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Bruce Dowbiggin

Mad Math: Lies, Damn Lies & Temperature Distortions

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The assault on Paul Pelosi, husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has created a Jussie Smollett Category Five Media Storm. The facts, as laid out by the San Francisco District Attorney, seem clear: a homeless drug addict nudist entered the Pelosi home, roused Paul Pelosi from his sleep at 2 AM, and, after a brief tussle, inflicted serious head injuries to him using a hammer.

Police arrived within two minutes of Pelosi’s 911 call and apprehended Canadian David DePape in the Pelosi’s swank Knob Hill home. DePape is now facing state and federal charges. Considering San Francisco’s homeless crisis, the story is sadly plausible.

And yet a substantial portion of the educated public doesn’t believe a word of it. An industry of fact checkers who’ve ridiculed the S.F. DA’s claim that it was a right-wing politically motivated attack. How did DePape get by Pelosi security team? How come his incriminating website was only launched the day before?

Who’s right? Who’s scoring points with the Midterm Elections just days away? It doesn’t much matter anymore. The collapse in public trust over political stories is endemic. Coming after a tsunami of fake news stories— abetted by police— since the Donald Trump election in 2016 there are competing realities running side by side in North America. In Canada, the inquiry into Justin Trudeau’s imposition of the Emergency Measures Act illustrates the split. He says white supremacists. They say freedom fighters.

A public saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” illustrates the tribal nature of belief in the age of social media.

In fact, the chasm of credibility has existed even longer in the Climate debate. With so much financially riding on correct data, newly minted King Charles III is inviting a rabble of green fanatics to Buckingham Palace for a pep talk before the latest global conference in Egypt. That is how embedded the Green narrative has become. Anyone challenging the King’s prophecies on “96 months to oblivion” is ruthlessly tracked down and made a non-person.

One such skeptic is Canadian researcher Ross McKittrick who has been producing material for years that should, in a normal context,  stop— or at least slow— the engine of Green Prophecy. The University of Guelph professor continues to shoot holes in the Greta Thunberg Theories. Instead of being hailed as a hero or awarded the Order of Canada he is branded a lunatic by the cultists.

Among McKittrick’s “controversial” assertions as told to Science Matters: “People need to understand that for the 20th century as a whole there’s temperature data for less than 50 percent of the Earth’s surface. And a lot of stuff is just being filled in with with assumptions or or modeling work.”

“For the vast majority of the world there’s just no data at all, or there are short temperature records or fragments of temperature records over various intervals. Yet what we see are these temperature graphs going back to the 1860s that they call the observational record.”

“They create this picture that somehow in 1960 everyone in the U.S. knew how to measure temperature perfectly. So that’s the year we’re going to leave as it is, and prior to that everybody made the same mistake. Everybody was always overestimating temperature, so we’ve got to adjust those records downward. Then, ever since 1960, people haven’t known how to measure temperature so we have to raise those those measurements.”

DORTMUND, GERMANY – AUGUST 02: Supporters of the Fridays for Future climate change movement participate in a demonstration during a five-day Fridays for Future congress on August 2, 2019 in Dortmund, Germany. A thousand activists are taking part in the congress in order to listen to scientific presentations, learn political work and network with one another. Inspired by the Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, the Fridays for Future weekly strikes have drawn tens of thousands of young demonstrators in hundreds of cities across Germany. (Photo by Juergen Schwarz/Getty Images)

“I know the people who make the adjustments will say: Well, we’ve got to deal with time-of-observation bias, you know. But if these were the sort of standard measurement errors, you would expect a mix of positive and negative mistakes. Instead, …the adjustments account for all the warming.”

“Obviously, this whole warming trend in the U.S record is coming through the adjustments. So we have a right to a very detailed and skeptical review of these adjustments. The lack of constructive engagement on a question like that ignores that, at a certain point, the burden of proof here is on you guys, the record keepers. “

“I think the evidence is: It’s not a big deal. And there’ll be changes and things to adapt to, but they’re on a small scale compared to the normal course of events and things that we we adapt to in life. And then you’ve got the alarmists who are you know, throwing cans of soup at paintings and gluing themselves to the sidewalk and and having a complete emotional meltdown.”

