Another Minnesotans for Global Warming parody…

The Minnesotans for Global Warming have produced I’m a denier to the Monkey’s song I’m a believer…

It’s not the way I would have made it, but it’s funny.

I fight the use of the term, but these guys coopt it. It’s the opposite approach but it also chips away at the power of the namecalling bullies.

7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Australia’s High Quality Data: 12-year-sites used for “long term” trends

 

What would you say if you knew our high quality temperature record included sites with 100 year long “records” which were based on just 12 years of data and some undisclosed method was used to construct 90% of the graph?

Wow? I mean, Wow?! Why are these sites with such little actual data being included in a series called “high quality”?

Presumably the “adjusted” trends were recreated (in a sense) by homogenizing data from nearby stations, but why not use just the stations with long records in the first place? Out in the vast outback there are long distances between stations, and while a “splice” might overlap for ten years, who knows whether the dramatic PDO oscillations don’t shift weather patterns during their 30 year cycle and mean that any ten year period is not indicative of the longer time frame.

BOM compensate for the Urban Heat Island effect by making adjustments that essentially result in almost no change in the trend. They remove the “urban” stations, but UHI affects even small populations, and Andrew Barnham speculates that the largest changes in the UHI effect may occur in these smaller rural locations that are still included.

Andrew […]

An update from the Thompsons down under

For all the supporters of the Thompsons, Janet writes to describe the kind of limbo they are living in. The eviction day October 15, came and went in a blur of work. They remain on the property only due to court injunctions, which have no certainty. Matt and Janet are their own lawyers — doing all the paperwork — with helpful advice from all round, especially Peter King. Legal suits were launched from both sides. The Thompsons are basically under siege, living week to week in their home, waiting, though not sitting still. […]

Who are the deniers now?

The people are rising up in protest. Today my inbox theme is of people emailing me with responses of the questions they are putting to the Establishment — at universities, institutes, and political parties – to the ABC, UWA and The Greens in particular. In all the cases they received answers that deny there is a problem, but between the lines you can tell that those forced to write the replies are feeling the heat.

And may the heat escalate.

I’ll be publishing as many as I can.

This story below came in this morning about Roger Helmer MEP (UK), who was invited to speak to the VC of East Anglia (ie. Climategate central). He asked if he could bring “two friends”, which was fine until they turned out to be Monckton and Delingpole, at which point the UEA’s staff were suddenly forced into a demeaning dance, doing all they could to limit the damage by artificially splitting up the group into separate appointments.

Squirm squirm squirm. There is fear in their eyes… why go to so much trouble to prevent a few skeptics being in the same room at the same time?

7 out of […]

10:10 spin til it hurts

After the marketing disaster of the century, 10:10 desperately needed to save some face. They had accidentally showed us their totalitarian desires and lost at least 20,000 members in a week. How embarrassing.

How do you hide that? In true PR form, you frame your membership numbers and “save” the members you lost: keep the thousands of people (or fakers) who have joined and then left your group on your tally. (Just don’t call it “current members”.)

On their new redesigned home page they say they have 110,340 worldwide …wait for it…”sign ups”.

But as far as the UK members go, what was once 94,910, is now still just 74,190.

5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings […]

Two million pageviews

Well, well, well. Google Analytics clocked up 2 million pageviews for joannenova.com.au in the last 12 months:

2,032,353 Pageviews 340,000 unique visitors coming from 199 countries* and leaving 38,000 comments

(*If anyone has a friend in Chad, Niger, or Zaire, you could email them and we could bump that country tally up to 200. Similarly, I’ve bombed out in Turkmenistan and North Korea. I guess there are places where “climate change” is not even a question they would ask in phone surveys … if they had surveys, or I guess, phones. Those are lands where esoteric debates about carbon footprints are irrelevant.)

All up, around 3,000 visitors drop in each and every day, and it often spikes to 5,000 – 7,000 (many of the unique visitors visit more than once).

Just for comparison’s sake, Quadrant online announced it had one million plus page views per annum, back in September. Coincidentally Quadrant and I both started out at about the same time, they with 156 supporters, and me with with one (thanks David. :-)).

