I won’t claim the climate isn’t changing.  That much is obvious.  But I have yet to see anyone show that we’re causing it.  What’s more, I have yet to see anyone show that the climate would stop changing if we (magically) completely eliminated pollution tomorrow – and there’s certainly practically no evidence that we can actually reverse it.

As it turns out, I was wrong; the climate isn’t really changing.

I suspect some of you are staring at your screen with your jaw on the floor.  Allow me to elaborate.  You know the CRU?  The group which was at the forefront of the pro-Anthropogenic-Global-Warming movement?  The group whose e-mails were leaked, displaying their scientific misconduct to the world?

Their director, Phil Jones, has temporarily resigned from his position while the whole thing is investigated.  What’s more, he has publicly admitted that not only is global warming not caused by man, but nothing significant is happening!

But don’t take my word for it.  In his interview with the BBC, he admits that since 1995 there has been no statistically significant planetary warming.  He goes on to quibble over “almost significant” and “over longer periods of time”, in an effort to still support his pro-AGW stance, but then he says this:

Of course, if the [Medieval Warming Period] was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

Forbes.com points out that “A Nature study last year showed water temperatures in the Indonesia area were the same in medieval times as they are today.”

In other words, there is, in fact, evidence that the MWP was just as warm as we see things today, which means our current warmth is not unprecedented.

Why does this all this matter?  Well, people who think global warming is man-made always point to greenhouse gases as the cause.  Since 1995, we’ve increased our yearly GHG production by 26%; however, this has had no effect on planetary temperatures.

So if greenhouse gases don’t actually affect the planet’s temperature, and if there have been similar warm periods in the past, then what evidence remains to support AGW?

Jones also states something else:

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view.

The director of the Climate Research Unit believes the debate is not over.  How then can Gibbs, the White House press secretary, make the statement he made back in December?

… on the order of several *thousand* scientists have come, uh, to the conclusion that, uh, climate change is happening.  Uh, I don’t think that’s, uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.

Even the CRU didn’t really know whether climate change is happening, or whether it’s man-caused.  (If they were sure, there would have been no reason to engage in all the scientific misconduct they did.)

I, for one, am uncomfortable making policies based on such controversial opinions.

There are plenty of reasons to reduce pollution, so it’s complete and utter nonsense to base any pollution-reducing measures on whether global warming is happening (or even on whether it’s our fault).  (Here I’m referring to the Copenhagen conference, whose stated goal is, according to Gibbs, to “stop and reverse climate change”.)

It seems politicians are abandoning the phrase “global warming” in favor of the more ambiguous “climate change”.  Here’s a two-minute clip of a White House press conference, and a transcript of it:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs

Reporter 1:  Climate change.  Why is it a good idea for the President to arrive near the beginning of the climate talk negotiations, as opposed to the end, when the ultimate deal is going to be struck?  And secondarily…

Gibbs: Well…

Reporter 1: Does the White House have any evaluation, uh, or comment on this controversy of the hacked e-mails that suggest that some of the underlying science, through some of the propositions before by climateologists, may be an error, or may have been altered in some way?

Gibbs: On the second part, I think Carol Branner addressed that last week, uh, on the order of several *thousand* scientists have come, uh, to the conclusion that, uh, climate change is happening. Uh, I don’t think that’s, uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.  Uh, in terms of when the President goes, obviously, uh, we believe that, uh, progress has been made with developing nations prima – the US has made some progress with the Chinese and the Indians over the past couple of weeks.  Uh, the President will travel to Oslo on the tenth, and believed it was important to, uh, use, uh, this visit to help get us to the point of a deal.  Uh, something that, uh, can take the type of action that scientists say need to be taken to, uh, to stop and reverse climate change. I think the President believes that, uh, uh, that, a visit happening at the beginning, uh, is just as important as it would be at any point, uh, to getting that deal going, uh, quicker.

Reporter 2: Are you aware of a list, a published list, of thirty-one thousand scientists who oppose this idea of global warming?

Gibbs: I don’t doubt that there are…

Reporter 2: And there’s… and then twenty… uh… uh… six thousand of are PhDs.

Gibbs: I don’t doubt that uh, uh, that there is such a list, less, I think there’s, uh, no real scientific basis for the dispute of this.

(Emphasis mine.)

So Gibbs has the following position:

- “Several thousand scientists” agree that it is happening.  (Do they agree it’s caused by man?)

- The goal of these talks is to “stop and reverse climate change”.

- The thirty-one thousand scientists who publicly oppose the idea that man causes global warming are crackpots with no scientific basis for their claims.

Why, exactly, should I be listening to Gibbs?  Who is he to tell 31,000 scientists that their claims have no scientific basis?  Has he studied climatology?  According to Wikipedia, his education is in political science, so I doubt he’s qualified to comment on the scientific accuracy of anyone else’s claims.

Now, I won’t claim the climate isn’t changing.  That much is obvious.  But I have yet to see anyone show that we’re causing it.  What’s more, I have yet to see anyone show that the climate would stop changing if we (magically) completely eliminated pollution tomorrow – and there’s certainly practically no evidence that we can actually reverse it.

It’s all based on suppositions and “educated” guesses – disputed guesses, at that.

Why are we letting our leaders base far-reaching decisions on this pseudo-religion we call “global warming”?  They should be throwing research grants at anyone willing to study the issue, even if they think they can disprove it.  (If a scientist is denied funding because he disagrees with a popular idea, we’re doing it wrong.)

If there’s one thing everyone should know by now, it’s that “correlation does not show causation”.  It seems that the whole “man is causing global warming” movement is based on nothing more than a handful of correlations and some ice cores.  (Which, by the way, present their own set of problems.)

I want Obama to stop wasting time on “climate change” talks, and spend more time fixing our broken welfare system, our broken health care system, and so on and so forth.

Enough said.  Edit: Here’s another.  And another.

Someday I’ll write a longer post about this.

Ars’ conclusion is that the relevant portions of ACTA are merely the same as the DMCA, but on a global scale.  It could conceivably, in the future, morph into BoingBoing’s nightmare scenario, but not in the immediate future.

My interpretation?  This is based on existing law – what possible reason could there be to keep it secret?  I maintain my earlier call – write your Senators and House Representatives.  We need this treaty out in the open for the whole process.

I suggest you read this BoingBoing summary of the Internet section of ACTA.

Did you read it?  No?  Go ahead, click that link.  I’ll wait.

Alright, you’ve read it.  Surely you’ll agree, this is A Bad Thing(tm).  There is no possible scenario in which this treaty can have a good effect on the Internet.

Please everyone, write your House Reps and Senators and demand that this be examined by professionals who actually know what they’re doing.  That way it can be destroyed before it’s ever agreed on by governments.

So, let me define what I mean when I say “net neutrality”, so there’s no confusion for the rest of this post:  “net neutrality” is the idea that the internet should be treated as an impartial communication medium, just like a telephone network.  ISPs should not be able to prioritize one type of traffic over another for any reason other than traffic management (which I’ll get back to in a moment).

“Big deal,” you’re thinking.  “Why does it matter?”  Perhaps this image can illustrate (click to enlarge):

If you can see what’s going on in this (fake) ad, you’ll see the problem: the ISP (”Telco”) is charging you extra for faster access to various content providers – and limiting your access to everyone else.  (It would be similar to the per-minute and per-text rate ripoffs that cell phone companies are guilty of right now, but that’s a rant for another time.)

So what’s all this about “net neutrality” legislation?  Well, there are two kinds of “net neutrality” legislation.  The first kind (which is being pushed by Senator McCain, unfortunately) is an attempt to prohibit federal legislation regulating internet access.  At first glance, that might seem like a good thing – but it’s exactly what will enable the situation pictured in the mock ad above.

The second kind of legislation is what we really need if we want America’s internet service to catch up with the rest of the world.  That is, there are proposals that would regulate internet access, thus guaranteeing equal access to all internet content.  Regulation is key to preserving the status quo with respect to free access to all content. That is exactly what is so confusing to many people – it seems backward that we have to add regulation to preserve freedom.

So what kind of freedom am I talking about?  Well, if I sign up for internet access, I should be signing up for one thing and one thing only – a particular connection speed, optionally with a transfer quota.  I should not have to pay extra to get “priority” access to YouTube – something we get right now by default.  All traffic should be delivered to me as efficiently as possible, whether that traffic is a YouTube video or an online game or an obscure discussion forum.

Earlier I mentioned that the only permissible reason an ISP should prioritize one type of traffic over another is for the purposes of traffic management.  What I meant by that is simple: the ISP should do its best to keep the network as usable as possible for everyone.  Sometimes that will mean prioritizing VoIP traffic over P2P traffic; however, the ISP should never arbitrarily throttle one type of traffic in the absence of network congestion.  Furthermore, the throttling should not occur network-wide unless the traffic causing congestion is network-wide; for example, if Jim is downloading the latest Linux ISO via BitTorrent and it’s making things slow for everyone, his ISP should not throttle everyone’s BitTorrent; they should only throttle Jim’s.  Even better, they shouldn’t throttle other things Jim might be doing (like gaming).

I realize that’s easier said than done.  But it’s the only way the internet (as a communication medium) can remain truly neutral.

• Orson Scott Card finally came back from a hiatus writing his WorldWatch column.  I no longer agree with his political views.  He’s gone from “I don’t like Obama for his policies” to “I don’t like Obama because I’m accusing him of breaking every single promise he’s ever made, and some he hasn’t.”  OSC used to provide support for his arguments.  Now he makes unsubstantiated claims.  One quote that shows OSC’s viewpoint (which I disagree with):

Now [Obama has] shown us that he’s a radical leftist at heart and all his promises — every one of them – were lies. But he’s still relatively harmless domestically because he’s such an incompetent leader, unable to hold his course or persuade even his followers.

