Normally I do this on Sunday or Monday, but this has been an extraordinary week in many ways.
This QOTW comes from an unexpected and surprising source. When I read it, I realized that it describes what we witnessed today on the floor of the House of Representatives.
“When the strategic interest of the nation and the world is so clear, can a few gluttons with a few bucks really drive our policy? Does this great country not have better leadership than that?”
Guess who said it? Don’t be tempted to click through right away, think about it a bit.
Who said it?
NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, in a personal essay written on the evening of June 25th.
Dr. Hansen’s latest has seen little notice due to the intense media coverage of the deaths of celebrities followed by the Waxman Markey bill in the house today.
He may not have intended those words to be relevant to today’s situation, as it was written in the context of coal in West Virginia. However, they seem prescient now.
Read his latest missive here (PDF).
Looking at his essay written the evening before, ( Thursday at 4:55PM EST, I checked the document properties) I wonder if Dr. Hansen even thought about today’s vote at all?
Here’s a man writing about himself, the day before “historic” climate legislation, much of it due to what he started in an address to congress on June 23rd, 1988, and all he thinks about is coal in West Virginia and describing his experience there?
Odd.
Back to science tomorrow. – Anthony
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The myopia of the true believer.
And to add insult to injury, it’s not even some great big secret conspiracy – there’s not enough intelligence in that domed structure to partake in such a venture.
Did you catch the Constitutional-esque quote relating to his four demands that he bolded at the bottom of page 2?
“We hold it self evident that these demands are just, feasible, and essential.”
He really isn’t a very convincing advocate. I’m not sure that there’s much there that a PR firm could use.
..back to science tomorrow,
Because there sure as hell wasn’t any in Congress today.
Odd.
Hmm.
Interesting word to apply to Hansen.
It seems soft for some reason. Almost coddling.
Poor little odd Jim.
I wonder how odd he will become in the coming months and years.
IMO he has the potential to become very odd.
Possibly the oddest of them all.
In a few short years, living on the fringe with health and finacial problems wating for the sea to rise, and still admired by his odd little Gavin friends.
They’ll continue theorizing a gloomy climate future while never realizing their oddity or the need to apologize for it.
Or maybe not. I could be just odd myself.
Last I heard, Hansen was in prison in England.
You don’t mean to say that they were so stupid as to relaese him!
What is the strateguc interest of the world?
As you noted here, Hansen, to his credit, is dead set against Cap and Trade. However you feel about reducing our carbon footprint and gutting our economy, its easy to be against legislation that won’t cut our carbon emissions much, transfer’s billions to special interests and the government, and guts the economy too.
It looks like the Senate isn’t going along. I think the only way Pelosi was able to get the house to go along is by assuring them it was DOA in the Senate, and bribing farm staters with continued ethanol incentives.
Rats, I thought for sure my ‘Good Job’ in Chinese would get me up here. Oh well, one day. My name will be up in the lights. Anyone know where I can find a wit sharpener? 😉
John H (21:43:30) :
Poor little odd Jim
True John.
They don’t need him anymore; they don’t need any of them.
What are they going to do, study AGW? The usefulness of
the useful idiots is over. Oh… a silver lining!
astronmr20 (21:41:24) :
..back to science tomorrow,
Hear, hear!
Dave
I hope this is true:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven’t heard of this politician, it’s because he’s a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country’s carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute’s annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn’t.
This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on “unconvincing green science.” The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.
ohioholic (22:32:09) :
Don’t feel too bad, we knew exactly what you were trying to say, but the Chinese don’t say it that way. I still haven’t been able to get characters on my computer, but in transliterated form the words would be something like “Ni tsuo-de hen-hao!” (roughly means “You did it good!”) or “Wo-men ta-jia tsuo-de hen hao!” (We all really did good!) – or a universal phrase of approval would be “Ting-Hao!” meaning literally, “Best!”.
