Pub questions

From the first Skeptics Handbook (p 14-15). The very short answers to questions you might get in a bar, or in the media tent at the UNFCCC. Point 1 below was the single most popular riposte from supporters of the greenhouse theory at COP 13 in Bali.

1. How can so many scientists be wrong? Most scientists are not wrong, but they’re not studying the central question either. Instead they’re researching the effects of warming — not the causes. Whether orangutans in Borneo are facing habitat loss tells us nothing of what drives the weather. Likewise: wind-farm efficiency, carbon sequestration, and insect-borne epidemics. Warm weather changes these things, but these things don’t change the weather. Consensus proves nothing. It takes only one scientist to prove a theory wrong. Theories fit the facts or they don’t. Instead of saying “Which side has more PhDs?” a better question is “Where’s the evidence?” Once upon a time, the masses thought the world was flat, that no machine could fly, that the sun went ‘round the Earth.

The only thing we know for sure about climate change is that big government-funded committees […]

Announcing the timeline: “ClimateGate: 30 years in the making”

UPDATE: The newer edition has been released here.

Here’s a Spectacular Poster of ClimateGate Covering 3 Decades

You have to see this to believe it. Look up close and admire the detail while you despair at how long science has been going off the rails. To better appreciate the past and what was exposed by the CRU emails, the Timeline chart consolidates and chronologically organizes the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers along with some related contextual events. That the chart exists at all is yet another example of how skilled experts are flocking in to the skeptics’ position and dedicating hours of time pro bono because they are passionately motivated to fight against those who try to deceive us.

Click on the image to see it enlarged, but download the full PDF to see the detail.

Download The PDF (788k)

Mohib Ebrahim has created this amazing document. I’ve produced a permanent Home page for this beautiful poster that will host the latest updates as a PDF. There are also printable versions in A4, A3, A2, […]

The tenth translation – Balkans (Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian)

Thanks to Dr. Mensur Omerbashich for translating the Handbook into the common languages* of most of the Balkans: Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian. Mensur is a theoretical geophysicist from USA with PhD from Canada, who also is a certified court interpreter in Bosnia.

Send this link to your friends in the former Yugoslav republics. This translation will be understandable to Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, Montenegrins, including most of Slovenians, Macedonians and Kosovars. Around 25-30 million people.

Mensur suggested that ideally someone could volunteer to do localizations into Croatian proper, or Serbian proper.

There is a larger 5Mb version for better printing here.

* I use the term “common language” loosely. There is so little agreement about it, I gather there is not even a proper name of this “language”. It’s more a overlapping common collection of several languages, sometimes referred to just as BCS or Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian. (Correct me if I’m wrong).

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Wholesale theft in the name of carbon

Imagine a third world nation was mired in corruption so deeply that the ruling class were able to stealthily steal the rights to vast acreage of private property from landowners without paying any compensation.

Imagine that one of the victims of this injustice had approached every court of the land and had not even had his case heard, even after more than 200 attempts. In desperation, and with no other avenue available, having officially “lost the farm”, he starts a hunger strike, which has now gone for 28 52 days unbroken, threatening to starve to death if he has to.

Welcome to Australia — right on track for Third World Status.

Get ready to be shocked.

10 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]

Copenhagen, a $30 billion dollar “success”?

A funny thing happened this week. Humanity did a low-orbit bypass of a totalitarian world government, and pulled away, but only a few noticed the near miss.

Christopher Monckton has already spoken about the draft treaty with it’s message of setting up a new form of global governance, but without any mention of voting. He spoke again yesterday to Alex Jones and pointed out that in a sense Copenhagen succeeded, despite what everyone is saying. After all, it was never really about saving the environment was it? It was about setting up a world government, and they got the odd $30 billion dollars. Not bad for a failure.

10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]

Shock: UN finds Earth’s thermostat

Source: Satirical Press In breakthrough news today, The United Nations announced they had found The Global Thermostat to control the Earth’s temperature.

With 45,000 people searching for the controls in Copenhagen at the Bella Convention Center, commentators were shocked when it turned up instead in a closet in the basement of the World Meterological Organization (WMO) headquarters in Geneva.

“It’s a landmark day for human-kind” said Rajendra Pachuri, Chairman of the IPCC.

Barack Obama stood for a standing ovation that lasted 23 minutes and said: “It gives us all hope”.

Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia: “We wouldn’t have found this without Obama’s magic touch. Obama rolled up his sleeves in Copenhagen, and the ancient Sumerian map fell out of his shirt.”

