Post Catastrophe

*

A Dead Song

This is True
Mister nothing said forever said
I can sing
Hit it! Make it a dead one
with words like
blood, soldier mother
O.K. O.k.
I want to sleep before the end
which is impolite
Hit It! Make it a dead one
If nothing crops up
I'll give you a ring
you can sing the end
o.k o.k.
then I could get
all the little animals out of my room
Hit it! With a broom
O.k O.k
Put them in a big white sack
no visitors came
hit it! With words like.....
Thou shalt not
The end

Nick Cave.

And then it seemed, after that sad death, that nothing was the same, the light more flimsy, our fragile flesh even less glued to the planet surface. Transitory moments, these consciences, fleeting gaps in the history of the world. That was all. He grimaced and it was gone. He shook his head and was old. The3 surface was coated with young, dynamic figures. He looked on from an ancient place, his ancient soul, and was not comforted. These trolling, roiling moments, these clouds boiling above, the intense, cloying summer heat, all of it combined in the too bright colours of a Sydney summer. And he was gone. His friends were gone. Those moments were gone.

And that was it, he shrugged, his own is that all there is? moment. Colin's death shook through him and away. There was almost no one left of the old gang now. Each sad death counted to a greater loss. He didn't want to recover. He didn't want to be happy. Somehow this would betray the faith of a darker time. These silly thoughts. Books, which had been so important to him, crowded the shelves, many of them unread. This technology, these art forms, were fading. He was shattered at a very deep level; and knew there could be no further way. The gang was over, dissipated, mostly dead. And with the gang went his own story; because they had all been the documenters of each other, the pivotal points, the keys through which the story of the world was told.

But not any more. The lucid moments were less and less. He smiled beneath the arches. But his old frame, his cracked teeth, betrayed his own enthusiasms. Now there was nothing but remote villages and poverty stricken villagers, the only ones who would sleep with him; for money. Klaus the taxi driver regaled them with tales of his Indonesian exploits, the girls who loved him long time, the bar girls who kept him company and fought over him every trip; how well you could do with money over there. His shattered psyche wasn't going to recover this time, that's how it felt. The mess was too great. The shame guilt regret remorse routine barely registering, such was his dissolution. If Colin hadn't died, would their story still be told?

But now it seemed there as nothing to tell. Shut up shouts a nasal aboriginal voice outside the window, Sharon probably, yelling at her mongrel dog. Sitting up there on the corner all day; monitoring the dealing, directing the traffic, taking her cut. Blonde hair and a round face and missing teeth. They tell you everything, anything, the most elaborate tails in order to get money out of your pocket into theirs. Plausible, even, expert liars, picking up on what you want to hear. There's been a string of them, since Henrietta's laptop was stolen, knocking at the door, assuring us with elaborate stories they know exactly where it is and exactly who the thief, Stephen Green, sold it to. And they'll get it back for us, $50, $100, $250.

We offered $400 and it never came back. He felt that small, the man who bought the stolen lap top, he was told, yet another ragged addict gesturing at the door, telling tall tales. He was astonished by the elaborateness of the lies. Their plausibility, internal logic. Sometimes they were so plausible he fell for them; and gave them $50 to go off in search of the increasingly mythical lap top. The kids jeered at him. How could you be so stupid? He said he could get it back, he said feebly, and they crowed even louder. It wasn't everything. It was almost nothing. The heat swamped through the door; temperatures forecast to hit 44 in western Sydney and possibly 47 in the far west of the state; the hottest place on the planet. It didn't help, his head full of fuzz. You brought it all on yourself, you should be ashamed, a voice said. And he crawled up inside his own familiar depression, without so much as a wave. Catastrophic, that's what it was.

THE BIGGER STORY:


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/nasa_climate_theon/


I'm a sceptic now, says ex-NASA climate boss

Hansen supervisor takes aim at thermageddon

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Environment, 28th January 2009 14:18 GMT

Free research: Application platforms, the state of play

The retired scientist formerly in charge of key NASA climate programs has come out as a sceptic.

Dr John Theon, who supervised James Hansen - the activist-scientist who helped give the manmade global warming hypothesis centre prominent media attention - repents at length in a published letter. Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009, and excerpts were published by skeptic Senator Inhofe's office here last night.

"As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research," Theon wrote. "I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made.”

Theon takes aim at the models, and implicitly criticises Hansen for revising to the data set:

“My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it.

"They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.”

Hansen is in charge of the GISS data set, derived from readings published by NOAA. The GISS adjustment have received criticism (a potted summary here) for revising the historic record in an upward direction - and making undocumented and unexplained revisions.

Theon also takes issue with Hansen's claim that he was suppressed by NASA officialdom, and states that the science didn't support Hansen's increasingly apocalyptic warnings of an imminent thermageddon.

