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Friday, August 19, 2005

Odd Indeed

First, Howard at Oraculations thinks the Pentagon refused permission to give Able Danger intel to the FBI because it would cause legal problems. I think he's right. I'm going to go hunt through some stuff to see if I can come up with any citations, etc, but if any person who actually knows about this area of the law would like to weigh in, be my guest! Because I'm lazy and ignorant. (It's amazing how often ignorance seems to show up hand and hand with laziness, isn't it? Do you think there could possibly be some cause and effect relationship there? I'm too tired to think about it....)

Second, here's a rather funny article about the Greenland climate conference. There's not much information, because the deliberations are secret. We would not want McKenzie, McKitrick or Lindgren to get their hands on the secret climate decoder ring! What made me laugh about this was:
Representatives at the talks toured a fast-receding glacier. Areas of summer melt in Greenland have expanded sharply in recent years....

"Ministers have come face-to-face with the visible evidence of the scale and urgency of the climate change challenge," British Environment minister Elliot Morley said after viewing the polar icecap from a helicopter.
Gasp! The only problem is that those glaciers are rarely stable. They usually are receding or growing. This isn't visible evidence of any "climate change challenge" - that claim assumes that this is evidence of a long-term trend caused by man. You can't assume the conclusion and try to use it as evidence for your conclusion.

Conversely, if the sun suddenly went into an inactive period and that glacier started expanding, it would not be evidence that anthropogenic climate change wasn't occurring - any more than the fact that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is piling up ice rapidly, or the glaciers in Norway are expanding rapidly, or that Pio XI and Moreno in South America are expanding (I found contradictory evidence on Moreno) is evidence against anthropogenic climate change. Augury and divination is no basis for action. Why not slaughter a few goats and examine their livers for "visible evidence of the scale and urgency of the climate change challenge"? It would be just as scientifically accurate.

Now, the fact that icecaps on Mars are receding is empirical evidence that maybe what's happening to glaciers in Greenland is not evidence of anything but fluctuation in the sun's output, but temperature observations on Mars still don't contradict the underlying theory that man's release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will eventually cause climate warming. That's because the sun's activity fluctuates, so that our observed climate will always fluctuate. Detecting a long-term trend in the midst of these fluctuations is a challenging scientific task.

There is one, and only one, firm conclusion we can draw from the helicopter tour of the glacier in Greenland. It increased CO2 in the atmosphere without increasing our knowledge about climate change at all.

Finally, this alligator in an LA lake is not evidence of sudden, startling climate change. It's evidence that someone let an alligator loose in LA and it found a nice lake, not to mention that people in LA must be really bored with life:
Dozens of residents gathered on the shore of Lake Machado on Thursday, sitting in lawn chairs or scanning the water with binoculars as park rangers with nets waited for the 7-foot (2 meter) alligator to rise out of the muck....

"I don't think you could say they didn't catch the gator for lack of effort," said local Paul Smith, who has spent much of the past two days watching the action at the lake. "They'll get him eventually. They'll figure something out."
Next they'll be watching the grass grow.


Comments:
Are not scared crocodiles. I can say the one that if it is gotten to be hotter. Task that from the heat the crocodiles the lake. It eats some children, if people not to consider. Abdul
 
You're right. If it gets hungry it is big enough to grab one. We have many alligators where I live and they will eat people if they are large enough and hungry.

I guess that's why they're trying to catch it.
 
MOM, I wouldn't recommend spending a lot of time researching the "wall" between intelligence and the military on one side and domestic law enforcement on the other. You would probably start with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which generally forbids use of the military and the reserves (but not the National Guard) in direct law enforcement roles. Military support to law enforcement is permissible in many cases, and it happens a lot. Beyond that, you get into a whole lot of things that happened beginning in the 1970s, as a reaction to perceived abuses. The rest of the "wall," in reality, is based on laws, executive orders, agency directives and regulations, etc. Many of them are classified, and you wouldn't be able to find out much about them in any case. Suffice it to say that the "wall" was, and to some extent still is, very real. I personally bumped up against it frequently in my past life, and it was serious as hell. Trying to get around it could literally cost you your career.

And by the way, it's interesting that liberals who blabber so much about the "wall" are so opposed to specific steps to overcome it where necessary.

Abdul, I have to say that I really enjoy your comments. I have no idea what you're talking about, but there's a kind of poetry in them. I think.
 
Tom - I appreciate very much your sharing of the special knowledge you have. What you describe is almost worse than a specific law, because it is so tangled and beyond the reach of the American public. And I guess we are now facing the commission's refusal to face the issue.

As for Abdul, I enjoy his comments too. Humor doesn't translate well.

He made a pretty funny joke cross referencing two different points which went something like "I can say for sure that crocodiles aren't afraid of global warming, even if it has gotten warmer. And that crocodile is going to warm things up around that lake! It will eat some children if they're not careful."
 
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