Another Republican has gay/prostitute issues

link

A Republican state legislator who repeatedly voted against gay rights measures resigned his seat Wednesday amid revelations he had sex with a man he met at an erotic video store while in Spokane on a GOP retreat.

In a written statement, Rep. Richard Curtis, of La Center, said that while he believes he’s done a lot of good during his time in the Legislature, “events that have recently come to light have hurt a lot of people.”
….
Three days earlier, Curtis had insisted to his local newspaper that he was not gay and that sex was not involved in what he said was an extortion attempt by a man last week.

But in police reports, Curtis said he was being extorted by a man he had sex with in a Spokane hotel room. The other man contends Curtis reneged on a promise to pay $1,000 for sex.

Fox “News” betrays young scientists on global warming

This is what you get when you agree to collaborate with Fox “News”

China arrests 774 people in crackdown on shoddy products

later, all escape from shoddy police handcuffs , made in China.

link 

Kilimanjaro glacier retreat not due to “deforestation”

The retreat of the glacier on Kilimanjaro was used by Al Gore to show the effects of global climate change. The causation of this phenomenon has been called into question, and critics have cited a “study” which supposedly blamed the disappearance of the glacier on deforestation. That is nonsense. Forests don’t “pump moisture into the air.” Trees consume water and carbon dioxide, and produce oxygen and fixed carbon products. And the “study” was not a study. It was just somebody’s idea in a newspaper story.  For the lowdown on the complexity of Kilimanjaro, see this.

Sorry, Sen. Imhofe and Mr. Limbaugh, but Greenland is warming

link to NY Times:

…while temperatures here in the south dipped in the 1980s, they have risen steadily since. Between 1961 and 1990, the average annual temperature was 33 degrees; in 2006, it was 35 degrees, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute.

Somebody better tell the wingnuts.

Anderson Cooper visited Greenland:

COOPER: Yes, I can, John. Yes, we’re on Constable Point, which is on the east coast of Greenland. Jeff is much farther west than we are.

A lot of what he said, it’s the same situation here. I mean, Greenland is a prime example, probably the best place to come, to really see the real impact of global warming so far. The average temperatures in Greenland have risen 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 30 years. That’s more than double the global average. The ice sheet here is melting much faster, faster than anyone thought. It’s really hot.

It’s really caught a lot of scientists by surprise. The models they had to predict about what’s going to happen to sea levels in the coming years, in the coming decades. It may not be that accurate. They’re still trying to figure out exactly what may happen down the road.

But any melting of this icecap, any melting of the ice sheet here, which covers some 82 percent of Greenland, affects sea levels around the world, affects us all.

As we just said already, ice in some place has decreased by as much as 40 percent in the last 40 years — in the last 30 years, an area the size of Texas and a half has already melted.

Glenn Greenwald gets whacked-out email from Petraeus’ spokesman

link

Greenwald publishes a barely coherent, hostile letter from Col. Steven A. Boylan, the Public Affairs Officer and personal spokesman for Gen. David G. Petraeus.

Sample:

The issues of accuracy, context, and proper characterization is something that perhaps you could do a little research and would assume you are aware of as a trained lawyer.

I do enjoy reading your diatribes as they provide comic relief here in Iraq. The amount of pure fiction is incredible. Since a great deal of this post is just opinion and everyone is entitled to their opinions, I will not address those even though they are shall we say — based on few if any facts. That does surprise me with your training as a lawyer, but we will leave those jokes to another day. . . .

You are either too lazy to do the research on the topics to gain the facts, or you are providing purposeful misinformation — much like a propagandist. . . .

Politicization of the military is very disturbing; but this goes beyond that… to the “disturbed…”

More Pacific islanders must re-settle because of global warming

link

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea (The National, Oct. 17) – The Carteret Islands are almost invisible on a map of the South Pacific, but the horseshoe scattering of atolls in eastern-most Papua New Guinea is on the front line of climate change, as rising sea levels and storm surges eat away at their existence.