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress."

Hansen has called for energy industry executives to be jailed for dissenting from the man-made warming hypothesis.

http://www.christianpost.com/Opinion/Columns/2009/02/global-warming-and-the-media-06/

You may have noticed that some of President Obama’s most ardent supporters speak of him in almost messianic terms. But there’s one public figure who apparently means it literally: James Hansen of NASA.

Hansen, who is the “father” of the global warming movement, recently told the U.K. Guardian that the new President “has only four years to save the world.” Unless we implement drastic measures like a “moratorium on new power plants that burn coal” and a hefty “carbon tax,” we face an apocalyptic future—“global flooding, wide-spread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns.”

Of course, Hansen’s warnings made headlines around the world. Not only because “doom and gloom” sells, but because the mainstream media treats any claim about man-made global warming with the utmost credulity.

Thus, last summer, when a “researcher” claimed that global warming might lead to more violent earthquakes, news outlets trumpeted the story.

In their haste, they neither asked how warmer temperatures can cause earthquakes nor checked the researcher’s credentials. These included previous pieces on something called the “Thiaoouba Prophecy” and reading auras. Really. The story was quickly deleted from the outlets’ websites without retraction or comment.

Less comical but no less telling are the stories about the “disappearing” Arctic ice. A year ago, we were told that the Arctic had reached a “tipping point” and that Arctic ice could be “completely” gone, with dire consequences for polar bears and Santa Claus, within five years.

What you probably haven’t heard is that, by October, that same Arctic ice covered 29 percent more area than it did the year before and that by the end of the year, it was approaching its greatest mass since 1979. And it’s still growing.

There are countless other examples of where real-world facts conflict with global warming theory, not the least of which is that the Earth has been cooling since at least 2003 and arguably since 1998.

As the chairman of the International Geological Congress has asked, “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?”

Those of us shivering this winter have been asking the same question.

It’s possible that he and other critics are wrong, of course. What is certain is that we are not getting anything resembling a complete presentation of the facts. The media reports the dire claims, and by the time the claims have been debunked, they have already moved onto the next one.

http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/3018161

(Source: Portland Press Herald)trackingBy MD Harmon

If you, I and everybody else who pays for electricity, gas or any other kind of energy are about to see our bills go through the stratosphere to pay for someone else's faith-based initiative, we shouldn't take it quietly. So I won't.

Billions are going to be vacuumed out of consumers' wallets by "cap-and-trade" measures like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) that Maine and other Northeastern states have implemented, and by a bill in Congress that would impose a similar carbon- trading scheme nationwide.

Want evidence? The New York Times reported last week that a New York state energy firm, Indeck Energy Services Inc., is suing that state over joining RGGI. The suit claims Indeck "will lose millions of dollars that other power generators won't (because) while most power plants will be able to eventually pass those carbon costs on to customers, Indeck says it will not able to do so because they are locked in a long-term fixed-price contract" for one of their plants.

If one company is complaining about RGGI because it can't recoup millions of dollars from its customers based on power production at one plant, how many millions - or billions - of dollars in extra costs will be passed on to us based on all the plants in all the states that participate in RGGI?

If these measures were aimed solely at reducing pollution, their expenses could be subjected to a rational cost-benefit analysis. However, their real target is not truly noxious gases or particulates, but carbon dioxide, which is increasing in the atmosphere - though not to anywhere near the levels that have often pertained in the Earth's past.

And while the costs of RGGI are clear, its benefits remain highly theoretical.

For example, European nations are discovering that the carbon- trading schemes they have already implemented have enriched some companies while not yielding any appreciable decrease in CO2 levels.

So, opposition to more climate-control measures is mounting across the Continent.

Meanwhile, Al Gore told us in "An Inconvenient Truth" that the more CO2 there is, the warmer the Earth will get.

However, what has happened as CO2 levels rose is global cooling. Global temperatures basically flattened off in 1998 and remained level for about six years, before starting to decline four years ago.

Thus, 2008 was the coolest year in the past decade.

Scientists writing in Nature magazine now say that cooler is the way we're going for at least the next 10 to 15 years.

And that's not even counting the fact that the sun's been much less active recently, leading some solar experts to wonder if we might not soon enter a freezing-cold period like the "Little Ice Age" that ended about 150 years ago.

You might be interested to know that the past decade's cooling was not predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose famous report said that a warmer climate was inevitable, based on their computer-generated climate model forecasts.

Yet, the response of Gore and his allies is on the order of, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

Yes, weather is not climate. But that would mean more if Gorean advocates did not pounce on every chance weather phenomenon that they could say supported their theory.

However, the public is beginning to catch on to all the hype.