Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a safe and happy holiday period.
Thanks especially to all of you who support independent science research and commentary. Somehow both earners in this household have been drawn full time into this strange pursuit. (Just doing our best to fill some gaping holes left by monopolistic government driven research and public broadcasting.) We are reliant on your generosity, and very grateful. It’s a team effort.
Dr David Evans, my other half, the Stanford Fourier man, has continued his research. The notch-delay theory is healthy and well. Updating the solar model has been delayed while an unexpected gem gets extracted and tested. David ended up spending most of the last six months digging deep into one corner of an appendix where an unpredicted contradiction revealed itself. Potentially this is a key part of the jigsaw, intrinsic to all climate models. It was too tempting to ignore. Unlike most of the climate debate, this gem does not rely on any arguments about datasets. And it is not diabolically complex either, for the most part. We’ll be releasing news of that sometime early in 2015. We’ll also be going through the empirical evidence that supports the notch delay theory in more detail soon.
I also want to thank all the contributors, the commenters for their advice and ideas, and of course, the moderators — who work behind the scenes to help the conversation flow (and get paid nothing but thank-yous from me!)
Site traffic up 20%
Such is the power of the Internet. In the last 12 months the site has been visited by 600,567 unique users, who have looked at 3.4 million pages. Traffic is growing. Twenty seven percent of visitors were new. When I add up the data, collectively in the last 365 days the site has occupied 101,300 hours of human attention among people from 224 countries.
Some personal messages to people I can’t email:
To Peter in SA – a note is coming your way. Thank-you! To the person who sent a letter to the PO Box in mid Dec from NSW, thank-you, too, – can you email me? (joanne At joannenova.com.au).
A very happy Christmas to you Jo and your family. Thank you for all the hard work, your patience and your forbearance.
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Remember well: if the local atmosphere was absorbing and thermalising global mean 157.5 W/m^2 ‘Clear Sky Atmospheric Greenhouse Factor’ surface-emitted IR energy, it would have to be 15.47 K cooler than the 16 deg C surface. This is a S-B calculation that even the dumbest of eco-fascists, and they are seriously dumb to have fallen for the IPCC fraud, can do. I assume a generously low 0.75 Emissivity for 238.5 W/m^2 atmospheric Emittance.
That air temperature would be lower than at any time since the Ordovician ice age, 444 million years ago. The fact that there is no surface to atmosphere temperature drop proves there can be no Enhanced GHE. Furthermore, real CO2 climate sensitivity is very near zero, kept there by atmospheric processes that reduce humidity. You can check my reasoning from Figure 2.5 of co-IPCC founder Sir John Houghton’s ‘Physics of Atmospheres’ where he demonstrates there can be no mean surface to atmosphere temperature drop because of the convection needed to maintain lapse rate temperature gradient. He wrongly assumed a grey body atmosphere, but that is unimportant. One wonders why he now supports the IPCC fraud.
So, tell warmists you meet that not only are they wrong, they are stupid; this goes all the way to the top. No professional scientist would ever make such a dumb error. As for the real AGW, and there was some in the 1980s and 1990s, it was from the burst of Asian aerosol emissions. The same mechanism accounts for ice ages and the 60 – 90 year Arctic melt-freeze cycle, now freezing. Merry Christmas everybody and hope the New Year will see the chief fraudsters put on trial.
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Woke up to minus 13 this morning. They claim Norway is the best country to live in. But I think I know why only 5 millions live here?
30
Now we know why the Lemmings hurl themselves off cliffs.
20
Jo and David.
Its very good to hear that the notch-delay theory is not dead.
Its approach looked like it had merit, and it will be interesting to see how it has progressed.
Happy Xmas and New Year to all.
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This is Science. The work done on the Notch Theory will never die, it will be recorded and provide those who follow with a guide post. The post may say, “Look here!” or “Look somewhere else,” but it will be useful for a long, long time.
It’s not surprising that something interesting has been found in an appendix. Appendices and footnotes are where contrary science would be swept by those who would conceal it, yet wish to retain some pretense of being scientists.
Which reminds me: has any blog ever shown the full structure of a climate model? Models have all sorts of nooks and crannies within which to hide things. It might be useful to dissect a model, bit by bit, and see what the inner workings actually look like.
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Merry Christmas Jo and David! Likewise to all who come here. Great work all year Jo and it’s very much appreciated.
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Merry Christmas, Jo, Moderators and all the readers, even the mystery red thumbs. Hope you all have a Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year, except the red thumbs getting their way on tax policy and measures that hurt people.
Now good people it’s time to release some CO2, preferably from glass bottles containing beverages, a whole bunch of food consumption, and please remember the meaning of Christmas viz, goodwill to all men (with male gender implying female regardless of age etc, etc – Just for the PC crowd)
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Keep it up. We needs ya Jo.
Aaron Mead & Al Gore.
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Jo and David, have a wonderful Christmas time and best wishes to you and the family,
from sunny Queensland
121
A quiet and peaceful Christmas Joanne, David and family.
Christmas is for children, and our joy as adults is seeing their joy at this time.
To all the readers here, I hope you all have a wonderful time with your families.
Tony.
291
A Happy Christmas to you Jo and your family, and everyone else !
Pointman
221
Dare we expect a Christmas greeting from sillyfilly or the other trolls? I doubt it; only some snide remarks, I expect.
Thank you Jo, David Evans and all the team. You have done a superb job during 2014. I trust by the end of 2015 we shall see the end of all this CAGW nonsense. It has gone on for far too long, and cost far too many billions of wasted dollars. The whole scam is showing definite signs of eroding away, and you Jo-anne, have done much to achieve this. Keep plugging away in 2015. Meanwhile, have a good Christmas and New Year break.
242
Greetings from the trolls? Unlikely they will stop their weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth to be civil. The increase of traffic to this site must be the final humiliation for them. Unlike the wise men they can see no light, nor have they wanted to. Still, they make an occasional source of innocent merriment.
My thanks to you, Jo, and David and all the team and may you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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MurrayA,
Don’t be too harsh in your criticisms, use the negatives I say.
The trolls provide good sport and a bit of a giggle, but whats more their drive-bys they help Jo increase her KPI’s.
And don’t forget that every troll operates out of their prime instinct for ‘attention’.
The continuing success of Jonova, which is contributed to in no small measure by the ‘attention seeking instincts’ of the trolls themselves, is merely a natural process that will inevitably lead to the extinction of the natural troll habitats, SkS and such like, because they fail to gain the attention they crave the dynamics of the modern world dictate that they gravitate to a greatly more successfull habitat, but this ultimately only temporaily eases their feelings of failure.
Unfortunately, like any addiction, the craving for attention will see more and more trolls appear more and morte often – did I write morte often just then, beg pardon must have been a Freudian, I meant to write more often – so to continue, more and more often, and if we continue to use the negatives this cultuarl change will merely provide more avenues to enlighten, teach and guide the trolls, but more importantly their own habitats wil dry up and return to the primordial ooze – did I just write ooze, it’s early, forgive me, I meant sleeze – the primordial sleeze from whence they came, leaving the trolls no other choice but to get with the program or be left out in the cold, quite literally.
So, Merry Cristmas to all, Happy New Year,
and last one out at SkS turn off the lights.
That was a cricket, I just heard a cricket, I did, that was a cricket at SkS…
183
James. The cricket starts on Boxing Day. 🙂
MC+HNY. !
40
Thanks for that, Griss. 🙂
20
Wow, thanks guys, that was one helluva ride…
10
“Morte” is a good word in this context, especially if you speak French,
20
A bit like trap shooting sometimes except with multiple shooters aiming for the one target and the clay targets shout “pull” themselves .
21
Byron,
“and the clay targets shout “pull” themselves ”
Reasonably apt turn of phrase in view of the subject trolls under discussion, but there probably should be a comma somewhere to clear up the ambiguity…
20
erm yes , re-reading that I can see the ambiguity , how about …
21
Soused sent us all a Christmas greeting a few days ago.
Actually it was Happy Festivus, but the sprit of goodwill was plainly evident.
20
Yeah, saw that PeterC,
Bit creepy coming from that old bat just the same.
52
Aw red thumb on Christmas, give me a break, it wasn’t the real Sou that sent the greeting and did you even watch the Festivus episode to see what Festivus was all about…
12
Merry Christmas to you and yours also.
80
All the very best for a great Christmas; Jo, David and the hard working team.
This site is democracy in action and a wonderful oasis of reality in a desert of propaganda.
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Merry Christmas and a happy new year to Joanne and her many readers. This is a great site. Interesting issues and polite discussions.
Best wishes,
William
90
Not much can be added to the comments above but; Merry Christmas All
Jo, David and team and all who visit, read and post.
A brilliant site.
A thousand inputs from comedy to tragedy but inevitably held together by the Truth of Science.
Well done ALL
KK
aka MaryFJ
80
Merry Christmas and Happy and Productive New Year to you and David.
Thoroughly enjoyed all of your posts. A fantastic effort and looking forward
to a bigger and better 2015.
90
I’m inclined to be the Christmas Grinch, but I will hold off on site criticism until the new year.
In the meantime I have one Christmas wish to impart to all and sundry. It concerns renewable energy. Take a look at these newspoll survey results from August this year.
As Winston Churchill reputedly said, the main argument against Democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter.
According to that survey, 62% of Australians are STRONGLY in favour of “governments in Australia funding the development of renewable energy”. According to the same survey done at the same time, over 62% of Australians think using renewable energy is “A good idea as long as you don’t have to pay any more for your electricity”.
WHERE DO THEY THINK THE GOVERNMENT GETS MONEY? Hel-looo? If you want the goverment to fund renewable energy then you are going to pay extra for the produced electricity via your taxes… and maybe give up a bit of education and healthcare funding along the way to make the budget balance. (I’m sorry, did I just suggest that an Australian government would deliver a balanced budget? There must have been too much rum in these Christmas rum balls.)
