It’s been one of those days. Lots of grading. Lots of meetings. Lots of classes. Lots of labs. I’m tired. I come home, I fire up the laptop, and…everything is awesome!
Rupert Murdoch ends global climate change!
Wild winter in US, UK, etc. no respectable evidence any of this man made climate change in spite of blindly ignorant politicians.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) February 18, 2014
Wild winter in US, UK, etc. no respectable evidence any of this man made climate change in spite of blindly ignorant politicians.
You know what happens when the local fracking well explodes?
FREE PIZZA! Chevron actually gave out coupons for free pizza to residents of Bobtown, Pennsylvania, after a colossal explosion of a fracking well killed one person and burned uncontrollably for five days.
Wait, these things explode?
Don’t worry, forget that. Also free 2 liter soft drink! Shut up and stuff your face!
More happy news! Further progress has been made in bringing a little bit of Alberta to America!
You do not think that looks good? Need I remind you: PIZZA. So many many pizzas!
Everything is awesome!
I must say: I’ve been having an awful day, and it seemed as though nothing could cheer me up. Strangely enough, this – the most cynical thing I’ve read all day – actually improved my mood. I guess I should say thanks, but I should probably be concerned.
Oh, frak him. Over here in the Nordics we had the most interesting winter of not having much snow to speak of until the bloody beginning of January, and it looks like winter is almost over in Southern Finland. Not two-three months ago we were having ducks already nesting before we actually got proper minus Celsius… in the middle of winter in a country partially within the Arctic Circle.
Uh, PZ – check your fly, your sarcasm is showing.
Yeah, Rupert, te only things that are happening are right in front o your nose. 81 here in Las
Vegas, 88 in Tucson this past week. And last month it only got up to about 114 in Perth back in your old country. Oz, welcome him back with fetid dingo kidneys.
The blossoming plums in my neighborhood are saying it’s March.
“FREE PIZZA” should totally be how every corporate and political entity distracts from their various life endangering mishaps and atrocity. “FREE PIZZA” is to the ones in power, as “SQUIRREL!!” is to public successfully manipulated by the distraction tactics.
Someone get me off this planet.
i’m far too hungry atm to be depressed
I love pizza, in fact, I am slightly obsessed with pizza of all sorts, but Chevron buying me a pizza would not make me like them any better. I am not sure what is worse, their cynical view of the people of that town, or that it probably made some people feel better about Chevron.
Yeah, this awful cold we’ve been having, it used to happen every winter back when I was a pup. It was just winter. Now it’s OMFG cold and unusual.
See, the winters of the last few decades have been freakishly warm. Hell, right now it is almost 70 degrees outside, which used to not happen until March or even April. And this is a winter that supposedly disproves global warming.
Well, it isn’t really global warming. It is global climate disruption, and it is freaking happening. Unusual cold would be evidence for it, and this is only cold that used to be usual.
Speaking of cold, I like cold pizza. Yep, when I get leftover pizza out of the fridge, I just eat it. But if it were bribe pizza from climate wreckers, I would throw it away.
Professor,.. just gotta love your satirical sense of humor!
Hey, Bobtown is lucky. The Chevron refinery in Richmond, CA releases clouds of toxic gases every 3 or 4 years, forcing residents to “shelter in place” (try not to breathe too deeply) and they NEVER get free pizza. Of course Richmond is majority black, would I be being overly cynical if I guessed that Bobtown is majority white?
But we need more of this because there’s still money to be made, and cleaner energies are for sissypants and they’ll never supply our needs. Never ever in a million years ever. Stop even trying.
Weird. I live in Pennsylvania. This has not been mentioned in the local news. Admittedly, I’m in the opposite corner of the state, but, considering the amount of unregulated frakking going on up here, I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned.
Well, maybe not all that surprised. The local networks love to run adverts paid for by the gas companies telling us how great and wonderful and perfect the gas company is, so . . .
It’s strange to hear that from an Australian, since they are having such a hot and dry summer there.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-downplays-role-of-climate-change-in-current-drought-20140217-32vub.html
And as for the cold in the north, that might possibly also be a product of climate change.
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/01/john-holdren-video-polar-vortex
Yes, but Rupert Murdoch is a billionaire, and most of them don’t live on the same planet as you and I do.
moarscienceplz @10,
According to the webpage http://censusviewer.com/city/PA/Bobtown , Bobtown has only 757 people and 96.7% of them are white.
Meanwhile there has been record or near record highs in Alaska this winter.
