Michael Mann and Tree Ring Data

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Apr 15

My hometown newspaper ran a story headlined, "Hamilton is going to get warmer and wetter, climate meeting hears."  For 'Earth Day' local environmentalists held a prayer meeting as a means of demonstrating and reviving their faith.  The local preacher, Brian Montgomery, delivered the sermon.  He spoke of the flooding of the Red Hill Valley Parkway, the ice storm of a couple years ago, and flooding in the nearby city of Burlington. and blamed it all on global warming, or 'climate change' as the saying now goes.  He assured the assembled that the apocalypse is indeed coming, and a sign of it will be Hamilton becoming a warmer and wetter place.  Parson Montgomery's authority to preach in the Church of the Environment rests on his being the Air and Climate Change Coordinator for the City of Hamilton, according to the story.

I have written on global warming since it was actually called global warming by the faithful, i.e. over eighteen years.  Below is my response and commentary.

After the last two winters Hamilton has endured, only a shameless, apocalyptic wacko could possibly warn that Hamilton is going to get warmer and wetter and that these are bad things.

The fact is that the global temperature has not risen in the last eighteen years.  To hold that global warming is occurring as a result of anthropogenic carbon dioxide is to make a mockery of the principle of cause and effect.  If the effect is not happening, then the cause is not operating.

At Hamilton’s third Annual Environmental Summit, the meeting was told that the flooding of the Red Hill Valley Parkway was a sign of global warming.  I recall at the time that a similar set of apocalyptic environmentalists blamed poor planning and poor design of the road for the flooding that occurred.  I guess those engineers who were responsible are owed an apology, but they shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for one.

Once again, the environmentalists wackos confound weather with climate when it suits their purposes.  Blaming severe occasional weather events on global warming is the usual sleight of hand they employ.

As a research scientist for 35 years, I know the difference between a tree ring and a mercury thermometer.  In my experience, a thermometer is far better for measuring temperature than a tree ring is.  A tree ring is inconsistent in shape and thickness, and, most importantly, the edges are not sharp.  On a thermometer, the gradations marking temperature are sharp and crisp, and with a wide range thermometer I can measure a temperature to within half a degree.

The global warming wackos claim that with tree rings someone can measure “temperature” to within one tenth of a degree!  I simply don’t believe them.  Everything that Michael Mann claimed in his 'hockey stick' graph turned on measurements of tenths of a degree, something I deny they can reliably measure.  Mann's hockey stick notably failed to observe the Medieval warm period, during which the Vikings occupied Greenland, and the Little Ice Age, which ran from about 1650 to 1850.

Other reasons for not believing the global warming hypothesis is the immediate political and economic consequences the hypothesis conveniently pointed to.  If you ever hated something about the success of western civilization, its industry and its wealth, global warming provided the reason to bring western civilization down a few pegs of success.  A real scientific investigation would have observed that the climate models were interesting, but required more work and refinement before any large practical conclusions should be drawn from them.  But that is not what was done.

The scandals that have gone on concerning global warming: the shunning and browbeating of skeptics, the loss of raw data by the principals, the emails that show conspiracy to cover up doubt, all point to a very unscientific handling of what is supposed to be a scientific question.  What we get is political cudgeling.

What has happened over the last eighteen years is a lot of political, emotional, and financial investment into a cause that isn’t panning out, all because the scientists who proposed global warming on the basis of tree ring data drew hasty conclusions, failed to be scientifically prudent, and advanced something that rested on doubtful and inconsistent evidence.  They saw something not for what it was, but for what they wished it to be.  And now Michael Mann is suing everybody in sight in order to salvage his reputation.

People who still talk about the dangers of global warming are not scientists; they are politicians with an agenda.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561629/Top-scientists-start-to-examine-fiddled-global-warming-figures.html

The above link demonstrates the chicanery which has taken place in order to delude the general public into fearing the global warming phenomenon.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/24/seven-big-failed-environmentalist-predictions

This link (which will have to be cut & pasted into your browser) lists seven other failed apocalyptic forecasts of environmentalist wackos since 1970.

