Tom Bodett Didn’t Leave The Lights On For Me At The Motel 6

July 2, 2012 | Filed under Personal,Weather | Posted by

Saturday up and down the Mid-Atlantic region was a nightmare of power outages and stifling heat. Over one million residences in the DC/Baltimore region were without power and countless more in other states from Friday evenings derecho storm, which basically a no notice hurricane. Once the reality of an extended outage dawned on people they began flocking to hotels. By Saturday night you couldn’t find a vacant room for 150 miles in any direction from Washington, DC.

Into this abyss I journeyed – pre-paid reservation in hand to the Motel 6 in Ashland, Virginia. Ashland exists, apparently, solely to bunk interstate travelers and guest at the popular Kings Dominion amusement park nearby. It was a 2 hour drive to get to this remote outpost, but the beacon of an air-conditioned room was strong for my youngest son. My wife and the older boys were having a slumber party in the basement, but our youngest was having no part of it. Every time we returned to the house Saturday he had a fit. I can’t say I blame him, there was no power and it was over 100 degrees outside. The top floor of the house was 90 degrees according to the thermostat. The basement was still comfortable, in the 70′s, and the main floor was hot, but not as bad as the upstairs rooms.

He and I set out for the hotel as a father-son adventure. It turned into a nightmare, at least for me. He enjoyed the whole trip…

When we got to the Motel 6 around 10pm I went to the check-in desk and gave my name and confirmation. Hmmm, no record. “Did you book on Expedia?” the overmatched manager Sam asked. Not only had I booked via Expedia I had already paid. Seemed like a slam dunk.

“No, we cancel all Expedia reservations.” he said in is broken English. “We are all sold out and they keep sending. I tried to call them to stop sending, but I don’t get through.”

Now if you’re like me you’re thinking that this is a Seinfeld-esqe moment…

We most definitely had some conversations about them knowing how to take reservations, but not hold a reservation. But when you book a room and the hotel doesn’t honor it, but keeps selling rooms you’re kind of screwed. This being Motel 6 and Expedia’s problem – not mine – I spent an hour on the phone with Expedia while they looked all over the East Coast for a room for me. That’s pretty much how I know there were no rooms available – the poor Expedia supervisor was reduced to calling hotels while I was on hold as the online systems that Expedia and Hotels.com used had pretty clearly been overcome by events.

Eventually a room was found in Newport News, Virginia which was an hour farther south. We rolled in there after midnight by that point wishing we’d stuck in out at the slumber party.

What was shocking to me was the number of people who came to the Motel 6 while I was on the phone looking for a room. Do people really do this any more? I guess some people do, but Saturday those people were totally out of luck. I have to imagine that there were a lot of people sleeping in cars Saturday night.

That night I booked the entire family into a Springhill Suites room near our house through Friday. I can cancel the extra days when power comes back, so it really is the best situation for us. The kids are enjoying free breakfast, an indoor pool, and air-conditioned room.

As for Motel 6, they can take their “light” and shove it up their ass… They’re now on my “do not patronize under any circumstances” list.

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Posted by on July 2, 2012.
Filed under Personal, Weather.
Kevin founded Wizbang in 2003. He still contributes occasionally and handles all the technical and design work for the site.

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  • GarandFan

    Isn’t it amazing what you can do via a computer………and what a computerized system can do to you?

    Wonder what our forefathers would make of us today?

    • jim_m

      They would not think very much of us I am afraid:

      George Washington, On Cursing, Orderly Book of the Army Under the Command of Washington, (August 3 1770):

      The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked
      practice of profane cursing and swearing, a vice heretofore little known
      in an American army, is growing into a fashion; he hopes the officers
      will, by example as well as influence, endeavor to check it, and that
      both they and the men will reflect that we can have little hope of the
      blessing of Heaven on our arms, if we insult it by impiety and folly;
      added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without any temptation,
      that every man of sense and character detests and despises it.

      Extract from the Orderly Book of the army under command of Washington, dated at Head Quarters, in the city of New York (3 August 1770); reported in American Masonic Register and Literary Companion, Volume 1 (1829), p. 163.

