"Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

Note that this part of the Treaty does NOT say that they have to continually pursue negotiations until the end of time. All they had to do was pursue negotiations ONCE in order to fulfill the Treaty.

There were regular nuclear disarmament negotiations during the 1970s and 1980s - right up until the point where one of the participants in the NNPT effectively disbanded.

Yeah, those darned conspiracy theorists, all crazy and stuff - complaining about a policy that was stupid and evil.

But now that it hit the news and EVERYONE said it was stupid and evil, the government has stopped doing the stupid, evil thing.

So those people are now wrong and crazy.

Until the government starts doing it again.

- E. Venkman

...with your links.

The first one? The guy who uses Rush Limbaugh and other TV folks to show how unredeemable the skeptics are? Instead of actually quoting the folks who did the research and found the quotes?

He makes a big deal about finding "trick" in scientific papers to represent a clever solution for a problem. Fair enough.

However, he pretends that the problem with "hide the decline" is about something other than tree rings... when the hinge of most of the AGW models was tree-ring reconstruction. Basically, the guys "hiding the decline" desperately needed to hide the decline in temperatures for that part of their reconstruction in order for that reconstruction to be used as a metric for past temperatures versus CO2.

Yes, it's a nice snarky propaganda video, but it's wrong.

The second one? the one you refer to as "in depth and impartial?"

You're kidding, right?

For example, he handwaves "the divergence problem" with tree rings, which is something that those particular climate models can't survive. Remember the Hockey Stick? Notice how nobody uses it any more? Based on tree ring models. So yeah.

The thing you also missed about the Climategate problem for AGW fans: a lot of what they said would be fine, in a publication, or in an answer to a paper. It was, however, stuff they never told anyone, because it poked huge holes in the foundation of their work.

Except, of course, that it was not "valid" at all.

When you have to hide your own results, you're doing something wrong.

A lot of dedicated alarmists have tried to pretend that "the trick" was above-board... but it wasn't.

In any other field, if a scientist had tried this sort of thing to hide a bad result, they'd be in deep trouble.

Just so you know: That "97 percent of all scientists in the world" silliness came from a rigged "poll."

Basically, an AGW-supporting scientist polled a number of his AGW-supporting scientist friends and co-workers - 30 or so - and asked them if they thought AGW was real.

That's where your number came from. Which should tell you something about the actual support for AGW among the scientific population at large...

They recently came up with another poll, where they cherry-picked a bunch of papers, and said "97% of scientific papers agree!" While not mentioning that only about a third of them actually addressed AGW, and they got their "new" 97% by only looking at 65 papers. Out of 12,000. Oops.

A big reason you won't see any critiques of that sort is that the influential folks in the AGW alarmist camp made a big effort to block any critical papers from even being considered. Threats to blacklist journals for publishing "anti-AGW" papers, for example, or to take behind-the-scenes action against anyone who tried to submit such papers.

This all came out in the Climategate emails. But you never heard about those, did you?

They also admit in those emails that most of the actual criticisms of "mainstream" AGW were valid, and discussed ways to cover it up.

"Hide the decline" ring a bell?

Or "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on ... shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

The State of the Climate 2012 paper is... get this... from two years ago. After they had to start "adjusting" their models to reflect reality.

When you look at the actual historical AGW models, we're below their "optimistic" model (the one where we cut CO2 drastically over the last couple of decades - which didn't happen). And a good 0.2 C below their "probable" models.

If you're looking at predictions, go back and look at the climate models from the late 1980s and early 1990s. They're off, by a ridiculous amount.

Out of 90 models (yes, ninety), a grand total of TWO managed to predict the current temperature.

Those "record breaking massive storms" were, overall, not much worse than average. A couple of large ones, but they got large mostly because there weren't that many medium-sized storms along their paths. Meanwhile, we didn't seeing much of anything in the Atlantic (record-breaking "dud"), and areas outside of that one patch of Pacific Ocean were pretty average.

On the "paid" issue:
You do realize that even the guy who wrote that study you mention says that the reporter who wrote the story pretty much lied their ass off, right?

The short form: The actual study took any group that published anything at all that might, maybe, sorta could question AGW. Even one article or study. Then they took the entire budget of each organization and added it up. That's how they got that $900 million plus.

The actual amount that could actually, sorta, maybe be tied to anti-AGW funded studies or articles? About enough to fund Greenpeace for week and a half. If you counted things like studies showing that people don't like paying extra taxes for green energy stuff that doesn't actually work.

On the other hand, the "green" businesses are funding all sorts of sketchy "science" to support their industries. Like the guy who makes money off of "carbon remediation," who funded the really stupid "expedition"/tourism group that's currently being evacuated from their ice-trapped Russian ship.

The study assumes that the models that show lower amounts of warming are the "less accurate" ones, and the models with higher warming are going to be "more accurate." Eventually, that is.

The problem is that all of the climate models that predict AGW have been wrong, and the ones that show the least amount of actual warming are the ones that are least wrong at this point. So their solution is to come up with yet another one-dimensional computer model that shifts the possible warming a few decades into the future.

The study also suggests that the water vapor in the lower atmosphere will more or less migrate up - which is not happening, according to actual observations by satellites.

It's like the old AGW models, which predicted a "tropical hot spot" a few miles up that would happen due to AGW - and which never appeared.

You should note that, despite what many believe, we don't really "subsidize" fossil fuels to any major degree. The majority of the "subsidies" people whine about are just plain old tax deductions - the same ones that other businesses get. The oil companies didn't even get those deductions for a long time, and people complained when they finally got to deduct for exploration and drilling expenses in the same way normal businesses deduct for operations.

There are a few real deductions they get, though - alternative energy research, for example. And, technically, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve counts (although that's just the government buying and storing oil in case of an emergency - and counts for about 2/3 of all actual subsidies). Compared to the size of the industry, it's tiny. Overall, the "subsidies" fossil fuels get don't affect the end-user price much - maybe a half-cent per kilowatt-hour in some markets.

Compare to the various alternative energy sources, which get massive subsidies - and are still three to five times as expensive.

The problem with that line of attack is... KlearGear apparently added that part after this all happened.

No, you can't take action against someone for a "contract" you put up after you did something wrong. They also deleted the web page with the "contract" after someone pointed that out.

Not to mention that KlearGear never actually sent the items in question, and PayPal cancelled the purchase automatically.

Number one rule: "Don't Do That."

While you see a lot of US companies there, they were either providing support services (like surveying people about possible use of the system) advertising and publicity services, or secondary systems.

Most of the rest were "consulting" jobs, with only a few real hardware/software production contracts in the mix.

Once you get past the obvious $93 million for CGI, the next one of any size is Maximus Federal Services, which has a certain track record for handling this sort of thing - they were obviously hired to do the connections between the ACA site and things like CHIP and Medicaid. Makes you wonder why they're a secondary contractor, though, instead of the primary.

The big thing to remember is that even CGI isn't the effective primary contractor. That job effectively fell to HHS government bureaucrats, who had a stranglehold on the management of the whole mess, even though they definitely had no experience or training in such matters.

Yes, it was the lowest, but there apparently weren't any other bidders, or at least none that anyone can find or name.

You see, they didn't actually put it out to open bidding, and instead awarded the contract to someone with political connections.

They used something called "task orders," which allows bureaucrats to completely bypass open bids. Basically, if you win one government contract somewhere along the way (even for a completely different project), it's possible for the government to award you future contracts on other projects without worrying about all of that pesky "low bidder" stuff.