S&S Gather Winners

My favorite The Way Life Should Be, a Maine crime novel has won the Gather.com First Chapters contest and a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster. Fire Bell in the Night, a historical thriller I'm told, set in the antebellum slavery era South, came in second. Both were awarded contracts, which to my knowledge wasn't in the fine print. Well done. I have personal details I'm putting in the vault along with miss snark's indentity.

15 Answers to Climate Sceptic BS

Sciam blog

Yeah, according to a fellow competitor at the Gather writing contest, Scientific American has lost credibility in recent years. Right. With wingers who know nothing. There are always casualties when wielding truth.

Burr

FALLEN FOUNDER:The Life of Aaron Burr. Burr was 19 when he showed up at Colburn's Shipyard in 1775. He enjoyed benefits of legacy and got to dine and sleep inside in feather beds like some of the officers and Arnold himself, at our house, and at Howard's in Augusta. The regular infantry slept out in the rain.

Memorial Day

The 28-star flag found in the attic of Colburn House back in the 1950's.

Wall Street Dropouts

Odd as it is, my WSJ editor quasi-nemesis Jim Taranto allowed this to go through. Let freedom ring!


A Proud CSUN Grad
Mark A. York - Sunland, Calif.

Well, kudos for coming clean on that one. Can you imagine, though, a liberal getting a high-profile newspaper job with this kind of attitude and résumé? I can't. I did graduate from your school, Cal State Northridge. I was 52 years old. I had to sit in a multitude of general ed classes with freshmen as a senior to do it. I fought this for, well, decades before giving in.

Now this sort of Custer's last stand doesn't work out for most who try it. They get tossed to the curb for failing. It went well for you though. That's just luck and the right political litmus test for Heritage and WSJ. A sort of affirmative action for conservatives, eh?

Now you can go back to mocking science and other subjects you either failed or didn't bother to learn. That's how ignorance works. It's self-perpetuating. For some. There's always someone to blame instead of the guilty.

John Fund didn't graduate either. We don't need no stinkin education.

France Elects a Wingnut

This should make Texas happy but not so much the NY Times' foreign reporter Helene Cooper who tonight on Gwen Ifill's Washington Week cited new French president-elect Nicholas Sarkozy's reading of Hemingway as proof positive. That, and he rides horses. Oh so Bushian. Has anyone ever seen Bush on a horse? I haven't. But to my point, Hemingway was a liberal tracked by the FBI for his activities in Cuba against the Germans. It was the basis for Islands in the Stream. EH was anti-fascist in the Spanish Civil war, but to the ethnic, chuckling Cooper, it's obvious Hemingway is just as right wing as they come. Fact: He wasn't. This is bias.

"I believe there is a pressure on scientists to be conservative."

Writes NASA's James Hansen. "Papers are accepted for publication more readily if they do not push too far and are larded with caveats."

So again, the record shows the opposite of what wingnut sceptics say, which is they're hyping global warming to get funding. On the contrary, according to Hansen, who would be in a position to know, that's the way NOT to get funding. It's clear any scientific trail that leads to a place the oil companies don't want to go gets chastised. By this administration anyway. Was there ever any doubt of this? Not here.

Not Natural Variability

Cameron P. Wake, a climatologist at the Climate Change Research Center of the University of New Hampshire, said a 30-year period would include several cycles of multiyear effects like El Niño, with an underlying assumption that climate is stable and varies around a mean. Warming, on the other hand, “is not variability, it’s a long term trend,” Dr. Wake said. “I would say the U.S.D.A. doesn’t want to acknowledge there’s been change.”

That's the difference amateur critics can't make. They both don't want to, under some sort of skeptical critieria that doesn't meet standard scientific skeptic criteria, and don't know the difference.

Amplified at the Poles

My novel Warm Front features the Gwitch'in people of Arctic Village and Old Crow, Yukon, Canada. As a member says here, the changes due to global warming are here now.

Climate Denierama

Climate Denierama abounds this week and Dr. Michael Mann responds to the BS by wingnut CNN-sanctioned Glenn Beck, and left-wing whacko Alexander Cockburn. Cockburns and Coburn/Colburns are closely releated and I can attest to some in my own family so inclined, albeit conservatively political, and averse to scientific reasoning. Cockburn is evidence it can happen on both sides of this ideological spectrum.

RE Beck, his cast is the same dubious industry shills as Media Matters fleshes out here. It's pitiful to get a scientist at any level to lie for money. All the deniers are in this category.