That pain in my ears

Dennis Miller looks better than he sounds, which isn't good for a radio show man. The old codger babbling on, being rude to people who just keep phoning back in makes your mouth feel sour. Exactly the sort of idiot who would have Myron Ebell on a second time (19 June). I've put off for a month the job of listening to it. It starts at minute 43:

Miller: [As Deep Purple fades out with Miller humming to it] "Smoke on the Water"... Water vapour. Responsible for much of the greenhouse gas. (giggles)... Myron, welcome back to the show my friend.

Myron: Thanks for having me Dennis.

Miller: I am glad... Every time I leave a guest I just hope that global warming doesn't off them before they come back. I see that you've survived, and welcome back my friend.

Ebell: Well, as President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic said that if it warms up in 50 years and it's half a degree warmer, I hope that people alive then will be half as brave as I am.

Miller: I think you're going to see a lot of heat towels fall off the nose of the global warming argument. Some people are just saying Enough is enough at this point. Let's continue to debate it, but I think it was a really beautiful tipping point for my side, which does believe something is happening, also happens to think it's cyclical, and man plays a minimum part in it. But when Gore said the debate is over, I think he didn't realize it at that moment, but that might have been the beginning of the end of the zealous approach to it.

Ebell: Yeah, we're trying to track back the first person who said we had ten years or less to act, because if it were eight years ago, then in a couple of years we can give it up and turn to something else.

Miller: Right. It's just like the blood for oil thing. We're there to take their oil. And you keep wondering, maybe there's a small scintilla of a chance they're right. But we never do. Nobody ever goes back and says, Hey wait, we didn't take it the first time when you told me we were going to take it in the 90s. Now we don't take it now.

Then they chatted about the climate change denialist victory in an Intelligence Squared debate in March, held between three professional liars (Crichton, Stott and Lintzen) against three scientists. Then discussed the more-or-less resolved Cape Wind project as if it was still a hypocritical controversy. And finally talked about the elderly climate scientist Reid Bryson, making out that he was some big cheeze on their side.

Dennis Miller's endearing habit of inserting movie titles all over his conversation is ruined by the way he deals with phone-ins, when he gets them. Frequently the switchboard is empty, as it should be, because he usually takes one statement from the caller, then drops the phone and rattles along on some boring tangent. There is no conversation. For all we can tell, half of these phone-ins are taped and played. You don't need real people there because there is no response.

UPDATE: Dennis Miller had made it to The Daily Show. His party trick is to talk nonsense without stopping. He's also frequently on Fox Noise with his rant against global warming. Newshounds has a go at him as well. A long time ago, people like Bill Hicks would appear with Dennis Miller.

Financial letters

The Exxon funded "newspaper", the Financial Times wrote in an editorial on 8 June 2007 about how we are right to be suspicious of any positive Bush position relating to climate change to emerge from the G8.

They then corrected their position by publishing Myron Ebell's letter to the editor on June 12. As an Exxon-sponsored compulsive falsifier with a very established reputation, few people are less qualified to get their verbage into a newspaper, but it's easily explained by the advertising revenue.

Ebell likes to point out that the Kyoto Protocol was all words and no deeds, and that Europe failed to cut its emissions in the time period in spite of all the talk. The Climate would have it be known that since the Kyoto Treaty was essentially killed by his Bush Administration in 2001 by the withdrawal of the the greatest polluter in the world, the United States (how is it an agreement if one of the sides is not there?), it's difficult to hold the European economy to it.

Kind of like if one major industrialized country in the world is allowed to use child and prison sweatshop labour, they end up owning the entire international manufacturing base. Or we all sink to that level.

In the domain of atmospheric sciences, we stuck with the same level. After all, it only belongs to the whole world, and no one gets hurt today. In some ways the Chinese appear to love their children less than we do in the United States or Europe, or they wouldn't stand for it.

As an intellectual hit man, Ebell's job is to hold to rigged standards, and ignore the mitigating circumstances. So, he writes:

The nations that have agreed to cut their emissions are incurring significant costs but are not cutting their emissions, although they do continue to talk incessantly about doing so. Since Kyoto was negotiated in 1997, emissions have increased in every one of the EU-15 nations, despite all the talk. In fact, EU-15 emissions have been rising faster in percentage terms than in the US, where emissions have been going up about one point for every three points of economic growth.

Okay... It's not that he's just found a negative comparison between the third differential of the carbon emissions, as I had originally thought. It's the second differential (the rate of change in the rate of emissions) divided by the GDP!

This is greenhouse gas intensity hogwash all over again. Such bogosity I had thought had been buried years ago. Trust Myron to scrape it up again.

Let's be clear: The climate does not care how many iPODs or champaign breakfasts you make per year to bump up the GDP!!! Only the total physical quantity of CO2 matters. You might as well divide it by how many times you've had sex with your wife before your first child, for all the relevance it has.

And the Financial Times publishes this bonkers. Yeah, well the whole financial thing is an entirely fictitious godforsaken invention of the human mind. Unlike the future, death, and mass extinctions, it's an entirely imaginary construct. You can watch the stock-market metrics as hard as you like, but if you don't care if the destiny of the children of your grandchildren will be to live and die in unnecessary misery because you used your time and talents to make an extra buck by lying and misleading people in the generation today, then they get what's coming, don't they?

Since we have shown how little we care, no future generation will shed a tear for us. We will be remembered as the biggest bone-heads in the history of the species. The ones who threw it all away for nothing. There is nothing that could be written now that will come close to the level of contempt that we are in for.



P.S. For some light relief, there's this exchange from Michael Moore on the the TV: "Just apologize to the American people and to the families of the troops for not doing your job four years ago. We wouldn't be in this war if you had done your job. Come on. Just admit it. Just apologize to the American people."

CEI is Sicko

Those who have noticed the great cry for, let's say it, socialized medicine -- ie something that's specifically designed to work, as opposed to a corrupt system whose only purpose is to make money for the rich at all costs -- might have noticed a certain lack of activity on behalf of those great pioneers of free market thought, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In fact all they could muster to link to from their web page is some photos of these privileged white folks waving placards: "Socialism kills profits".

That's because, according to the New York Sun, the industry has hired Pacific Research Institute, The Manhatten Institute, PhRMA, The Cato Institute, The Galen Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and Health Care America to run the public disinformation campaign for this one.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is listed nowhere in this campaign, probably due to being extremely crap, talentless, and counter-productive on such a "sensitive" issue -- meaning that people can experience with their own senses now, today, that they are promulgating bald-face lies whose direct consequences are to make them die painfully.

For now they will continue to work in the field of ensuring that our next but one generation is the one who faces death on a dying planet. They're not born yet. They can't shop and drive cars today. They don't have any of today's money in their wallets. These future people, these grand-children of ours don't exist yet, so they can't be harmed by anything.

All they'll be able to do is -- after they're born -- walk over and piss on Myron Ebell's grave.

But that won't hurt him, unfortunately.