Quotulatiousness

January 24, 2010

The only surprise about this is that they’re admitting it

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:41

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

It was unverified, but so important that they couldn’t hold back? It would be funny, if trillions of dollars were not being forcibly redirected in useless, futile “green” directions, and the lives of billions of people may be negatively impacted by government and UN mandates on unproven technologies to curb global warming.

January 22, 2010

British law enforcement moves on bomb detector scam

Filed under: Britain, Law, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:03

Well, it’s nice to see that sometimes the British government can move quickly on something. As reported on the BBC program Newsnight, a bogus bomb detector has been selling briskly in Iraq (link here). The lead scammer has been arrested today:

The managing director of a British company that has been selling bomb-detecting equipment to security forces in Iraq was arrested on suspicion of fraud today.

At the same time, the British government announced that it was imposing a ban on the export of the ADE-651 detectors because it was concerned they could put the lives of British forces or other friendly forces at risk.

The government promised to help investigate the multimillion-pound deal between the company, ATSC, and the security forces in Iraq.

Iraq has invested more than £50m in buying the devices and training people to use them. Police and military personnel have used them to search vehicles and pedestrians for explosives. But concerns over their effectiveness — and fears they could put lives at risk — have been raised.

Avon and Somerset police officers arrested Jim McCormick, 53, on suspicion of fraud by misrepresentation. A spokesman said: “We are conducting a criminal investigation and, as part of that, a 53-year-old man has been arrested.

There should be a special hell for this scam artist

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

A report from the BBC on a “bomb detection device” widely sold in the Middle East, which does nothing at all:

A BBC Newsnight investigation has found that a so-called “bomb detector”, thousands of which have been sold to Iraq, cannot possibly work.

Leading explosives expert Sidney Alford told Newsnight the sale of the ADE-651 was “absolutely immoral”.

“This type of equipment does not work,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind betting that lives have been lost as a consequence.”

Questions have been raised over the ADE-651, following three recent co-ordinated waves of bombings in Baghdad.

It sounds like the ADE-651 is a combination of tech-look crap and new age marketing crap:

Iraq has bought thousands of the detectors for a total of $85m (£52m).

The device is sold by Jim McCormick, based at offices in rural Somerset, UK.

The ADE-651 detector has never been shown to work in a scientific test.

There are no batteries and it consists of a swivelling aerial mounted to a hinge on a hand-grip. Critics have likened it to a glorified dowsing rod.

And if that’s not enough whiff of flim-flam for you, how about this claim?

The training manual for the device says it can even, with the right card, detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills.

Update: The Guardian reports that the managing director of the firm has been arrested today.

December 16, 2009

How do you deal with unwanted automated calls?

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:20

The phone rang a minute ago, with the long-distance ring. When I picked it up, I got a pre-recorded message starting with “This is an important message about your credit card account. We have attempted to contact you . . .” I’m sure most of you in the GTA get similar calls on a regular basis.

I just hung up, but I wonder if there’s a better way of dealing with this sort of harassment (it’s never a company you already have dealings with). If I just left the phone off the hook and let the recorded message play out, would I tie up more of their resources? Might I even get a human waiting on the other end after I didn’t hang up on the automated portion of the call?

Is the petty revenge (however theoretical it might be) worthwhile? After all, they used misleading information (“my” credit card) to try to get my attention. Is it fair play to reverse the gambit and pretend they’ve got a chance of getting my business?

December 3, 2009

The hidden damage from Climategate

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Daniel Henninger correctly identifies the worst result of Climategate . . . not the still-ongoing debate about AGW, but the damage to science as a whole due to the unethical, unscientific, and (in some cases) illegal activities of the CRU:

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because “science” said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

The would-be green tyrants will recover from Climategate, but the rest of the scientific community will suffer for their sins. Malpractice and deliberate deceit in one area will continue to taint genuine scientists for years to come.

November 30, 2009

CRU’s fall from Mount Olympus

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

Andrew Orlowski finds the “shocked, shocked!” reactions to the Climate Research Unit’s systematic perversion of the scientific process to be a bit overdone:

Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged. You mean, it is? Really?

The archive — a carefully curated 160MB collection of source code, emails and other documents from the internal network of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia — provides grim confirmation for critics of climate science. But it also raises far more troubling questions.

Perhaps the real scandal is the dependence of media and politicians on their academics’ work — an ask-no-questions approach that saw them surrender much of their power, and ultimately authority. This doesn’t absolve the CRU crew of the charges, but might put it into a better context.

[. . .]

The allegations over the past week are fourfold: that climate scientists controlled the publishing process to discredit opposing views and further their own theory; they manipulated data to make recent temperature trends look anomalous; they withheld and destroyed data they should have released as good scientific practice, and they were generally beastly about people who criticised their work. (You’ll note that one of these is far less serious than the others.)

But why should this be a surprise?

