End Game of Climate Wars: Clive James discusses how it plays out (slowly)

The best way to kill off the Climate Debate is to do what Team-Alarm has done for years — stop talking about whether it’s real, and just project forwards, detailing the collapse. For twenty years others have been saying “the debate is over”. Now the tables are turning. The debate really is over, skeptics won, and what’s left is to watch it continue to unravel. Clive James argues that it won’t collapse like a house of cards… (an extract from the new IPA book Climate Change: The Facts 2017.)

To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being danger­ous to stand between him and a television camera. If the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.

The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come true need not be enough to discredit him, just as American professor Paul Ehrlich has been left untouched since he predicted that the world would soon run out of copper. In those days, when our current phase of the long discussion about man’s attack on nature was just beginning, he predicted mass death by extreme cold. Lately he predicts mass death by extreme heat. But he has always predicted mass death by extreme something.

The scientists who created this grand-swamp-of-failed-predictions should be the first ones to pay — after all, it’s their speciality, and not only have their predictions failed completely. But so far the payback for climate gullibility has not cost scientists much, but it has cost politicians:

When he left Copenhagen, Rudd scarcely mentioned the greatest moral challenge again. Perhaps he had deduced, from the confusion prevailing throughout the conference, that the chances of the world ever uniting its efforts to “do something” were very small. Whatever his motives for backing out of the climate chorus, his subsequent career was an early demonstration that to cease being a chorister would be no easy retreat because it would be a clear indication that everything you had said on the subject up to then had been said in either bad faith or ­ignorance. It would not be enough merely to fall silent. You would have to travel back in time, run for office in the Czech Republic ­instead of Australia, and call yourself Vaclav Klaus.

Climate Gullibility costs newspapers:

The print media, with notable exceptions, is on its way down the drain. With almost no personnel left to do the writing, the urge at editorial level is to give all the science stuff to one bloke. The print edition of The Independent bored its way out of business when its resident climate nag was allowed to write half the paper.

In its last year, when the doomwatch journalists were threatened by the climate industry with a newly revised consensus opinion that a mere 2C increase in world temperature might be not only acceptable but likely, The Independent’s chap retaliated by writing stories about how the real likelihood was an increase of 5C, and in a kind of frenzied crescendo he wrote a whole front page saying that the global temperature was “on track” for an increase of 6C. Not long after, the Indy’s print edition closed down.

Clive blames the media for propagating the pernicious myth (me too) but thinks this is an accident because people still hold the mainstream media as worthy of reading:

Few of those people have been reading the sceptical blogs: they have no time. If I myself had not been so ill during the relevant time span, I might not have been reading it either, and might have remained confined within the misinformation system where any assertion of forthcoming disaster counts as evidence.

Clive doesnt’ say it, but perhaps if the “free press” restores itself for a while to true freedom (where news outlets compete to scoop each other for the truth) — perhaps the next FakeScare will be harder to get going.

The effect of this mountainous accumulation of sanctified alarmism on the academic world is another subject. Some of the universities deserve to be closed down,…

If only, academia deserve to be forced to run on pure philanthropy. That might sort them out.

Clive warns against predictions:

Modern history since World War II has shown us that it is unwise to predict what will happen to ideologists after their citadel of power has been brought low. It was feared that the remaining Nazis would fight on, as werewolves. Actually, only a few days had to pass before there were no Nazis to be found anywhere except in Argentina, boring one another to death at the world’s worst dinner parties.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, when it was thought that no apologists for Marxist collectivism could possibly keep their credibility in the universities of the West, they not only failed to lose heart, they gained strength.

I would point out that there were few research grants for Nazi’s in 1946, but there is always an ocean of collectivist dollars for people researching the advantages of Big Government. Therein lies the boring truth… “follow the money”.

This is an exclusive extract from the essay Mass Death Dies Hard by Clive James in Climate Change: The Facts 2017 edited by Jennifer Marohasy, published next month by the Institute of Public Affairs.

9.5 out of 10 based on 167 ratings

169 comments to End Game of Climate Wars: Clive James discusses how it plays out (slowly)

  • #
    Wayne Job

    Clives article is absolutely brilliant, Clives articles about global warming should be spread far and wide, maybe give his ramblings to Anthony Watts.

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    Rod Stuart

    Actually there is a school of thought that maintains that Martin Borman planned extensively for Nazi control of Europe, in early 1945 when it became clear that Germany would be defeated. Lo and behold, a scant 13 years later, in 1958 characters from the Wermacht were instrumental in conditioning Europe for the ECM. This school of thought maintains that developments since, as authoritarianism trundles along in the EU, events are eerily in keeping with Borman’s plan. This of course can be labelled a conspiracy theory. That does not make it implausible.

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    • #
      Griffo

      Ted Heath was an undercover Nazi,I like it. Still the original Europe,Germany France and the Benelux ,probably did no particular harm to those countries,the whole thing became unstable when they let the PIGS in.

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    • #
      Shane

      Rod ,is it still a conspiracy theory if there is solid evidence for it.
      Clive is just so wrong about there only being a few nazis dying of boredom in Argentina after 1945.
      The Nazi party never officially surrendered in 1945,rather those signing were merely the German military .
      In mid 1944 ,Bormann organised a massive transfer of money out of Nazi Europe with strict controlling interests in these laundering companies,in preparation for the post war period.
      BTW The massive IG Farbin took until 2003 for it to be formally closed down
      & Martin Bormann was still signing cheques on the Chase Manhatten’s local branch in BA as late as 1967.
      The EU today bears remarkable resemblance to the 1942 organisation of Nazi Europe .In both case for example there is definitely no direct political representation ,& in both cases Europe is a captive market for german exports.
      US presidents ,including Eisenhower ,Mr (& Mrs) Clinton & even Obama seem to enjoy taking vacations while in office ,in Argentina ,always visiting that Bavarian like scenic spot ,Bariloche whose main hotel was once a hospital specialising in plastic surgery.
      Putin’s famous remark that he wasnt so much worried about the Nazis in Kiev ,but rather those in Washington should give you pause & wonder whether they really did lose WW2 .
      Just maybe they morphed into part of the Deep State that loves wars ,AGW & seems able to suck trillions of $’s of US taxpayer funds that the auditors if they survive ,never seem able to find.

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      • #
        Rod Stuart

        Is it still a conspiracy theory if there is solid evidence for it?

        I would suggest not. The tag “conspiracy theory” is used to silence much for which there is solid empirical evidence in these dangerous times.
        However, suggestions that are not in the mainstream are sometimes frowned upon in polite company.
        After all, the idea that Chamberlain was at fault in failing to appreciate the threat in Europe in 1937, was thought by many to be “conspiracy theory”. Unbeknownst to the mainstream, the Nazis had a very vibrant cell in London, which MI5 was fortunately able to pierce. Oswald Mosley and Archibald Ramsay and Anna volkov etc.

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  • #
    RobK

    Clive James is a Master of his craft. Sometimes I hear a musician and wish I could play like that. Very occasionally I read an article and wish I could write like that. I tip my hat to you Clive, you are a inspiration.

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    • #
      RobK

      …..an inspiration. The neurons failed to translate into pixels.

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    • #
      Griffo

      Right on, Clive James has a brilliant gift for satire and deep understanding of the ratbags who are riding on the gravy train.

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      • #
        Dennis

        I still find it amusing that the head of the IPCC was a former railway engineer from India, a perfect chief engineer for a gravy train.

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        • #
          sophocles

          It was staring us all in the face for the whole of that engineer’s tenure … 🙁

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          He was an oil man, appointed at Bush’s behest.
          …but don’t let something as minor as plain facts get in the way of your narrative…

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          • #
            Andrew McRae

            That’s all… apparently true.
            Though he did have a very brief stint in management at a Diesel Locomotive company in the early 70s, during the early phase of his IPCC career in 2002 he was also on the board of GAIL, and “Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd”, and “Indian Oil Corporation Ltd”, which is enough to make him “an oil man” but you neglected to mention that all 3 of those fossil fuel companies were 100% state-owned nationalised oil companies of India. Oil, but not Big Oil.
            http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press/briefcv_pachauri.pdf
            And yes, the Bush administration pressured for the removal of Robert Watson and his replacement by Pachauri.
            http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2002/2002-04-03-07.asp

            Seems Craig does sometimes say things that are true.
            Thank you for restoring some balance to this blog, Craig. Please, keep at it.

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  • #
    Graham Richards

    What is needed now to help the public digest the meaning of these “” accords/ agreements” are the details of the agreements, praragraph by paragraph together with explanations of where itakes ones country and what te realistic costs to the State/ Federation will be be in both the long & short term, what happens to our mining, manufacturing & agricultural sectors.
    Very important is knowing where all the revenues go & the planned use of the revenue.. all information must be verifiable from sources other than the UN, EU or national government.
    In other words we want the verifiable truth. Not some dream of Socialist Utopia.

    Without the verifiable detail the war of words, propaganda will continue to no avail.
    USA under Trump will win but tha hole in the revenues will cripple the Paris Accord’ s remaining victims as the revenues will need to shared by the remaining members.

    The only way to see the insanity is to expose the detail.

    I can see Government & MSM fighting to hide the truth so it’ll be be a tough ask!

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    • #
      RobK

      Graham,
      Fair point, but the IPCC needs it’s charter changed (or abolish the whole thing) so it can consider climate study generally, not specifically CO2 and anthropogenic impacts.

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      • #
        el gordo

        Its charter is founded on the ‘precautionary principle’ and cannot be overturned even with a pause in temperature for over 18 years.

        Only a sharp drop in temperature over a few years will get the MSM onside, then the politicians and scientists will fall on their swords. When the ‘news outlets compete to scoop each other for the truth’ …. victory will be ours.

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        • #
          gnome

          They’ll never fall on their swords. We will be miles deep in ice and they’ll still be saying “it’s worse than we thought – we must stop burning fossil fuels”.

          They have no shame. Logic, real world evidence and commonsense will never sway them and a big percentage them are insane.

          (I don’t mean to seem negative, but I heard Michael Mann interviewed on their ABC this morning.)

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          • #
            Ted O'Brien.

            So true. The only thing that can make them shut up is send them the bill for what they have cost us by deception. That would cost more than it returned.

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          • #
            Ian Hilliar

            I agree with you gnome.I take it you were in your car. Why else would any of us waste our time listening to the ABC rabbit on about the wonderful digital future. Ever tried to listen to digital radio, in a car???

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        • #

          Agree El Gordo,
          Ultimately it is the Mother Nature that always has its last laugh as no one knows the answer. The pause appears to continue after the strong El Niño for say 20 years now, but they are still harping on. The combination of accelerated CO2 increase and continuing pause perhaps could do the trick when we hit say 450ppm. De Grasse and co think that we will go Venusian if we cross it. But this is at least a few decades in front of us (from memory). Other things will have to come in as well to disrupt this histeria, far more dangerous. Economic and political instability. People don,t care about science really, too difficult, just tell good or bad.

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          • #
            el gordo

            ‘People don’t care about science really, too difficult, just tell good or bad.’

            Then its our job to educate them.

            Did you know that an overabundance of CO2 in the stratosphere has the potential to make the world a cooler place? The Klimatariat is keeping this hypothesis in the bottom draw until needed, the hiatus may go on forever.

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        • #
          Speedy

          El Gordo – I hope you are right. But it seems that these people are shameless and without honour. And excellent at making excuses for themselves.

          Cheers,

          Speedy

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          What “pause”? The cherry-picked start date of 1998 stopped working 2 years ago, as the latest El Nino peak surpassed it:
          https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/GlobalTempAnoms_1880-2016_620.png

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          • #
            Peter C

            One of the frustrating things about your comments Craig is that you learn nothing from the others on this blog and hence you keep repeating all the silly things that you have said in the past.

