Dear NY Times Re Willie Soon: Character assassination is not science.

This is about much more than just Willie Soon. The fans of man-global warming know they can’t win a polite science debate. They know the biggest threat to the green gravy train is for competitive research, free debate, and independent funding for scientific research.  The anti-science brigade want to stamp out and starve independent research. Where once companies would be lauded for their philanthropy, now they are forced to hide it knowing they’ll be targeted, and no matter how good the research work and publications are the results won’t even be discussed if smear-fans can talk about “funding” instead.

Welcome to the dark world of manufactured petty smear campaigns against scientists.

What we need is a science debate, but if “science writers” want to talk money, I say Yes Please. Lets talk about the wall of money distorting science from monopolistic government funding. This one vested interest is running at almost 100% purity in climate science. How many grants are there for skeptical scientists to audit, check, and critique one intergovernmental committee report issued from Geneva? None. But there was $30 billion (plus) from the US government to find a crisis.

Other monster conflicts distort the public science debate: Big Bankers had a carbon scheme worth nearly $200 billion a year until it went out of fashion and shriveled.  Financial houses hanker for the broking profits of the 2 trillion dollar global carbon market.  Bank of America even promised to spend $50 billion to save the world — but it’s all selfless philanthropy, right? No questions asked.  The numbers get exponentially silly. In 2012 Big-Renewables were getting nearly a billion dollars a day in investments, much of which depended on government subsidies, and the EU improbably promised 20% of it’s whole budget to control the weather.

But Justin Gillis and John Schwartz of the New York Times, and Susanne Goldberg of The Guardian don’t worry about these influences and conflicts, instead they are “shocked” when an independent thinker indirectly receives 0.003% of the money dished out by the biggest vested interest in the game.

Thank goodness some corporate giants want to fund independent science

We need more independent funding, not less. Praise those companies!

Real fans of science would applaud more independently funded science.

 

Spot the Big-government vested interest

If the sun controls our climate, big-government can’t tax us to stop it or slap levies on the Sun itself. But if humans control the climate the bureaucrats “have” to have a global bureaucracy, more money, more junkets,  more rules and more power. What’s not to like? Would bureaucrats want control of an even larger section of the free economy, while paying themselves whatever they think they are worth?

What government minister wants to fund research that shows their portfolio is pointless? What government-funded-scientist wants to announce that 97% of their whole field made an error, and that their models are useless, and that grants should be funneled instead to other scientists in different specialties (like astronomers working on solar activity)?

Any fan of real science would welcome corporate donors and philanthropy

More money means more research. To stop this being abused, all we need is open public debate. Even if the donors are funding research they hope will produce results that contribute to their profits, the work stands or falls by its data and reasoning. If Willie Soon has done biased, incomplete or erroneous work, let the critics speak up. The fact they attack funding and dubious ethical claims shows they have nothing.

What they are really afraid of, terrified of, is that coal power might grow some balls and actually throw serious money at real independent scientists. How would it look if the coal industry not only produced the energy that allows us to live a rich modern life, but it also advanced scientific knowledge?

In a normal world, electricity providers like Southern Company would be bragging about being good corporate citizens funding real research. If they funded weak scientists who couldn’t produce the goods, those scientists would be embarrassed in the public science debate, and Southern Company would not get much value, and take its funding and offer it elsewhere. But there is no free market in scientific research — and the activists want to keep things that way.

Here’s the ethical announcement all government funded climate science researchers should be making

Government-funded science is often used to increase government revenue. That conflict of interest is almost never disclosed.

The Conversation used to promote deceptive disclosure statements like this one below:

Disclosure Statement

Stephan Lewandowsky does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.”

I explained how ridiculous that was. Coincidentally (or not) the next month the disclosure statement from Lewandowsky dropped the false claim, and was more carefully worded fog.

Here’s what government-dependent scientists should be declaring:

This research is funded by grants from a government that has a fixed public position that man-made global warming is “a serious threat”. Both the government, and my academic institution will benefit financially from results which help to sell government policies and promote demands for increased revenues from taxpayers.

Or …

This research is funded by an organisation which has jobs, reputations and billions of dollars staked on the scientific hypothesis.  The odds of this research confirming that is 10 raised to the power of a global carbon market.

The bottom line – character assasination is not science

Real scientists want open debate, a free market in the funding and to talk about the evidence. When skeptical scientists criticize other scientists, it starts with their science, and only then discusses the money.

People who want to “milk science” for money and power start and end with character assassination (because they can’t do logic and reason). If Willie Soons work is flawed, disproven, and riddled with errors, then the conflict of interest matters. If he’s done good work, by definition, potential conflicts are irrelevant. Good work is good work.

It’s easy to launch ad homs when intellectually weak media outlets like The Guardian and the  New York Times are happy to promote namecalling one-sided attack pieces by “science writers” who don’t seem to know what science is. The real intellectual debate has moved to blogs and a few old media publications like The Daily Mail, The Australian, The Financial Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Matt Briggs asked the New York Times author, Justin Gillis to state whether he has ever received funding from Greenpeace or other environmental groups. Gillis’ answer was to block him. Who cares about conflicts of interest?

 We need more scientists like Willie Soon

Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute sums it up:

“The Heartland Institute stands four-square behind Willie Soon. He’s a brilliant and courageous scientist devoted entirely to pursuing scientific knowledge. His critics are all ethically challenged and mental midgets by comparison. We plan to continue to work with Willie on future editions of Climate Change Reconsidered and feature him at future International Conferences on Climate Change, including the next one, the tenth, scheduled to take place in June in Washington, DC.”

MORE:  Bob Carter and Christopher Monckton defend Willie Soon at Breitbart

9.3 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

151 comments to Dear NY Times Re Willie Soon: Character assassination is not science.

  • #
    Roy Hogue

    It’s quite remarkable how the climate change “debate” remains so predictable from one year to the next. Name calling and character assassination seem to be the only weapons in their arsenal. They have nothing else to throw at skeptics who stand their ground and demand evidence.

    We need more scientists like Willie Soon

    And that’s the truth.

    371

    • #
      Just-A-Guy

      Roy Hogue,

      Name calling and character assassination seem to be the only weapons in their arsenal.

      If you can’t kill the message, kill the messenger.

      They have nothing else to throw at skeptics who stand their ground and demand evidence.

      True. But it seems that each time around the attacks on skeptics get more virulent. Case in point. The Obama website now has this witchhunt for skeptics campaign.

      Goes to show they must be desperate. Which is why . . .

      . . . skeptics who stand their ground and demand evidence.

      . . . must continue to stand their ground and demand evidence.

      Abe

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      • #
        Roy Hogue

        They’ve been trying to up the fear factor for some time yet so far it doesn’t work well for them. But our fearless shameless leader has certainly stooped to a new low, even for him.

        You have it right. Skeptics,

        . . . must continue to stand their ground and demand evidence.

        https://www.barackobama.com to which you link is registered as follows:

        Registrant Name: Grant Campbell
        Registrant Organization: Organizing for Action
        Registrant Street: 224 N Desplaines
        Registrant Street: Suite 500
        Registrant City: Chicago
        Registrant State/Province: Illinois
        Registrant Postal Code: 60661
        Registrant Country: us
        Registrant Phone: +1.3128936437
        Registrant Phone Ext:
        Registrant Fax:
        Registrant Fax Ext:
        Registrant Email: [email protected]
        Registry Admin ID:
        Admin Name: Nick Catalano
        Admin Organization: Organizing for Action
        Admin Street: 224 N Desplaines
        Admin Street: Suite 500
        Admin City: Chicago
        Admin State/Province: Illinois
        Admin Postal Code: 60661
        Admin Country: us
        Admin Phone: +1.3122128143
        Admin Phone Ext:
        Admin Fax:
        Admin Fax Ext:
        Admin Email: [email protected]

        This is all publicly available information from http://cqcounter.com/whois/. Just enter the domain you want info about and enter the security code so they know you aren’t another computer.

        I wonder if this site is directly connected with the White House and I think probably not. But being located in Chicago it’s sure to be some stooge of the Obama camp, bless their black little hearts. I should have looked this up a long time ago.

        If you want to cause them some trouble for bothering us you could bombard the site with false email addresses and zip codes (5 digits) and let them sort out the difficulty they get. Or email the owner and admin with complaints. I doubt they could do private citizens any harm for complaining. And frankly I think it’s time to take the fight back to our antagonists.

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        • #
          Roy Hogue

          I counted 164 deniers on their list. That’s up from just a handful when the fight against global warming began. Looks like they’re losing, not winning.

          30

        • #
          Just-A-Guy

          Roy Hogue,

          According to Wikipedia, the group of people who run the website, Organizing for Action, is headed by former employees of Obama who worked for him during his campaign for re-election. These are the people who are organizing the witchunting campaign against skeptics like Willie Soon. Using character assasination as a tool is clearly in the spirit of Macarthyism from back in the fifties. Back then, they were exposing communists, today they’re outing skeptics and calling them by the d-word in an effort to shame them in the sphere of public opinion.

          The reference section of the wikipedia entry for this organization, has a link to an article in politico.com, Obama unveils ‘Organizing for Action’.

          In the comments section of that article, DEACON54 writes: (emphasis mine)

          You know that OFA kicked butt in 2008 and 2012 but in between that we worked for Health Care Reform, and WE won.
          I know the TeaParty likes to think they were the only ones working, but we learned our lesson from 2010. This fight ain’t over and we can not, and we will not sit back so yes we will continue. You folks really have no idea how organised these households are. Grass roots all the way. When we were out there, there were no Romney volunteers out there in the swing state of Colorado. You folks wrote a check and thought that you could just buy your way into victory. But you forgot that it takes shoe leather, elbow grease, neighbor to neighbor, and forgot that, the most money doesn’t win the most votes, the most voters do.
          So just as in the health care fight we will just keep plugging along, because we are organised and we had fun, made friends, and learned how to get it done

          Clearly thet’re not giving up. Neither should we.

          Just as an aside, and for the record, the name and shame tactic is promoted by Dan Kahan as a way to influence policy by changing public opinion. This is the guy who has been publishing pseudo-polls on skeptics claiming their skepitcism is really based on political beliefs and not on scientific understanding of the issues relevant to AGW. That wikipedia entry sheds a lot of light on the many flaws in Dan Kahans research, the latest of which was recently published by him and for which a preliminary review was done by Jo.

          If you want to cause them some trouble for bothering us you could bombard the site with false email addresses . . .

          This is a stunt used by hack-tivists to overload a websites’ server causing it to crash. It’s also called a Denial of Service attack and it’s illegal. I would strongly advise against it.

          The rest of your suggestion . . .

          . . .email the owner and admin with complaints. I doubt they could do private citizens any harm for complaining.

          . . .is a much better idea.

          And frankly I think it’s time to take the fight back to our antagonists.

          Agreed.

          Abe

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          • #
            Roy Hogue

            Just-A-Guy,

            Your research is impeccable. As far as anyone can see, at least anyone with an opinion I’ll trust, Obama retains that “plausible deniability” shield, which works like this — he surrounds himself with a bunch of like minded yes-men (or worse) who pay attention to what Obama is saying publicly (stooges). His stooges then implement what Obama implies. There’s no real traceability back to the White House. The IRS scandal looks like just such an implied directive from the boss.

            This is the most pernicious thing I’ve ever seen. They stick at no lie, no diversion, no dishonesty whatsoever to get their way.

            It’s hard to tell whether Obama is holding the reins or whether he’s the horse.

            The Benghazi scandal on the other hand, leads straight to the State Department and that can’t possibly not involve the White House because State works directly for Barack Obama. The Secretary of State and her ambassadors are the president’s personal representatives wherever they’re sent. They speak not for the country but for the President of the United States of America, who has the sole constitutional authority to conduct the foreign affairs and set foreign policy for the United States. And HE left his ambassador to Libya in the lurch to avoid any damage to his reelection. The responsibility starts and stops with the president. As Truman put it, the buck stops with Obama on that one.

            10

            • #
              Roy Hogue

              This is a stunt used by hack-tivists to overload a websites’ server causing it to crash. It’s also called a Denial of Service attack and it’s illegal. I would strongly advise against it.

