The graph to show next time denialists say global warming has stopped

How Can It Be Warming When It’s (Almost) Always Cooling?
[Via Climate Progress]

The Koch-funded Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) verified three things we already knew:

1. Recent global warming has been “on the high end.”
   
2. It’s accelerating.
3. The data won’t stop the deniers and their media allies from spreading disinformation, including the myth that it has stopped warming.

Figure 1: BEST land-only surface temperature data (green) with linear trends applied to the timeframes 1973 to 1980, 1980 to 1988, 1988 to 1995, 1995 to 2001, 1998 to 2005, 2002 to 2010 (blue), and 1973 to 2010 (red).

Dana of Skeptical Science has a good post on the denier’s latest spin, “Going Down the Up Escalator,” reposted below.

One of the most common misunderstandings amongst climate “skeptics” is the difference between short-term noise and long-term signal.  In fact, “it hasn’t warmed since 1998” is ninth on the list of most-used climate myths, and “it’s cooling” is fifth.

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Because of normal climate oscillations, which sometimes add to the heating trend and sometimes subtract, looking at approximately decade long trends – or shorter – in pretty meaningless. They cherry pick the times warming appears slower due to these weather oscillations but ignore the times when it heats faster.

The data set above was actual;y created by some skeptical scientists. Their conclusions is that the globe is warming. And their work has separated out the true scientific skeptics from the denialists.

Because the denialists continue to attack the work of the skeptical scientists with almost exactly the same arguments they used earlier against all climate researchers.

For someone living in a Cargo Cult World, the narrative is always more important than the data. To a scientist, the data determines the narrative.

What happens when recording artists start sueing to get their fair shar of digital revenue

Fight The Power: Chuck D Sues Universal Music For Hundreds Of Millions In Unpaid Royalties
[Via Techdirt]

When Eminem’s publisher won its lawsuit with Universal Music over how to account for iTunes royalties, we expected a flood of similar litigation, possibly enough to seriously cripple the world’s largest record label. Universal Music insisted that Eminem’s deal was unique and the case was specific only to that, but so far, we’re seeing more and more musicians understanding the implications of the ruling, and filing similar lawsuits. If you don’t recall, the battle came down to the simple question of whether or not an iTunes sale was a sale or if it was a license. Amusingly, in almost all other legal contexts, Universal Music claims that when you “buy” a song at iTunes it’s just a license. But that proved to be UMG’s undoing here — because many of its old contracts had extremely different terms for royalties on “sales” and “licenses.”

Now, there’s a good reason for this. Historically, sales were of things like CDs, where Universal had relatively higher production, storage and distribution costs. So for “sales” (of CDs), the royalty to the musician was lower. “Licenses” generally referred to things like licensing a song for a movie or TV commercial. There, labels were willing to share higher royalties with the artist, and for good reason. The costs to the label of such a license were minimal, and licensing was always a relatively small part of the business.

But, of course, iTunes makes for a weird situation. The labels want to pretend it’s the same thing as selling a CD, and thus they’ve been paying the lower royalty rate. But, in other legal contexts they keep claiming that downloading a song from iTunes is not really a “sale” but merely a “license.” Thus, the basic legal claim from musicians is that for iTunes sales, they deserve the much higher royalty rate (usually closer to 50%, rather than 10% for sales). The court in the Eminem/FBT case said that iTunes songs were licenses… and thus the higher rates applied.

As we noted, when others started suing, this could lead to somewhere around $2 billion that the labels may need to pay out to artists, and the artists are noticing.

The latest to file suit is is Chuck D of Public Enemy, claiming that Universal owes him hundreds of millions of dollars.

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What a surprise. When it suit shame it is a sale. When it doesn’t they call it a license. Except when they call it a license, they owe artists more money.

Hoisted by their own petard. Read the rest of the post to see just how outrageous their ‘deductions’ are before they calculate the royalty.

The artists gets $80 for every 1000 songs sold – by the company’s calculation based on a sale. Based on a license, they owe over $315.

Looks like the media companies rip everyone off. But they continue to act like they are the victims.

Why I do not watch TV news anymore – Conan O’Brien does a gay wedding rake joke

Same Talking, Different Heads: How Not To Localize News
[Via Techdirt]

If you haven’t seen this short clip of a bunch of local TV newscasters all saying the exact same line about Conan O’Brien’s officiating a same-sex marriage on stage in New York City during a show this week, it’s really worth watching just for the mind-numbingly bizarre reaction you have to seeing so many newscasters all repeat the exact line: “Conan O’Brien may be about to push the envelope on late night television.” Or, as O’Brien notes, watch as they each put “their own spin” on the news:

Honestly, it’s hard not to watch that and think that all of the newscasters didn’t receive the identical script. While the phrase is a common one, it’s not that common that it would lead so many newscasters to all use the identical phrasing. It’s possible these are all news affiliates from a single company, who were sent a basic script — but, once again, this seems to highlight the growing irrelevance/ridiculousness of TV news these days. If you’re just going to have 50 different newscasters all read the identical script, why not just have a single newscaster do it, and air it directly on all those other stations.

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The rake joke from the Simpsons Cape Feare episode is a classic of comedy. Extend the initial joke past the point of being unfunny until it is funny again.

Conan, who used to work on the Simpsons, presents the rake joke as satire, demonstrating the absolutely brainless nature of local news. There must be a central producer of the news, sending out the material to huge numbers of news programs to fill in their time.

They do not even put any effort into reframing the piece because that would cost money for writers. No writers, no camera people – yep, many of the cameras are robotically run from the production booth – and only some good looking newsreaders.

Much better to get the news via more interesting, better written and more newsworthy online sources.