            The pause is not calculated from a cherry picked starting point in 1998. In fact the starting point is the most recent temperature and the pause is calculated by then working back to find the longest period of no change or negative trend.

            For the world as a whole and the high northern latitudes in particular there is currently no pause.

            However for the southern temperate region the length of the pause is 19 years and 9 months and for the Antarctic the pause is the whole length of the satellite record (37 years and 6 months).
            https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/

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      • #
        el gordo

        At this stage the hot money is on Lukewarmer by a length.

        http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_May_2017_v6-1.jpg

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          Looks like even Roy Spencer is unable to hide the incline – his graph shows some pretty clear modern warming.

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          • #
            AndyG55

            NO, UAH and RSS show ONLY warming from El Nino and ocean events. Neither of these can be anything to do with atmospheric CO2

            from 1980-1997.. NO warming

            from 2001-2015.. NO warming.

            NO CO2 signature anywhere in either satellite data set.

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    • #
      Yonniestone

      The MSM monopoly is dwindling as people gain more access to alternate online sources, the only thing keeping those sources independent of manipulating corruption is the relative freedom given to anyone wanting to voice an opinion which is why those that yearn to control all push for ever tightening restrictions on what can or cannot be aired on the world stage.

      Where once people received their information via print then radio and television the invention of the internet and its rapid self development left many governments flat footed on how to legislate the ongoing tech advancements, what they fail to see is those first years of printed media were essentially self regulating and yet entire civilisations continued to prosper due to the citizens making informed decisions of free will that mostly would benefit themselves and their nation.

      The main purpose of MSM now is to distract the population into thinking that any problems a nation faces can only be solved by more government while watching random people exhibit predictable emotions while attempting to cook something that no one has heard of, people know something is amiss in western democracies but have become soft from no experience in facing real adversity so they are told what they should be outraged by and even given a script, I’m honestly waiting for “Hate Week” at some stage.

      The most damaging thing to come out of a civil war is the memory of fighting your very own regardless of the victor, the best possible way to achieve success is to win hearts and minds which while exist is possible, in my view the warming war has just been another cold one.

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    • #
      sophocles

      Graham Richards wrote:

      What is needed now to help the public digest the meaning of these “” accords/ agreements” are the details of the agreements …

      That is an excellent idea. You’re right, we should all know what we were being led/pushed/shoved/herded/dragged into.

      What can be found on the Internet? Is there anything there? The UN diplomats are sufficiently arrogant and enamoured of their own cleverness to have put something on the net to be viewed. Can anyone/everyone find anything?

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      • #
        Geoff Sherrington

        Soph,
        It is very easy to search Green Climate Fund and then to follow the path to Australia’s contributions. That answers part. It is less easy to find the eventual fate of Australia’s payments to the Clinton Foundation of some $m88, now ceased, maybe because Clinton’s are no longer selling secrets and we need fewer illegal arms.
        Someone in authority should be asking WTF govt is doing handing out semi-secret lollies to highly doubtful parties.
        Geoff.

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        • #
          philthegeek

          lollies to highly doubtful parties.

          definitely! The billion for the Adani rail line is looking way dodgey.

          20

  • #
    TdeF

    The Australian is a great newspaper. Very balanced, if Graham Richardson can write for it and many of the Labor luminaries. However it is my only source of news. news.com.au and the rest are all click bait, weight loss, hair loss, worst dogs to buy, best shampoo.

    There was a point to the ABC, to provide unbiased, up to date news. Now it is a bastion of whatever comes out of Brussels or Berlin as the story, from gay marriage to why Donald Trump is a disaster. It seems that only one religion is any good, about peace and womens’ liberation (guess which one) and Climate Change is self evident and all migrants are wonderful refugees not invaders, as long as they are not in my backyard or neighbourhood or over my back fence. The only world problem is old white men, apparently.

    So it is good to read great writers like James. Even Germaine Greer can make sense these days as she reels from LGBITQ. These writers are a dying breed of 1960s aspirants who worshipped everything overseas and particularly British, despite despising the weather and the royal family and the class system.

    The world is changing. Media stars think they are gods. American comedians think they are funny if they please only their friends. Along the way we have developed a huge bureaucracy of public servants in Brussels, Washington and Canberra who really need to run our lives and pay themselves fortunes and the Chinese would like to run the world.

    All we can hope for in Australia is to have the facts, so Pauline Hanson is right. The ABC needs to obey its charter or close. Then perhaps we will know what is going on in the world instead of having it filtered through the worst possible people, some Australians of the Year. Transvestite military footballing dead wombat experts, to name a few.

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  • #
    sophocles

    Clive doesnt’ say it, but perhaps if the “free press” restores itself for a while to true freedom (where news outlets compete to scoop each other for the truth) — perhaps the next FakeScare will be harder to get going.

    Harder to get going? I doubt it. Charles MacKay’s great book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” documents and demonstrates the human inability to learn from history. The title alone is so eloquently descriptive.

    Despite having read this great book, I had trouble understanding and appreciating the 15th-17th Centuries’ Inquisition of Torqemada (persecution of Europe’s Jews and anyone else who held ideas and views differing even slightly from the approved) through the later Witch Hunts as weather changed and heavy crop losses through the Little Ice Age were sustained, starving millions. I couldn’t wholly appreciate the sociopathology of true believers .

    Some years back it became obvious from the AGW believer’s fanaticism that Climate Change was the latest Extraordinary Popular Delusion and the behaviours evinced by the believers was truly The Madness of Crowds.

    Climate Change was no less an entrenched and unreasonable belief as those from previous centuries; they hadn’t quite psyched themselves up to converting sceptics through torture (like the Morisos and Conversos) during the Inquisition and then burning defaulters (protestants) and sceptics at the stake as protestants and, later, accused and condemned witches were. Not Yet. But it was still pretty worrisome.

    Censorship, an early tool of the Inquisition, was very visible by the MSM and so-called Science Journals. The five heresies witchcraft, blasphemy, bigamy, protestantism, sodomy, and Freemasonery became causes of repression through death.

    After nearly a thousand years, Protestantism is respectable in many if not most Christian countries, although not so popular in the Vatican.

    Blasphemy has long gone, too, with the massive more recent splintering of Christianity into multiple cults and the formation of others such as Mormonism. One religion is still with us formalising that.

    Sodomy is gone with the modern widespread tolerance and same sex marriage laws.

    Witchcraft has gone too.

    I know very little about Freemasonery so I can’t comment there.

    I have been stunned and amazed at seeing the early stages of the old pogroms appearing in these supposedly enlightened and educated modern times. Superstition and Ignorance can no longer be blamed as the whipping boys.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same. 🙁

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    • #
      sophocles

      If you think the Inquisition of the Catholic Church is gone, think again.

      According to Wikipedia: [Inquisition]

      In Italy, after the restoration of the Pope as the ruler of the Papal States in 1814, the activity of the Papal States Inquisition continued on until the mid-19th century, notably in the well-publicised Mortara Affair (1858–1870). In 1908 the name of the Congregation became “The Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office”, which in 1965 further changed to “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”, as retained to the present day.

      It’s not all that hard to get something going, but once it’s going, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it in it’s entirety. Even the Flat Earth hasn’t completely disappeared. “You only have to look around and you can see it.”

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      • #
        Griffo

        I knew a man who worked for the Congregation in Rome,he left the priesthood years later,but never lost his faith completely.The modern day Inquisitors don’t wear the robes and KKK hats anymore,but the current Pope is a believer in the climate scam,who knows ,Catholic sceptics should be careful.

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        • #
          sophocles

          I was only slightly surprised at the Pope’s conversion to AGW. But then, that’s because the two heresies of witchcraft and blasphemy were reinflated or resurrected. He understands those.

          The inquistors might not wear the ‘KKK hats,’ as you put it, but that doesn’t really change much. At least
          they don’t murder by burning anyone guilty of the five heresies at the stake anymore. Thankfully! But what gives me some anxiety is the thought: just how close did it come?

          The IPCC relies on unvalidated computer models which ignore all solar variability (TSR is Konstant!), and focus on mankinds CO2 emissions from burning Fossil fuels as the cause of warming. That’s not science but pseudoscience, Cargo Cult Science as Feynman calls it. To the IPCC Correlation is Causation. This dependence on pseudoscience is the resurrection of witchcraft .

          Anything which demonstrates in any way which denigrates and challenges the holy writ brings on the personal attacks from the AGW Guard Dogs. It’s blasphemy.

          It’s all been done before, it’s just the names which have been changed. It’s rather scary to see it all is still in action and that Superstition is still rampant.

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          • #

            Indulgences. Pay for your emissions sins via a carbon tax.

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            • #
              sophocles

              Good point, Bernd.

              I left out the heresy of bigamy, too. The ease with which marriages can be broken now makes for a serial form, where husbands/wives can be on their second, third or fourth wife/husband. 🙁

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          • #
            Annie

            A certain group still used fire to kill a Jordanian pilot trapped in a cage…remember?

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            • #
              sophocles

              I do remember that. Bit off topic as that was a barbaric act by barbarians at war, not a climate inquisition judgement and sentence.

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              • #
                Annie

                It was a response to your statement that thankfully they don’t murder anyone by burning at the stake any more (for certain heresies) so to my mind it wasn’t any more off topic than yours Sophocles.

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      • #
        Craig Thomas

        Even the Flat Earth hasn’t completely disappeared. “You only have to look around and you can see it.”

        That’s funny, when I look around, I see the same curve that was noticed by the ancients and correctly identified all those thousands of years ago as being an indication that we populate a body that has a spherical shape.

        I guess some people don’t know how to look and ignore the plain evidence that is right in front of them.

        I still recall when our modern understanding of plate tectonics was fiercely opposed by a small number of people who were unable to grapple with the advance of human knowledge.

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    • #

      Not with a bang
      but a whimper
      print media.

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  • #
    cedarhill

    Yogi said it best: It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.

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  • #
    ROM

    Lets go back in history a century or more and find something very similar in science and political affairs as is the “climate change” meme of today and what eventually happened to that particular very popular and widely believed meme of those times.

    To take a few quotes from Wiki which show some quite marked parallels to today’s climate change cult like beliefs replete with racism, scientific discord, scams and the whole bag of tricks and scams that are remarkably similar to today’s Climate Change cult and its exploitation by a whole gamut of scammers, both scientific, political, business, greens and rank but cunning and lying hypocritical amateurs all out to exploit anything and everything related to the climate change meme.

    Phrenology;
    Just change a few words in this narrative and it almost fits most of today’s Climate Change claims and its memes.
    ——————

    Phrenology (from Greek φρήν (phrēn), meaning ‘mind’, and λόγος (logos), meaning ‘knowledge’) is a pseudomedicine primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules.[1]
    Although both of those ideas have a basis in reality, phrenology extrapolated beyond empirical knowledge in a way that departed from science.
    Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796,[2] the discipline was very popular in the 19th century, especially from about 1810 until 1840.[ edit ; 30 years! Global Warming; Hansens presentation to the Congressional committee ,1988 ]
    The principal British centre for phrenology was Edinburgh, where the Edinburgh Phrenological Society was established in 1820

    &
    Phrenology is a process that involves observing and/or feeling the skull to determine an individual’s psychological attributes.
    Franz Joseph Gall believed that the brain was made up of 27 individual organs that determined personality, the first 19 of these ‘organs’ he believed to exist in other animal species.
    Phrenologists would run their fingertips and palms over the skulls of their patients to feel for enlargements or indentations.[5]
    The phrenologist would often take measurements with a tape measure of the overall head size and more rarely employ a craniometer, a special version of a caliper. In general, instruments to measure sizes of cranium continued to be used after the mainstream phrenology had ended.
    The phrenologists put emphasis on using drawings of individuals with particular traits, to determine the character of the person and thus many phrenology books show pictures of subjects.
    From absolute and relative sizes of the skull the phrenologist would assess the character and temperament of the patient.

