Big-government propaganda: ABC, BBC are “Aggressive political participants”. Sell or Split?

What to do with the public broadcasters? ABC BBC CBC (Can anyone explain public media in NZ?)

Big-government fans forcibly take funds from all citizens to support big-government propaganda by journalists who predominantly vote left or very-left (see here or here). The question is not whether or not they should do this but whether to privatize the public broadcasters, or to split them in two. I say, let’s forget the submissive plea to get one conservative commentator among a monoculture of “progressives”. Chop the current one in half and call it what it is: pro big-government. Then set up a new counter half to match — the pro-small-government broadcaster with the same funds but new staff. (Game on — let the best team win that ratings war.) Abbott could keep ABC funding promises. ABC-L plus ABC-R equals current ABC-LL+ funding.

Obviously, true free-market libertarians want public broadcasters 100% sold — their incentives are always going to run counter to unbiased reporting and the hunt for the truth. On the other hand, among the populace, the ground is not remotely laid for a big-sell. Many voters remain blind to the bias, and have no idea how filtered the half-truths are: […]

Coal is like “torture” rage Guardian, Friends of the Earth

Oops. Who hates “the environment”? Green lobbyists keep revealing how little they care. Friends of the Earth want to categorically rule out one of the most cost effective ways to reduce our carbon emissions. New supercritical hot burning coal plants can reduce emissions by an amazing 15%. But Friends of the Earth and The Guardian hate coal more than they care about CO2.

The green climate fund (GCF) refused an explicit ban on fossil fuel projects at the contentious meeting in Songdo, South Korea, last week.

“It’s like a torture convention that doesn’t forbid torture,” said Karen Orenstein, a campaigner for Friends of the Earth US who was at the meeting. “Honestly it should be a no-brainer at this point.” — The Guardian

Poor old solar and wind power are so useless that the debate is about whether they achieve any reductions at all. Their intermittent power means some kind of back-up base load power source has to run on standby to pick up the pieces when they collapse. The more wind power you have, the less CO2 you save. Solar Power provides “cheaper” electricity to the rich at the expense of everyone else, and potentially […]

Bloggies 2015 winners. Climate Audit, NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat, JoNova

Thanks to all the readers here who took time to vote. Skeptical sites are well represented in the finalists and winners largely thanks to readers here, at Tallblokes, Realscience and NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat.

Best European Weblog: Not a lot of people know that Lifetime Achievement: Climate Audit Best Topical Weblog: JoNova Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog: The Pickering Post Best Weblog about Politics Breitbart News Network

Congrats to Steve McIntyre who surely deserves every bit of his LifeTime Achievement award. I’m delighted to see Paul Homewood (Notalotofpeopleknowthat) win in Best European blog. He was stiff competition in the Topical category given his role in the Christopher Booker series on the scandalous temperature adjustments which made such an impact around the world. Breitbart was also a favourite of mine, largely thanks to James Delingpole.

Congrats to all finalists like Tallbloke, WattsUp, RealScience (who is moving to RealClimateScience) and NoTricksZone. Tallbloke, the ultimate good sport, was a finalist for the LifeTime Achievement, but announced he’d vote for Climate Audit.

One day, maybe The Bloggies will bring back The Best Science Blog Category which skeptics would obviously dominate at the moment. Repressing a passionate crowd doesn’t work.

For the overseas crowd, Larry […]

Weekend Unleaded

Don’t forget Power Hour, your chance to shine. 🙂

8.5 out of 10 based on 42 ratings

Ted Cruz — US Presidential candidate and skeptic who “follows the science” on climate

I don’t see how this man can possibly get elected. On climate change he is far too sensible.

This is one of the best short video responses by a politician that I have ever seen. Such clarity…

The full video is at the right scoop.

If this man stays in the campaign running for long he will change the dynamics of the whole public climate debate.

h/t to Joe B. Thanks 🙂

9.5 out of 10 based on 134 ratings

BoM forum been, gone. Rejoice! Invisible problems being solved behind closed doors

You’ll be glad to know the BoM problems are all dealt with. Some hand-picked statisticians met with some BoM people yesterday, and they had a robust private chat about secret temperature stuff at the technical advisory forum (that’s the tea-and-cakes one-day-wonder). I’m so relieved to know it was “productive”. (Imagine if the press release had said it was “predictable, boring and unproductive”?) In a few months we will find out a small, filtered version of what they said and possibly something of what the BoM approved statisticians think about the nameless, unlinked, public-submissions.

