Thursday, April 24, 2008

Moron poker

Eli is stealing this from Daniel Davies. I start off by linking to something moronic. In this case it is Phil Chapman's claiming that an ice age is upon us because there was a large drop in global temperature between Jan 2007 and 2008. Deltoid is having fun with it.

Anyone can play by linking to something else that is dumber. Your link has to "follow suit" by being either on the same topic or author, so you would have to find something by Chapman or about a decrease in global temperature. You also have to "bid up", your's has to be dumber than mine, which may be hard as Chapman is pretty dumb, but it's a big internet out there. As d-squared says

The game is open to all and is scored in "King of the Hill" style; at any point, the poster of the last valid card is "King of the Hill". The winner is the person who is king of the hill at the point when we all get bored and stop playing.

59 comments:

Tom Fiddaman said...

I'll see your Chapman and raise you a Bob Carter classic...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html

I'm not sure that Carter is dumber than Chapman, but he does make an additional egregious error, by expecting emissions growth rates to match temperature trends, ignoring intervening integrations.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, he may not be dumber than Chapman, but hey, Chapman is a real Rocket Scientist (tm).

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, there is someone dumber than Chapman or Carter, he may be Watts but he's pretty dim.

Unknown said...

i think you wilkl be out of a job soon sorry!
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, Vincent 1:22am's stuff is nowhere near the dumb of dumb. It's dumb, but it's an ordinary kind of dumb.

OK, here's my hand: Gerhard Kramm on CO2 emissions, which I've commented on before.

"This paper documents a fundamental scientific misconduct because the first twelve years of the Mauna Loa CO2 observations were neglected because the projections disagree with the observations."

Someone thinks the IPCC needed "projections" for past observations. Do the inactivists have some sort of obsession with time travel technology or what?

Anonymous said...

(Aw shucks, broken link again.)

Anonymous said...

Checkmate!!

http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=150

David "Seminal Paper" Archibald on global cooling.

Anonymous said...

Ack. The bunny wants to play poker, then lays down a straight flush.

Anything dumber is probably verging on the mentally ill (see Graeme Bird for example). I don't think it's nice to pick on he mentally ill.

Walt Bennett said...

What an insular little community we live in. Given an opportunity to teach, we choose to mock.

Sure, you think you are mocking the likes of Chapman, but you are actually mocking those lay people who can become confused by such arguments, and by laughing at them, you discourage them from asking questions.

Perhaps something like: "averages matter, and the longer term the average, the more it matters. Temperatures vary from month to month and from year to year, just due to variance in weather over such short periods. Over longer periods, ten years and longer, averages matter more, because the short term variability is less noisy. When we look at those averages, we see a clear trend since 1980, that temperature is rising. It isn't much yet, but due to the persistence of CO2 and of the human activity which leads to warming, we expect this average to keep increasing for at least the rest of this century. That accumulated warming is a threat to sea levels and to precipitation patterns, among other things. That's what AGW is all about."

I get that there is a glib, flip tone to this blog. I never miss a post. But can we, every now and then, remember that there are newcomers who are trying to sort all of this out for themselves, and that there is a lot of chatter to sort through? Can we at least understand why they might be confused by arguments such as Chapman's?

As we have discussed recently, people do get confused, and they do get misled. Let me assure you that you play into the hands of the obfuscaters when you mock them, because they can use your disdain against you. "See how they dismiss us! They aren't interested in scientific exploration! Their minds are made up! It's a religion! There's no room for anything that might change their minds!"

I see such thinking every day, and I see newcomers swept away by it.

I have made the argument in CCD that the debunkerati wish to keep the debate as simplistic as possible, which is one reason they bring up Gore and AIT every chance they get, and why they trot out arguments such as Chapman's. Understanding AGW requires more than a little time, and working out the problems that seem to contradict theory at an initial glance, also takes time.

On the one side there are those who keep it simple and make a case for, at a minimum, no clear trend. On the other side are those who expect you to have a solid grasp of engineering as well as physics and even some chemistry, and if you don't immediately grasp why the simplistic argument is flawed, you get the knee-slap treatment.

And another denialist is born.

bigcitylib said...

I claim victory. Witness the Manhattan Declaration Endorsers, where your standard issue deniers coerce their families into signing to bulk up the numbers.
Monckton's wife, for example, is name Juliet.

http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=63&Itemid=1

EliRabett said...

Should we open another contest for concern troll of the week?

Anonymous said...