    [ edit; Today they use computers and algorithms to guesstimate the character of the future climate with lots of assumptions and lots more guesstimates for the inputs to those algorithm derived computations .
    Not much has changed in the world of pseudo science from those 18th century pseudo scientific practitioners to the manner in which most self designated expert climate scientists of today who are usually found to be operating far from the scientific fields in which they originally trained when they barge into climate science with all the chutzpah and loud mouths of any professional conman and outright scammer. ]

    &

    Phrenology came about at a time when scientific procedures and standards for acceptable evidence were still being codified.[24] In the context of Victorian society, phrenology was a respectable scientific theory.
    The Phrenological Society of Edinburgh founded by George and Andrew Combe was an example of the credibility of phrenology at the time, and included a number of extremely influential social reformers and intellectuals, including the publisher Robert Chambers, the astronomer John Pringle Nichol, the evolutionary environmentalist Hewett Cottrell Watson, and asylum reformer William A.F. Browne.
    In 1826, out of the 120 members of the Edinburgh society an estimated one third were from a medical background.[25]
    By the 1840s there were more than 28 phrenological societies in London with over 1000 members.[19]
    Another important scholar was Luigi Ferrarese, the leading Italian phrenologist.[26] He advocated that governments should embrace phrenology as a scientific means of conquering many social ills, and his Memorie Risguardanti La Dottrina Frenologica (1836), is considered “one of the fundamental 19th century works in the field”.[26]

    &
    Phrenology was mostly discredited as a scientific theory by the 1840s.
    This was due only in part to a growing amount of evidence against phrenology.[25] Phrenologists had never been able to agree on the most basic mental organ numbers, going from 27 to over 40,[32][33] and had difficulty locating the mental organs. Phrenologists relied on cranioscopic readings of the skull to find organ locations.[34]

    Scientists had also become disillusioned with phrenology since its exploitation with the middle and working classes by entrepreneurs.
    The popularization had resulted in the simplification of phrenology and mixing in it of principles of physiognomy, which had from the start been rejected by Gall as an indicator of personality.[36] Phrenology from its inception was tainted by accusations of promoting materialism and atheism, and being destructive of morality.
    These were all factors which led to the downfall of phrenology.[34][37]

    &
    Through the teachings of Gall and Spurzheim, phrenological teachings spread, and by 1834 when Combe came to lecture in the United States, phrenology had become a widespread popular movement.[64]
    Sensing commercial possibilities men like the Fowlers became phrenologists and sought additional ways to bring phrenology to the masses.[65]
    Though a popular movement, the intellectual elite of the United States found phrenology attractive because it provided a biological explanation of mental processes based on observation, yet it was not accepted uncritically.
    Some intellectuals accepted organology while questioning cranioscopy.[66]
    Gradually the popular success of phrenology undermined its scientific merits in the United States and elsewhere, along with its materialistic underpinnings, fostering radical religious views.
    There was increasing evidence to refute phrenological claims, and by the 1840s it had largely lost its credibility.

    And there you have the parallels from the 1800’s to the global warming / climate change meme and cult describing how a mass belief system that seemed be so set scientifically in concrete that it could never be challenged, plus being something that was very personal in application for each individual, slowly lost its entire credibility as the evidence mounted up against it until it basically disappeared and is now not known or is forgotten in public and scientific circles outside of psychiatry..

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      Wayne Job

      Phrenology and Phlogiston, they had a fetish for the words they made up using ph, furphy is an Ozzy contribution meaning a clever deception a rumour to deceive. Not much different to made up science whether it starts with ph or is abbreviated to AGW. Same same BS.

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    theRealUniverse

    With all this even Trumps staff (how many I dont know..) still believe in “Klimate Change” its just a “bad deal!” Thats why we (Trumps USA) are exiting it…
    https://www.iceagenow.info/forget-climate-change-bad-deal-video/

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      Ted O'Brien.

      Many bad deals have been made in the expectation of profiting from the changes that the Paris Accord was expected to bring. When Trump (and hopefully our government too) cuts off the subsidy train there will be kicking and screaming from the people who lose as a result.

      And for many of those it will be through no fault of their own that they have lost money, as e.g. politically minded super fund managers support their mates by investing in next year’s formerly subsidised windmills or whatever.

      Trump, and Turnbull too, would be well aware of that. But who has the courage to stop the scam now instead of postponing the day?

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        Dave in the States

        When Trump (and hopefully our government too) cuts off the subsidy train there will be kicking and screaming from the people who lose as a result.

        This is key. Obama is telling lefty local and state governments to carry on. Some mayors are vowing to implement Paris Accord policies anyway. How are they going to pay for it? Are they going to place the burden on their local constituencies? They will be thrown out of office on their ears and good thing too. Are companies and corporations going to continue to go green when there is no more money in it? They will have to return to sound economic principles or go under.

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          Graeme No.3

          Dave:
          That behaviour by Mayors and State Governors will stop when the first one is charged with being an agent for a foreign organisation.

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            Ted O'Brien

            I think it will stop immediately. The howling mob will wake up and realise that they will be fingered for the resulting losses. If the US economy is picking up as Trump claims, and it should be, all the howling will get swamped.

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    OriginalSteve

    When the vampire is on its knees, is when you hammer a fresh stake into its heart and never ever stop…

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      gnome

      Good analogy but – you hammer a stake through its heart when it’s lying in its grave. The stake is intended to pin it there forever, and so far global warming hoax hasn’t reached that point.

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    Gee Aye

    The debate really is over, skeptics won, and what’s left is to watch it continue to unrave

    How many times have you paraphrased yourself on this one. Maybe write something to back this up instead of feeding the eager audience who have been coughing up good money in the form of donations for about 10 years now. Why are the previous victories forgotten? If this one is different, why?

    And will you refer back to this moment like you haven’t for the previous moments?

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      AndyG55

      YAWN !!!

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      sophocles

      Gee Aye, he’s right.

      As for the eager audience who have been coughing up good money in the form of donations, well, they pays their money and they takes their chances.

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        PeterS

        That is a good enough illustration of how Australian voters have been acting at each election over the past few times. One or two more and it will be a KO!

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      el gordo

      ‘Why are the previous victories forgotten?’

      Perhaps they were small battles.

      ‘If this one is different, why?’

      Its not different, a rich and fatuous white guy says he is going to discontinue giving money to the Third World because AGW is based on a fallacy. On the ground this is going down like a lead balloon.

      ‘And will you refer back to this moment like you haven’t for the previous moments?’

      Its along the road towards a rational debate, so yes its probably just another minor victory as the Fourth Reich joins with Beijing in preparation for the ultimate pyrrhic victory.

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    Robert Christopher

    ‘Some of the universities deserve to be closed down …’

    Well, at least a faculty or two! 🙂

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    Robert Christopher

    ‘Some of the universities deserve to be closed down …’

    Well, at least a faculty or two! 🙂

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    pat

    humour is a great weapon, and Clive James knows how to wield it.
    here’s a bit more:

    2 Jun: NationalEconomicsEditorial: World’s First Multi-Million Dollar Carbon-Capture Plant Does Work Of Just $17,640 Worth Of Trees—It’s The “Worst Investment In Human History”
    On May 31 the world’s first commercial carbon dioxide capture-plant was opened in Hinwil, Switzerland.
    It’s designed and operated by a Swiss company called Climeworks, and uses a modular design that can be scaled up over time.
    The company says that the plant will remove 900 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year by passing it through a special filter that isolates carbon dioxide molecules.
    What will happen to all of this carbon dioxide?
    Some of it will be cycled into nearby greenhouses to help the plants grow better (ironic), which will increase crop yields.
    They also plan to market the carbon for use in carbonated beverages—I guess we’ll have to start drinking more Coke and Pepsi in order to save the planet…
    The company says their technology could be used to stop climate change.

    They estimate that 250,000 such plants would be necessary to capture enough carbon to meet the Integovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s goals of capturing 1% of global emissions by 2025…

    In fact, it only takes an average of 98 trees to remove 1 ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year.
    That means that this plant is worth only 88,200 trees per year (never mind the fabrication costs for all the parts, which probably have an enormous carbon footprint)…

    You can sponsor charities to plant trees for you at a grand total of 20 cents per tree.
    That means that only $17,640 worth of trees could do the work of the multi-million dollar Hinwil carbon-capture plant.
    This is lunacy, pure and simple…
    According to Spencer P Morrison, this paper’s editor-in-chief, the Hinwil carbon plant may be “the worst investment in human history”, and is “symptomatic of a complete disregard for common sense, and utter contempt for the working man”…
    https://www.nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/06/02/carbon-capture-plant-bad-investment/

    Smisthsonian doesn’t think it’s funny:

    1 Jun: Smithsonian: Jason Daley: First Commercial Carbon-Capture Plant Goes Online
    The plant will collect 900 tons of carbon a year, piping it into a nearby greenhouse to boost vegetable growth
    The CO2 is then redirected to a greenhouse where it will help grow vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers. The carbon boost could improve the lettuce harvest by up to 20 percent, according to the company’s website…

    “CO2 capture from air has been a very controversial topic in research for a long time,” Valentin Gutknecht, a business development manager at Climeworks tells Pultarova. “There was a belief that the cost can’t get down below $600 per ton of CO2 even at the mass scale. But we have managed to break this barrier.” As Magill reports, the company hopes to get the price down to about $400 per ton…

    it didn’t tickle Bloomberg’s funny bone either:

    31 May: Bloomberg: Brian Parkin: Swiss Pickles Set to Benefit From First Carbon Capture Plant
    Carbon dioxide extracted by Climeworks’ direct air capture plant will pumped into greenhouses owned by Gebrueder Meier Primanatura AG in Hinwil, according to a statement from the company. The greenhouse gas will be used as a fertilizer to boost the growth of tomatoes and cucumbers — the fruits used to make pickles…

    Climeworks is targeting carbon capture and storage as its main business model, supplemented by carbon offset deals with companies and applications such as the greenhouse and clean fuel partnerships…

    The company has won financial support from the Swiss government, Zurich Cantonal Bank and European Union. Climeworks can currently make 150 air capture units a year.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-31/swiss-pickles-set-to-benefit-from-first-carbon-capture-plant

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      TdeF

      Ironic isn’t it. You cannot dispose of CO2 without turning it back into.. fossil fuel in the form of plants. Hopefully nice lettuces. So $600 per ton to capture CO2 for a few weeks. Clever Swiss scientists.

      However you could freeze it at -78C into huge blocks like ice and you drop these into deep lakes or the ocean, perhaps encased in water/ice. As the IPCC assure us CO2 cannot escape from the deep ocean for thousands of years, job done. 98% of all CO2 is already stored in the ocean.

      One ton of fossil fuel worth $1500 means 3.5 tons of CO2 which at @400 per tonne costs $1400 to capture and dump,so just double the price of petrol and you can put all the CO2 back in the ocean. Easy. Mad.

      Or you could just admit that in the real world, CO2 capture is done by the oceans continually and that 2/3 of our CO2 level existed before fossil fuel, which is how we have trees and life on earth in the first place. Is it possible that a slightly warmer ocean releases slightly more CO2 according to Henry’s Law and there is almost no fossil fuel CO2? No, the IPCC tells us that is not happening, except that it seems so obvious.

      Imagine if there was no problem at all, that the whole business was just a fantasy. What would happen to all those Green jobs and taxes and the windmill and solar business and those massive jet in conferences? What would happen to Elon Musk’s business? Oh, the humanity.

