Several real climate scientists contacted by Gizmodo felt Smith was not as up to snuff on his research as he claimed to be, however. “These comments reflect the. The internet is inherently deceptive. While I know most of you assume I write from a luxurious, sumptuously upholstered cabin in a perpetually globe-circling zeppelin. ATLAS is an incredible machine. There’s no way around that. First unveiled in 2013, the humanoid robot can now walk around autonomously, move boxes around, and. The official PlayStation®Store - Buy the latest PlayStation® games, movies and TV shows for your PS4™, PS3™ and PS Vita.

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These Climate Scientists Think House Science Chair Lamar Smith Has No Idea What He's Talking About. Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Science Committee who also happens to believe global warming might actually be a really good thing, flew off the hook this week.

The cause? The New York Times publicized a draft version of a federal scientific report which climate scientists worry Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to suppress or doctor. In a statement, Smith argued the “alarmist media is at it again” and tried to one- up the thousands of studies referred to in the report, suggesting he knows better than the tens of thousands of scientists who wrote them.

Seriously, Smith is done with the whole Republican “I’m not a scientist” line. In his telling, Smith has practically done the research himself, with his mighty brain striking like thunder at dubious scientific methodology.“In numerous instances, the report fails to examine some of the most current data,” Smith wrote. For example, the impact of El Nino on the climate is completely downplayed and misconstrued to conflict with historical reports.

Moreover, this alarmist reporting attempts to falsely link extreme weather events to climate change, when the data has never suggested this. Making temperature predictions far into the future has proven to be nothing more than speculation, and goes against the principles of scientific integrity.”The report published by the Times requires final sign- off by 1. White House, so Smith might not have much say in its final conclusions. But he did seem to confirm a general Republican objective of cooking the books, writing, “We should treat this document for what it is, an unfinished draft that requires serious revision.

To report it in any other way is just fake news.”Several real climate scientists contacted by Gizmodo felt Smith was not as up to snuff on his research as he claimed to be, however.“These comments reflect the utterances of someone who either doesn’t have the faintest understanding of the science, or has total contempt for scientific truth,” Michael Mann, climatologist, geophysicist and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, told Gizmodo.“To conflate El Nino (which is a climate fluctuation that occurs on timescales of a few years) with climate change (which describes trends over decades) is the last refuge of the climate change confusionist,” he added. And given that model forecasts made decades ago successfully predicted the human- caused warming that has occurred since, the only thing that is ‘nothing more than speculation’ and in defiance of ‘the principles of scientific integrity’ is Lamar Smith’s fossil- fueled attack on the scientific discipline.”Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor and regular Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contributor, told Gizmodo that Smith “seems to be reading from the contrarian script rather than listening to climate scientists.”“For example: Increases in the intensity and frequency of extreme heat including deadly heat waves such as the ones that killed about 4. Europeans in 2. 00.

Russia in 2. 01. 0 have been convincingly linked to climate change,” Oppenheimer added. Our ability to attribute the characteristics of some types of extreme events to climate change has been confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences. Does Smith know better than the best US scientists?”Richard Alley, another Penn State geosciences professor and expert on the Earth’s cryosphere, noted Smith was correct the report was a draft finished some time ago, so it could not include “the absolutely most recent data.”But Alley suggested reading a 2. National Academy of Sciences report that he wrote showed “some extreme weather events can be attributed to climate change, in the sense that we have made them more likely, and more of them or more extreme ones are occurring.”“This does not say that every extreme can or should be blamed on climate change, but some events are linked, with high confidence,” Alley added. Kevin Trenberth, a senior climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and lead author of three IPCC scientific assessments, called Smith’s remarks “woeful ignorance, openly advertised!” and “certainly fake, or should I say, completely wrong.”“The impact of El Nino is well known and is indeed taken into account,” Trenberth wrote. It does not undermine the fact that 2.

Yes, both were influenced by the big El Nino, but 2. He added there is “abundant evidence” the recent increase in extreme weather, like Hurricane Sandy and widespread flooding in the southern US, was the result of human- inducted climate change.“The statistics for heavy rains increasing are very robust, although the effect has been greatest in the Northeast,” Trenberth added.

Meanwhile stronger droughts (think California), and now year- round wild fire seasons, cause tremendous hardship and disruption and monetary losses. The huge flood along the Front Range in the Denver- Boulder area in 2. The scientific evidence is overwhelming, and scientific integrity has everything to do with scientists crying out a warning,” Trenberth concluded. The four scientists who spoke with Gizmodo are just a tiny fragment of the greater climate science community, which nearly universally agrees humans are responsible for climate change, which virtually all of them also agree could have disastrous impacts on the human species. Smith is just one dude who won a few elections in Texas and has no formal scientific qualifications whatsoever, but who does take an awful lot of money from the oil and gas industry. It doesn’t really take a scientist to figure this one out, but you should probably listen to what they have to say anyway.

How To Uncover Online Car Escrow Scams. The internet is inherently deceptive. While I know most of you assume I write from a luxurious, sumptuously upholstered cabin in a perpetually globe- circling zeppelin, the truth is that I’m usually stationed on a damp mattress crammed into the back of a wrecked Econoline.

