|
|
Lennart Bengtsson joined the GWPF only two weeks ago. He’s a very well respected Swedish leading climate scientist. But he’s been put under — as he describes it — unbearable pressure to quit. Steve McIntyre calls it a fatwa.
What an extraordinarily raw letter:
Dear Professor Henderson,
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.
I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
Three years ago I made the case for dumping renewables, and doubling medical research — and both occurred in last night’s budget. (Yes, I hear the cry that this is just more big-government funded bad-science, bear with me, I’ll get to that). First let me bask in the glory (wink).
I’m especially proud of the Op-Ed I wrote in The Weekend Australian in May 2011. Indeed it’s very much my driving mission — to redirect corrupted and wasteful tax funds towards better uses, and to help four year olds with cancer, and all the other variants of human pain.
It’s big biccies… The Abbott Government is setting up a 20 billion dollar medical research future fund, which is expected to distribute $1 billion to research annually by 2022-23. It’s being claimed it is the largest in the world (I am not entirely convinced, but nonetheless, it’s radically big). We currently spend about $800m a year on medical research, so this would really double it. (Spooky).
But I can feel the barbs of skeptical libertarians already — saying the money should have been used to pay off the debt or returned to the people who earned it — and I’m […]
UPDATE: The bottom line. Meh.People are calling it “brutal”, and saying it’s a slash and burn budget, but really government spending will only shrunk by 0.5% of GDP.
[The Guardian] “The government is cutting overall spending, but relatively slowly – from 25.3% of GDP to 24.8% next year, 24.7% in 2016-17 and rising to 24.8% again in 2017-18. By comparison Peter Costello’s first budget was much more savage, cutting government spending from 25.1% to 23.9% of GDP.”
The Australian 2014/15 Budget has just been released. It’s the first budget of the Abbott government. (Catallaxy has the transcript of the speech). Given election cycles there will probably not be a better opportunity to move towards a smaller, less burdensome government. Are the cuts enough? [UPDATE: No].
How much unnecessary tithing is there to the carbon monster?
There are some good signs: 16,500 public service jobs will be cut. And “70 government agencies will be scrapped or merged” including the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). Depressingly, while this is useful, it’s not much. There are apparently so many government agencies no one can figure out the exact number. There are estimates it’s close to 1000.
UPDATE: From News.com […]
The Satirical Times
Mother Nature has issued a disguised voluntary recall notice for Arctic Treemometers. Sold as a way of measuring temperatures over the last two millennium, they turned out to fail frequently, even going against trends in most other thermometers in the last half century. The flaw has been quietly recognized for years, but is rarely mentioned in polite circles.
Critics wonder why it took Mother Nature so long to issue the recall and why it is so qualified and partial. They point out that these safety warnings only seem to appear when product salesmen are also offering a repair kit for sale too.
In this case Stine and Huybers tell us they can fix the “divergence” problem with treemometers by considering incoming light. Treemometers are failing, they say, because of global dimming and inconvenient volcanoes. As long as sunlight reaches trees the treemometers work. (Critics dryly reply that it’s hardly news that sunlight affects tree growth, and that they never bought the tree-ring data in any case.)
Meanwhile Mann-made Treemometers Inc issued a statement in 4-point Roman Half-Uncial script at 3am saying that their Treemometers are as accurate as ever in all locations where cloud cover, […]
A miracle has occurred, climate models which have been plagued with failure and have finally been gifted with The Scientific Truth. Apparently the God of Weather has visited upon Matthew England and others. (We wonder why God didn’t visit earlier, but are grateful for this insight.)
The climate models didn’t predict Antarctic sea ice extent trends. Polar amplification was supposed to mean it would warm twice as fast at the poles, yet inconveniently after years of massive output of CO2 — above the levels assumed in the models — Antarctic sea ice has hit another record high. Finally in the eighth round of making excuses for their excuses, the Scientific Truth has emerged to sweep away the scientific untruths that went before. (After all, climate models couldn’t possibly have been expected to understand heat flow around the planet could they?)
