Beto O’Rourke has gained national attention for running in Texas against the most hated man in the Senate.
I’ve taken on Ted Cruz’ climate denial in the video below.
Beto O’Rourke has gained national attention for running in Texas against the most hated man in the Senate.
I’ve taken on Ted Cruz’ climate denial in the video below.
Off topic, but as Vindictive Trump fires FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe just two days before his retirement Just Read FBI Deputy Director McCabe’s Statement Regarding His Firing By Trump… Just Read It.
The Truth Squadding Ted video is one of your best. Beto is one of the many
Dems bombarding me with requests for campaign donations—-I’ve resisted him so far, but he IS impressive here with Maher, and I’m going to send him some bucks—-I too hate Ted Cruz.
A couple of days ago I was in correspondence with Jim Powell. He asked me how I find his article Climate Change or Global Warming? Skeptic or Denier?. I told him that I think both terms AGW and CC are qualified. When someone tries to confuse there, I’m always saying: It’s climate change due to anthropogenic global warming. The one is the cause (AGW), and the other is the effect (CC). Simple as that. Jim’s reply were just the three words: “Well said, Charlie.”
From the link—-Powell says:
“Just as “skeptic” is the wrong term, so “climate change” is wrong. Yes, as we geologists know, Earth’s climate is always changing. But it waxes and wanes on a timescale of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, not in less than two centuries. A change on that timescale has only happened after a near-instantaneous catastrophe like the meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs. And that was 65 million years ago”.
“Also, we are not concerned with climate change in general, say cooling and a new Ice Age. Rather we are concerned because the climate is changing in a specific and dangerous direction: it is warming and the only known explanation is human activity. Why not call it what it is rather than use a euphemism?”
Well said, Jim. I too prefer using AGW to describe what is happening. (And use “denier” rather than “skeptic”, which got me banned from WUWT)
Global warming and climate change are two different things.
Global warming is the warming of the globe that we have seen over the last century.
Climate change is the changes to the climate we have seen – more especially over the last 40 years – that has resulted from the observed global warming. Changes in rain and snow patterns, increased prevalence of droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and other extreme weather.
The term ‘climate change’ has been in use since Gilbert Plass published his seminal work “Carbon Dioxide and the Theory of Climate Change” in 1956.
The term ‘global warming’ was first coined in 1975. 20 years after the term ‘climate change’.
Both terms, with their different meanings, have been in common use ever since.
Interesting that I got a downvote for relating a few simple facts.
Wear the “down thumb” as a badge of honor. You may have noticed that I get a down vote or two on EVERY comment I make, controversial or not. They are given by some impotent pussies who cannot get over the fact that I ripped them a new anal orifice at some time (or several times) in the past, and who aren’t smart enough to contest the factuality of what I say, so they cower in a corner sucking their thumbs and hide behind the anonymity of the down vote. Watch—this comment will get at least one.
It has nothing to do with content—-it’s personal—-and as I said, it is really a sign of respect and worthy of a chuckle.
That said, I must disagree with the equal weight you give to the terms AGW and climate change. Although you are correct in what you say, the “shameless liars” of the denier world like climate change because it fits with their argumentative BS about “the climate is always changing” and “man has little to do with it”. AGW is clear and precise—-the Earth is heating up, and man is responsible for nearly all of it, and the vast bulk of scientific facts and scientists agree that it’s so.
To quote Powell again:
“Also, we are not concerned with climate change in general, say cooling and a new Ice Age. Rather we are concerned because the climate is changing in a specific and dangerous direction: it is warming and the only known explanation is human activity. Why not call it what it is rather than use a euphemism?”
Both terms are earned and it depends how you behave which one is used. Nay-saying the growing evidence for AGW can only earn you one label – denier. These people can get as upset as they like but it won’t make a difference in the way they are described.
Oh! And Cruz is a bigot.
=> Climate change denial
Denialism in this context has been defined by Chris and Mark Hoofnagle as the use of rhetorical devices “to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists.” This process characteristically uses one or more of the following tactics:
1. Allegations that scientific consensus involves conspiring to fake data or suppress the truth: a global warming conspiracy theory.
2. Fake experts, or individuals with views at odds with established knowledge, at the same time marginalising or denigrating published topic experts. Like the manufactured doubt over smoking and health, a few contrarian scientists oppose the climate consensus, some of them the same individuals.
3. Selectivity, such as cherry picking atypical or even obsolete papers, in the same way that the MMR vaccine controversy was based on one paper: examples include discredited ideas of the medieval warm period.[136]
4. Unworkable demands of research, claiming that any uncertainty invalidates the field or exaggerating uncertainty while rejecting probabilities and mathematical models.
5. Logical fallacies.
The National Center for Science Education describes climate change denial as disputing differing points in the scientific consensus, a sequential range of arguments from denying the occurrence of climate change, accepting that but denying any significant human contribution, accepting these but denying scientific findings on how this would affect nature and human society, to accepting all these but denying that humans can mitigate or reduce the problems. James L. Powell provides a more extended list, as does climatologist Michael E. Mann in “six stages of denial”, a ladder in which deniers have over time conceded acceptance of points, while retreating to a position which still rejects the mainstream consensus:
1. CO2 is not actually increasing.
2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming.
3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes.
4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor.
5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth’s climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us.
6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it’s too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.
Not even sure if ‘denier’ is apt any longer.
‘Shameless liars’ would seem to be a more accurate description.
The thing that ate America’s brain
https://images.dailykos.com/images/517153/story_image/TMW2018-03-14color.png
Troubled Times
https://images.dailykos.com/images/518027/story_image/troubledtimes915.png
Best line from the monologue
“the Irish prime minister presented a bowl of shamrocks to the Trumps at the White House, a plant from Ireland for a plant from Russia”
And from the man responsible for it all
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
The Cambridge Analytica Files
‘I created Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower
He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.
Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.
In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.
It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined “The great British Brexit robbery”, which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone,” he said at the time. And then he couldn’t stop talking.
By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”
Read the article to understand what has been done to us all
Continuing with installment 2
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.
Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Kogan, who has previously unreported links to a Russian university and took Russian grants for research, had a licence from Facebook to collect profile data, but it was for research purposes only. So when he hoovered up information for the commercial venture, he was violating the company’s terms. Kogan maintains everything he did was legal, and says he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.
The Observer has seen a contract dated 4 June 2014, which confirms SCL, an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with GSR, entirely premised on harvesting and processing Facebook data. Cambridge Analytica spent nearly $1m on data collection, which yielded more than 50 million individual profiles that could be matched to electoral rolls. It then used the test results and Facebook data to build an algorithm that could analyse individual Facebook profiles and determine personality traits linked to voting behaviour.
There is also a Russian Connection in there as well, plus Mueller has copies of all files and emails and receipts and invoices