      Their objections would start with our personal behavior and go on from there.

      • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

        You might want to check your dates and/or sourcing on that…

        • jim_m

          Source posted.

          Although I admit to being puzzled myself. I found this quote with the associated date in several places. However, Washington was still a Colonel in 1772 and was not officially associated with the military from 1758 to 1775.

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            Which matches my recollection of his military career and causes me to suspect the 1770 date in the quoted material. I also seem to recall that the Continental Army wasn’t formed until after the first shots were fired on Lexington Green in April of 1775.

  • http://www.wizbangblog.com David Robertson

    ”
    The kids are enjoying free breakfast . . .”
    Yeah, right. As if nobody has to pay for that breakfast.

    • Guest

      Just walk up to the kids, grab the waffle out of their mouth, and slap them for DARING to take a free breakfast that OTHERS HAVE PAID FOR!!!!!!

      Or… you could get a life, and worry about things more important than some kid getting a free waffle, you know….

      • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

        DERP!

      • http://www.wizbangblog.com David Robertson

        Leave it to Grumpy to completely miss my point.

      • Vagabond661

        If you want to compare this to healthcare, the kid will need to demand that the hotel cover his chicken nuggets for lunch.

    • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

      Price is built into the room cost. It helps to search out the good places on road trips – Drury Inns have free wifi, breakfast, AND dinner, with booze for adults. (Weak, watery booze, and only two drinks, but yet better than no booze at all.) And the prices are pretty competitive, especially when travelling with a teenager in tow.

      (We tried strapping him on top, but he kept working the latch and getting himself free…)

      • Guest

        (We tried strapping him on top, but he kept working the latch and getting himself free…)

        Mitt Romney can offer you some tips there.

        (You set ‘em up. I knock ‘em down.)

        • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

          LOL. It’d be difficult to wrestle him into a carrier at this point. Far easier to persuade him to ride in the back.

      • jim_m

        Seriously. Teenagers are supposed to be strapped to the hood like a deer. No wonder you’re having trouble.

        • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

          We tried that, but I was worried about braking too hard and having him slip down… then I’d run over him and damage the tires.

          Sigh. There’s always tradeoffs…

  • SteveCrickmore075

    But don’t dare mention climate change and global warming and lack of planning for what will be a bigger and bigger problem in the future! And this is the anticapated consequence! Why? ”

    “If you mention climate change to them, it’s like a big red flag,” he says.
    “A barrier goes up. That’s the way it is here in the Virginia.”,,,,
    They fear measures needed to curb climate change would hurt the economy,
    threaten private property, and harm commercial and industrial interests.

    “Here in Virginia there is very little political will to address the
    mitigation side of things – reducing our carbon footprint, reducing greenhouse
    gas emissions,” says Carl Hershner, who studies coastal resources management at
    the Virginia Institute of Marine Science
    “There is a high degree of scepticism in the political and the general
    public.”

    Virginia’s attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli, has waged an
    aggressive public battle against the Obama administration’s efforts to rein in
    greenhouse gas emissions, which he said would drive up electricity costs and
    kill jobs in the state’s coal industry.

    • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

      People live above the Arctic circle. They live at the equator. We adapt to conditions – as do animals.

      And the Sun’s got much more effect on global warming than humanity.

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/02/the-sun-has-changed-its-character/

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/02/co2-is-greening-the-planet-african-savannahs-getting-a-makeover-to-forests/

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/30/memo-to-doubtersi-was-tempted-to-say-deniersco2-is-plant-food/

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/28/the-uhis-of-texas-are-upon-you/

      Have to find something else to get humanity to voluntarily de-industrialize – ‘AGW’ simply isn’t going to do it. People are bored with it.

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/28/newsbytes-world-cooling-to-global-warming/

      See, the problem was, it was presented as an OMG DISASTER we must do somethingnownownow!!!! But the people who were presenting it as a disaster weren’t acting like it, and when Al Gore says we’re all gonna drown because the ice is melting, then goes and buys a seaside mansion, you can perhaps excuse us for thinking it’s a steaming pile of crap you and the rest of the AGW profiteers are trying to feed us.

