Wednesday, December 11, 2013

A darker shade of bile ...

(Above: another day in Murdoch la la land)

Over the years the pond has seen many reasons for rape trotted out by the shock jocks and the crony commentariat.

Usually it involves the woman - what she was wearing, where she walked, how she walked, even how she talked, what make up she had on, how she failed to take due care and exercise an appropriate level of paranoia - and never you mind the behaviour of the man.

But surely Miranda the Devine reaches an astonishing new level of insight in today's splash.

Oh wait, the pond realises that the average male reader might have missed the topic under discussion.

Let's remove those unsightly distracting Daily Terror cheerleaders from the shot, and focus in on the detail:


Now it's environmentally sensitive street lighting?

Read on, link to the piece, attempt a sensible, rational discussion? You must be joking, the pond would rather go out on the lawn and eat a little grass to prevent the vomiting ...

Can paranoia about the environment and sensitivity to the environment hit any deeper lows?

Barking mad, but at least the Devine has provided the perfect excuse for any roaming rapist:

"But, muh lud, it was the environmentally sensitive street lighting what made me done it."

Please no jokes about the need for environmentally insensitive lighting in home, street, village and city - rape isn't a matter for joking - but please do study where an obsessive compulsive desire to take an ideological stance on everything can permit a member of the crony commentariat to mistake lighting of the streets for the need to light a night game of football ...

And if that wasn't enough, it's a double-barrelled, double-decker day of Devine at the Daily Terror:


Well at least it provides rich fodder for a column down the track deploring the evil ways of environmentally sensitive secularists intent on trashing the real meaning of Xmas ...

And yet there's probably a few lost souls at the Daily Terror wondering why their circulation is falling ...

Meanwhile, speaking of being off on another planet, here's a snippet the Bolter ran yesterday, on the principle that an Xmas stocking isn't much use unless it's full of crappy compound chocolate and a few boiled hard lollies:


The funny thing? Well the link takes you to Cold Dis-comfort: Antarctica Set Record of -135.8, where inter alia, you could read:

Just because one spot on Earth has set records for cold that has little to do with global warming because it is one spot in one place, said Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and NASA's former chief scientist. Both Abdalati, who wasn't part of the measurement team, and Scambos said this is likely an unusual random reading in a place that hasn't been measured much before and could have been colder or hotter in the past and we wouldn't know. 
 "It does speak to the range of conditions on this Earth, some of which we haven't been able to observe," Abdalati said.

So what is the Bolter on about?

Well absolutely nothing meaningful, in the usual Bolter way.

The story just gives him an excuse to take a jab at "warmists" and it doesn't matter to the Bolter that it's a completely ineffectual, meaningless, puff pastry jab.

Nor does he care that the jab proves that - for the squillionth time - the Bolter willingly confuses scientific observations with ideology.

Why should "warmists" fear a little cold?

The findings were presented at a press conference at the AGU Fall Meeting (here) and naturally they were picked up and circulated around the globe in a trice - call it the Guinness Book of Records mindset that is deeply established in the tabloid mind.

Naturally NASA was pleased - The Coldest Place in the World - because it was good publicity for its Landsat 8, recently launched.

Of course NASA is full of climate scientists who accept the current basic theories of climate science:

"With Landsat 8, we expect to see more accurate and more detailed maps of the landscape than we've ever been able to see," said James Irons, the mission's project scientist at Goddard. "If change is occurring, I think we'll be able to detect it earlier and track it." 
Researchers also are eager to see what new results come out of Landsat 8, both from icy plateaus and Earth's warmer regions. 
"What we've got orbiting Earth right now is a very accurate and consistent sensor that can tell us all kinds of things about how the land surface of Earth is changing, how climate change is impacting the surface of Earth, the oceans of Earth, and the icy areas of Earth," Scambos said. "Finding the coldest areas on Earth is just the beginning of the discoveries we're going to be able to make with Landsat 8."

Uh huh. Scientists going about the business of observing, and let the data fall how it may.

Of course on any other day of the climate science week, you can find the Bolter patiently explaining how you simply can't trust the satellites, or their data ... at least when he's simply not misusing and abusing satellite data himself (Andrew Bolt dumb-arse)

It seems it's simply beyond him to note that perhaps climate extremes of any kind might be related to observable trends in the climate ... because in the end the theory is talking about a trend where a minor upward variation turns out to have remarkable implications ...

So perhaps we could re-phrase his intro:

It's not science, it's just another stupid Bolter posting with a link, but what would the denialists say if they knew the Bolter had accepted the satellite record of unfolding climate change in action, as recorded and expounded by devoted NASA scientists? 

Or some such thing.

Strangely, for a denialist, the Bolter took the story on face value. A most unseemly thing for a denialist, when you can look around and find denialism ready and anxious for a run.

You see the Ruskis are already indignant. The previous Antarctic record belonged to the then Soviet Vostok station in 1983, as you can read in Minus credibility? Antarctic record low temperature.

