Time For Another Roundup

From the Aaaaargh file:

Child abusing grandma receives conditional term

"A 66-year-old Saskatoon woman who was convicted last fall of common assault and assault causing bodily harm for using violence against a granddaughter who was in her care will be allowed to serve her sentence at home, where she continues to look after three other grandkids."

Protest about 'Redmen' thwarted at Saskatoon high school

"A group of Idle No More protesters says it was blocked from entering a high school basketball tournament last weekend by Saskatoon police.

On Saturday, Bedford Road student Storm Night and about 30 others had planned to stage a protest at the finals of the Bedford Road Invitational Tournament — one of the largest high school basketball tournaments in the country.

The protest concerned the Bedford Road Redmen, a team name with an old logo that some people think is racist. Aboriginal people, in particular, have taken offence at a logo that shows a First Nations man with a red face."

...and the Breath of Fresh Air file:

To Solve Native Issues, Focus more on the Indians and Less on the Chiefs

"The country’s most famous hunger striker has declined to declare victory and moved the aspirational goal posts after successfully hijacking the Prime Minister’s schedule. Canadians are divided as to whether she is a Northern Ontario Mother Teresa or an incompetent small town administrator on a highly publicized weight loss program.

The Idle No More movement has seen demonstrations across the land, so far peaceful and no sign as of peaking. Yet Idle No More has no coherent program or leadership, and indeed is founded upon a rejection of such elements. Surfacing spokespeople demand a shifting grab bag of change.

The Indian establishment is fractured. The nominal leadership for the Assembly of First Nations has met with the Prime Minister with no tangible results. Numerous other chiefs reject that process, challenge their elected grand chief and darkly threaten serious civil disorder.

Treaty negotiations across the country are stalled. On-reserve poverty reigns in spite of immense public expenditures. Cries of “genocide” and “colonialism” rive the air.

And to top it all, a federal judge has issued a ruling effectively doubling the number of legally recognized Indians in Canada. One wag responded by suggesting we should just declare everyone an Indian and the whole country a reserve. Then none of us would have to pay taxes any more.

How to parse this chain of events? Let us start with Chief Theresa Spence. Were her reserve truly a sovereign nation, it would clearly be called a failed state."

Yup.

Who are the deniers now?

"Last year The Mail on Sunday reported a stunning fact: that global warming had ‘paused’ for 16 years. The Met Office’s own monthly figures showed there had been no statistically significant increase in the world’s temperature since 1997.

We were vilified. One Green website in the US said our report was ‘utter bilge’ that had to be ‘exposed and attacked’.

The Met Office issued a press release claiming it was misleading, before quietly admitting a few days later that it was true that the world had not got significantly warmer since 1997 after all. A Guardian columnist wondered how we could be ‘punished’.

But then last week, the rest of the media caught up with our report. On Tuesday, news finally broke of a revised Met Office ‘decadal forecast’, which not only acknowledges the pause, but predicts it will continue at least until 2017. It says world temperatures are likely to stay around 0.43 degrees above the long-term average – as by then they will have done for 20 years.

This is hugely significant. It amounts to an admission that earlier forecasts – which have dictated years of Government policy and will cost tens of billions of pounds – were wrong. They did not, the Met Office now accepts, take sufficient account of ‘natural variability’ – the effects of phenomena such as ocean temperature cycles – which at least for now are counteracting greenhouse gas warming."

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"We all get things wrong, and by definition futurology is a risky business. But behind all this lies something much more pernicious than a revised decadal forecast. The problem is not the difficulty of predicting something as chaotic as the Earth’s climate, but the almost Stalinist way the Green Establishment tries to stifle dissent."

2012 Probably Not the Warmest Year in America

"Last summer headlines blared, "Hottest July in the history of the United States!" The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said so.

This week, NCDC is reporting the same, with the added alarm that 2012 was the warmest year on record and one of the top two years for extreme weather in America.

Climate activists are linking this to man-made global warming, ignoring that the area reported on in the NCDC reports, the U.S. contiguous states (i.e., continental America, not including Alaska), is only 2% of the Earth’s surface. So trends that may, or may not, be real in the U.S. in no way indicate global phenomena. In fact, the U.K. Met Office has admitted that there has been no global warming for 16 years and, this week, announced that temperatures are expected to stay relatively stable for another five years."

[---]

"This week, NCDC’s credibility was further damaged when meteorologist Anthony Watts announced that he had discovered huge differences between their “State of the Climate” (SOTC) reports released each month and the actual database of NCDC temperatures. For example, the July 2012 SOTC report, issued in early August, announced that a new record had been set with the average July temperature for the contiguous U.S. being 77.6°F, one fifth of a degree higher than in July 1936. However, today NCDC say the July 2012 average was actually 76.93°F, nearly 0.7°F less. What is going on?

It turns out that, besides periodically "adjusting" the temperature database in ways that tend to lower historical temperatures, NCDC does not wait for all the data to be received before computing, and announcing, the U.S. average temperature and its rank compared to other months and years. While some stations, such as those at airports, send the data quickly via radio links and the Internet, other stations use old paper forms that arrive by mail considerably later.

When the data from lower technology sources finally arrives, NCDC update their temperature database typically “cooling” the country when all the data is used.

But neither NCDC nor NOAA tells the public and the press if, when the complete data set is analyzed, the temperature announcements in previous SOTCs are no longer correct.

Strangely, NCDC change temperature data even from the distant past without notification. For example, NCDC now assert that the average temperature in July 1936 was 76.43°F, a full degree cooler than the 77.4°F that they claimed for the month in the July 2012 SOTC report. This allows them to continue to claim that July 2012 set a record.

NCDC claims cannot be taken seriously."

Other than that, American blogs are all "gun control" hysteria, while here in Canada, it's all Idle No More and raaaaaaaaacism. And I continue to have fun at SNN's website where the discussion in the comments is getting really, really nasty. It's so refreshing to see a website where the comments policy is "anything goes" and the facade of political correctness has been thrown out the window.