      You point at models as saying that there will be 4, 6, 8, 12 degree increases in the next century – then don’t let the modeling software out to be examined and we find the data sets have been ‘adjusted’ and massaged to the point where the numbers going in don’t resemble the original readings at all.

      You know the saying – garbage in, garbage out. Models aren’t reality – and reality laughs at models.

      (Especially when they trip on their ridiculous footware and fall off the catwalk…)

      • SteveCrickmore075

        “Models aren’t reality – and reality laughs at models”. Ask Kevin, if he is laughing? “Saturday up and down the Mid-Atlantic region was a nightmare of power outages and stifling heat”.

        • jim_m

          Stevie, There happens to be a difference between a model that predicts tomorrow’s weather and one that predicts the next hundred years worth of weather. There is also a difference in a model that predicts the local weather and one that predicts global climate.

          Apparently you are unable to understand the distinction. You are still confusing weather with climate. One heat wave in the US does not provide any evidence global warming.

          The US is less than 2% of the surface area of the globe and the DC area is only a fraction of that and you are demanding that we accept a local weather event as proof positive that it is representative of global climate? I think not

          • SteveCrickmore075

            It might be one heat wave, to you but, it is the probability and increased frequency of more and more heatwaves than turns weather into climate. When swaths of western US begin to resemble death valley (which is even getting hotter), your descendents might want to peruse where you stood on this issue.- you thought it was still a religion- of the world’s elite scientists, despite all evidence and their predictions bearing true.

            “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. “The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.”

            Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn’t listen. So it’s I told-you-so time, he said…

            The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            We’re shocked, shocked we tell you, to discover you are an accolyte of manbearpig! /LouisRenaultMode

          • SteveCrickmore075

            “What was shocking to me was the number of people who came to the Motel 6 while I was on the phone looking for a room”. funny, Rodney, maybe, you should mock you’re own publisher while your at it?

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            We’re even more shocked, more shocked we tell you , to discover you are humorless when it comes to your prophet manbearpig. /LouisRenaultMode

          • Guest

            Haven’t you noticed? Rodney is an equal opportunity troll.

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            DERP!

          • jim_m

            Yeah, kind of like they were predicting more hurricanes with global warming, until they didn’t happen. Again: weather is not climate and it only appears to be considered as such when it supports warmism.

            Wildfires in the west are not due to global warming, but due to bad forestry management that has been criticized for several decades now. Funny how ideology increasingly clouds scientific judgement these days.

          • SteveCrickmore075

            To repeat “The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.” but he is only a expert.

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            …who forgot to mention the Forrest Service refusing to allow control burns or other clearing of accumulated fuel in the National Forrests of the area.

            We’re shocked, shocked we tell you, to discover your fervor for manbearpig exceeds your honesty. /LouisRenaultMode

          • jim_m

            Yep. The problems that were causing wildfires in the west for the last 30 years are no longer causing them even though the issues have not been addressed. The new reason is global warming because that fits with the left’s religious agenda.

          • jim_m

            You might also note that these are a single year combination and not a multi-year, sustained trend. Once again you are taking weather and claiming that it is climate. Are we seeing the same issues in Europe? In Asia? It is summer throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Unless you can show uniformity in the change you are simply pointing out regional weather patterns.

          • SteveCrickmore075

            You might also note that these are a single year combination and not a multi-year, sustained trend. And what about last year, 2011 and then there is 2010. This was written in November 2011

            Extreme weather has certainly taken a toll on the insurance industryas insurers have struggled to mitigate the impact of two consecutive years (2010, 2011) of disastrous events, some of which are being linked to climate change by the industry. These disasters – floods, hurricanes and droughts – have contributed to a spike in health care costs in recent years, according to the report.

            The authors of the report suggest that the issue lies in climate change. As the planet warms, natural disasters are expected to become more frequent and powerful. The issue is shrouded in controversy, but the insurance industry has a long history of taking the possibility of climate change very seriously.