That story shows how the Bolter should have responded, which is to deny everything, as denialists do, maintain the rage, insist on paranoia, treachery and suspicion, and denounce the satellites:

“It is incorrect to declare a temperature record based on satellite data,” Martyanov said, explaining that AVHRR and MODIS are measuring the so-called ‘luminance temperature’, which does not fully correlate with true meteorological conditions and must be confirmed by observations on the ground. “Air temperature is measured according to standards, at the height of 2 meters above the ground, like they do at meteorological observing stations, therefore recognizing a temperature measured by remote sensing is unrealistic,” Martyanov said.
Still, there is a solid chance to beat the 30-year-old record, believes Russian scientist, and it could be done by Chinese scientists at Kunlun stationed opened in 2009. 
 “It is uninhabited in winter time, but if they put a [automatic] meteorological station there – they can register a temperatures lower than at Vostok station,” Vyacheslav Martyanovtold RIA Novosti.

Yep, it's a cold war 'coldest temperature in the world record' space race ...

Naturally the Bolter achieved his aim with his trolling ... the usual comments about the Typical Green Warmie zealot, and so on and so forth, right down there with Miranda the Devine blaming rape on environmentally sensitive lighting ...

All the pair prove is that these days it's completely impossible to mention the environment or climate science in the Murdoch tabloid rags without setting off a bout of foam-flecked rage and fury, replete with some sly innuendo about the warmists and idle chatter about greenies...

The big worry is that Sydney's dim lighting will fade even more, thanks to Lord Mayor Clover Moore's jihad against "carbon pollution". 
Street lights are council's biggest single contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and our Lord Mayor is an ardent greenie. To cut emissions she has started replacing traditional street bulbs with low energy LED (light-emitting diode) lights.

Jihad? Greenies? Of course the pond couldn't resist reading the barking mad Devine, so shameless, so unremittingly attracted to the gutter that she'd use a rape as an excuse to attack street lighting ...

Her piece, thankfully behind the paywall, is entitled A darker shade of green.

Could the pond suggest to the NZ subbies that A Darker shade of paranoid bile would have better reflected the tone of the piece ...

Remember all the ranting and the moaning and the raging at the dying of the light when tungsten lighting was phased out of the light bulb market?


Sure the world moved on, but stuck inside the pond's mind like a cracked record was Tim Bleagh sounding really stupid.

And now we have to cop this sort of nonsense:

More secret enviro-meddling will come from a body called the National Strategy on Energy Efficiency which has been working since 2011 on a plan to "significantly improve street lighting energy efficiency by 2020". We can assume "improve" is meant in the Orwellian sense. 
Electric light has been the wellspring of human progress over the last century, protecting us from the creatures of the night. Now the Luddites of the green movement want to send us back to the dark ages.

Barking mad. Electric lighting as the way to stop rapists? Try telling that to a woman walking the main drag in Brunswick, in a street laden with lighting and with store security cameras ...

Does it get any more offensive than this?

But there is an upside. At least the pond was distracted by all the other noises emanating from the pre-school down the road.

Remind us Mr. Pope, and remember to get your Popery here.


Watch out for that toaster! Quick, someone get hold of the wiki on toasters ...

7 comments:

  1. DP - doubtless you have seen this.

    "MURDOCH IS EVIL" hidden in last week's Sunday Tele's childrens puzzle.

    http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/10/murdoch-is-evil-the-message-hidden-in-a-sunday-telegraph-childrens-puzzle



    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Anon, what a hoot. We even got a hard copy while off at the Opera House watching Vilde Frang do a very spikey Britten Violin Concerto, ably abetted by conductor James Gaffigan

      Delete
  2. Dorothy, did you see the news from the SMH Editors last night (via twitter, see @bencubby stream) that the Prattling Polonius is "moving on" from Fairfax and his replacement from 2014 will be .... Peter Reith. My first thought -- after thinking fairfax was apparentyly happy to sleepwalk into oblivion rather than fight it even a little bit - was to think of WWLPS (What Would Loon Pond Say) ....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Amanda, the pond had a fainting fit for a moment but thank the long absent lord Polonius will now prattle amongst the reptiles at the lizard Oz. And we can just ignore Peter Reith, the way we've ignored him at The Drum. Though perhaps now they might have to do something about The Drum:

      http://mumbrella.com.au/gerard-henderson-moves-column-sydney-morning-herald-australian-195796

      And so we say, Hendo Lives, or Prattling "Stegosaurus" Polonius can happily roam wild and free amongst his own reptilian kind ...

      Delete
  3. Hopefully these Murdoch louts and thugs will move into oblivion very soon and their leader drops of his perch the evil bastard does not deserve the air of this planet.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Really, DP, all you've done is draw the obvious line from La Devine's ranting to the Jill Meagher tragedy. What a vacuous, nasty piece of work she is.

    ReplyDelete

Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.