Sometimes I’m dismayed at what happens in Dutch Politics. Especially since the founding of the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), which is Dutch for Party for Freedom.
This is the party that Geert Wilders founded, and is basically his response to some problems we have in our country with certain immigrant groups. These issues are a legacy of these groups not fully integrating in our culture. These issues are then worsened by the response from those of Dutch decent to these immigrant groups. What basically is happening is people from both groups are being reactionary towards each other and are creating a downward spiral.
Among the children of the immigrants (third generation) this translates in some rejecting Dutch culture and values. One expression of this is them identifying more with the faith of their parents, which then translates into things such as hatred towards gays (the children are often far more conservative than their parents are).
Continue reading Why The Dutch Party For Freedom (PVV) Doesn’t Support Freedom
Sometimes you come acros something that just makes you ask “is this for real?”
This time it was a letter sent to the Sydney Morning Herald that made me ask this question:
I do wish that the Herald editorial team would stop presenting Carl Sagan science fiction gibberish dressed up as if it were fact (‘‘The little spacecraft that could’’, September 14-15). It occurred over the weekend, when we were fed a far-fetched story about a space vehicle named Voyager and interstellar exploration.
This is the same type of pseudo scientific mumbo jumbo that exploiters of the public purse have been doing with climate change over many years. It is arrant nonsense and has to stop right here and now. The Herald does itself no favours by printing it, pretending that the sci-fi exaggerations are factual.
Bill Thomas, Cabramatta
As this letter mentions it is a response to the article “The little spacecraft that could“, which is an article telling readers that Voyager 1 has left our solar system. A very important moment in our history as it is a first for mankind.
Continue reading This Is Why We Need Better Science Education
Although the article is quite hard to address as he barely mentions any sources for what he’s basing his claims and arguments on. And he does make a lot of claims about climatology and the IPCC.
To show I’m not taking anything out of context his entire blog post is quoted by me, with my responses to the point he’s making below the quote. I’ve kept my responses as short as possible, which means I’ll be referring you to a lot of other sites/pages for further information.
But before I begin I’d like to point out that any bolded or emphasized text in the quotes is by Dr Roy Spencer. I copied the text as is from his blog so that I don’t distort what he’s saying. That being said lets begin:
What the Cook et al. paper did was examine 11,944 abstracts from papers that were published from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses, which meant that 2,142 papers were also rated by their authors on their endorsement level. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. This was done to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in the rating system used and this seems to indicate that.
Continue reading 97% Climate consensus ‘denial’: the debunkers again not debunked
As my regular readers will know I try to keep tabs on what is happening on social media in regards to climate change and global warming. Sometimes because of that I (eventually) notice other odd things that are doing the rounds on social media.
The Label It Yourself (#LIY) campaign is a decentralized, autonomous grassroots campaign born out of our broken food system. We have been asking our government to label food products so we can make educated decisions about what we eat. The government has ignored our requests and so we are taking matters into our own hands.
Get your labels at www.labelityourself.org or create our own!
I’m utterly against what they are trying to do with this campaign. Not because I think they aren’t allowed to know what is or isn’t genetically modified, but because of how they’re attempting to get this information to the consumers.
Again I was quite silent on my blog due to a few maintenance tasks. This time it was because I was transcribing audio for all of the videos that I’ve released. Not exactly a fast or fun chore, it was in fact quite tedious to do. However, all complete transcripts for my videos are now available on my website for anyone…
The term chemtrail comes from the chemtrail conspiracy theory where the claim is made that some of the contrails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents. According to this conspiracy theory these are deliberately sprayed at high altitudes as ordered by governments. The more commonly stated reasons that I’ve heard for doing this is for mind control or population reduction.
I don’t think that I have to spend much time on telling you that this is complete and utter nonsense that’s not supported by any evidence. Just the logistics involved and the amount of people who need to be in on this make it impossible to do.
The reason I’m now talking about this is that Watts published a guest blog post by Tim Ball (archived here) in which Ball talks about the nonsense of chemtrails. With Watts saying this about it in a note he attached at the beginning:
Like with the essay Saturday about isotasy/glacial rebound being a myth, I don’t think the chemtrails idea has any merit whatsoever. Dr. Tim Ball points out more bad science – chemtrails, which are really just contrails, and which has a cult-like following much like some of the worst theories of global warming zealots – Anthony
The guest blog post in question is written by Richard Guy who argues in it that Post Glacial rebound is a myth (also known as isostatic rebound). According to him it’s a “false concept” and says that it’s part of “Geological theology”. This last one is apparently his way of referring to the scientific field of geology.
The evidence he uses to argue for this is ‘interesting’ to say the least:
Several months ago Cook et al released a paper in which they analysed the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
What they did in that study is examine 11,944 abstracts from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
When they asked the authors of those papers to rate their own papers they again found that 97% stated that humans are causing global warming. They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. They did this to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in their rating system and this seems to indicate that.
For anyone who is aware of other studies that did something similar these results weren’t a surprise. As studies like Oreskes 2004, Doran 2009 and Anderegg 2010 showed similar results. It’s the very reason I just shrugged at these results and mostly watched everything play out from a distance. To me they just didn’t seem that interesting, or that they would generate a lot of controversy.
Continue reading Cook’s 97% Climate Consensus Paper Doesn’t Crumble Upon Examination
The past week I was a bit quiet on my blog as I was updating several pages and creating a few new ones. I also took the opportunity to do some much-needed theme maintenance.
Terminology:
New page listing terms used on this website and their meaning.
YouTube Rules:
New page containing rules used by me on my YouTube channel.
Please note that you accept the Site Terms and Conditions of Use, Blog Terms and Conditions of Use and the Privacy Policy for this website by using it. They are very standard but if you’re not familiar with the type of rules, requirements, and disclaimers listed in them I recommend that you at least have a gander.
This time I noticed a blog post called “
On Watts Up With That (WUWT) another attempt at discrediting the 
As my regular readers will know I try to keep tabs on what is happening on social media in regards to climate change and global warming. Sometimes because of that I (eventually) notice other odd things that are doing the rounds on social media.
Well, according to Watts that is.
Anthony Watts published 
Several months ago