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Looks like Scientific American has gone a bit “cosmic”: The Little Ice Age was apparently caused by black death, small pox, and slavery. The theory goes that there was a small spikey dip in CO2 levels in 1610, which was man-made. So hold your breath, that means a whole new era should start from then. This small dip of dubious causality, plus the correlation of oddly unclimatic things like slavery, seems to make the spike worthy of an impressive sciencey title, lo, a new era is born — The start of the Anthropocene. Let’s not mention that temperatures started falling from 1400 AD. That’s 200 years before the CO2 spike down. Cause and effect are so passe in postmodern science. Mass Deaths in Americas Start New CO2 Epoch Scientific American: The atmosphere recorded the mass death, slavery and war that followed 1492. The death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans—as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas—allowed forests to grow in former farmlands. By 1610, the growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least […] March 14th, 2015 | Tags: Hockey Stick Graph, Little Ice Age, Scientific American | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | Just another day in a science debate, right? One side of a scientific theory, are generally bully boys conducting witchhunts, wishing of execution, joking about chopping off heads, and thinks it’s funny to mock explode children of dissenters. This is the same side who wants to force us pay billions to change the weather. They dehumanize their critics with relentless petty names that imply they have no rational brain. When their lauded hero professor can’t convince the crowd with reasoned arguments, he discusses using industrial sabotage and destruction to get the message across. Go blow up a dam to save the planet? The other side are upstanding scientists. Pat Bagley, the Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist, has things a little mixed up. “Anti-Scientists.” A cropped section of Pat Bagley’s cartoon | Salt Lake Tribune See the full cartoon on CAGLE CARTOONS Artists used to pride themselves on being a thorn in the side of authority. In the topsy turvey world of “climate science” they instead attack the volunteers fighting corruption and incompetence, and help the industrial green machine, global financial houses, and ever-bigger government (or if you like, respectively the environmental, financial, and political authorities). Someone should let […] “Merchants of Doubt” — the new attack-umentory released last week — has been a box-office bomb. Even the anti-carbon activists can’t be bothered watching the rehashed malevolent fantasy speculation about the scientists who dared stand against the establishment. Jim Lakely at Heartland reports that total takings were $23,300 last weekend. It uses 20 year old documents to absurdly try to tie the smoking campaign to the climate debate. Oreskes fights on the side with billions of dollars but tries to paint herself the victim of intimidation. No one is buying it. The Merchants of Doubt is an unwitting self projection of her own obsession trying to sell doubts about honest, upstanding scientists. Fred Singer got his PhD in 1948 on cosmic ray showers. His thesis committee included J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr. I’d like to see Fred Singer discuss atmospheric physics with Naomi. Bring on the debate that matters and let the smear campaign get all it deserves.
9.5 out of 10 based on 133 ratings These results are devastating for the carbonistas. In the lead-up to Paris, every time someone suggests “there is momentum”, remind them of this Swiss result. The majority of western populations do not want serious climate action, they don’t want to pay more for energy, and countries are not “picking up the carbon challenge”. The Greens in Switzerland asked the Swiss to dump the VAT tax and replace it with a “carbon tax”. It would (in theory) mean Swiss people could pay less tax overall, and save the environment at the same time. Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund endorsed it, and 92% of Swiss people rejected it. Swiss Voters Reject Initiative to Replace VAT System With Carbon Tax Roughly 92% of voters opposed the initiative, known as “Energy Rather than VAT,” while 8% supported the measure, according to preliminary results from 13 of the country’s 26 cantons. The Swiss cabinet had recommended voters reject the proposal because it would likely have caused a falloff in revenue for the federal government. The current VAT tax, which ranges from 2.5% to 8%, generated income of 22.6 billion Swiss francs ($22.92 billion) for the federal government in 2013, according to […] Last August the BoM were feeling the heat — Graham Lloyd at The Australian and skeptics, particularly Jennifer Marohasy, were asking why cooling trends were being revised to warming trends at stations with no recorded moves. People were raising eyebrows at embarrassing questions about why the Bureau thought climate change was all-critical, yet they were tossing out historic Stevenson-screen data. The BoM felt so squeezed they finally answered some basic questions they’d been ignoring for years (like details on Rutherglen). But the pressure kept growing because nobody needs a degree in Meteorology to know that there ought to be a reason for fiddling