Chinese is a language with no word for “yes” or “no” – you have to affirm or negate a verb to achieve the same effect… and the phrase “just say NO” does NOT translate in Chinese. See? Language affects the way you look at the world and establishes the categories you divide that world into. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a linguist and fire safety engineer of the 1930’s, noted that industrial fires often started in “empty” rooms, rooms that were used to store “empty” drums that at one time contained volatile chemicals. What better place to sneak a smoke than in the “empty drum room”? Language shapes perception, and the Chinese perceive the world in very, very different terms than we do. As do warmers. We may not have been paying enough attention to the terms that frame the discussion.
The world they want is not the world they’re going to get. Their cause has been co-opted. As it ever was.
John H (21:43:30) :
LoL….. That was oddly satisfying to read;-)
And I always thought the strategic interest of the world was the creation of a global totalitarion government.
It’s not odd at all. He is a self-absorbed egomaniac (from the department of redundancy department)–just like pResident Minderbinderand his handlers, who have just fulfilled Nikita Krushchev’s 1956 prediction.
ohioholic (22:32:09) :
Rats, I thought for sure my ‘Good Job’ in Chinese would get me up here.
I worked in China for a while. I asked for a Tsin Dao beer in a bar one day and the barmaid gave me a pair of scissors. (Apparently the word for scissors is also tsin dao. I used the wrong tones.)
At long last it has been said. Says Paul Bachman, director of research at the Beacon Hill Institute, “Contrary to the claims made in these studies, we found that the green job initiatives reviewed in each actually causes greater harm than good to the American economy and will cause growth to slow.”
http://www.beaconhill.org/BHIStudies/GreenJobs09/PressReleaseBHIGreenJobsStudy090625.htm
We few in the UK, who are up to speed in these matters, join in your despair at the passing of this stupid bill and we hope it fails in the Senate.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/
“Back to science tomorrow. – Anthony”
Sorry Anthony, I’m afraid one of the victims of AGWing is science itself. When science is abused and used as a cloak for a money and power grab, it’s hard to respect it.
What I found striking about the essay is the way it treats blue collar workers as if they physically deformed by their work. Those thick necks got that way keeping a country running that provides a cushy living for the pencil-necks that live off the taxes collected from the people who didn’t go to college.
But, I wanted to know if the tropical wave off the yucatan was going to become a tropical storm and not on how might makes right.
“Dr. Hansen’s latest has seen little notice due to the intense media coverage of the deaths of celebrities followed by the Waxman Markey bill in the house today.”
Dr. Hansen’s latest has seen little notice due to the intense media coverage of the deaths of celebrities followed by the death of the nation in the house today.
What is the strateguc interest of the world?
The strategic interest of the world is functioning ecological systems. But this has no importance compared to the interest of the US and its corporations, I mean people.
The problem is not so much the few gluttons with a few bucks, as are the millions of gluttons with hardly any bucks that will support them, no matter what the truth is. I find it amazing to see how much righteous indignation the AGW-hoax can produce, whereas the WMD-hoax that is costing the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives NOW can just continue and continue and continue.
When Jim Hansen involves himself in politics he must roundly be condemned!!!
When Jim Hansen does not involve himself in politics he must roundly be condemned!!!
These government scientists always want it both ways.
Cheer up folks, Ian Wishart is fighting back – looks like he’s angling to capture hearts and minds with a complete media push: first the book Air Con and now the documentary:
It must be working because when I flicked through the rest of the recent posts on the Air Con site (http://www.tbr.cc ), I see it has been outselling Gore, Stern and Romm on Amazon
“As of 8pm tonight:
Air Con by Ian Wishart, #16,366 on Amazon US
An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, #21,692
The Global Deal by Nicholas Stern, #35,104
Heaven & Earth by Ian Plimer, #59,652
Hell and High Water by Joe Romm of ClimateProgress, #113,490”
Maybe that’s the answer though – using video to recapture Gen-XY, with books as back-up once we get people interested.
There seem to have been too many in the skeptic community who simply couldn’t believe that the Left would successfully roll out its agenda. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee – we need to get on message and take the opposition seriously, then beat them at their own game.
The vote in the House today revealed a lot about the state of education/denial of science tomorrow.
My take is that the “science dummies for lunch bunch” joined the Next Big Bubble save the planetists in voting Yea.
Most of the Nay voters saw clearly the economic and national strength dangers laying in ambush, and sported a level of education far exceeding the political dropouts of pure party agenda.