You could have your renewable energy (sporadically at unpredictable times) but you would be paying extra for it one way or another. Anyhow, you will now understand the background for the Christmas wish I shall bestow upon the nation;
I wish this Christmas that Santa will bring every Australian taxpayer a shiny new alarm clock so that they can WAKE UP. 🙂
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The populous simply don’t ‘get’ renewable energy. Renewable energy is successfully locked (for the moment) in the same green & eco-friendly marketing paradigm with phosphate free washing powder and biodegradable plastic bags, both moderately useful, moderately appealing but more importantly, nice sounding, heart warming, save the planet thought-bytes that help the mushrooms feel slightly more important (less powerless) and a part of the meme.
They will eventually come to realise the cost implications when they they feel the pain of paying the same to run their electric cars and bikes as they presently do for their gasoline powered versions, and when they are compelled to run their homes ‘off’ courtesy of ‘smart-metering’ for a several hours a day. In the meantime, the green rip-off is in full swing. I see hotels proclaiming they are green and advising that you can skip having your room made up and towels refreshed without at the same time offering a rebate on the reduced services provided. I always ask, but usually get a blank, uncomprehending look from the front desk staff, bless ’em.
Happy Christmas to one and all. Big thanks to Jo and her vital team for providing the crucial lynch-pin here. Bottoms-up and see you all on the other side. At least, the year ushers out with The Pope having a go at Vatican bureaucrats. One prays that he’s the unwitting author of a new craze – slam-a-crat?
90
Merry Christmas Jo and David.
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Jo,
Your wishes are gladly received and returned to you. I wish you and yours all the best.
Now go unthreaded and enjoy all of them!
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“... go unthreaded ...”? For one unguarded moment my mind suggested something it is now ashamed of.
No. I’m not going to explain!
Merry Christmas, Jo.
40
As in… “Dear Santa: I can explain” ….
Enjoy and thank you all!~
30
Merry Christmas and a safe and Happy New Year to Jo, David and team and all who visit and read this Blog. Best of luck with notch-delay theory work David hope you show how your theory evolved to fit the data not the other way round. To show those Climate Scientists the way a real theory is researched in that update coming soon in 2015. I think they could do with the lesson of how real science is suppose to work
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Merry Christmas and the best in 2015. Thank you for all you do. From Canada with love to all Aussies and your international audience. May truth and honesty prevail!
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Well this Canadian looks down under several times a day to catch up!!
Best to you and your family and Merry Christmas.
100
Be careful, you can get moderated for for looking down under in public. 😉
Happy yule … something, everybody.
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Merry Christmas Jo. Read you blog every day; keep up the good work. Received a copy of “Climate Change The Facts 2014” on Monday and finished it today; it was supposed to last me through Christmas and Boxing day. Thoroughly enjoyed the book and found your chapter 11 very easy to follow.
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Merry Xmas to Jo and all the regulars (even sillyfilly!)
60
May I wish everyone a very Happy Christmas and a good New Year.
Thank you Jo for all your hard work.
Καλά Χριστούγεννα
100
Evcharisto!
50
Merry Christmas, all. God bless us, every one.
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All the nest, Jo. Of course it’s already Christmas where you are.
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I’m glad to hear the solar theory is still looking viable and being worked on. But frankly, the sun looks like a much better suspect as the cause of climate change simply because we know its output varies in cyclic fashion, even without David’s theory.
And David, I hope you can finish up the work on the one hole in your first attempt and show us something soon. And thank you for being a true scientist who listened to valid criticism. It’s an example a lot more of the science world should follow.
It’s already December 25th in Oz so Merry Christmas, Jo, David and family.
And congratulations to you, Jo, on the increase in readership. Your awards for the last 2 years are well deserved.
152
From the dry side of the Cascades in Washington State:
Merry Christmas
91
Merry Christmas Jo and David!
Your contribution of truth about Man-made Global Warming began for me with your “Follow the Money” article on ABC News in 2010. I appreciate all that you do and all of the information you provide….tirelessly!
Mahalo and Aloha,
Richard Ferguson
Honolulu
90
Ditto Merry Christmas from north of 60, I suspect the number of readers will continue to increase 2015.
The true conversation is only just beginning.
We dissidents, anti-arguement by authoritarian types are about to get lots of company, because the average voter is getting financially abused by their ever increasing fuel/electricity bills in a non warming climate.
reality is nasty, it is cold and ever more expensive trying to raise a family, idiotic restrictions mangle enterprise on every front, yet the number of regulators and quasi rulers is ever growing.
I predict a swing in the cycle, human nature is unchanged.
Parasitic saturation will be culled.
Buy popcorn, perhaps we could run a sweepstake, which propagandist rats out their colleges first.
Who will accompany the mann as the bus rolls onto oblivion?
51
Halleluja, Eureka,
Just figured it out, the statistical calculation John Cook used to arrive at his consensus…
The answer was right there all the time…
It’s the same one you use when you turn your calculator upside down to spell:
SHELL.OIL
51
None of the engineers will get that joke, because it doesn’t work on the modern RPN scientific calculators.
Mind you, they never seem to get the joke about most things. IEEE – Joke free zone – no parking – no reacting – and keep your moments to yourself.
52
Of course it works on RPN; as long as they have a 7-segment display.
Key in the following number: 710.77345
I prefer(red) TI calculators: more bang for buck. In my final year at Uni., the population of calculators in my class was about 30% TI, 30% HP and the rest “others”, including Canon and Sharp. But by that time, I was doing all the serious calculations in FORTRAN (or AlphaBASIC); simply because “my work” was self-documenting and I could easily trace back to where I might have gone wrong.
Maybe electrical/electronic engineers prefer RPN because it’s closer to the machine; as in assembly-language programming.
61
Funny thing about calculators.
When I was posted to Wagga Wagga to teach the electrical trade to new guys, I found that I had to recall all that Maths I had conveniently filed away in my brain (from my original trade training) especially for Elec Tech 2, the longest Phase subject on the electrical course, and all of it Maths based, resolving formulae, like reactances, and then applying that to circuit flow, be that series or parallel, and then adding in Voltages, working out the current flows, and building up and resolving complex vector diagrams, ALL of that Math based.
To that end, to simplify it all for individual learning from the Instructor at the front of class, all students had to have, not a variety of calculators, but a Standard, and that standard was the Casio fx-100C, which were issued to each student at the start of the course. NO other calculator was allowed.
That Casio did the lot, everything. All you really had to learn was the sequence. Until you’ve had to work up an LCR circuit, series or parallel, and do all vector diagrams for individual values of current and voltage, overall voltage or current, true power, apparent power, and others I’ve probably forgotten, the real value of an engineering calculator is totally lost on most people.
Power Factor calculations sound simple, but it’s a working up of those vectors finding the true power/apparent power relationship, and then having to re-apply all that backwards for the new value to find individual values to bring that power factor back to the required 0.8 which is the Australian standard absolute minimum. Only an electrical engineer can understand how difficult all this really is, because a simple comment here just cannot explain what is involved with that.
I still have that original calculator I was issued with way back in 1986.
It gets used (a number of times) daily. Mouse on one side of the Monitor, and that calculator on the other side of the monitor. I mainly work in powers of ten these days, kilo/mega/giga and terra (or as it was originally referred to, Tetra) as in power output.
Then there’s the application of formulae and the most common one I use is the Standard for actual power delivery.
NP X 24 X 365.25 X CF
It’s how I blow renewable power out of the water.
What renewable power proposers do is quote the old crock of number of homes supplied, and people just lap that up, because they do not know the maths involved to work that out, and the people making those renewable power proposals know that. It’s how they hide the truth in plain sight, because no one knows what it ACTUALLY means. The proposers have an idea of the basic residential power consumption for that area. They have a theoretical value for their CF, always overstated. They use the above formula to work out actual power delivered by their wind plant, and then divide that down to supply X number of homes.
It sounds so innocuous really, but once you know what to look for it ridicules renewable power for the failure that it is.
All of that is maths based and all of that on the trusty calculator.
When I did my original trade training we had slide rules and log books, and you get proficient on a slide rule very quickly, but that fx-100C is a boon I could not do without.
Tony.
91
Ah the perennial Casio Fx-100
Have 2 on my desk here and two at work
Actually no, one of these ones here is an FX-82.
30
Merry Christmas to Jo and all that come here.
Question Griss,, where does the fx 82 get it’s power from ?? Mine is a 82 super
I have had mine since, I don’t know how long and it just keeps working.
I have a TI 59 with the card reader I used when working. Retired 20 years now.
30
“where does the fx 82 get it’s power from ??’
No idea, this one must have a little flat battery or something inside. there is nowhere to put dry cells.
Yep, they seem to just keep going, I guess this one is 10-12 years old.
30
There’s an Anroid app which does a good job at emulating the TI-59. Much faster of course and there’s nowhere I can insert my old cards to read the old progarms and data. But it will read and write virtual “cards” so if you love your programs enough, you can put the instructions into a file and run them like you used to… much faster than before.
10
If I could find out the power source, maybe we could scale it up and run the house for 10 years or more without refuelling ! I think my fx 82 is nearer 20 years old.
BTW. The TI59 and myself retired 20 years ago !
30
I graduated from Engineering a couple of years before the electronic calc became widely available.
Now that I think about it, there were guys who claimed to read a 10 inch slide rule to 6 significant figures. I think some of those went on to become climatologists. Pick the nits without any comprehension of the big picture. First rule – do some ready reckoning to identify the ballpark. The Bomar LED calc changed my life at the time, followed shortly by the scientific calc. I went TI as I never quite
got the hang of the RPN cult.
61
I got caught in the switch.
Started on slide rule ( beautiful bamboo work of art) and finished most of the course with a calculator.