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        Mickey Reno

        Yes, that’s ironic. So is the fact that you don’t even have to pump the CO2 into a special structure to grow things at a faster rate, you can just let it circulate. Okay, MAYBE we should send some special CO2 gas pipeline down to that forest in N. Carolina where they’re cutting down the trees and chipping them for shipment to the DRAX wood burning generation plant in the UK. Boy, there’s nothing inefficient about that, eh, sending wood chips thousands of miles to burn in a plant build right on top coal seams?

        The climate alarm movement will vanish when a LOT of people ridicule it for being the stupid, destructive, or alternately self-serving scam that it is. We must not be afraid of calling it a scam. CO2 in the atmosphere is NOT the prime driver of climate change, and it’s presence in the atmosphere is a godsend to all living things.

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      Robert Christopher

      The exhaust from gas boilers that heat greenhouses are already fed directly into the greenhouses, for CO2 enrichment, so no need to capture the CO2 and then release it!
      The uses for CO2 mentioned mean the CO2 escapes eventually, so it will contribute to our guilt 🙂

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    john

    Breaking: Toyota Divorces Tesla….

    http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN18U05E

    Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said on Saturday it had sold all shares in Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) by the end of 2016, having canceled its tie-up with the U.S. luxury automaker to jointly develop electric vehicles.

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    Deano

    The earth’s climate is a mighty complex thing and so far the only reliable way to increase the earths’ temperature as a result of carbon emissions is in computer simulations. To be scientific and logical, we must urgently reduce carbon emissions in computer simulations if it makes fans of these program creations happy.

    Far bigger real-world pollution problems are being ignored I feel.

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    TdeF

    Musing on the massive meltdown because the US left the Paris treaty and given the real change in CO2 from this action is inconsequential, the question is why there is such a reaction.

    US support and cash is the feared cornerstone of the whole stack of cards which is man made Global Warming invented by the IPCC.
    Now the US has called the bluff of the IPCC, others will follow. People will not want to keep paying. Politicians will sense the change in the wind and change tack. Combine BREXIT and CLEXIT and as Paul Kelly in the Australian calls it “a dangerous delusion to tempt the Right”.

    So Kelly and friends fear world wide political change and in Australia, the fall of the one seat Turnbull Green Government opening the door for Tony Abbott and friends, Kelly’s deluded conservatives. You have to say the contempt in which Clinton held the deplorables and Kelly and Savva hold their ‘delcons’ is amazing. Far past just having an opinion, these journalists are openly deriding their opposition as simply lesser people.

    If Richardson is right, the knives are out now in Canberra and Turnbull will not last the month. Repealing the RET would sail through the new senate, giving immediate relief to the country and bringing Hazelwood back, stopping the windmills and putting South Australia and Tasmania back on their feet with energy security at low cost. Then deals could be done in the senate to get the place moving as a place where things can be made again and the smelters do not have to close and do not need massive secret subsidies.

    This could be an exciting month. I hope Kelly fear is correct. The Right are dangerously tempted.

    The question is whether banker Malcolm’s $1.75Million came with an illegal IOU? Has he bought Menzies Liberals?

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      TdeF

      Awful mixed metaphor. Cornerstone and stack of cards. Sorry. Just cornerstone.

      US support was fundamental to the Paris treaty as most really want US cash and could care less about CO2. Now the signatures of Nicaragua and the Maldives and Chad and Zimbabwe mean nothing. China and India and Russia and now the US are unfettered, so what treaty? Turnbull’s bleating and that of individual US mayors and governors is just irrelevant. There is no Paris agreement.

      It is like the Trans Pacific Partnership, an economic grouping formed to balance China. Now without the US, it is nonsense. You have to laugh at the naivete of Turnbull’s suggestion to replace the US with China. Even the Chinese could not believe it.

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        Graeme No.3

        TdeF:

        paraphrasing you:
        “You have to laugh at the naivete of the EU’s suggestion to replace the US with China.”

        The EU leadership is delusional. Putin has run rings around them; wait until winters get colder in Europe and they need more gas.
        China has run rings around them, copied by India. Now they’ve been Trumped.

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        Bobl

        Actually, the Paris treaty only came into effect with 55% of emissions committed on, without the US I don’t think they have that, Since both the US and Russia have never ratified the agreement it is yet to come into force.

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    Oliver K. Manuel

    President Trump took control of US policy away from the US NAS when he announced this country’s withdrawal from the UN’s Paris Climate Agreement, just as . . .

    President Kennedy took control of US policy away from the US NAS when he announced his decision to start the Apollo program to block USSR control of the entire world through control of the space around it.

    President Eisenhower had warned Kennedy that he needed to take control of US policy away from a private “scientific-technological elitist group” in his farewell address to the nation on 17 Jan 1961:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOLld5PR4ts

    but Kennedy was assissinated in Nov 1963 and the Apollo space program cancelled by Kissinger and Nixon in Jan 1972 as the concession demanded to re-establish worldwide peace with the USSR and China.

    May President Trump succeed in establishing US independence from the UN!

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      Oliver K. Manuel

      My insight into the US NAS came from their efforts to hide

      1. Kuroda’s 1956 discovery of natural nuclear reactors burning on Earth ~2 Ga ago, and
      2. Dr. Dwarka Das Sabu and my 1976 discovery a solar supernova birthed the entire solar system ~5 Ga ago.

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        Oliver K. Manuel

        CORRECTION: In January 1970, Nixon announced the end of the Apollo program, but Lunar Science Conferences continue to meet annually in March.

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    Roy Hogue

    I suspect it will play out just about that way, slowly, so slowly that it will leave behind the wreck of much of western society before it’s over. And I haven’t even a guess as to what will happen in the rest of the world as it all slowly collapses.

    A look at the 800 years historians claim the Roman Empire was a recognizable entity before it finally disappears seems instructive. It was replaced with tribalism, feudalism, dictatorship… You name it, it happened in the long decline of any authority able to hold the thing together. The Romans, for all their faults, which were many, could once defend their empire, guaranteed citizens certain rights and insured a reasonable standard of peace and security.

    The United States already cannot guarantee a reasonable standard of peace and security in many places and it’s getting worse, not better.

    I suppose I’m exaggerating some for emphasis. But how far are we from what I describe? We’re much too close to it for me is all I can say.

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      Graeme No.3

      Roy:
      the difference is that the Romans were concerned with external enemies. Gibbon put their decline down to allowing a new religion to take charge, with a stiffling effect on rational thought and a demand for unthinking faith.

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        Roy Hogue

        And climate change with all it brings with it is not a new religion? You coulda fooled me. 🙂

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          Roy Hogue

          In other words you appear to be describing the demands of the climate change gods that we submit on the basis of faith in their infallibility.

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          Graeme No.3

          I thought it implicit that a new religion based on blind faith and obedience would not help the West survive.

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        Roy Hogue

        Also that new religion, Christianity, taught submission to the civil authorities. There was no attempt to subvert the Roman government. And when Christians were persecuted they hid for fear of their lives, they didn’t take up arms and fight.

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          Graeme No.3

          Christianity also taught non violence. For all that they rejected the STATE religion – worship of the Gods. And since these GODS included the various Emperors I don’t blame them. The Romans regarded them as subversive because they were DENYING the unifying part of the empire, much as the Jews.
          What happened has been rewritten by the christians; it seems that they were an increasing force in society and joined Constantine who allowed them freedom of worship when he won. He tried to sort out the various factions and provide a uniform system of belief. He himself doesn’t appear to have been a Christian until he converted? on his death bed. By them they had loose control of the bureaucracy who liked the idea of a submissive, non violent lot of taxpayers.
          There was a backlash – Julian the Apostate – but resistence crumbled after he was gone. Thereafter the Pope and/or the Patriarch of Constantiople were heavily involved in ruling the masses. It was the increasing external pressure on the Eastern Empire (along with a stupid retention of the Roman method of selecting the Emperor) which brought it down.

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            sophocles

            and joined Constantine who allowed them freedom of worship when he won.

            Not quite. It was Constantine who called the Council of Nicea (325AD), not the Christians. He was careful to set himself as the head of the Church as well as of the country and he wanted a unified creed, not a patchwork quilt. The Christians in were almost as bad as the Jewish Zealots in Jerusalem facing the Romans under Titus back in AD 70, with several schisms and lots of infighting. (The Catholic Church is the last remnant of the Roman Empire.)

            (along with a stupid retention of the Roman method of selecting the Emperor) which brought it down.

            In a way. Byzantium killed off its tax base, and with it, its army. It was divided into roughly 30 acre farms, owned and operated by `yeomen.’ The tax collectors assessed the annual taxes for each farm (land tax) and were paid by the yeomen. The yeomen had the duty of providing themselves and some men from their farms as soldiers in the army when needed.

            Tax collectors extended `credit’ when times were bad and the charge on the land couldn’t be paid. They were quick to foreclose on the farms. So the land was soaked up into fewer and fewer hands. The now large landowners became a new aristocracy, to whom, like all the very wealthy, paying tax was anathema.

            Each new Emperor forgave all debt and returned the farms to their real owners, just as in the Hebrew Jubilee, at the start of his reign, effectively resetting the economy.* But this was not popular with the `ennobled’ ex tax collectors because they lost their ill-gotten gains. The very wealthy everywhere in the world regard paying tax as someone else’s duty and always work assiduously to push tax their off onto others, especially the poor. (Familiar?)

            The method of selecting the Emperor was able to be corrupted and it was somewhere about 900 or 1000 AD when they managed to get one of their own into power as Emperor and the economic resets stopped.

            By the Third Crusade, there were no Yeomen left to form an army and the `nobles’ didn’t pay taxes to pay for one. So Byzantium, ever under pressure from the Ottoman Turks and others, borrowed to pay mercenaries.

            The Doge of Venice was a large creditor. Byzantium eventually defaulted. The end of the Fourth Crusade meant there were a lot of unemployed Crusaders passing through or around Venice, looking for a profitable Crusade and the Doge wanted his money back.

            Employer, meet new employees.

            Constantinople was sacked in 1204AD and that left the way in for the Ottoman Turks.

            *The Hebrews had a land Sabbath every seven years, which was to rest the land (let it lie fallow to refesh its fertility). Every Seventh Sabbath (49 years) was the Year of the Shobul (Ram’s horn) when a horn was sounded throughout the land to mark the following year as the Jubilee Year. All debt was excused, the captives (indentured debt labourers) were freed and their land returned to them. This regularity kept the economy healthy and vital. In Byzantium, and many other kingdoms, it was done usually at the start of a reign.

            All this is in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

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              Roy Hogue

              The Catholic Church is the last remnant of the Roman Empire.

              I had never thought of the Catholic Church in that way before I read your comment but your argument makes sense.

              And I make no apology for Christianity about its misdeeds, past or present. It went wrong a long time ago and remains in trouble today in my perhaps not so humble opinion.

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            Roy Hogue

            Graeme No.3,

            You are the better historia between the 2 of us. I could not have rattled off what you did from the top of my head but would have needed a lot of reading to get it right.

            It’s mostly moot since we humans seem incapable of learning from history. We’re mostly incapable of even teaching it in our schools these days.

            But I do like the fact that you replied to me. That gives me an opportunity to learn something.

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              Graeme No.3

              Roy: Thank you. Feel free to disagree.
              Re the Catholic Church being the last remnant of the Roman Empire, of course it is. The Organisation is based on that of the Roman Legions; the ranks have to do as they are told and succeed, although these days the survivors are not decimated (1 in 10 killed by lot) if they don’t. But the whole edifice is based on the same principle – ruthlessness and determination to succeed, and a wholesale disregard for the peons is the key to climbing the hieracy.
              It came out of difficult, perilous times, and was the discipline necessary for success. Other problems such as the capture of the central apparatus by unworthy and corrupt (sexually, financially, psychologically) types was another, leading to the Reformation.
              Most Catholics are nice people, indeed many Moslems are, it is the power hungry who are the problem.