with historic thermometer data. The dumb punters were not impressed with the excuse that stations “might” have moved because tricky statistics on other stations 300km away detected an “unrecorded shift”. So the BoM and their apologist friends in The Dept of Environment dusted off a 3 year old idea called a Technical Advisory Forum, pulled out some names of respectable sounding statisticians and “voila” — created a one day wonder. The “technical forum” will spend more time releasing press releases than analyzing data. On Jan 19th we were promised so much. The full gloss press release ticks […] March 10th, 2015 | Tags: BOM, Marohasy (Jennifer), The Australian | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | How the political landscape has changed. The Labor Party is just waking up to the new demographics. Greens in the inner city are more like the profile of some former Liberal (conservative) voters 30 years ago. Greens in the outer suburbs are more the sustainability hippies. One ALP source said the ALP had identified a big split in the profile of Greens in the inner city and those on the urban fringes, with the outer-suburban Greens more like the earthy, environmental Âactivist-style Greens of the Bob Brown generation rather than the wealthy careerists of the inner city. Inner city Greens are wealthy, educated types: In Victoria, the ALP has pushed back the preselection of its candidate in the federal seat of Melbourne, now in the hands of the Greens’ Adam Bandt, to ensure it adopts the right candidate and the right campaign strategy. “There is a lot of institutionalised prejudice about how we have to be more Green than the Greens. In reality a lot of these Greens come from Liberal voting backgrounds,’’ the source said. “The Greens vote in Hawthorn was north of 20 per cent — that’s a blue-ribbon Liberal seat. These Green voters […] Because there is always something else that needs saying… 8.7 out of 10 based on 21 ratings Google is considering the possibility of “filtering out” politically incorrect and controversial sites by adding a Truth TM ranking for their search results. It is hubris unbounded — oh hear ye, Google ranks truth for humanity! Fergoodnesssake, the narcissism of it. It might be a “truth” ranking in Orwellian Newspeak but everyone knows that translates as being whatever government and biggest man in the room decides is true. Like every organization which silences debate and censors ideas, it will be superseded in a flash by those who don’t. Why would Google even toy with a move that makes it as much fun as a sterilized encyclopedia? Too big for their boots — do they think They Are The Net? By alienating the most active sector of the Net — the creative, high-risk thinkers — the buzz of the web will shift. It will become known that Google is the place to go for official boredom, and safe state propaganda. Moms and dads will send the kids to do school projects on Google, while all the adults go somewhere else. Google-fawn will become Google-yawn. The driving lifeblood of the Internet are the people debating and hunting for the forbidden — the […] … The Abbott government has at least grown enough backbone to not renew the Labor appointees Chairman to the CSIRO board, who have allowed scientific standards to decay so badly. It’s about time. As long as any director of CSIRO claims that “consensus” has any meaning in science, then the board is an unscientific failure. UPDATE To clarify: There is no official policy to not reinstate people because they were appointed by Labor. But three directors/panelists say they have heard unofficially there is. I think board members should be sacked if they don’t serve the public, not because of who appointed them. It would be a silly thing for a Minister to say. But in the case of the CSIRO, the Labor appointee appears to be a political assignment rather than a scientific one, and should have been replaced long ago. See my comment #1.1.1 for names and more details. UPDATE #2: Bolt calls it an anti-Abbott rumour. “And a spokesman for Tony ÂAbbott told The Weekend Australian there were more than 50 government agencies with boards where a person was appointed by Labor and reappointed by the current government… “ Not surprisingly, this has […] March 7th, 2015 | Tags: Australian Politics, CSIRO | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming, Politics | Print This Post | | Naomi Orsekes’ big intellectual contribution to the climate debate is her fantasy that skeptics copy tactics from the tobacco lobby. It’s a trick to reframe real criticism — Dr A spots a real error, but Oreskes waves the “Tobacco tactic!” red flag. Stop the conversation! Not only are these ad hom attacks tactics as old as the stone age, bone obvious, and used in every political hot-potato debate, but “tobacco tactics” are the stock and trade of Prof Naomi Oreskes. She’s make a whole career out of mimicking the tobacco industry. Oreskes wrote an entire book designed to denigrate scientists based on tenuous links on unrelated topics with 20 year old documents. She is The Merchant of Doubt — it’s what she sells — “doubts” about the motivation of skeptical scientists. Her fantasies about skeptics using tobacco tactics is pure psychological projection. Perhaps she isn’t aware? In a science debate about the climate, the only things that matter are evidence and reasoning about the climate. Those who can’t point out