LGBTQ Re-Education Camp Held at local High School

Vincent J. Curtis

16 April 15

RE:  LGBTQWERTY students take turn as teachers at Pride Event

A story was run in the local newspaper of an LGBTQ so-called "Pride" event.  The story began with, "Westmount Secondary students were imparting knowledge to their teachers Wednesday instead of the other way around at a Spring into Spring with Pride day."  An interest use of the word 'knowledge' there, since metaphysically knowledge is the possession of truth in the mind, and LGBTQ truth-enforcement is anything but the conveyance of knowledge.

What is going on at Westmount Secondary School?   At a normal educational institution, teachers instruct students in subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, English, French, history, geography, and the like.  Yet we see this report on how students instructed teachers in how to politely address a certain turn of student.  This description was reminiscent of a re-education camp.

The story did not say how many LGBTQ students actually came out of the closet and delivered instruction to their teachers.  Only one was quoted in the story, and was said to be leader of the movement.  It turns out that the leader was an ‘L’ type who had yet to “come out” to her family. Some leader!  Her name is Olivia, but she goes by Kurt, and the Spec writer amused her and confused the rest of us by referring to Olivia-Kurt as a he when biologically she is a she.

Never mind the disruption of real education this event created, what this event declared metaphysically is that truth is relative.  Truth is whatever you can browbeat others into accepting.  Hence, a she can be a he if she wants to, and you have to be polite about it or suffer consequences.  Might makes right.

At a real educational institution, truth is not relative.  There is truth and there is falsehood, or error.  Even relativists know that this is so, and that is why they browbeat others into accepting their version of truth.  If truth were relative, math and science and much else would be impossible.  There is a truth in male-female sexuality, and LGBTQ sexualities all amount to error in the male-female truth.

Young people in high school are still undergoing puberty, with all its physical changes and emotional traumas.  The sexuality of a fifteen year old may not be fully expressed.  Since, by their own admission, LGBTQ sexuality is extremely emotionally trying to those who suffer from it, it ought to be incumbent upon the guidance councillors to talk them out of it while it is still possible.  What happened at Westmount High turned out to be more of a recruiting event for the LGBTQ community than truthful education.

Yes, the education tax dollars of parents are going to support this too.

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At the end of the story, it was reported that 1 % of the Hamilton Police Service identified themselves as LGBTQ, a number that corresponds with realistic surveys of the general North American population.  Thus the number of LGBTQ in 1000 students is roughly 10, and for 10 students, an entire day was set aside to boost their pride and delicate little egos (by their own admission).  Truth is to be made a relative in an educational institution in order not to hurt the feelings of 10 sexually confused adolescents!  Such today is the power of the LGBTQ lobby.

Mike Pence Bulldozes George Stephanopoulos

Vincent J. Curtis

8 April 2015

It has been widely mischaracterized in the media of both right and left wing persuasion that George Stephanopoulos embarrassed a defenseless Indiana Governor Mike Pence in an interview that was aired on the ABC News program “This Week,” hosted by Mr. Stephanopoulos, on March 29th, 2015.

The subject of the interview was Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act that was signed into law by Governor Pence on March 26^th, 2015.  It was widely alleged that the purpose of the law was to enable religious-minded small businesses in the state to discriminate against gays and lesbians and allow them to refuse them certain services, such as provide wedding cakes or to photograph gay weddings when such activities would be repugnant to the religious views of the business owner.  Governor Pence appeared on “This Week” to dispel this widely reported and vicious mischaracterization of the Indiana RFRA.

The allegedly poor performance by Governor Pence is said to have all but eliminated any chance he may have had to run successfully for the Republican nomination for President in 2016, and in which he was thought to be interested.

The interview is available in its entirety on Youtube.

A review of that interview shows that the alleged drubbing that Stephanopoulos gave Pence is a canard.  Governor Pence was on the show to hammer home his talking points about the law, and spoke a great deal of the time.  This method of seeming to be interviewed but for the purpose of driving home a message is widely used by politicians on television, and has the unfortunate effect of having the interviewers asking questions that are not answered by the interviewee.  At least, not appearing to.