            </ and this is the consevative insurance industry putting their money where their mouth is!

          • jim_m

            They never measure damages in constant dollars. of course the recent year is the most costly on record. It’s called inflation.

            Of course the pricing surge is due to AGW. The slide of the dollar against other currencies would have nothing to do with it. Sheesh!

          • SteveCrickmore075

            Climate deniers who have stymied action in Congress and confused the public (no proof or evidence)– like the tobacco industry did before them — need to be held accountable for their systematic misrepresentation of the science, their misuse and falsification of data, and their trickery.
            The conservative (and economically driven) insurance industry understands the reality of data and observations: Munich Re (one of the world’s leading reinsurers) has said:
            “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge.”

            it is ironic that America, second only to Australia (the real canary in the coal mine) which is suffering from global warming the most of developed countries, has the highest percentage of global warmer deniers of the first world, well behind europe!

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            Still exuding carbon we note… manbearpig is very disappointed with you.

          • jim_m

            Inflation happens to be an economic reality.

            People used to think that comets predicted disaster too. You might as well quote a court astrologer saying that the failure of the harvest was due to the emanations from the comet. They have just traded one superstition for another. Real data shows that global warming is BS. Real data has shown that climate models are non-predictive. No AGW prediction of warming or quantitative prediction of sea rise or ice melt has been borne out.

            A theory that cannot predict outcomes is not scientific by definition. AGW cannot predict outcomes. AGW is not science but religion.

          • SteveCrickmore075

            So medicine is not scientific, or it is not based on science because it cannot predict with a certainty, when you will die or from what? Why bother to accept any lifestyle advice from doctors ,why give it? Smoking has no effect on lung cancer rates, this is what your lot was saying for years, because doctors couldn’t predict exactly who or when they would get lung cancer, (what happened to that strugggle, no guess which side of the debate you were on in that one, jim, prove me wrong) the same lot who are still funding and supporting Heartland Institute the loudest anti global warming think tank, full of second rate scientists and lawyers with no climate science expertise.. Give me one first rate scientific society or body who supports what you are saying and I will eat my hat. The last one were the geologists who questioned the efficacy of AGA `human induced global warming, and they gave that up14 years ago`.

          • jim_m

            It is not necessary to predict with absolute certainty. In biology (which medicine is part of) if you can reach a high degree of statistical significance then you have sufficient predictability. You cannot predict whether or not an individual will get lung cancer but you can predict how many within a population given sufficient information about their exposure to risk. You can also predict the outcomes of treatments of a population but you cannot predict which individual will be in the survivor cohort and which will not.

            That is science. I can predict how many will survive their cancer. I can make a good prediction about how many may even get cancer. It is about populations not persons.

            AGW on the other hand is not science at all. It doesn’t predict anything with any accuracy. It does not forecast global temperature correctly because ave global temp has not increased since 1998. It cannot predict severe weather because they were predicting increase hurricanes and then we got almost none. Warmists have now gone so far as to say that increased cold winters are the result of AGW. Please. It’s religion.

            As for scientific organizations they are continually in a battle with their membership. The APS and ACS have had big fights between membership and the leadership with the members denouncing public statements in favor of AGW.

            Of course your demand for a “first rate scientific society” is self referential. Any society that you would consider “first rate” will by definition be supportive of global warming. Any that rejects it you will declare not to be first rate.

          • SteveCrickmore075

            Of course, it is not an absolute prediction..who could have predicted that China would have not ninety percent but ninety times the amount of cars it had in 1990, twenty years later. Unfortunately the results of climate forecasting have been, in the main in underestimating rather than overestimating the accumulation of carbon dioxide and AGW global warming temperature effects. Because of EL Nino, yes there was a big spike in 1997 temperatures. And the Arctic is having its highest ice free summer above the previous highest, 2010.

          • jim_m

            If AGW were predictive then it could take the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and predict temperature change. It cannot. The models that it uses have failed to predict the global temp for over a decade now. I could buy that they can miss on a year or two, but they fail on the trend. It isn’t about predicting the exact temp it is about the trend and they can’t. It isn’t science.