And California is looking pretty dismal. Three year drought. Worst since they started keeping records. 38 million people. The perennial water war is going hot again.
You can’t link any one event to global warming. But a prediction of most climate models is that California was going to get dryer as the rainfall belts move north. And it was a dry state to begin with.
And a lot of scientists think the massive cat 5 hurricane in the Philippines was partly due to global warming. Not the hurricane itself but the strength and the massive storm surge.
This made me laugh out loud. An article I read earlier said that they only sent out 100 vouchers.
But the article also mentioned that a worker died in the explosion and no remains can be found at all.
DBP:
Perhaps one per household? Only those with enough money to be deserving of a vote? Only the straight, older white men? The relatives of the mayor?
I’ve been struck lately with how weather extremes are getting more common. Hurricane Sandy, Australia heating up, cold spells in the USA, hot spells in Alaska and so on. So has everyone.
1. And even more struck by how the climate models aren’t really predicting all this. They’ve gotten the macroscale trends down OK. But the mesoscale not too well.
2. Some models predict that global warming might well cause an increase in cold winters in the USA. That missing cold in the arctic has to go somewhere and it is going mostly into the northern USA. The polar vortex is what kept it bottled up and the polar vortex is slowing down.
Other models don’t predict this. One of the workers in the field recently said we really need a decades worth of data to tell. Well OK, statistics are statistics. That isn’t going to help us but chances are in a decade, we won’t have done anything different from today anyway.
At this point we are all just passengers on a spaceship (the earth) where no one is captain and no one knows where it is going.
Rupert Murdoch may be an Australian by birth but he became an American in 1985 to avoid paying his tax bill!
I live in North Central PA and I’ve got constant phone calls from people just ready and willing to drill holes in my property and get shit out of the ground for MOOOOOOONEY! My acreage is entailed to the Nature Conservancy. Woot. Trees ‘n shit.
The new Citizen Kane of misinformation, bigotry and all things regressive strikes again, i.e. ever time he opens his mouth.
It’s not just California. Most of the southwest is in drought. The Colorado river has been in drought for 14 years. With climate change, this might be the new normal.
A lot of rivers in the world no longer reach the sea. The Colorado is one.
Some places are turning to desalinization plants. One in California sells water at 200X what conventional sourced water wholesales for.
….now I want pizza…
Horrors have to come in threes. A Kansas legislator proposes we spank kids till it leaves marks. And to add insult to injury, it’s being proposed by a Democrat.
http://cjonline.com/news/2014-02-18/proposed-bill-would-allow-teachers-spank-children-10-times-hand
WOO HOO! Let’s bring fracking to New York!
We have far better pizza, anyhow.
You can call me shallow, but I would be in a much better mood on average if corporations and my stupid government gave me a free pizza each time they fucked up.
Mainly because I could sell the pizzas and be a millionaire within a week.
@Menyambal:
XKCD for you.
Aaaaand now I have that song from the Lego Movie stuck in my head again. GAH!
I just read this article about fracking here in Texas.
It makes me even more motivated to get this house fixed up and sold so that we can get out of Texas again and stay out.
http://stories.weather.com/fracking
Well … nobody can say their hasn’t been progress.
Used to be bread and circuses; now it is pizza and 99 channels with nothing on.
As opposed to the ones who took your money with eyes wide open and see what?
Money is the most powerful hallucinogen ever invented.
God, do I hate the “it’s cold in winter, so global warming is obviously not happening!” line of bullshit so much. I live in northeast Texas. I remember several winters from my childhood that included school closures due to snow. I fondly remember playing in the snow with my cousins until we were called in by our grandmother to warm up with hot chocolate.
Ignoring these childhood anecdotes, this line of thinking betrays a disturbing misunderstanding of the nature of the winter weather events currently taking place. When explaining the nature of these events to my conservative Republican family, I was met with silence and vacant looks.
Also, awesome post in general.
They see exactly what Mr Murdoch tells them they see! Or else…
You kid, but it’s better than what oil companies usually do to the people their negative externalities effect.
Suitably chilling phraseology, there, jedibear.
Said externalities are, after all, “relatively tiny” in comparison with the world…..
(It’s “affect” in this case, by the way.)
It makes me think of this (relevant part starts about 2 minutes in if the link doesn’t take you there directly)
Not strange at all. Rupe, who owns our government, is a climate science denier just as the “coal is great, roads are even better, and fuck those highspeed trains and renewable energie thingies” prime moron he has installed as PM.