We do know that the BoM didn’t want public submissions, but in their good grace, they have given them to the select forum members anyway. (Be grateful serfs, you don’t get acknowledgment or answers, but your dedication in listing and referencing known scandalous problems with our national dataset is worthy of one line in the last paragraph of a press release. Congratulations — maybe. Only one two submissions have been formally acknowledged which means the others, with months of work, might fall off the back of a truck, lost in the mail.*It’s possible. Is it too much to expect officials to send an email receipt with acknowledgment?)

[…]

One quarter of the US are now implacable skeptics of “climate change” fears

The new Gallup Poll is out. Most commentators are focused on the worried “a great deal” category, which is back to 1989 levels, but that’s largely noise. The important trend is at the other end of the spectrum, and seems to be missed. The only category with steady growth are the hard core skeptics, people who are worried “not at all”. That’s doubled from 12 to 24%; the trend is up. This is an unequivocal category. One quarter of the population are solidly, completely skeptical.

Given the 4% errors, there are only two clear trends in this table below. Firstly, those who had no opinion have now got one, and it’s skeptical. Secondly, the number of the most implacable skeptics has doubled. After 20 years of propaganda the section of the population that is not buying the scare is steadily increasing. The size of the groups with variable levels of worry flicks up and down as people switch. But the numbers of those who worry “not at all” are steadily rising, and therein lies the death of the scare. It’s a one way ticket from being uninformed and worried to the “only a little/not at all” category.

The “enviro-scare” campaign […]

The 97% Cook Consensus – when will Environ Res Letters retract it?

Richard Tol has an excellent summary of the state of the 97% claim by John Cook et al, published in The Australian today.

It becomes exhausting to just list the errors.

Don’t ask how bad a paper has to be to get retracted. Ask how bad it has to be to get published.

As Tol explains, the Cook et al paper used an unrepresentative sample, can’t be replicated, and leaves out many useful papers. The study was done by biased observers who disagreed with each other a third of the time, and disagree with the authors of those papers nearly two-thirds of the time. About 75% of the papers in the study were irrelevant in the first place, with nothing to say about the subject matter. Technically, we could call them “padding”. Cook himself has admitted data quality is low. He refused to release all his data, and even threatened legal action to hide it. (The university claimed it would breach a confidentiality agreement. But in reality, there was no agreement to breach.) As it happens, the data ended up being public anyhow. Tol refers to an “alleged hacker” but, my understanding is that no hack took place, and the […]

The climate religion is God’s gift. (God spoke to NOAA, right?)

Hail the Episcopal Bishop who “knows” which experts are right in this science debate. She hath declared that certified climate scientists paid by government grants speak the word of God. Other scientists (like 48% of Meteorologists, and two thirds of Geo’s and Engineers, plus practically everyone retired from NASA) are immoral, blind, threatening the poor, and wrong.

The Guardian: Climate denial is immoral, says head of US Episcopal church

The highest ranking woman in the Anglican communion has said climate denial is a “blind” and immoral position which rejects God’s gift of knowledge.

Get ready climate denier, for your brain was not a gift from God. When you speak of Aristotle, Popper, and Feynman, you are not using the gift of knowledge to take apart the false posturings of broken climate simulations. Nor are you protecting the poor from witchdoctors with biblical prophesies of doom.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in […]

CO2 is not making storms worse near Japan either

Yet more evidence that there is no relationship between CO2 and cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons. This paper from 2012 tests the theory that global warming made storms more severe and tried to find any effect on typhoons hitting Japan that could be linked to climate change since 1980.

There has been no increase in “super typhoons”. The typhoon season is not longer, nor is it delayed in starting. There has been no change in intensity. The wind speeds are not increasing. The minimum pressure is pretty much the same.

CO2 appears to influence storms in simulated worlds, but not so much in the real one. There is no sign of more severe storms in Australia, New Zealand or the South Pacific either. Nor is there any pattern in the Global Energy indicies, US Hurricanes, US Tornadoes either.

When will scientists and reporters make sure that their audiences know that?

The authors conclude:

“The results suggest that typhoons have not been influenced by global warming. In conclusion, global warming has not significantly changed the characteristics of typhoons, and there is no close relationship between the two.”

Figure 19. Number of super typhoons that develop

9.4 […]

How will you celebrate Power Hour — next Saturday?

Australians don’t forget Earth Hour The Power Hour!

At 8.30pm tonight March 28th, celebrate electricity and set that CO2 free. Do your bit to feed starving plants, and regreen deserts. Rejoice that at the flick of a switch we can do something that would seem magical for most of human history, and that which 1.3 billion people today still can’t do.