KK
40
Slide rule to Friden “electromechanical”
http://www.mortati.com/glusker/elecmech/rotary/FridenSBT.htm
Then to IBM 1620
20
Nice thing about the TI was that it had Eng(ineering) exponents available; so you always got your Mega-, kil-, micro-, etc right in the display.
20
Well, my HP 32 S ii (now archaic technology, so I am told), uses a 7 by 5 dot matrix display for each number. The 4 doesn’t work as an “h”, and the 7’s only barely work as “l”‘s.
As far as I can remember, the joke originally appeared in the Shell Petroleum in-house newsletter, where people were asked to add two numbers, in order to get the 710… answer. The joke was that the two numbers also made words when read upside down, but I can’t for the life of me, remember what they were. Perhaps we can persuade Jo to run a competition … ?
50
Merry Christmas Jo, David & family. Great to see popularity of the site still growing despite that most people now realise CAGW is a crock and yesterday’s news.
I just have to bring up my HP 41-C comment from earlier in present discussion.
” You mean Charles Hamblin also credited as the inventor of the Reverse Polish Notation with which I wrestled on my trusty old HP-41C calculator in the Eighties.
I didn’t know that.
Tested my algorithm for one of the first microprocessor based echo cancellers on that.
Later built on a state-of-the-art TMS320 in 1983
“
11
Can anyone show that CO2 can increase the lapse rate at all? There is no absorption of IR flux with every location in the atmosphere at a temperature higher than that needed for radiative equilibrium. This higher temperature via latent heat conversion means no actual altitude for exit flux. The flux outward to space continues to “accumulate” all the way to 220 km. Increasing atmospheric CO2 can have no effect on temperature at the surface or troposphere, and can only increase exit flux from the stratosphere, cooling it. It is the purpose of the atmosphere, not the surface, to regulate, via adjustable water vapor content, the temperatures, on or about this planet.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! 🙂
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Will: Read this article at Real Science.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/
22
PeterK,
That is where I got the idea for the question. Dr. Gray, an excellent meteorologist, does not address thermal radiation at all. I put the same question there. Got the dreaded “awaiting moderation”! 🙂
40
Merry Xmas, moderation again?
I must be bad wording, is it rats?
40
Happy Christmas Joanne and David. Great news that traffic is up 20%, a reflection of the quality of your work and a growing scepticism of climate alarm.
May 2015 bring all you wish for and more.
60
There seems to be a consensus of goodwill @jonova.
And it’s growing!
Heartfelt thank you for the opportunity to comment.
Merry Christmas to all.
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Thanks Jo and all the others for a great site- the go-to on all things rational!fröhe weihnachten!
50
Danke!
20
Delete that umlaut
20
Hey, leave that umlaut alone. !
What did it ever do to you ! 🙂
70
The South Australian Government will shortly pass umlaut anti-discrimination legislation.
Unlikely? Bear in mind that they think wind farms lower the price of electricity (SA highest % wind and highest prices) and their solution to speeding runaway trucks was to lower the speed limit for cars.
A Merry Christmas to All (except the SA Government and maybe one of the trolls-goodwill can only go so far).
60
That umlaut joke was aw-vowel….
50
We don need no steenkin Omelets here! 🙂
30
I never use umlauts. They roll off and cause unnecessary punctuation.
70
Especially as you get older.
30
You must learn to add them after you’ve completed each word.
esp. for running writing in the snöw. 😉
30
Well, that little sub-thread got well and truly scrambled !!
I really shouldn’t egg you guys one.. 🙂
40
Merry Christmas to All.
Jo and David, special thanks for creating a forum where some sanity prevails.
Those climate scientist flockers have put a serious dent in scientific credibility, from peer review to sharing data to treating models as data.
111
Merry Xmas to all
and THANK YOU Jo, seriously. You have done such a stellar job in 2014, keep not believing!!
Evidence is King and Jo is Queen lol
All the best for a sensible 2015
91
To all you good people i hope you all have a good safe time over xmas that goes for you and yours specially Jo. from a brain dead observer who enjoys this site greatly.
from my wife & I.
30
Hi Jo. For the last 5 or 6 years you have been a real inspiration, I have never ceased to marvel at your tenacity, wit, clarity of mind and grace under fire. Merry Christmas to you and your family. Merry Christmas also to all the other bloggers here who have provided endless hours of educational, thought provoking reading and a good deal of comic hilarity as well. Cheers all.
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I was going to write my own thank you, Jo and David, but MC said it so well, so I agree and augment what he/she wrote. All the best to you both and your family and, please, never give up – there are 600,000 + people depending on you!
31
To Jo, David and family our heartfelt best wishes for Christmas and the year to come.
Regards Yonnie & Sharon Stone.
80
Sharon Stone ?? Now that’s a nice Christmas present ! 🙂
60
Yes it’s a Christmas miracle. 🙂
70
Merry Christmas Jo and David. The same to all who comment here, even the trolls.
60
Jo, David,
A very happy Christmas and a happy New Year to you and your family. Look forward to reading and contributing to many more posts in 2015 and beyond.
Ron Cook
R-COO- K+
30
A very Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays if you prefer) from a wet and warm Virginia Beach. Glad to hear traffic is up this year – well deserved. I try to link stories to friends here in the states and tell them they should bookmark you but most of the people I engage haven’t really woken up yet from the CAGW stupor just yet, but every year it erodes farther as the façade continues to fail.
Good luck to all of us in the New Year and Godspeed to you and the other crusaders of truth Jo, whatever that truth may be.
60
The next couple of years promise to be the most exciting of our lives. All the best everyone.
40
Merry Christmas to Jo and David and to all who are thirsty for knowledge.
Now go and enough the holidays with the drink of your choice.
50
Thx Jo and David u r appreciated. bts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaRlW-jz1QQ
00
Yes, I meant enjoy. Caught it a second after pushing ‘Post Comment’
Enjoy your holiday cheer.
10
🙂
I thought that might have been what you meant. 🙂
Enjoy your new year too 🙂
00
“and enough the holidays ”
Sorry gai, I’m not sure what you mean ?
20
I suspect she has already had a few drinks of her choice …
10
I’m sure she “meant” enjoy – damned auto carriage, damn, I mean correct!
10
Dear David and Jo, Hoping you have some time out of the trenches, and enjoy the Cheer basking in the warm glow of an (until recently) active Sun. Though here in Brisbane it still feels like it’s pretty damned busy!
I look forward to your accurate marksman (and woman!) ship next year. God Bless you and your Family.
40
Merry Christmas to you Jo and family. Thanks for all the great work with your very informative site. Wishing all of you all here many happy days ahead.
Good day from a wet and warm N FL USA.
50
Just noticed this on Fairfax’s Farm Weekly website:
“Following the hottest spring on record, summer 2013-14 was warmer than average for Australia, and coinciding with this was another season of below average rainfall for the eastern states.
Given the seasonal conditions over the year, it is not surprising that sheep and lamb turnoff in 2014 finished higher year-on-year.”
Is there any truth in it being the hottest spring ever?
30
“Is there any truth in it being the hottest spring ever?”
The wording seems to be referring to spring 2013.
Using UAH satellite, 2013 had an anomaly of 1.067°C, second to 2006 with 1.090°C
Notice that we are talking in “hundredths” of a degree differences, as if that’s even measureable over the whole of a country.
Spring 2014 was 4th at 0.827°C
51
It should also be noted that summer 2013/2014 was 10th in the UAH satellite record with an anomaly of 0.357°C
41
What appears critical and seems to have been omitted in the Christmas haze is whether the “anomaly,” a ridiculous misnomer were there ever one (!), was + or – together with the instrument error, which I’ll bet is an order of magnitude greater than the measure we’re ‘anomalising’.
Happy Christmas.
40
You are right Manfred. Anomalies are signless, and at three decimal places are, well, meaningless.
I had a boss once, who used to say, “You can only measure something that is bigger than the the smallest graduation on the equipment you are using, and even then it is a guess, because you can never measure the parallax error.”
52
Have you never found yourself closing one eye, then the other to eliminate the parallax ?
00
I can not even get a good reading on a Refractometer because my astigmatism means I read way off from the rest of the people in the lab.
00
Yes, and I get two readings. I then have to homogenise those measurements, to allow for the fact that my right eye is somewhat stronger than my left eye; or is it the other way round?
We also have to account for other readings made at other times by different people in the lab, using less modern equipment, so we also need to adjust my calculations to take all of those previous readings into account, and we find that it is worse than we thought.
50
The UAH data is to 2dp. I should not have used 3dp. Me bad.
31
ERROR:
http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/1/37/2013/prp-1-37-2013.html
10
Thank you for the reply, Griss.
30
May have been Len, but I’d been watching the isobar charts and what was interesting during November was the repeated set of high pressure systems one after another being caught in the Tasman Sea. This is a well known blocking event (the link is a Oz farmers’ climate instruction website, well worth a look).
When you have a blocking high in the Tasman you get the weather systems being impeded in their west-east progression and air therefore warms up over the continent. And thus we get hot weather in the east, which occurred through October and November.
We seem to get blocking highs in the Tasman when the high pressure systems cross the continent at about the latitude of Sydney. During El Ninos they tend to cross at the latitude of Brisbane and miss getting stuck in the Tasman Sea (which is a nice roundish basin for a high to sit in). In La Nina conditions the highs move east at about the latitude of Hobart, so we get SE winds bringing a lot of moisture onto the eastern coast. That latitude is below the Tasman Sea sweet spot. ENSO was neutral all during November and that seems to be favourable to blocking highs in Tasman.
I’ll add that the southern jet stream has an influence too. When it loops up to the latitude of Melbourne, which it has been lately, it also seems to squeeze high pressure systems into the Tasman Sea pocket. During November both the southern and northern jet streams were funnelling the highs into the Tasman Sea (the chart I linked to is just one from mid November – you can see the rest here).