“In the early days the the International Panel for Climate Change was sort of on the alarmist camp over against the Skeptics, in the sense that they were the ones trying to pull everybody away from a viewpoint like the one I hold.”

“Now the alarm side has moved so far up the scale  that I think the IPCC is having to face the fact they have to begin to pull everybody back in our direction… Take for instance, discussions around hurricanes. You’ll get everybody from President Biden on down to some local weather caster on the the Channel 6 Nightly News confidently declaring that your tailpipe emissions caused hurricane Ian. And it’s your fault that all those homes are blown down.”

“And you’ve got the experts in places like NOAA and IPCC thinking: Oh we just put out a report that doesn’t say that that; in fact says the opposite. We don’t want to draw that connection, and we can’t see a trend that would be consistent with that story.”

“Now they’ve got an even bigger problem with these crazy extremists saying all kinds of stuff that isn’t true and isn’t in their reports. What they should be doing is jumping up and saying to world leaders: Don’t listen to those guys, they’re nuts; we disavow that message. They’re not doing that, and at this point they’re not yet capable of doing that.”

But McKitrick sees a silver lining as the proof for Big Green is put to the test. “We’re going to get to 2030, and people will have seen the price that they paid for climate policy, they will have experienced the harm, experienced these winters that we’re in for. Europeans especially are in for the next couple of winters where they don’t have enough fossil energy sources to get through. And just the cost of living effects of climate policy and 2030 will come, and we won’t have experienced climate Armageddon.”

“And they won’t be able to turn around and say: Well yeah, but we avoided it because we cut emissions, because we didn’t cut emissions either. And so that’s where I would hope there’ll be a certain reckoning and maybe some of it will have happened up to that point.”

Can’t wait. Till then, don’t expect a big buy-in from elites trying to protect their vested interest. And don’t buy narratives from Democrats facing election extinction.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft YearsIn NHL History, , his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

 

 

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

MLB’s Exploding Chequebook: Parity Is Now For Suckers

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MLB has seen parity and proclaimed, “We don’t give a damn!” Okay, they didn’t say that. In fact they insist the opposite is true. They’re all about competition and smaller markets getting a shot at a title. But as the 2024 offseason spending shows, believe none of what you hear and half of what you see in MLB.

Here’s the skinny: Juan Soto‘s contract with the NY Mets — 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred. Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankees. Later, Nathan Eovaldi secured a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers. Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs) added to the splurge.

There’s one more thing that stands out. MLB has no trouble with the financial big boys in New York, Los Angles, Texas, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago shelling out money no small market dare pay. In the MLB cheap seats, Tampa, Pittsburgh  and Miami can’t send out quality players fast enough. But MLB is cool with that, too, as those paupers get a healthy slice of TV money.

So yes, they’re all about talking parity with their luxury tax system. But to keep the TV, digital, betting and marketing lucre flowing they have to have large media markets swinging the heaviest bats come postseason. The question is, do MLB fans care the way they used to about parity? It says here they don’t. More want to seed best-on-best more often. Which is brutal but refreshing.

Their sister leagues, married to draconian salary cap systems, are still pushing parity, even as they expand beyond recognition. In our 2004 book Money Players, legendary Boston Bruins coach/ GM Harry Sinden noted, “The problem with teams in the league, is that there were (then) 20 teams who all think they are going to  win the Stanley Cup and they all are going to share it. But only one team is going to win it. The rest are chasing a rainbow.”

And that was before the expansion Vegas Golden Knights won a Cup within five years while the third-year Seattle Kraken made a run in those same 2023 playoffs. There are currently 32 teams in the league, each chasing Sinden’s rainbow of a Stanley Cup. That means 31 cranky fan bases every year. And 31 management teams trying to avoid getting fired.