So I got raised and reraised. Ha! I'm going all in.

But seriously, this guy has been getting some press recently for his contrarian views, however what has really happened is he's gone emeritus.

Walt Bennett said...

Eli,

I assume you include me as a "concern troll".

You just lost a friend as well as a reader.

Congrats, o insular one.

Anonymous said...

Argh, bigcitylib and rattus, that's just cheating! You're not following the rules!

But cheating is fun... makes it easier to reach new levels of stupid. So I'll just cheat and show my invincible hand: Harold Pierce Jr. tells us he's an alchemist. (OK, you've probably seen it on Deltoid already...)

Unknown said...

The great backdown
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23597729-7583,00.html

Anonymous said...

Well on the subject of morons, and their statements my favorite has to be this one:
"The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters." James Hansen

or perhaps this little gem from Michael Mann:

"The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at oderately high levels of confidence."

Those two get my vote for the most moronic statements in the AGW debate.

guthrie said...

Strictly what Harold Pierce is claiming is correct, (it appears that under certain conditions of temperature and pressure you can get water and limestone to combine to make hydrocarbons but it is irrelevant, given the amount of energy required to do so.
And the Alchemists were operating on a different understanding of the universe.

Walt Bennett, (not that he'll read this, but hey, I feel like being the voice of reason just now) the reason you look like you are concern trolling is that there is no concievable way that the posters on this site can educate the people they are refering to in their poker hands. These people have had the reality pointed out to them many times before, and ignored it. Hence, you make fun of them in a harmless fashion. If any innocent people stumble on this website, I'm sure they will ask what the problem is. In the meantime, havering on about education in a situation which never was and will not be conducive to education, is counter productive.

Anonymous said...

Wait. Did Chapman get his idiotics from Archibald?

Bennett, sure, there is a place for teaching. The basic gist is, you can't deduce an ice age from *one average winter* in a long string of warm ones. The winter was because of La Nina. That's mostly it, there are numerous other errors as well in Chapman's writings.
The whole thing has been addressed by David Karoly who is an actual climatologist and can quote the stuff from memory to see the errors even more clearly.

But we sure can laugh at and deride the idiots as well over here. I've seen self-described "scientifically minded" and "healthily sceptical" bloggers jump on the story uncritically. That speaks volumes of them, as the article is really wrong on such fundamental level.

Anonymous said...

Correction: Davies, with an E.
(saw the "moron" & figured that's who you meant though; if you have not read his classic One Minute MBA ("Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101") be sure to do so.

Anonymous said...

The stupid. It hurts...

Anonymous said...

How stupid do things have to get before I get everyone's money?

Anonymous said...

There is so much stupid on the intertubes that you just cannot grasp it all...

Anonymous said...

The 41% Fraud
http://www.nov55.com/41r.html

"Supposedly, 41% is the amount of energy leaving the surface of the earth as radiation. The real amount is closer to zero; and this is one of the several reasons why carbon dioxide cannot create global warming.

Nothing could be easier to measure than this number. To balloon a small number into such a large number can't be anything but fraud."

Anonymous said...

Here is another bonafide rocket scientist who just doesn't get it (the comments are especially stupid). I guess this just goes to show that climate science is much more difficult than rocket science.

Come on guys, this is too easy...

Anonymous said...

Rattus I see your Gerlicht and raise you

Anonymous said...

And I am willing to
re-raise

"Calls were raised to organize an international meeting to discuss what measures would be needed to meet the challenges of the coming Ice Age. This meeting never took place. The agenda was hijacked and turned upside down by imperial forces to pull the focus away from the near return of the Ice Age. The doctrine of global warming was 'invented' and put in place to accomplished that diversion in order to prevent at all cost a global economic renaissance that the private world empires would not survive."

Also note how "Vikings" is an event that occured briefly in 900AD.

Anonymous said...

How about Mann's statement "I am not a statistician..."

- mickey

Anonymous said...

The Mysterious Receding Seas

Richard Guy puts forward conclusive proof that our planet earth is expanding. He concludes that the expansion process makes seas recede from shorelines worldwide. Guy states that sea level datum is the misleading factor in the Isostatic Rebound theory. "Both Seas Level Datum and Isostatic Rebound are myths: Guy states "they do not exist".

Anonymous said...