I’ll add that the jet stream sinuosity appears to be linked to low solar activity which Jo has already mentioned in the past. We’re in the weakest solar max for a century or so. Jet stream blocking also impedes the eastwards progression of the pressure systems causing air to warm up over the continent, so that too can cause heatwaves. I’ve seen no plausible science linking CO2 to Rossby wave sinuousity, but plenty on the solar connection.
So in short, it was the Sun and ENSO wot dun it IMO.
42
https://balance1010.wordpress.com/2014/12/25/well-beloved-ones-the-truth-of-being-is-of-necessity-within/
ho ho ho
20
Have a nice Christmas.. x
20
Best wishes for the season, and thanks all of you for this sane website which I stumbled into only a few months ago. By this time next year let’s hope we can read in the news about a hot, cold or average day without a need for it to prove anything.
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Merry Christmas Jo, David & family. All the very best for the New Year. Take a few days in the WA sun to enjoy some quiet family time.
Best wishes to everyone else who has contributed to this brilliant site over the past year. Like others have said, coming onto this site helps keep me sane as well as exercising my brain on a daily basis.
Thanks to all those behind the scene helping Jo run and maintain the site.
50
Merry Christmas to Jo and David and family and helpers. And Merry Christmas to all who come here with good intentions. This site very much appreciated.
41
Merry Christmas to all, but really is there anything worth celebrating?
1. Billions will continue to be spent on the biggest fraud in history
2. People will continue to die as a result of Eco-fuels
3. Debt will continue to rise that now even our children can,t repay and hence there is no possiblity of economic recovery
4. Human stupidity has risen to unprecedented levels despite the best excess to information ever
5. The right moved to the left in an effort to cowardly win votes and abandon me and I guess most of you
6. Liberals will loose the next election with labor bankrupting Australia by 2020-2021 or sooner unless the US goes before.
7. Lost most my friends as they either not interested or openly hostile.
7. New dark age is approaching.
Despite all of these Jo and Co. provide a little flicker of hope in reason and courage. I thank you all.
Even trolls, as we need them to check our sanity and give generously to their utterings.
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Skeptical Science has so little content they’ve copied the Greg Laden post (and didn’t notice McIntyre and I had already replied?)
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=2791
Thanks to everyone here for the good wishes!
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Jo
That means the useless idiots have no interest in science and are only interested in ‘The Hatred of the Good for Being the Good’
41
Thank you for that gai – very profound (and I do not mean that sarcastically).
30
This mindset explains the very real difference in the protests of the ‘Tea Party’ and the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd and the more recent riots in the USA.
With the Tea Party there have been no arrests, no property damage and they left the areas ‘occupied’ clean. There was respect for the environment and for the property of others. OWS seems to be white, upper class from the info I have bothered to look at but there was vandalism, breaking windows, throwing rocks and over 3,000 arrested. This is the temper tantrums of the spoiled rotten who are not satisfied with what they have.
The more recent riots are about the hate I mention above from what I can see. They certainly do absolutely nothing in promoting better race relations or convincing people blacks are a productive law abiding part of society. The riots and the recent police killing does the exact opposite.
Actually what is happening to the Democrats in the USA reminds me of what happen with Mick Jagger, and the Rolling Stones when they invited the Hells Angels as ‘a kind of unofficial security presence.’ at Altamont.
Meredith Hunter was killed by an Angel in front of the Rolling Stones.
(Note the differences in the two stories of the incident.)
NOTE: I am an independent and not affiliated with anyone.
30
I’ll click on that SkS link.
Only because it will give them an rise in ‘hits’ that when checked, will all come from jonova.
That’s gotta hurt!
Whadda ya say Mr Cook?
Just point, click and laugh.
11
Must be a record for SkS.
That post has been up since 24th December 2014 and still no comments (I thought I’d add the year as well for context – I bet there’ll still be no comments by 26 December 2015).
Although that may be an unkind observation, those zany guys over there may just be partying-up like it’s the end of the world, college kids, go figure.
Then there may be another explanation to the excuse I just gave for the unkind observation I made first, bear with me on this, they may actually be holding a wake because it is not the end of the world.
It really is sort of bizzare that the same people that are running about hither and yon, crying, threatening and generally trying to convince anyone that will listen that man made CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming and that if the effect isn’t reduced and eventually stopped the end of the world is nigh.
So how come they aren’t overjoyed that the planet hasn’t warmed in the last 18 years?
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thank you, jo…and david…and the mods…and the readers. merry christmas & a happy new year to all.
something to ponder at this time, because it has received so little MSM coverage in the UK, or anywhere else, for that matter:
20 Dec: UK Telegraph: Forget your gas cooker – we’re headed for ‘zero carbon’ Britain
How many people realise what the government is up to with its energy policy, asks Christopher Booker.
As we look back over the past 12 months and forward to the next, I regret that there is one story I reported two months ago to which I didn’t begin to do justice. It’s one that, when the penny finally drops, will be blazoned in shocked headlines across every newspaper in the land. How many people realise that, within a few years, our government is planning to phase out all use of gas for cooking or heating our homes?…READ ALL
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11305122/Forget-your-gas-cooker-were-headed-for-zero-carbon-Britain.html
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I wonder if the vapourous minds in Whitehall realise that most of the Cordon Bleu chefs in Europe prefer to cook with gas, because they have far better control of temperature.
The chefs who run the fine dining restaurants in the exclusive Gentlemen’s Clubs, that a lot of politicians frequent, will be up in arms. “Oh no sir, we never use Tabasco Sauce, so it could not possibly be present in the tomato soup.”
10
Anyone who has cooked with gas and has cooked with electric will use gas if they have a choice. I hate my electric stove and I am not much of a cook.
10
Ah, the silence strongly suggested engagement in some heavy thinking. I, for one, will be very interested to see what pops out.
Will it have the potential to beat the BOM for long range weather forecasting? (Piers Corbyn is still demolishing the UK Met Office, those who forecast `a warm and mild winter’.)
Merry Christmas to you Jo, David and family,
Merry Christmas to the moderators,
Merry Christmas to all who hang out here. (Go on Griss: enjoy yourself!)
And a great New Year to all.
Traffic may take another leap with visitors from the UQ course being run by Cook. I can just see a visit here to `explode denialist myths’ as a serious assessment … (yes, I know there’s no such word)
22
Cook would not dare send any of his students here or to any skeptic site for fear of losing an initiate.
They show up sometimes from Al Gore’s Climate Leadership Course and run away with their tails between their legs when they realize they are seriously out gunned.
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“I can just see a visit here “
oooo, I do hope so ! 🙂
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“oooo, I do hope so !” said the Spider to the Fly 😉
20
More like the crocodile to the lamb.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, a swirl of water and poor lamby pie ends up as dinner.
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I prefer my lamb in a curry or a kebab ! 🙂
00
Or maybe on the rack. 🙂
00
“Nothing, nothing, nothing”
Frank.. is that you ? 🙂
00
… it could be fun 🙂
00
Even though the Christmas festival day is almost over as I write this I also would like to add my best wishes for a blessed Christmas to Jo, David and all the JoNova denizens and even to the masochistic alarmists who occasionally venture here to try and paint the resident skeptics as ignoramuses unfit to inhabit the doomed planet if we don’t “do something”.
Alarmists are inherently masochists.
They have to be to be climate alarmists. Otherwise they would be rejoicing in the fact that despite the increases in atmospheric CO2 global temperatures are now going nowhere.
And that perhaps all those oh so clever climate scientists with all those letters after their names who used their ever so sophisticated and complex climate models set up in those very comfortable A/C rooms without any windows to look out of at the real weather and climate, to predict the End of Times unless “we did something” were quite wrong as Nature just went her own way regardless.
________________
Been thinking again.
A few comments on the most trafficked skeptic blogs
WUWT is usually my first daily port of call for the relevant climate related news events of the moment.
Anthony Watts has very significantly improved both the climate news presentation with a choice of subjects from a menu of regularly updated subject matter
The commentary has been very improved with the provision of threading for comments.
But it is all still serious stuff with little in the way of relaxed chatter amongst the regulars.
So find it a bit difficult to get into my commentary stride which must be a relief to the WUWT denizens
________________
Judith Curry’s Climate Etc is the place for deep discussion but it ain’t no place for a non science layperson to get involved in as you will soon cop a few well honed academic elbows or be skinned alive by some well practiced academic or professional type who has had lots of experience at just that.
And it seems that a lot of Climate etc regulars know one another personally or professionally which puts a damper on comments by outsiders
In short you have to be brave as a lay person to get into the commentary on Climate Etc even though a couple of my very occasional and wordy [ yeh! I know ! ] comments have had quite an uptick from Judith herself.
I was highly amused at Judith’s comment on the WUWT denizens reactions when the WUWT mob went after Richard Betts of the UKMO and Tamsin Edwards, an IPCC modeler got into Dr Tim Ball, a Canadian skeptic who has had a very hard time professionally and personally at the hands of the academic alarmists.
To quote Judith Curry ; Climate change and social media is mostly blood sport over in the US (and Australia and Canada), where the situation remains very polarized and polarizing.
Umm! Judith’s own “Climate etc” is often quite a colosseum for a display of verbal blood sports itself.
____________
And then there is JoNova’s
My own feelings about Jo’s blog is that it is the common street level man’s and woman’s climate blog. Subject matter is quite variable.
It is headlined for a couple of days allowing some thinking time on the subject and allowing the commenters to actually get a few comments in as well as developing their thinking in the commentary through the period the headline post is up.
All of which arguably leads to a better analysis of the subject.
The nesting of comments is damn good as it has created a relaxed atmosphere with a lot of wise cracking, one liners plus some damn good information at the common mans level.
