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When personal, ad hominem attacks are launched against a scientist there is no upside for science. People who care about science discuss the science, not the scientist’s-biography. Instead there are five potentially ugly outcomes that the mudslingers are presumably aiming for:
The target scientist may be effectively silenced: spectators tune out. Weaker journalists feel less inclined to cite them for fear of the push-back against themselves. Another day where the scientific national conversation wallows in the gutter instead of discussing science. The target scientist feels dissuaded. Who needs this hassle? The message to thousands of silent skeptical scientists is unmistakable — “don’t speak” or you’re next. Philanthropists, and corporate donors feel the heat too, and may (if they are not made of strong stuff) figure that their funding does more harm than good. This starves independent science of essential support.
These attacks don’t raise a single scientific argument. Their aim is not “better science”. Let’s turn the pain back on the mudslinger and those who aid and abet. It won’t be so much fun for them if each attack makes us stronger, crystallizes support, and exposes their anti-science intent.
This mud-ball is begging to be turned
We don’t want to […]
Margaret River | Photo Jo Nova on Friday (Click to enlarge) Trees are Karri and Marri.
Yes, I’ve been away again. Hence not so many posts and comments. This holiday thanks to reader Alex and his lovely family.
8.6 out of 10 based on 32 ratings
Researchers were sure fatter people would get more dementia, so they studied two million middle-aged people for nearly a decade but were “baffled to find the exact opposite. Their sample included 45,000 cases of dementia and the obese were 30 per cent less likely to be diagnosed with it.
This contradicts previous studies and was not at all what the researchers expected, so they analyzed the data every which way they could think of but can’t explain the results. Need I say “experts” and “consensuses”?
Scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said they were baffled by the results as previous studies have shown that being overweight raises the risk. —Telegraph
Risk factors such as alcohol and smoking made little difference to the results, published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. — Mirror
Dr Qizilbash said the findings held despite attempts to adjust for other causes of dementia and the tendency of obese people to die earlier. “We did a lot of analysis to see if we could explain it but just seems to persist. We couldn’t get rid of it so we’re left with this apparent protective effect,” he said. […]
There’s another more subtle message to politicians from the Gallop poll last week. The headline we discussed was that a whole quarter of the US are emphatic skeptics who don’t worry “at all” about climate change. But the other message is that if the politicans want to show they care about the environment, nearly every major environmental issue is more important to voters than “climate change”: 55% of the population worries about water pollution but only 32% feel the same level of concern for global warming.
On environmental concerns, climate change has the highest profile, but is consistently low ranking in the concern-stakes. People are much more worried about clean water, lakes and rivers, and air pollution rather than “climate change”. There is room here for either side of politics to step over the top of the supposedly greenest left wing parties and win voters by tackling real pollution rather than the fantasy kind. Any party that took serious action on rivers and water would earn environmental kudos and swinging votes. They wouldn’t win the die hard green vote, because those votes are not about the environment anyway. But true swingers shift between the major parties, and they are less […]
1954 Yearbook Brisbane
Here’s an update to the digging through our historic records we discussed a month ago, we can now include nearly twice the stations and the difference between temperatures originally recorded 100 years ago and temperatures today are even smaller.
Chris Gillham has been working with CSIR documents and official Commonwealth Year Books. Last month he used the 1953 Year Book which contained 44 weather station averages for 1911-40 to compare with 2000-14 temperatures, but has since discovered that the 1954 Year Book provides an additional 40 stations with 1911-40 data. The average rise in mean temperatures across all 84 weather stations around Australia over the last 70 years of global warming is about 0.3C. This larger dataset suggests as much as two thirds of the current official trend in Australian warming was due to post hoc adjustments, not heat recorded by thermometers.
These historic temperatures were calculated by the best scientists of the day, using the best equipment of the era (the same Stevenson Screen we use now). Yet again, global warming appears to have a “man-made” contribution. Far more important than CO2 is man-made “pollution” called homogenisation.
When doubling the recorded trend makes “No difference”
[…]
Almost exactly 25 years ago Al Gore, a Democrat Senator at the time, warned us of an ecological Kristallnacht in the New York Times. He didn’t use the term “denier” but he was talking up an unmistakable environmental holocaust. Since then CO2 levels have risen 50ppm, and the global population increased by two billion. Yet much of the article could be rerun today and who would know? He could just change the dates.
The 1990’s are the decade of decision. Profound changes are required.
In 1987, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to surge with record annual increases. Global temperatures are also climbing: 1987 was the second hottest year on record; 1988 was the hottest. Scientists now predict our current course will raise world temperatures five degrees Celsius in our lifetimes.
The holocaust was coming
Here’s the headline and opening paragraphs: March 19 1989
An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.
“Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with our planet. Unless we quickly and profoundly change the course of our civilization, we face an immediate and grave danger of destroying the worldwide ecological system that sustains life as we know it.”
April 7th, 2015 | Tags: Gore (Al) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
Ian Dunlop in the Canberra Times, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald namecalls away, discusses a mythical creature called a “climate denialist” and shows how little research it takes to get an opinion page in the Fairfax mastheads. (Comments are “open” at these sites).
He thinks that PM Tony Abbott ought follow Margaret Thatcher on climate policy, without realizing that skeptics would say “Bravo — Yes Please” to that. Thatcher was a chemist, and no fool. In 2003 she made it clear, when few people did, that she was absolutely a skeptic.
