Thursday
Aug192010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Useless fact
Number of uses of the words "conspiracy", "conspirator", etc in The Hockey Stick Illusion: 2
Number of uses of the words "conspiracy", "conspirator", etc in Bob Ward's article: 3
Reader Comments (5)
I am glad that you share my obsession with counting words on webpages, Bishop
I see a software project here...
bish -
at least u r getting some mentions in the MSM, which the McShane/Winey paper, the NOAA degraded satellites and Joe Bastardi castigation of Penn State are not.
besides, "conspiracy" is part and parcel of the MSM arsenal, and not only in the case of CAGW. how many falsehoods can u count in the following piece by a guy who gets paid to write rubbish?
Aug 18: San Francisco Chronicle: Mark Morford: Thank God global warming is a hoax
I am delighted to be reassured by the fringe right wing that the piles of dead bodies, millions of lost homes, and even the very sun itself are part of a vast conspiracy, a plot to form an evil one-world government, a lefty liberal charade even in places that don't understand or care what the hell a liberal is...
Because otherwise, wow, what sort of hell is this? Pakistan, Russia, China, Greenland, Niger and on and on it goes. Unprecedented heat waves, scorched crops, giant icebergs, savage droughts, dire emergencies, thousands dead here and 10,000 more over there and nothing like these events in the history of the world, ever...
Scientists are saying that all these severe weather patterns fit in exactly with what they've been predicting all along. Not only that, but they say it's increasingly likely that we've waited too long to change our behaviors, cut emissions, reduce consumption and other such liberal gibberish, and now it might be too late to do anything about it. Increasingly extreme, violent weather will now be the norm, and the devastation, disease and death will only increase. Good news! If I blink a few times while clicking the mouse, it all goes away...
Heck, even here in the eco-terrorist homeland of San Francisco, they say the change in ocean temperatures will soon mean Fog City will be entirely fog bound, edge to edge, nearly year round. But I repeat: It's not our fault. Seven billion rapacious, industrialized bipeds have the impact of a feather...
I mean, so what if giant icebergs four times the size of Manhattan are suddenly breaking off in Greenland? That's happening way, way up there. I'm overconsuming energy and blocking out inconvenient truths way, way down here. There is no cause/effect, no connection whatsoever, never mind that dark, nagging sense of self-wrought doom, deep in my bones. I know that's just a liberal lie, an implant, completely futile -- just like those failed climate talks in Copenhagen, and the soon-to-be-failed ones coming up shortly in Mexico. I mean, whew.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/08/18/notes081810.DTL
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous cherry-picking,
Or to take arms against a sea of misinformation,
And by opposing end them?
That is the question.
On counting words and opposing them with other words:
Bob Ward doesn’t seem to realise that the Hockey Stick Illusion was mostly written before Climategate. Warmists generally seem to have difficulty understanding terms like “before” and “after” - witness the contortions of Ammann in his Tardis revealed in “Caspar and the Jesus paper”, and their strange belief that fossil trees from the past contain the key to future temperatures.
I wonder whether the fault may not lie with the English language, which has one common adverb for the present (“now”) and another for the past and the future (“then”). Thus intelligent children speculating on the fate of woolly mammoths grow up to be climate scientists claiming to be able to predict temperatures a hundred years hence.
He's projecting again. Poor guy keeps the Von Storch pea in play, but ignores the Goodess.