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            Priest, reduce thine own carbon footprint to zero!

          • lasveraneras

            NEWS FLASH: Your six year old child knows as much about “mathematical models” and climate predictions as James Hansen of NASA and other “climate experts”!

            This from a June 13th article by a statistician in the Financial Post:

            “A 2011 study in the Journal of Forecasting took the same
            data set and compared model predictions against a “random walk”
            alternative, consisting simply of using the last period’s value in each
            location as the forecast for the next period’s value in that location.
            The test measures the sum of errors relative to the random walk. A
            perfect model gets a score of zero, meaning it made no errors. A model
            that does no better than a random walk gets a score of 1. A model
            receiving a score above 1 did worse than uninformed guesses. Simple
            statistical forecast models that have no climatology or physics in them
            typically got scores between 0.8 and 1, indicating slight improvements
            on the random walk, though in some cases their scores went as high as
            1.8.

            The climate models, by contrast, got scores ranging from 2.4 to 3.7,
            indicating a total failure to provide valid forecast information at the
            regional level, even on long time scales. The authors commented: “This
            implies that the current [climate] models are ill-suited to localized
            decadal predictions, even though they are used as inputs for
            policymaking.”

            Re AGW Alarmism: the [scientific] hits just keep comin’.

      • SteveCrickmore075

        So I suppose the US Navy, were duped as well, to use your words, to believe that global warming is a “steaming pile of crap” and” fell off the catwalk” on one of their ships?

        At Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval base, the US Navy is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to replace aging piers with new ones better able to withstand the rising water.

        “Sea level rise (I wonder why) was having a measurable impact on the readiness of the ships,” says retired Capt Joseph Bouchard, who was commander of the base from 2000-2003. “And that’s unacceptable! “(but it is to you, JLawson)

        You will say: we don’t know why the oceans are starting to rise, why it is getting warmer, why we’re having more extreme climate events droughts, floods, more wildfires, earlier tornadoes etc things that have been predicted by 97% climate scientists for the last decade. You and you GOP human induced global warming deniers, are much readier to defer to the explanation and remedy of another Virginian Pat Robertson, the confidant of Republican presidents, ex contender himself in 1988, who said after the March tornadoes
        “God doesn’t send tornadoes to hurt people. We call them acts of God, but they’re not. All I can say is, why do you build houses in a place where tornadoes are apt to happen? If enough people were praying He would’ve intervened, you could pray. Jesus stilled the storm, you can still storms.” That is conservative, global warming and climate change policy, fortunately not Obama’s or the US Navy’s .

        • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

          OMG! I didn’t realize I was a HERETIC!

          Please, PLEASE don’t burn me at the stake, oh Grand Master of the AGW Inquisition!

          How DARE I ignore actual evidence?

          http://www.marklynas.org/2012/04/where-sea-level-rise-isnt-what-it-seems/

          And I can see why the Navy would be wanting to replace piers. How long have the things been there, anyway?

          From your article –

          “So the Navy decided to replace the old piers with double-decked piers – one for utilities, the other for the ship operations – with the upper deck 21ft above current sea level.”

          Now, perhaps there’s some credibility in the thinking of a Captain that was released from his position (and or retired 10 years back) who doesn’t have any apparent linkage to that particular
          program – but for some reason, I’m just kind of iffy on that particular purpose as the main reason.

          “Let’s see – if we say there’s a possibility of THIS we can justify THAT, which we normally wouldn’t be able to because money’s tight – and we can make it a lot easier to get cargo and men off ships… Okay, let’s push that idea.”

          Think we’ve had this discussion before. I still think you’re a gullibile sap who’s looking hard to justify your belief. I’ll look at actual sea levels, especially somewhere in the Maldives where there’s no subsidence from sucking out groundwater – and there’s no apparent sea level rise.

          Plus – talk to me about unprecedented warming when they start harvesting wheat on Greenland like the Vikings did. Until then?

