The Dependent, (and yes, I did try to stop Matt Chambers on the title, but, hey, whatever) is about a set of personal reflections on Vancouver. Sex, drinks and art; but I repeat myself. There is an article about a suitcase full of dildos – does anyone need that many? Apparently.

Worth a visit. If Matt is really really, lucky, (and smart) he will ask me to contribute a weekly pinup and very doubtful book reviews. Hell, I’d even be willing to be the book editor. I like free books.

Check it out.

Four months (well four years actually) late, it dawns on the Times that there may be a tiny problem with this “climate change stuff”.

Of course the Times could not be bothered doing the digging itself…instead it reports stories from the Telegraph and the London times….Perhaps the New York Times has become a blog.

But the good new is that it is reporting the wobbles in climate science only a day after the Globe and Mail. Right on the news…good work NYT!

Ha…I laugh at the attempts of Five Feet, BCF and Flea! [Though all are inspiring – except the Doukhobors which are simply scary.]

The truth is that a single ad on Craigslist in Victoria and I have brilliant, beautiful women just dying to wear more clothes than they are in on the beach. And not just any women…women who have never know frostbite, women whose skin is caressed by the sweet moisture laden breezes of El Nino. Who hike and camp and eat turnips grown within twenty miles of their front door…You will never win…never! Not even with the whole of the internet to hotlink…Bwaaaahahaha!

Update: An Olympic moment live from Vancouver. Not safe whether you’re at work or at home….

Update II: I always say to my models that they will have more on than they would at the beach…but not this much :)

At a weekend conference, Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith signalled her own willingness to push the envelope of provincial autonomy, suggesting that Alberta should look to imitate Quebec by creating its own pension plan, taking control of its immigration and pushing health-care reform more aggressively. Chantal Hébert

Wild Rose is articulating the same sort of intelligent autonomy as the PQ and Bloc made real in Quebec. It would be deeply encouraging to see Alberta strike out on its own in pensions, immigration and health. And, if Alberta did there would be even more reason for British Columbia to do the same.

There are many places to argue over the specific details of issues like climate change. This ain’t one of them. Here’s why—taken from the policy right below the box where comments are entered: “This forum is intended for discussion of the craft of journalism, not of the issues of the day that journalists cover.”

Those with something to say about how the craft of journalism has dealt with an issue, please join in. Those who want to comment on that issue—or focus on someone’s character—will need to go someplace else. In cases of overlap where the difference is not clear, moderation will side strongly with journalism.

Deborah Jones, editor, Townhall

Here’s the comment I was trying to have published:

[2nd try at this – the captcha ate the first one]

Stephen, the problem is that you did not put methane into any sort of context And by failing to do so you pushed along the AGW hysteria even as you discussed cow burps.

You missed three important facts about CH4: a) its concentration is 1/200th that of CO2, b) its persistence in the atmosphere is 8 years rather than the IPCC’s estimate of 100 years for CO2 (a number I would treat with a good deal of skepicism) c) even at 20 times the GH gas potency of CO2 there is so little of the stuff that it has 1/10th the effect. source

Mentioning these facts render ruminant tummy rumbles entirely irrelevant in the ongoing AGW conversation. You have not posed a “wicked problem” you have posed a faux problem which simply does not matter even if AGW is true.

Now, what saddens me about this is that you are one of Canada’s leading science writers and should know better. What about the other lumps in the legacy media who are largely bereft of science and strikingly innumerate. If we can’t rely on our science writers to at least put their stories in context why would we rely on people covering policy, economics and politics to have even the slightest clue.

You really should do better Stephen.

Which was in response to Stephen Strauss’ comment:

Posted by Stephen Strauss 2010-02-05 10:03:12

This must reflect on how poorly I made my argument, because Jay you miss the point I was trying to make. The debate over whether or not humans have or are producing climate change is essentially two-sided. You can say: Here are the arguments for and here are the arguments against. Here is the evidence for, here is the evidence against those arguments. You can reflect this quoting people who believe human actions are making a significant difference in global warming and people who don’t think so. Everything is bipolar and that means you can apply the traditional journalistic sidedness approach to reporting what is going on. However if you move beyond that, if you accept humans are doing something significant, and you try and talk about what to do about human actions, the yes/no schema simply falls apart. I used the cows’ burps as an example. Solutions here contradict themselves not the least because they go against solutions to other issues. Remediation is both a very wicked problem and almost impossible for journalists to convey to the general public using their traditional Hegalian paradigm. Rather we – the journalists and those who read what we write – find ourselves in a universe where the Latin quotation “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” seems to sum up best our feelings about what to do about the contradictions which lie before us. That is: “Kill them all; let god sort it out.”

Signed: Clearly A Tofu Ass

The link to Stephen’s CBC article is here.

Now call me crazy but I would say that calling out a leading science writer for failing to do the basic research is onside when it comes to commenting on the “craft” of journalism. Especially when that journalist has asserted that I, personally, “missed” his point.