As a resident of Rupert’s birth city, I apologise for this export of ours. Mind you if it hadn’t been Rupert, some other crook would be in his place, likely indistinguishable in outlook. I suspect newspaper tycoons get that way naturally.
I don’t know if this counts as anecdotal or hard statistics, but I work for a landscaping company (in the UK) that does gritting and tree planting over the winter.
We’ve just had the analysis of our winter figures come in by email this morning. This year, gritting is down by a full 50% on projected average sales because the winter has been non-existent. Also, the tree planting season, which is supposed to extend another month, is already in jeopardy because everything is coming into leaf.
So that lackwit Murdoch can talk all he likes about how wild the winter here has been, but it hasn’t actually been any colder than a mildish autumn.
Wow – that’s one hell of a disaster at the well. Someone’s got to lose their job for being an incompetent boob. They probably didn’t put in the appropriate blowout devices due to cost.
As for Rupert Murdoch – what more proof can you ask for the nonexistence of gods (or at least of any caring gods) than the fact that the bastard’s still alive and poisoning society.
Me too, but Murdoch’s tweet here is even worse. He’s saying “it’s not cold in winter, so global warming is obviously not happening!”, which I think might set a new record for sheer climate-denial chutzpah. Not only is it obviously untrue in the case of much of the US, the “logic” is entirely backwards.
Sorry, I misread “wild” as “mild”… Need more caffeine.
I’m in a vanpool at work and out of 14 people, about four are serious climate change denialists. (Most of the others are only moderate denialists.) The worst not only uses the “it’s snowing somewhere in winter so global warming is crap” argument but also spouts “Al Gore!” as it that conclusively proves climate change to be false. And he’s a tea partier so the laughs just never end.
The irony is that we work at a place involved in building, launching, and monitoring satellites that are actively measuring and demonstrating climate change.
(Sorry for the vent. I’ve never seen such a dry California winter and a long string of winter days in the 80s and I’m pretty depressed about the way things are going.)
But..but..but…That smartly dressed middle-aged woman on the TV commercials said that this stuff is “safe” and “proven”. She even emphasized “proven”.
A corporate spokesdroid wouldn’t lie to me, would they? Would they?…
..Suddenly I feel all sort of … dirty…
It is early morning, and I need to get back to sleep. But there are birds outside that shouldn’t be here this month. Even birdsong is depressing.
raven
It depends what models you’re talking about. The ones that are set up to imitate the earth’s climate at large are unbelievably fantastic. Write buckets full of all those physics equations, add in the geography of the planet, don’t put in any start conditions, then hit the Go button and the amazing thing just goes right ahead and spits out the climate as we’ve known it. It even comes up with the ENSO and Atlantic variations all by its little self.
But the projections for what to expect in any given region in a given time period for our known emissions? Not so wonderful. The worst of the unwonderfulness is that they’re way, waaaay slower to predict change than is actually happening. The loss of Arctic sea ice and land terminating glaciers, sea level rising _and_ that rise accelerating, extreme weather events – they’re all running at least a couple of decades faster than the models were.
The real biggie is the weather extremes, especially hot days and heatwaves as well as storms and floods. (Though they’re just the ones that people notice as they happen. The genuinely frightening one is the rise in overnight minimum temperatures for food crops like rice. Too warm overnight at the wrong time, and that’s not really “warm” for a person – no grain, even if the plant recovers from the setback and looks as though it’s growing vigorously. No grain = no food.)
@madscientist,
I’m sure an appropriate scapegoat will be found and offered up as a sacrifice. A worker or a low-level manager perhaps. No one in middle management or higher, of course, even if the orders to skimp on safety came from them.
No, they would never offer free pizza. Maybe slightly reduced prices for day-old pizza, and maybe a pizza on a lay-a-a-way plan with only the most modest of fees and interest. But free pizza?! Now you’re talking like a communist.
Winter over here lasted like what, 2 or 3 weeks? And it’s been over for 2 more.
Thread won.
I’m always a little conflicted when it comes to criticism of the oil sands.SSpecifically, because I live in Alberta and my income is dependent on it. It doesn’t help that I find well fires and strip mines to be some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
But on the other hand, yeah, we probably shouldn’t be fucking with the atmosphere. So the best course of action I can think of is to keep going to work, working to eliminate my job on my off time, and take some pictures while it lasts.