Do it for the children

It’s just one hour a year when we glory in the achievements of electricity. What child would not benefit from taking part in an expression of gratitude that we do not live in the cold and dark anymore? In the West, almost everyone has cupboards-of-cold to store food that we don’t have to catch and kill, or grow, or grind?

 

h/t to Turtle. I got the date wrong. Next week… – Jo

9.2 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

Weekend Unloaded (last day to vote in Bloggies)

Some thoughts need to be shared…

PS:There are lots of skeptical blogs to vote for. Bloggies 2015 voting closes tonight 10pm Sunday EDT, which is 1pm Monday in Sydney. (And I had an old incorrect link in the post about it last week. Oops :- | ).

8.7 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Melbourne heat — BoM makes mystery corrections, but misses new skyscrapers. Incompetence?

More errors in ACORN — The Bureau of Met wonder-database corrects for mysterious “statisticals” but not for 15 story buildings built next to the thermometers. They correct a step change that doesn’t occur in minima, but don’t correct for one that does in maxima. Big site changes are marked in some datasets but not in others. And where is the correction for obvious urban heat island effects? Bear in mind, the size of the artificial steps and corrections is on a par with the warming supposedly due to carbon dioxide. Hmmm.

The BoM database needs to be independently and publicly replicated, all the way from their raw data to the final output down to several decimal places. Then we will all know what is going on. Let’s shine a light in. If it ain’t replicated, it ain’t science.

Melbourne has one of the longest temperature records in the Southern Hemisphere. Looking at the original records it appears Melbourne maximums have not changed much from 1855 – 1995. Then they suddenly jumped or stepped up.

Tom Quirk did some sleuthing, and figured out why that happened. But what he can’t figure out is why the Bureau missed this adjustment, yet makes […]

Vanuatu sea levels: how much did they contribute to cyclone damage?

Sea levels are part of the scare campaign, but how many journalists ask, and how many scientists admit, that sea levels in the South Pacific are noisy data that changes as the ground moves and the ocean slops back and forward? The Pacific averages 4 km deep. Is it any wonder that slight changes in winds and currents will shift the top 10cm, just 0.0025% , around? Long term sea level changes are difficult to assess. But this is not what we hear much in the media:

“Rising sea levels making island nations such as Vanuatu more vulnerable to storms and amplifies the impact of tropical cyclones” –The Guardian

“Coastal flooding is a sleeping giant,” it says. — The Climate Council (News.com)

The good recent data shows big rises and falls that don’t correlate with CO2

A very neat high-quality network of SeaFrame equipment was installed around South Pacific Islands in 1992 to measure both land and sea movements. This is called the Pacific Sea Level Monitoring Project. It is maintained by the Australian BoM. The geodetic observations are done by Geoscience Australia.

These tide gauges show that sea levels are rising and falling around Vanuatu […]

The Guardian-the-gullible: blind to whistleblowers, ignoring scandals, defender of feel-good teenage thinking

In years to come when people wonder how so much money came to be wasted in a frivolous attempt to stop the storms, people will marvel at the failure of parts of the free press. The Guardian will rise above that pack, standing out as the one that dressed itself in the color of gullible.

There are more than 31,000 whistleblowers inside science, 9,000 with PhD’s, 2 with Nobel Physics prizes, and 3 men who walked on the moon. There are meteorologists who won prizes in Meteorology, and physicists who studied with the greats — and they’re warning that the science is not settled, but the journalists at The Guardian know better.

Instead of asking hard questions of both skeptics and believers, the writers saw the passion and energy of namecalling activists and were swept off their feet to join the march. Now they dish out their infinite wisdom on science, on national policy and finance. If only the rest of us could be as genius and kind as Alan Rusbridger, eh?

But what are the Guardian guarding these days? They want to silence skeptics, and push a committee consensus. It isn’t free speech, and it isn’t science. If there […]

Vote for your favourite in the Bloggies

(Click to start voting)

Voting closes on Sunday, and there are lots of great sites to vote for.

I know voting is a bit of an effort, but if you get a lot from a site, it’s a way to say thanks. Awards are useful for bloggers — and it means blogs you like can reach a wider audience.

It’s already a success to be listed and linked as a finalist. Thanks to those who nominated and voted in that round.

For 2015 I’ll be voting for The Pickering Post in Australia-NZ, Steyn Online in Most Humorous, and Breitbart in Politics (though American Thinker is also a great site). I’ll have to choose (darn) between Not a Lot of People Know That, and No Tricks Zone in Europe; Tallbloke’s Talkshop and Climate Audit in Lifetime Achievement and Watts Up and Real Science in Weblog of the Year.