Nor is the moderating heavy handed allowing some quite expressive colloquial Australian expressions to be used within bounds which itself is unusual in most blogs
Plus a visual encouragement in both the visual colour changes when a comment gets a number of thumb upticks or down ticks all of which encourages or should encourage posts with depth in their content.
Perhaps my critiscm of JoNova’s commentary is that there is too much me-too -isms in the commentary but at the level Jo is operating at and considering the type of alarmist spleen vented for so long against the skeptics that is pretty mild reaction compared to the threats, denigration and straight out vindictiveness of the alarmists over the last decade and a half against anybody who dared to question the masochistic alarmists ideological cult like beliefs.
So summing up Jo’s blog from my personal perspective only;
A common mans skeptic blog with the common touch and lots of good information at the interested lay persons level.
A bit like family really .
May it long continue
172
Quick clarification after a reread of my comment above.;
The me-to-isms I referred to were for the denizen’s posts and commentary, NOT Jo’s headline post comments.
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Merry Christmas to Jo, David and family. Merry Christmas to all the bloggers who come here! I don’t comment so much on Jo’s blog these days but I come by each day.
While I’m here I’ll add some Christmas cheer. On SBS the last two nights Silvio Rivier has been running a doco on Katla, which is a rather concerning volcano in Iceland right next to Eyjafjallajökull. Its always fun to keep an eye on volcanoes in Iceland especially since the Bárðarbunga-Holuhraun basaltic eruption has been going like gangbusters for three months now, with something like 3 km^3 of lava erupted so far (and a whole lot of sulfur and HF too).
There are some small science and translation issues, but Silvio is a Croatian-Australian presenting a French-Icelandic documentary, so they are forgivable!
Iceland: Living On A Powder Keg Part I
Iceland: Living On A Powder Keg Part II
They are free to watch until 7-8 January at the links.
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Meh.
Documentaries are for the old and infirm. I prefer to really climb active volcanoes.
Actually that statement is self-fulfilling; I became slightly more infirm as a result of improper climbing. 🙂
By the way, the other tourist who did the same tour in 2010 was a German woman aged 52. Her hiking fitness was impressive for her age, although climbing out of the Benbow crater required more strength than she could comfortably accommodate. (She still made it out okay.) It’s only walking up a 45 degree slope of razor-sharp rocks with the aid of a rope, but still a challenge for the average office-dweller.
Also… sulphur dioxide in humid air will slowly corrode electrical contacts in cameras. My D-SLR survived just fine with only an hour or two of exposure, but weather-sealed versions of cameras/lenses are a more robust option for any extended stay mountainside.
10
Andrew – By preference I’m not a tourist, but one day at work I mentioned a volcano to one of our mineralogists. Koryaksky, says I, is a beautiful cone shaped stratovolcano in Kamchatka. “Yes”, says he, “I’ve walked around it three times.”.
He also has an enormous rock collection at home. Sometimes mineralogists find it hard to leave their work at the office.
20
Jo and David. This is the best site ever. I am a consultant Electrical engineer and construction in the UK with my own Company. Fourier transforms largely bamboozled me at uni and I was glad to see the back of them until now. Look forward to David’s posts in the new year.
Have been a skeptic for many a year. Keep up the good work..
51
Merry Christmas to you and yours Jo just sitting here this X-Mas AM watching the snow fall in Red Deer Alberta CANADA
Ps Merry Ho HO to all your readers ;>)
30
I ran across this interesting item while looking for something in my archive of stuff I’ve saved over the years. How large a part would you suppose this plays in the acceptance of manmade climate change? The art of Bafflegab… …where have we seen it before?
Would a Skunk Cabbage by any other name smell as bad?
—————————————-
This was a downloadable pdf file so I don’t believe there’s any copyright problem with reproducing the entire text here. Full credit to the author is in the first line of the text.
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An excellent point Roy. We need to teach children that it is much harder to write less and be understandable, than to pour forth confusion, complexity and ambiguity. The citizens would be so much more skeptical of every official edict if they knew what good writing really was. The art of baffling people to impress them is everywhere. Jargon is a weapon. 1 page is harder to write than 2. And passive sentences are designed to put the audience to sleep -which is an advantage if a communicator doesn’t want their audience to pay attention.
We’ve raised generations of obedient tools. I would like to do something about that.
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In ancient Sparta it was a discipline of Spartans to only speak if there was something meaningful to be said, this included answering questions, the practice was so well known a rumor circulated that Spartan soldiers had their tongues cut out when they were boys!
The MSM has developed an infuriating method of page filling where an article/story is simply a gradual elaboration of the initial headline, pick up any newspaper and you’ll find this uninformative drivel in most content, it would go:
– Truck rollover on Hume.
– Emergency services are attending a truck rollover on the Hume Hwy.
– Police report a man has been taken to hospital following a truck rollover near Bright, Victoria at 2 pm today and are investigating.
and so on… hell I can’t even stand to write a fake one! 🙂
But the result of constant exposure to low quality literature is indeed low quality learning or a slipping of standards, I recently got a job where the public’s spelling and numerical skills are an important part of me being able to complete the job on a daily basis, I don’t lay claim as a literary genius but some of the spelling/writing I have to decipher is simply amazing, I would never belittle a person struggling to grasp the three R’s so my reaction is sadness for these people who clearly don’t know better and have fallen victim to a flawed education system combined with a dumbing down of presented information, negligently or otherwise.
60
Yonnie,
My husband is a writer. He says the best way to learn to write is to take a great novel and copy it out in its entirety by hand. (Not typed)
We no longer make children write long hand since it is so much easier for the teachers to read typed essays. It is so much easer to correct multiple guess so we do not have essay questions…
In my state they were even thinking of deleting handwriting from the curicculum!
This has got to be a classic in poor writing . It is… Well just read it. Short and a great comment on todays education:
No, 80 Percent of NYC High School Graduates Are Not Illiterate
40
Sounds like my local newspaper which has become riddled with typos and worse, bad grammar. I finally gave up on it.
Letters (email) to the publisher had no effect and were not answered.
10
It gets better….
New York City: Majority of city’s trainee teachers flunked literacy tests
This has to be a Keystone Kops movie it can’t be real life, it just can’t….
On a more serious note, Robin has don an incredible amount of work digging out the information on the UN Common Core that is responsible for our terrible education system.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/is-accreditation-the-enforcer-for-unescos-vision-of-solidarity/
10
Yonniestone mentions this:
For Christmas, I was asked what I would like, and I actually got it, as the result of the biggest fluke in history, Pink Floyd’s new album The Endless River, and there’s nothing special there I suppose, except that this was the vinyl, the double LP, and only two of them came to Rockhampton, as I have since learned. My grand daughter found it by absolute fluke, not even looking for it in the first place, and, once sighted, she waited for her mother (our daughter) to arrive before purchasing it, and being told it was the last of only 2 copies which had only been placed out in that LP tray only two hours before she found it. I have no idea how she even recognised it, as she said that even as a frequent visitor to this store for CDs and DVDs, she did not know that this vinyl area with just the one tray of albums even existed. She knew I wanted it, and she waited for her mother, our daughter, to arrive to purchase it, not letting it out of her sight. It was the last of 2 copies to come here, and they had only been in the small vinyl section in JB Hi Fi for 2 hours.
What this wonderful present means to me is entirely incidental, as I have it on CD already, but now, I have every one of Pink Floyd’s studio albums, all 14 of them, on Vinyl LP, which is really meaningless, other than to be able to say I actually have them all on Vinyl.
Anyway, that made me think of Christmas presents and this is a direct link back to what Yonniestone says about exposure to ….. Literature. This is the first Christmas when I have not received a book voucher or a book, and I was actually hoping for the new Peter F. Hamilton novel, The Abyss Beyond Dreams.
My three children know of my penchant for reading, and are never at a loss for what to get me for Christmas, a gift voucher from a book shop. One son thinks that is akin to giving money so he asks me for a list of 5 books and he usually gets me 2 or even 3 of them, saying he just likes to do the browsing and shopping for himself.
One of the books on that list until I finally received a copy was Anna Karenina, written by The Count, Leo Tolstoy, and my copy is a Penguin Classic translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and dated at 2000.
Now, why I even mention this with respect back to literature is that this Christmas, I noticed that there was a new, umm, version of this novel released, a new translation.
What the!
A new translation.
Surely, the novel being written originally in Russian, and in 1873-7, then surely any translation would be the direct translation from the Russian to the English.
How can there be a ….. NEW translation?
Surely it is what it is, a direct and literal translation from one language to the other.
Please forgive me for being sceptical here.
By the way, I’m glad I have this novel, as it is probably the second best novel I have ever read, and is even better than his novel War And Peace, which in fact is the stereotypical ripping yarn, a wonderful story.
What is a new translation other than the translators own embellished ‘version’ of what they think it should be.
What is it about these old time writers and their novels that make them so much better than the modern pap, which people just lap up, and ignore these Classics because they are ….. just plain old, and not considered relevant in this day and age. People are missing so much.
Tony.
20
Hang on to the vinyl Tony. The stuff is coming back into vogue and original pressings of Pink Floyd could easily become worth a lot of money.
00
It’s the incentive they have to deliver a newspaper or news broadcast that fills up so much space or time. And when they have something sensational they milk that for all it’s worth. I wish I had a dollar for every hour of useless empty coverage of flight MH-370 here in the states alone. It’s mind numbing. I don’t care to hear about who robbed who, who shot who, who slept with who, who… I’d like the important things going on, like what my government is doing and why.
Foolish to even hope…
10
Hypothesis: That kids become disheartened and apathetic in learning due to the prevailing system insisting they learn the same material (regardless of interest level) and at the same pace (regardless of individual capability) as their age cohort and imposes enormous punishments and shaming if they don’t keep up.
Maybe that’s a stretch, but an alternative system has interesting benefits quite aside from avoiding the “class = age” nonsense.