              It’s denial of service only if it actually succeeds in denying service. The only successful denial of service attacks I know of required dozens if not hundreds of computers working as fast as they could to swamp the site. It takes connect requests coming in so fast that legitimate (along with attack requests) start to be rejected because the server can’t handle any more connections. That’s how it works. I doubt we could possibly do that by manually making entries on a web page. So what I proposed is nuisance value stuff, not denial of service. And frankly, I don’t expect it will be taken seriously by anyone.

              It takes a little more nerve to email the site’s registered owner and complain about what they’re doing because your real email address goes along with the message. And even if thousands of such emails start to swamp the site, that isn’t the slightest bit illegal. But then you’re identifiable because your IP address is traceable and I don’t put it past these people to try to retaliate.

              Obama and his stooges work to make life more and more difficult in every way they can for the productive people who keep society running. Climate change is just an excuse for doing exactly this, swamp the people they’re jealous of (or hate) with greater and greater burdens until they collapse. But they use everything they can. I’m about to meet with my accountant to start on preparation of my 2014 tax returns. I get form 1099 in several variations for all by holdings. This year those 1099s are so much more complex than last year that I can’t even understand them. This year my tax return will require my statement that I’m covered with medical insurance that meets the government’s “standards”. I’ll be required to have proof in my possession if audited. This is what Obama’s legacy is.

              It’s time, no, past time to get ticked off. And I am.

              10

              • #
                Roy Hogue

                It sure is a challenge to figure out what Jo’s comment filter will pass and reject. I’m stuck in limbo again.

                00

              • #
                Just-A-Guy

                Roy Hogue,

                So what I proposed is nuisance value stuff, not denial of service. And frankly, I don’t expect it will be taken seriously by anyone.

                and

                It takes a little more nerve to email the site’s registered owner and complain about what they’re doing because your real email address goes along with the message. And even if thousands of such emails start to swamp the site, that isn’t the slightest bit illegal. But then you’re identifiable because your IP address is traceable and I don’t put it past these people to try to retaliate.

                I may have misinterpreted your intention but I wrote what I wrote just in case.

                More importantly, the progressive left’s scare tactics are working. They want our silence. Silence is translated into passive approval. That’s the whole point of their campaign to ‘out the skeptics one by one’.

                When you think about it, after the Snowden revalations, does anybody still believe that governments (including, but not only the US), don’t already know and monitor skeptics along with everybody else? Really?

                Google built a billion dollar industry just by knowing two things. What words people use in their searches and what links they click in their search results. A simple search for the words ‘Snowden google nsa’ reveals what Snowden claims was going on.

                And google keeps way more meta-data than just those two pieces of information.

                Bottom line is someone has to spend the time reading the emails. It may be annoying to them, but free speech has to be exercised in order to preserve it.

                Free Willie Soon. NOW!

                Abe

                00

              • #
                Just-A-Guy

                It sure is a challenge to figure out what Jo’s comment filter will pass and reject. I’m stuck in limbo again.

                Third time for me in 24 hours plus dissappearing posts.

                Abe

                00

              • #
                Roy Hogue

                When you think about it, after the Snowden revalations, does anybody still believe that governments (including, but not only the US), don’t already know and monitor skeptics along with everybody else? Really?

                They surely do. And yet I speak out on this blog under my real name. I know of no harm I’ve suffered from it. Not yet anyway. What they probably fear more is that I support their opponents, both political and legal. While they have nothing they can do about it — at least nothing they can get away with — I’ll oppose them with every tool I have available. I’ll have to reconsider if things change drastically.

                However, in the end, if you don’t have the courage of your convictions you lose anyway.

                On March 23, 1775 a man not very widely known at the time named Patrick Henry addressed the third Virginia convention held in St. John’s Church in Richmond to discuss relations with Great Britain and delivered a very pointed message ending with,

                I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.

                Have your speakers on, there’s sound along with the text.

                That address made him a target. He would have been dragged back to England and executed in the most vile way the King could come up with for his treason if he had been caught. It also made him an inspiration throughout the revolution that followed. And he’s still an inspiration today.

                I only exercise my right to free speech. We all should do that much if nothing more. I doubt that execution is in our future for our opposition. The worst most of us can suffer is for the cause to fail. And since I don’t want that I ask myself, can I do any less than Patrick Henry?

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            • #
              Roy Hogue

              By the way, the assertion in the Wiki article about Organizing For Action that,

              The organization is officially non-partisan…

              is ridiculous at face value.

              10

              • #
                Roy Hogue

                I forgot to add that being partisan should deny them any chance of tax exempt status. Having the domaine name barackobama.com should be enough of a red flag all by itself. The implication regarding the IRS targeting of conservative organizations is obvious. But what the heck? Putting it politely, honesty is all in the eye of the beholder to some people.

                00

          • #
            Roy Hogue

            So just as in the health care fight we will just keep plugging along, because we are organised and we had fun, made friends, and learned how to get it done

            Conservatives need to learn a lesson from this. I wonder if they will. So far it’s a field of far too many candidates and no evidence of real organizing for success. 🙁

            Only 2 years left to learn, organize and perfect that organization. 🙁 🙁

            00

        • #
          Just-A-Guy

          OK, I see a part of my last post got lost in the sauce.

          Here it is:
          .
          .
          In the comments section of that article, DEACON54 writes: (emphasis mine)

          You know that OFA kicked butt in 2008 and 2012 but in between that we worked for Health Care Reform, and WE won.
          I know the TeaParty likes to think they were the only ones working, but we learned our lesson from 2010. This fight ain’t over and we can not, and we will not sit back so yes we will continue. You folks really have no idea how organised these households are. Grass roots all the way. When we were out there, there were no Romney volunteers out there in the swing state of Colorado. You folks wrote a check and thought that you could just buy your way into victory. But you forgot that it takes shoe leather, elbow grease, neighbor to neighbor, and forgot that, the most money doesn’t win the most votes, the most voters do.
          So just as in the health care fight we will just keep plugging along, because we are organised and we had fun, made friends, and learned how to get it done

          Clearly thet’re not giving up. Neither should we.
          .
          .
          Abe

          00

          • #
            Just-A-Guy

            HUH?

            Jo or moderators. I’ve repeatedly tried to post a quote from the Politico.com website and it either does not show up in my reply or when I try to post it by itself, even without the blockquotes, the entire post just disappears.

            Any ideas?

            Abe

            00

        • #
          Just-A-Guy

          In the comments section of that article, DEACON54 writes: (emphasis mine)

          You know that OFA kicked butt in 2008 and 2012 but in between that we worked for Health Care Reform, and WE won.
          I know the TeaParty likes to think they were the only ones working, but we learned our lesson from 2010. This fight ain’t over and we can not, and we will not sit back so yes we will continue. You folks really have no idea how organised these households are. Grass roots all the way. When we were out there, there were no Romney volunteers out there in the swing state of Colorado. You folks wrote a check and thought that you could just buy your way into victory. But you forgot that it takes shoe leather, elbow grease, neighbor to neighbor, and forgot that, the most money doesn’t win the most votes, the most voters do.
          So just as in the health care fight we will just keep plugging along, because we are organised and we had fun, made friends, and learned how to get it done

          00

    • #
      aussieguy

      Its coming apart on them. They are running out of options.


      And this seems like the cherry on top…

      R.K. Pachauri steps down as IPCC chair
      => http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rk-pachauri-steps-down-as-ipcc-chair/article6929267.ece
      => http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/rk-pachauri-resigns-as-ipcc-chief/articleshow/46356460.cms

      Why? Sexual harrassment allegation made by a female researcher working at his think tank, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI).

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    • #
      gai

      Speaking of vested interests it seems the New York Times is anything but lily white.

      Tallbloke had a guest post on the New York Times entanglements:

      http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/martin-cohen-new-york-times-has-vested-interest-in-climate-alarmism/#more-10301

      10

  • #
    Peter Miller

    Willie Soon is an obvious target for the alarmist fraternity, as he is an honourable, honest, ethical scientist, everything they demonstrably are not.

    Alarmists do not like being told the emperor wears no clothes, so abuse and smearing is all they have left. After all:

    a) Global temperatures have plateaued for the past 12-18 years (depending on the series you use) despite the best efforts of GISS, the BOM and others to homogenise this embarrassment away.

    b) The rise in global sea levels is stable (no change over the past 150 years) and may even be decelerating.

    c) The Antarctic ice cap is at record levels, and the decline in the Arctic ice cap extent impressively reversed itself 5 years ago.

    d) The polar bears are thriving so much they are coming a pest. The revelation that polar bears mainly decline in numbers when there is a cold spring drives a wooden stake into the heart of tabloid alarmism.

    e) The glaciers are melting no faster than they have been doing for the past 160 years.

    f) Natural climate cycles did not suddenly end and man made ones take over sometime between 1950 and 1960, after being around for a couple of billion years.

    g) Droughts are not getting any more prevalent, heat waves more often, or hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones more common.

    h) Ocean acidification by CO2 is such obvious nonsense, that only the most desperate of ‘climate scientists’ bleat about this any more.

    i) The world’s plant life is exuberant about increasing CO2 levels and as a direct result of this the planet is becoming greener.

    So what is an alarmist to do?

    Answer: Continue to manipulate the numbers, fiddle more with their dodgy models, scream louder that “Thermageddon is upon us” and smear, smear, smear………

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    • #
      Just-A-Guy

      Peter Miller,

      The AGW Emperor Wears No Clothes

      It’s certainly true that the most dire predictions/projections of the IPCC and the rest of the AGW adherents have been proven wrong with the passage of time. The IPCC makes a distinction between ‘climate variability’ and ‘climate change’. They define climate variability as the naturally occuring variations we normally see in the climate. Climate change, on the other hand, is defined by them as the deviation from the ‘normal’ climate which is caused, in their estimation, by human activities.

      As many here may recall, Jo recently published an article giving tribute to Hubert Lamb whose primary battle with the establishment climatologists of his day was that there is no such thing as a normal climate. Hubert Lamb was the first Director of the Climate Research Unit, the CRU, at Brittain’s University of East Anglia when the CRU was established.

      In that article, you can get an overview of Hubert Lamb, a skeptic, and there’s also a link there to another paper with much more detail describing his strugle to convince people in his day to look at the facts as evidenced by the research and to abandon the illusion of a steady, normal climate. Instead, Hubert Lamb had shown that the climate is governed by cycles.

      Cyclical Climate Variability “Rules”

      Besides the obvious diurnal cycle, (day/night), and the annual cycle, (the seasonal changes), he proposed that other cycles were at play such as the Milankovitch Cycles. There are three Milankovitch cycles and they are described very well in that link attached to his name.

      Professor Nir Shaviv has published two papers on how the movement of the Solar System through the Milky Way’s spiral arms is correlated with the ice ages backing up Milankovitch and Lamb. You can find links to these and other related papers on his website in an article called, “The Milky Way Galaxy’s Spiral Arms and Ice-Age Epochs and the Cosmic Ray Connection”.

      The sun-spot cycles also affect the climate. Sun-spots are correlated with increased solar activity and increased solar irradiation. The evidence from the data collected around the world from proxies also shows cyclical actvity with an approximately one thousand year cycle predominating. There are others . . .

      The Moral Of The Story

      Richard Feynman tells the story of an encounter with an older woman at one of his lectures:

      (paraphrased because I couldn’t find the video)

      The Woman: Excuse me, young man, but your theories are obviously wrong.
      Feynman: How do you mean?
      The Woman: Well, everybody knows that the world is sitting on the back of a turtle.
      Feynman: Yes, but what is the turtle standing on?
      The Woman: Why, it’s turtles all the way down!

      In conclusion, and to paraphrase The Woman, “It’s Cycles all the way down!”

      Abe

      Epilogue: Richard Feynman on the scientific method.

      70

    • #
      Michael Whittemore

      “Global temperatures have plateaued for the past 12-18 years”

      With only about 2% of global heat found in the atmosphere and over 90% found in the ocean, it would literally take less than a fraction of a percent of heat to be taken from the atmosphere and pushed into the ocean to see a reduction of warming in the atmosphere. There is no global temperature plateau as can been seen from the total heat content of the earth here http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=66

      “The rise in global sea levels is stable (no change over the past 150 years) and may even be decelerating”

      This is completely untrue as seen from recorded ocean rise http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=36

      “The Antarctic ice cap is at record levels, and the decline in the Arctic ice cap extent impressively reversed itself 5 years ago”

      This is completely untrue as seen from Arctic http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.1.png and Antarctic http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Antarctica_Ice_Mass.gif Ice volume loss

      “Natural climate cycles did not suddenly end and man made ones take over sometime between 1950 and 1960, after being around for a couple of billion years.”

