Bad Science and Bad Law

I wrote about this recently: The scandal of manipulated meteorological temperatures. The Manhattan Contrarian has 4 essays on The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4. The questions are mounting:

Are government climate agencies tampering with climate data to show warming? Some Republicans think so. California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says to expect congressional hearings on climate data tampering.

@caerbannog666 expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise – Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 20, 2015

Rohrabacher serves as the vice chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over NASA and other agencies that monitor the Earth’s climate…

Rohrabacher isn’t the only one to call for hearings on the science behind global warming. Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe has also promised to hold hearings on global warming data.

“We’re going to have a committee hearing on the science,” said Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “People are going to hear the other side of the story.”

For years, those skeptical of man-made global warming have argued that government agencies are altering raw temperature data to create a warming trend. Allegations of tampering have increased as satellite temperature readings show much less warming than land and ocean-based weather stations show.

Still on bad science, H/T Dick Puddlecote:

Many of us doubted that the evidence [behind smoking bans] really mattered. As I wrote in The Oregonian/OregonLive at the time, “Protecting workers is simply the polite fiction by which nonsmokers have imposed their will on an increasingly unpopular minority.”

We suspected this, but how could we prove it? What if there were a device that looked like a cigarette and mimicked the effects of smoking, yet emitted a mostly harmless vapor instead of tobacco smoke? If authorities tried to ban that too, without bothering to establish that it endangered anyone, then our suspicions would be vindicated.

That device exists. It’s called an e-cigarette. And sure enough, the Multnomah Board of County Commissioners is voting on whether to ban its use indoors. The Legislature, too, may expand the state’s smoking ban to cover vaping.

The evidence that e-cigarettes cause significant harm to users, much less to bystanders, is weak to non-existent. The county’s case against them is that they sort of look like smoking. Vaping indoors, says the Board of Health for Multnomah County, “threatens to undermine compliance with smoking regulations and reverse the progress that has been made in establishing a social norm that smoking is not permitted in public places and places of employment.”

So laws are for establishing social norms? Clearly a lot of people think so. But I think it’s an abuse of the law.

Still on e-cigs, this is really sickening (H/T Harley):

Loving couple banned from adopting… because husband had ‘e-cigarette’
Couple barred from adopting after would-be dad was seen using an e-cig
Decision came after they’d passed a series of tests to qualify as parents
They had earlier paid for expensive fertility treatment which had failed
Told they couldn’t adopt if they’d used an e-cigarette in the past 12 months
Experts say that ‘vaping’ poses little or no threat to children in the home

What’s to stop people being barred from adopting for having drunk alcohol in the past year, or eaten chocolate? Nothing. If this is a legal requirement, it’s another abuse of law.

…

The way it used to be:

A takeaway was a mathematical problem.* A pizza was something to do with a leaning tower.* Bananas and oranges only appeared at Christmas time.* The only vegetables known to us were spuds, peas, carrots and cabbage, anything else was regarded as being a bit suspicious.
* All crisps were plain; the only choice we had was whether to put the salt on or not.
* Condiments consisted of salt, pepper, vinegar and brown sauce if we were lucky.* Soft drinks were called lemonade.* Coke was something that we mixed with coal to make it last longer.* Rice was a milk pudding, and never, ever part of our main course at dinner.* A big mac was what we wore when it was raining… <more>

Via Facebook, still on food, a new way of getting honey from a beehive: