Just a couple of things

I came across a couple of articles today that I wanted to comment on.

One is a column, Monbiot's metamorphosis, that I found rather interesting. A while back, I'd started to write reviews as I read Heat: How to stop the planet from burning. The reviews I'd written so far are:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

I never did finish the book. I'd actually borrowed it from the library several times, renewing it again and again as I found myself unable to actually pick the thing up and try to read it again before I had to return it to the library. If you read my reviews, you can probably understand why. It's one of the worst pieces of trash I've ever tried to read, and I just haven't been able to stomach wasting time reading the rest when there are so many better uses for my time. Between my attempts to read his book, his columns online, and even some passing comments by his wife in a column she's written, I've come to believe Monbiot is an egotistical fool who takes his fiction a little too seriously to be mentally healthy. It blows my mind that he's actually taken seriously, rather than laughed at for the demented garbage he spews.

Which is probably why I found this piece from spiked right up my alley.

I also found this story very interesting. Makin' Up Climate Data... From Junk! If you're a regular visitor of Watt's Up With That? (which I highly recommend) and Surface Stations, you know that there are serious problems with the data being used to determine global temperatures and other climate information. Poorly designed, situated and maintained sites are bad enough, but to get data from stations that have been closed for more than 10 years??

...The station closed in 1995 but the data continues until 2006? Did some of the worlds leading climate scientists create the data from thin air? Well, not exactly.

Part of the USHCN data is created by a computer program called “filnet” which estimates missing values. According to the NOAA, filnet works by using a weighted average of values from neighboring stations. Filnet is applied after a homogeneity adjustment which is not designed to find many of these problems.

Imagine that, the worlds leading climate scientists creating temperature data from surrounding stations which are biased by barbecues, bodies of water, wind blocks, jet engines, pavement, roof tops, air conditioner exhausts, inversion layers, non-standard equipment, urban heat islands, automobiles and chimneys.

They didn’t create climate data from thin air; they created it from junk.

The idea that we can (or even should) control global climate and "stop climate change" is arrogant enough. How can we even pretend to know what we're doing - and make decisions regarding laws, policies and just plain day to day living - if we don't even had accurate information to base those decisions on in the first place? And people are pushing for us to spend trillions of dollars to "fix the climate" based on crap like this?

Insanity.