Hey Walt, our Rabbet is the one who cannot do his expansions correctly and he calls other people morons. What a funny guy. Sundry Rabett friends claim what a smarty he is, they hold a pair of twos and think they can bluff their way through. Walt, we are watching druken kids play their games- all bravado and no class, and no success. But gee they're funny to watch. So stay around, next Rabett and friends will pick on a 14,13,12, year old girl- take your pick.

Be charitable Walt, the kiddies need to play until the ice reaches its 4 M minimum. Rabbet loses his bet, needs some extra coin and asks all to contribute.

Regards to all
JohnS

Anonymous said...

Sorry, not following the rules, but you gotta go for old Rabett again, when he tried to go all philosophical on us and couldn't quite spell Sartre. Old Jean - Paul would have laughed and laughed, if he was alive, of course.

Connection to AGW- the extra heat trapping gases that emerged from all orifices of the various people who laughed and laughed, as if they were old Jean- Paul.

Hey Ratty, you're not old cym are you- he of the pithy but meaningless comments. And bi-foc-al, I think you are a channel for the dead Sartre, as he didn't make much sense when he was alive either.

Regards to all
JohnS

Anonymous said...

Did JohnS just out himself as a 14 year old girl? I knew his intellectual hero was a 15 year old girl, but...

Anonymous said...

You think you've seen stupid?
[l=http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2050] Take that![/l]

Anonymous said...

Regarding Walt's concern:

I'd have to say that the people being mocked here are certainly deserving of it because they are far more interested in spreading nonsense than in actually educating themselves.

Ignorance in and of itself is not worthy or ridicule but "ignorance masquerading as knowledge" most certainly is.

Those who are honestly trying to learn will recognize as much and probe more deeply.

The ones who will be turned off most are the ones who have no interest in what the truth actually is. It is impossible to change their mind because they made it up before even looking at any information.

Anonymous said...

I raise you a tamino for this post:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/e/#more-365

It's the S-Curve, tamino, not the exp curve. Look it up, Wiki-it. By all means fix it.

Calculate the year-to-year change in the number of plants needed to consume your predicted increases. As a matter of fact, calculate the year-to-year change need in each step of mining/refining/processing/consumption of any natural resource. And BTW, don't forget the number of people needed to carry out each step.

The calculations of the increase in horse droppings in NYC was very likely done the way you did this one.

Anonymous said...

offtopic: arctic sea ice concentration anomoly has just fallen to about where it was this time last year..

Anonymous said...

"It's the S-Curve, tamino, not the exp curve."

I call this the Zhenshan-Xian method of prediction: look at an upward trend, and claim that it's obviously part of a cycle or something.

It'll be a great candidate for King of the Valley if Zhen-Shan and Xian hadn't gotten there first.

Anonymous said...

Just wrote about a bogonews item which is right up there with "the EPA was created under Jimmy Carter".

Anonymous said...

I raise you the guy above who is under the misapprehension that he has somehow taught Tamino and the rest of us a lesson in mathematics.

Said gnat-brained fool missed the whole point of Tamino's post, which was that "continued growth at a rate that is a constant % of current size (ie, exponential growth) is not physically possible in the long run because resources are not limitless.

In the post that the anonymous nitwit referenced above, says this
Tamino: "It seems to me that we’re rapidly approaching the point at which continued growth will be impossible, and sustainability should be the goal. The important, and sometimes frightening, thing about exponential growth is that the function gets very very large, very very quickly."

EliRabett said...

Dear Hacks,

Borrowing Michael Berube's words, Eli has pretty well expressed himself on why you are worthy of "mockery, dismissal and deserve a double minor for unsportsmanlike bullshit"

However, the Rabett now lays down a double twisted set of eight aces to claim the pot. (Hat tip to Ed Darrell)

Anonymous said...

I suspect that the original "cooler" was Theodor Landscheidt, in his New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming? paper (oroginally published in 1998, but I can't find it - this is a later revision).

Landscheidt also published The Golden Section: A Cosmic Principle, in which he shows that the Sun's "Pentadactyl Pattern" also explains:

The outbreak of World Wars 1 & 2
The establishment of Stalin's and Hitler's dictatorships
The Great Depression
Annual birth rates in U.S.A.
U.S. stock prices
Why the best time to visit the dentist is 10 minutes before 3 p.m.

Anonymous said...

Hehe, that epistles blog is a gem. :)

Anonymous said...

John S says Hey Walt, our Rabbet is the one who cannot do his expansions correctly and he calls other people moron"

Everyone makes mistakes/mistatements. Even Einstein.