flaws in the science debate launch personal attacks from the gutter instead. What has tobacco got to do with Earth’s Climate? It’s not a forcing or a feedback, but the […] March 7th, 2015 | Tags: Oreskes (Naomi), Singer (Fred) | Category: Academia, Global Warming, Logic & Reason | Print This Post | | What if you lost, say, the Great Barrier Reef? No seriously, what if you woke up one morning and it was gone? Celeste Young is paid to worry about that and she’s written a whole article on climate grief. It has no data, and uses models and namecalling which makes it a perfect fit for The Conversation. A variety of losses can be experienced. People may grieve due to the perceived future loss of something; for example, the type of grief often expressed via social media over the potential loss of the Great Barrier Reef. Individuals and communities may grieve for the loss of a loved landscape damaged by drought, fire or flood. She adapts the famous Kubler Ross Five Stages of Grief (doesn’t everyone) to to deliver clichĂ©s in table form. But don’t rush to knock it, I think this is a new form of grieving, where people project the grief of their collapsing religion onto something else instead, like “the environment”. Let’s call it Parody-grieving. Does Young realize the parallels? The Climate-club are still stuck at stage one. They know something is wrong but the cognitive dissonance is killing them: their heroes hide declines and data, […] March 6th, 2015 | Tags: Psychology, The Conversation, Universities | Category: Academia, Big-Government, Global Warming, Psychology | Print This Post | | New study says going on about “moral duty” will convince the skeptics (Sure, load on the guilt trip) Last weekend a Reuters IPSOS survey found that if you ask the right questions, a majority of Americans see climate change as a moral obligation. The brains trust inferred from this that the climate propaganda groups ought to load up on discussing values to convince conservatives as if that might be the magic key. “The moral imperative is the way to reach out to conservatives,” said Rev. Mitch Hescox, president of the Evangelic Environmental Network, a large evangelical organization that advocates for action on climate change. “Talking in terms of values is the only way forward if we are to bring our fellow Republicans along.” UPDATE: Results of the online poll 2,412 Thanks to Pat for finding the survey. How the full results change the picture. Half the population are skeptics. And most people distrust experts, politicians, and even UN scientists. Q6. Which of the following people, if any, do you think can speak with authority about global warming? UN scientists 43% Bill Nye (the Science Guy) 31% Al Gore 18% President Obama 18% Neil deGrasse Tyson […] March 4th, 2015 | Tags: Polls, Precautionary Principle, Survey | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Panic! “The proof Australia is getting hotter” The headlines are as inane as ever — stating the obvious, proving only that the modern media is mostly bread and circuses. Pretty much everyone agrees the world is slowly trending warmer, but it’s rolled out in the media as if someone somewhere is denying it, and as if mere proof of warming is “proof” it will keep warming. Watch the causal chain explode into climate astrology: “THERE is no point in denying it: Australia is getting hotter, and it’s not going to stop. And we have the figures to prove it. “ If this proves anything about the future climate its that journalists are getting more gullible. They have figures too?! Caroline Zielinski, of The Telegraph, dutifully repeats the PR line, that “2014 was the hottest ever on Earth”. She must have missed the press release that also said that NASA were only 38% sure of that. That makes them 62% sure they were wrong — just another global warming factoid, eh? Zielinski tells us that Boulia had 25 days of 40-plus temperatures – “the longest heatwave ever”. So Ken Stewart promptly checked the BOM records and found it was […] UPDATE: *Chris has been over the entire dataset again, and makes a correction that adjustments account for 30-40% of the rise. A bit less than half. Headline updated. See his site for the newer stats. March 9, 2015 Adjustments that cool historic temperatures have almost doubled Australia’s rate of warming. CSIR published “Meteorological Data” 1855 – 1931 There was a time back in 1933 when the CSIRO was called CSIR and meteorologists figured that with 74 years of weather data on Australia, they really ought to publish a serious document collating all the monthly averages at hundreds of weather stations around Australia. Little did they know that years later, despite their best efforts, much of the same data would be forgotten and unused or would be adjusted, decades after the fact, and sometimes by as much as one or two degrees. Twenty years later The Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics would publish an Official Year Book of Australia which included the mean temperature readings from 1911 to 1940 at 44 locations. Chris Gillham has spent months poring over both these historic datasets, as well as the BoM’s Climate Data Online (CDO) which has the recent temperatures […] March 2nd, 2015 | Tags: Australian temperatures, BOM, CSIRO | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | … 8.3 out of 10 based on 15 ratings |
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