      What Natural climate cycle? It’s the same old story, people say its natural but cant back it up. CO2 has been one of the main climate drivers from as far back as we have climate records as seen here http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Royer_2009_present_smaller.JPG even when we look at the last deglaciation CO2 was the dominate driver of the warming as seen here http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/ShakunFig2a.jpg

      17

      • #

        Yep. Keep telling yourself one thermometer can measure 200,000km3 to 0.003C.

        Sea levels are only “accelerating” if you use adjusted satellites which are calibrated with one subsiding tide gauge in HK. Hundreds of tide gaugues show it is decellerating or stable instead.

        None of the models predicted Antarctic sea ice would increase.

        It’s the same old story– people say it is CO2 but can’t back it up. Where’s the evidence the assumptions of the models on feedbacks are right? There isn’t any — not for clouds and water vapor. 28 million weather balloons show the models are wrong. Slowing ocean rise shows the models are wrong. Slowing surface temps show the models are wrong.

        We can find thousands of years of examples in ice cores where CO2 was stable but temperatures fell. Thousands of years where there is no correlation or an inverse correlation.

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        • #
          Peter Miller

          Jo

          Don’t be so harsh.

          You know you can trust Sceptical Science.

          Sarc off/

          20

        • #
          Timboss

          Five independent organisations are capable of calculating sea level rise to almost the exact same figure.

          http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

          CU: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
          AVISO: 3.3 ± 0.6 mm/yr
          CSIRO: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
          NASA GSFC: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
          NOAA: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr (w/ GIA)

          Water vapour feedback is basic physics – you’ll need to break the laws of physics in order to pretend that carbon isn’t adding heat.

          (Carbon,doesn’t absorb IR,which is not heat either) CTS
          [Using the same modelling algorithms will give similar answers – funny, that] Fly

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          Timboss

          BTW Joanne, I’m feeling generous today and through my shining kindness I’d like to help you understand part of your failure.

          They’re measuring the CHANGE in sea level over time. 😉

          [And they are doing it in tenths of a millimeter per year – the precision and consistency is amazing] Fly

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          • #

            So are Chen, Feng, Huang (2013) Global Sea Level Trend during 1993-2012, Global and Planetary Change online 13 November 2013.

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          • #
            Just-A-Guy

            Timboss,

            They’re measuring the CHANGE in sea level over time.

            Change over time is the same thing as rate or speed. Like the change in distance over a given time tells you the speed of an object.

            Change over time can change over time. This is called a change in speed, and we call that either acceleration or decelaration. A change in the rate of something is called a rise or a fall in rate.

            Think about it. 😉

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        • #
          Michael Whittemore

          “Yep. Keep telling yourself one thermometer can measure 200,000km3 to 0.003C.”

          I don’t tell myself that! Peer Reviewed Science tells us that! ..

          A review of global ocean temperature observations: Implications for ocean heat content estimates and climate change: “The evolution of ocean temperature measurement systems is presented with a focus on the development and accuracy of two critical devices in use today (expendable bathythermographs and conductivity-temperature-depth instruments used on Argo floats). A detailed discussion of the accuracy of these devices and a projection of the future of ocean temperature measurements are provided.”
          http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rog.20022/full

          “Sea levels are only “accelerating” if you use adjusted satellites which are calibrated with one subsiding tide gauge in HK. Hundreds of tide gaugues show it is decellerating or stable instead.”

          You keep pirating this statement, where’s the link to the peer reviewed published paper that explains this??

          “It’s the same old story– people say it is CO2 but can’t back it up.”
          Every paper published on climate forcing can’t explain the recent temperature rise without CO2 forcing as shown by Lovejoy 2014 http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8.jpg.. It’s one thing to get data and publish your work but it’s another to just scream and shout Nothing..

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          • #

            Your first statement is argument from authority. Your repeat use of this logical error is in breach of blog policy. You clearly have no rational reply to the ridiculous overestimates of accuracy.

            You link to Abraham as if it supports you. Have you seen Fig 1a and 1b in it?

            Here’s one quote of how uncertain it all is:

            5.3. Impact of Ocean Measurements on Earth Energy Balance
            …By 2005, the ocean observing system had reached
            new capabilities, providing regular temperature soundings
            of the upper 2000 m, giving considerably greater confidence
            in the OHC assessment. However, the pre-Argo and Argo
            eras may not be compatible for inventory analysis in determining
            changes over time.

            Re Sea levels, follow the link I already provided.
            From 1992 – 2000 “the annual mean sea level changes from TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite” … “slow, long-term rising trend of 1.0 mm/year was identified,” (Menard 2000, fig 5)

            Re hundreds of tide gauges: see the links I already provided.

            Your last point is Argument from Ignorance, a fallacy which I have explained before. Your repeat use of this is also in breach of blog policy. I allow you to repost these banal mistakes only because I think you genuinely don’t understand logic and reason, and apparently are not bright enough to learn to do it either. The models are known to be broken, (see Hans von sotrch 2013) obviously they don’t understand the main climate drivers, so if they can’t reproduce the surface temps accurately without any one factor, it demonstrates nothing.

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              Michael Whittemore

              “Your first statement is argument from authority”

              Can you explain this statement? Because if anything it sounds Bizarre.
              [You say: “I don’t tell myself that! Peer Reviewed Science tells us that! ..”. That is an appeal to the ‘authority’ of science or an argument based in the ‘authority’ of science. But science is only a process of discovery and investigation, and nothing else. Science itself, has no opinion, it presents no argument, it is amoral, and it has no authority. When used correctly, it may help you discover something that has always been there, but you didn’t know about before. But using that discovery to do something to society is a political decision and not a scientific one, and it is certainly not mandated by the discovery process.] Fly

              “You clearly have no rational reply to the ridiculous overestimates of accuracy.”
              I don’t have a rational reply because you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about..

              I linked the paper to explain “Temperature Sensor Bias: No example of significant temperature drift has been identified within the Argo array. The thermistor used in the SBE41 and SBE41-CP has a manufacturer’s stated accuracy of 0.002°C and stability of 0.0002°C yr−1.” (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rog.20022/full).

              [That is very good. Argo uses a thermistor, accurate to one ten thousandths of a degree. That is pretty impressive. But that is the theoretical best accuracy feasible. What of the rest of the circuitry? To what level of accuracy is that calibrated? What is the temperature and humidity sensitivity of the other components? What is the cumulative error likely to be, when the whole of the measurement system is considered in its totality? At a guess, I would put it at least two, if not three, orders of magnitude lower than the rated tolerance of the thermistor.] Fly

              When using all records including ARGO to determine the total heat content of the ocean the margin of error is over four times the accuracy of ARGO temperature sensors
              [Now it is my turn to not understand what you are getting at. Do you mean that the accuracy of all readings, from all sources, is four times the accuracy of the thermistor, i.e. one part in forty thousand? That would be plainly ridiculous. Or do you mean that the overall accuracy from other sources is four times worse than relying on just ARGO alone? In which case, why not throw them away? I am bemused.] Fly

              (http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat12.pdf). There is NO! pause, hiatus or whatever you want to call it (http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index1.html)
              [If you say so. Temperatures are changing, it is just happening so slowly, that it is only detectable by thermometers that are constantly being re-calibrated to what the models say they should be. Now I understand.] Fly

              “Sea levels are only “accelerating” if you use adjusted satellites which are calibrated with one subsiding tide gauge in HK”
              I want proof of this ridicules statement! It is well documented that sea level rise is “1.8 ± 0.2 mm yr−1 from tide gauges alone and 2.1 ± 0.2 mm yr−1 from a combination of tide gauges and altimeter observations” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL048794/abstract

              [Each satellite needs to be calibrated against a single standard value – a datum point – that can be verified every time a satellite passes over the datum point. That is basic engineering practice. From that baseline, it can be determined if each satellite is staying within its calibration limits, and if not, adjustments can be made to the recorded data. The datum point needs to be reasonably close to the Tropic of Cancer, and that was presumably why Hong Kong was chosen as a location. But as Jo points out, the system relies on having a stable datum point, and the one in Hong Kong is not.
              To use a technical term, that is a bit of a bugger. It is like a cop trying to measure the speed of a car when he himself is moving. What to do? Perhaps they do the best they can at adjusting the figures, but human judgement comes into play, and if you look for acceleration, you are likely to find it.] Fly

              “Your last point is Argument from Ignorance, a fallacy which I have explained before”
              You have explained nothing and you continue to explain nothing.
              [Then let me have a go, with a little rhyme for you: “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away.” And you say: “Every paper published on climate forcing can’t explain the recent temperature rise without CO2 forcing”. That is an opinion about all the published papers, that just happen to make that statement. It is an appeal to majority. But it says nothing about the one or two seminal papers that can explain recent temperature rises without CO2 forcing, that for editorial, or financial, or political reasons, have not yet been published.] Fly

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                Fly has done a good job. (Thanks). I would only add (for the third or fourth time) that on sea-levels Michael could finally finally read the post I keep linking too http://joannenova.com.au/2012/12/are-sea-levels-rising-nils-axel-morner-documents-a-decided-lack-of-rising-seas/ and then follow that to the full article that the post references.

                The raw satellite data showed only a 1mm rise during the 1990s. Not 3mm. Sea levels are not accelerating. Like everything, the poor fans of alarm have to adjust all the equipment which conspires against them. The weather balloons temperature gauges read too low, their humidity gauges read too low, the satellites too low, the old thermometers read too high, and every instrument needs adjustment until it agrees with the models that did not predict the climate. Modern thermometers read too low, and those Argo buoys read too low. Oh the pain of it all~!

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                Michael Whittemore

                I think there is no way you could have enough funding to do what you do, so the question “do you assume that I’m motivated by money” the answer is very much no.

                So if I’m not motivated by money, and my income makes no difference to the graphs or data I provide, why even ask? Either what I say is true or it isn’t. Fixation on money only shows how unscientific your focus is, and at times reveals an unscientific “hate”. I would have earned a lot more if I stuck with the old beliefs I had and sold my soul. If money meant anything in science I’d be angel. But it’s irrelevant. – Jo

                From what I’ve read its clear the things you have done for the Heartland Institute so its clear you are not trying to cover anything up. I just saw a chance to ask the funding question in light of the post. Its really no ones business. If I did an environmental study for a mining company its crazy to simply imply I’m being paid by Coal and giving them a deliverable!
                [This is a direct response to a direct question from Jo. It is held in moderation for her review] Fly

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                Michael Whittemore

                “Either what I say is true or it isn’t” It isn’t..

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          Timboss

          Sea levels are only “accelerating” if you use adjusted satellites which are calibrated with one subsiding tide gauge in HK

          Wrong.

          http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

          “These measurements are continuously monitored against a network of tide gauges.”

          As for adjustments, I’m still waiting for you to show where they did this incorrectly.

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          • #


            As Nils Axel Morner and others have shown in many papers,
            hundreds of tide gauges show that the global sea level is rising at a rate more like 1 – 1.5mm a year. The raw original observations from satellites showed almost no rise in teh 1990s until they were adjusted.

            I’m still waiting for anyone to explain why such a drastic adjustment, and one which went far beyond hundreds of raw observations was ever necessary in the first place.

            I have nothing to explain.

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      • #
        Annie

        “A fraction of a percentage, etc. etc…pushed into the ocean”.

        I am much amused by this. How is CO2 “pushed into the ocean”? Sounds really scientific …not.

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    • #
      Just-A-Guy

      Peter Miller,

      The AGW Emperor Wears No Clothes

      From the very beginning, the IPCC reports have predicted/projected that global temperatures would continue to rise in direct proportion to the increasing amounts of CO2 being released into the atmosphere by human activities. They have further claimed that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere because the earth’s environment, plants, oceans, soil, etc., cannot absorb the CO2 quick enough by way of natural environmental processes.

