…and there’s collusion. Not only did Vladimir Putin share a bed with Donald Trump as they worked together to get Trump elected, but Putin was busy in the climate bed, too.
Boslough’s logic builds, as folks point out his initial foolishness.
Now the big tie-in:
That Putin, he is vigorous.
Yet again. This one is from Watts Up With That.
A bloke bought a sheep property of half a million acres in western Queensland for $2.0 million. Instead of running sheep on it, he now gets $350,000 per annum under the federal government’s Direct Action scheme for not using the grass on his property. The idea being that the grass locks up carbon and reduces Australia’s carbon emissions. A neighbouring property gets $600,000 per annum.
I have no idea what the second guy paid for his property, but the first guy will have recouped his investment in three years of doing nothing. I’m torn between the waste of taxpayer money and wishing I could beat feet to Australia so I could get in on this kind of deal.
The Environmental Protection Agency has sent out more than 1,000 buy-out notices to its employees….
The positions are being eliminated, and the incumbents aren’t being offered positions elsewhere on the government’s teat payroll. The horror. The union-demanded, if not God-given, sinecures are not sinecures, after all. American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 President Michael Mikulka is quite vocal with his dismay.
EPA wants over 1,200 of us to leave, purportedly to save money going forward and claiming that they no longer need the positions occupied by staff that in some cases worked at EPA for over 30 years[.]
Because the existence of a union-protected job means the employer needs that job, and the longer its existence, the deeper into perpetuity that need must be. Sure.
Mikulka also insisted that the EPA would be less active without those jobs, speaking like that would be a bad thing. He said this, too:
We’re going to have to do less with less.
Recall that, during the Obama government shutdown in 2011, the EPA rated over 90% of its workforce as unessential and furloughed them for the duration of the shutdown. Certainly, that per centage was true only for the short-term, but a huge fraction of those 90% really are unessential, and they could be released were the EPA to be returned to its original mission of science-based protection of the environment and moved away from supporting its politically motivated pseudo-science climate funding industry.
The agency certainly can do less with less. And it should.
…is in the offing. The piece by John O’Sullivan in Principia Scientific International is a bit optimistic, but the outcome is legitimately expected under Canadian law. The offing-ed outcome concerns Penn State pseudo-scientist Michael Mann and his slander lawsuit against Canadian climatologist Dr Tim Ball in a British Columbia court.
It turns out that there are two legal factors of interest here. One is that Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable, and Mann had moved for such an adjournment of the lawsuit’s trial that was scheduled to months ago on 20 Feb. Ball agreed (of course), but he was able to get conditions imposed on that adjournment, one of which was that Mann would produce the data underlying his suit in court by 20 Feb.
Now (4 Jul) Mann has refused to provide the data. That’s important scientifically because Ball had said Mann belongs in the state pen, not Penn State, and Ball produced this figure to illustrate why.
Notice that Mann’s graph disappears both the Medieval Warm Period and the following Little Ice Age, but it does draw in a pronounced uptick in the late 20th century, resulting in Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” representation. Below that, Ball’s graph, using more reliable and widely available public data—as opposed to “data” that Mann refused to produce in open court or anywhere else, shows the MWP (and the fact that it was warmer than today), the LIA, and that today’s temperature is well within the noisy variation of those prior 1,100 years.
The other legal factor, the larger one, is that this sort of contempt, this refusal to produce the data underlying a slander claim, is taken by Canadian courts as dispositive: the refused-to-produce data are taken ipso facto as false and so the slander claim itself is false.
[U]nder Canada’s unique “Truth Defense,” Mann is now proven to have willfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team.
This outcome, if the judge follows through as anticipated, will have tangential implications for Mann’s similar lawsuit against Mark Steyn in the DC Federal trial court. There, the court had ruled that Mann could withhold the underlying data because they are his intellectual property. The BC court ruling, based on Mann’s contempt of court, will be of interest in the US courts and may have some influence.
The influence will be tangential, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that foreign court rulings have little influence on domestic courts: the logic in them might be useful to understand, but they do not direct an outcome.
The other reason is that the DC trial court erred in its ruling regarding the proprietary nature of Mann’s research results. That research was funded by the Federal government through grants to Penn State. What the US taxpayer pays for in the way of government funding for research or development or both, however, belongs to the Federal government, including the results of that research or development. Only the processes used in the research or development can be proprietary. Data aren’t proprietary.
There’s one other consideration regarding the PSI piece. O’Sullivan is taking the (anticipated) ruling as blowing up Mann’s research and with it all of the research underlying claims of human-impacted global warming. That’s a bit overwrought. Court rulings are legal matters; they’re not scientific findings. The (anticipated) ruling will blow up Mann’s reputation as a climate scientist, and little else.
Nope. Eric Worrall, writing at the link, quoted Doug Erwin, a Smithsonian Paleontologist on whether we’re in the middle of one, as many climatistas (not all) insist [emphases in the original]:
Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were[.]
And
“‘[H]ow many geographically widespread, abundant, durably skeletonized marine taxa have gone extinct thus far?’ And the answer is, pretty close to zero,” Erwin pointed out. In fact, of the best-assessed groups of modern animals—like stony corals, amphibians, birds and mammals—somewhere between 0 and 1%t of species have gone extinct in recent human history. By comparison, the hellscape of End-Permian mass extinction claimed upwards of 90% of all species on earth. … By comparison, the hellscape of End-Permian mass extinction claimed upwards of 90 percent of all species on earth.
The money quote, though, begins in the penultimate paragraph.
Add the measurable greening of the world which has occurred the last few decades.
This isn’t a mass extinction, this is a blossoming of life such as likely has not occurred for millions of years—all thanks to the fertilisation effect of Anthropogenic CO2.