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                Roy Hogue

                Graeme,

                I would have been reluctant to make some of the pointed remarks you did. But it has not escaped me that those things appear to be true about the Roman Catholic Church.

                By the way and possibly at risk that you already know this, the word catholic, not capitalized, simply means the whole body of all Christians, in other words, the body of Christ on Earth. But you’ll have trouble discovering that on the Internet unless you hit a good dictionary. I use Roman Catholic when I mean the Roman Catholic Church so there’s no ambiguity about what I’m referring to. All Christians, at least those who understand their Christian Heritage consider themselves to be catholic (not capitalized) and in many denominations a service includes one or the other version of the creed which includes, “I believe in one Holy, apostolic and catholic church…” meaning universal church.

                And now Jo might prefer that we not go any further. I remember some moderator remarks to me from the past.

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                Oliver K. Manuel

                Graeme,

                I entered college as an angry atheist in 1956 and fell in love with science as a sacred path to sanity.

                In 1976 I discovered that the US NAS had no more interest in advancing knowledge than the Roman Carholic Church.

                In 1996, I learned that we can each develop our own concept of reality, God, Truth,

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    grahamd

    Yes Clive will be a great loss, this extract of Jo’s, demonstrates the quality of his writing. Cant wait to read the full version.

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    Mark M

    It was the kid in the crowd who pointed out the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes.

    https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/870730316893360130

    The Age posted this cartoon, but, I don’t think my interpretation is what they were aiming for.

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    manalive

    Clive blames the medior propagating the pernicious myth …

    I can understand the confusion intentionally created in the minds average people, I was that way back in the early 2000s, but there is no explanation for the apparently invincible ignorance of for instance John Kerry: ‘ Kids Will Have Worse Asthma’ Thanks to Trump Ditching Paris Climate Deal …”He is not helping the forgotten American … their kids will have worse asthma in the summer …” ‘ unless he is suggesting that a slightly higher concentration of CO2 will cause grasses to proliferate causing more allergens — but I don’t think so.

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      manalive

      “medior”? .. that was my fault in pasting.

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      Bobl

      You see, what happens is this. CO2 makes plants, aka food, grow more, causing more flowers and more allergens. What needs to be done of course is to reduce CO2 to the point at which all the plants die, so there will be no more flowers, or Athsma – (or children for that matter.)

      /sarc

      This is about as rational as it gets in climate change activism

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    mikewaite

    I am going to risk some anti-pommy anger now if I say that , compared to the UK , the Australian politicians are dong a good job in protecting their taxpayers from the
    worst consequences of the Paris Accord.
    According to data provided by ClimateOtter on WUWT
    http://www.greenclimate.fund/partners/contributors/resources-mobilized

    UK has already sent off 1.1Billion USD , $18.77/ capita whilst from Australia it is just $7.92 ie 1/2.
    However the GDP / capita is higher for Australia at 62 compared to 46 for UK .
    Also emissions for Australia are 17 (presumably tons of CO2) / capita compared to 7 for UK .
    To summarise: compared to UK Australia produces more emission / capita , has a far higher disposable income , but is contributing much less to the global action on climate change.
    It seems that you are getting off relatively lightly, which is presumably due to the greater skill of your politicians compared to ours .

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      Bobl

      Your statistics are wrong, Australia sinks 11Gt CO2 per annum and emits a mere 550 MT. That gives a Nett of -10.5 GT up 1GT from 1990 thanks to CO2 fertilisation. Australia produces NO nett CO2 and therefore I’m waiting for my cheque from the UK given the UKs measly forest sinks.

      Note that this analysis fails to take into account Australia’s considerable ocean sinks in our exclusive economic zone – many times the extent of the UK’s

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      el gordo

      ‘Australia produces more emission / capita , has a far higher disposable income , but is contributing much less to the global action on climate change.’

      Irrelevant pseudo marxist interpretation of the world, repeat after me, CO2 does not cause gorebull worming.

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    David Maddison

    I think President Trump could do an enormous additional service to the world by giving a 10 to 20 minute talk explaining how CAGW is not true and pointing out things like inappropriately altered temperature records to “prove” global warming, no real time correlation whatsoever between CO2 level and global temperature (but CO2 level lags temperature because as the oceans heat or cool CO2 is released or absorbed), completely invalid IPCC computer “models” that have no forecasting or even hindcasting ability, that the main driver of temperature is the sun; and finally get prepared for the big chill as solar output diminishes.

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    David Maddison

    “The science is settled” are possibly four of the most damaging words ever uttered with respect to CAGW and have cost the Western World trillions and unnecessarily kept the Third World in poverty. They were first uttered by science fiction film maker Al Gore in 2007 when he spoke to Congress. Audio is at:

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9047642

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    Earl

    Has anyone noticed an upsurge in predictions of catastrophe since the Donald’s announcement.
    The latest is that all the koalas in central NSW are going to drown in 50 years when the sea level rises.
    Really tugs at your heart strings what. Gotta get them kids on side.
    The Greens really have no shame

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    Trump should also withdraw from the UNFCCC as well as the Paris Accords.
    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to select from the evidence and from time to time produce reports which would show that CO2 was the main driver of dangerous climate change and then a meeting in Rio in 1992 chaired by Maurice Strong produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , later signed by 196 governments.
    The objective of the convention was to keep greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that they guessed would prevent dangerous man made interference with the climate system. This treaty is really a comprehensive, politically driven, political action plan called Agenda 21 designed to produce a centrally managed global society which would control every aspect of the life of every one on earth.
    It says :
    “The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures”
    In other words if the useless IPCC models show there is even a small chance of very bad things happening the Governments who signed the treaty should act reduce CO2 emissions. Since 1992 Trillions have been wasted on this dangerous anthropogenic global warming delusion but TRUMP and PRUITT get the SCIENCE RIGHT – NATURAL CYCLES DRIVE CLIMATE CHANGE.
    Climate is controlled by natural cycles. Earth is just past the 2004+/- peak of a millennial cycle and the current cooling trend will likely continue until the next Little Ice Age minimum at about 2650.See the Energy and Environment paper at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0958305X16686488
    and an earlier accessible blog version at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html
    Here is the abstract for convenience :
    “ABSTRACT
    This paper argues that the methods used by the establishment climate science community are not fit for purpose and that a new forecasting paradigm should be adopted. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in time in relation to the current phases of those different interacting natural quasi periodicities. Evidence is presented specifying the timing and amplitude of the natural 60+/- year and, more importantly, 1,000 year periodicities (observed emergent behaviors) that are so obvious in the temperature record. Data related to the solar climate driver is discussed and the solar cycle 22 low in the neutron count (high solar activity) in 1991 is identified as a solar activity millennial peak and correlated with the millennial peak -inversion point – in the RSS temperature trend in about 2004. The cyclic trends are projected forward and predict a probable general temperature decline in the coming decades and centuries. Estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling are made. If the real climate outcomes follow a trend which approaches the near term forecasts of this working hypothesis, the divergence between the IPCC forecasts and those projected by this paper will be so large by 2021 as to make the current, supposedly actionable, level of confidence in the IPCC forecasts untenable.”

    The hysteria of the climatically insane (literally)western leaders is peaking in reaction to USA withdrawal but in a few years Nature will show Trump to have been ahead of establishment science in his embrace of natural cycles as the climate driver. The EPA should establish an outside group of empirical scientists to revisit the endangerment finding .This will show that the that the Anthropogenic Warming Paradigm was a delusion of the establishment academic scientists’ old boys club

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      Oliver K. Manuel

      I agree, Norman. The Climategate fiasco has convincingly shown that the UN (united nations) and the UNAS (united national academies of sciences) are supporters of a globalist, one-world government and opponents of any democratic national governments by the people.

      Trump needs to withdraw the United States from all tenacles of this deceitful, organization.

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    Rick Will

    I have the 2014 book. This essay has prompted me to pre-order the 2017 book. I could almost hear Clive James speaking as I read it; great prose – laconic, droll and his rhythmic speech come to mind.

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    pat

    2 Jun: TheLocal, Sweden: Summer is here now, right? Think again. Northern Sweden just had snow – in June!
    Last month in Sweden was a month of extreme weather. The far northern parts of Norrland saw record-low temperatures, the lowest since 1968 according to preliminary figures from the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI)…
    On June 1st, snow was falling over the small village of Kåbdalis in the northern county of Norrbotten.
    “June 1st! From clear blue sky (and freezing cold) to snow storm in one minute. Yes, I do like snow. And I like winter. But maybe not in June,” Kåbdalis resident Marie Nygårds wrote on Instagram…
    Other Swedish weather extremes in May:
    • Tarfala in the northern Lapland mountains set the record on May 11th with -16.6 degrees Celsius. On the same day, Visby on the Baltic island of Gotland had -7.8 degrees.
    • On May 2nd, Katterjåkk in the far north of Lapland had a snow depth of 205 centimetres, which was a seasonal high…
    https://www.thelocal.se/20170602/summer-is-here-now-right-northern-sweden-just-had-snow-in-june

    lol:

    3 Jun: TheLocal, Sweden: Stockholm’s Globe Arena lights up in green for Paris climate agreement
    Iconic buildings in cities across the world are lighting up in green as a protest against Donald Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate agreement, and Sweden’s Globe Arena is joining in the symbolic move…
    https://www.thelocal.se/20170603/stockholms-globe-arena-lights-up-in-green-for-paris-climate-agreement

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      Graeme No.3

      Do green lights use less electricity than normal lights?

      It is the extraordinary response to this hardly surprising decision that baffles me. Whether the USA is in or out won’t make any difference to either emissions or the global temperature (whatever that is). Are European politicians unnerved by the sight of an elected official doing what he promised to do?

      The USA has done more to reduce emissions than any large economy, and is likely to do so, unless the continuing dumping of (subsidised) renewables forces their nuclear station to close. In the meantime the insistence on expensive and unreliable methods of electricity generation is forcing Asian and African countries towards installing cheap reliable coal fired stations along with hydro. Meanwhile the AGW campaign here will face increasing resistance as electricity prices (and others e.g. food) are forced upwards.

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        Graeme No.3 mentions this: (my bolding here)

        The USA has done more to reduce emissions than any large economy, and is likely to do so…

        I mentioned this in the earlier Thread from Joanne, but it’s worth showing again.

        While everyone vilifies president Trump for dumping the Paris Climate Agreement, it is true that the U.S. has actually done more to reduce their CO2 emissions than any other of those Countries in the World.

        They have reduced their CO2 emissions by 15%, and while that percentage total might look like not very much, that total reduction comes in at more than 877 Million Tonnes between 2004 and 2015, so it’s not even down to President Obama, because those reductions began during the first term of President George W Bush.

        Note that among the loudest protesting voices, Angela Merkel was the loudest of all, and while Germany has reduced its CO2 emissions by 10%, that reduction in the U.S. is 100 million tonnes greater than the current total emissions in Germany, and that’s just the reduction in the U.S.

        I went and dug further into that data and the analysis is in a Post at my own home site, if any of you wish to read it, or use it as a reference.

        In 2004 the U.S. was the largest emitter, and emitted one billion tonnes more than China in second place. Now, China emits DOUBLE what the U.S. (in second place) emits.

        The World total CO2 emissions has gone up a staggering 32% to 36 Billion Tonnes per year, while all this time, the U.S. total has been decreasing.

        That analysis is at the following link:

        Perspective On The Paris Dumping – World CO2 Emissions Up, U.S. CO2 Emissions Down

        Tony.