      We were told that these two claims of the IPCC, when taken together, would bring about global warming, what they now call climate change, and that because of this we should all embark on a world wide concerted effort to reduce CO2 from the atmosphere. If not, the steady increase in temperatures would cause droughts, famines, and other assorted catastrophes by the end of the next century.

      They told us that CO2 would cause all of this by heating up the atmosphere. As evidence of this claim, the IPCC told us that we would find a hot-spot above the tropics because that is wher most of the CO2 would accumulate.
      .
      .
      Global Temperature Hiatus

      You said:

      a) Global temperatures have plateaued for the past 12-18 years (depending on the series you use) despite the best efforts of GISS, the BOM and others to homogenise this embarrassment away.

      To which Michael Whittmore replied:

      With only about 2% of global heat found in the atmosphere and over 90% found in the ocean, it would literally take less than a fraction of a percent of heat to be taken from the atmosphere and pushed into the ocean to see a reduction of warming in the atmosphere. There is no global temperature plateau as can been seen from the total heat content of the earth here

      Before we get into Michael Whittmore’s response, let’s take a closer look at the plateau. In order to do that, I went to the Wood For Trees website and plotted some graphs.

      The first graph shows the Gistemp LOTI and the Hadcrut4 global temperature anomalies and linear trends for 1998 thru 2014. Both of these include land and sea temperatures. These show a total increase of about 0.1°. Gistemp shows slightly more, Hadcrut4 shows slightly less.

      The second graph shows the Hadcrut4 and the UAH lower troposphere (satelite) anomalies and linear trends for 1998 thru 2014. I plotted Hadcrup4 again for comparison to the satelite data to show the close correlation in the data. Both of these show less than 0.1° increase in temperature.

      The third graph shows the Hadcrut3 unadjusted and the RSS lower troposphere (satelite) anomalies and linear trends for 1998 thru 2014. The adcrut3 unadjusted shows a flat line, no rise in temperature, and the RSS shows a decrease in temperature of slightly less than 0.1°.

      The reason for using these particular surface data sets and not others is because they represent the entire entire global surface, land and sea. The reason for the satelite data sets is because of the central claim of the IPCC that the increase in CO2 would heat up the atmosphere.

      As far as an increase in atmospheric temperatures, when looking at the graphs of the satelite data the combined effect is no change in temperature. While each of them uses different strategies for deriving the results, which of the two is better is pretty much a matter of preference at this point. Both use basically sound reasoning in their procedures and the scientific community has not yet shown why one is better than the other.

      The one thing we can rely on is that in the real world, the observations show that the atmosphere has not continued to heat up and in fact, the heating has stopped.

      As far as the IPCC’s claim that “the more CO2 the more the warming”, that claim has been falsified by the observations.

      The IPCC had also claimed a hot spot over the tropics but if you read the various articles on the missing hot-spot here on JoNova, that claim has also evaporated.
      .
      .
      The Winds Ate My Heat

      Michael provided a link as evidence for his claim that the heat that was going into the atmosphere has switched direction and is now going into the oceans. Regardless of what his link purports to prove, the claim that the heat has now gone into the oceans is itself silly to say the least. Someone once used the phrase, “He’s not even wrong.”, to describe a similar situation.

      The reason for this is that the oceans didn’t just decide to suddenly begin absorbing heat. There has to be a well documented process that would describe how, up until 1998, the heat went into the atmosphere and from then on, the heat went into the oceans. The switch has to be confirmed by science. Hypothesis (describe a mechanism), experiment (data gathering), evaluation, conclusion. This has not been provided by him nor anyone else. But the claim is made anyway.

      As to the increase in winds pushing heat into the ocean that Michael has been promoting for some time now on this website, I say, bullocks(and I’m not even British). The strength of the winds may have increased, but the wind patterns on this planet serve to cool the surface temperatures. How do stronger winds suddenly stop cooling and begin heating? What is the mechanism that causes the switch in the winds cooling function? Where in the laws of physics is this switch described and confirmed? Just saying that this is so, does not make it so?

      Abe

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        Michael Whittemore

        I clearly state total heat content! Surface temperature makes up 2% of total heat content so your graphs are meaningless. As I have already explained on this “blog”

        A recent peer reviewed paper found a considerable amount of aerosols in the atmosphere that were not detectable by satellites. These aerosols are causing the global temperature to be up to 0.12C cooler. http://s11.postimg.org/ce7etg3yb/Aerosols.png (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract) These Aerosols are from volcanic eruptions which models cant predict.

        Also I’m sure you’re all aware there has been a measurable amount of heat from the atmosphere going into the oceans due to increased trade winds as shown here http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n3/fig_tab/nclimate2106_F1.html. England et al took this heat transfer into consideration regarding models http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/model-trend/england-2014-nature-ocean-winds-figure-5.gif

        This transfer of heat causing a lowering of atmospheric temperatures will be short lived due to the ocean controlling overall temperatures http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=66

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        • #

          The dishonest discussion continues. Michael and I have already discussed the aerosols extensively and for days after the rest of the thread went dead, yet he ignores what I said (Is there any point responding to him?). We’ve discussed this exact paper. He’s posted the “ce7etg3yb/Aerosols.png” link twice already before this here and here. I’ve already told him he needs to include links back to past discussions when he raises a topic as a repeat. How can we move on if we have to keep repeatedly correcting the same fallacies he makes? It’s timewasting.

          I’ve also asked him not to use links to graphs without also providing links to the places where he got them and where we discussed those graphs. He repeatedly uses this tactic. He did it first to deceptively imply Judith Curry agreed with him when she didn’t. He eventually, after many requests, admitted it was misleading, but what is that worth if he keeps repeating the same dishonest tactic?

          Above he links to the England graph from a post where href=”http://joannenova.com.au/2014/02/global-wind-excuse-monkey-modeling-shows-global-warming-theory-is-still-not-wrong/”>I detail why it is meaningless. Whittemore knows this (if he read my previous responses) but hides it from commenters. He has already posted this graph link. I have already asked him to provide this exact graph with the post link. We are now up to repetition of repetition. Apologies to readers who hope to learn something, but instead get a list of one commenters pattern of commenting.

          Is Whittemore here to learn and debate climate science or have an honest discussion — it appears not. The use of these lazy and dishonest techniques suggests he is here to advertise and promote a point of view. Perhaps it is “done with good intent” to satisfy his religious needs, but there is little sign he can improve or learn. He has breached blog standards of manners and logical errors many times, ignored repeat requests to lift his standards, and provided little that we have not already discussed ad lib already.

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          • #
            Michael Whittemore

            I really don’t have to reply to this comment, you have linked my most of previous comments that show how wrong you are and everyone is welcome to go back and read them.
            [Probably very wise of you to let things be … ] Fly

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    Rereke Whakaaro

    People in the UK keep budgerigars in cages, as pets, because people like the singing, and the bright colours.

    The budgerigars are quite safe, as long as they remain in their cage. If they escape however, and make it to the great outside, their life expectancy can be measured in minutes, rather than hours, because the drab, brown, sparrows, peck them to death.

    So it is with people, who stand out as being different from the regular run-of-the-mill workers in any line of work. A lot of manufacturing companies stopped giving “star worker” status to their best people, because of the vindictive responses from their fellow workers.

    Genuine Research Scientists, like Willie Soon, standout as being different from the Jobbing Scientists, who try to model the random patterns of weather. So they are attacked because, a) they are different, and b) because they expose the jobbing researchers as being inadequate to the tasks set for them.

    So if you are petty, and vindictive, and jealous of somebody who is better at their job than you are. And if you know that you cannot beat them with the facts of the matter, the only recourse you have is to attack their support base – their funding sources – through the power of the media.

    Hence the beat-up in the NYT. The journalist involved, wouldn’t really know swat about the science. But they do like a good lunch, and they do like copy being written for them, and they enjoy having their ego polished.

    In such a world, the actual science becomes irrelevant, in the face of the political drivers.

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    • #
      diogenese2

      Rereke, you of all people should be aware of the stubborn hardiness of thegenus Psittacula. London has been home to several groups of free flying budgies though usually needing sheltered nesting accommodation especially in the occasional hard winter. On the other hand the Parakeet family have made themselves well at home. The Greater London Council recently spent £226k on reducing the population on the Isle of Dogs (on the Thames) to 50 breeding pairs, because of the threat of nesting to power supplies! Perhaps the same process should be applies to the Dept of Environment and Climate Change. No such luck with the Ring Necked Parakeet now, at 8.6k pairs, regarded as british as curry.
      On topic – could the hounding of Willie Soon turn out to be the “Barbara Streisland” moment for global warming? This is probably not the best moment to draw attention to the alternative narrative.

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      • #

        Budgies don’t sing either. There are flocks in the north and south of England.

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        • #
          Annie

          No…they sqwark and chatter! They can certainly survive if they escape. Canaries sing. My father kept some for a while back in the 1950s.

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          • #
            Yonniestone

            We found a young budgie on the footpath outside a shop in the main street last December, we just picked him up and ended up with a new family member, a budgie breeder told us he was lucky we found him as one of the biggest threats to budgies outdoors besides the weather is crows as they hunt other small birds often, I can personally recall after years of working on roofs seeing this occur about a dozen times, the crows work in pairs with one chasing the hapless bird into the talons of their cohort, quite distressing to witness actually.

            2 weeks ago we got a bigger cage and another budgie for some company for the first one and I’ll say they certainly chatter to one another, we got another male budgie, I hope he is, as we don’t want to go the way of Nova mouse sexing and end up with little budgies!

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            • #
              Peter Miller

              Yonniestone

              I used to breed budgies – sadly, a long time ago – when I was a kid and my mother used to give the offspring away to pensioners for company.

              To sex a budgie, you need to look at the top if its beak – if it is blue, it is a male and pale brown to brown if it is female.

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      Rod Stuart

      In the wilds of northern British Columbia there is a species of small fresh water crab that congregate together in a closely packed group if they are out of the water.
      If one of their number should happen to stray, several others immediately follow it and kill it.
      Many years ago I had occasion to spend a few summer months with a band of Salteaux in North-eastern BC bush. It was a necessary part of my employment at the time that I learn to understand these people and their way of life.
      Native Canadians encounter the same difficulties with integration into modern culture that plague aboriginal people elsewhere.
      One day I was speaking to one of the Elders of the tribe about the trials and tribulations of a young Indian who wishes to relinquish life in the bush in favour of a job in town.
      We were on the shore of a large lake at the time. She said”See those crabs there. If one of them tries to leave the group, the others chase it and kill it. Our people are like that”.
      I suppose that is not unique to a stone age aboriginal culture, but in fact is an integral fragment of the human condition.

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      Manfred

      The budgerigars are quite safe, as long as they remain in their cage.

      Another valid analogy might be ‘the canary in the mine’.

      Willy Soon and the host of outspoken canaries (forgive the metaphor) have been ruthlessly persecuted. They make the signalling canaries of the moment.

      The Smithsonian, now seemingly a pretentious bulwark of science and political echo chamber state:

      In October, the Smithsonian released a statement saying that it’s roughly 500 scientists worldwide have seen drastic impacts from climate change.

      “Scientific evidence has demonstrated that the global climate is warming as a result of increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases generated by human activities,” the statement said.

      This week, the organization said that it “does not support Dr. Soon’s conclusions on climate change.”

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      • #
        Manfred

        Meanwhile, the biggest, greenest canary of them all, The Chair of the IPCC UN rail engineer Rajendra Pachauri resigns amidst what appears to be a broadening array of saucy allegations.

        Perhaps like the Medieval Warm Period, the IPCC will expunge him from the record as the inconvenience that never was? After all precedent is a fine thing.

        They betray themselves at every turn.

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      Glen Michel

      …not to mention Monty Pythons budgies flying out of lavatories all soiled and that.Every scenario covered.

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  • #

    If you can’t fault what a person is saying, then just attack their character. Medieval …

    https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/the-age-of-unenlightenment/

    Pointman

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    Nigel

    “Character assassination is not science” – exactly; it’s all the alarmists have to turn to, because the science against them is rock-solid.

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    James Bradley

    That explains the prevalence of ‘trolls’ on sceptic sites and the absence of them on alarmist sites.

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    Jimbo

    Here are some more of the jokers at play with oil money.