Come to think of it, even you (imagine that ), Climate Oracle that you are, in your claims about winter ice "recovery": 14 m sq. km. Alas, so close, John S and yet so far :)


But at least Eli admits and corrects his mistakes while leaving the incorrect statement(s) in place for everyone to see where he went wrong.

Which is more than i can say for yourself or for your hero Steve "Purge without trace" McIntyre.

What a joke. A couple of clowns.

BTW, the ice is already back down where it was last year at this time, on track for another record low in the fall? It's dripping like a rock Johnboy, which, as everyone (Eli and everyone else here) tried to explain to you is not unexpected given that the ice "recovery" involved new (one season) thin ice -- a concept that you have such a hard time understanding.

Anonymous said...

"The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology."

Jan Esper

"You have to pick cherries, if you want to make cherry pie."

D'Arrigo

Anonymous said...

I think Eli's double twisted set of eight aces wins if we are going for pure stupidity.

But here's an example of a flawed analysis of solar-temperature connection I have seen:
http://capnbob.us/blog/2006/08/23/correlating-sunspots-to-global-climate/

Read the first comment by bob12smith (me) and then the responses by the blog owner until I simply give up hope that the blog owner is capable of ever understanding the error with the whole post. The stupidy here lies in the response to the clear rebuttle of the whole thing.

It was disheartening to go back to it and see someone else since then had been duped by it.

Anonymous said...

Umm, everybody did realize that Eli's link to the epistles blog was a parody?
Poe's law strikes again...

As for that sunspot guy, you should use short sentences and keep on pressing on the single most damning point: He doesn't show temperature data, so his claims about the temperature are bogus.
He uses data generated by a model that uses sunspots as input. Hence it correlates so well with sunspots. It's circular reasoning.

Damn, it's so late and I can't bring my brains to produce an atomistic all encompassing sentence, my head just hurts from reading all this stupid here and at deltoid tonight... Could Eli find some agree-with and triumph of science links for a change.

Thank you - a tired reader.

Arthur said...

Hey guys, I've corresponded with Phil Chapman before. He happened to be on a mailing list I was on relating to some outer space issues (yes I'm into "rocket science" too), and spewed his routine list of stuff, including sending along a powerpoint etc. Needless to say I responded with the facts, some of which he wasn't familiar with and actually seemed to listen to - but more importantly, the rest of the mailing list got tired of his nonsense pretty quick and cut off the argument. A good sign, I think.

Interestingly, our first correspondence was August last year, when he posted to the list some "questions from a friend" that turned out to be less than an honest portrayal of his own position. Here are his "questions" and my responses at the time.

------

So to the questions (?) from your friend:

> 1. Over millenia the earth has been through numerous natural warming and cooling cycles. Scientifically we cannot explain the causes.
>

There are two things wrong with this claim. First the "over millenia" bit - the typical time-scale for Earth's temperature cycles in recent history is around 100,000 years, not a few mere "millenia". Wikipedia has some nice graphs on this stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ice_Age_Temperature.png

The last ice age did end about 11,000 years ago, and before that it was certainly very cold on Earth - about 6 degrees C colder than now, global average. But before that it hadn't been as warm as the present era since about 125,000 years ago.

Going back much further in time, millions of years to hundreds of millions of years, there are even wider temperature variations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png

and it's been as warm, globally, as 12 degrees C more than now, as far as we can measure, during the Eocene about 50 million years ago.

So what's wrong with "over millenia"? It downplays the length of times involved. Over any single thousand years, as far as we can measure, the fastest temperature changes in the past have been at most about 1 degree C. Until now, where temperatures are rising at between 0.1 and 0.2 degrees C per *decade*, which is 10 to 20 degrees per millenium. And that rate is accelerating. The rate of change is what's so unprecedented.

The second thing wrong is the statement "scientifically we cannot explain the causes". I'm not even sure what it's supposed to mean, but there's an awful lot of science that explains exactly why the temperatures changed during the ice ages, and carbon dioxide has a lot to do with it. The ultimate cause of the ice age cycles (100,000 years or so) is variations in the energy we get from the sun due to changes in Earth's motion through space. This triggers an increase or decrease in temperatures directly, which indirectly affects the greenhouse gases through various feedback mechanisms, leading to the large temperature swings observed. If you leave out the effects of greenhouse gases you cannot explain the large temperature changes of the ice age cycles. And CO2 can be measured for hundreds of thousands of years in the past:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr-2.png

>
> Today, science cannot provide evidence that the earth is not simply going through another cycle, an extremeley mild one at that.

