Center of Attention
Mar 25th, 2007 | 12 responses
A round up of recent reporting and commentary by a few centrist, moderate, and independent bloggers.
At Munaeem’s Blog, there’s a wonderful post on the complexity of Islam. Money excerpt …
… can one talk of a single homogeneous Islamic experience? After all, the experience of Damascus under the Umayyads was very different from the experience of Abbasid Baghdad, while both were very different from the historical experience of Andalusia, where a unique bonding between Muslims and Jews produced such great thinkers as the Muslim Ibn Rushd [Averoess] and the Jewish Ibn Maymoun [Maimonides].
Andrew Sullivan’s quote for the day (from yesterday) is worth a read, as is his unrelated pointer to a WaPo article on the environmental influence of Paris (the city, not the Hilton).
Jon Swift is known, loved, and in some corners, despised for his snarky parodies. (I’m in the “love” camp.) Regardless of what you think of his writing, Jon entirely outdoes himself yesterday in a post on “Sanjaya Malakar, the 17-year-old Indian-American contestant with the face of an angel and the voice of…something else.” Money excerpt …
… this is not a small-town talent show we are talking about, it is American Idol, the number one show in the country, and increasingly people around the world are asking themselves, What is wrong with American voters? Have they gone completely insane to vote for someone who is clearly so incompetent and dim-witted and has gotten as far as he has on little more than charm and luck?
Meanwhile, Brad DeLong continues building the case for impeachment … and Libby Spencer takes a rather embarassing (for Peggy Noonan) “trip down memory lane.”
At Stubborn Facts, Simon — who claims he is “not a global warming skeptic” — asks “a serious question” of global warming zealots, while TMV assistant editor Michael Stickings (writing at The Reaction) borrows a lyric from Pink Floyd to suggest (indirectly) that questions like Simon’s have no place in U.S. schools.
The Angry Independent suspsects the U.S. is (and has motive to) sabatoge regional negotiations with North Korea.
And finally, at The Glittering Eye, Dave Schuler looks at this week’s story on the “seizing of 15 British sailors by the Iranians.”
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12 Responses to “Center of Attention”
I haven’t gone and read the Jon Swift article yet but the first thing that popped into my mind was “And the 2004 Presidential election didn’t tell you anything? The parallel is there.”.
Jim, you do realize that Jon writes satire, right? That he’s making fun of the far right?
Junk like that post is one reason I ignore Stubborn Facts in spite of Pat’s claims to not be a “winger”. The simple and stubborn fact is that there is no grand law that says that natural cycles must resemble ones caused by man. After all, the reason for the increased CO2 is different.
I know what Jon writes and what can I say? I was up way too late last night.
Jim,
Proponents of the anthropogenic global warming theory are saying that increased CO2 is what is driving the warming trend, and they are USING the historical record of natural cycles as the basis of proof of that. This is the claim that Gore made in his film, which Simon is questioning. Gore shows a graph of the ice core records, and he makes a snarky remark about how obvious the correlation between CO2 levels and temperature are. But the trouble is, although the graphs do overlay pretty nicely, when you blow it up enough to see which came first, it is always the warming that precedes the CO2. So not only do you not have proof of causality, it’s almost in reverse so that you could make a case for CO2 in the natural cycle rising because of the increased temperatures, not vice versa (of course another possibility is that CO2 increases are one cause among many, or that there might be a cyclical feedback effect- temp rises and then CO2 rises and then that feeds more temp rise, etc-but that’s not what Gore and the ‘consensus’ climatologists are saying.)
So, I’m wondering, do you have any actual rebuttal to Simon’s argument, or is it just going to be that the question itself proves that the guys at Stubborn Facts are “wingers” (in other words, do you have anything other than ad hominen attacks?)
CS I didn’t know you were also an atmospheric scientist. Please explain your analysis or supply a link.
CS,
It does work both ways. I refer you to this article on realclimate that points out that the overall warming cycle was one of 5000 years and the lag is only 800 years and that the lag doesn’t inherently disprove that the balance of the warming trend was contributed to by CO2 increases. The realclimate article also provides a link to a peer reviewed paper that goes into further detail. Is it really so difficult to comprehend that other forces can start a trend and the increase in CO2 will continue it? I’ve linked to this site which in turn contains a treasure trove of links to other honest climate science web sites multiple times. Somehow the conservatives never seem to learn anything from it, dismissing completely any actual climatologists who disagree with them. One of them even dismissed them by calling the climatologists who are the founders of realclimate.org a bunch of socialists.
As far as referring to Stubborn Facts as a winger site please note that every post every made their except the comments is that of the deniers’ position. It’s all Tully ever does wherever he posts on this issue. However loudly Pat may try to deny it his site is rather predictable in the conservative viewpoints it will take.
JS – The second graph on the EPA site is more telling. It uses multiple data to show a warming trend over a few hundred years, not 400K years. Also, the graph that Simon refers to shows a HUGE spike in CO2 concentration, yet he completely ignores this.
As far as referring to Stubborn Facts as a winger site please note that every post every made their except the comments is that of the deniers’ position. It’s all Tully ever does wherever he posts on this issue. However loudly Pat may try to deny it his site is rather predictable in the conservative viewpoints it will take.
I noticed that too, Jim S. Its basically talking points with explanations attached -
Who needs science, when my party can tell me everything I need to know, said the ostrich.
I saw an interesting documentary about the fake science industry. There are companies producing scientific looking data to discredit real science, and, apparently the oil industry are big customers. The toabacco industry was another good customer.
But, basically you can hire them to muddy the waters on anything you want; they’re not choosy.
That’s true, Doma- the politics of affirmation is moving into the pseudo-scientific world, where a false reality can be created for a price. Remember recently AEI’s offer to pay scientists $10,000 to come up with research that counters global warming?
Maybe it is a knee-jerk lefty position, but I do believe that the oil companies have too much influence over our energy policy (they wrote it) ,our environmental policy, our elections (their Dream Team is in office now!) our contracting, and our foreign policy.
No, Jim, that possibility isn’t hard to understand at all (that’s why I already mentioned it) but for one thing, it’s not what Gore said (he was making the case that the CO2 is the main driver), and for another, I still haven’t seen any proof that DECREASING levels of CO2 have ever preceded a cooling trend so unless there is some evidence of that, how are we to conclude that if we decrease the levels now it would lead to a reduction in temperatures? That is what Simon is asking in his post, and no one seems willing to answer it. I will try to look around the realclimate.org site some more but so far I haven’t seen this point addressed.
Kim,
I don’t think that the oil companies should write our energy policy but I’m becoming more cynical about people who profit from carbon offsets writing policy as well (eg, Al Gore). Are you aware that he buys offsets from his own company? Isn’t that a bit of a conflict of interest?
Rudi,
No, I’m not an atmospheric scientist, are you? Aren’t we all just people who want to understand the situation? The links to the information I stated, BTW, were in Simon’s post that was linked to here.