    July 9, 2013
    200 Climate Campaign Groups All Funded by a Single Source”
    Source: The Rockefeller Brothers
    http://fair-questions.com/post-4/

    There are many other takers of oil and gas money in town. They don’t even mind working hand in hand at times. Take the case of Dr. Rajendra Pachauri who helped out big oil while head of the IPCC.

    On the 20th April 2002 Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri was elected Chairman of the IPCC.

    In 2005 Pachauri set up a residual oil extraction technology company called Glorioil. It advised and gave technical assistance to oil companies on extracting residual oil from fields which would otherwise have been abandoned. Pachauri is no longer linked with the now defunct firm now re-named Glori Energy based in Houston, Texas.

    2007 – “Glorioil delivers state of the art bio-technology solutions to improve and increase recovery from mature oil wells. Operating from our new state of the art 20,000 sf headquarters in Houston, TX, GloriOil is ready to discuss and apply this breakthrough technology to increase recovery from your mature assets today.”

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    gai

    Daily caller has a good article:
    http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/24/campaign-to-out-climate-denier/

    Dr Briggs has an article at Breitbart: Left Panics over Peer-Reviewed Climate Paper’s Threat to Global Warming Alarmism

    Ivan Frishberg is the campaign manager for Organizing for Action On Climate Change, an Obama-Allied Group. According to Huffington Post Organizing for Action has Entered The Climate Wars. received show Frishberg is leading the attack on scientists for Obama.

    For those who do not know Organizing for Action was originally part of Obama’s presidential campaign apparatus. Previously it went by the name Organizing for America. MoveOn is part of that organization.

    MoveOn Petition – DEMANDING Dr Soon be fired.

    The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a joint program of the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University, is harboring a polluter-funded climate denier. Documents uncovered by Greenpeace reveal that Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon has taken money from the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, coal giant Southern Company, and others to produce “deliverables” that push the long-debunked claim that solar activity, not fossil fuel pollution, drives global warming….
    http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/harvard-smithsonian-drop

    It is truly a sad sad day for my country when the President of the USA and Members of Congress feel they can openly attack scientists. It is an even sadder day when the press joins this attack like a pack of jackals.

    At this point I feel nothing but contempt for both groups.

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      The truth will never be silenced…..

      And like all Collaborators, those who pursue evil, always come to some form of sticky end.

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    gai

    Thank you Jo, for posting this article while I was composing my request you do so.

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    me@home

    Lew’s later disclosure says “He has no commercial interests of any kind” What no bank account, mortgage, loan or asset any of which could be affected indirectly by his crazy alarmism.

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    nfw

    Can it really be true that the renowned climate scientist, er Indian railway engineer and the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, resigned on Tuesday, following allegations of sexual harassment from a female employee at his research institute in Delhi. Although this link is to the Gradiuan (sic) http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/24/ipcc-chair-rajendra-pachauri-resigns?CMP=share_btn_tw
    it might still be true. No doubt there will be an undignified scramble amongst “them” to replace “him” for all the planet saving travel, hotel rooms and conferences they will have to endure.

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      David-of-Cooyal in Oz

      There’s an article on the ABC’s “just In” site making the same claim, posted about 7 hours ago.

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      The Backslider

      I read that Pachauri is claiming that his email account was hacked to send inappropriate emails…..

      Yeah, right….

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      • #

        “Hacked” for 18 months.

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        The Backslider

        Oh…. his phone also was hacked he claims:

        Mr Pachauri, who had chaired the IPCC since 2002 and whose second term was due to end in October this year, denies any wrongdoing and says his email account and mobile phone were hacked.

        I bet he also used to tell his teacher that the dog ate his homework.

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      The Backslider

      If these allegations are proven it will open a can of worms for the alarmists, since any proclamation made by Pachauri can now be called into question as clearly his mind was elsewhere other than rational thought…..

      Oh, and don’t forget those little books he liked to author……

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  • #
    Ross

    This is another clear sign they AGW crowd are panicking , big time. Their goal of changing the world via this year’s Paris conference is slipping away. Obama wants to leave a legacy on the AGW front ( or at least his lackey’s like Holdren & co want him to ) and maybe they see this slipping away.
    They are even trying to say this winter in the USA is the warmest in history !!

    Steve Goddard shows why it must all data adjustment

    https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/record-great-lakes-ice-during-ncdcs-warmest-us-winter-ever/

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  • #
    Robert O

    The AGW industry is starting to beset with problems since it is not warming currently and the predictions based on their models are a succession of failures. What to do, up the rhetoric with the aid of a compliant media and make personal attacks on those who dare to provide objective data and opinion which differ from their norms.

    However, the momentum is such that it is very difficult to do. Why do we have Renewable Energy Target? So fairly inefficient means of electricity production, solar and wind, can be subsidised to compete with coal. The current government has a report on the subject, but is loathe to bite the bullet for fear of voter backlash. The same with direct action, perhaps some schemes might be beneficial, but the majority won’t, and the government has to be seen to be doing something to appease the believers and the international community.

    As you point out Jo, there is a lot of money riding on the AGW hypothesis, billions, and money, unfortunately, talks.

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  • #
    ROM

    In answer to the above questions on the IPCC Pauchauri resignation.

    From the BBC Feb 24th 13.31hrs.

    UN climate head Rajendra Pachauri resigns

    The head of the UN climate change panel (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, has resigned amid sexual harassment allegations.

    In a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Mr Pachauri said he was unable to provide strong leadership.

    Indian police are investigating a complaint from a 29-year-old woman working in his office in Delhi.

    Lawyers for the woman say the harassment included unwanted emails as well as text and phone messages. Mr Pachauri has denied the allegations.

    Mr Pachauri, who had chaired the IPCC since 2002 and whose second term was due to end in October this year, denies any wrongdoing and says his email account and mobile phone were hacked.

    His office at the Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi (TERI) said he had gone on “long leave” from the organisation.

    On Monday, the 74-year-old had pulled out of a high-level IPCC meeting in Kenya starting on Tuesday, because of “issues demanding his attention in India”, an IPCC spokesman said.

    __________________

    It seems from reports that Pauchauri has been suffering from an Under wear Heating Infliction [ UHI ] while around the ladies for quite some time.

    We trust that any doctors taking his temperature will not connected be to climate science in any way as any.

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    • #
      ROM

      Darn! Last line!

      “We trust that the doctors taking his temperature will not be connected be to climate science in any way.”

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  • #
    Ruairi

    Some warmists get very irate,
    With those they fear to debate,
    So,when faced with defiance,
    Of their climate change ‘science’,
    They resort to ad hominem hate.

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  • #
    ROM

    Re Justin Gillis and John Schwartz of the New York Times, and Susanne Goldberg of The Guardian

    The best description and one I believe should be used every time to describe the media perpetrators, both the “reporting” individuals and the media publications themselves every time they stoop to their usual low and despicable slime ball level of deliberately denigrating any skeptics or questioners in support of their increasingly vicious climate catastrophe ideology is a very apt and very descriptive tag from E.M.Smith on his Chiefio blog.

    The term is Slime Mongers , about as an apt and descriptive term one could find for every one of those repulsive green slime mongers who continually try to slime, denigrate and destroy anybody who they doesn’t agree with thier increasingly rabid, radical and vicious green, watermelon, hard left ideology;

    Definitions;

    Slime;
    slang. a repulsive or despicable person.

    Mongers;
    a person who is involved with something in a petty or contemptible way (usually used in combination):

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  • #

    The template used for CAGW had an antecedent. Drug Prohibition and the suppression of the medicinal properties of cannabis. Reagan in his first term forbade any further research into its anti-cancer properties. An effect that was discovered in 1974.

    Right now human trials are going on in Spain with respect to breast cancer. Israel is also doing cancer trials. If you want an interesting anecdote on the subject look up ” Dr William Courtney brain tumor “.

    Our enemy is not the Left. Our enemy is not the Right. Our enemy is the State. And it uses Left/Right as convenient to take our liberties.

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    • #

      What is amusing is that just as the left is immune to evidence on CAGW so is the Right immune to evidence on cannabis. Of course the division is not perfect. But that is generally how it runs. This immunity to evidence has been noted before:

      “Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out. Thus, Science advances one funeral at a time” Max Planck

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      • #
        Bobl

        There is nothing remotely unique about cannabis at this point, it’s a half decent analgesic (among a wide field of competing much safer drugs) and has some impact on cancer in a test tube (as does say habanero chillies) but it has no particularly notable properties according to the research done on it. The magic properties you ascribe to this scurge do not exist in science at the moment, unlike say the fact that warming feedbacks are negative which has plenty of proof and evidence.

        Fact is the sceptics are simply going with the evidence, but lets follow your reasoning for a moment…

        I presume you would be happy with a THC free canniboid free from intoxication effects being marketed instead of THC laden weeds?

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        • #

          Well Bob it is not just test tubes. We have anecdotes: look up ” Dr William Courtney brain tumor “. But I will grant that test tubes are not too good. And animal models are deficient. But until human studies are allowed we have copious anecdotes.

          We have knowledge of the endocannabinoid system which regulates every other system in the body including the immune system (seems rather significant to me).

          You have more endocannabinoid receptors in your body than any other kind (seems rather significant to me).

          But your point is well taken – the lie is so well done at this juncture that despite indications you are convinced that there is nothing there.

          Well wouldn’t the evidence be much more solid if human clinical trials were allowed? I don’t hear you calling for those. The powers have done their job well. They have convinced you without good evidence that there is nothing there. Of course you are a sceptic. There is no evidence. And why is there no evidence? The part you seem to have missed. Its collection has been suppressed. Don’t you find that little fact the least bit interesting?

          Don’t look. There is nothing there.

          And you fell for it.

          As a proper sceptic shouldn’t you be calling for the collection of proper evidence?

          You are fortunate that in fact a start has begun in the proper collection. Spain is doing trials on breast cancer. Israel is doing proper trials on another cancer. When those trials come out we will have some evidence.

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        • #

          I don’t know how it is where you live but in the US we have laws against the proper collection of evidence. The law says (in effect) “no medical use”. And on that basis no human trials can be done.

          “Can’t study it; it’s illegal…can’t make it legal, hasn’t been studied enough!”

          And you fell for it.

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  • #
    Ron C.

    In attacking Dr. Soon, green journalists display a quite stunning world view. Behind their writings you can see their logic:

    Climate scientists are paid to publish results supporting Global Warming.
    Dr. Soon’s results don’t support Global Warming.
    QED Dr. Soon is paid by those against Global Warming.

    Seeing all the fame and fortune going to true believers, they can not imagine a scientist motivated by his own integrity. After all, in their view, all published results are bought and paid for.

    Green journalists attacking Dr. Soon reveal their operating assumption: Climate science is totally corrupt. . .well, 97% corrupt.

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  • #
    Bobl

    We could call it the “green slime machine” great fun on Nickelodean but not in public discourse.

    Folks, remember, while the science is resoundingly rebutted already, the moral/political war has just begun. When talking to people or writing to media about cAGW. Remember to outline the moral dimension. We need to borrow the tactics of shame from the green slime machine, and point out how destructive the responses to “climate change” are to grannies, the poor and sick right now, here in 2015. We need a narrative that defines a moral argument the government can borrow to reject climate alarmism. So far we have been unsuccessful, because we are (unlike say GetUp) not organised as a lobby group.

    From what I can see there is only really one CO2 reduction strategy that is morally defensible and that is to plant more trees, prefferably, to feed humanity, ones of the food bearing varieties.

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  • #
    Timboss

    “More ice is bad for polar bears” is not science.

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  • #
    Mac551

    Just a quick jump in – “Carbon Schemes”,the new Halal certification for the entire world.

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  • #
    Another Ian

    Jo,

    FYI

    “Editor’s Note: As reported by Breitbart News, the New York Times over the weekend ran a hit piece on astrophysicist Willie Soon, pressuring his superiors, Charles R. Alcock of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center and W. John Kress of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, to punish him after the publication of a peer-reviewed paper debunking climate models that predict carbon dioxide will lead to catastrophic global warming.

    Two of Soon’s peers, Bob Carter and Lord Christopher Monckton, have each written letters to Dr. Alcock and other colleagues of Soon’s, defending his professional integrity against the misleading charges brought by NYT authors Justin Gillis and John Schwartz. We reprint these letters here with the permission of their authors.”