Along the way lots of others have helped with the Tip Jar, some repeatedly, and I do so appreciate it. Even spare change. (If most […]

Insurance that kills

A helicopter arrives at the scene of the crashFrom Metro.co.uk

The great Piers Corbyn popped in when I wrote the first post about the 10:10 video. His comment on that thread is the most popular (rated by thumbs up) of any of the 38,000 comments on this site (110 thumbs up). This below is that comment, which fits with my recent theme of What’s the harm in acting?

For those who don’t know, Piers uses solar factors and writes long range weather forecasts and does it with uncanny accuracy — he predicted the Copenhagen Blizzards a month before Copenhagen. His site is Weather Action. He’s so good at predicting atmospheric action that over 12 years, he won so many bets on the weather the bookies gave up and begged him to stop. (The odds were set by the UK met office.)

He discusses the often unseen but deadly costs of bad decisions. In this case, Natasha Jade Paton might still be alive today if authorities had sought better advice than that from deeply flawed climate models. Piers warned them they would run out of road salt.

There are thousands of people who think that “taking insurance” is like paying […]

Donna Faragher: armed with unpublished complaint-mail and an unbankable license — destroys livelihoods

Donna Faragher, Minister for Environment and other stuff.

Some people have recently received replies from the Minister of the Department of Environment in Western Australia.

The ten second answer to the latest DEC excuses: The Thompsons License is unbankable; the Thompsons have already met the conditions; the complaints are unverified and often solicited, or relate to some other business, and Donna Faragher can teach you how to spell “business certainty” but she hasn’t got a clue what it is.

I’ve added my thoughts below, in between the full grey-box-quotes of the letter.

____________________________________

Minister For Environment; Youth

Thank you for your email to the Western Australian Government dated 22 September 2010 regarding the Narrogin Beef Producers cattle feedlot in Narrogin.

Good to see that through the magic of electronic communications it only took one month and four days to reply.

By way of background to your letter, Narrogin Beef is one of 44 licensed or registered cattle feedlots in Western Australia. The Narrogin Beef feedlot is the only feedlot in Western Australia which has been the subject of significant and ongoing community complaints about unreasonable odour. […]

Funeral for Property Rights

UPDATED: Dates for the West Australian Speaking Tour below

Magna Carta

The Thompsons protest on Monday was moving. Janet Thompson delivered one of the best speeches I’ve heard at a protest. I was going to copy parts of it and attach the full speech in documents. But so much is worth saying, I’ve put it here almost in entirety.

In Part I – Janet reads the eulogy to “property rights”: from the Magna Carta til Maxwell Szulc was put in jail for clearing firebreaks on his own land.

In Part II –– she recalls those who are not with us, and then those who are. Government infringements on rights destroys lives, and breaks up families. Janet gives us brief examples of other travesties unfolding.

In Part III — Matt reminds us that the government encroachment affects us all, contributes to suicides and points out that we bow daily to the UN. Every other time people have been subjected to centralized, unelectable power, the death toll has mounted. Now we are now presumed guilty until we prove our innocence.

Matt quotes Ayn Rand:

““When you see that trading is […]

What’s the harm in acting anyway?

Saving energy or stopping pollution is a good thing. What’s the danger in acting now?

We can save energy and stop real pollution without setting up a whole financial bureaucratic system based on “thin air”. The wholly unnecessary trading system feeds the sharks of finance with more money and power. We waste blood, sweat and tears and encourage cheats. We reward fraud and foster corruption.

When we trade real things, people who cheat get caught easily. They can’t get away with it for long. But in the quasi world of meaningless permits-for-air, the only limit to cheating is “what they can get away with”.

For example: Carbon credits paid to China to build hydro dams end up helping bankers buy yachts, and feed the mafiosi in China. They evict homeowners, don’t pay them enough compensation, flood their valleys and commit these people to homelessness or more slavery to bankers through mortgages.

Sure, some useful outcomes might occur. But hoping we get lucky is not “planning”. It’s policy-by-accident. If solar energy, say, is a good idea all on its own, we don’t need to invent fake reasons to force people to use more of it.

We could for example tax […]

BOM, GISS have record setting bugs affecting a million square miles?

How bad are these datasets? How sloppy are the data records?