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      Ian Joyner

      To all those saying it is unseasonably cold in the regions near the poles, you are using some personal observations. This is a mistake – and both sides of the debate fall into it. We cannot take individual locational events as any evidence either way. Rather many measurements must be taken over time over the entire planet in different conditions.

      There are good reasons why some zones are experiencing cooling conditions.

      Try this thought experiment:

      Consider a trough filled with water. Put two blocks of ice at either end of the trough. The ice will melt as it warms. But the zones adjacent to the ice will cool. Now consider the tropical zones in the middle which get the most heat – the heat will flow towards the polar zones. The polar zones get more energy, which pushes their cooling effect again towards the adjacent zones. In Australia we call these blasts from Antarctica cool changes.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Köppen_climate_classification

      It is not just that the atmosphere is warming – it is that it is getting more energy. That results in more cold being pushed from the poles. This explains why zones adjacent to poles seemingly are cooler. It is the poles that are warming at a faster rate.

      [“Not just warming” Hmm is it or is it not? “The heat flows but it’s not just warming”……..
      “More energy in the polar zones” but that “pushes cooling effect”. Sorry, you sound very confused ] ED

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        Yes, Ian, we need to look at observations across the planet, but the atmosphere didn’t warm as a whole as fast as the models predicted (or even as fast as the lowest possible estimate the models allowed).
        your belated “just so” explanation of cooling being pushed north is yet another post hoc story-changing rationalisation for the theory that can can never be proved wrong.

        Find the model that predicted it and I’ll show you a model that got something else wrong like rainfall, evaporation, sea ice… take your pick. There is no model that got most things right.

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          Ian Joyner

          How do you figure the atmosphere did not warm as fast as the models predicted? What exactly did the models predict? Are you taking the infamous 1998 as a starting point?

          [The models not only fail on global decadal scales, but on regional, local, short term, [1] [2], polar[3], and upper tropospheric scales[4] [5] too. They fail on humidity[6], rainfall[7], drought [8] and they fail on clouds [9]. The hot spot is missing, the major feedbacks are not amplifying the effect of CO2 as assumed. References listed here. — JN]

          What do you mean by belated? I am explaining this to this audience, has nothing to do with belated – it just helps to explain to those who raise that weather observations are all over the place.

          [The scientific method starts with a hypothesis, then tests it. In the case of the cold patches you mentioned, the hypothesis didn’t predict that outcome. Post hoc, just so reasoning, after the original hypothesis was found to be wrong, isn’t science. Anyone can rationalize events after the fact. Forming the hypothesis after the event, and then not testing it, is mere guesswork and speculation. — JN]

          post hoc story-changing rationalisation for the theory that can can never be proved wrong.

          Really – address the argument and reasoning, but not with patronising phrases such as post hoc, or even your ad hominem – you clearly don’t understand what they mean. What do you mean by can never be proved wrong?

          [So explain what observation, measured by which instrument, would prove man-made warming was minor rather than catastrophic? All floods, droughts, storms, cold spells, heat waves and more and less sea ice is apparently always “evidence” for a theory that is unfalsifiable. – JN]

          Scientists have the power to prove it wrong, but not a bunch of arm-chair moralists as the climate-change denialist brigade who have very little understanding of this or the scientific process.

          [“post hoc” has a definition. Look it up. — JN]

          Find the model that predicted it and I’ll show you a model that got something else wrong like rainfall, evaporation, sea ice… take your pick. There is no model that got most things right.

          No let’s not do that. Let’s observe that many scientists are reasonably certain that global warming is happening and it is happening because of the activity of man.

          [Don’t observe the atmosphere, watch opinion polls instead? Looking at survey’s of opinions of a certain very narrowly defined subpopulation of humans is social science not atmospheric science. The scientific method is to look at measurements. The neolithic method is to follow tribal leaders. — JN]

          http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/man-made-global-warming-disproved/

          Let’s reduce that activity – or at least find better more efficient ways to do that as we have. Irrespective of climate change that is the direction we should be going anyway. Why risk the planet on your bogus ‘climate change is a hoax’ arguments? There is a risk – we address the risk. That is a good thing.

          [You are very new at this Ian, and I don’t doubt your intention. But you have been misled. If I were to use the same reasoning — of money, connections and opinion surveys I would conclude the opposite of you. There is more money, more vested interests in believing the theory. Skeptical scientists outrank and outnumber believers. “Less than half of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “95%” certainty” I agree with half of meteorologists and thousands of skeptical scientists. But I’d never argue by authority, nor ad hom. That’s why I only mention these to show you that ad hom reasoning, and argument by authority is fallacious. — JN]

          What you want to risk is the survivability of the planet and the entire human race. Now that really is stupidity.

          [When observations all suggest that humans have little effect on the climate and the sun is responsible, the real stupidity is spending trillions to reduce irrelevant (beneficial) emissions, whilst cutting back funding for cancer research, education, preventative medicine… People are already dying earlier because they cannot afford to heat their home. – JN]

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    pat

    1 Jun: ABC: Adelaide shivers through coldest start to winter
    Duty forecaster Paul Bierman confirmed the city had its equal coldest June 1 on record, a temperature not seen since 1943…

    1 Jun: Timeout Melbourne: Rebecca Russo: Mt Baw Baw has opened a week early thanks to record snow fall
    It’s colder than an icicles testicle out there, and everyone knows the only way to deal in situations like this is to hunker down (maybe with a glass of mulled wine in hand?) and wait the storm out…
    Mt Baw Baw, located just shy of three hours drive away from the CBD, has declared an early start to the 2017 snow season. Thanks to an unprecedented amount of snow in the past few weeks, the mountain has decided to open their alpine resort to the public a week early…

    31 May: TheSatellite: FREEZING: Temperature plunges below zero
    IT’S the day before winter, but the temperature has already plunged to near freezing in Toowoomba.
    The lowest official minimum temperature recorded at the Bureau of Meteorology’s weather station in Wilsonton was listed at 4.5 degrees at 6.30am.
    But taking factors such as wind into account, the apparent temperature dropped to a frigid -0.5 degrees.
    It was even colder a few kilometres west at Wellcamp airport where the temperature dropped to -1 degree.
    The apparent temperature at the airport was -4.3 degrees at 7am.
    If you thought it was colder than normal you’re not dreaming.
    The temperature in Toowoomba was about four degrees below the average May minimum of 9 degrees…

    4 Jun: SBS: AAP: US may still be at climate table: (Julie) Bishop
    Australia may step up its role in international climate negotiations in the wake of the United States pulling out of a landmark global agreement…

    “Now, renegotiation in the technical sense is not possible because the Paris agreement has been ratified,” she told Sky News on Sunday.
    “But it may indicate that the United States is still prepared to be at the table … as the Paris agreement is implemented.”
    Under the deal reached in late 2015, countries have pledged to submit and review five-yearly plans to slash their emissions to limit ***GLOBAL WARMING to below two degrees, with an aspiration target of keeping it to 1.5 degrees…

    The coalition government faces internal pressure to follow the US in leaving Paris but Ms Bishop and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull have rejected that notion.
    “My understanding is that a vast majority of our party room support the government policy, indeed the entire cabinet supports government policy,” Ms Bishop said…
    http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/06/04/us-may-still-be-climate-table-bishop

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    Albert

    There’s far too many snouts in the trough for CC to die quickly

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      bullocky

      Indeed Albert. A caricature of the ‘Trough’ could be used as the
      International Symbol for Climate Change:
      \$$$/

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      David-of-Cooyal-in-Oz

      G’day Albert,
      Sounds to me that the Donald ain’t gunna fill that trough no more, no more.
      Cheers,
      Dave B

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    ROM

    Well it hasn’t taken long has it?

    1 / GWPF; China the great white [ ? ] hope along with the EU elite was supposed to lead the World into a new climate nirvana when the Trump pulled up the Obama’s gold plated treasure chest full of american dollars and took it all back home for americans to share around amongst themselves instead of having the EU elite slopping around drenching themselves in those same dollars.
    Now it seems, a couple of days later, the Chinese aren’t the flavour of the month any more amongst the EU’s Brussels’ elite as they refuse to bow down before the EU’s dictates on what amounts of steel China is allowed to produce and sell into the EU and around the World.
    —————–
    2 / GWPF; Two days after the decision by US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, the conservative wing of the ruling Christian Democratic Party (CDU) is demanding a radical change in Germany’s climate policy.
    &
    According to the paper, “the opportunities associated with the melting of polar sea ice (ice-free northern passage, new fishing opportunities, raw material extraction) are probably even greater than possible negative ecological effects”. The UN’s IPCC is said to have turned into a kind of “world salvation circus”. However, it is its model predictions on which “increasingly aggressive political objectives, in particular CO2 reduction targets” are based.
    &
    According to the authors’ views, German climate policy should therefore no longer focus on mitigating climate change, but on adapting to changes. Germany’s current policy has not been an international model, but a “negative example”.

    Specifically, the criticism is directed primarily against the promotion of solar and wind power. The document says that the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) cannot be reformed and should be abolished accordingly. The promotion of e-mobility and the requirements for energy-related refurbishment of homes should also be reassessed.
    ————-
    3 / The stock market heads up!
    Shock horror, How can it after Trumps dereliction regarding the future of the planet?
    ————–
    4 / New York Times, about as anti-Trump as one could find anywhere.

    Small Businesses Cheer ‘New Sheriff in Town’ After Climate Pact Exit
    Meanwhile Big Business moans as it might soon lose its ability to screw anybody and anybody if the American small business who are beginning to boom are right.

    But the move to pull the United States out of an agreement it had previously signed with 195 countries has opened up a fissure between smaller companies and some of the biggest names in business. In the hours after the president’s announcement, dozens of companies including General Electric, Facebook and Microsoft voiced their opposition to the decision, and two prominent chief executives resigned from the president’s business advisory council.

    Many small-business leaders in the Midwest, on the other hand, were largely unfazed.

    For those more concerned with their local economies than global greenhouse gas emissions, walking away from the Paris agreement was just another example of a bottom-line business decision made by a president who knows a good deal from a bad one.

    “This just heightens the divide between big business and small business,” said Jeffrey Korzenik, an investment strategist for Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati who spends much of his time talking to small businesses in the Midwest. “They really have different worldviews.”

    At the root of this disconnect is a sense that companies that employ up to a few hundred workers — such companies make up 99 percent of businesses in the United States and account for half of its private sector employment — are held to a more onerous standard than their larger peers when it comes to complying with regulations.
    &
    In Michigan, Ohio, Missouri and beyond, many small businesses are reporting improved sales and bigger work forces — regardless of what is going on in Washington.

    “We’ve had customers who actually brought business back from Mexico that we haven’t done in seven years,” said Bill Polacek, president of JWF Industries, a manufacturer in Johnstown, Pa.

    5 / The latest London terror attack;
    Trump’s decision to refuse entry to people from certain national groups which a couple of blatantly Liberal judges in low level courts have ruled against will get a huge boost.
    And the so called sanctuary cities where illegals are under the protection of city authorities and can’t be arrested by the federal authorities is already in trouble without London as a number of crimes including murder have been committed by the illegals in those sanctuary cities.
    ————–
    6 / Merkel and the pro-unlimited refugee intake proponents will now have to start doing some very heavy explaining as to why they ever allowed this illegal and uncontrolled massed influx of non European, often [ violent ? ] anti European culture and basically economic rent seekers into Europe without any controls or limits.
    Merkel in fact might be finished as much of what Trump has now done and is still doing is really showing up Merkel and her major political and social mistakes and creating an opening for those who are opposed to Merkel and the EU’s present direction and trends..
    When and if Merkel is forced out and doesn’t leave of her own volition then the EU won’t be far behind in the collapse of its present form and structure.

