Australian Science Curriculum over run with green politics. Help them fix it!

The Labor Party pushed and got a National Australian Curriculum. Now instead of the states separately mucking up parts of kid’s education, we’ve achieved a monoculture — an entire generation spoon-fed the same flaws. At least with the state systems — for all their imperfections, some states would do better than others, and we’d get a generation of Australians with different strengths and weaknesses.

Members of the public are invited to make a submission to the Australian Curriculum Review. But it closes this Friday (tomorrow). on Friday March 14th (it has just been extended). (h/t Truthseeker and Paul M). One of the two experts conducting the review has spoken up about ideological slants in the curriculum — the more people who voice objections to politicized bias in our education, the better. Three sacred topics?

Get the Pillars of Political Correctness out of our curriculum

The new Australian Curriculum insists that three areas were so important they must be taught in every subject. So, if you are a maths teacher or a French teacher or any other teacher of K – 10, you’ll need to consider how to embed these “Cross Curriculum Priorities” in your subject.

You and I might, in […]

Half a million people in the air at any one time

Marvel at the science and engineering that keeps these planes flying, and remarkably safely:

Planes in the sky with half a million people in the air at any one time | Guardian & Flightstats

How many flights are in the air at once? NOAA estimates that 5,000 planes are in the sky over the United States. On any given day, more than 87,000 flights travel through US airspace… globally estimates seem to be that there are around 8,000 – 13,000 though I didn’t happen to find an authoritative source.

This youtube shows the dots in motion:

8.4 out of 10 based on 60 ratings

Busted: 120 gibberish science papers withdrawn — so much for “peer review”

At least 120 computer generated nonsense papers have been reviewed and published in publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Springer, as well as conference proceedings. The fakes have just been discovered by a French researcher and are being withdrawn.

Cyril Labbé found a way to spot artificially-generated science papers, and published it his website and lo, the fakes turned up en masse. In the past, pretend papers have turned up in open access journals–this time the fake papers appeared in subscription based journals. But the man who caught the fakes says he cannot be sure he’s caught them all, because he couldn’t check all the papers behind paywalls.

According to Nature:

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and […]

Almost everything the media tells you about skeptics is wrong: they’re engineers and hard scientists. They like physics too.

In the mainstream media, skeptics are called Flat-Earthers, Deniers, and ideologues who deny basic physics. So it’s no surprise that they are exactly the opposite. A recent survey of 5,286 readers of leading skeptical blogs (eg here, WattsUp) shows that the people driving the skeptical debate are predominantly engineers and hard scientists with backgrounds like maths, physics and chemistry. Which group in the population are least likely to deny basic physics? Skeptics.

I asked Mike Haseler for more details:

around half of respondents had worked in engineering and a quarter in science around 80% had degrees of which about 40% were “post graduate” qualified. Respondents were asked which areas they had formal “post-school qualification”. A third said “physics/chemistry. One third said maths. Just under 40% said engineering. 40% said they had post school training in computer programming.

Furthermore, the media “debate” is nothing like the real debate. Four out of five skeptics agree our emissions cause CO2 levels to rise, that Co2 causes warming, and that global temperatures have increased. In other words, the mainstream media journalists have somehow entirely missed both the nature of the skeptics and the nature of the debate.

The so called “experts” (say like Stephan […]

Monday Unthreaded

Sorry, other engagements call, back soon.

8.5 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Greenland ice cores show natural swings are large and warming means less storms

A new high resolution ice core in Greenland surprises even me with the wild swings and detail. The authors are discussing wind direction and storms that occurred in specific years 12,000 years ago, which is extraordinary information if accurate. They use elements like sodium (from sea salt) to figure out how many storms have dumped salt on the ice and take bands so thin they identify each summer so long ago*. The slices are so thin, they claim to have hundreds of samples per year.

The message here is that the cold younger dryas period ended abruptly (within one year) and so did the storms. Naturally, they warn that the abrupt changes mean the climate is unstable, “be afraid” type stuff. My take on this is that if natural factors cause abrupt climate change, we need to know what those natural factors are. The obsession with CO2 is hindering that. Also if warming brings less storms, that’s probably not such a bad thing. The caveats being that this is only one site, and less storms over the GISP site doesn’t tell us if less storms occurred elsewhere. It could be that jet streams shifted and moved the storms to another […]

Weekend Unthreaded

For all those other topics…

8.8 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

The Deification of climate saints – Curtin University’s sacred Nobel wall

UPDATE: Commenters are reporting that the bio page has changed. Does anyone have a screenshot of the original? – Jo

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A friend at Curtin University, Western Australia reports that a new mysterious and imposing mural appeared on the facade. It is as if passers-by can look through the bricks and see a Saint-of-Science himself working.