Well, it’s quite understandable that the folks who’ve been pointing out the Emperor’s lack of clothing for the last few years are indulging in a fair bit of Schadenfreude . . . but it’s disturbing that the mainstream media are still trying to avoid discussing the issue as much as possible. This is close to a junk-science-based coup d’etat which would have had vast impact on the lives of most of the western world, and the media are still wandering away from the scene of the crime, saying, essentially “there’s nothing to see here, move along”.

November 27, 2009

QotD: Green totalitarianism

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:43

In other words, despite the fact that science (or history) tells us that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, thus destroying the basis of the AGW myth that we are living through an unprecedented warming of the climate caused by carbon dioxide arising from industrialisation, it cannot be true — because the Hadley CRU Director’s ‘gut’ tells him so.

All the manipulation, distortion and suppression revealed by these emails took place because it would seem these scientists knew their belief was not only correct but unchallengeable; and so when faced with evidence that showed it was false, they tried every which way to make the data fit the prior agenda. And those who questioned that agenda themselves had to be airbrushed out of the record, because to question it was simply impossible. Only AGW zealots get to decide, apparently, what science is. Truth is what fits their ideological agenda. Anything else is to be expunged.

Which is the more terrifying and devastating: if people are bent and deliberately try to deceive others, or if they are so much in thrall to an ideology that they genuinely have lost the power to think objectively and rationally?

I think that the terrible history of mankind provides the answer to that question. Nixon was a crook. But what we are dealing with here is the totalitarian personality. One thing is now absolutely clear for all to see about the anthropogenic global warming scam: science this is not.

Melanie Phillips, “Green Totalitarianism”, Spectator blog, 2009-11-23

October 15, 2009

The Billionaire’s vinegar-scented legal decision

Filed under: Britain, Law, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Following up on an item posted a couple of months ago (“The Billionaire’s Vinegar-scented lawsuit“), Michael Broadbent wins his lawsuit against the publisher of The Billionaire’s Vinegar:

This week, the man who authenticated the Lafite and presided over its auction won an apology and damages from the publisher Random House over a bestselling book, which, he argued, had suggested he had sold the wine knowing its provenance to be suspect. Michael Broadbent has retired as the senior director of Christie’s wine department but remains, according to Adam Lechmere, editor of decanter.com, “among the top three most respected wine critics in the world”.

Broadbent described the ruling as a “great relief”, adding that he planned to celebrate with a magnum of Mouton 1990 over dinner at his club.

The settlement relates to a book called The Billionaire’s Vinegar by American journalist Benjamin Wallace, which outlines the now notorious case of “the Jefferson bottles” – and which Random House, according to Broadbent’s lawyer, Sarah Webb, must now remove from bookshop shelves in Britain.

August 20, 2009

The Billionaire’s Vinegar-scented lawsuit

Filed under: Law, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:14

Mike Steinberger discusses the recent lawsuit launched by Michael Broadbent against the publishers of Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar:

Broadbent, the legendary former head of Christie’s wine department, alleges that Wallace defamed him in his gripping whodunit about the so-called Thomas Jefferson bottles — a trove of wines initially said to have belonged to the oenophilic Virginian but now almost universally believed to have been fakes. Three of the bottles, all Bordeaux, were auctioned off by Broadbent in the 1980s, and of the many wine luminaries caught up in this saga, his reputation has suffered the most damage. Broadbent contends that he was falsely depicted in the book as being complicit in a crime. But his suit makes no claims one way or another regarding the authenticity of the wines that he sold, which can be taken as an acknowledgment that the evidence is not in his favor. Broadbent can’t undo the fact that he was at the center of what now appears to have been the greatest wine hoax ever perpetrated. By pursuing legal redress, he is simply making it harder for a more considered judgment of his actions to emerge.

[. . .]

As Wallace meticulously documents, Broadbent repeatedly and insistently vouched for Rodenstock and the Jefferson bottles. He was dismissive of the researcher at Monticello who cast doubt on the authenticity of the wines and of questions raised in the press. In addition to doing business with Rodenstock, Broadbent benefited from his largesse. Rodenstock was famous in wine circles for the marathon tastings that he held, multi-day extravaganzas that typically featured wines back to the 18th century. Broadbent attended these bacchanals, served as the authority-in-residence during them, and came away with tasting notes for many old and exceedingly rare wines. If, as now seems undeniable, Rodenstock was a con artist who trafficked in counterfeit wines, those tasting notes are worthless.

But contrary to what Broadbent is claiming in his lawsuit, The Billionaire’s Vinegar does not suggest that he was a witting accomplice to Rodenstock. Rather, the portrait that emerges is of a man who let his hopes and competitive zeal cloud his judgment.

I’ve read Wallace’s book — which I heartily recommend — and I think, based on the information presented, that Broadbent was not complicit in the apparent fraud itself, although he certainly took full advantage of the opportunity (and thereby reap the fame to go along with being associated with the “discoveries”).

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