Except at the very end of the interview, when Stephanopoulos asked a “have you stopped beating your wife?” question, Pence actually did eventually get around to answering the questions put to him by Stephanopoulos.  He just had to fully elaborate his talking point before he discovered that, in fact, the answer was in the heaping pile of words he just delivered.  Stephanopoulos, anxious to get his next question in, failed to recognize that somewhere in the forest he was presented with was the tree that bore the answer to his previous question.

Because Pence spoke at such length to every question, Stephanopoulos was bulldozed by Pence and he was not able to force Pence to confront the matter of discrimination against gays and lesbians until the very end.

What failed to come through in the interview, despite Pence’s best efforts and because of Stephanopoulos’s obtuseness, was that the new Indiana law does not apply to disputes between private individuals.

The RFRA applies to cases in which state law is said to apply to a matter in dispute.  In this situation, the judge is instructed by the RFRA to apply the principle of ‘strict scrutiny’ to the case.  That means that the state has to show that a compelling state interest in the matter requires that the individual contesting a law on religious grounds must comply with the law regardless of religious scruples.  This is a high standard for the state to meet; members of certain religious groups in the United States have been exempted from the draft in time of war on the grounds of religious beliefs.  It is a legal application of common sense to certain matters, and that the RFRA was made necessary at the federal and state level is due to the Supreme Court of the United States that in 1992 threw out common sense on religious matters as a basis for judgement.

What has been said of Indiana’s new RFRA is that it now enables private individuals to discriminate against gays and lesbians on religious grounds in the state.  This is flatly not true because it has always been the law that private individuals can make choices.  To discriminate is to make a choice, and in a free country individuals are allowed to exercise their free will.  What made Jim Crow laws repugnant was that the state imposed its will upon the right of private individuals, as well as on local and state authorities, to make choices.  To treat whites and blacks the same indiscriminately was a choice forbidden by a Jim Crow law.  The various RFRA in the United States are like Jim Crow laws in reverse, forcing the government to demonstrate necessity of compliance with certain laws that may conflict with the religious conscience of a citizen.

Thus by bulldozing Stephanopoulos, Pence retained control of the interview and never was embarrassed by him.  At the end of the interview, Stephanopoulos desperately asked “Should it be legal in the state of Indiana to discriminate against gays and lesbians?”

This is a loaded question, and questions like these are why politicians only speak in talking points in televised interviews.  Pence, exasperated, spoke of tolerance being a two-way street, which, while true, failed to meet the loaded question.  He ought to have answered that the question just asked had nothing to do with the new Indiana law.  That answer would not only have the advantage of being true, it would have thoroughly befuddled George Stephanopoulos at a time when he could not recover.

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Has Reason been Abandoned?

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Mar 15

Wednesday was a really, really bad day for the local newspaper.

RE: Transgendered woman barred from HSR bathroom, left in tears.

RE: Rob Ford’s legacy of fear.

These stories seem to depict ‘the gradual victory of delirium over reason and of passion over truth.’

It occurred to no one at the transgendered press conference to ask about the rights of actual women for privacy, and for their right to use a “woman’s” bathroom without a deviant male being present.  The crying jag was a nice touch and probably deflected attention from the real issue, which was why should a security guard accept the word of a self-interested deviant male about human rights?

The author of the trash piece on Rob Ford did not seem especially fearful in light of the legacy of fear that the cancer-stricken former mayor allegedly left behind.  But Ford is a Conservative and the Toronto Star is a Liberal paper, and Liberals never let anything as implausible as truth get in the way of whacking a Conservative.  Liberal writers like those which type for the Star justify themselves upon ‘the Greater Cosmic Truth that exists independent of objective truth.’  That Greater Cosmic Truth holds that anything conservative is evil and deserves to be destroyed.

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With thanks a a hat tip to Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review for some fine turns of phrase.