    ————

    And all thats since June 2nd; two – three days!

    What will the next couple of weeks / months bring?

    I think the Americans and possibly the western world has found its Great Disrupter who might not have to do very much himself but the flow on effects of his breaking of the old political caste and rigid bureacratic system will , like a landslide beginning with a very small rock rolling but finishing up in wiping out a whole vast area and the entrenched system of an increasingly putrid political, bureacratic and Big business patronage system that was beginning to destroy democracy in the western nations.

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    pat

    comment in moderation, beginning with: “1 Jun: ABC: Adelaide shivers through coldest start to winter”

    the CAGW farce will never end at NYT.
    same smoke-spewing chimneys, Koch Bros rubbish, exaggerated scientific claims, smears, fake Yale “study”, as ever, under the names of some of their BIG-HITTERS:

    3 Jun: NYT: How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science
    By CORAL DAVENPORT and ERIC LIPTON; Henry Fountain contributed reporting from New York
    PHOTO CAPTION: A coal-fired power station in Mount Storm, W.Va., in January. The coal industry played an instrumental role in efforts to unwind the Obama administration’s climate policies.
    Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries (which can process 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day) as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil…

    ‘The Turning Point’
    It was called the “No Climate Tax” pledge, drafted by a new group called Americans for Prosperity that was funded by the Koch brothers…
    With the help of a small army of oil-industry-funded academics like Wei-Hock Soon of Harvard Smithsonian and think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, they had been working to discredit academics and government climate change scientists. The lawyer and conservative activist Chris Horner, whose legal clients have included the coal industry, gathered documents through the Freedom of Information Act to try to embarrass and further undermine the climate change research…

    Myron Ebell, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, worked behind the scenes to make sure Republican offices in Congress knew about Mr. Horner’s work — although at the time, many viewed Mr. Ebell skeptically, as an extremist pushing out-of-touch views…

    In 2009, hackers broke into a climate research program at the University of East Anglia in England, then released the emails that conservatives said raised doubts about the validity of the research. In one email, a scientist talked of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. The research was ultimately validated, but damage was done…

    The Science Gets Stronger
    The recognition that human activity is influencing the climate developed slowly, but a scientific consensus can be traced to a conference in southern Austria in October 1985. Among the 100 or so attendees who gathered in the city of Villach, nestled in the mountains along the Drava River, was Bert Bolin, a Swedish meteorologist and a pioneer in using computers to model the climate…

    While the politics of climate change in the United States has grown more divided since then, the scientific community has united: Global warming is having an impact, scientists say, with sea levels rising along with the extremity of weather events…
    In recent years, many climate scientists have also dropped their reluctance to pin significant weather events on climate change. Studies have shown that certain events — a 2015 Australian heat wave, floods in France last year and recent high temperatures in the Arctic — were made more likely because of global warming…

    American voters — even many Republicans — recognize that climate change is starting to affect their lives. About 70 percent think global warming is happening, and about 53 percent think it is caused by human activities, according to a recent study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. About 69 percent support limiting carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants…
    ***But most public opinion polls find that voters rank the environment last or nearly last among the issues that they vote on…
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html?_r=0

    at bottom:

    Correction: June 3, 2017
    An earlier version of this article misstated when the Supreme Court stayed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulated emissions from coal-fired power plants. It was in February 2016, not April.

    BIG MISSTATEMENT, NYT, GIVEN ALL YOUR WRITERS/EDITORS.

    Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, died 13 February, 2016.

    16 Feb 2016: TechnologyReview: Richard Martin: Scalia’s Death Boosts Chances for Obama’s Clean Power Plan
    Days before his passing, Scalia joined a five-judge majority in temporarily halting the implementation of the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s program to accelerate the shift away from fossil-fuel-based power plants. The unprecedented ruling was considered a likely death knell for the plan, but with eight justices now remaining and an extended political fight brewing over Scalia’s successor, most commentators agree that, as Climate Central’s John Upton wrote, “in dying, Scalia may have done more to support global climate action than most people will do in their lifetimes.”

    Briefly, that’s because there are four possible outcomes…
    4. A new Republican president appoints the next justice, and the Clean Power Plan is scrapped…
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600816/scalias-death-boosts-chances-for-obamas-clean-power-plan/

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    pat

    2 comments now in moderation.
    the following relates to the Koch Bros references in the second comment, beginning: “3 Jun: NYT: How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science”

    2 Jun: Breitbart: Adam Shaw: Top U.N. Adviser Calls Trump ‘An Idiot’ Over Paris Decision, Former Envoy Calls U.S. ‘Rogue State’
    Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and senior adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General since 2002, told Bloomberg Television Friday that President Trump lives in a “dream world” and is an “idiot” for his decision to pull out of the treaty. He also blamed the decision on the left’s favorite boogeymen — the Koch Brothers.

    “The president doesn’t know what he’s doing, this is obvious he’s an idiot,” he said. “But what’s happening behind here is real politics. This is the victory paid and carried out for 20 years by two people: David and Charles Koch.”
    “This is all about the Koch brothers, I’m sorry to say it, they have bought and purchased the top of the Republican Party,” Sachs said, pointing also to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) support of Trump’s position.

    Sach’s Koch claim is particularly unusual in that President Trump and the Koch Brothers have frequently clashed on a number of issues. The conservative patriarchs refused to back Trump in 2016, while Trump mocked conservatives who sought their backing — once accusing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) of being their “puppet.”…

    Sachs, who was retained by current Secretary-General António Guterres this year, is known for his anti-Trump views. In April, he wrote a column titled: “Donald Trump’s Climate Fantasies.”
    “In less than 100 days, we have learned that Trump is a man living in a fantasy world. He issues decrees, barks orders, sends out midnight Tweets, but to no avail. The facts – real ones, not his ‘alternative’ variety – keep intervening,” Sachs wrote. He has also called Trump a “non-stop font of lies” in a column in March.

    Sachs’ remarks come after a former U.N. special envoy on climate change, Mary Robinson, said the decision makes “a rogue state on the international stage.”…
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/02/top-u-n-adviser-calls-trump-an-idiot-over-paris-decision-former-envoy-calls-u-s-rogue-state/

    even the progressive left Nation Magazine had to report on the disastrous outcome of Sachs’s “shock therapy” for ordinary Russians:

    June 1998 Issue: Nation Magazine: The Harvard Boys Do Russia
    After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S.
    By Janine R. Wedel
    Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of “shock therapy” to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades.

    Shock therapy produced more shock–not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent–than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians…
    https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/

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    Peter C

    I will receive my copy of Climate Change the Facts 2017 in due course.

    In the mean time does anyone have link to the full transcript of Clive’s article?

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    ROM

    With regard to ands apropos the London terrorist attack, I think this article from the USA’s CNBC network pretty well clarifies and sums up the way in which my own thinking has been tracking re the huge discrepancy in the contribution to costs to the defence of Europe between the Europeans and the Americans.
    The Europeans being little more than completely parasitical on the generosity of the Americans in ensuring Europe’s defence.

    And it is the European political class that is threatened by Trump’s call for Europe to up their contribution to their own defence or face the consequences
    One consequence of which is the EU’s political class is being caught in an economic trap of its own making.

    And that is why they hate Trump with a vengeance .

    By reducing and withdrawing from the complete suport of Europe with money guns and men regardless, Trump has threatened that political class with elimination once the people of Europe wake up to the real situation, one where the Americans are no longer prepared to defend a Europe whose political and bureacratic classes have failed to and refused to finance and have short sheeted their own defence in the belief that the stupid Americans will always rush to their rescue.

    Well it seems that under Trump that any European defence rescue is going to be based on just how much the Europeans have been prepared to help themselves before the Americans again get involved in a European defence mission.

    Trump is threatening Europe…with the truth

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    treeman

    Hi Joanne
    This has been a long time coming and if one reads between the lines it’s worse for the catastrophists than they’re prepared to admit. Increasingly they ramp up the ad homs, lies and smear.

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    el gordo

    The Trump Effect

    ‘Two days after the decision by US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, the conservative wing of the ruling Christian Democratic Party (CDU) is demanding a radical change in Germany’s climate policy.

    ‘A statement submitted to the ARD Capital Studio, the “Berliner Kreis (Berlin Circle)”, which includes numerous federal and communal politicians of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), calls for an end to “moral blackmail” by climate research and a “farewell to unilateral German CO2 targets.”

    GWPF

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    Henry’s Law (HL) is a “known known” in chemistry, but rarely discussed in respect to AGW, or the IPCC. I have lectured on the subject with copy available at http://www.bosmin.com/HenrysLaw.pdf

    Since HL is an axiomatic LAW of science I believe that AGW will go down in history as one of the most wasteful initiatives humans have ever been involved with, and is more about world government than science.

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    philthegeek

    Speaking of predictions, hows the Cool futures thing trucking along then??

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    ren

    “Atmospheric back radiation and surface temperature:

    Since (according to Eq. 10b) the equilibrium GMAT of a planet is mainly
    determined by the TOA solar irradiance and surface atmospheric
    pressure, the down-welling LW radiation appears to be globally a product
    of the air temperature rather than a driver of the surface warming. In
    other words, on a planetary scale, the so-called back radiation is a
    consequence of the atmospheric thermal effect rather than a cause for
    it. This explains the broad variation in the size of the observed downwelling
    LW flux among celestial bodies irrespective of the amount of
    absorbed solar radiation. Therefore, a change in this thermal flux brought
    about by a shift in atmospheric LW emissivity cannot be expected to
    impact the global surface temperature. Any variation in the global
    infrared back radiation caused by a change in atmospheric composition
    would be compensated for by a corresponding shift in the intensity of
    the vertical convective heat transport. Such a balance between changes
    in atmospheric infrared heating and the upward convective cooling at
    the surface is required by the First Law of Thermodynamics. However,
    current climate models do not simulate this compensatory effect of
    sensible and latent heat fluxes due to an improper decoupling between
    radiative transfer and turbulent convection in the computation of total
    energy exchange.”
    https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/New-Insights-on-the-Physical-Nature-of-the-Atmospheric-Greenhouse-Effect-Deduced-from-an-Empirical-Planetary-Temperature-Model.pdf

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    ren

    The charts show clear cooling at mid-latitudes.
    In turn, in the equatorial zone, the temperature is high, which generates a high average temperature in the troposphere (higher evaporation between the tropics).
    http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/ocean/sst/anomaly/anim_4mfull.html
    http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/ocean/sst/anomaly/anim_4mp.html

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    Oliver K. Manuel

    Has the government found other ways to keep humanity living in constant fear of reality?

    https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/logical-solutions-and-creative-solutions-in-your-life/

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    Oliver K. Manuel

    I am glad to put the AGW scam behind and to go to Nepal in August to express my gratitude to be living on a water-covered planet that orbits only 1AU from the pulsar creator and sustainer of every atom, life and planet in the solar system. Here is information on the Fifth International Conference
    SCIENCE AND SCIENTIST — 2017
    Working Together Toward a Spiritual Science of the Conscious Self
    August 17, 2017 — August 18, 2017
    Nepal Pragya Pratisthan, Kamaladi – Kathmandu, Nepal
    http://www.scsiscs.org/conference/scienceandscientist/2017

    What a refreshing relief from the UN’s false AGW fears.

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      Oliver K. Manuel

      Scientists created the sad state of government science today and we need to accept responsibility for fixinging it. The central theme of the Nepal conference is “Can the Scientists Examine Science?” I believe that we can and must do that.

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    Dr Anthony Ablong

    Clive’s observations on the climate change debate score a ‘direct hit’ particularly related to those ‘experts’ that crawl out of the whizz-bang planet of academia and whooshy land. I still clearly remember the much-ado commentary from the Year 2000 prophets in which gloom, doom and end-of-world scrare mongering became the headlines of journalist, news commentators and general media all over the planet. In this period of ‘trumpish behaviour’ and hysteria driven dishonest politicians, it is imperative that we remain logical clear thinkers and vocally object to matters that need deep discussion and thought.