Science can indeed prove it's not "simply another cycle" - that's what the IPCC analysis is all about. And as I mentioned, the rate of change right now is not "extremely mild". So far the temperature changes have been small, but that's because we've only had a few decades with at near the present warming rate - continue that on for another century and it'll be very far from "mild". And even now the temperature changes are clearly related to all sorts of anomalous weather that's bothering people now.

> During the Ordovician period (440 million years ago) there was 16 times more carbon dioxide in the astmosphere than there is today and an ice sheet near the South Pole 80% the size of current Antarctica.

I don't know about the ice sheet (wasn't Antarctica in a quite different location 440 million years ago? What was this ice sheet resting on?) But the other parts are certainly accurate: the Ordovician is the "O" on this graph:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png

You'll notice that the Ordovician had both a glacial period and a "hot" period. Here's CO2 on about the same time scale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png

But there's clearly a lot of uncertainty about such tremendously ancient time periods. What was the sun's output back then? How has Earth's orbit changed? The less you know, the harder it is to make any claim that's relevant to today's situation.


> During the Cretaceous period carbon dioxide levels were eight times current levels yet the global temperature was about the same as today.

Actually, CO2 during the Cretaceous, (the "C" on the last graph) seems to have been about the same as today. Again this is such ancient history - for example the shape of Earth's continents was completely different then - that it's hard to draw any conclusions.

>
> 2. From 1940-1975 greenhouse gases skyrocketed while the global temperature decreased. In the early 1970's the earth was
> cooling and the now debunked hysteria was that man was the cause. Are we not being knee-jerk hystericals again?

First, "greenhouse gases skyrocketed" is a misleading (and incorrect as stated) statement. That is a period when the *rate of emission* of greenhouse gases from human actions increased greatly, but the *total quantity of greenhouse gases* (primarily CO2) increased at a slow but increasing rate, because what matters is the accumulation of the gas, not the instantaneous rate at which we release it. Which is why it's going to be so hard to fix this problem, because we've accumulated so much and it won't go away for hundreds to thousands of years, if we just stop emitting it. The high rate of emissions from 1975 has stuck with us and increased somewhat since then, so the accumulation has continued to increase, and continued to accelerate its increase in recent years.

By 1940 the amount that had accumulated in the atmosphere from human activities was relatively small, and had little effect on temperatures. By 1975 that had begun to turn around, and since then as the total accumulation has increased, the effects have gotten clearer and clearer.

Also, the "cooling" during those years is now understood to have been caused by other human emissions - primarily of sulfate particles (that also caused acid rain) which temporarily overwhelmed the small greenhouse effect of the time. The "skyrocketing" that happened during those years was not only an increase in CO2 emissions, but also an increase of these sulfates. The thing is - the sulfates *don't* accumulate, they get rained out. So when we stopped our "skyrocketing" during the oil shock years, the sulfate levels remained steady or dropped while CO2 kept on going up. Hence: warming.

All very easy to explain, scientifically. :-)

>
> 3. Mars is experiencing global warming without the assistance of humans.

Mars also has an atmosphere of almost entirely carbon dioxide :-) Actually this claim is based on 2-3 Martian years worth of observations of Mars' south pole. We really know very very little about the weather on Mars; the quantity of data is perhaps a millionth of what we have about Earth. Once again, making analogies based on something we know very little about is a very shaky proposition.
>
> 4. How is the debate over, how is there scientific consensus, when nearly 20,000 reputable scientists have testified that there is no scientific evidence that human activity is a factor in global warming?

Hmm, where did 20,000 "reputable scientists" "testify" on this? There was some sort of glossy petition that went around about 15 years ago (before there was nearly as much overwhelming evidence as we have now). Is that what this is based on? I even received a copy of the petition for me to sign - not only was I not working scientifically in any remotely connected field, I was hardly a seasoned "reputable" professional at the time! I've not heard of anything of this sort recently. There are certainly a handful of scientists who continue to dispute human influence on climate, but almost all of those who are actual active scientists in climate were involved in contributing to the IPCC report - which is why it's actually a very conservative document on the state of the science.

>
> 5. Global temperature is more closely aligned with solar activity than greenhouse gases.

This is an odd statement - for example, look at the ice age CO2 and temperature graphs. Looks like pretty strong correlation. Of course, the *driving* factors on temperature (the ultimate causes) were not the greenhouse gases then, but sunlight and Earth's tectonic activity (volcanos and movements of the continents) which in turn affected greenhouse gas levels.

