When we trade real things, people who cheat get caught easily. They can’t get away with it for long. But in the quasi world of meaningless permits-for-air, the only limit to cheating is “what they can get away with”.

For example: Carbon credits paid to China to build hydro dams end up helping bankers buy yachts, and feed the mafiosi in China. They evict homeowners, don’t pay them enough compensation, flood their valleys and commit these people to homelessness or more slavery to bankers through mortgages.

Sure, some useful outcomes might occur. But hoping we get lucky is not “planning”. It’s policy-by-accident. If solar energy, say, is a good idea all on its own, we don’t need to invent fake reasons to force people to use more of it.

We could for example tax [...]

How do you tell a scientist from a non-scientist? Where does science end, and propaganda, politics, and opinion begin? You only need to know one thing:

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Straight away, this sorts the wheat from the weeds. We don’t learn about the natural world by calling people names or hiding data. We don’t learn by chucking out measurements in favor of opinions. We don’t learn by suppressing discussions, or setting up fake rules about which bits of paper count or which people have a licence to speak.

A transparent, competitive system where all views are welcome is the fastest way to advance humanity. The Royal Society is the oldest scientific association in the world. Its motto is essentially, Take No One’s Word For It. In other words, assume nothing; look at the data. When results come in that don’t fit the theory, a scientist chucks out his theory. A non-scientist has “faith”, he “believes” or assumes his theory is right, and tries to make the measurements fit. When measurements disagree, he ignores the awkward news, and “corrects”, or statistically alters, the data–always in the direction that keeps his theory alive.

Once again, marvel at the worldwide grassroots network of volunteers. E-mail all your Turkish friends. Click on the image above to see the Turkish Skeptics Handbook II. The first Skeptics Handbook in Turkish was announced in August (and had a rather interesting synopsis of the Turkish situation vis a vis climate change at the time).

Thanks to  Zulloch Ltd again for the translation. They are a professional translation service in Istanbul, so this was (again) an easy, effortless process for me. I just had to give permission, and the finished product appeared. And just in case you ever need to arrange a Turkish translation, I highly recommend:

Zulloch Tercume (Translation and Print Services) Ltd, Istanbul. Phone: (0212) 641 1840 – 41 Fax: (0212) 641 1839

The full printable top quality 16Mb version can be downloaded, too (for all your friends in Turkey with four color printing presses).

People have known for 200 years that there’s some link between sunspots and our climate.  In 1800, the astronomer William Herschel didn’t need a climate model, he didn’t even have a calculator — yet he could see that wheat prices rose and fell in time with the sunspot cycle. Since then, people have noticed that rainfall patterns are also linked to sunspots.

Sunspots themselves don’t make much difference to us, but they are a sign of how weak or strong the sun’s magnetic field is. This massive solar magnetic field reaches out around the Earth, and it shields us from cosmic rays. Dr Henrik Svensmark has suggested that if more cosmic rays reach further down into our atmosphere, they might ionize molecules and help “seed” more clouds. As it happens, this year, the sun has almost no sunspots, but for much of the late 20th Century, the solar magnetic field was extremely active. If the theory is [...]

French Translation Skeptics Handbook II

There are those who are bridges between populations, who fight to spread information — the antidote to darkness.

This is the first translations of the Skeptics Handbook II, “Global Bullies Want  Your Money”. (And if you are wondering, this version of the Skeptics Handbook, which has been out since Nov 19, 2009,  is not just an update on Skeptics Handbook I. It is a totally new booklet.)

A big thank you again to Pierre Allemand for his professionalism, dedication and skill in translating the text and artwork. The place to go for French-speakers is to skyfal.free.fr

The Franco roots of English are on display: the Tyrannie, the Risques, the Marche du Carbone!

When the Normans conquered England in 1066 they bought French words. English became a quixotic meld of common Germanic words and polysyllabic French ones. (The farm animals were German, but the meat — the beef, poultry, and pork — was from France.)

The first Skeptics Handbook is also available in French.

Click on the image to download the French version. (2.4 Mb)

(More curious, [...]

This is argumentum ad ignorantiam — essentially they say: we don’t know what else could have caused that warming, so it must be carbon. It’s a flawed assumption.

It’s easy to create impressive graphs, especially if you actively ignore other possible causes, like for example, changes in cloud cover and solar magnetic effects.

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(Addendum: Since the Skeptics Handbook came out we now know that actually they did care about that warm blip in the 1940′s that the models can’t explain. But instead of changing the models, they changed the data. Thanks to ClimateGate for that insight.)

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Error bars make the graph look more official. (On a graph based entirely on a logical [...]

Al Gore describes how carbon dioxide beats up Mr Sunbeam and stops him leaving the atmosphere. But he “forgot” to mention that clouds reflect around a quarter of all the sunlight that hits the earth. Those beams of light travel all the way from the sun to get bounced off into space when they are just a few kilometers from the ground.

Any change in cloud cover makes a major difference. The IPCC assumes clouds respond to warming, but clouds could easily drive the warming.

There are lots of things that could potentially change cloud cover, which would affect our climate. Things like cosmic rays (see page 18), changes in patterns of ocean temperature, land clearing, or aerosols all affect clouds.

The models not only get the feedback effects of clouds wrong, they appear to mix cause and effect

Clouds reflect around a quarter of all the sunlight that hits the earth

Evaporation and rain keep the planet 50°C cooler. Fifty! Eighty percent of the natural greenhouse effect is due to humidity and clouds. Clouds cover 60% or so of the entire planet. No one has [...]

Carbon dioxide only causes 1.1°C of warming if it doubles. That’s according to the IPCC. Did you know?

The real game is water.

Researchers made guesses about humidity and clouds in the early 1980s and they built these guesses into their models. We now know they were wrong, not about carbon, but about water in the form of humidity and clouds. Here’s how the models can be right about carbon and wrong about the climate.

Here’s how the models can be right about carbon and wrong about the climate.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and it warms the planet. The modellers guessed that as the world warmed, more water would evaporate, and the rising humidity would lock in more heat. Makes sense. Humid nights are warmer than clear nights.

This is called “feedback” — carbon warms us, which lifts humidity, which warms us even more, at least in theory. But water is complex and fickle. Humidity can stay ‘humid’, or turn into low clouds, high clouds, or fall out as rain, hail or snow. And they all have a different effect.

Every prediction over 1.1 degrees relies on “feedback” of some sort. But what if that [...]

It’s clear that the world was warmer during medieval times. Marked on the map are study after study (all peer-reviewed) from all around the world with results of temperatures from the medieval time compared to today. These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5°C warmer world wide.

What follows is a sordid tale of a graph that overthrew decades of work, conveniently fitted the climate models, and was lauded triumphantly in glossy publication after publication. But then it was crushed when an unpaid analyst stripped it bare. It had been published in the highest most prestigious journal, Nature, but no one had checked it before or after it was spread far and wide. Not Nature, not the IPCC, not any other climate researcher.

In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph [...]