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

Copenhagen: blizzards, walk-outs, frustration – good news

Disaster averted

There has been no breakthrough at Copenhagen.

Barak Obama has spoken, and the crowd was disappointed. He was visibly angry.

China and India have walked out. The West did not offer enough.

The departure of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a major snub for the Western congregation, and guarantees that nothing binding or significant will arise out of Copenhagen. The walkout was exactly what they vowed to do in to the strategic plan they announced a few weeks ago.

The draft treaty has become the Copenhagen Accord, and deadlines have been dropped or postponed.

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

Why don’t women want to face global bullies? I can’t imagine…

… Richard Black from the BBC won’t name me or link to me. Is he scared of sending people my way? Afraid my arguments are too compelling? He claims the evidence for man-made global warming is overwhelming, and he’s wondering why more women aren’t skeptics, so surely he would help his readers if he directed them to the two Australian bloggers he specifically refers to: Jennifer Marohasy and myself.

In fact, across the entire sceptical landscape, as far as I can see, the female contingent numbers one UK columnist, a couple of Australian bloggers, UK academic Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen and US counterpart Sallie Baliunas…

But thanks for the backhanded endorsement, Richard, I’m delighted to find out you read my blog and I can tell you exactly why women don’t leap to announce they are skeptics. All you had to do was email me to ask…

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

“Propaganda” Warrior exposed

Skeptics are growing in number and becoming more confident. Yesterday, CFACT unfurled a banner on the Rainbow Warrior in Copenhagen.

Rather cheekily, global warming skeptics used GPS triangulation from Greenpeace’s own on-board camera photos to find the infamous boat, the Rainbow Warrior. Then the activists unfurled the banner.

7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]

New Scientist becomes Non Scientist

You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason.

In DenierGate, watch New Scientist closely, as they do the unthinkable and try to defend gross scientific malpractice by saying it’s OK because other people did other things a little bit wrong (that were not related) a long time ago. Move along ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing to see…

The big problem for this formerly good publication is that they have decided already what the answer is to any question on climate-change (and the answer could be warm or cold but it’s always ALARMING). That leaves them clutching for sand-bags to prop up their position as the king-tide sweeps away any journalistic credibility they might have had.

I’ve added my own helpful notes into the New Scientist article, just so you get the full picture.

8.7 out of 10 based on 7 ratings […]

Confused? You might BE a psychologist

Some scientists just keep looking in the wrong places for answers. Here’s Stephan Lewandowsky, professorial fellow of psychology, in The Age trying to answer the most important question in modern science and economics. He refers to ClimateGate and asks if the stunning accusations of serious misconduct are true? Watch the flat out assertion backed by a non-sequiteur:

They are not. Even if we presume that the stolen material is authentic, the notion that climate data is being nefariously withheld is fantastical.

This does not even make sense within the confines of it’s punctuation. Is there a new Natural Law of Thermodynamics that says it’s impossible to withhold data? The data is gone, even Phil Jones, head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit admits he has withheld it and won’t ever provide it:

“The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

We know the emails are real. Phil Jones has said as much. He admits he has withheld data for years, and that he’ll delete it as well […]

Carbon rises 800 years after temperatures

Ice cores reveal that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds of years after temperatures change

In 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years. Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point—the “greenhouse effect” captured attention. But, in 1999 it became clear that carbon dioxide rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003, we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.

8 out of 10 based on 24 ratings […]

A letter to parents who are not gullible

Clive Hamilton (failed Greens candidate and “intellectual” Australian) couldn’t persuade skeptical adults he’s right about carbon pollution, so instead of improving his arguments, he’s trying the same lines out on our kids.

This is a message for parents in response to Clive Hamilton’s letter to children of “deniers”.

Hi there,

Clive Hamilton has written to your kids. If you’re like me, almost everything he said about you was a lie. How do you answer your children if they say “you are paid a lot of money to try to stop laws about pollution and what you do will kill poor kids?”

After you explain the truth, and point out that this man, a) wouldn’t know, and b) has an interest in promoting the fake scare, it might be time to give them a skill for life. The most dangerous people in the world are the ones who pretend to have good intentions, and there’s a way to tell the fake heroes from the real ones.