Western Australia (WA) covers 2.5 million square kilometers (1 million square miles, about a third as big as the USA). The average of all WA stations over one month last year was adjusted up by as much as a gobsmacking 0.5 degrees due to a database “bug” – which contributed to August 2009 being the hottest August on record?! That’s one heck of a bug!

Could it get worse? Unbelievably, GISS seems to have lost data for key WA locations that an unpaid volunteer found easily in the BoM online records. GISS only has to maintain copies of records for sixteen stations in WA* which have temperatures current to 2010, but in seven of them they are missing data, and it affects the results. Are they random errors? No, shock me, six errors are upwards: in one case making the spring 2009 average temperatures for Kalgoorlie-Boulder 1.1 C degrees warmer!

But with no-one auditing our BoM or NASA’s GISS, and no team jointly receiving raw data or regulating standards in either agency, temperatures recorded in the field could potentially be listed in official records as being quite […]

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Part 10: Gore Orwell

 

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans 19 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third was on ocean temperatures, and fourth discussed past temperatures, the fifth compared the alleged cause (human CO2 emissions) with the alleged effect (temperatures), the sixth canvassed the infamous attempt to “fix” that disconnect, the hockey stick, and the seventh pointed out that the Chinese, Russian, and Indian climate establishments (which are financially independent of the western climate establishment) disagree with the western climate establishment about the cause of recent global warming and the eighth showed how government institutional and funding pressures created the consensus among western climate scientists. The ninth showed the evidence that the amplifying feedbacks, responsible for two-thirds of the model warming projections, are not present in reality—and that the lame response of the establishment was to miscolour a graph to mislead us into thinking those feedbacks were […]

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Part 9: The Heart of the Matter and the Coloring-In Trick

This point is THE critical one. It was the first point raised in the Skeptics Handbook, developed in the Second Handbook; the point that Dr Glikson had no reply to; the point that tripped up Will Steffen, Deltoid, and John Cook. As a modeler there was the moment in August 2007 when David saw the graphs below and said, emphatically: This is it. It’s over for the climate models. –JN

 

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans 19 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third was on ocean temperatures, and fourth discussed past temperatures, the fifth compared the alleged cause (human CO2 emissions) with the alleged effect (temperatures), the sixth canvassed the infamous attempt to “fix” that disconnect, the hockey stick, and the seventh pointed out that the Chinese, Russian, and Indian climate establishments […]

Rare historic weather observatory faces closure

The Library at Collegio Romano

How valuable is empirical evidence and long term data?

The Collegio Romano is one of the few places in the world with multi-centennial meteorological and climate data series (228 years!). Maurizio emailed me to let me know that it’s in danger of being broken up. He’s translated an Italian Petition on his site. I’ve copied parts of it below.

Not many people in the world appreciate how important and rare those long temperature series and historic collections are. It only takes a moment to sign the petition (see below for English instructions).

From Maurizio:

Help Save Five Hundred Years Of Weather Observations

The historical meteorological observatory of the Collegio Romano, in operation for 228 years, has been told to vacate its premises occupied from 1879. To this moment, nobody knows where it will be moved to, and worse, nobody knows what will be the future location of its Library, immense historical Archives and collection of old instruments, a priceless heritage cared for during more than two centuries by many great people with lots of passion.

7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]

DEC, deceptive, duplicitous, or just clueless about money?

The DEC fight back with deception, bogus licenses (that no bank will loan money against), ask for things that have already been done, and turns a blind eye to the killer fine print clauses that make them kingmakers with veto rights over any business in the State.

This is a PR war, and the DEC response (below) is obviously designed to confuse the issue and slow down people who are asking questions. Instead of serving the people, they are deceiving the people. Shouldn’t we expect to get an honest reply from our “public servants”?

With all the emails headed into the WA Parliament about the Thompsons, people were asking DEC very awkward questions. In response DEC produced this reply (below). On face value, local parliamentarians might read that, and think this issue is resolved. Not so. Nothing had changed. DEC either naively don’t understand the World of Business, or worse, they do understand it, and are maliciously using it against their chosen targets.

