El Niño expectations have collapsed from “monster” and “super” to “weak – if at all”

September 8, 2014

Alarmists had a great time in spring this year as they looked forward eagerly to a “super” or a “monster” El Niño. For some the very foundations of global warming ideology was at stake. Global temperatures have not risen now for 18 years and have shown a slight decline for the last ten years. An El Niño was seen, by the more rabid alarmists, not just as another regular weather event (which we cannot predict very well) but as a way of shoring up their temple – an edifice that is now crumbling. Catastrophe scenarios for the Indian monsoon began doing the rounds.

And still they claim this is a settled science!

The alarmists such as Joe Romm went to town with dire predictions just 3 months ago and were predicting a “super” and a Monster” El Niño for 2014. Of course, dire predictions which never ever materialise are the stuff of alarmism.  The clever alarmist is the one who makes unverifiable predictions which will never happen but which cannot be disproved.

Joe Romm, 26th March:Is A Super El Niño Coming That Will Shatter Extreme Weather And Global Temperature Records?

Signs are increasingly pointing to the formation of an El Niño in the next few months, possibly a very strong one. When combined with the long-term global warming trend, a strong El Niño would mean 2015 is very likely to become the hottest year on record by far. ……. 

John Upton, May 16th:A monster El Niño could be on its way, and it will likely have a complicated effect on the world’s breadbaskets.

Something fierce is rising out of the Pacific Ocean, and its appetite for the world’s major carb crops could be even more ravenous than that of a monstrous mythical sea creature. …… A dinosaurian belch of warm water thousands of miles wide has appeared at the surface of the Pacific Ocean near the equator. The warming ocean conditions have spurred NOAA to project a two-thirds chance that an El Niño will form by summer’s end. It’s tipped to be of the monster variety—the extreme type that could become more common with global warming.

But they were all crying “Wolf” again. They will have to swallow their disappointment as the WMO has now reduced its expectations for El Niño to be just a “weak event if at all”.

ET: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now sees less chance of El Nino conditions forming this year than it did three months ago and expects only a weak El Nino event if it occurs at all, it said in a statement on Monday.

During El Nino events, surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific become substantially warmer than normal, a phenomenon that is strongly linked to major climate fluctuations around the world and can last for a year or more. 

“Despite warming of the Tropical Pacific Ocean up until June, the overlaying atmosphere largely failed to respond. As a result, ocean temperature anomalies along the equator have decreased over the past two months,” the WMO statement said.

“Changes in the wind patterns in early-August brought some weak re-warming, but winds have now returned to near normal in the western Pacific, while the pattern of cloudiness has remained largely neutral.”

The downgraded WMO forecast follows a similar easing of expectations by several national weather agencies. The WMO, which aggregates data from climate models around the world and expert opinion, said Pacific Ocean surface temperatures may yet warm towards El Nino levels in the next few months.

It will not be a “good” Indian monsoon this year but rainfall has recovered during the second half and the official monsoon season still has 3 weeks to go. The current rainfall is on the edge of shifting from “deficient” to “normal”. (Green is normal and red is deficient. Blue is excess)

Monsoon status September 8th 2014

Monsoon status September 8th 2014

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Six months since MH370 was “vanished” by somebody

September 8, 2014

Today it is 6 months since MH370 disappeared.

A most astonishing vanishing act and not a hint of an explanation in sight. The Vanishing has already passed into the category of “Great Mysteries of the Past”. All “plausible” explanations have been exhausted and only the implausible remain. MH370 has been overtaken by the shooting down of MH 17.

But it is MH370 which I find somehow very disturbing. Maybe because the only implausibly possible explanation is of a covert, callous action by a State or State agencies. One of the many theories even has it that “the plane purported to be MH17 at the crash site in Ukraine was actually MH370. Both aircraft were the same model but MH17 was a 1997 version as opposed to MH370, which Malaysia Airlines took ownership of in May 2002.”

But no explanation can provide any real solace for the relatives of the 239 passengers and crew who vanished (and died).

The search goes on.

Thursday, August 28

Malaysia Reaffirms Commitment to Search for MH370

Signs MOU with Australia for ongoing collaboration

…. Today, Malaysia signed an MOU with Australia which provides the framework and broad parameters for cooperation in the search for MH370. This forms an important part of our existing cooperation with Australia and reaffirms Malaysia’s commitment towards the search. 
 
In this regard Malaysia will provide the necessary financial contribution towards the search effort and match Australia’s commitment. The combination of undersea search equipment, world-class experts and cutting edge technology that is being used will be our best chance of finding MH370 and we are hopeful in our prospects of doing so. …..