Maybe we’ve reached peak franchise level? Uh, no. Not so long as salary-capped leagues can use the dream of parity to sell more franchises. As we wrote in October of 2023, “If you believe the innuendo coming from commissioner Gary Bettman there is a steady appetite for getting a piece of the NHL operation. “The best answer I can give you is that we have continuous expressions of interest from places like Houston, Atlanta, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, but expansion isn’t on the agenda.” In the next breath Bettman was predicting that any new teams will cost “A lot, a lot.”

Deputy commissioner Bill Daly echoed Bettman’s caution about a sudden expansion but added, ”Having said that, particularly with the success of the Vegas and Seattle expansions, there are more people who want to own professional hockey teams.” Translation: If the NHL can get a billion for a new team, the heck with competitive excellence, the clock might start ticking sooner. After all, small-market Ottawa just went for $950.”

It’s not just the expansion-obsessed NHL talking more teams. MLB is looking to add franchises. Abandoned Montreal is once more getting palpitations over rumours that the league wants to return to the city that lost its Expos in 2005. Recent reports indicate that while MLB might prefer Salt Lake City and Nashville it also feels it must right the wrong left when the Expos moved to Washington DC 19 years ago.

The city needs a new ballpark to replace disastrous Olympic Stadium. They’ll also need more than Tom Brady to fund the franchise fee and operating costs. And Quebec corporate support— always transitory in the Expos years— will need to be strong. But two more MLB franchises within five years is a lock.

While the NBA is mum on going past 30 teams it has not shut the door on expansion after seeing the NHL cashing in. Neither has the cash-generating monster known as the NFL where teams currently sell for over six billion US. The NFL is eyeing Europe for its next moves.

The question that has to be asked in this is, WTF, quality of competition? The more teams in a league the lower the chances of even getting to a semifinal series let alone a championship. Fans in cities starved for a championship— the NFL’s Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns are entering their seventh decade without a title or the Toronto Maple Leafs title-less since 1967— know how corrosive it can be.

Getting to 34, 36, maybe 40 teams makes for a short-term score for owners, but it could leave leagues with an entire strata of loser teams that no one—least of all networks, carriers and advertisers—wants to see. Generations of fans will be like Canuck supporters, going their entire lives without a championship.

In addition, as we’ve argued in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and How The Free Market Can Save Them, watering down the product with a lot of teams no one wants to watch nationally or globally seems counter productive. The move away from quality toward quantity serves only the gambling industry. But since when has Gary Bettman Truly cared about quality of the product? So long as he gets to say, “We have a trade to announce” at the Draft, he’s a happy guy.

When we published Cap In Hand we proposed a system like soccer with ranked divisions using promotion and relegation to ensure competition, not parity. Most of the interviewers we spoke to were skeptical of the idea. But as MLB steams closer to economic Darwinism our proposal is looking more credible every day. Play at the level you can afford. Or just watch Ted Lasso. Your choice.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Bordering On Legend: Why Josh Allen Is Hero to Two Nations

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Headline: Josh Allen sets NFL mark with 3 TD passes and 3 TD runs, but Matthew Stafford’s Rams hold off Buffalo Bills 44-42

Canada has no NFL teams to its name. But different parts of the country have a fervent rooting interest in a team. Often it’s because of the local American markets that have been piped in by cable TV companies. The Lower Mainland of B.C. is fertile Seattle Seahawks territory. Alberta is partial to the Denver Broncos (owned for a long time by an Albertan). Manitoba and Saskatchewan get Detroit stations on their cable but are equally invested in the Minnesota Vikings.

In the East, Quebec and the Maritimes have plenty of New York Giants (older) and New England Patriots (Tom Brady) fandom. In southern Ontario, where the locals grew up on a diet of Buffalo TV icons Irv Weinstein and Tom Joles, there is little question that the Buffalo Bills are top of mind. As many as 20 percent of the crowd on game day comes south across the Peace Bridge. TSN and Sportsnet closely cover the Bills closely.

Not so long ago Rogers thought playing Bills games in Toronto might be a thing. For reasons ranging from ticket prices to the Bills ineptitude the gamble flopped. So they gave up the plan just as the franchise’s fortunes were to take a great leap forward in the name of quarterback Josh Allen, a raw talent from Wyoming, of all places. Opinions on whether his athletic ability and size (6-foot-5, 240 pounds) would translate in the NFL were many.