          Talk to the hand, bub. And if you’re looking for some sort of ‘religious’ significance to my skepticism – ask yourself this…

          Where does Mother Gaia want the flippin’ thermostat set anyway?

        • SCSIwuzzy

          “There is time to turn the ship around,” says Michael Mann, a former University of Virginia climate scientist, “but there is not a whole lot of time.”

          That’s Mike “Hide the decline” Mann of the discredited hockey stick fame. Odd that when quoting one of the most famous proponents of AGW they don’t identify him as such. Or that he is currently at Penn State, or his seminal work. There is a sidebar mentioning that the VA AG tried to get information on his grant applications, suspecting fraud, but just reading the article you would think Mann is just some local guy…

    • jim_m

      Just another warmist pointing at weather and calling it proof of global warming. You have evidence that the global temperature is currently out of normal variation? Global temps have flatlined since 1998 so do you have evidence that warming is still increasing? I think that the warmists in academia would love to see that because they don’t have it.

      And as JLawson points out: It was warmer in the middle ages than it is today. Care to postulate how their vast industrial nothingness produced so much CO2 that the earth warmed? I suppose you will just provide some BS weasel words on how that was natural but there is no reason to suppose that there are any natural forces going on today which is why no one is bothering to rule them out.

      Warmism is a religion, plain and simple.

  • SteveCrickmore075

    I would like to know when the light bulb goes off in you heads, what is not merely weather but what is the new climate reality that is really occuring now in 2012, as it occurred in 2011, as occurred in 2010 and so on.What would the actual ‘weather’ be like in an ascending pattern the last years, if climate warming was not a hoax, since most of you believe it is.
    We can now admit it: global climate change is one big hoax. But let’s give credit to the special effects experts who have given us wildfires, downpour, and record heat this past month writes Bill McKibben.

    • jim_m

      Linking to a leftwing non-scientist is pretty poor if you intended it for proof.

      How about another example of how the AGW crowd falsifies its data: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/06/noaas-national-climatic-data-center-caught-cooling-the-past-modern-processed-records-dont-match-paper-records/

      Or we could talk about how the left spins record cold as natural but only record warmth as AGW: New York Times Blames 2009′s Record Cold on Natural Factors — But Blamed Record Warmth in 2000 on Man-Made Global Warming! http://climatedepot.com/a/2266/Media-Spin-New-York-Times-Blames-2009s-Record-Cold-on-Natural-Factors–But-Blamed-Record-Warmth-in-2000-on-ManMade-Global-Warming

      Or we could talk in general about the AGW alarmism related to our current heat wave and how similar alarmism has, on scientific reflection, turned out to be just so much left wing BS: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/03/the-kevin-trenberth-seth-borenstein-aided-fact-free-folly-on-the-usa-heat-wave/#more-66704

      Or we could simply refute your BS statement earlier that AGW will turn the world into a vast global desert : http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/02/co2-is-greening-the-planet-african-savannahs-getting-a-makeover-to-forests/#more-66607 Increased CO2 means increased plant growth, or did you manage to fail 6th grade biology?

      • SteveCrickmore075

        not if it is too hot and too dry!

        • jim_m

          Read the article dope. I love how the AGW idiots claim that the polar ice caps will melt and that global temperature will increase yet none of that water will find it’s way into the atmosphere and none of that water will be evidenced as precipitation.

          WTF? And they wonder why we call AGW a religion.

          • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

            I’m starting to think that there’s no way to get through to him. There’s our reality, and his reality – and the two simply do not intersect.

          • jim_m

            It’s a religion. It isn’t based in fact it is based in faith.

            It doesn’t matter what scientific proof you offer because he is incapable of understanding how science works. He is incapable of understanding the concept of predictability. He thinks that predictability means that you should be able to predict the outcome of every event but even modern physics admits to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. That isn’t unscientific it just demonstrates the limits of knowledge.

            His allusion up thread to medicine being unable to predict who will get cancer as being equivalent to AGW being not able to predict climate and is unable to see that medicine does make accurate predictions but on a different scale.

