climate change

Unethical Wise-Ass Quote of the Week: Baseball Writer Keith Law

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Of course, the size and length of the deal look absurd, and I doubt anyone expects Soto to still be a $50-million-a-year player in 2039, when he’ll be 40 if we haven’t burned up the planet by then.”

—Baseball writer Keith Law, writing in The Athletic regarding the impact of the Mets signing outfielder Juan Soto to a 15 year, $765 million dollar contract as discussed on Ethics Alarms here.

I’ll start with a full disclosure: I’ve had some unpleasant personal interaction with Keith Law, who is a talented baseball analyst of long-standing but out of his depth in the field of business and sports ethics, where his nasty exchanges with me occurred more than a decade ago. This quote would be flagged by me as unethical if had been made by my sister in a national publication.

Experts have an obligation to not abuse their authority, influence, presumed wisdom and ability to persuade the public. Keith Law is a very qualified commentator on all aspects of baseball, from the business of the game to talent evaluation and statistics. Unlike a lot of sportswriters, he has an impressive educational background including an undergraduate degree with honors in sociology and economics from the same disgraced but unfortunately still prestigious college that I graduated from, as well as a Masters in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. He is not, however, a climate scientist, and as it appears that his every waking hour has been and is devoted to the wide, wonderful world of baseball, it is safe to presume that he has not acquired any special expertise in the area of climate change other than what he reads in the New York Times (which owns the Athletic) and other progressive propaganda media.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: A Climate Change Expert Testifies For the Democrats…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

For once, I am speechless.

No, “Over 1,600 Scientists” Have NOT Signed A “No Climate Change Emergency” Declaration

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Climate change hysteria, hype, propaganda and disinformation have become overwhelming lately, and with hurricane season upon us, it can be expected to get even worse. So is evidence that the spectacularly woke and incompetent Biden administration is so dedicated to the enviro-fascism this cult engenders that its priorities have become unhinged. For example, when the Pentagon needed to be devoting it full attention to minimizing the carnage from Biden’s disastrous snap withdrawal from Afghanistan in the two weeks between the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, and the final U.S. military flight out of Afghanistan on August 30, newly revealed emails show that top Pentagon officials were working to finalize the Department of Defense Climate Adaptation Plan, which declares climate change a major national security risk. After all, what’s a few dead servicemen and abandoned foreign allies along with the collapse of U.S. foreign policy credibility when the END OF THE WORLD looms?

Central to this international brainwashing and bullying effort—the U.N. recently ruled that children can sue nations that haven’t adequately wasted resources on anti-climate change measures that are likely to have no effect whatsoever on the climate—is the misleading claim that there is “scientific consensus” on the topic, when in fact there is not, and when even if this were true, “consensus” on scientific matters has been wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong, throughout history. The conclusions of this so-called consensus are being parroted by activists, politicians and journalists who couldn’t pass a 7th grade science quiz.

Meanwhile, President Biden is being urged to declare a constitutionally dubious “climate emergency” because of all this “certainty” regarding climate change doom, despite the fact that none of the models have panned out and predictions of deadlines to “save the planet” have been as accurate as the those of latter day prophets who have announced the exacts dates when Armageddon was arriving.

Despite all of this (and more), today’s lie being plastered as a headline on multiple conservative and anti-climate change news and a commentary sources is still a lie, still unethical, and still unforgivable. “1,600 Scientists Humiliate the Climate Ghouls Once and for All,” claims PJ Media, the conservative punditry giant. “Coalition of Scientists: ‘There is No Climate Emergency,” shouts CatholicVote. “Over 1,600 Scientists Sign ‘No Climate Emergency’ Declaration” is the most common phrasing, as used by the Epoch Times.

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Climate Change: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

How can you tell that you’ve landed on a woke website where facts don’t matter? Here’s one way: the site features a story that tries to explain the declining attendance at the Disney theme parks without mentioning the headlong, suicidal rush of the Disney organization to embrace radical progressivism and all that entails. Here’s another big clue: the propaganda site defaults to climate change, the Left’s all-purpose explanation for anything people don’t like, because that’s how fear-mongering and indoctrination works.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: “The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Here is yet another Comment of the Day regarding climate science, junk science, propaganda…you know: “Climate change.” It is also yet another excellent entry by Sarah B. Here is her Comment of the Day on the post, “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis” but it applies equally well to this one (from today), this one, and this one too:

Many people who question anthropogenic global climate change have good reason to do so. Here are a few of the facts that make believing the anthropogenicity of climate change difficult for me.

This “hottest days ever” claim has been shown to be mostly false. For example, the Rome data point was from a model, not actual data. Indeed, while the temperature measured was almost two degrees Celsius below what the high was claimed to be, that high was under previous highs from the last few decades recorded in Rome. The actual temperature of the day in question was 40C, measured at the Urbe airport, not 41.8. Rome’s highest temperature ever recorded is not 40.8C as claimed, but instead 42C. This high temperature was recorded at the Ponte di Nona bus station in 2005.

