Piers Akerman, and a little cherry picking will fix what ails ya ...

Oh the horror, the horror, the shock and the consternation.

It's almost as if Chairman Rudd knew exactly the right buttons to press, and set out to shock, dismay and consternate Akker Dakker.

Yet what's Akker Dakker done to deserve it, as he sits sighing, his keyboard gently weeping?

You see, according to Akker Dakker, the Ruddster has appointed Tim Flannery to a new gig, and it's more than a mortal can bear, as Piers Akerman explains in Flim-flannery to run new bureaucracy:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has named mammal palaeontologist Tim Flannery as the head of the federal government’s new bureaucracy, the Coasts and Climate Change Council.

Professor Flannery, an alarmist author, is best-known for his widely publicised doom-laden predictions about the fate of Australia’s coastal cities.

They've put an hysterical mammal palaeontologist in charge of the beaches! Head for the hills!

Naturally Akker Dakker goes through all of Flannery's broken predictions, and sadly I didn't have time or the inclination to run through them all, but then I came to these couple of succulent references:

Even Flannery conceded in an interview with the ABC’s Lateline last November that the world “hadn’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend” and “the computer modelling and the real world data disagree”.

Well Akker Dakker is of course an expert in such matters, and well known for his recent exemplary quotation-based work, as outlined by vicious set-up merchants in Fabricated quote used to discredit climate scientist, and his stout-hearted defence of his citation techniques in Malicious bullets fired by the global warmists' guns.

So I scurried off to Lateline and to the transcript of Tim Flannery discusses hacked climate emails, as broadcast on the 23rd November 2009.

Let's compare the quotes:

Akker Dakker: “hadn’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend”

Lateline: ... In the last few years, were (sic) there hasn't been a continuation of that warming trend, we don't understand all of the factors that create earth's climate, so there are some things we don't understand, that's what the scientists were email about (sic), you know, we don't understand the way the whole system works, and we have to find out.

Well let's not be pedantic. What's a 'hadn't' compared to a 'hasn't' between chums, though perhaps not to Mr. Chips, or the need to insert 'warming' in brackets, when it's already in the snippet, especially given the ABC transcriber's inability to transcribe.

But what a pity Akker Dakker didn't feel the need to continue and explain the quote in context, as Flannery went on to say:

... These people work with models, computer modelling, when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem, that's when science gets engaged. What Kevin Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, is saying is, "We have to get on our horses and find out what we don't know about the system, we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn't reflect it". And that's the way science progresses, we can't pretend to have perfect knowledge, we don't. We have to go forward and formulate policy on the basis of what we know now.

Yep, that's how Akker Dakker arrives at:

“the computer modelling and the real world data disagree”.

It's called cherry picking, and it used to be a much loved technique for film distributors, and still is, though Sony has stopped writing its own reviews for intertubes publications, in order to generate solid, useful adjectives for quoting on posters, or so I'm told.

Instead if a vile reviewer writes "this is the most mind boggling pile of crap", it's perfectly fair to put on your poster, "Mind boggling", raves Dorothy Parker on loon pond. And so forth and so on. It's fun to do - which word would you chose from "most amazing pile of tosh"?

Indeed there are masters of the art everywhere - I'm reminded of this funny anecdote, as outlined here in Cherry-Picking Quotes:

I was reading The Times over the weekend and saw a two-page ad for the Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line,” one of my favorite shows. I was surprised, though, to see this quote from The Times’s own Ben Brantley:

“What occurs shortly after 8 p.m. at the Schoenfeld Theatre feels so fresh that you stop to catch your breath.”

That’s funny, I thought; I distinctly remember Mr. Brantley giving the revival a not-so-hot review.

So I looked it up online. Sure enough, Mr. Brantley’s actual review goes like this:

“What occurs shortly after 8 p.m. at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, where the otherwise pedestrian new revival of ‘A Chorus Line’ opened last night, is a sort of time bending that Einstein would have trouble explaining. Light, music and a mass of bodies in motion combine to allow you to exist both in 1975, when this musical was first staged, and 2006. This is what ‘A Chorus Line’ was when I saw it 31 years ago, and yet it feels so fresh that you stop to catch your breath…

“Watching the show, directed by Bob Avian, is like drinking from a pitcher of draft beer: You never repeat the tang or sting of that first swig.” And the review ends: “In providing us with an archivally and anatomically correct reproduction of a landmark show, its creators neglected to restore its central nervous system and, most important, its throbbing heart.”

So the producers of “A Chorus Line” not only implied that Ben Brantley gave the show a rave, they actually chopped up his opening paragraph to form a whole new sentence that never existed. Aren’t they legally obligated to use an ellipsis (…) to show where they’ve chopped out text?

Ellipsis? Egad sir, that's a little pedantic for Akker Dakker.

Here's what Flannery had to say about warming in the very same interview:

We had a huge cooling event in Sydney between yesterday and today. Time scales are important. If you take too short a time scale you won't get a climate signal, you get a regional weather signal or whatever else. The scales that the climate scientists use to look at the overall trend is century long, and on that trend we are still warming, sure for the last few years we have gone through a slight cooling trend, we saw it in the 1940s the same sort of thing, but that does not negate the overall warming trend.

Say and think what you will about Flannery. I'd just note, perhaps on a paleontological level, that leopards don't change their spots, tigers their stripes, or Akker Dakker his form.

My astonishing, patented, shocking, revelatory, irresistible and stunning explanation? The zombies have taken over Broadway, and there are gremlins in the works at News Corp.

Oh okay, ya got me, that's just so gentlemen readers can get excited about zombies clutching an inert woman in what I'm assured was the most exciting, terrifying and nail biting movie of 1945. And if you believe that, you'll believe Akker Dakker wielding quotation marks ...