After all, while his QB rivals played in the Rose Bowl or the Orange Bowl, Allen had starred in the Great Idaho Potato Bowl. Using a pick obtained from Tampa, the Bills got him seventh in the loaded 2018 draft behind more heralded prospects Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold. He was considered the riskiest pick in the top seven. While none of the players taken before Allen have flopped, Mayfield and Arnold have wandered in the wilderness before finding success. Saquon Barkley has finally reached superstardom with a second team.

But not one of that septet has had quite the career arc of Allen. In just two years he took them to their first postseason since 1995. The next season he led them to the AFC Championship game where he lost to his future kryptonite, Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. During his Buffalo tenure, he has led the team to a total of six playoff appearances, five consecutive division titles, and five postseason victories. Only a Super Bowl trip has eluded him.

But statistics don’t capture Allen’s dual-threat impact on the NFL. He’s not been alone. In our in 2022 column NFL Run/ Pass Maestros: Can’t Catch This, we wrote about the move to more mobile, improvisational QBs . Players such as Allen, Mahomes and Lamar Jackson of Baltimore, the two-time NFL MVP.  Stick-in-the-pockets like Jared Goff, Kirk Cousins and Matthews Stafford are still viable threats, but it’s clear that to stay one step ahead of defensive coordinators a QB needs the option of rolling out, isolating a defender and making him choose between the run or pass.

Where it was rare for QBs to gain more than a few years running it’s now common to see six or seven QBs in the Top 50 rushers in the NFL. Currently six QBs are in the Top 50 rushers in the league. But where the competition have been race cars, Allen has been a snow plow, going through, not around, defenders.

His feats of strength would impress George Costanza’s father. Week after week he makes single-handed plays that deliver the Bills victory. His weekly highlight reel of mad dashes and bazooka-liken throws had led the Bills to six straight wins before’s Sunday’s loss. Two weeks ago it was a hook-and-ladder TD lateral in the snow from teammate Amari Cooper in which he received credit for a TD pass and a TD reception on the same play. On Sunday in Los Angeles, he added 82 yards rushing to a mighty 342 yards passing.

This has led his fans to cover their eyes as he smashes into opponents or the turf. Bills fans know that their success is untranslatable without Allen, who’s now considered the favourite for MVP with four games left. Career backup Mitch Trubisky sits behind Allen, which is like Pete Buttigieg backing up Elon Musk.

Allen has been the beneficiary of the NFL taking the target off QBs as the 2020s dawned. “In act of mercy or perhaps to juice offence, the NFL took pity on the athletic QBs. ‘It feels like the NFL is in a moment when a defender can get called for roughing the passer or unnecessary roughness simply by breathing hard on the QB,” writes Joe Mahoney of SB Nation. “It’s a reason why the career longevity for running QBs like Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, Jalen Hurts, Justin Fields, Josh Allen, and Taysom Hill should be much longer the career lengths of some of the previous elite dual-threat QBs’”.

This was all written before Sunday’s epic personal offence total in a losing effort against the Rams— just the third defeat all season for the Bills. At one point they trailed by 17 before rallying to lose by just two.

Perhaps the only thing holding back Allen from a title now is the game strategy of HC Sean McDermott and the coaches of the Bills— as their fans know only too well since the last-second disaster against KC in the 2022 AFC final when McDermott couldn’t kill off 13 seconds at the end of the game. Allowing the Chiefs to come back for a win and a trip to the Super Bowl.

Sunday he and his OC Joe Brady wasted a time-out at the conclusion of a monumental comeback that prevented the Bills getting a shot at a game-winning field goal. It was not the first time the seventh-year head coach had muffed game-ending strategy this season. Losses to Houston and Baltimore also featured faulty game management. Otherwise the Bills might be undefeated in 2024.

But we won’t know for a month, at least, whether that’s enough of a drag on Superman’s cape to prevent a Super Bowl appearance. For now, Bills fans in Canada and the U.S. can only marvel at what’s happened to the farm boy from rural California who is both irresistible object and unstoppable force in the same body.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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