The words on the plaque (which must be something like 5m wide) read “Inside our walls Professor Richard Warrick is continuing the climate change research that led to a Nobel Peace Prize. “ (Sing Hallelujah and praise Al Gore).

Richard Warrick [Jo particularly likes the aura effect Curtin create around this Saint.]

From the anonymous dissident within the enclave:

“We were showered with press releases when Richard Warrick joined Curtin last year… we have our own piece of the IPCC here with us! It’s the closest most of us will ever get to touching the holy hockey stick. (I heard stories that blind students have regained their sight after touching Curtin’s sacred wall)

“Warrick’s bio pages say that he is a “co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize” and that “he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former […]

What’s an alarmist to do? Extreme weather images lead to denial (like everything else does)

I sense much gnashing of teeth. There seems to be nothing a reasonable social-science communicator can do. If they write like conservative scientists, the public don’t worry enough, if they load on the fear and guilt, people turn off. They can hammer the anti-science notion of consensus, which seems to work a treat in inept five minute surveys, but “the consensus” has been all over the press, in school, and in documentaries, yet (wail and weep) the polls of public alarm are still sliding! The media is even less interested. (See Figure 1 below).

There plots the rise and fall of climate in the media. (Figure 1 in this paper).

For the last few years the media have tried showing a lot more high-gloss posters of floods, cyclones and cracked earth, and that is not working either. It doesn’t seem to matter if we show disasters-away with stoic Sudanese or disasters-at-home with suffering suburban mortgagees, the public disengage.

Here Nerlich and Jaspal use “visual thematic analysis” (a technical word for looking at pictures and saying things about them) and publish a paper in a journal with the unlikely title “Science As Culture“.

It appears the social science communicators have […]

Matt Ridley: They ridiculed skeptics. The skeptics were right.

Another excellent article by Lord Matt Ridley

UPDATE: Read it in full on Matt’s Blog. (ht Gordon/backslider/harrie/RPS/John)

Argument by ridicule is not just something that happens, it’s the main approach:

“In the old days we would have drowned a witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed Miliband demand we purge the climate sceptics. No insult is too strong for sceptics these days: they are “wilfully ignorant” (Ed Davey), “headless chickens” (the Prince of Wales) or “flat-earthers” (Lord Krebs), with “diplomas in idiocy” (one of my fellow Times columnists).

What can these sceptics have been doing that so annoys the great and the good? They sound worse than terrorists. Actually, sceptics have pretty well all been purged already: look what happened to Johnny Ball and David Bellamy at the BBC. Spot the sceptic on the Climate Change Committee. Find me a sceptic within the Department of (energy and) Climate Change. Frankly, the sceptics are a ragtag bunch of mostly self-funded guerrillas, who have made little difference to policy — let alone caused the floods.

On floods, the skeptics agree with the IPCC:

8.8 out of 10 based on 161 ratings […]

Big unions outspend Koch Bros 15 times over – where is the outrage?

The Koch Brothers have “distorted democracy”, held a “war on climate”, built a vast network of “climate disinformation think tanks”, and we can apparently blame them for “congressional inaction“. But now (oh No) Greenpeace, DeSmog, Think Progress, Naomi Oreskes and fan-followers must be in meltdown, for it turns out there are 58 more powerful forces in US politics! Donations to US political parties were tallied from 1989 – 2012 by Open Secrets and the most powerful donors by far are the unions.

Washington Examiner: “Six of the top 10 are … wait for it … unions. They gave more than $278 million, with most of it going to Democrats.

These are familiar names: AFSCME ($60.6 million), NEA ($53.5 million), IBEW ($44.4 million), UAW ($41.6 million), Carpenters & Joiners ($39.2 million) and SEIU ($38.3 million).

In other words, the six biggest union donors in American politics gave 15 times more to mostly Democrats than the Evil Koch Bros.

Others in the top ten were AT&T, Goldman Sachs, and ActBlue. Three quarters of the top 16 donors sent most of their money to the Democrats. The other quarter split it between both sides of politics. All up, the unions dominated the donor […]

Thank Agenda 21, Red Tape and Green sustainability for Somerset floods in UK

Christopher Booker explains in The Spectator that it’s not global warming that caused such ghastly floods in the UK, but incompetence and a Green EU wetland plan. He lives near Somerset, (SW England) so he started investigating the rising water six weeks ago — which has now become widespread inundation there, with damages estimated at over £100 million.