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Rep. Omar’s Dumb Tweet (Continued…)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was so tempted to headline this post with the res ipsa loquitur tag, but didn’t at the last minute. The reason: I was convinced that as obvious as the scientific and logical nonsense her tweet represented should be, a lot of usually intelligent people wouldn’t allow themselves to see it, because, as Ethics Alarms notes repeatedly, “bias makes you stupid.” The post’s comments turned out to be a marvelous example of that.

One persistent defender of Omar insisted that it was crucial that I had checked the alleged authority for her gaffe before criticizing her. It happens that I did, but I didn’t need to. Nobody did: that’s the whole point. If the woman had the requisite number of brain cells to rub together to start a bonfire, she would have known what emerged from her keyboard when she typed that was hilariously silly with the application of basic critical thinking skills.

Recently, Major League Baseball teams broke the record for the most runs scored in all games on a single day. It was remarkable, because the record was more than a century old: the day occurred in the 19th century. All of the articles about this event specified the day. If, as Omar’s ignorant tweet claimed, the Earth had broken its previous record for “hottest day in 120,000 years,” there would be a day from 120,000 years ago that held the broken record. No source mentioned such a day, however, because there are no daily records of the Earth’s weather—daily temperature is weather, not climate—from 120,000 years ago or even a thousand years ago (though we know Pompeii got pretty damn hot when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.) Estimates of global climate in the periods before records were kept depend on “proxy data.” Here is a chart explaining what proxy data can tell scientist about distant climates:

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Comment Of The Day: “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ah, how I love it when readers send in superb and informative Comments of the Day when I am strapped for time and have ProEthics deadlines to meet! This post in particular has generated several COTD-worthy responses. I may re-post them all.

But first, here’s Michael R.’s Comment of the Day on “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”:

***

One of my big problems with the whole ‘climate change’ agenda is that the people who are pushing it don’t believe it, either. If they believed it, they would push agendas that would further the goal of counteracting global warming, but they don’t. They push agendas that are outrageously expensive, damaging to the economy and the well-being of people, and don’t do much, if anything, about the warming of the planet.

(1) Electric vehicles. This is an easy one. The demand to eliminate cars and trucks and replace them with electric vehicles is a high-profile and telling example. First of all, electric vehicles are not capable of replacing many of our vehicles, such as semis. Secondly, we probably lack the resources to replace even most of our cars (alone) with electric vehicles, especially since we oddly won’t allow the mining required to obtain the materials. Thirdly, of electric grid is completely incapable of powering this massive addition to the electric load, especially since we are making it more unreliable with renewables. Most importantly, however, THEY DON’T REDUCE CO2 emissions significantly or at all. Their increased energy involved in production and the battery replacement cycle makes them worse or marginally better than today’s gasoline powered cars (depending on your assumptions). For my use, my gasoline powered cars are better for the environment.

(2) Meat. There is a big push to eliminate meat from our diets for ‘global warming’. However, anyone with half a brain realizes that the ‘fake meat’ they are creating takes vastly more energy to produce than a cow does. Lets take a large vat of rhizobium and extract a few hundred milligrams of leg-hemoglobin so we can make our soybean patty taste like meat? Sure, that’s so much more efficient than a cow or chicken. Of course, a lot of our beef is grown on western grazing lands where you are ONLY allowed to graze cattle. Removing the cows from that land, without opening it up to other agriculture (as the Biden administration has done) only reduces the amount of food produced, increasing the world starvation we are facing.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Since some EA commenters have chosen to send their credibility to die on the metaphorical hill of Rep. Omar’s ridiculous climate change tweet of last week, I felt this paired set of reports made an important point. Amazingly, so far at least, these irreconcilable contradictions—and this is far from the only one in the climate change “settled science” debate—- don’t seem to shake the faith of climate change fanatics even a little bit.

Which itself is useful information….

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month (Well, One Of Them) And Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

Observations:

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The Des Moines Climate Change Propagandist Weatherman Is Quitting. He Should Have Been Fired.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Poor KCCI-TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger is quitting because viewer criticism of his slots hyping climate change propaganda while he was supposed to be giving local weather reports became too unbearable. Well good, except that he should have been fired first.

“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically,” he said in his interview with The Associated Press.

Except that’s not his job. He is a meteorologist, not a climate scientist, and isn’t qualified to “connect” the dots. Weather isn’t climate, and while climate change activists find ways to connect virtually any kind of weather to the climate change doom watch, that is not what people tune into weather reports to hear. For me, it’s in the same category as NFL players using games to protest social policy.

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