10
In the 5th or 6th grade my son became ill and was confined to the house for much of the semester. The school district sent a visiting teacher once a week who brought the required books and spent a little time going over the next assignments; then there was some discussion back and forth about the previous week’s material — total time, 2 hours a week with the teacher.
I’m not going to brag and say my son is some kind of whizz-kidd who could excel at anything he put his hand to. But with that two hours one day a week in touch with a teacher and a few additional hours of reading, he kept up with his grade level in every subject. Since then I wonder what’s going on when students spend 6 hours a day, 5 days a week in the classroom with a teacher and can’t keep up. The one size fits all approach certainly hasn’t been a smashing success.
20
I was working for a school district when we had a disagreement over my son’s school. So we pulled him out and home schooled him for one semester until we could enroll him in a private school. We mimicked the curriculum he had been getting in a TAG program. Basically he was done in a couple to 3 hours per day! THere was no teacher visitation. His mother did most of the subjects and I did the math.
I do not fault teachers per se as they do have to teach to the LCD. But the amount students learn is embarrassing little. He entered the private school ahead of his class.
10
Phil,
My son spent his first 3 years in a private school where he was taught to actually read and write — you know, those awful outdated phonics that no expert thinks worthwhile anymore. At that point there was an internal problem at that school and we decided to put him in the public schools. By then he was the master of his own destiny because he didn’t need anyone to interpret a book anymore so he could understand it. When you can read, the world immediately becomes an open book for you. Sounds too obvious to need stating doesn’t it? But much of the time it isn’t.
I give credit to those first 3 years for his success all the rest of the way through to a bachelor’s degree in communication from Pepperdine University in Malibu, California — not a school you can slide through by dumb luck.
Teachers are supposedly above all else, motivators, along with the parents. If the student has learned to read, has good parents and teachers, success is almost automatic and neither parents nor teachers have much of a job to do except keep the student supplied with the right books and pointed in the right direction. But failing that we get newspapers full of typos and grammatical errors made by people who are pretending to make their living with words they aren’t able to use correctly. It’s shameful.
I know I’ve oversimplified the teacher’s job for contrast with the alternative. But it really is much easier when done right.
10
@Roy – Pepperdine? Is that a spice? 😉
Actually, I have a friend who went there, and while they will not make national headlines in football or basketball, I know my friend, and I know the education he got (not too unlike your son, he was destined to never go to college, but eventually did, and has become very successful).
I agree with you about teachers. But we do not have to look at our children for that lesson. Look at ourselves! I hated “English” (literature in my day). Yet one of my favorite teachers was a John Brunner (yes, the same as the SciFi Author and he hated that fact). He, like Ray Fotenote, CHALLENGED us to learn! And when we stumbled, encouraged us!
My best teacher was a chemistry teacher. I had stared Chemistry in a snooty CA school system (one that the hoi polloi think is the best in the nation) and had to transfer mid year to another state. I found myself miserably behind, and indeed my first quizz, I failed! But this teacher pulled me aside and told me that I would “get it” and he knew it. He was not an easy teacher, and indeed out of his 3 classes (he only taught 3 as they were 2 hours long – class and lab), only 2 got an A in his class. I was not one of them, but I got the highest B average of the rest (93). He had lists on his wall, his “Abbott List” that showed all the students who had gotten an A or B in his class during his tenure. That B was the most prized grade of my high school years.
Taking those lessons into adulthood, I sought out similar teachers. I was not always successful. One year, I remember, we had to pick the best of the worst for one of my sons. But it is due to our involvement and finding good teachers that all my children went to college, and most honored (my youngest – well, he is still kicking around, but he is actually the smartest of the bunch).
SO that private school for my oldest son (#2 in birth order) was not better than the public. It certainly was not worse. But there usually is more parental influence there, so students do perform better. Your son had that start. And it was enough.
We benefited from some great teachers – who were more the exception, not the rule. So did our children. And mostly because our parents cared. And that is the factor the state cannot substitute for.
10
Phil,
My memories of teachers are now a long way back in the past and pretty foggy. But I remember three from K-12 who were very influential because they took a personal interest in where I was going. And each time I probably fumbled the ball, not realizing the full importance of their interest and encouragement. But as time went by, some of their effort spent on me payed off. They are the only 3 I remember by name from all those years of sitting in a classroom.
In college I remember one math teacher who took enough interest that when she heard I had applied for a job as computer operator she asked me who had interviewed me and unknown to me until later, she called him and gave him a good reference. It turns out that he considered me “over qualified” and wasn’t going to hire me but she changed his mind and I got the job.
The right help at the right time is a priceless gift, whether from parents, teachers or someone else with a genuine interest in your future.
00
Is Pepperdine a spice?
It sits on a hillside in Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean and last time I drove by the place it still looked like it would spice up anyone’s life at least a little just to be on the grounds, much less live in the dorms.
So factually, perhaps not. But emotionally, yes, it is a spice. 🙂
00
@Roy – I have almost exhausted my knowledge of teacher names with the 3 that I gave. The only other one that stood out was the worst one ever, and that is why I remember her (AP English).
00
Phil,
I remember a few worst ones too. Two stand out. One taught chemistry and another taught physics. I survived in spite of sleeping through nearly all of that early 8:00 AM physics course because I’d been working the night before. Shows you how unimportant the teacher can be sometimes and what the student can do by studying. My grade wasn’t exactly sterling but I passed both courses.
I remember one high school English teacher very well because she made the course interesting and the language skills she was trying to get into our thick heads seem useful.
10
Short of genocide, I hope?
30
And yet, Jo, I have that same problem myself. I write like an engineer using too many words, many far to big for the job and I have fought lifelong to get anything down on paper or the monitor that comes even close to good, succinct writing. You have no idea how many times I revise something I post on your blog. It’s terrible sometimes.
We certainly need to get back the emphasis on good written communication we once had in our schools.
20
my husband suggests a course in journals (old school)
You get a set of facts
Who
What
Where
when
How
and ten minutes to write a story and hand it in at the beginning of each class. By the end of the semister you can write a good story in ten minutes. He and his brothers had the honor of taking a course from Dick Pothier who did a news story on Scott Armstrong’s Bafflegab pays.
00
Acak That is a course in JournALISM.
tRY TYPING WITH A HUNGRY BABY IN YOUR LAP.
Darn it he stomped the key board….
00
gees, get your priorities right.
Put the kid on the floor while you type ! 🙂 🙂
00
I just did. He is a real kid, as in goat and I was trying to warm him up and dry him off. Just born this morning and Mom rejected him – no milk. Since it was below freezing he had hypothermia.
At least now he is warm, dry and fed instead of screaming in my ear while trying to nurse on my ear lobe.
10
That is one of my favorite articles. Scott Armstrong has done some great research and written some wonderful papers.
(He is also not a fan of CAGW)
20
We had a Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who often could not be understood. Streams of words issued which made no sense. Then we had another, John Howard, who when asked on the steps in passing what he was going to do “about the worst drought in 1000 years” paused and replied “how do you know that?” and kept walking. The next day the newspaper headlines were “worst drought in 100 years”. Clear speech is a sign of clear thinking.
10
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to Jo, David, Family and everyone else.
30
Some of you may recall that, a few days ago, I mentioned that I would be having Christmas lunch with my (No 2) daughter, her husband and her in-laws, (all confirmed “warmists). We were also joined this year by our elder daughter. She is the Professor of Astrophysics at a major university on the west coast of the USA (trained and qualified in Sydney, Australia, by the way). As well as her academic duties she runs a research team of about 40 PhDs from a range of disciplines on behalf of NASA. The objective of the research is to set up a process to determine if life could exist on the planets that may circle stars in our galaxy, by capturing the refracted light that comes to us through the atmospheres on those planets.
The work entails looking at the records that exist on this planet that would indicate what the consistency of our atmosphere would have been before life started, at the start of bacteria and moulds, the beginning of plants, the development of animal life, and so on, up to the present time.
I thought that she would have a really good grasp of the varying levels of CO2 over the millennia and I would get some sense out of her about the current debate. No such luck!
She made a comment at dinner one evening “the way to go is solar – it will be good for the planet”. “Why?” Said I. “because of CO2” she gasped, wide eyed. “Why is that” I aked, all innocent. “it’s a GREENHOUSE gas!!!!” Almost hyperventilating! Sucked in! “OK” I said “point me in the direction of just one paper, not computer models, that proves that rising levels of CO2 cause a rise in global temperatures, because the rise in CO2 over the last 18 years has had no effect on temperature”. The look in her eyes clearly indicated that her Dad was not the dill she thought he was. Pursed lips for a moment, then “Our atmosphere is very complicated and you clearly do not understand the intricacies, there is no doubt that man made CO2 is responsible for the recent (note “recent”) warming, so there is no point in us discussing it further!” “Ah,” said I, that is the normal response from those who have an incentive to push the warmist barrow and don’t want to discuss it with someone who might, just, undestand more than you would like”. A fist was banged on the table and a heavy silence decended. My wife looked daggers at me.
Then it dawned. Every two years she has to apply for about $6,000,000 of funding and I will bet that somewhere in her submission are the words “this research will lead to a better understanding of the historic development of atmospheres on planet earth and will aid in the future understanding of anthropogenic warming and climate change”. Bingo! She was correct; no point in discussing it further – my own flesh and blood – how sad!
PS – I did not bring up climate change at Christmas lunch!
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Sad…
20
Peter, does she like cherries?
Bumper Australian cherry crop forecast
http://www.smh.com.au/business/bumper-australian-cherry-crop-forecast-20141224-12dcxp.html
Isn’t that what happens in a greenhouse when you increase co2?
10
I tell people that I am sceptical about everything. Some ask me why. I respond, “I’m not sure, but it seems safer than being totally convinced about something that then turns out to be wrong”.
