Breathe

OK, so it's nearly a month since I wrote anything. Not surprising really; it was a given that I was gonna have a month or two of being very busy. Working weekends, delivering projects, etc... On top of that, buying a house.
Now kicking off the next weeks is also the World Cup, and I'm writing a couple of project outlines that are basically strategy documents for my work.
All sounds too fucking serious, too much like I've been co-opted :-)

Meanwhile... truth of some of the massacres in Iraq is starting to come to light, the Cold War with Iran continues to warm on us like a frog in a warming pan of water, the North Atlantic Hurricane Season kicked off yesterday (and yes, New Orleans is still a deserted disaster zone, though my money's on Tampa getting the big hit this year).
And on Climate Change, one of the most famous forecasters, Bill Gray, has come out saying that it's a hoax. He knows more than these number crunchers he says. "Few people know what I know. I've been in the tropics, I've flown in airplanes into storms." But the person who's taking his role as the most famous Hurricane commentator these days is Jeff Masters, who has flown Hurricane Hunter missions and is perhaps more to the side you'd expect froma site consciously called the 'Weather Underground'.
There's nonsense in the article, as you'd expect from any half-assed journalist interviewing some cranky old fucker. (And why are hurricane forecasts issued from Colorado of all places anyway?) ""It was a Category 3 hurricane," Smith says of Katrina. Not the Cat 5, at landfall, you keep hearing about." Well, nobody has ever said it was a Cat 5 at landfall. Not even in the media. Irrelevant point scoring off non-existent targets is the surest sign of the right-wing impotence theory. It's like the Creationsists going on about how "scientists are unable to explain the development of the eye". (FYI - Darwin himself was stumped by the eye, but was still confident that it was explicable by evoultuionary theory. These days it fits perfectly well within standard theory.)
The more I read of the article though, the more obvious it is that Gray's - well, basically bonkers. Your run-of-the-mill neo-con nutjob, perhaps, like a Keith Joseph or Alexander Haig,
but a few sandwiches short of a picnic nonetheless.
Here's a bit that gets progressively - but rapidly - madder...

"Smith takes an abrupt detour into the issue of endangered species. The solution is to let the private sector handle it. They should be privatized, like pets or livestock. Dogs, cats, chickens, pigs: These creatures won't ever go extinct.
I want to make sure I understand what he is saying, so I begin to ask a question: "For endangered species, people should --"
"-- own them," Smith says.
But isn't there a difference between animals that live in zoos and animals that live in the wild?
"Yes and no," Smith says. " 'Zoo' is a pejorative term that PETA has turned into an animal slavery community. A zoo is nothing more than an elaborate ark."
What's unnatural, Smith says, is wilderness. The so-called wilderness of early America used to be inhabited by Indians, and they changed their environment. "They burned down trees, they burned forests, they ran buffaloes over cliffs. They were not dancing with wolves," he says. "Wilderness is the least natural part of this planet."

Isn't that a wonderful final phrase? "Wilderness is the least natural part of this planet." This is right out of the Black-is-White school of thought.
Then the journalist got the quote that had him dreaming of Pullitzer: "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews."
It's a good article to get an idea of the crap involved in the debate. There's an awful lot of poor science - and I'm just an old-fashioned amateur, not a professional. But I recognise that there are alot of nuances in the whole Climate Change scenario(s). Essentially we are observing phenomena (climate warming, chemical composition of the atmosphere, species distribution, event intensity) without any control experiment. We have nothing to compare this to. Without the control, we can only make our best assumption of what is happening. In this assumption, I'd rather err on the side of caution than the side of neo-cons.