To make your vote count you do need to supply an email, check it, and confirm. See below for instructions if you need them.

How topical is climate science? In the last year 600,000 people visited this site. When Tony Abbott faced a leadership crisis last month his main competitor was an […]

Playing politics with every disaster: Vanuatu cyclone blamed on “climate change”

So far 24 are confirmed dead in Vanuatu, a figure that seems likely to rise. About 100,000 are homeless, according to the local Oxfam director, which, if accurate, is an awful lot in a country of 270,000. There is no doubt the nation needs help.

Despite the pressing need to solve immediate problems, the predictable claims are already starting. How many journalists will bother to check these claims against the history of cyclones in Vanuatu? Accuweather lists a lot, including one in 1951 that killed 100 people when CO2 levels were just 311ppm. In 1987 another storm killed 48.

President Baldwin Lonsdale is blaming “climate change”.

Pacific nations regard themselves as at the frontline of climate change, given many are low-lying islands dangerously exposed to rising sea levels, and Lonsdale said changing weather patterns were partly to blame for the destruction.

“Climate change is contributing to the disaster in Vanuatu,” Lonsdale told reporters in Japan, saying rain had been unusually heavy this year.

Even President Hollande, host of the Paris UNFCCC later this year, is milking this disaster: “…the cyclone “is a new cry for the international community to take seriously its responsibility in the fight […]

Kingsman — a movie where the villain is a climate change megalomaniac

The movie came out in December (I’m way behind the times). It appears most of the audience had a rollicking good time at a spy movie where the evil villain “Valentine” had the ultimate genocidal carbon reduction plan. It was murder-to-save-the-planet.

Perhaps the leading edge of Hollywood has finally arrived? This can’t be good for the forces of freeloading. Someone shot the sacred cow, and though they did it quietly with no bragging or boasting, the crowd rewarded them.

From Mark Steyn’s review a few weeks ago:

Valentine is tired of giving money to politicians for action on climate change and nothing happening. He loves the planet and man is destroying it. So he’s concluded that the only solution is to eliminate the vast majority of mankind, leaving only those pre-selected individuals he’s invited to his mountain lair to re-emerge when the dust settles to live on a now Edenic earth cleansed of what he calls its “virus” – man.

This actually makes way more sense than the average Bond villain’s plan. Indeed, it makes so much sense that the pajama boy at Vox isn’t too sure who to root for. I mean, why would Colin […]

Fellow, Michael Kelly says The Royal Society must not hide uncertainty of climate

Another excellent job by the UK Daily Mail.

Professor Michael Kelly, Fellow of the Royal Society, was one of the 43 who protested back in 2010 at the Royal Society’s climate change position. (Read up on the Rebellion of the 43 at the GWPF p32.) They felt the Royal Society was breaking its own motto: motto ‘Nullius in verba’ – or ‘Don’t take another’s word for it; check it out for yourself’. Now five years later, Michael Kelly gives us an update, and he fears things are worse: “… since then the Society has become more, not less dogmatic – despite the fact that since we sent that letter, it has become evident that there is even more uncertainty than previously thought.”

Why my own Royal Society is wrong on climate change: A devastating critique of world’s leading scientific organisation by one of its Fellows

His main point is that the Royal Society is not giving balanced information about the uncertainties and model failures. (It’s the same pattern of telling us half truths, while hiding the bombs, that we see in the BBC and the ABC, and “love media”.) Kelly argued that Society ought to distance itself from levels of […]

Be afraid for your red wine and steak now!

Extra carbon dioxide is the wonder fertilizer that has greened deserts and created a global crop boom, but don’t think for a moment that just because plants love CO2 that more of it won’t be an utter disaster come to wreck your dinner! Yet again, we are at the tipping point, and everything is just about to fall apart. How unlucky can one planet be! “There are few winners”.

Wouldn’t you know it — the current rainfall and frost patterns are perfect? But soon you will sweat like a pig, have poorer bread, and heat stressed steak. Worse, you may have to eat more olives and mangoes and drink Merlot from … a different region. This is serious, folks: when a cyclone hits the North West of Australia, some West Australians may even have to eat Queensland bananas.

Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald, “investigates” the news that another government agency has written another long, dire report with prophecies of doom. But unlike the past incompetent exaggerated beat-ups, this one (finally) is going to be right, so he doesn’t bother asking hard questions, or interviewing other experts, or even doing a Google search.

“Hotter, harder times forecast for the […]