JoNova

A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).

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We have been conned

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You can’t buy the truth, but you can buy a committee interpretation of it.

One year ago a group of eminent scientists wrote a letter to congress provocatively titled “You are being deceived.”

Now, in a similar vein, but with all the gory details, John McLean has put together a 66 page compilation of the modus operandi and history of said deception. It’s a story of how small committees of activists cite their own work, ignore contradictory information and dissenting reviewers, use the peer review system to lock out opponents,  and blithely acknowledge crippling uncertainties (but only in tracts of text that few will read, and  never in summation when it matters).

Click to read the full article

When your favourite prancing-horse-committee — the IPCC — is failing to impress the crowds, it’s time to distract them with dressage from another source. In this case, the IPCC is being reviewed by the brand new InterAcademy Council (IAC). Expect their somber pronouncement to discover some minor flaws of process, posit a few proceedural improvements, and then declare that above all, the science is sound, rigorous, and that carbon dioxide will surely kill millions if we [...]

August 28th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (98)

South Pacific sea levels – Best records show little or no rise?!

Are the small islands of the South Pacific in danger of disappearing, glug, under the waves of the rising ocean? Will thousands of poor inhabitants be forced to emigrate, as desperate refugees, to Australia and New Zealand? Has any of this got anything to do with man-made emissions of CO2?

By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones. The Science and Public Policy Institute has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993.

Sea levels: The El Nino / tropical storm anomaly in 1997-1998 is clear. A long sustained rise is not.

Take the infamous Tuvalu for example. It’s sea level rise was reported as 5.7 mm/year back in  2008. Now it’s calculated as 3.7mm/year. But look at the Seaframe Graph – [...]

August 18th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (102)

The truth shall make you free

Art Robinson is a rare man. He’s risen above and laid bare the creeping failure in the infrastructure of modern science over the last 50 years. He describes how the control of the quest for knowledge itself has been usurped from individuals and private industry and taken over by the government.

At the end of the day, what does being a scientist mean if there is nothing other than a certificate? Where is the code of conduct? Where are the professional associations which stand up and decry those who breach the basic requirements? What sense of duty and honor is left in science when high ranking members can make statements that are dishonest and yet keep their jobs and their reputations?

I was struck with Art’s description of a true scientist–where the most important attribute is honesty, where humility is inevitable in anyone who understands how little we comprehend, and where being a scientist is a lifelong search, rather than a 9 – 5 job.

The 10 page paper  How Government Corrupts Science is worth reading in full.

Below are some select parts that especially struck a chord with me.

How Government Corrupts Science

Isaac Newton was the greatest [...]

March 30th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: AGW socio-political | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (90)

Not FOUR degrees, 1.4 degrees

ADDENDUM BELOW (with answers from Christopher Monckton)

The December SPPI monthly report came out on Jan 23. As usual, it contains graphs of the latest juiciest data: sea levels, ice, sunspots, cyclones, global temperature trends and the latest papers. Here’s a few snippets that caught my eye.

Get ready for 1.4 degrees (or more… or less).

Global Temperature Trends 1981-2009

Call me a cherry picker, but going by the full satellite data record we have and drawing a simplistic straight line, we are rocketing towards 1.4 degrees of warming by 2100, (but only if that trend of the last 30 years doesn’t change, which it is, every year). For those who are new to this, there are two interpretations of the satellite data and this neatly combines both of them (UAH and RSS) and makes one wiggly line out of masses of data.  Not surprisingly, the SPPI team have chosen to ignore the surface record of airports and air-conditioners, “ground based thermometers”.

[...]

February 11th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (406)

Horrifying examples of deliberate tampering

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for the cult of the carbon scare.

Now we need to ask if the world has even warmed? I’ve always said, “global warming is real”, but the recent exposés of shocking corruption in science have made me start to wonder whether even that is true.

Today a study by Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts, was announced by the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).

From their media release:

An extensive survey of the literature and data regarding ground and sea surface temperature records uncovers deception through data manipulation, reports the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).

Authors veteran meteorologists Joe d’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.

That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it [...]

January 27th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (78)