For those who might object to the use of the word 'deviant' to describe a transgender, the term is used in its strict philosophical sense of that which deviates from the norm, as the norm for a male is to be a male.  It also serves as a poison pill.

Supreme Court Clears Way for Loyola's Religious Course

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Mar 15

The decision by the Supreme Court of Canada to allow the private Jesuit Loyola High School to teach its own course rather than Quebec’s provincially mandated ethics and religious course is a rare victory for good sense.

If true to its roots, the Loyola course is founded upon the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest philosophical mind since Aristotle.  The course on ethics and religion the Loyola students would get would be vastly superior in rationality and content to anything founded upon secularism offered by anyone, Quebec’s included.  It would be embarrassing to deliver the secular course after the students had been exposed to Thomism – the students would tear secularism apart in the best Jesuit tradition.  Its message would be laughed out of the room on the basis of its dogmatism and irrationality.

On the other hand, Catholic ethics simply cannot be taught from a neutral perspective (if such a place exists) because Aquinas rationally demonstrated those ethics in his works on natural law and ethics.  It makes no sense to speak of a neutral perspective on something that is rationally demonstrated.  One can choose to be rational and accept the proof, or be irrational.

Secularism is rationally incoherent.  Secularism is a religion of anti-religion.  The secular assertion that one religion is pretty much of the same value as another is simply false on the basis of Thomist analysis.  And to say that because one religion has pretty much the same value as another means that one ought to be tolerant of other religions is a non-sequitor.  Students in a Jesuit school would quickly pick up on that.

The objective of the Quebec provincial course was to inculcate the idea that other religions and ethical traditions were deserving of respect and tolerance.  It does so by laying down dogmatically the secular notion of moral and ethical relativism.  Thomists can reach a conclusion approximating respect and tolerance without falling into the error, as the secular course must, of saying that the ancient Hindu practice of Suttee, and genital mutilation are things to be accepted rather than abhorred.

The worrisome part of the decision by the Supreme Court was that the decision was rendered on the basis of freedom of religion.  The actual merits of the two courses were not the basis of the decision.  The decision would have been stronger had the Supreme Court judged on the merits of the courses, and told Quebec officials that they were plain wrong and ought to recur to stronger intellectual rigor.

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Harper calls Muslim face-covering veil 'anti-women,' unacceptable

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Mar 15

A response to the CP article of this headline. 

Justin Trudeau, Charlie Angus, and other quasi-intellectuals of the left are quite right to take Stephen Harper to task for his condemnation of certain Muslim practices.  Harper does Islam the disservice of taking Islam seriously.

Elitist leftist like Trudeau and Angus are inclined to treat Islam as some harmless, quaint religious practice to be cherished and valued as an anthropologist would cherish the discovery of the religious practices of a recently discovered tribe of the Amazon jungle.  However, Islam is anything but harmless.

In the first place, Islam treats women as second-class citizens, contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  An expression of the shabby treatment of women is the obligation for women to wear certain clothing lest they be treated as prostitutes or available women.  Though the niqab and the burka are not strictly a part of Islam, it became an Islamic cultural practice for women to wear such clothing as a sign that as tribal breeding stock they were already spoken for.

The hijab has an altogether different history.  The hijab originated in the 1970’s as a sign of Islamic support for the Palestinian cause against Israel, and evolved into a sign of political Islam as such.  In effect, the woman wearing the hijab is saying that she is Muslim first, last and always, and Canadian somewhere far down the list.  And being a Muslim woman means to be inferior to a Muslim male and superior to non-Muslims.

Politically, Canada can withstand a small number of people who bear no loyalty to her; but it is a farce for a woman wearing a hijab, a niqab or a burka to take an oath of loyalty to Canada when plainly they are demonstrating the absence of such loyalty.  They might as well be crossing their fingers before the citizenship court judge.  It is quite permissible for such people to live as they wish in Canada as landed immigrants, but if they want the full rights of citizenship then they ought to accept Canadian law, such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and not say they do while withholding true consent.