For 20 years, the 2,000 islanders living there have fought a losing battle against the ocean, building sea walls and trying to plant mangroves. Each year, the waves surge in higher, destroying vegetable gardens, washing away homes and contaminating fresh water supplies.

Recently, Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare appropriated PGK4.1 million [US$1.4 million] to resettle PNG villagers affected by global warming.

This is the second community which will be moving:

On December 6, 2005, The United Nations Environment Program announced that a small community living in the Pacific island chain of Vanuatu had to relocate due to sea level rise. In addition, in 2005, the people of the Carteret atoll in Papua New Guinea announced their imminent evacuation and the government of Tuvalu has asked New Zealand to be ready to evacuate islanders.

Baseball: the coming collapse of the Yankees

Joe Torre was smart, in a way, not to return to the Yankees.  I will be very surprised if the Yankees are much over a .500 team next year.  Father Time is going to pay a visit to the Bombers,  with devastating consequences. Jorge Posada, Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, Bobby Abreu, the list goes on and on.  Even A Rod is past his physical prime. Several of these players had good years. So what? Baseball wisdom says these guys are due for a huge fall off.  If Brian Cashman doesn’t clean house, he will be fired next year, as the Yanks battle it out with the Orioles for third place.  This team is kaput. Not like the Kansas City Royals. Please. But kaput for a Yankee team. I am guessing that Cashman is at least smart enough to get one of  the good centerfielders on the market.  That would cushion the flow a little; but none of these free agents are spring chickens either.

Glenn Greenwald takes on Washington Post editor Fred Hiatt

link

…the “price” which AT&T, Verizon and others are paying from “litigation costs” is so miniscule that to cite it as a reason to give amnesty is either incredibly ignorant or purposefully dishonest.

Greenland’s warming trend

Sen. James Imhoff (R-fantasyland) has claimed

Greenland has COOLED since the 1940′s!

In fact, current temperatures in Greenland — a poster boy for climate alarmists – are COOLER than the temperatures there in the 1930s and 1940s, according to multiple peer-reviewed studies.

Yes, you heard me correctly. Greenland has COOLED since the 1940s! A fact the media and global warming activists conceal.

Greenland reached its highest temperatures in 1941, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. And, keep in mind that 80% of man-made CO2 came AFTER these high temperatures.

link

Well, Sen. Imhoff’s statement flies in the face of what we can see with our own eyes: Greenlanders are now growing broccoli and the native population can no longer use their dogsleds for transportation.

The study Imhoff cites actually showed that the apparent cooling was reported from 2 weather stations in southern Greenland. This is explained by a local weather phenomenon called North Atlantic Oscillation. One part of Greenland which is not included in the NAO has shown marked warming. A scientist from the University of Colorado has shown that, after a warm spell in the 20′s and 30′s, Greenland has now been warming for the past 20 years, and the ice is certainly melting:

For each of the past 17 years, Steffen has spent one month at a remote research site called Swiss Camp, located 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland. He monitors the changing ice sheet through a network of global positioning systems and weather stations, which have recorded a dramatic rise in temperatures since the mid-1990s.

“When we came here in 1990, the first two, three years were actually colder than normal. Then in 1994, 1995, it started to warm steadily and since then, we’ve had a temperature increase during the winter months of 4.5 degrees centigrade, 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very large, the largest temperature increase on earth,” he said.

The rising temperatures feed what scientists call a “positive feedback loop.” As the air warms, it melts ice on the sea and snow on land. This exposes more water and land to the sun. Those surfaces in turn absorb more of the sun’s heat, leading to more snow melt and ice melt.

“When you look at our satellite analysis, we can see the melt area of Greenland over 30 years has increased by 30 percent,” Steffen said.

…..

Last year, satellite data collected by NASA scientists revealed Greenland is losing 100 billion tons of ice each year, more than it is gaining from snowfall in the interior. Steffen and others have also detected a new, faster movement of the ice sheet, causing the glaciers to dump more ice into the ocean, where it melts and contributes to sea-level rise.

For an rather extensive discussion of this subject, go to the RealClimate site.