DEC declare they’ve given the Thompsons a five year license for 10,000 head — but the fine print catch is that condition A1 makes it unbankable — no one would loan the Thompsons money to run […]

Thompsons update – protest in Perth on Monday

Tower of Hope

Presents The Death of Property Rights

Please and join us for the Funeral Service

To be held on the steps of Parliament House Perth 11:00 a.m. Monday, 25 October 2010

Followed by the Burial Ceremony

Cottesloe Beach, Approximately 1:30 p.m.

“wear black, and bring your truck”

Are you fed up with our government stealing assets, destroying good businesses and ruining families? Are you sick of inordinate red tape being used against you?

Monday lunchtime next week join us at Parliament House in WA, meet Matt and Janet Thompson, Peter Spencer (the 52 day hunger-striker who has won the right to challenge in the High Court), and Maxwell Szulc (a WA farmer who, I understand, cleared fire breaks on his own land, and was jailed for it. Incarcerated! He is being released this Monday morning, which is why the protest is Monday).

I know you have other things you need to do, but if the government keeps growing, when will any of us be less busy?

This is about free speech. What is happening to Matt and Janet is a warning to all of […]

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Part 8: Do Most Western Climate Scientists Believe Global Warming is Man-Made?

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans 19 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third was on ocean temperatures, and fourth discussed past temperatures, the fifth compared the alleged cause (human CO2 emissions) with the alleged effect (temperatures), the sixth canvassed the infamous attempt to “fix” that disconnect, the hockey stick, and the seventh pointed out that the Chinese, Russian, and Indian climate establishments (which are financially independent of the western climate establishment) disagree with the western climate establishment about the cause of recent global warming.]

Click to download a pdf file containing the whole series

Yes, But It’s Murky

Photo adapted from Youxue Hong Wikimedia

The vast majority of scientists in the western climate establishment believe in the theory of man-made global warming (but not Chinese, Russian, or Indian climate scientists, as noted). But […]

What the heck are science journalists for?

From The Skeptics Handbook II

Last week a science journalist at The Guardian wrote the best summary I have ever seen of the state of the profession known as “science communication”. Only, he thought it was a spoof. Well, it is — and it’s satirically funny at the same time as being an unwittingly cutting commentary. (We laugh at the formulaic approach because we know it’s so true, and then we bang our heads on the wall…).

Science journalists who churn out mindless ritual productions are effectively being PR and marketing writers. Dangerously, though, they are dressed as “investigative” journalists. The public assumes they are checking that their stories don’t break laws of logic and reason, that they are supported by evidence, and that they are providing the whole story. Their PR is the most powerful advertising there is, it’s not just free, it’s a third party endorsement.

Ironically, the same journalists probably don’t realize how important they are. They think they’re there for a fluffy feelgood reasons: to help promote science, raise public awareness, and attract school leavers into careers in science. They don’t realize that their most important role is to protect science itself and be guardians […]

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Part 7: Other Climate Establishments Disagree

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans 6 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third was on ocean temperatures, and fourth discussed past temperatures, the fifth compared the alleged cause (human CO2 emissions) with the alleged effect (temperatures) and the sixth canvassed the infamous attempt to “fix” that disconnect, the hockey stick.]

Click to download a pdf file containing the whole series

The western climate establishment consists of the climate science research bodies in the western world, and their climate scientists. The leading organizations are the IPCC of the United Nations, the CRU in Britain, and GISS and NOAA in the United States. Personnel move around within the establishment, getting funding from the same sources, collaborating on projects, and publishing in the same journals.

There are other climate establishments in this world, and […]

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Part 6: The Hockey Stick

I know the Hockey Stick is old news to most blog readers here, but it’s easy to forget that the people reading the mainstream news (ie: most of the West) have no idea of the scale of the audacity involved. Up until the 1998 MBH paper came out, it was widely understood that there was a Medieval Warm Period, indeed there were hundreds of papers available at the time. The Hockey Stick Graph completely rewrote everything, yet was accepted and widely promoted without anyone so much as asking for the data… until, of course, McIntyre and McKitrick tried. It will do down in the annuals of science as one of the most egregious examples of “the not-so-scientific” method. — JoNova

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans

6 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third discussed ocean temperatures, the fourth discussed past temperatures, […]