The yellow line shows how much rain Antarctica is stealing and dumping as sea ice. If you turn on your tumble drier the penguins in Antarctica have to walk further.
Ocean winds keep Antarctica cold, Australia dry Science Daily May 11, 2014 Source: Australian National University
New research has explained why Antarctica is not warming as much as […]
Photo by Geoff Sherrington | Click to enlarge
8 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
In Australia half of all families get more money from the state than they contribute:
The exclusive modelling for News Corp Australia by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling at the University of Canberra reveals 48 per cent of Australia’s 12.2 million “income units” pay no net tax. Any tax they do contribute is more than offset by the welfare — pensions, family tax benefits or childcare rebates — they receive.
The fiscal churn is large. How many people are paid to spend all their productive hours just managing a circle of money?
On average, Australian families will pay $12,935 in income tax this year, but receive $9,515 in benefits — leaving a net yearly contribution to the public purse of just $3424.
In the USA 86 million private sector workers support 148 million benefit takers.
There are also 16 million government workers (not counted in the 86 million tally) — some of whom are most definitely serving the public. On the other hand, some of the private sector workers are doing contracts for the government, and are effectively government paid workers. I wouldn’t want to quibble about the exact numbers. What matters is that we are at […]
Disaster Disaster! Driving a car in 2014 could one day cause 2 billion people to suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies leaving them anaemic and prone to infection, and causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually. This is brought to you from the Annals of Hyped-Science (formerly known as Nature). A sad day indeed.
It’s true that carbon dioxide is plant fertilizer and increases plant yields, so future crops, grown in a CO2 rich world, may not have exactly the same nutrient profile. Presumably future plants will have slightly more useless starchy carbohydrate. It is a kind of dilution effect at work, where plants keep absorbing the same amount of minerals, but spread them out among more carbohydrate.
Before we hit the panic button, lets look the numbers. The new Myers et al study[1] reports that zinc and iron content of rice may fall by, wait for it, five percent. In wheat the iron content could fall by as much as 10%. But no one who has a choice, eats grains like rice or wheat for their iron and zinc content, since both these are poor sources of both. We’re talking about low grade bulk filler food.
Assuming the […]
A new study by Steinke shows that the sun could have been a driver (somehow) of some of the monsoonal rain changes over the last 6,000 years over Indonesia and Northern Australia. h/t to The Hockey Schtick
In the spirit of the Perfect ClimateTM that existed prior to Henry Ford, we also find that Indonesia had a dry spell that lasted for a while, like say, 3,000 years. It ended about 800BC whereupon things got wetter, and mostly stayed wetter. The authors (Steinke et al) think this might have something to do with solar minima which was very low 2800 years ago. (Though I note the Greek Dark Ages also finished then, and “city states” arose, right, so it could have been that too. Ahem?)
To get straight to the action in Figure 6 the top squiggly line is AISM Rainfall (that’s the Australian-Indonesian summer monsoon). It shows how things were wetter in the last 2800 years ago and drier before that (annoyingly, the present time is on the left). The second part of the graph in red shows sunspot numbers. That gets flipped upside down and superimposed on the rainfall graph in the third part, and we can see […]
Indian researchers have realized that the carbon modelers there had vastly underestimated the CO2 and CH4 given off by the parts of India covered in water, and when they put them in, they discovered they were churning out methane and carbon dioxide and the output was equal to 42% of what the Indian forests, farms and gardens were absorbing. (Lucky that only one sixth of humanity lives in India, eh?)
Humans are putting out less than 4% of total natural emissions of CO2 (as far as we can tell) – but obviously, we don’t even know what those natural emissions are — it’s like plus or minus forty percent. (Say hello to the Pacific Ocean and make that plus or minus 100%). Carbon accounting is a fog of best guesses.
And people trade global markets on this?
Below the authors explain why their estimates are so much better than past ones, but why they still don’t know the real answer. They also explain why the numbers change from place to place, river to river, and even from morning tea to dinner time.