    More at

    http://www.onepoliticalplaza.com/t-33883-1.html

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  • #
    Michael Whittemore

    Judith Curry on the hit list.. I wonder who might be next..??

    From Juidths Twitter account she says “Looks like I am up next in this ‘witch hunt'” with this link http://t.co/nBrw3T7DXy
    https://twitter.com/curryja/status/570265059156500481

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  • #
    pat

    nfw posted the link, but not these excerpts:

    24 Feb: Guardian: Damian Carrington: IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri resigns
    Pachauri thanked the thousands of scientists who had worked for free on the IPCC’s reports and made an “unmatched contribution to global society.” He added: “I will continue to [work on climate change] assiduously throughout my life in what ever capacity I work. For me the protection of planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than my mission, it is my ***religion***.”…
    (Bob) Ward said: “There will no doubt be some climate change ‘sceptics’ who seek to use Dr Pachauri’s resignation as an opportunity to attack the IPCC [but its most recent report] is the most comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the causes and potential consequences of climate change that we have ever had, and that remains true with or without Dr Pachauri as chair.”…
    Prof Nebojsa Nakicenovic, from Austria, South Korea’s Hoesung Lee and the German economist Prof Ottmar Edenhofer, who said in 2014 that “it doesn’t cost the world to save the planet”, are understood to be considering putting themselves forward.
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/24/ipcc-chair-rajendra-pachauri-resigns

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    Annie

    Is the attack on Willie Soon being used as a distraction from the news re. Pachauri?

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    • #
      Just-A-Guy

      Annie,

      Who knows. But the slimers will definitely try to milk the one to cloud the other.

      Abe

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    • #
      gai

      Actually I think it is much more dangerous stuff than that.

      Up for comment is a large hunk of Agenda 21. If there is no citizen outrage then the ‘recommendations’ become incorporated into ‘law’

      If you recall In 1992, Chairman Maurice Strong told the UN conference at Kyoto…

      “It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class, involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work place air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable.”

      The target is our diet.

      The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) came up with the recommendation that America Should Adopt a ‘Plant-Based’ Diet. It recommends:
      1. taxes on dessert
      2. trained obesity “interventionists” at schools and worksites,
      3. electronic monitoring of how long Americans sit in front of the television or computer

      The new Food Safety Modernization Act and Obummercare will be used as the weapons to ‘transform’ American dietary habits to a more sustainable pattern of eating. A year ago the chair of DGAC made that very very clear.

      “After 30 years of waiting, the fact that this committee is addressing sustainability issues brings me a lot of pleasure,” she began. Clancy went on to advocate that Americans should become vegetarians in order to achieve sustainability in the face of “climate change.”

      That statement certainly sounds like the DGAC is more concerned with Sustainability than with the health of Americans. The Chair goes on to say.

      What pattern of eating best contributes to food security and the sustainability of land air and water?” Clancy asked. “The simple answer is a plant-based diet.”
      Clancy said plant-based diets lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and have a “smaller ecological impact” on “drought, climate change, soil erosion, pesticides and antibiotics in water supplies.”

      “In terms of keeping a broader idea of food security in your minds it would be perilous, I would think, for this committee or anybody else to not be taking climate change into account in any of the deliberations about sustainability,” she said.

      Clancy said beef production is the “greatest concern.”

      Meat production is harmful to the environment because of manure runoff and “methane production by cattle,” she said, which has “a much stronger effect on climate change than carbon dioxide does per unit of methane.”…..
      http://weaselzippers.us/179187-meet-the-radicals-creating-the-new-federal-dietary-guidelines/

      So beef production, not the health of Americans are the ‘greatest concern’ Gee thanks for telling us that up front.

      William M. Briggs reports on the first part of the grand transformation here:

      http://wmbriggs.com/post/15374/

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      • #
        gai

        The last bit has to do with the new Food Safety Modernization Act. As in the EU and Australia it is not about food safety it is about control of the food supply.

        Trojan Horse Law: The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009
        …Lori Robertson of FactCheck.org, who is not a lawyer (she has a B.A. in advertising), claims the bill doesn’t apply to “that tomato plant in your backyard.” As a lawyer, I am skeptical of this claim (I co-represented the prevailing defendant in the last successful constitutional challenge to federal regulation under the interstate commerce clause, United States v. Morrison (2000), one of only two cases in 70 years in which a challenge was successful). Congress’s power under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause is almost unlimited in the eyes of the courts, and thus can reach the “tomato plant in your backyard.”

        THe USDA is now starting to put pressure on states to ‘register’ backyard gardens

        I first spotted garden registration at an Organic Gardner blog.
        People’s Gardens: Why Would the USDA Want People to Register Their Gardens?

        As the author says the ” People’s Gardens” are community gardens. (Although the use of the word ‘People’ should sound loud alarm bells.)
        What is interesting is one of the comments:

        Guest • 3 years ago

        I worked for USDA when a memo was sent out to all managers asking to compile list all community gardens in their area. My husband just told me two gentlemen he worked with got letters in the mail recently asking if they had a personal garden on their property (they both own a few acres). I personally would NEVER tell the government if I had a garden! My guess is that they know the economy is going to collapse so with a database of all the gardens they can force you to share your food with the community.

        Utah Garden Challenge for Suckers this article is well worth the read.

        The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food is promoting the Utah Garden Challenge in order to collect information about independent food production for the USDA.

        The Utah Garden Challenge is a voluntary contest to register 10,000 gardens. The data mining project has a broad interest in any “resource” who is growing food:

        “Whether you grow a tomato in a pot, a row in a community garden, have backyard gardens, a CSA or working fruit and vegetable farm, we want to hear from you because you are an important resource as a food producer.”

        While the contest paints a proud face on independent food production, it is important to remember that registering with the government sets up a system to track, tax, permit or confiscate the registered item. Gun ownership is a good example of this scheme….

        So between Obamacare which gives the US government the ‘right’ to snoop into your buying habits and your lifestyle; the new Food Safety Law that can be used to control food you grow at home; and the Patriot Act that allows strip searches, surveillance and the labeling of political enemies as ‘extremists’, the US government has gaine full control over our lives in less than a decade.

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      • #
        Leonard Lane

        Good post Gai.
        Seems the lefties have conflicting objectives. 1) Get rid of CO2 because of “global warming” and 2) Everybody become vegetarian and eat plants. How are you going to eat plants with no CO2 to grow them? If we all eat plants we must have more CO2.
        Ever see a dog chase his tail?

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    • #
      gai

      The second half half of the ‘Grand Transformation’ is reported by NaturalNews: Hospitals to begin monitoring your credit card purchases to flag ‘unhealthy’ habits

      What you buy at the grocery store, where you live, and even your membership status at the local gym are all subject to a new data collection scheme by the American medical system. Reports indicate that hospitals and doctors’ offices all across the country are now collecting this and other personal information in order to target individuals deemed to have “unhealthy” lifestyle habits that put them at high risk of disease.

      Bloomberg reports that hospital systems in both North and South Carolina as well as Pennsylvania have already begun tracking people’s food-purchasing habits by spying on them through public records and credit card transactions. Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS), which operates some 900 care centers throughout the Carolinas, has teamed up with a data-mining company to compile and track this information for the later purpose of calling “high-risk” folks and urging them to make a change…..

      I am an adult. I do not need some pimply faced do-gooder half my age snooping in my business and telling me what to eat, what to do and how to live my life. SLAVES had more freedom!

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    • #
      gai

      From the home of the Foremost Marxist Scholars in the world – Massachusetts:

      The Great Transition: Uniting Nations: The UN at a Crossroads

      February 2015

      The forthcoming release of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the critical climate conference in Paris make 2015 a seminal year for the global future. Allen White of the Tellus Institute talks with United Nations Environment Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner about how the international system can rise to the challenge of climate change and, more broadly, adapt to the sustainability imperatives of the twenty-first century….

      So yes this is a very very dangerous year in terms of whether or not we will remain free people or descend into ‘global’ serfdom.

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  • #
    Ken

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…thank goodness we have the internet and people like Joanne Nova and Anthony Watts (among many others) where the truth can’t be silenced.

    20 years ago, the only source for climate information for most people was the mainstream media, government organizations, and the occasional magazine article.

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    • #

      Chapter 11 of Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom.’If
      yer going ter make everybody serve the single
      system of ends towards which the social system
      is directed, yer hafta’ make everybody believe
      in those ends. Tsk, Judith Curry, tsk Richard
      Lindzen, Jo Nova et al, public expression of
      independent thought is, well, its thought-crime.
      er gotta subscribe ter whatever the ‘blood and
      soil’ myth de jour. A serf.

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      • #

        Hayek a good antidote to the NYTs daily load of bollocks.

        The New York Times has a proud history of serving the Collective, starting with star correspondent Walter Duranty’s promotion of Stalinism over many years. And it has quite a history of climate-bothering, going back to the 19th century. It’s a silly, snobbish rag tailored for the Herd of Independent Minds. Love the old masthead…but it’s all downhill from there.

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  • #
    pat

    Justin Gillis and John Schwartz –

    here’s something worth investigating and, yes, there is a US angle if u look:

    25 Feb: Courier-Mail: Views on global warming led to weather bureau staff exaggerating strength of Cyclone Marcia, claims scientist
    WEATHER bureau staff are so blinded by the view that global warming will produce more intense cyclones that they exaggerated Cyclone Marcia’s size, a scientist says.
    Jennifer Marohasy said the bureau had invested hundreds of millions in having researchers investigate the impacts of human-induced global warming and this had coloured its views.
    “They want to have more intense cyclones. (As Marcia passed) they ignored the observational data and it’s not good enough,” she said…
    She said that, based on bureau observations at Middle Percy Island of a maximum wind gust of 208km/h, Marcia was a category 3, not five.
    Dr Marohasy said Middle Percy observations of the critical period had been taken from the bureau’s website and this demanded an explanation***…
    Mr Carey said Dr Marohasy was right that some data was missing from Middle Percy observations because Marcia wrecked the weather station about 5.30am on Friday…
    http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/views-on-global-warming-led-to-weather-bureau-staff-exaggerating-strength-of-cyclone-marcia-claims-scientist/story-fnkt21jb-1227237685342

    ***an independent investigation would be in order.

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  • #
    pat

    why did Guardian’s Damian Carrington leave out “and my dharma”? if a CAGW sceptic omitted it, there’d be claims of racism.

    PDF: 24 Feb: IPCC: Pachauri Resignation Letter
    For me the protection of planet earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma***…
    http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/150224_Patchy_letter.pdf

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  • #
    STJOHNOFGRAFTON

    Character assassination is just one of the many dirty deeds of the Fabian Socialists/Big G vested interest groups and all other feeders at the government’s trough in their putsch against the practitioners of the ethos of uncompromising scientific endeavour. Their motivation is that they are fighting to perpetuate the racket that feeds them. The solution: Regular refutation with uncompromised scienticic fact as is done by sceptical scientists of the dissident thinker class.

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    • #

      How many times do you hear the right accuse – without evidence – that their opponents are in a haze of mind altering vapors?

      “What are you smoking?” being a common insult.

      Left/Right is an illusion. What you want to ask is, “Will a bigger state be required.”

      Will we need an army of bureaucrats and a horde of enforcers?

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      • #
        Mark D.

        Left/Right is an illusion. What you want to ask is, “Will a bigger state be required.”

        MSimon, I tend to agree with you though in the US the party that at least SAYS they want smaller government is the Right.

        In the end no matter whether Left or Right, government seems to always get bigger, need more money, restrict more, regulate more and make us less free.

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  • #
    Bulldust

    In case there was any doubt which side has all the money backing them… Citi Group just announced it will fund $100 billion (not a typo) over the next 10 years for activities “that reduce the impacts of climate change”:

    http://www.citigroup.com/citi/news/2015/150218a.htm

    Vested meets interests. Big time.

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  • #
    AJ

    “Embattled NYT Journalist Justin Gillis Fails To Deny Controversial Greenpeace Funding”. Might be something in that…

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  • #
    pat

    do you think Americans are taking any notice of the CAGW gatekeepers in the MSM?