(Click to enlarge) Map of Somerset floods | From this BBC page.

As usual, this was a process of small government becoming collectivized big-government.

In the Spectator he writes that before 1996, local groups of farmers and engineers managed the drains, but in 1996 the EA (Environmental Agency) took over. Regular dredging stopped happening, the pumping stations were neglected (or stopped, see the link to the note from the Ghost below), and the local drainage boards found it hard to get anything done with the EA red tape. Then things got worse. In 2002, “the Baroness Young of Old Scone, a Labour peeress, became the agency’s new chief executive”. As Booker goes on to note, she used to run the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Natural England, not that that’s a bad thing per se, just that she […]

Is a rock on the way? (and a Weekend Unthreaded)

50,000 years ago a bit of wayward rock about 50m across met Earth and left this 1200m wide crater in Arizona.

Ponder the momentum of 50m bit of rock that left a hole over a kilometer wide and 200m deep.

If one was coming. Would we know?

…(Click to enlarge) Photo not by JoNova

 

Thanks to NASA and The Earth Observatory

UPDATE: JoeV in comments adds an interesting link to Tracking space junk at Satview.org. An old satellite is coming in right now. It’s over Alaska (moving fast) at 153km high and falling quickly. Cosmos 1220, a Soviet era military surveillance satellite. Eddie adds a different link which suggests Cosmos is expected to crash into the Pacific in hours. Amazing what you can find out on the Internet.

 

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Climate Scientists say extreme summers “must be” due to CO2 “we can’t think of anything else”

Tick off Argument from Ignorance from this weeks Climate Bingo card.

Scientists who can’t predict temperature trends, clouds, rain, or humidity, are telling us that greenhouse gases must have caused the extreme summer last year because, they don’t have a clue what else might have done it. Journalists, editors, and scores of conference goers apparently fell for it.

The Mercury

THE extreme temperatures that ravaged Australia last year cannot be explained by anything other than greenhouse gas, the nation’s biggest annual meeting of climate scientists heard in Hobart yesterday.

Researcher Sophie Lewis told the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society conference about her hunt for reasons behind the extreme sum­mer, which coincided with Tasmania’s January 2013 summer.

Notice the brazen ambition here — they pretend that they can predict, understand, and model “natural climate variation”:

“It is nearly impossible to explain it from natural climate variation. Greenhouse gases are needed to explain this,’’ the University of Melbourne researcher said.

So figure perhaps, that if they knew all the forces in natural variability they might be able to predict the climate?

Remember, this is 95% certainty talking to you. Basically, they are “not wrong” because no one can predict the climate. […]

Farewell, Knights of Delingpole? Say it isn’t so!

Damn but we’ll miss you Dellers. Here today, what tomorrow? (See the Update #3: Brietbart.com? Plus note the story today on Spectator. Move those bookmarks eh?)

Of course we know we will keep tripping across your wake (I’m referring to the waves your words leave as they cut through the raging wash.) I absolutely can’t believe we won’t be hearing more of you. The Delingpole will not be silenced… somehow, someway, those impish, wicked thoughts and savage put-downs will make their way out in to the world.

 

Farewell, Knights of Delingpole – and thank you, trolls

And thank you most of all to those of you who have supported me through thick and thin. Thanks for your technical expertise and advice (it prevented anyone ever noticing that I’m an English graduate and know NOTHING about science apart from, maybe, how to grow copper sulphate crystals); thanks for your jokes, links and irrelevant asides; thanks for your friendship and loyalty and courage in the face of sometimes, near insuperable odds, against the dark forces of statism, political correctness, and green-left-liberal lunacy. You are like brothers to me: all of you; apart from the ones who are more like sisters.

UK Met office predicts 15% chance of heavy rain. Britain gets “biblical floods”.

UK Met Office in December predicted a 15% chance of Jan-Feb-March being the wettest category. Instead the UK got “Biblical floods”.

Cartoon thanks to Panda at It’sNotClimateScience

The Prediction

SUMMARY – PRECIPITATION: Latest predictions for UK-precipitation show a slight signal for near or just above average rainfall during January-February-March

as a whole. The probability that UK precipitation for January-February-March will fall into the driest of our five categories is around 20% and the probability that it will fall into the wettest category is between 10 and 15% (the 1981-2010 probability for each of these categories is 20%).