The bottom line is that even suggesting a carbon market globally is an invitation to global rorting. In […]
Look out, Australia might trim a tiny slice from the Tithe to the Gods of Weather (protest coming)
The Australian budget is in dire straits after the Rudd-Gillard years of promised surpluses but exploding arithmetic. The Commission of Audit is here to test public reaction to all the possible ways of paying off the Labor debt. Somehow, it missed the biggest cherry waiting to be plucked. We could save billions if the the Abbott Government become more rigorously scientific. Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.
“Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.”
I expect the Greens will join me in declaring that if the Abbott government cared about the environment it would immediately launch a royal commission, a real audit, or an independent investigation into the effect of carbon dioxide. Only the best science for the planet, right? All funding to environmental programs dependent on unverified research should be frozen until the audit is finished. Easy eh? Let me be PM for a day. :- )
But apparently the sacred carbon cow must […]
Dr David Kear
Climate Depot reports on a New Zealand geoscientist who has worked at the highest levels and has just released a detailed statement about why the threat of rising sea-levels has been blown out of all proportions, and “An ‘innocent gas, CO2, has been demonized and criminalized’”.
“The widespread obsession with Global-Warming-Climate-Change, in opposition to all factual evidence, is quite incredible.”
Kear laments the ‘Astronomical Cost of Major Measures to Combat a Non-Existent Threat’.
His scientific caliber: “Dr David Kear has a background in geology and engineering, becoming the Director General of the DSIR (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) in 1980. He is a Fellow and Past Vice-President of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and Past President of the New Zealand Geological Society [which promises to catalogue his work here]. Dr Kear has over 100 publications on New Zealand and Pacific geology, vulcanology and mineral resources.” Apparently a foraminifera shell was named after him in 1962.
He has been in this for a very long time.
h/t to Ian for the link to Steven Goddard.
Six Grave Scientific Errors and the history of an absurd idea
Kear […]
Here’s a tale of how to generate headlines from circular reasoning built on brave assumptions. All it requires are some unskeptical science journal editors and gullible journalists. Et Voila!
Congratulations to Chip Knappenberger, Pat Michaels, and Anthony Watts, whose response to Åström et al was published Wednesday.
In October 2013 Åström et al claimed that global warming had killed lots of people in Stockholm, hundreds. But the first thing you need to know is that they don’t appear to start with actual mortality data in the early 1900’s. Surprised? Me too. Anthony Watts found it hard to believe . The other thing worth knowing is that extreme heat was defined as the top 2% of hot days, and in Stockholm that mean everything above a terrifying 2-day-moving-average mean temperature of 19.6C (67 F).
From the methods:
We collected daily mortality during the period 1980-2009 and daily temperature data for the period 1900-2009 for Stockholm County, Sweden.
Åström 2013: Figure 2 j Temperature distribution of 2-day moving average of mean temperatures during summer months. Grey distribution, 1900–1929; black distribution, 1980–2009.
It appears the authors compared calculated death rates (using a model) from 1900-1929 with rates from 1980-2009 and concluded that […]
I say, it’s lucky people who want to save the planet do it for the love of it:
National Post: The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has helped funnel almost $400-billion into emission-cutting projects in developing countries by allowing investors to earn carbon credits they can sell to companies and governments of richer nations that use them to meet emission targets.
I imagine they love $400 billion too.
This was just one branch of the great green-industrial-machine. (And yet skeptics are winning, she says wickedly, with hardly any money).
But those halcyon days are gone for the CDM — what was $30 per ton, is now 30c.
From 2003, developers flocked to register projects such as destroying heat-trapping waste gasses at Chinese chemical plants or installing hydroelectric power stations in Brazil, and made huge profits by selling the resulting carbon credits for up to $30.40 a tonne in 2008.
But interest has waned while countries wrangled over setting new emission goals under the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), hammering credit prices down to unprofitable levels below $0.30.
There’s a tiny $200 million or so left ticking over in the accounts:
The latest UN financial statements show […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support AT joannenova.com.au
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Print This Post | | 
Recent Comments