That we have introduced a new driving factor - human activity that's producing more greenhouse gases - is what the fuss is all about.

Anonymous said...

Regarding Arthur's comment, Chapman's statement that the Cretaceous temperatures were about the same as today is singularly ill-informed. During most of the Cretaceous, both poles were essentially ice free, there were lemurs living in Spitsbergergen and palm trees in Siberia. Old data said the tropics were not MUCH warmer than today, but that was found to be spurious, around the year 2000. Modern tropical proxies support temperatures of 35C or even more.

And indeed, the Ordovician is a very long time, and we don't have good time resolution on CO2 throughout the period; for that matter, the error bars on Ordovician CO2 are too large to allow a definitive statement on climate sensitivity. Anyway, most of the Ordovician was warm, with a brief glaciation appearing only at the end. That took something like 15 million years to set in, plenty of time to draw down atmospheric CO2.

Anonymous said...

By the way, I'll see Eli'z 8 aces and raise him with Alexander Cockburn, who writing in the Nation claimed that global warming was due to heat escaping from the interior of the Earth. I only learned about Mr. Cockburn's profound work when he was quoted at me by Mark Morano in an attempt to refute my claim that having peer reviewed publications was a good indication of who could be counted as a "prominent scientist." (in contrast to the way the term was used in the Inhofe 400 list.)

Marion Delgado said...

Sadly, Arthur, it's clear you know next to nothing about Astrophysics!.

Global Temperature is an Aries. Solar Activity is a Leo. Both are, as you should have noticed, Fire Signs.

Whereas, Greenhouse Gases? All Air Signs, mostly Geminis.

The closer alignment of Global Temperature with Solar Activity is prima facie apparent.

And you call yourself a scientist???

Arthur said...

Thanks to raypierre for some clarifications of my comments on Chapman - just to be clear, I wrote all that back in August, when I was a little more ignorant on some issues :-)

Am I the only one here to have actually had a run-in with Chapman before? He claimed to have given talks on climate at MIT and quite a few other places... Sort of an anti-Al Gore apparently.

EliRabett said...

Man, this is a hard game, but sure enough Big Dan comes through with a boost from the Roger

Anonymous said...

Truly, Big Dan doth radiate with pure stupidity. Sparkling, shimmering, scintillating stupidity.

But when it comes to the stupidity of all stupidities, let it be known that there's still a contender: if Big Dan's post describes the problem, the Jaldhar H. Vyas's post describes the solution.

John Mashey said...

bi: I don't think that wins, because Vyas has a legitimate point, although probably not the one meant.

Would you agree that invading Iraq caused *less* oil to be shipped than if Saddam had remained?

[And actually, wells can be damaged by bad management, in which case they actually yield less.] Hence, that invasion may have deferred or even "sequestered" some CO2... depending on how much oil was used for the invasion compared with normal peace-time uses.

Anonymous said...

I'm outclassed.

Unless you'll accept either a box of frogs or a bag of hammers, I have nothing to match the links compiled here.

CobblyWorlds.

Anonymous said...

Someone (Eli?) should compile a list of the moron links, make said list readily accessible and highly visible and give it a title:

Something like: "Links your Mom would have warned you to avoid like the plague"

Anonymous said...

Big Dan is highly suspect, Eli.

No one can be that stupid, can they?

This points put a problem with the game: potential for fraud.

I am not accusing Eli, but how do we know that someone did not just cerate a stupid comment as a sock puppet and then link to it as the most moronic thing?

After all, I could think up all kinds of moronic stuff and put it in a comment (sometimes do, albeit unintentially)

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 7:36,

“Potential for fraud” should be considered synonymous with “internet”. (Actually it should also be considered synonomous with "life", "Radio", "TV", "elections", "actors", "propaganda"…you get the idea).

A good example is that someone may have thought you were being serious.

…oops.

Arch Stanton

BTW,, my sack of rocks is bigger than Cobbly’s bag of hammers. Does that mean I am winning now?

Anonymous said...

Are there any peer review papers on bad Karma?

Moron Mouse

Anonymous said...

Anon 7:36am,

"After all, I could think up all kinds of moronic stuff and put it in a comment"

Not true. My experience tells me that you simply can't out-moron the professional morons. You can try, but they'll surpass you with almost zero effort.

Indeed, Big Dan now has a new contender which none can fake: the "Heartland 500" list.