A lot of people think I am making a joke, but I am not. I really do think like that. It is actually very liberating, because I notice small changes in things, because I expect them to change. People who don’t expect change, tend to ignore the indicators, until the fact that it has changed, finally becomes unavoidable.
I just thought I would share that.
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““it’s a GREENHOUSE gas!!!!””
At which point I respond.. “Yes, I know. They use it in greenhouses to help plants grow”
That seems to annoy them intensely…. which is good! 🙂
72
I am going to have to remember that one.
(And a merry christmas to you.)
30
Then I can ask them to point to the glass top on the atmosphere.
You know, the one that stops convection cooling. 🙂
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And the glass walls which stop turbulence and mixing of layers and cooling. The very idea that steady state conditions can be applied to a turbulent, unbounded system is absurd.
21
The thing is that most alarmista apostates have not ever actually THOUGHT about any of the garbage that the AGW meme is built from.
It is a media created farce !!
21
Big whoops !!!
Wrong word.. apostates should be “apostles” !!!!
WE are the apostates..
ie “a person who renounces a religious or political belief.”
20
Gee, Griss, I wish I had thought of that at the time! What a great response; quite definitely in the memory bank for future use!
30
Gotta luv it when I can rate a red thumb, even at Christmas time. 🙂
Thanks guys.. nice to know I can still get to you ! 🙂
31
I think I really stirred them up by offering goodwill, I beat you at 6 red thumbs, do I get my prize now?
10
Yep, I bow to your greater red-thumbedness. Well done sir. 🙂
I suspect it was the mention of taxation etc “getting their way on tax policy and measures that hurt people”.
…or maybe the words “goodwill to all men” that set them off.
00
Peter,
I have a couple of simple math problems that converts people like your Daughter, some of them show that you have to violate the law of conservation of energy to get the effects claimed.
They are just designed to get people to check stuff for themselves particularly consistency with CoE.
Let me know if you are interested in tackling daughter No2
00
I hope this will not offend anyone because I know that some of us believe it’s a matter of great importance to search for and find signs of life out there somewhere — somewhere, “no man has gone before.” The question is even interesting to me. But are we really keeping 40 PhDs busy on this to the tune of $6,000,000 annually? I can think of a whole lot of more useful things to look into than extraterrestrial life that we’ll never be able to meet, never be able to communicate with and probably never even be sure they really are there in the first place.
10
It is better than the trillions spent on Climastrologists, politicians, propaganda writers, protesters and other parasites.
00
Admittedly it’s harmless compared with what they might be doing. So in that respect I agree with you. On the other hand, we really ought to hope for “beneficial” instead of harmless for that $6,000,000 bucks.
I’d like to find that kind of money in my bank account every year for just the price of doing a search for something where no one will even be able to tell what my result should have been or figure out if I was wasting the money or using it wisely. Maybe I should write a proposal, get in line and see what happens.
00
“40 PhDs busy on this to the tune of $6,000,000 annually”
Take out 50% for admin and costs, That’s only $75,000 pa each before tax.
Academics have gotta eat y’know !
00
no CAGW Christmas break for Fairfax, too busy pushing the Superfunds’ meme:
26 Dec: SMH Business: Clancy Yeates: Australian Super calls on banks to assess climate change risk
Australian Super’s investment manager for governance, Andrew Gray, said banks needed to give investors comfort that they were “assessing and managing” the risks appropriately…
Former Coalition opposition leader John Hewson, who chairs the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, said that carbon didn’t rate a single mention in the financial system inquiry by David Murray, who had previously doubted the severity of climate change..
“I was fascinated that the Murray Review, which is focused heavily on bank capital and the need to increase bank capital, doesn’t focus on the climate risk,” Dr Hewson said.
Until recently, views such as Dr Hewson’s were on the fringe in the finance community, even though environmental groups have been airing them for years.
But noise is being made everywhere. In December, the Bank of England reportedly launched an inquiry into a potential “carbon bubble” in the world economy.
Earlier in the year, former United States secretary to the Treasury and Goldman Sachs chief Hank Paulson likened the growing financial risks created by climate change to the US housing credit bubble that was allowed to inflate until 2008…
ANZ chairman David Gonski faced repeated questions on carbon at its AGM in December, and argued the bank carefully considered any extra risks that big carbon emitters would face…
Despite assurances such as these, research by Tim Buckley from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis – a group pushing for action on climate change by investors – paints a less comforting picture about lenders’ response to carbon risks.
Mr Buckley, a former head of equity research at Citi and fund manager, said the big four banks may have already funded “stranded assets” that were already feeling financial pain due to their carbon exposure.
He described the $3 billion Wiggins Island coal export facility as “potentially one of the first stranded assets in Australia” for banks and the associated coalmining company investors…
The Asset Owners Disclosure Project, which Dr Hewson chairs, is considering “naming and shaming” how the world’s 1000 biggest banks are responding to carbon risk, something it already does for pension funds…
Similarly, Mr Buckley prefers to describe the risks in the language of finance, rather than environmentalism or politics.
***”I actually never talk about climate change, I talk about the financial risk of stranded assets,” he said.
Whatever happens to the politics of climate change, the issue is now clearly on the table as a financial risk. And as Australian Super’s Mr Gray said, it was likely to remain there, especially as big super funds become more active in raising this and other social or environmental issues with boards.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/australian-super-calls-on-banks-to-assess-climate-change-risk-20141224-12d16q.html
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CAGW running hot or cold!
24 Dec: Fox News Science: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore: ‘Uncontacted’ tribe attacks Amazon village
It’s the third time this year that this particular tribe has traveled to Monte Salvado, reports the BBC, but this is the first time such a large group of just men (instead of families) have arrived armed.
Some suggest the tribe is growing desperate as loggers and drug-traffickers encroach on its protected land;
***others point to climate change, which has led to steeper drops in temperature…
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/12/24/uncontacted-tribe-attacks-amazon-village/
24 Dec: Aljazeera: Renee Lewis: Raid on Peru village by uncontacted tribe may be related to climate change
A Peruvian official said climate change has triggered temperature drops which may have disrupted the uncontacted tribe…
Balbuena said climate change may have triggered the latest incident, as it has caused abrupt drops in temperatures in that area of the southeast Amazon…
Farmers in other areas of Peru have echoed concerns about colder-than-usual temperatures…
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/24/peru-uncontactedtribe.html
the above are sourced from a single line near the end of a Guardian piece, headlined “Peru evacuates Amazon village after raid by indigenous tribe”:
“Anthropologists are trying to understand what caused this latest incident. (Patricia Balbuena, Peru’s vice-minister of intercultural affairs) said climate change, which was causing abrupt drops in temperature in this area of the Amazon, may have been a driver…
BBC, AFP, Survival International make no mention of any type of CAGW in their coverage of this story.
20
a reminder how difficult it is to argue with CAGW zealots!
24 Dec: Guardian: Sam Jones in Ayaviri: Bitter winters for Peru’s alpaca farmers combating climate change
As the snow came, Susana Mamani watched more and more of her herd sicken and die. “Last year, it rained a lot and my young animals got sick with toxaemia,” says the 33-year-old farmer. “It was colder than normal and it snowed early. I lost around a third of my 50 alpacas.” Despite her prayers, she was left to look on helplessly as many froze to death on the hillsides…
The people of Melgar did not need the presence of delegates from 190 countries in the Peruvian capital, Lima, to discuss climate change to confirm its effects; they have only to look at themselves, the land and their animals. “When it is cold, it is colder than before,” says Mamani. “When it is dry, we have more sun. The weather has been changing.”…
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/dec/24/peru-alpaca-farmers-climate-change
41
Merry Christmas, Joanne.
Congratulations on helping save countless lives and preventing many more instances of misery due to others’ bad science and motivated reasoning.
71
Jo:
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and the new Year is equally so.
Thank you for all the work you have done over the past year; I hope that you continue to fight the good fight. (Although I also wish that it wasn’t necessary.)
30
Merry Christmas to Jo and David and to all the contributors to this wonderful blog, even the Warmists!
If you are reading this, Peter Miller, a special Season’s Greetings to you and next time you are fishing in Iceland have an Aquavit for me and catch plenty of salmon.
Warm Regards to you all!
John
20
Does anyone have an explanation for 1877,1878 and 1879?
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01b7c725c9a7970b-pi
10
Its okay, nothing mysterious, a strong El Nino was the cause.
‘The mechanisms explaining this global disturbance are not well established, but
there is considerable evidence that the major El Niño episode that started by the end
of 1876 and peaked during the 1877–1878 boreal winter contributed significantly to it.
‘The associated regional climate anomalies were extremely destructive, particularly
in the Northern Hemisphere, where starvation due to intense droughts in Asia,
South-East Asia and Africa took the lives of more than 20 million people.’
Aceituno et al
The sharp temperature drop in 1879 indicates Gaia over corrected.
20
Are you ready to laugh?
Here is a late Christmas Present:
Rescued scientists bring back a warning from the Antarctic
The icebound crew of the Akademik Shokalskiy made headlines but, a year on, the fruits of their expedition are revealed
“Climate sceptics suggested the incident disproved global warming, even though the ship’s encasement was caused by the wind blowing ice around, making this a weather problem rather than a climate impact.”
Phew. That’s settled.
More laughs here:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/25/rescued-scientists-warning-from-antarctica?CMP=share_btn_tw
50
I know what you’re thinking …
You’re thinking, ” Who is this #%*+ to laugh?
What sort of peer-review has been cast over this?
Quote:
“On land, counts of Adélie penguins revealed the population had slumped near Mawson’s huts in Commonwealth Bay in East Antarctica.
The birds are now commuting 40 miles to get food for their young. “Another 10 years there probably won’t be many left,” said Turney.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/25/rescued-scientists-warning-from-antarctica?CMP=share_btn_tw
Q. What – Why is now a 40 mile commute?
A. Ice.
~ ~ ~
Another 10 years of 40 miles of ice?