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    Oliver K. Manuel

    May the GW scam end with humanity’s understanding that life evolved out of fresh, highly radioactive supernova debris on a water-covered planet located exactly 1 AU FROM THE PULSAR THAT MADE OUR ELEMDNTS AND SUSTAINED our lives as we evolved:
    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5633/abs/270159a0.html

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    Ian Joyner

    Let’s cut to the root comment here. Clive James says climate alarmists won’t admit they are wrong.

    THAT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT WRONG!

    James paints them all as ‘alarmists’ in a gross generalisation that James should be ashamed of and not worthy of his status as a social commentator.

    I was hoping that James was just talking about some of those who had overstated the case. But it seems – as I said above – that he is in league with Bob Carter and the IPA which is not interested in facts, but in pushing their own agenda. This is very disappointing from Clive James.

    But let’s dig deeper and find really who James has been influenced by.

    Clive James who I have always admired really went down in my estimation. This article is linked to a book recently published “Climate Change 2017: The Facts”. James name is on the cover along with the late Bob Carter who is a notorious denialist. The book is published by IPA – The Institute of Public Affairs in Australia. This is a right-wing think tank doing all they can for creating mischief and denying climate change while protecting the coal industry.

    This all has no credibility.

    [Thanks for the Ad hom arguments. If you find some reasons, do share them. – Jo]

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    Ian Joyner

    >>[Thanks for the Ad hom arguments. If you find some reasons, do share them. – Jo]<<

    At the end of my previous comment, Jo put the above.

    Do you even understand what an ad hominem argument is Jo? Perhaps you can enlighten us as to where I have used ad hominem argument?

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      It’s almost a case of “where didnt you”…

      Point to me where you make an argument rather than attacking the person who made the point, or the organisation, anyone “connected”.

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    Ian Joyner

    >>It’s almost a case of “where didnt you”…

    Point to me where you make an argument rather than attacking the person who made the point, or the organisation, anyone “connected”.<>Let’s cut to the root comment here. Clive James says climate alarmists won’t admit they are wrong.<>THAT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT WRONG!<>

    [Which you need to demonstrate… y’know… observations? — JN]

    James paints them all as ‘alarmists’ in a gross generalisation that James should be ashamed of and not worthy of his status as a social commentator.<>I was hoping that James was just talking about some of those who had overstated the case. But it seems – as I said above – that he is in league with Bob Carter and the IPA which is not interested in facts, but in pushing their own agenda. This is very disappointing from Clive James.<>But let’s dig deeper and find really who James has been influenced by.

    [Ad hom = James is wrong because he has the wrong friends? — JN]

    Clive James who I have always admired really went down in my estimation. This article is linked to a book recently published “Climate Change 2017: The Facts”. James name is on the cover along with the late Bob Carter who is a notorious denialist.

    [Ad hom = James’s friend is a “denialist” a term Ian can’t define scientifically. “Denialist” = namecalling, not a form of reasoning, just a plain insult. — JN]

    The book is published by IPA – The Institute of Public Affairs in Australia. This is a right-wing think tank doing all they can for creating mischief and denying climate change while protecting the coal industry.<>This all has no credibility.<<

    [“No credibility’ = ad hom. The only evidence is Ian’s psychic guesses as to motivation — JN]

    Not ad hominem. Good conclusion supported by what I said above. What I posted was 100% legitimate argument with absolutely NO AD HOMINEM. So you saying it is ad hominem is just lazy attack using words you don't even understand.

    [Science is done by observations. You are “concluding” the atmosphere is warming by man-made effects by providing observations of human networking. The atmosphere is not “in league” with Bob Carter (bless him) — JN]

    ——

    ad hominem
    You attacked your opponent's character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument.
    Ad hominem attacks can take the form of overtly attacking somebody, or more subtly casting doubt on their character or personal attributes as a way to discredit their argument. The result of an ad hom attack can be to undermine someone's case without actually having to engage with it.
    Example: After Sally presents an eloquent and compelling case for a more equitable taxation system, Sam asks the audience whether we should believe anything from a woman who isn't married, was once arrested, and smells a bit weird.

    from

    https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com

    [Exactly. I rest my case. — JN]

    ——

    I await your next logical fallacy.

    [Oh goody! a genuine troll! It has been so long.] ED

    (A very bad concern troll who can’t see the obvious fallacies and personal attacks in his own writings) CTS

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    Ian Joyner

    It is a shame your web engine makes a mess of my formatting, so I’ll try again so you get the point. In fact, it removed half of what I said.

    It’s almost a case of “where didnt you”…

    Point to me where you make an argument rather than attacking the person who made the point, or the organisation, anyone “connected”.

    No, you don’t understand ad hominem. You would interpret any argument as ad hominem. But ad hominem is a personal attack:

    ad hominem |ˌad ˈhämənəm|
    adverb& adjective
    1 (of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining: [as adjective] : vicious ad hominem attacks.

    So in what way do I say anything ad hominem? Let’s analyse it statement by statement:

    Let’s cut to the root comment here. Clive James says climate alarmists won’t admit they are wrong.

    No ad hominem there.

    Here is ad hominem “Clive James is a stupid fat bald white man”. Nothing of the sort, I have always admired Clive James as a great author and entertainer, but in this case he is wrong and has been misled.

    THAT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT WRONG!

    James paints them all as ‘alarmists’ in a gross generalisation that James should be ashamed of and not worthy of his status as a social commentator.

    No ad hominem there.

    James should know better than using adjectives like alarmist. As I go on to say most are very sober scientist, but he has a point that some have overstated the case – or been over interpreted:

    I was hoping that James was just talking about some of those who had overstated the case. But it seems – as I said above – that he is in league with Bob Carter and the IPA which is not interested in facts, but in pushing their own agenda. This is very disappointing from Clive James.

    No ad hominem there.

    But let’s dig deeper and find really who James has been influenced by.

    Clive James who I have always admired really went down in my estimation. This article is linked to a book recently published “Climate Change 2017: The Facts”. James name is on the cover along with the late Bob Carter who is a notorious denialist. The book is published by IPA – The Institute of Public Affairs in Australia. This is a right-wing think tank doing all they can for creating mischief and denying climate change while protecting the coal industry.

    No, I state my case. I follow who James is associated to and where these ideas are coming from. It is a shame he has listened to the IPA and Bob Carter. Carter is well known for putting around bogus arguments.

    This all has no credibility.

    Not ad hominem. Good conclusion supported by what I said above. What I posted was 100% legitimate argument with absolutely NO AD HOMINEM. So you saying it is ad hominem is just lazy attack using words you don’t even understand.

    ad hominem
    You attacked your opponent’s character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument.
    Ad hominem attacks can take the form of overtly attacking somebody, or more subtly casting doubt on their character or personal attributes as a way to discredit their argument. The result of an ad hom attack can be to undermine someone’s case without actually having to engage with it.
    Example: After Sally presents an eloquent and compelling case for a more equitable taxation system, Sam asks the audience whether we should believe anything from a woman who isn’t married, was once arrested, and smells a bit weird.

    from

    https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com

    I hope that formats better, and all my responses to your unfounded ‘ad hominem’ attack are preserved

    I await your next logical fallacy.

    [Oh goody! a genuine troll! It has been so long.

    A “shame” the web engine makes a mess of your formatting? It’s called WordPress. Perhaps you should take it up with them? ] ED

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      “James name is on the cover along with the late Bob Carter who is a notorious denialist.”

      Like I said, find the statement that isn’t an ad hom. There was one in your comment (you obviously can’t recognise it). The rest was an attempt to slur James because he is “in league with” or “on the cover with” someone, as if all arguments made by someone are neutralized because that person on a different day was on the front of a publication with someone you personally disapprove of. You do “guilt by association”. Give us data, not biographies. The atmosphere doesn’t care what organisation someone is with.

      True neolithic logic. It’s tribal for you, not scientific. You did not even try to deal with the substantive arguments Clive made.

      You also do namecalling “denialist” – define that in scientific terms. Tell us what observations we deny. Go right ahead….

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        Ian Joyner

        You still don’t understand ad hominem do you – you stupid bimbo! – Now that is ad hominem.

        [No. It’s just an insult. JN]

        What you are trying to cleverly twist here is that any argument that dismisses another argument must be ad hominem because it is against the other person. But it is not personally against the other person.\

        [You are the one saying Clive James is wrong because he associates with the wrong people. That is the very definition of an ad hom. — JN]

        True neolithic logic. It’s tribal for you, not scientific.

        Now you are using ad hominem argument. I often observe that as an argument technique – those who indulge in it first and the most are the first to indulge in accusing the other side of doing that. As I said, you don’t understand argument forms, let alone what ad hominem really is.

        [Nice try projecting your own flaws onto me. I use observations to support my arguments. You use opinion polls and follow the herd. The former is scientific, the latter, neolithic. I use defined terms and defined logic. You use insults you can’t define “denialist” — JN]

        You also do namecalling “denialist” – define that in scientific terms.

        That is not name calling. Against all scientific facts people are just denying it is happening at all.

        [Your “facts” are opinion polls. My facts are measurements from thermometers, boreholes, satellites, ice-cores, radiosondes. JN]

        Now I note that you don’t deny it. You said:

        …carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that adding more to it will warm the planet, yes, absolutely, that’s all well proven solid science known for years, yes. I have no disagreement with any of that. Disagreement is with how much warming there is. Is it going to be a catastrophe or is it going to be 0.5 degrees and as far as we can see the evidence the empirical evidence, and there’s lots of it, all seems to point to it being around about half a degree to maybe one degree with CO2 doubling which is not the catastrophic projections that are coming out from the climate models.

        So now it is just a matter of how much is happening. But why quibble?

        [Why quibble indeed? If numbers are irrelevant and 0.5C = 3C, then $1 = $1b, and we have spent more than enough :- ). Dear Ian, science is nothing without numbers. The question of how MUCH, is the only question worth answering. The alternative of a yes-no dichotomy is a religious faith. Do you “believe”, yes or no? — JN]

        By feeding the denialists you are risking the planet. Same with Bob Carter.

        My position is I’m not prepared to take the risk, but to proceed with caution. Even if climate change is eventually proved wrong (which is very unlikely), moving to better technologies will improve mankind, get energy to more poor people in the third world. So if you don’t like that, please move to planet B – if you can find one. don’t risk this one.

        [You are not proceeding with caution, but with flagrant innumerate belief backed by opinion polls, and avoidance of key data. You risk the lives and health of the poor and risk destroying more jobs and industries. Ask poor people what they want and it’s cheap electricity. If solar was cheap and reliable, we wouldn’t need government laws to punish coal power. — JN]

        I note you have also published “The Skeptics Handbook”, with the Heartland Institute, the US version of IPA and Global Bullies Want Your Money – an ad hominem title. Who are these bullies?

        [I did the Skeptics Handbook pro bono. I funded myself and did it out of duty and conscience. I was working directly against my financial interests in doing so, yet I don’t claim I’m right because of my angelic untainted position. (That would be an ad hom…) — 🙂 Stick around, you’ll get the hang of reasoning. — JN]

        [PS: Sorry but I can’t keep doing private tutoring. Please read more of the site before you make more mistakes. JN]

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    Rod Stuart

    The public school system has long ago given up on the idea of teaching people reason and logic.
    For a couple of decades now the emphasis has been on “feelings’.
    So deluged with copious propaganda, the poor dear snowflakes establish beliefs based on “feelings.
    Feelings are not arguments!

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