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The bookbook

September 8, 2014

IKEA 2015

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Fifty years of counter-productive affirmative action

September 7, 2014

I don’t like “affirmative action” which is merely a euphemism for reverse discrimination. Whether for race or for gender, affirmative action and quotas not only don’t work, they are also counter-productive in that they perpetuate the differences they are supposed to eliminate. Quota systems only create a privileged – and often undeserving – class and reaffirm and enshrine the very differences they try to address. The analogy is with subsidies for non-commercial technologies which only remove all incentive for those technologies ever becoming commercial. The “reservation” system in India – for example – has only ensured that those “scheduled castes” privileged by such “reservation” have no longer any incentive to get their children to come out of the “reserved” category. In fact whole communities now fight to be classified as “backward” or as a “scheduled caste” to enjoy the undeserved privileges that brings. Competence and ability are given no value and – surprise, surprise – are in decline. Five decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the US, there is no discernible improvement in the position of the home-grown, US, black population.

Jason Riley is black, writes for the Wall Street Journal and has a new book : Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

He addresses “which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?“ and makes the case that “Liberalism has also succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture.”

He points out that

  • The black-white poverty gap has widened over the last decade and the poverty rate among blacks is no longer declining.
  • The black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960.
  • Black unemployment rate has, on average, been twice as high as the white rate for five decades.
  • Black people from the US still continue to perform worse at school than other blacks, Hispanics, Asians and the white population.
  • Black teenage unemployment has never been as high at any time as with minimum wage laws.
  • Racial preferences in the form of affirmative action show no benefits.

Of course the liberals don’t much care for this book (as with this review in Salon.com by Ian Blair who is a student of journalism and apparently a very politically correct person). But Riley’s language is simple and straightforward and his arguments appear – to me – to be well substantiated.

Of course his arguments also fit what my experience tells me – that quotas don’t work and that subsidies don’t often work and both are usually counter-productive. Reverse discrimination only serves to perpetuate the difference it is supposed to reduce.

As this recent article puts it, affirmative action in the US was just a sop;

Slate, Feb 2014:

Today, the statistics on black and white inequality are so unchanging that they can be recited by rote: The black unemployment rate holds steady at double the white unemployment rate; the median net worth for black households is about 7 percent of white households; annual per capita income for blacks is 62 cents for every dollar of per capita income for whites.* When presented with these figures, supporters of affirmative action typically use them as evidence that conservatives kept affirmative action from working. Others say the statistics are proof that affirmative action didn’t really work that well to begin with. But there’s always the third option to consider: that persistent racial inequality is, at least in part, the result of affirmative action working exactly as it was intended to.

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Narendra Modi gets it (so does Abe but Obama doesn’t)

September 6, 2014

“Climate has not changed.

We have changed.

Our habits have changed.

Our habits have got spoiled.”

Narendra Modi, India Today, 5th September 2014

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International Panel of Clucking Chickens and their CCC’s

September 6, 2014
International Panel of Clucking Chickens

International Panel of Clucking Chickens

The image of the IPCC as a bunch of clucking Chicken Littles is actually much more apt than the one of a bunch of headless chickens! Ban Ki-Moon and Rajendra Pachauri then take on the roles of Chief Clucking Chickens the CCC’s of the IPCC.

From an editorial at The Pittsburgh Tribune

As its credibility dwindles due to its slanted “science” and politically motivated advocacy of anti-growth diktats, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is preparing a report so dire that it hardly seems to concern the same Earth on which the rest of humanity lives.

A draft of that IPCC report, due out in final form in early November, says greenhouse gas emissions are outrunning political reduction measures and predicts decades of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts,” according to The New York Times. The world’s loudest climate-clucking Chicken Littles foresee grain harvests diminishing, Greenland’s ice sheet melting, sea levels rising and extreme weather increasing. And there’s less time than ever to head off disaster by submitting to IPCC orthodoxy.

But even the loudest clucking can’t drown out contrary facts. U.S. temperatures haven’t risen in a decade. Global temperatures have been flat for 17 years. Prior warming was within natural variability. The IPCC’s main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, isn’t a pollutant. And humanity’s climate impact is negligible, so top-down “solutions” are pointless and economically harmful, as shown by Australia repealing its carbon tax in favor of voluntary clean-energy incentives.

Still, there’s value in this draft report. It shows how much at odds with reality the IPCC is — and how far climate science is from being “settled.”

h/t WUWT

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A “society” – to be a society – can be multi-ethnic but not multicultural

September 4, 2014

A “culture” is both the glue that binds any society of humans and lubricates the interactions within that society. It applies as well to a family or an association or a sports club or a company or a geographic area (say a country). The culture of any sub-society – a sub-culture – must be subordinated to that of the larger society it is  – or wants to be – part of.

Of course one can have – if one wishes – many different cultures within different sub-societies in a single geographic area. But if these sub-cultures are not subordinated to a larger culture then the sub-societies cannot – because it becomes a fatal contradiction – make up any larger society. Multiculturalism dooms that geographical area to inevitably be a splintered and fractured “greater” society – if at all.

