Infantile professor pronounces debate “infantile”

The Age — formerly a decent newspaper — never fails to take an opportunity to parrot PR for Team AGW.

Last week they gave a free shot to Will Steffen, Executive Director, ANU Climate Change Institute.

Climate debate ‘almost infantile’

(The Age, ADAM MORTON, May 25, 2010)

A SCIENCE adviser to the federal government has described the debate in the media over the basics of climate change science as ”almost infantile”, equating it to an argument about the existence of gravity.

It takes a tax-payer funded Pro-fessor to equate AGW to gravity. It must have taken years of education to be able to issue pronouncements like this eh? If Australian taxpayers were hoping to get a bit more than just bluster and name-calling from certain public servants, they’re bound to be asking for their money back soon.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the existence of gravity is proven each day you don’t get flung off the planet when you get out of bed. We can measure gravity to twelve significant digits*, but our value for climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide varies from 0 to 10. Pick a number. We can’t even get one […]

June 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

High Praise – I’m “insulted” in Parliament

Mr OAKESHOTT, Federal Independent Member for Lyne, talked about the failure of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in the Australian Parliament, and wanted to name and shame those responsible:

“I take this opportunity to raise the issue of the smoking guns that I have seen over the last six months. I smelt a rat in the shift that I saw and what looked to be—to their credit—a very well organised and very well-funded campaign from the likes of JoNova and Viv Forbes.”

— Hansard record of Parliament, 27 May 2010

Golly — I’m a smoking gun, a smelly rat, and a paid mercenary of undisclosed groups, and Viv Forbes of Carbon Sense is too!

I’m bowled over by the compliment. Is he really giving me and Viv the joint credit for the sweeping poll changes? (As if). I’ll just ask my PR department (me) to arrange with my cartoonist (me too) to throw together a parody of parliament, which the web-editor (me) can code into a page. All of us are delighted to be described as well organized. (It’s true we communicate like we are all in one head.) **

10 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]

June 2nd, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Why scientists get it wrong

David Archibalds new book

by David Archibald

David will be speaking with the Anthony Watts Tour in Australia. I’ll be buying a copy of his book.

June 1, 2010

This is a shorter version of the Quadrant Online extract.

Edited extract: “Why did so many scientists get it wrong?” from David Archibald’s book – The Past and Future of Climate:

If the data and forecasts in this book are correct, then the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO in Australia are all wrong. How can this be? Firstly, there aren’t that many scientists involved in the IPCC deliberations. The inner core is possibly twenty souls. Secondly, they were untroubled by the necessity to concoct fraudulent data to get their desired results. The only unknown question regarding the IPCC scientists is “Did they actually believe in the global warming that they were promoting?”

It turns out that they did, and possibly still do. That is shown by the Climategate emails released on 20th November, 2009. The Climategate emails are a selection of emails amongst members of […]

June 1st, 2010 | Tags: | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Round Five: Ignore the main point, repeat the irrelevant

The debate with Paleoclimatologist Dr Andrew Glikson about the evidence for Climate change has reached a telling point. There is a gaping hole.

Through four rounds of to and fro, I’ve been asking for evidence that the predicted (critical) “hot spot” was there above the equator, and we were drilling down to this point. It’s the weak link in the chain of evidence, and if the climate models are wrong on this element, you can kiss goodbye to the catastrophe. Everything else might be right, but there’s no major warming if there’s no strong amplifying (positive) feedback, and and there is no amplifying feedback from water vapor if there is no hot spot. Indeed, I quoted evidence from three peer reviewed studies that show that we’re headed for a half a measly degree of warming rather than a baking 3 – 6 degrees.

In Round 2 Glikson didn’t mention Lindzen, Spencer or Douglass (the three independent papers which suggest that predicted feedbacks are missing or negative). Instead he suggested “Sherwood 2008” found the hot-spot. I pointed out that Sherwood used wind-gauges instead of thermometers. To believe he is right we need to throw out thousands of thermometer readings and […]

June 1st, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |
 
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