10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]

Spot the real denier

A denier has many tactics to stop people talking about evidence. The real deniers here are those pushing a fake crisis. 10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]

The ClimateGate Virus

Thanks to Jorn in Germany for the graphic (with my additions)

The collateral damage from the emails is large

ClimateGate doesn’t just bring down the scientists who wrote the emails, it brings down all the institutions and organizations that were supposed to have exacting standards and ought to have exposed the crimes years ago. The men whose work was so bogus, were lauded by the IPCC, published in Nature and Science, and defended by the National Academy of Science.

This evidence of collusion, falsification, hiding data, and consistent deceit blows away the infrastructures of the practice of science. It doesn’t hurt the scientific method, but it destroys the premise that the IPCC expert review means anything, that peer review is capable of even picking up outright fraud, and that the National Academy of Science is functional.

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

Clouds dominate everything

Al Gore describes how carbon dioxide beats up Mr Sunbeam and stops him leaving the atmosphere. But he “forgot” to mention that clouds reflect around a quarter of all the sunlight that hits the earth. Those beams of light travel all the way from the sun to get bounced off into space when they are just a few kilometers from the ground.

Any change in cloud cover makes a major difference. The IPCC assumes clouds respond to warming, but clouds could easily drive the warming.

7.8 out of 10 based on 8 ratings […]

Smoking guns across Australia: Where’s the warming? Looking at 16 other locations

If there was enough money, fame and power on the table (think seismic proportions, money that moves the economic landscape), would it be possible to take a small unproven scientific theory as an excuse and, with the best PR teams in the world, promote it, support it, and make it appear unquestionable?

If it were cloaked in the most “innocent” of motives, and shrouded in terminology that veils the truth, would it not run unchecked for years, unless some big vested interest opposed it? And if there was no particular big vested interest to oppose it, isn’t it possible that if the only harm it causes is to the giant disorganized mass known as humankind, there would be no committee of humankind to check its momentum.

On Watts Up tonight, we get some insight into just one specific example of how corrupt science can be. It’s yet another day in the history of the climate-scam where people may say years from now… remember that night we got the news about Darwin? Thanks to Willis Eschenbach’s dedicated analysis.

The blue line is the raw unadjusted data from Darwin. There are five stations there and their records […]

Flashback to Bali: UN tactics to silence dissent

There were 12 of us skeptics among 12,000 believers at the Bali UNFCCC in 2007. We were a rag-tag team of passionate people, some of whom had PhDs, and most of whom were not paid to be there. We came because we were angry about the way science was being exploited.

It was a convention on a scale I had not seen before. Not just 2,000 for a weekend, which would be big, but 12,000 for two entire weeks, which was an extravaganza.

12,000 people for an two entire weeks was an extravaganza.

The UNFCCC meetings define the term “junket”. These mass climate conventions happen every year in locations like Nairobi (Kenya), Poznan (Poland), Montreal (Canada), Buenos Aires (Argentina), and Milan in Italy. Copenhagen is COP 15, meaning there have been 14 before it. (And at two weeks each, that’s over six months of non-stop PR and “staff incentives”.) Is there any larger yearly congregation in the world?

From the outset the UNFCCC did everything it could to maintain the appearance that it is a fair, transparent, and scientific based organization. Yet on the ground, it did everything it could to make sure that there would be […]

Carbon trading: not such a vote winner, eh?

The two by-elections in Australia this weekend were meant to be a “bloodbath” for the conservative Liberal Party right? After all, the Liberal Party have had their worst two weeks in history, where they were described as “imploding” over the ETS (Emissions Trading Legislation), and just elected a rather unexpected new leader. The two electoral seats were also held by high profile leaders who’ve resigned (former Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson and former Treasurer Peter Costello).

George Megalogenis said, “Tony Abbot could not have wished for two less friendly seats to test his leadership”.

Analyst Malcolm Mackerras was adamant that climate change would play a critical role in the calculations of voters on Saturday. [Here]. He was utterly confident the Greens would win (and that was only two days ago).

“…Higgins and Bradfield would be the electorates in which people most strongly feel resentment at climate change denialists,” he said. “That is why electing Abbott was a complete disaster. They will get a terrible shock on Saturday night, they really will.”

And the “complete shock” was a shock for Mackerras instead. The Liberal Party did just fine.

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]

The one flaw that wipes out the crisis

Carbon dioxide only causes 1.1°C of warming if it doubles. That’s according to the IPCC. Did you know?

The real game is water.

Researchers made guesses about humidity and clouds in the early 1980s and they built these guesses into their models. We now know they were wrong, not about carbon, but about water in the form of humidity and clouds. Here’s how the models can be right about carbon and wrong about the climate.

7.5 out of 10 based on 11 ratings […]