            That is why the warmists are so upset that they cannot cut off debate on the issue by declaring the science “settled”. Of course they fail to realize that real science is never settled. That in real science skepticism is necessary for advancement of knowledge. But the goal isn’t scientific understanding for the warmists. It is control.

          • Guest

            The science is definitely settled. There’s just people who don’t want to believe it for political reasons.

          • jim_m

            Idiot. Look at my point that science is never settled. So you are going to argue with me that the science was settled when we decided that the sun was the center of the universe? Or that the planets orbited around the sun in circles? Or how about the classic that fire was produced by the existence of a material called phlogiston?

            Science is settled only in the minds of religious zealots like you.

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            DERP!

          • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

            “But the goal isn’t scientific understanding for the warmists. It is control.”

            And that’s all its ever been. That’s why it was virtually impossible to pry out info on data sets, and there was no sharing of the code for the models. Everything was proprietary, and they’d be damned if they’d share with the non-believers. Because they’d pick apart the models, and question the data.

            Which is the way science is done.

            Instead, there were pronouncements of DOOM!!!1! if we didn’t do what they said and immediately cut down our carbon emissions. And Al Gore made some damn good money on carbon trading…

            Why, you’d almost think it was all a scam, wouldn’t you?

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            jim_m is right, it’s a matter of FAITH for the disciples of manbearpig.

    • http://www.rustedsky.net JLawson

      You want to know how to convince me about AGW, Steve?

      First – take a look at Ruddiman’s essay on Anthropogenic Methane and pay particular attention to the first set of charts.

      http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Ruddiman2003.pdf

      You’ll note that if it WASN’T for AM, by the interrupted curve – we’d be chest deep in a real ice age. The Warm-Cold cycle based on methane concentrations looks to be about 23,000 years long. And we should be about at the bottom of the cold swing.

      Second – If you look at the GISS dataset, and drop out the ‘adjusted’ stations, and the non-continuous ones – and only focus on the rural stations that have continually reported (being very unlikely to be unaffected by newly built parking lots, air conditioner exhaust, and the like) would you expect the temperature record to go up, or down?

      (Check out Figure 3 here… http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/24/unadjusted-data-of-long-period-stations-in-giss-show-a-virtually-flat-century-scale-trend/)

      “Figure 3: Temperature trends and station counts for all
      US stations in GISS reporting continuously, that is containing at least one
      monthly data point for each year from 1900 to 2000. The slope for the rural
      stations (335 total) is -0.00073 deg/year, and for the other stations (278
      total) -0.00069 deg/year. The monthly data point coverage is above 90%
      throughout except for the very first few years.”

      Having gone through both of those – show me unadjusted records, of equivalent observation quality and duration, where the numbers show an increase. An increase that isn’t attributable to any sort of man-made influence around the observation station, and the station itself is CRN 1 or 2, having less than a 1 C error rating. (Sadly, most surface stations are CRN 3 or higher, with from 1 to 5C error.)

      See http://surfacestations.org/ for an idea of what I’m talking about – and pay special attention to the two stations at the bottom of the page – one well maintained, and one not. There’s a considerable difference in the temperature record.

      You persuade me with facts. You persuade me with good research. You persuade me with evidence – not emotional arguments and blathering about what Pat Robertson says. You persuade me with reproducible results, using ‘unadjusted’ station data and open modeling software so we can SEE the workings of the program, not just dump a pile of numbers in and let it process them unseen.

      (The AGW promoters have been really bad about that – all the way from “We’re not letting you look at our modeling software” to the equivalent of “The dog ate the data sets we used.” That’s not the way to do it.)

      You want to persuade me? Show me it’s science instead of snake oil. That’s all you’ve got to do.

  • StephenPSmith

    Not Motel 6′s fault, it’s Expedia’s…and yours for being such a cheapskate. Hotels will almost always honor resos made through their in-house system. Booking on Expedia or any of those discount clearing-house sites is a crap shoot at the best of times.

  • http://www.wizbangblog.com Maggie Whitton

    As long as it took finding a room, you should have come on over to north east Texas and had free room and board. And we have a pond!