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Saturday 23 July 2011

Manufactured indices and other units


In the video above, Rush Limbaugh critisizes the use of the so-called "heat index", which inflates temperatures by adding the imagined effect of relative humidity. If the relative humidity is high, the heat index is higher than the actual temperature, and if it is low then is lower than the actual temperature. Rush says:
They’re playing games with us on this heat wave, again. Even Drudge, drudge getting sucked in here. Gonna be a 116 in Washington. No, it’s not. It’s going to be a 100, maybe 99. The heat index, manufactured by the government, they tell you what it feels like when you add the humidity in there.
By using the heat index, the government tries to make us believe that it is warmer than it actually is. The heat index is essentially a form of psy op, indendent to scare people so they will not oppose the new world governance.

But the heat index is not the only unit manufactured by the government. There are also these:

  • Temperature anomaly - the word anomaly is chosen by the government to make us think that there is something wrong, even unnatural, with the temperature changing, but the temperature has always changed. What would be an anomaly is the temperature being static, never changing. 
  • Degrees Kalvin - this you get by adding 273.15 to the temperature in degrees Celsius. For instance, 293 degrees Kalvin sounds incredibly hot, but in reality it is only 20 degrees Celsius. One understands that "Kalvin" is nonsense when one observes that its name is derived from a comic book character!
  • Arctic sea ice volume - as we all know, water expands when it freezes. That's why ice floats. By calculating the ice volume, and not the corresponding water volume which would be the correct thing to do, the amount of ice is exaggerated. And this means that any decline in Artic sea ice volume also is exaggerated! Horror, horror, the Arctic is melting! Well, acutally it is not.
  • Parts per million - for measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. The fraction of CO2 is currently 0.000391, which is a very small number. However, by using parts per million, one can make it appear to be much much bigger: 391 parts per million. 391 is a large number, and when you then read "million", it appears even larger. "Million" is usually associated with large quantities.
  • Permille - this is not strictly related to the climate, but to another issue where the government wants to interfere in our lives: alcohol and driving. If you, purely hypothetically, have lets say 4 permille alcohol in your blood when driving home after enjoying a couple of beers in the local gasthaus, what that really means is that the fraction of alcohol is a measly 0.004. Yes, that's right: there are three zeroes in front of that 4. Of course, the police will not listen to that when one tried to explain it to them. Bloody Gestapo! And they don't like being called Gestapo, I can tell you! What the heck is the problem with calling them Gestapo? It actually means "Secret State Police". Now, they sure are police, and they belong to the state. That is 2 out of 3. Ok, they may not be so secret, but that's nothing to get upset about, is it? And what if I was holding up an image of a Swastika while saying it? Does that somehow imply that I was calling those officers Nazis? What poppycock! No, they are just trying to suppress my freedom!

Tuesday 19 July 2011

Willie Soon - no burden for tax payers

Greenpeace has produced a report about the esteemed climate scientist Willie Soon. Apparently, Soon has received money from ExxonMobil, the Southern Company, Mobil, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. He is also associated with the Heartland Institute, the George C Marshall Institute, the Fraser Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, The Center for Science and Public Policy and the Science and Public Policy Institute. Oh, I'm sooo shocked. Not.

This time, the Greenpeace hippie-fascists have really shot themselves in their sandal-wearing feet. Who, besides a Nazi-hippie, would be stupid enough to think that all these corporations and institutes would give all this money to somebody who was incompetent? No, they fund only the very best. Successful corporations owe their success to being the best: they have the best managers, recruit the best people and make the best products. Did you really think that companies like Coca Cola, McDonald's and Microsoft would be so successful if they produced crap? And of course, they pay the best researchers, and that's Willie Soon, world leading expert on climate non-change and a number of other environmental issues such as the non-toxicity of mercury and the flourishing of polar bear populations. He has 23 papers in the Popular Technology list of "900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming (AGW) Alarm".

It's only second-rate scientists like Hansen, Mann and Jones that need to crawl in the dust in front of Politruks and bureaucrats to be allowed to feed at the trough of tax-payers money. The public is largely unaware of how public research funding is done today, but I think it is time they heard the truth. The full, unvarnished and unpolished truth, no matter how distasteful it is. I have seen with my own eyes how one is supposed to write research proposals, and I can read between the lines. I'm not making things up: I'm only making inferences.
When you want to get money from a funding agency, you need to write a proposal and submit it to the agency. For instance, lets assume that I would like to get tax-payers money to investigate the medical effects of drinking beer. First, I would have to write what my objectives are: "I want to prove that beer is bad for your health." Next, you have to show that nobody else has done the same thing before: "Although a number of studies has investigate some of the health effects of beer, nobody has yet shown that it can hurt your brain." Then you need to explain your method: "I will let monkeys drink large quantities of beer and then let put them in a room with a typewriter - if they don't write Shakespeare's collected works, then it proves that beer makes you stupid." As I said before, I'm not making this stuff up: this is how you write a research proposal.

Finally, there is the most important part. The "Impact" section, where you are supposed to write how the politicians and bureaucrats can benefit from your research. Here, you can for instance write: "When I have proved that beer is bad for the brain, you can make a tax on beer" or "you can regulate the brewery industry" or "`you can forbid people to drink beer" or such things. What you write here will determine whether you get your funding or not. If you can e.g. justify taxes, you are on. On the other hand, if you promote freedom, liberty and free enterprise, you have as much a chance as a snowball in hell, inside a burning oven. Of course, the scientists know this, and they are all either just after the money so they can fill their cofferswith tax-payers' hard-earned money and go to expensive and luxurious conferences or they are communists, so they play along. Well, most of them do, but a few people with integrity such as Willie Soon refuses. Instead, Soon and those like him get money from independent sources, with no strings attached. They don't sell their souls to the politicians. These are the only scientists you should ever trust.

Do you think Galileo got funding from the pope to perform his seminal research on the spherical shape of the Earth? No, he was funded by private means, just like Willie Soon.