• This opinion column in the Wall Street Journal compares global warming to a religion – and I agree completely.  Supporters of the idea of global warming don’t seem to care about the evidence; to them, any and all climate changes are evidence of global warming, even if that evidence is global cooling.  One choice quote:

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

• A commentary in the LA Times on the continual Democratic accusations that the Bush administration lied about Iraq.  The summary?  Democrats conveniently forget that the word lie implies intentional deception; nobody has ever shown that to be true of the Bush administration (and in fact, in 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found the claim to be false, as did the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report a year later).  One choice quote:

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

• A blog post about moral consequences.  Politicians of all colors seem to claim that if they were in charge, things would be better, but they all forget that the things they don’t do carry their own consequences.  Personally, I think (my) religion drives that into us fairly well.  This blog post is not inherently political in nature (that is, the poster does not claim any particular political viewpoint), but is instead simply an examination of moral consequences, and uses various real-world examples.  One choice quote:

If you adopt the notion of “doing no harm”, aren’t you then responsible for harm that comes because of what was left undone, or done some other way?

A few days ago, my wife commented that the news mentioned the National Guard preparing accomodations for 5,000 displaced people in the event of a flood.  Five thousand?  There are probably five thousand people in my apartment complex.  The flood zone is much, much bigger than my apartment complex.  Where are all these people supposed to go?

It gets even better, though.  Yesterday evening, the news played some comments by some woman high up in the local (city or county) government.  Her comments went something like this:

We need to learn from Hurricane Katrina.  After Katrina, the city ran out of body bags, and families were stuck with bodies for weeks and weeks.  We want to make sure that no families here are stuck with a body for weeks.

So much concern over body bags proves to me that they’re expecting a lot of deaths.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to tell everyone to leave the area?  That way, nobody dies! Gee, what a novel idea.

I feel like the local government is completely clueless about what to do about this flood.  Nobody has ever explained why they aren’t fixing the levy.  If money’s the issue, I’m sure the tens of thousands of people in the flood zone could all pitch in and fund repairs – I know I would be willing.

Update: I found a local news station’s story on the King County Council meeting.  This was the actual quote:

KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reporter Chris Egert said one council member asked about body bags while others made comparisons to Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to know what we have in the supply of body bags if somebody gets killed,” asked Kathy Lambert of the King County Council. “Do we have a supply of body bags so families will be able to deal with that?”

Update 2: Another news story on the same station’s site informs us that

Engineers are working 24 hours a day on a temporary fix at the dam, but they don’t know how well it will work.

My response-question was this: “So you wouldn’t vote for someone that represents your views almost perfectly, simply because they associate themselves with a party?”

harryandthehenderson’s answer? “Yep, because those political parties are just lackeys of special interests that I have none of my interests at heart.”

harryandthehenderson appears to have a very different understanding of the phrase “represents your views” than I do. You see, when I say John represents some particular set of views, I mean he actively works to put those views into action. harryandthehenderson appears to mean that John might hold those views himself but ignores them in favor of some special interest or other. If harryandthehenderson is correct, John can hardly be said to represent those views, can he?

My use of the phrase mirrors closely the meaning of the words, while harryandthehenderson’s apparent understanding of the phrase removes its meaning and replaces it with useless drivel.

This is why our political system is so messed up.  There are citizens out there who actively refuse to vote for people who represent their views, simply because those politicians have chosen to associate themselves with a party.  That refusal essentially ensures that those citizens’ views will never be represented in our government.

Vote based on your views, people!  If you refuse to vote for people who believe as you do, then you’re ensuring that people who don’t will get elected, and your complaints about politicians ignoring your views will be your own fault.

This would be extremely difficult for me to comply with; if it would be hard for me, how hard will it be for my non-tech-savvy parents?

There are several problems with this bill.  First is the cost – storing two years’ worth of access log files uses a lot of space.  Some families could conceivably spend more storing access logs than they spent on their computer.

Second is that most people simply don’t have the expertise required to comply with this legislation, meaning most families would be required to hire an IT professional to maintain their network.  How are working-class families supposed to pay for that?

Third is that the legislation will utterly fail at what it is designed to do – access logs only record MAC addresses, which are easily forged and (even if they’re not forged) are often not unique.  In other words, they want access logs to be able to show if someone used a particular access point to do something illegal – but the logs don’t prove anything, because the data they record can be forged.

There is an article on Slashdot discussing the problems with this proposed legislation:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/20/131224

I urge you to contact your Senators and House Representatives and ask them to vote against this proposed legislation.