The basis for tolerating these face-covering practices is a combination of ignorance and arrogance.  Stephen Harper knows enough about Islam and the law to realize the hazards of allowing Muslims to avoid taking seriously the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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Yes, Canada Should Get More Involved

Vincent J. Curtis 

25 Feb 15

The work below was prepared at the request of Esprit de Corps magazine.

Item: ISIS beheads James Foley, Posts video of beheading.

Item: ISIS beheads Steven Sotloff, Posts video.

Item: ISIS beheads Peter Kassig, Posts video.

Item: ISIS beheads Alan Henning, Posts video.

Item: ISIS beheads Hervi Sourdel. Posts video.

Item: ISIS beheads Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, Posts videos.

Item: UN:  ISIS beheading children, crucifying children, burying them alive.

Item: ISIS burns Jordanian pilot alive, Posts video.

Item: ISIS sells Yazidi girls into sex slavery.  “Sold me from one man to another.”

Had enough?  These aren’t half the notorious items that could be listed as authenticated examples of ISIS barbarity that have occurred since July 2014.  And the purpose of posting videos is for recruitment.  Between June 2014, and February 2015, ISIS apparently gathered a further 20,000 “fighters.”

There is an evil afoot in the Middle East the like of which the world has not seen since World War II.  It does not matter a whit for the sake of what religion these acts are being done.  They are objectively evil.

What should Canada do about it?  What can Canada do about it?

Presently, the Canadian Army has about seventy advisors or trainers working with the Iraqi military on the ground in Iraq.  We also have a squadron of CF-18 fighters based in Kuwait that attack ground targets in ISIS controlled areas of Iraq.

The Canadian army troops have, in the course of their work, indicated targets on the ground to be struck from the air.  While doing their job, these Canadian soldiers came under fire from ISIS forces.  The skilled Canadian soldiers wiped out the threat with their own organic weapons, which technically means that they engaged in combat.  Some in Canada are saying that this amounts to “mission-creep,” since engaging in combat was not the purpose of sending soldiers to Iraq.

Canada’s mission in Iraq may need to creep a lot more in order that ISIS be annihilated.  ISIS is an evil the world does not need.  History has demonstrated time and again that the decisive answer to evil of this nature is to annihilate it.

Canada has a powerful moral position in the world.  Canada has never been an imperial power.  She has no capacity or desire to be an imperial power.  Yet Canada has been on the side of successful moral right in world affairs for as long as anyone can remember.  Canada fought the Nazis in World War II, fought to save South Korea in the 1950s, stayed out of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, invented modern UN peacekeeping and participated in numerous UN peacekeeping missions, as part of NATO defended Western Europe from the Soviet Union.  A Canadian travelling abroad sooner or later becomes aware of the high regard in which Canada is held in the world.  Only bad guys dislike us.

If Canada makes the world aware that she is so moved by ISIS savagery that she is willing to take risks and put a significant effort into ending it, that act itself would be a moral blow against ISIS.  A country with an impeccable record of making moral decisions would not be standing aside and remain aloof in a matter of no direct interest to it.  Canada would be making a serious moral statement to the world concerning the ISIS movement.

The next question would be: to what extend should Canada become involved?

The reason ISIS has survived up to this point at all is that it is remote from any serious ground military force, except that of Turkey.  For its own reasons, Turkey has stood aloof.  ISIS controlled territory consists of a road net in Syria and northern Iraq that includes several major population centers, and is held by only 30,000 men, most of whom are foreign.  Their standard of training is low, and their military staff and logistics system could not withstand a mobile battle against so much as a mechanized brigade group.  ISIS has no air defense to speak of.  Engaging ISIS on the ground would be like pricking a balloon.

The Iraqi military, however, is thoroughly corrupt; and the Jordanian army is not equipped to project power far beyond Jordan’s borders.  The United States has announced that the Iraqi army is going to attack Mosul in ISIS controlled Iraq some time this spring.  Corseting that Iraqi effort and enabling Jordan logistically are the obvious places in which a middle power like Canada can maximize its diplomatic and military effort to rid the world of ISIS savagery.

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