Ian Dunlop 2015:
It is too much to expect the male-dominated, eminence-grise of the incumbency to rise to the occasion, but women might. There is a precedent. Margaret Thatcher, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1989: “We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their objective if, by their output, they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the wellbeing they achieved by the production of goods and services”. Just so. You may not agree with Margaret Thatcher on many things, but on climate change she was spot on, three decades ahead of her […]
It was 1977. Things looked ominous:
“The argument that we face some long cold years is pretty convincing.”
The story was that some professors at the largest meteorology center said so — we’d had a couple of really cold winters, temperatures are falling, and the armadillo is moving.
“There’s a theory among climatologists that the last two years of battering by winter mean that an ice age is returning to the Earth and ice ages Glaciers Down to the Mason-Dixon Line.”
“…the headlong retreat of the heat loving armadillo from Nebraska to the southwest and to Mexico…”
Climate scientists have come so far in 40 years. They would never make a fuss over a few freak seasons and an armadillo.
H/t to Tom Nelson (he’s back on twitter @tan123, thanks to skeptics) and Heartland. This is a great video originally reported by Julia Seymour at MRC Business report. See that link for the full commentary.
40 Years of Media Hype for Climate Alarmists | Heartlander Magazine“
“Warm periods like ours last only 10,000 years, but ours has already lasted 12,000. So if the rhythm is right, we are over-ready for a return […]
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8.2 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
Another excuse may be on the rocks. The Arctic ice melt has been a favorite clarion of catastrophists. What will they do if it stops declining? It is early days, but if the missing heat is hiding in the Arctic this pattern is not following the green machine plan.
Cryosphere
David Whitehouse GWPF
A New “Pause?”
Examining the sea ice extent data for the past eight years it is obvious that there has not been any statistically significant downward trend, even though there is more noise (interannual variability) in the data. There are interannual variations but they do not form a trend. For the 2002 – 2006 period the annual differences are mostly in the extent of maximum and not minimum ice cover. The period 1990 – 1996 displays much more interannual variability. The main difference between the ice-curves is that in recent years there has been an increase in the gradient around the beginning of June.
Of the general decline and the interannual variability how much is due to external forcing and how much to internal variability? Estimate from climate models give about equal measure to forcing and internal variability, Kay et […]
I believe we’ve seen this method before, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away:
Thanks to Steve Hunter 2015
Credit Steve Hunter illustrations
Happy Easter to everyone!
9.7 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
UPDATE April 4th: Tom Nelson’s account was unsuspended today. Success!
What fantastic publicity. Twitter suspended Steven Goddard’s account last week, then reinstated it after getting inundated with complaints. Now Tom Nelson’s twitter account is gone, also “suspended”, because he used the word “crap” in response to Gavin Schmidt using the word “crap”.
Those two accounts that have made the all new celebrity Twitmo Hall of Fame:
@SteveSGoddard and @tan123.
The word is that trolls abuse the “report abuse” link to get skeptics silenced. We note Michael Mann recommends blocking and reporting. What else can you do when you don’t have an answer?
So let’s show them that silencing voices doesn’t work. Follow @SteveSGoddard to show that trying to silence people only makes them stronger. To get Tom Nelson reinstated, send your thoughts on this to @Support.
WattsUp calls it abusive censorship. ✔ @MarkSteynOnline wants to know why @twitter “suspended” another climate dissident, Tom Nelson @tan123. See also @iowahawkblog.
Useful hashtags to watch and join in on are #BigClimateEnforcers and #twitterthoughtpolice.
Follow me @JoanneNova
UPDATE: Do you hate twitter? Is it a land you never visit? Read my comment […]
Be warned. Don’t write this off as the usual exaggerated hype from Nature.
Zoology: Here be dragons Andrew J. Hamilton, Robert M. May & Edward K. Waters Nature 520, 42–43 doi:10.1038/520042a Published online 01 April 2015
Emerging evidence indicates that dragons can no longer be dismissed as creatures of legend and fantasy, and that anthropogenic effects on the world’s climate may inadvertently be paving the way for the resurgence of these beasts.
Figure 2: The rise and fall and rise again of dragons. The relative frequency of ‘dragons’ in fictional literature (thick red line), as determined as a unigram probability4, with two historical reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere temperature (decadal smoothing) shown in blue5 and purple6. Global temperatures have been measured since 1855 (thick black line5). Temperature anomalies represent deviations from the 1961–90 reference period. The rising incidence of dragons in the literature correlates with rising temperatures, and suggests that these fire-breathing lizards are being sighted more frequently. As a result, the large-scale ‘Third Stir’ is deemed to be imminent.
Ominous signs are there:
Further work has revealed that the early medieval period was a veritable paradise for dragons. This can be attributed to the […]
During the recent warmest decades on record, Earth suffered under the highest CO2 levels of the last 800,000 years. Life responded to this devastating situation by — flourishing. There are now some 4 billion tons more living matter on the planet than there was in 1993. What a calamity. (And what a lot of carbon credits.)
It has, naturally, got nothing to do with warmth and aerial fertilizer. The researchers tell us it due to that force of nature known as “good luck”. Remember, human CO2 emissions were pollution that was going to afflict life on Earth. After twenty years of predicting the loss of forests and species, it turned out that biology bloomed instead. Notch up another model “success”. The press release headline: Good luck reverses global forest loss. (What else would we expect from UNSW?)
To those who know basic biology — and that almost half the dry weight of plants is carbon, sucked straight out of the air — this is not so much good luck as one entirely foreseeable and foreseen consequence of rising CO2. Acquiring carbon is often a plant’s hardest task. When the sun comes up, a cornfield begins sucking, and by lunch time […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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