Photo Chris Murray

The flooding continues:

[RT] England’s largest river, the Thames, has burst its banks, devastating homes in the southeast in the worst floods in 50 years. PM David Cameron has called the flooding “biblical,” as economists predict the crisis will cost close on $1 billion.

The latest bout of rainfall caused the Thames River to swell and burst its banks, forcing people in Berkshire and Surrey from their homes. On Monday evening Surrey Police issued a statement saying that over 150 people had been rescued from their flooded homes. So far about 5,000 homes across the country have been […]

Global Wind excuse — monkey-modeling shows global warming theory is Still Not Wrong.

The backdown continues. Faced with the ongoing failure of their models, the search rolls on for any factor that helps “explain” why the official climate scientists are still right even though they got it so wrong. The new England et al paper endorses skeptics in so many ways.

The world might warm by only 2.1 degrees this century, not 4c. (Skeptics were right — the models exaggerate). There has been and is a pause in warming which the 95%-certain-models didn’t predict. (The science wasn’t settled.) What the trade-winds giveth, they can also taketh away. If they “cause cooling” after 2000, then they probably “caused warming” before that. How much less important is CO2? Ultimately, newer models are less wrong if they include changes in wind speed, but they don’t know what drives the wind. It’s curve fitting with one more variable.

As usual, the models still can’t predict the climate, but they can be adjusted post hoc with new factors to trim their overestimates back to within the errors bars of some observations.

As I said nearly 2 years ago, Matthew England owes Nick Minchin an apology:

Nick Minchin: ” there is a major problem with the warmist argument […]

Coal is a gift from Gaia

Solar Energy Storage – A Gift from Gaia

There is a massive problem with photo-voltaic solar power. Modern cities and industries require power 24/7 but solar panels can only deliver significant energy from 9am to 3pm on a clear day – a maximum of 25% of the time. Even within this time, energy production peaks at midday and falls off steeply on either side.

Science has yet to develop a solar storage battery suitable for grid power. It must be sufficiently large, cheap and efficient to hold the solar power generated during the short solar maximum so it can be used later, when peak demand usually occurs. This process requires that much of the solar energy produced in peak times would have to be devoted to recharging the massive battery.

A linked hydro plant would work in certain limited locations, but the same people advocating solar power are opposed to dam building for hydro power.

But Planet Earth has already solved this problem. For millions of years Earth has use photosynthesis to store solar energy via wood and plant material then converted this to long-term storage in the form […]

Do winds control the climate or does the ocean control the wind? Kininmonth on England 2014.

William Kininmonth essentially says that it’s possible that the trade winds have changed the climate, but asks why the winds themselves changed. Kininmonth explains that the ocean is much larger and holds much more heat than the atmosphere, and that the ocean drives the winds rather than the other way around. He points out again (as he did before here so eloquently in more detail) that what the paper describes is what we’ve known for a long time about the ENSO patterns and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO): when an El Nino Strikes, trade winds fall, ocean surface doesn’t turn over as much, the ocean surface is warmer, and the air stays hot above. When La Nina’s occur, trade winds speed up, the ocean stirs, and the cold deep water takes the heat out of the surface of the ocean and the air above.

His points are:

“Natural variability” is hardly a credible, useful scientific explanation. The IPCC said natural variability was small, so if it is larger now, then it was also larger during the rest of the 20th Century? This reduces the effect CO2 had earlier (and the effect it will have in future).

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Guest […]

Australia: more skeptics than believers, and few really care about “Climate change”

First up, despite the endless repetition in the media that the science is settled and the evidence is overwhelming, the latest CSIRO survey shows 53% of the Australian population don’t agree that “humans are causing climate change”. When the ABC gives 50% of its climate budget and time to skeptical arguments we will know it is fulfilling its charter. Right now, the ABC serves less than half the population. Secondly, even with 47% of the population agreeing that humans are “largely” causing climate change, many of these people still don’t think climate change will be that bad. The issue “Climate Change” ranks 14 out of 16 general concerns, and among environmental concerns a pathetic 7th out of 8. It seems a large section of the 47% think the warming will be minor, or even beneficial. The CSIRO has done another clumsy survey, the fourth in a series, still not learning that inaccurate survey terms make the results of most questions meaningless. The unmistakable bottom line from this is that only a minority of Australians think that humans are changing the climate in an important way. Most Australians are more concerned about their health, their income, their job, water shortages, or […]