reinvestment ACT for leverage, the Alinskyite "community organizer" group ACORN succeeded in forcing banks to lower their credit standards on the grounds that existing standards (standards that only lend to borrowers who are likely to repay their loans) had a disparate impact on blacks.
(Read the whole thing. In addition to forcing banks to make bad loans, ACORN also succeeded in forcing the quasi-government mortgate companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase these loans and implicitly guarantee them with taxpayer dollars, which is what turned the A-bomb into an H-bomb.)
Obama was intimately involved in all of this. He worked for ACORN as a lawyer and participated in a 1994 lawsuit against Citibank for having too discriminatory (too strict) a credit standard. The woman who pioneered ACORN's pressure tactics against the banks, Madeleine Talbot, also brought Obama in to teach Alinsky tactics to ACORN personnel. You may have seen the picture of Obama teaching Saul Alinsky's "power analysis" at the University of Chicago Law School:
Obama trained ACORN leaders and foot-soldiers in these commie pressure tactics for years. Here is Obama meeting with the ACORN in 2004:
Oops, I did it again
So Obama screwed everything up when, as "the senator from ACORN," he helped force banks to loan to bad credit risks, and now he thinks the answer is to force them not to lend to bad risks. But guess what? Title X of Frank-Dodd creates and entire new bureaucracy dedicated specifically to enforcing the very anti-discrimination laws that Title XIV of Frank-Dodd is trying to counteract!
Title X is Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to enforce The Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, and a mish-mash of other re-distributionist and anti-discriminatory lending laws. (When Obama helped sue Citibank, it was under the ECOA law.)
Each of these moves is in itself destructive. If banks are left alone they won't make bad loans and they won't leave profitable loans un-provided on account of anyone's race. Some individual bank might pass up profitable loans on account of race, but they would just be leaving money on the table for some non-racist bank to come in and pick up, which means some non-racist bank will come in and pick it up.
Remember what it took to stop such equal economic opportunity in the old south: a vast network of Jim Crow laws, working to outlaw the thousands of ways that free economic activity kept treating blacks as equals. Markets are an anti-discriminatory force. To maximize anti-discriminatory effect they should run free. There is no possible benefit to roping them down with anti-discrimination law, but there is vast potential to do any amount of harm, as the mortgage meltdown demonstrates.
Marvel at the sheer manic insanity, ordering one contradictory mandate after another when every single one of them is in itself destructive. We've got Moe Howard in the Oval Office.
You know Moe's gonna get mad, and Curly (should be Elizabeth Warren) is not backing down so: Egg fight!!!!!!! It's a Three Stooges breakfast party, with our lives hurtling like cream pies through the air. Smash everything! Leave no table unturned! Feel the Obama love.
Part II: "You lie!" (Obama claims that Islam teaches the law of love.)