Are you ready to give up your jet-setting way of life? If not, the fuel to run it has to come from somewhere. So, are you more interested in digging it up in our own backyard, or do you think we should be buddying up with a middle-eastern theocracy where women’s rights are way way worse than they are here? Which way will lead to less outrage in your crusadey little life?
Oh, I’m all for continuing to research green technology, except that it isn’t anywhere near ready to take the load we intend to put on it and I guarantee you that most of it comes with provisos like this… some part of it needs to be dug up, refurbished regularly or melted down and some part of it can probably explode. Just like oil can. Just because it’s oil we’re talking about doesn’t make it big and histrionically evil, especially since every time you jet overseas to some conference, you are relying on it. I know you’re all about cutting meat out of your diet now for the name of these insane, halfbaked liberal “morals” as well as boycotting everything that isn’t in complete lockstep with your views, how about cutting out jet fuel and plastic and see where that gets you.
However up in arms you want to get about another insane little thing done by your fellow man, keep in mind that you are enabling, like it or not. Until I read a blog post that says “I’m not driving or flying anywhere else until green technology kicks in,” all you are is another self-righteous hypocrite.
For fuck’s sake, it is like clockwork. We are talking about safety, about a fucking explosion that happened due to lack of safety, and a fucking ridiculous, condescending “compensation” in the wake of that explosion. And you are going to pull the “well don’t use gas or you’re a hypocrite hurr hurr hurr” line? Go fuck yourself.
anteprepro
Everyone should have a hobby.
This just happens to be viggen111’s.
I think PZ was mean to them once upon a time and they’re still pouting.
Ah. Didn’t realize this was a habit of theirs. Though it makes sense, given that their comment might as well be a cut-and-paste job automatically inserted into posts that use the words “global warming” and/or “oil”.
Gee, who pissed in your Wheaties? And your example isn’t what PZ has ever said, only a piss-poor attempt by an inane critic to wrongly use exaggerated hyperbole feebly show your lack of cogency and context. Try again.
San Diego is trying to be proactive. My dh and I were out and about in north county San Diego yesterday where we were stuck in a bit of traffic caused by the installation of a pipeline for a planned desalinization plant where San Onofre used to be that will run from the coast in Carlsbad to the northeast of the county in Escondido.
Here’s you wild winter:
Met stations:
Nov 2013: 2nd hottest on record.
Dec 2013: 4th hottest on record.
Jan 2014: 2nd hottest on record.
Land-ocean index:
Nov 2013: Hottest on record.
Dec 2013: 4th hottest on record.
Jan 2014: 4th hottest on record.
Did someone say something about “blindly ignorant”?
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council also says that those of you who agree with scientific consensus regarding evolution and climate change are out of step with real science, with modern science.
Yes, Perkins conflates evolution and climate change. Yes, Perkins in a religious dunderhead. Yes, Perkins wouldn’t know science if it bit him on the backside.
So, there’s evidence (real science) to back up the idea that natural disasters are God-made, and there’s no evidence for man-made disasters. There you have it, that explains everything.
Murdoch is making the (mostly true) point that one unusual event or even an unusual season cannot easily be proved to be principally caused by global warming. It takes careful study to do that, and that means attribution will only come later when the crazy weather isn’t quite as much in the news anymore. Handy, that.
Meanwhile, he’s got his flack O’Reilly to put on a show that will cover why global warming is a scam. His producers are a bit desperate for material, and have asked DesmogBlog for help.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/02/19/fox-alert-o-reilly-factor-producer-asks-desmogblog-provide-best-arguments-against-global-warming
You are attributing far more nuance to Murdoch than is warranted.
It’s a common one: Cold out? Proves global warming is a scam! Hot out? The scientists say you can’t attribute this single weather event to global warming you idiot! That’s exactly as much nuance as I attribute to Murdoch.
I see. Yeah, that’s pretty spot on.
Say, in that exploding well picture, isn’t that the finger of god pointing through the fire? See! He does live, so checkmate atheists! (Hey, it’s just as good as the image of Jebus in bird shit.)
Raven:
or even worse… the captain is Zap Brannigan.
14°C here in Munich right now. I’m sitting on my balcony roasting my belly in the sun. Last weekend temperatures went up to 20°C. Slopes are closed in our ski resorts already. Absolutely normal in the middle of winter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-snow.html?_r=2
Uh no, he’s trying to make the opposite point. That a single cold winter in which snow appears means that global warming must be false. Even though it’s only cold on the US east coast and most of the rest of the world is way above normal right now.