Sambal

I guess I better post my analysis of the M&M critique of modern paleoclimatology, started here, continued here, here and here, before it’s completely irrelevant. The replies have started to get published, as RealClimate and the WSJ report. The M&M GRL paper, available here, is their first and only paper to appear in a science journal. It spends about half its space on their phantom hockey stick theory, and the other half introduces a Monte Carlo analysis for reassessing the error bars for the reconstructed temperature series. I also skimmed their latest contribution to Energy and Environment, but didn’t see any new issues. This will be my last post on climate skeptics, I promise.

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Salon thinks so. The market disagrees, though the price, now at 0.65, has been dropping.

Reading about the NYT’s Judith Miller and her trip to the Big House to protect her source on the Plame leak (AP), and I couldn’t help but wonder why? Why do it? I sure wouldn’t go to jail for my employer. Heck, I’d probably be more likely to call up and volunteer info to a prosecutor about my employer if I had any. (Perhaps that’s why they never tell me anything interesting). So why did she spend 85 days in jail to protect Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, especially after the guy from Time caved to the prosecutor, and Robert Novak, the fellow NYT columnist who printed the leak in the first case, was apparently singing all the way along?

And then I realized: she’s from New York. Look at it through the lens of Mafia culture, omerta and all that, and it makes perfect sense. It’s actually a career move. She has now gone to the big house to protect a source. Prosecutors and judges told her what to do, and she refused. No way, not unless it’s on my terms. And guess what? After a year of negotiation, after 85 days in jail, it’s the prosecutors and judges who caved. She won. She’s now a made woman, she’s untouchable, and everyone knows it. Time in jail as a badge of honor in the loyalty driven culture of journalism.

Organized crime, rap music, and journalism… any other fields where doing time is a career move? Oh yeah, peace activism.

ADDED: And how could I have forgotten Martha Stewart? A little time in the clink was apparently just the thing to give her formerly prissy CEO image that down-home touch.