Curse you Global Warming!
Is there nothing you can’t do?
60
The ship had problems? At no stage does this appallingly glib excuse for risking people’s lives with a boy’s own adventure consider the danger and the stupidity and the risk to so many lives involved for one man’s fun and arrogance. Waffle is not science and Global Warming is a leftist political device, not science, which is why the Guardian keep trying to exonerate Turkey.
61
Seriously, If you value your keyboard..
Do Not read any of the comments on that Gruniad link while drinking coffee.
It seriously is kindergarten brain-washed central !!
******* HILARIOUS !!!
31
OH, My the Christmas Turkey rises again at Christmas time for another roasting….
20
Spare a thought for all those others in climates far less benign than our Australian climate during the Christmas season, particularly those 600,000 or so German families who have been cut off from power because they can no longer pay the unaffordable energy costs brought on by Germany’s politicians and science alarmists head long rush to renewable energy , the “Energiewende”, the Energy Transition
A renewable energy policy that was heavily backed and heavily promoted by the German greens but has now been admitted and described by one of Germany’s greenest publications as; “Energiewende” Takes A Massive Blow…Top Green Energy Proponent Concedes: “Blunder With Ugly Consequences”!
Per “NoTricksZone” blog
Now after a warm spell in Germany and Central Europe they have this ; From the “NoTricksZone” blog.
“Winter With An Exclamation Mark”! Meteorologists Warn Of Blizzard Conditions, 30°C Temperature Plunge In Europe! –
And just a small item that should be kept in mind for the future;; The Little Ice Age [ LIA ] is well known from historical records for it’s very stormy climate and its very frequent and contrasting and often dramatically rapid and usually severe changes in weather conditions.
Europe’s average temperatures have been falling since the beginning of this century and the winters in central Europe are becoming more changeable, more severe and more extreme in both temperature directions.
Is the LIA climate history starting to repeat itself?
And to repeat a cliche; Are the European weather developments over the last decade the “canary in the coal mine” for the future of the global climate?
70
The NAO is about to go negative.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao_index.html
20
Also spare a thought for those in Japan.
Ontop of an active volcano that has killed several people, this December Japan has been hit with a series of snow storms.
Tokushima, Japan (34.0° N) is about the same as where I live in mid North Carolina. We get snow about once every five years and a bit of below freezing weather every year. Tokushima, Japan is actually milder.
A the beginning of the month:
December 4th – Two Die, 1400 Homes Left Without Power in Tokushima, Japan After Snowstorm
s*p*utniknews.com/asia/20141207/1015580225.html (Remove * as wordpress does not seem to like this site)
M*o*s*cow is reporting this storm so where is Huffington Post?
Two days after the storm a search returns this puff piece:
Scarecrows Outnumber People In This Dying Town
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/japan-vanishing-villages_n_6287770.html
2 days ago … NAGORO, Japan (AP) — This village deep in the rugged mountains of southern Japan once was home to hundreds of families. Now, only 35 …
Meanwhile Japan continued to get snow. By December 6th, 20,000 homes were without electricity. By the 7th up to 116 cm (almost 4 feet) of snow was reported in some areas and 6 people dead. On the 8th the death toll was raised to 8. Another storm hit on the 15th of December. Mountainous regions in Niigata and Nagano Prefectures have had snowfall of up to one meter in 24 hours and Tokyo registered its first snow of the season. This was 20 days earlier than the average year. The storm’s strong winds and heavy snow force cancellation of almost 300 flights and bury vehicles in deep drifts. On December 17th, the weather agency reported more than 70 cm (28 inches) of snow has fallen on parts of Hokkaido in the last 24 hours. By the 18th, with more snow, some buildings collapsed and at least five people had died.
Niigata Prefecture Tsunan had a snow height of 207 cm (6 ft – 8 inches), Nagano Nozawaonsen had a snow height of 183 cm (6 ft) of snow, and Gunma Minakami had 171 cm (5′-7″) of snow.
Last winter was also a record breaker.
In February 2014, Japan had a record breaking snowfall. The storm shut down highways, collapses roofs, and forced cancellation of more than 600 flights. Hundreds of people had to be evacuated from their homes, hundreds were injured, and at least 13 were killed. The impact on transportation left store shelves empty and vegetables doubling in price. 14,099 vinyl greenhouses in 29 prefectures were damaged or destroyed.
In March of this year on the Spring the Japan Meteorological Agency reorted record snowfall for March of 115 cm (45 inches) in Nemuro, Hokkaido.
Ice*Age*Now has all the links to this news.
10
India is having the same problems as Japan with over 50 dead. No surprise India’s prime minister gave Lima a past.
SEE: http://iceagenow.info/?s=india
But no fear! The India Prime Minister say the answer to Climate Change is YOGA! (It was on the BBC) you can find it discussed here:
http://grist.org/climate-energy/yoga-could-be-the-answer-to-climate-change-says-indias-prime-minister/
10
They will not give up!!!!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-19/27-facts-you-might-have-missed-in-2014/5972460
26.In the decade to 2013 the number of days that set new records for extreme heat outnumbered the records set for extreme cold by almost three to one.
new records
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-12/tony-abbott-drought-severity-claim-checks-out/5295232
00
mean whileby December first:
47,402 Record Cold temps this year so far vs 33,013 Record warm temps
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
Northern Hemisphere snow cover this fall highest ever on record
20
Happy New year, Jo & Family!
Many thanks for your tireless efforts to champion Real Science in the face of this confected smokescreen of CAGW, and for this site, which I have been regular visitor to for several years now. Long may you continue – and one day write your book for us all!
From a long-term fan in Bedfordshire, UK.
40
Phil, thanks, that book… that book….
At least I’ve done a chapter now. :- )
30
Merry belated Christmas and congratulations on your success! Your site is the second most cited by me (WUWT is the most) as the information is invaluable!
10
From talkshop
clivebest says: December 24, 2014 at 12:06 pm
“Kristian, (” However, you cannot escape the fact that there is no connection between temperature and emission flux from any specific layer in the Earth system.”)”
“Well that is a basic assumption of atmospheric physics. So if it is wrong then everything is wrong. The assumption is that CO2/H2O molecules are in thermal equilibrium with N2, O2 molecules at a given height Z and temperarure T. It is also assumed that Kirchoff’s law applies which says that absorption and emission of IR photons are equal and opposite for a gas in thermal equilibrium.”
The “average” contribution or addition to exit flux for each specific atmospheric layer can indeed be calculated from the free database updated and maintained by Harvard University. Your atmospheric physicists at NASA, NOAA, and universities around the world have that data and computational facilities to do just that! No conspiracy, only stupidity, and the overwhelming evidence that your atmospheric physicists have not the competence to use that data in any meaningful way!
Your claim, “It is also assumed that Kirchoff’s law applies which says that absorption and emission of IR photons are equal and opposite for a gas in thermal equilibrium.” Is the exact evidence of, and the why of widespread incompetence. The two main laws from Dr. Kirchhoff are:
1. “The surface properties for electromagnetic radiation, emissivity (out), and absorptivity (in). are exactly equal at every frequency, and in each direction.” There is no indication of any actual radiation, or radiative flux in this law.
2. “In the case of “only” radiative power transfer”, a body at radiative equilibrium, has no energy exchanged with that body.” This is but 1LTD, for radiation only. There is no indication that incoming and outgoing power (flux) need be at the same frequency, or in the same or opposite directions in this law. For most any mass, independent of transmittance, the radiant flux in/out is in the same vector direction. This is driven by the “difference in radiative potential” between the mass and the source and the sink, indicating the exact same power transfer in one direction only.
Please indicate any reference that quotes where Dr. Kirchhoff ever, writes or speaks, of what you claim.
00
The Pope’s Christmas message:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/27/pope-francis-edict-climate-change-us-rightwing
“Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches”
It didn’t anger me, since I take no notice of witchdoctors anyway (except maybe the ones who advocate murdering apostates).
10
The Gruniard WANTS it to anger them, but as a Mackeral Snapper and a skeptic, it does not. I do not go to my doctor for advice on my car, nor will I go to the pope for scientific information. I can see where the Gruniard would think that since CAGW is a religion to them.
20
Now if the Pope only knew something about the subject…
Another thing that’s too much to hope for. 🙁
It’s one thing to have a cadre of people well educated in science principles and past discoveries and quite another to have real world understanding of a subject from actual experience, isn’t it? I wonder what the Vatican budget is for scientific research, any kind of research. When His Holiness conducts real world research on the climate I’ll begin to listen to him. Meantime, methinks he should examine both sides of the story before speaking.
Yet another thing too much to hope for. 🙁 🙁
00
And unfortunately the Pope, any Pope, has a voice with a lot of authority behind it. Too much authority for me.
I suppose this will offend some Catholics. But nonetheless, an uninformed voice of authority, like, say, President Obama, who speaks from no factual basis can and frequency does do a lot of harm.
If we value our freedom we should not grant so much authority to anyone. The Pope should stay silent where he isn’t an expert from personal experience.
10
On spiritual matters? Most assuredly even if you are not of the faith, as he leads over 1 billion Catholics world wide. But as I have pointed out elsewhere, I do not ask my doctor for advice on fixing my car. Nor do I go to my religious leaders on matters of science (ethics, morality and faith, yes, science no).
The Pope is a mere man. One who holds a very important position, but his life has not been spent studying science, and I bet that everyone on this board (with the possible exceptions of SF and PS) know far more on the subject than he does! And of course, far less in the spiritual matters than he does.
Remember, as a mere man, he is subject to the same forces as most other men, and for the great masses who have not looked into the matter, are easily swayed by the liars and cheats.
He is a man of faith, not facts. Of religion, not science. His prognostications on matters of science should be treated that way.
00
Thank you Jo, and a very Merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous New Year to you and yours.
00