The politically correct “multiculturalism” followed in Europe in recent times has effectively preserved and maintained each ethnic group in its own cultural silo and – inanely – made a virtue out of preventing the evolution of any overriding, common culture. This has been the fundamental, “do-gooding” blunder of the socialist/liberal “democrats” all through Europe. Creating a society of the future with a common culture as the glue has been sacrificed in a quest for some imagined God of Many Cultures. For an immigrant – anywhere – how could it be more important to keep the language of his past rather than to learn the language of his future? The “do-gooders” have prioritised living in the past to creating and living in a new future.

Hence Rotherham and Bradford or Kreuzberg or Rosengård or Les Bosquets,

Multi-ethnic communities particularly need both a glue and a lubricating medium. And that has to be an overriding common – new – culture and not some mish-mash, immiscible collection of sub-cultures – each within its own silo, insulated and held separate from all others.

  1. Multi-ethnic societies are inevitable around the world.
  2. A single society has a single culture.
  3. To have many cultures in one area – which are not subordinated to a larger culture (values) – is to exclude a single society.
  4. Promoting multiculturalism is to promote the fracturing of that area into many immiscible (inevitably ethnic) societies.

Multi-ethnicity – especially – requires a mono-culture to be a society at all.

Multi-ethnic and multi-cultural is separatism and serves to ensure that a single society will never be established.

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Oh Dear! Celebrities whinge at release of naked pictures

September 2, 2014

I am concerned that iCloud can be hacked – but only because my assessment of their security was clearly wrong. I’ll just have to give iCloud a lower rating for security than I have done.

But I cannot share the indignation of the celebrity “victims” at having their naked pictures publicised  and their “plight” leaves me largely unmoved.

The hackers may be despicable but those who upload naked pictures of themselves (or other compromising material) into the Cloud are just plain stupid. In fact I feel sure that the act in itself is some subconscious (or perhaps conscious) craving for the pictures to be leaked and for the resulting publicity. Stupid people can also be victims but my sympathy for stupidity is very heavily tempered.

What is much more upsetting is that I haven’t seen any of these pictures yet (but I shall not be spending any time looking for them either).

Ricky Gervais got it right first time.

Apparently he has now back-tracked somewhat in response to protest but I only think the less of him for that.

The comedian was criticised after posting this message on Twitter - blaming celebrities for taking the photos and storing them on their computers in the first place 

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Counter protest

September 1, 2014

A plea for emancipation!

counter protest - image raju sharma

counter protest – image raju sharma

funnyindianpicza.blogspot.com

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Just a conspiracy theory or did the US and Turkey create ISIS?

September 1, 2014

ISIS appeared apparently from nowhere in June this year. For a supposedly splinter group of Al Qaida they were remarkably well armed, generously funded, well trained, completely ruthless, took Mosul without resistance and swept through Iraq to the outskirts of Baghdad.

How could this possibly have happened without the knowledge of the intelligence services and their massive data collection activities?

When something is inexplicable, conspiracy theories come out of the woodwork. But some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true.

Certainly the US did install Saddam Hussain in the 1960s and support him in the 1980s against Iran. Certainly the US helped in drawing the Russians into Afghanistan and then in creating the Taliban. And now come the theories of the connections between the overthrow of Gadaffi, the channeling of weapons and rebels by the US and Turkey to Syria to bring down Assad, the funding of the rebels (later ISIS) by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Ambassador Chris Stevens who was killed in the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi was a key figure in setting up the agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to set up the “rat line”.

Even Haaretz wrote in February 2014 “Military option against Syria is alive. U.S., Saudi Arabia and Jordan are reportedly helping rebels plan attack starting in south and spreading to Damascus”. Front Line (PBS) reported in May on the training of jihadists by the US in Qatar on “how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush”.

A number of articles and a video came out last week on “The covert origins of ISIS” but more compelling is this article by Seymour Hersh from April this year. He exposed a classified agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to create what was referred to as a “rat line”. The “rat line” was a covert network used to channel weapons and ammunition from Libya, through southern Turkey and across the Syrian border. Funding was provided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Red Line and the Rat Line

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? …….. Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. ……

……. The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida…… 

In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. ……… A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.) ….. 

Read the whole article

ISIS did not come out of nothing and from nowhere. They were created and trained and armed and funded. Quite possibly the creators of ISIS did not fully realise the kind of monster they would spawn – just as they did not know what the Taliban and Al Qaida would become.

As SCG’s report puts it:

This is a tried and true geopolitical strategy.

Step 1: Build up a dictator or extremist group which can then be used to wage proxy wars against opponents. During this stage any crimes committed by these proxies are swept under the rug. [Problem]

Step 2: When these nasty characters have outlived their usefulness, that’s when it’s time to pull out all that dirt from under the rug and start publicizing it 24/7. This obviously works best when the public has no idea how these bad guys came to power.[Reaction]

Step 3: Finally, when the public practically begging for the government to do something, a solution is proposed. Usually the solution involves military intervention, the loss of certain liberties, or both. [Solution]

But under the big picture – conspiracy or not – we have the encouragement and nurturing of the vilest characteristics of gullible, degenerate, European Muslim youth who are enticed by jihadi cool.

And the weapons industry is still showing strong growth.

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