In much the same way, a car buying website with a name you trust may, in fact, be a total scam. Like this fake Edmunds site is. Neither the scam nor many of these sites are new, exactly, but they’re still very much around and many are designed well enough that they can be deceptive to many car buyers. What’s the scam? The basic scam is pretty simple; the site claims to be a respected escrow service, to add a layer of security when you’re paying a lot of money for a car to a stranger. Here’s how a site that seems to be part of the respected Edmunds. Buyer and Seller agree to term.

Buyer submits payment to Edmunds. Seller or Edmunds delivers the vehicle to buyer. Buyer approves the vehicle. Edmunds releases payment to seller. The scam here is that the escrow site is first, not associated with Edmunds, and second, the escrow site isn’t an escrow site at all, just some jackass who will take your money and keep it. A reader sent us the link to this particular site, the one that claims to be part of Edmunds so that’s the one we’ll focus on now, but remember, there’s more of these sites.

Looking at the site, it apes the look and feel of the normal Edmunds site pretty well: As you can see, the fake site mimics the Edmunds logo, top navigation bar design, typography, and overall look and feel. It’s not quite perfect, but to a great many car buyers, it’s more than close enough. Even the URL of the site is deceptive. The real Edmunds is www. Edmunds escrow site is www. To many users, seeing the edmunds.

Edmunds. It’s not, of course. The actual web domain is the inv- sll. WHOIS on that domain, we find this: Last we checked, Edmunds is not owned and operated by a Manchester woman named Samantha. I went on the fake Edmunds escrow site to see what I could find out from the online tech support there, and decided to ask them if the site was affiliated with Edmunds. Since I’m a suspicious bastard, that actually wasn’t good enough for me, so I contacted Edmunds. Edmunds- affiliated escrow site with the URL I was visiting. Here was my response: Hi Jason, Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

No, Edmunds has no affiliation with this site - unfortunately, this is a fairly common scam that impacts many third party shopping sites. When these pop up, we work with our legal team to notify the appropriate authorities, but the best prevention is consumer education. We regularly update consumer advice articles warning consumers of the red flags, and our shopper support team also posts updates as well (links below).

I’ll be sure to forward this over to our Legal team. Hope this helps, Nicole Shocking, right? Of course, the whole thing is a scam to take your money and keep you from getting the cars you wanted with that money, possibly one of the worst crimes a human can commit. Nicole of Edmunds had a good point about consumer education, which is exactly why I’m writing this now: these sites exist, and we should all be aware of them, and not let them get away with this shit. Adding another layer of deception, the fake site provides a section where you can see their ‘licenses.’ This is part of the website that, with cruel, cold irony, seeks to warn the buyer that this sort of escrow service is necessary because the internet is an uncertain, dangerous place: At Edmunds, we know uncertainty doesn’t feel good. You can rely on us to ensure your vehicle or payment is protected with every transaction.

When your transaction happens behind the Edmunds shield, you can be certain your funds will be safeguarded by our simple payment steps. It’s our job to sweat the small stuff. We’ll make sure your sale is safeguarded from fraud while you focus on your business. Oh, you fuckers. They do give some plausible- looking licenses and credentials.. The California Department of Business Oversight license is absolutely a real thing.

In fact, the license number, 9. The problem is that it’s not issued to this site. That’s actually the license number of Escrow. Edmunds site says it will do, just without all the lying and crime. That means you can google the license number and find it’s valid, and related to an escrow company, which this Edmunds site claims to be.

For many people, this could seem like a plausible validation of the site. So, how do you know what’s real? If you want to use an escrow site when buying a car, making sure the one you’re working with is real can be tricky, but I think the best bets are to be a bit skeptical, and keep an eye open for details. Specifically, here’s some tips: Check that URL. Look at the domain name.

Really look at it. Remember that a URL can have a lot of other characters that look like URLs in the string of characters that makes up the address. Take the case of this site; here, the actual URL was at the end, before the final . URL is just there to confuse and make it look like a real Edmunds site: www.

A real Edmunds site would have separated other parts of the URL with slashes, like this : edmunds. Weird- looking, long, or confusing URLs can be a tipoff that something is up.

How’s it look? Almost all major, genuine companies that are in this business have money to spend on making their websites look just right. If things look weird or sloppy, that’s usually a sign something’s up. Here’s an example from this site: See the sort of clumsy overlap of the semi- transparent navigation window and the text box on the lower left? Also, note the awkward look of that center- justified paragraph in the window? None of that would pass muster at the real Edmunds site, and sites with design that looks bit short of professional should be suspect. Be a grammar national- socialist.

Are there misspellings, misused punctuation, foreign spellings, or other errors? Real companies don’t allow that shit. I mean, we sometimes do, but that’s different. On a reputable car- buying site, details like this.. Be wary. Play it safe. Watch The Lennon Report Online Idigitaltimes.

Look, this isn’t buying locally- brewed beer or eating bacon from the farm just outside of town. Stick with the big companies that do this sort of thing all the time.

Of course, Edmunds is such a company, and this site exists, so don’t be afraid to reach out. Call or email companies and ask about sites or URLs or anything you’re uncomfortable with.