It appears that Miss Jones brings the moderating skills of a playground monitor to J-Source’s Townhall: Anything to avoid controversy.

Which is, of course, precisely what is wrong with Canada’s lard ass legacy media. They are too lazy to deviate from the Establishment narrative or even question it thanks to people like Miss Jones.

Update: For those interested in how a) journalism, b) the criticism of journalism is actually done go read Donna Laframboise here, here and here. Ms. Jones could learn a bit about criticism and Mr. Strauss could pick up some tips on research.

Jeffery Simpson will be pissed.

While I enjoy shooting the kids and the dog and pretty flowers and such like, the fact is that taking pictures of pretty girls and trying, usually unsuccessfully, to make good pictures is great fun. With Tamy, the girl in these pictures we were really just doing a test shoot to see how she photographed. My partner, Susan, who styles the shoots (and yes, I do know I am an astonishingly lucky man) wanted to do a bit of a mash up of 30’s and 50’s. The full arm tattoo was a tiny bit challenging but as I shot I began to like it.

Deborah Jones 2010-02-04 10:19:21

“Lard asses” ???? Did commentator Jay Currie REALLY call people in what he calls the “Canadian legacy media” “lard asses” who, he suggests, can’t comprehend the climate issue because it’s “To, (sic) well, sciency” ???

Really, man? This is how you foster intelligent debate? Seriously? j-source

Ms. Jones appears to be the comments editor at j-Source…and she is absolutely right; I did call Canadian legacy media “lard asses”

As the rather conflicted Mr. Monbiot is being cited as some sort of journalistic guru, perhaps another quote:

“It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

monbiot back in november while you were pretending climategate was a fiction

You lard asses in the Canadian legacy media could not be bothered with climategate. I guess that many emails, not to mention disastrously awful code and long repressed data, were a bit too dense. To, well, sciency.

You completely missed the story – Mark, Lorne and Lawrence have been on it for years. Little wonder legacy media circulation is tanking and no one watches TV. j-source

And I backed up the assertion here (the material on Stephen Straus’ article will likely be the subject of another post…I like Straus’ work except when he wanders into climate science)

I did indeed call the journalists in Canadian legacy media “lard asses”.

On the climate file (and much else but we’ll stick to the climate file).

When did a legacy journalist first interview or go to Steve McIntyre or Ross McKitrick for comment on the Mann “hockey stick”. Which they refuted. They are, after all, both Canadians and both in the Golden triangle – how hard would it have been?

Were Canadian journalists all over the fraudulent but iconic “drowning polar bear” pic?

Did any of them bother to check the “science” in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” before it was rubbished in a British Court?

To this day has any enterprising legacy journalist bothered to examine the efficacy of a ban on incandescent lightbulbs in a cold country like Canada?

Could you cite the last hard, or even neutral, interview of David Suzuki conducted by a member of the Canadian legacy media?

Have any of the lard asses managed to read through the “Climategate” emails and data – as poor Fred Barnes at the Guardian has now gotten around to?

Where was the coverage of the declining count of thermometers north of 60?

Stephen Strauss, whose work I occasionally read to my kids, gives an unintentionally good example. The article he cites simply takes for granted that there is AGW. He assumes that the science is settled when, in fact, the “science” is barely underway.

A better article would have acknowledged that the climate models relied upon by the IPCC are losing traction steadily as the overall climate cools. Not one of them predicted this and, on that basis alone, all are incorrect. That is not to say they cannot be recalibrated; rather it is to say that they cannot be relied upon until they are. Strauss knows better. But, in the usual lazy legacy media style, he simply wanders along with the herd mooing that the “end is nigh, or, at least close”.

I don’t want to pick on Strauss, but the fact is that his article is very much of a piece with the vast majority of reporting in legacy media on climate.

The Establishment view of the IPCC is assumed correct and then we can get on to the interesting question of cow belches and methane.

While Strauss acknowledges a need of “other sidedness”, he cannot be arsed to find a person who speaks for the other side. Instead he quotes Lord Stern, of the now discredited “Stern” Report, on vegetarianism. You could not possibly find a better exemplar of the Establishment than Lord Stern and there he is popping up on the question of cows.

Did Strauss bother to compare cow methane to natural sources? Did he consider the persistence of methane in the atmosphere? Did he raise the question of why the political classes are obsessing about CO2 when methane is, as Strauss points out, 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2?

No he did not. And that is hardly a surprise because he has already accepted that AGW is true. His objectivity has left the proverbial building.

Legacy journalists in Canada have been lazy on the climate file. They have not challenged the underlying assumptions of the science and, worse, the policy which flows from the science.

So, yup, by and large they are lard asses. j-source

Needless to say there has yet to be a cogent response to any of the questions I asked with respect to the legacy media’s non-coverage of climate science.