    24 Feb: Daily Mail: Evan Bleier: Invasion of the Snow People! Massive snowfall is forcing North Americans to dig snow tunnels to get around this winter
    Pictures of snow tunnels have been posted on social media in recent weeks
    Canadian couple dug a 25-foot long and six-foot high tunnel in their backyard
    Man used keys to set off his car horn to figure out which way to dig in snow
    One tunnel in Massachusetts took ten hours to dig and measured 40 feet
    One man is now shipping and selling ‘historic Boston snow’ from Bay State
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2966868/Snow-tunnels-Canada-new-way-around.html

    23 Feb: USA Today: Doyle Rice: Snow on the ground in 48 states
    http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/02/23/snow-cover-48-states/23885439/

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      gai

      “do you think Americans are taking any notice of the CAGW gatekeepers in the MSM?”

      We will know the answer to that question tommorrow from Rasmussen Reports….

      It is HERE!
      What America Thinks: Global Warming or Ice Age?
      Tuesday, February 24, 2015

      It’s no secret this winter’s been a brutal one, pummeling the northeast with record snowfall and bringing snow, ice and extremely low temperatures across much of the country. But is this just a typical February chill, or is climate change to blame? We decided to find out what America thinks.

      Well, for one thing, most Americans think the media overhypes weather conditions to make them seem worse than they are. Nonetheless, there’s no denying we’ve had some extreme weather this winter, and 45% of voters think global warming is causing it. Nearly as many disagree.

      By a similar margin, slightly more voters think global warming’s caused by human activity, but a sizable number say it’s due to long-term planetary trends instead. Regardless of their views, most voters recognize that scientists don’t agree on global warming and that the scientific debate isn’t over yet….

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  • #
    stargazer

    AGW causes believers in AGW to drop their pants or grope women??? Wow.. this is more serious than I thought. Imagine that, increasing CO2 turned Pachauri into a perv. If he works it right, this is the perfect ‘Twinkie Defense.”

    Obviously, more funding is needed to model… something or other.

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  • #
    Gary in Erko

    If Greenpeace thinks the source of funds matters, then why don’t they pay Soon for a repeat of the research.

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  • #
    pat

    gai –

    imagine these poll results if the MSM weren’t almost entirely pushing a CAGW agenda 24/7.

    and if only the public knew what it’s all about:

    24 Feb: CarbonBrief: Simon Evans: MEPs vote for early EU carbon market fix
    Analysts say the reforms could see EU carbon prices more than double by 2020, to between €17 and €35 per tonne. Member states must still back any reforms to the ETS, however…
    With today’s vote, the European Parliament’s environment committee says the reserve should be established in 2018 and should be operating by 31 December 2018. This leaves ambiguity over the start date, which could come during 2018 or perhaps only at the start of 2019…
    A final decision on reforms will need the backing of the European Commission and EU member state governments in a process known as trialogue negotiations. Member state agreement will be the hardest to secure…
    Around 80 per cent of council decisions are taken by consensus. If this is not possible, then the decision is taken by qualified majority vote.
    The voting system was changed last year. The changes reduce the voting power of smaller member states, while increasing it for the likes of the UK and Germany. However, until 2017, any member state can ask for the old voting rules to apply. Poland is likely to do this, as standard bearer for the opponents of ambitious EU ETS reform, and because it has reduced voting power under the new rules…
    Sandbag would like the EU to cancel some suprlus allowances to “ramp up its climate offer”…
    If the reforms backed today by the European Parliament were implemented, they would be expected to increase prices to between roughly €17 and €35 by 2020, according to differing forecasts from market analysts Thomson Reuters Point Carbon and ICIS Tschach Solutions.
    Sandbag argues these price forecasts are too high because electricity consumption in the EU will continue to fall faster than expected while the increasing penetration of renewables will make life more difficult for gas- and coal-fired power stations, reducing their incentive to trade ETS allowances in advance…
    DISCLOSURE: *Sandbag and Carbon Brief both receive funding from the European Climate Foundation
    http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/02/meps-vote-for-early-eu-carbon-market-fix/

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  • #
    pat

    gai – remember:

    2011: Rasmussen: 69% Believe Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research
    At least somewhat likely
    The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 69% say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who say this is Very Likely. Twenty-two percent (22%) don’t think it’s likely some scientists have falsified global warming data, including just six percent (6%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Another 10% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here .)
    http://www.iceagenow.com/Rasmussen-69%25_Believe_Scientists_Have_Falsified_Global_Warming_Research.htm

    questions from the latest survey, linked by gai:

    note that altho Rasmussen asks itself(?)”Is Global Warming to Blame for the Cold Weather?” but actually asks those they survey “Is global warming causing more extreme weather events in the United States?” not the same thing. if they’d asked is GW responsible for this winter’s snow, the results might be different.

    also, “global warming” is used in the questions as a fait accompli.

    Rasmussen: Questions – Global Warming – February 12-13, 2015
    Is Global Warming to Blame for the Cold Weather?
    Global Warming vs. Terrorism? Voters Decide
    National Survey of 800 Likely Voters
    1*Is global warming causing more extreme weather events in the United States?
    2*Which is a greater long-term threat to most Americans– global warming, epidemic diseases or terrorism?
    3*Is the scientific debate about global warming over?
    4*Some people say we must take immediate action to stop global warming. Others say we should wait a few years to see if global warming is real before making major changes. What do you think?
    5* When it comes to dealing with global warming, should President Obama take action alone if Congress does not approve the initiatives he has proposed or should the government do only what the president and Congress agree on?
    NOTE: Margin of Sampling Error, +/- 3.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence
    http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/questions/pt_survey_questions/february_2015/questions_global_warming_february_12_13_2015

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    pat

    btw the iceagenow website (from which i linked the 2011 Rasmussen survey details) is pretty busy lately & has a new web address!

    http://iceagenow.info/

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    pat

    dare i suggest these people are full of it:

    23 Feb: CarbonBrief: Roz Pidcock: Surface warming ‘hiatus’ could stick around another five years, say scientists
    Don’t be surprised if the slower pace of warming we’re seeing at the Earth’s surface lasts for another five years, scientists say.
    A new paper out today puts the chances of the so-called “hiatus” staying until the end of the decade at about 15 per cent, or one in six.
    But the heat hasn’t gone away…
    Since 2000, the temperature at the Earth’s surface hasn’t warmed as quickly as it has in previous decades, despite greenhouse gas emissions rising faster than they were before.
    A growing body of evidence is homing in on the Pacific Ocean as the main culprit for why we’re seeing “unexpectedly modest” warming, as the Nature Climate Change paper puts it…
    But what are the chances of natural variability being strong enough to offset some, or even all of the warming expected from greenhouse gases?
    The new paper by Dr Chris Roberts, an ocean and climate specialist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, and colleagues at the University of Exeter sheds some new light on this question…
    There’s a good chance we’ll see an accelerated pace of surface warming as soon as the current surface warming slowdown comes to an end, the new paper says…
    Climate models suggest we could see Arctic warming intensify, leading to “increased climate stress on a region that is already particularly vulnerable to climate change”, the paper says…
    Roberts, C. D. et al. (2015) Quantifying the likelihood of a continued hiatus in global warming. Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2531
    http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/02/surface-warming-hiatus-could-stick-around-another-five-years-say-scientists/

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    pat

    going after Lomborg! it’s a bit like abc’s factcheck, if u know what i mean:

    24 Feb: Forbes: Tom Zeller Jr: Policing the Online Climate Conversation
    (Tom Zeller Jr. has written on energy and environment for The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, HuffPost and Bloomberg View)
    “Many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected,” wrote Bjorn Lomborg, the political scientist and climate policy contrarian, in a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. “This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging.”…
    But how would an average reader visiting The Wall Street Journal’s web site know whether Lomborg’s assertions hold water with the wider community of atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, biochemists and other experts?
    The truth is, they wouldn’t — and that’s precisely what a fledgling and, at least for now, somewhat amorphous collection of volunteer annotators are aiming to correct.
    The Climate Feedback Project is the brainchild of Emmanuel M. Vincent, a post-doctoral research fellow in climate and oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project harnesses the power of a browser plug-in known as Hypothes.is, which allows users to highlight and critique select bits of well, really anything that appears online. These annotations then appear to all Hypothes.is users in a panel directly to the right of the text being analyzed…
    At the moment the team is comprised of about a dozen young post-docs in climate science and related fields, along with a smattering of more pedigreed scientists. It has so far visited its wisdom on just three articles (LINK***), though more are planned…
    “We don’t want to say what the truth is, but to promote scientific reasoning,” said Vincent, who will begin expanding his project next month under the auspices of the Center for Climate Communication at the University of California, Merced…
    “This conversation would be great to be had, if the goal was to further understanding,” Lomborg said in an email message. “But the way I see the people who’ve read my piece are approaching this, it is not with the intent of improving understanding, but to simply prove me wrong, misguided and unscientific.”…
    Update: In a follow-up email message Tuesday morning, Lomborg challenged both Voss’s and Emanuel’s annotations. “Interestingly,” he wrote, “they’re both incorrect.” His full remarks can be seen below…
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomzeller/2015/02/24/policing-the-online-climate-conversation/?ss=energy#

    ***from 2 of the pieces at the link:
    “7 scientists gave a low credibility rating to Bjorn Lomborg’s article on climate alarmism in the Wall Street Journal”
    “8 scientists gave a high credibility rating to Justin Gillis’ article in the New York Times.”

    LOL.

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    pat

    ???

    23 Feb: CarbonBrief: Robert McSweeney: Uncertainty behind climate projections could be cut in half by 2030, study shows
    More certainty about the climate’s sensitivity to emissions means a better assessment of our chances of keeping global temperature rise below the two-degree limit, the researchers say…
    In its 2013 report, the IPCC estimates TCR is likely to lie between 1.0 and 2.5 degrees Celsius. The new research, published in Nature Geoscience, suggests scientists will be able to reduce the uncertainty around these estimates by about 50 per cent by 2030…
    Co-author Prof Piers Forster, director of research at the University of Leeds, says he’s looking forward to getting past his frustrations with uncertainty in climate projections…
    Mhyre, G. et al. (2015) Declining uncertainty in transient climate response as CO2 forcing dominates future climate change, Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/ngeo2371
    http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/02/uncertainty-behind-climate-projections-could-be-cut-in-half-by-2030-study-shows/

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    gai

    Paul Homewood @ Not a Lot of People Know That

    Put up an excellent comment from WUWT Thoughts From Leo Smith

    It addresses the question of what is now happening and why.

    A Playboy Interview, 1964 also addressed this issue of censorship.

    ….since reason is man’s basic tool of survival, rationality is his highest virtue. To use his mind, to perceive reality and to act accordingly, is man’s moral imperative….

    A rational man knows — or makes it a point to discover — the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their passive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow — then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction — his own and that of others.

    PLAYBOY: What, in your view, is the proper function of a government?

    ….there is really only one proper function: the protection of individual rights. Since rights can be violated only by physical force, and by certain derivatives of physical force, the proper function of government is to protect men from those who initiate the use of physical force: from those who are criminals. Force, in a free society, may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. This is the proper task of government: to serve as a policeman who protects men from the use of force….

    PLAYBOY: …Do you think the time has come for the artists, intellectuals and creative businessmen of today to withdraw their talents from society….

    ….when society has reached the stage of dictatorship. When and if this happens, that will be the time to go on strike, but not until then….

    PLAYBOY: What is the dividing line, by your definition, between a mixed economy and a dictatorship?

    A dictatorship has four characteristics:

    one-party rule,

    executions without trial for political offenses,

    expropriation or nationalization of private property,

    and censorship.

    Above all, this last. So long as men can speak and write freely, so long as there is no censorship, they still have a chance to reform their society or to put it on a better road. When censorship is imposed, that is the sign that men should go on strike intellectually, by which I mean, should not cooperate with the social system in any way whatever.…

    Sure sounds like we are coming close to that time folks.

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      gai

      One-party rule does not mean we have three parties but that we have parties that represent different things. It means voters are not forced to choose between the lesser of two evils but can choose a party or candidate they think actually represents them.

      Rasmussen polls show the American public is not represented by our two parties.

