His Fanatic Heart

Ernst Haeckel

An Appendix Might Not Be A Footnote

[Posted by reader_iam]

Wait long enough, and it could turn out that the seemingly useless has a purpose after all, in defiance of assumed and received knowledge.

Hat tip, Memeorandum.

Rosie Outlook

[posted by Callimachus]

Quick! Burn the manuals and file the serial numbers off the hardware. Pick up your passports at the safe house and scatter for the tropics. Our cover's been blown.

It seems I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that my editors and I — indeed, the entire Right — are afraid of the truth about 9/11 for one simple reason: We helped Bush and Cheney plan the attacks. A full, non-partisan study, as opposed to the sham 9/11 Commission report, would implicate me and a long list of other conservative pundits (Goldberg, Will, even little Ben Shapiro) in the controlled demolition that brought down the twin towers and the Oscar-Meyer Weinermobile filled with explosives (that's right — look closer) that we paid some homeless guy to ram into the side of the
Pentagon.

Why did we do it? Oil. Cheney promised us a cut of Halliburton's profits from its no-bid contracts in Iraq, so we all worked together on 9/11 to give Bush an excuse to start the war he was planning all along. Naturally, the American sheeple took the bait, and now I can afford the things I've always wanted, like a Hummer made of solid gold and trips to outer space with N'Sync's Lance Bass.

Why am I telling you all this? Simple. By sending me this e-mail, I'm afraid you signed your own ticket to Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to the Patriot Act, a secret 9/11 Cover-Up Team deep within the bowels of the FBI automatically receives a high-priority alert anytime someone sends an e-mail containing the words "AFRAID", "NON-PARTISAN" and "LIED" in all caps; it's a clear sign that the sender has learned the truth about 9/11.

So you see, I can tell you all about my involvement in 9/11 because by the time you get this e-mail, the 9/11 Cover-Up Team (911-CUT) will already be knocking on your door.

Pity. I thought someone as clever as you would have figured out the FBI's keyword algorithm a long time ago.

Damn that Rosie.

Confession time: Rosie attended Dickinson College at the same time I did, a class behind mine, but left before graduating. A dear friend of mine in college was a floor-mate of Rosie and only ever said good things about her. I believe, though I can't confirm this, Rosie was in the 101 astronomy course when I was the TA in the observatory. That means I may be partially responsible for her science education. If this is true, I will stand up to be stoned. Hell, I'll get stoned even if it turns out not to be true.

Climate Report

[posted by Callimachus]

AP apparently has got a copy of the big climate change report and it wants to tell me "The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is 'very likely' caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries ...."

But I'm frustrated that it doesn't seem to know enough climate to answer my main question. I already know all that. What I want to know -- and still don't -- is how much of the warming is caused by human industrial activity and how much by other forces and factors.

The world's climate has fluctuated all through its history. In Roman times, the Alpine glaciers disappeared entirely. A few thousand years earlier, the ice sheets had rolled over what is now Connecticut. Yet the AP seems to misunderstand the climate to be a steady, continuous, balanced thing that only the arrival of modern human activity has upset.

The scientist says:

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

Emphasis added. But the AP writes as though it's an either-or situation:

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

It should say "a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused at least in part by man's burning of fossil fuels." The bigger number I want to know is, "in what part?" And I still suspect that's unanswerable in scientific terms. I don't believe scientists know enough about the complex mix of natural forces that drive the climate even to say whether human agency is the primary cause of the current climate change.

To head off the inevitable charge of being a denialist, I think it is real, and I think it's a dire problem for everyone, no matter the cause. And that's why I'm concerned about the message fuzzing out amid bad reporting and sloppy political agendas.

An analogy: You know water is flooding your basement, and you know you're running your faucets upstairs with leaky pipes. So "very likely" there's a connection. But you can't see outside to know whether it's been raining for 40 days and nights, too.

[I notice, too, that the media is not averse to using the old, damned, sexist term mankind when it comes to things like pollution and industry, even though the AP's own style guide recommends "a substitute such as humanity ...."]