      In 2007: 58% Say Competitive Third Party Good for USA

      In April 2009: 51% View Tea Parties Favorably, Political Class Strongly Disagrees

      In December 2009: Tea Party Tops GOP on Three-Way Generic Ballot

      Suppose the Tea Party organized itself as a political party. When thinking about the next election for Congress, would you vote for the Republican candidate from your district, the Democratic candidate from your district or the Tea Party candidate from your district?
      Democratic ………. 36%

      Tea Party ………….. 23%

      Republican ……… 18%

      Not sure ………… 22%
      http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/december_2009/tea_party_tops_gop_on_three_way_generic_ballot

      Note that the 2009 poll showed Political Class Strongly Disagrees with the Tea Party and the MSM responded by painting the Tea Party as racist know-nothing, bible thumpers.

      We were then served up the Astro-turf group, Occupy Wall Street and the tea party sunk into relative obscurity unless need as a scape goat for the Republican party.

      Rasmussen calls them the Political Class
      Dr Evans called them the Regulating Class
      This article calls them America’s Ruling Class

      What ever you call them these characteristics are evident:

      …Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class….

      Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind….

      Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust…. until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter.

      Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity….

      The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity.

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      Mark D.

      Gai, this is really good stuff. I think you should re-post it in the future.

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    Ron C.

    So warmists, no longer controlling the US Senate with votes, now are intimidating potential witnesses from stating facts contrary to Global Warming Alarm. That would be witness tampering in a criminal proceeding, but apparently fair game in politics. We can only hope that the other side is as diligent in discovering the extent of environmental activist money funding alarmist research.

    Still, anyone deciding to testify in the upcoming Senate hearing better be ready for the hard questions (echoes of the past):

    “Are you confused between weather and climate change?”

    “Do you accept the writings of the UN IPCC as the scientific truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

    “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of any organization that believes CO2 is only a harmless trace gas and is essential to plant life?”

    “Why is your carbon footprint so large?”

    How long have you been taking money from fossil fuel companies?

    “Do you advocate the overthrow of the United States Climate by force or violence?”

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    The Backslider

    OT – I just received the funniest reply from a warmist, talking about “back radiation”:

    Funny thing about conservation of energy: if you add MORE energy to some water, and get more evaporation as a result, you do not get EXTRA energy leaving the water over and above the MORE energy that you have added

    Who can tell me what is wrong with this…?

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      Reed Coray

      Backslider. This is off the top of my head, so take it with a grain of salt. If what your warmist friend said is true, then after the water has evaporated, what happened to the thermal energy originally stored in the water? Specifically, consider a glass of water at say 20C (68F, approximately 293K). Because the water is not at 0K, it contains a non-zero amount of thermal energy, and depending on the design of a heat engine, a fraction somewhere between 0 and 1 of this thermal energy can be converted to “work.” Place the glass of water in a room at 20C. After some time interval, half of the water will have evaporated. Independent of the source of the energy that causes the water to evaporate, if NO ENERGY over and above the energy that entered the water (and hence caused the water’s evaporation) has been released from the water, then shouldn’t the water in the half-full glass contain as much thermal energy as the water in the full glass? And if that’s true, then shouldn’t the temperature of the water in the half-full glass be higher than 20C–the temperature of the water in the full glass? In essence, if what your warmist friend says is true, then you can raise the temperature of water by placing a quantity of water in a room at the same temperature as the water and letting the water evaporate. As the water evaporates, the temperature of the remaining water will keep increasing. All of my experiences (and I believe mankind’s current understanding of thermodynamics) say the opposite. Specifically, evaporation cools rather than heats the remaining water.

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    Robber

    RIP The New York Times. In its death throes, the once respected NYT known for high quality reporting is now spewing out incoherent ramblings.

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      gai

      The New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for his “patently dishonest and pro-Soviet reportage”*** of the starvation deaths of millions.

      The Ukrainian genocide is the reason there are Russians in the Ukraine now causing unrest. The cover-up by Durant is why the Soviets were recognized as a legitimate government, admitted to the league of Nations and were able to trade with other nations for the goods they so desperately needed. Without the New York Times/ Duranty cover-up of the Soviet atrocities, the world would not have had a Soviet Union. Public opinion would have forced at minimum trade sanctions and the refusal to recognize the Soviets as a legitimate government.

      Duranty even went so far as to denigrate Gareth Jones report of the starvation.

      The New York Times, Friday March 31st 1933.

      By WALTER DURANTY
      Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES

      MOSCOW, March 30—In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with “thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation.”

      Its author is Gareth Jones, who is a former secretary to David Lloyd George and who recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union and reached the conclusion that the country was “on the verge of a terrific smash,” as he told the writer….

      Since I talked to Mr. Jones I have made exhaustive inquiries about this alleged famine situation. I have inquired in Soviet commissariats and in foreign embassies with their network of consuls, and I have tabulated information from Britons working as specialists and from my personal connections, Russian and foreign….

      In short, conditions are definitely bad in certain sections- the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga. The rest of the country is on short rations but nothing worse. These conditions are bad, but there is no famine. http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/russians_hungry_not_starving.htm

      The actual situation:

      1933
      By June, at the height of the famine, people in Ukraine are dying at the rate of 30,000 a day, nearly a third of them are children under 10. Between 1932-34, approximately 4 million deaths are attributed to starvation within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. This does not include deportations, executions…

      Denial of the famine by Soviet authorities was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, like Walter Duranty. The Soviet Union adamantly refused any outside assistance because the regime officially denied that there was any famine. Anyone claiming the contrary was accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda…

      In fact, in November 1933, the United States, under newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to formally recognized Stalin’s Communist government and also negotiated a sweeping new trade agreement. The following year, the pattern of denial in the West culminated with the admission of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans for the modernization of the Soviet Union depended largely on the purchase of massive amounts of manufactured goods and technology from Western nations. Those nations were unwilling to disrupt lucrative trade agreements with the Soviet Union in order to pursue the matter of the famine.

      In the ensuing decades, Ukrainian émigré groups sought acknowledgment of this tragic, massive genocide, but with little success. Not until the late 1980’s, with the publication of eminent scholar Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow,” the report of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, and the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine, and the release of the eye-opening documentary “Harvest of Despair,” did greater world attention come to bear on this event. In Soviet Ukraine, of course, the Holodomor was kept out of official discourse until the late 1980’s, shortly before Ukraine won its independence in 1991…

      And the New York Times has the unmitigated gall to call us skeptics Deniers?

      The New York Times still has the Pulitzer Prize for this shameful soviet propaganda by Duranty.

      *** CIA

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    Louis Hissink

    The bank’s biggest problem is figuring out how the various socialist economies, and governments, are going to pay their borrowings. Greece’s debt is 175% of it’s GDP and getting worse.

    The real issue is that the socialists globally have no idea how to pay the banks back, and this is why I suspect there is a move to another way of paying the debts via a carbon tax or something similar.

    The whole problem of course is the socialist/statist politicians who borrow funds in order to allow their voting supporters to consume in the here and now. Equally the burgeoning public sectors which produce nothing, also need funding, and if you kill off the capitalist productive sector, how then are you going to create wealth or facilitate trade?

    No, this whole problem is one vast socialist stuff up, created by people who believe, ultimately, that some thing can be created from nothing.

    Interesting times we are living in.

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      Just-A-Guy

      Louis Hissink,

      Interesting times we are living in.

      Many years ago I had heard that the ancient chinese had a curse, “May you live in interesting times”. A curse because interesting times are often dangerous. It turns out, that this is not really a curse and it’s not really Chinese. The interesting thing for me was that the phrase often turns up in the NYT, the newsrag advancing the character assasination of Willie Soon.

      Abe

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    Christopher Essex writes in the Financial Post:

    Save Willie: The global warming movement is anti-science, oblivious to how little we know about climate

    “Small minds do not understand the importance of unorthodox thinking to science”

    Beheading, war crimes, prison, death threats. Perhaps you think I’m talking about IS. No, it’s just the routine hyperbolic language of media climate activism, and the minds of our cultural overlords. Next December policymakers will try again to save the world from what they don’t understand by proposing policy on something else, which won’t work anyway.

    In anticipation, climate effusions grow. The great cultural climate PR machine slowly stretches its enormously well funded muscles, warming up for another hysterical run at utopia. Its weird unphysical world has certified carbon-free sugar, oxygen-free carbon dioxide (i.e. carbon) and the alleged carbon in glass causing interiors of cars to be warm on sunny days. Unfortunately the dense nonsense of the previous sentence won’t send the appropriate clown-time signals that it should.

    Every debate has boundaries; beyond them lies other subjects. Climate debates are unique: Their boundaries exclude their own subject. Few of the elites, journalists, or academics come close to actually discussing climate. Nearly all of them try to address physics, chemistry, computer science, and mathematics by talking anthropology instead. Try discussing anything useful with such rules.

    Fresh thinking is inherently unorthodox. Small minds, unenlightened politicians, and activists do not understand the importance of unorthodox thinking to science, and ultimately to everyone. Research must transcend the zeitgeist. Therefore it’s forever in trouble. Scientists are political targets on climate.

    Read the rest at the link. It’s well worth the click.

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    Timboss

    Can you explain why these guy are wrong about Willie Soon being wrong?

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/02/the-soon-fallacy/

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      Just-A-Guy

      Timboss,

      The article you linked to was prepared by someone who is obviously incompetent in constructing an argument based on logic and so they resort to cheap rhetoric. Case in point:

      Willie Soon writes:

      It invalidates the hypothesis that CO2 is a major cause of observed climate change – and raises serious questions about the wisdom of imposing cap-and-trade or other policies that would cripple energy production and economic activity, in the name of “preventing catastrophic climate change.”

      Gavin, the author of the paper you link to replies to this by saying:

      It is the leap from the first to second sentence that drives Soon’s research – the notion that if you can find enough correlations to solar forcing, the impact of CO2 must be diminished, if not obliterated altogether. But this is a fallacy. It is equivalent to arguing that if total caloric intake correlates to weight, that exercise can have no effect, or that if cloudiness correlates to incident solar radiation at the ground, then seasonal variations in sunshine are zero.

      The IPCC has claimed that the major driver of temperature in the atmosphere is CO2. They also claim that solar influence is minor.

      Willie Soon states, as can be seen from the quote, that his findings show the opposite to be true. Read it again, go back to the article you linked to if that’s necessary for you. Willie Soon does not say CO2 has zero influence. He says it is not a major influence.

      In logic this is called a straw-man. You construct a straw-man, in this case the false statement that Willie Soon claims CO2 has no influence, and then knock down the straw man with a valid argument.

      Most people won’t notice this deceit, but someone always does.

      I thought you were smarter than that.

      Abe

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      Just-A-Guy

      Timboss,

      The article you linked to was prepared by someone who is obviously incompetent in constructing a proper graph. Case in point:

      The graph presented by Gavin in the article you link to:

      Faulty Graph of TSI Reconstructuion.

      The graph as it should have been presented:

      Historical TSI Reconstruction

      In Gavins graph, the TSI appears to oscilate up and down along a flat line. The SORCE TSI Reconstruction from their website clearly shows the oscillations following a curve that drops slightly from 1850 to around 1900-1910, then the curve rises until around 1990-2000, and then the curve starts to drop again thereafter.

      This means that the oscillation of the TSI follows a curve that is also oscillating. This is similar to what you would observe if you were to plot the temperature of some location once an hour over the course of a year. The graph would rise during the day and drop thru the night. But, that rise and fall would follow a curve that would itself rise in the spring and summer and then fall in the autumn and winter.

      Technically, a sine curve whose mean is tracing another sine curve.

      You appear to have the intelligence to understand these things. I’m guessimg you may not have gone over Gavin’s article and actually verified that the information was accurate.

      Abe

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      Just-A-Guy

      Timboss,

      The article you presented to us has various other faults and inaccuracies. The fact of the matter is that one flaw in logic plus one flaw in the data are enough to invalidate the entire article.

      Abe

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    Just-A-Guy

    Update

    The Guardian has decided to do a piece on Dr. Wei-Hok ‘Willie’ Soon.

    Jessica Glenza, a news reporter at the Guardian US, has written a character smear on Willie Soon.

    Her e-mail appears at the top of the article. Ppl might want to drop her a line telling her to . . .

    Free Willie Soon. Now!

    H/T to pat

    Abe

    00