In ice-ages, CO2 hides in the oceans (yes we knew that)

Antarctic Glacier Image: Paomic

It comes as not even a tiny surprize that when someone asks “Where does all the CO2 go in an ice age?” that the answer is “The Ocean“.

We already know temperatures rise 800 years before CO2 levels (Caillon 2003), and we know the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the sky. Moreover, basic chemistry tells us that CO2 (like all gases) will dissolve better in cold water, and be released as the water warms. To cap it all off, the deep abyss of the oceans turns over once every millenia or so (which fits loosely with the “lag” between temperature and CO2 levels).

But you would think this new research was solving a deep mystery, rather than confirming what most sane knowledgeable people would expect. Nonetheless, this may be the first detailed study of C13 levels going back 24,000 years.

CO2 was hidden in the ocean during the Ice Age

EurekaAlert

Why did the atmosphere contain so little carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago? Why did it rise when the Earth’s climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says […]

Flannery admitted to Australian Academy of Science for PR work. Who is next? Cate Blanchett?

What does it take to be a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science? Apparently, making wildly exaggerated predictions that are already known to be wrong, calling people names, and having a thin grip on the scientific method is just the stuff the Academy is looking for. Who knew? Science used to be about seeking the truth.

Tim Flannery

The Australian Academy of Science thinks that it can give the besieged Tim Flannery more credibility. Instead, they pour their own credibility down the sink. If making predictions that are wrong and exaggerated, and following fashions of scientific groupthink is “good science”, who next will make the hallowed list of “Fellows” — Cate Blanchett? Clive Hamilton? Charles Manson?

Hailing people who achieve in Science Communication might be fine, but it is not communicating science when their predictions don’t fit the real world and they won’t change the theory. The prophesies of Tim are a religion. (See “Help! How you can tell a scientist from a non-scientist”.)

Now every time Flannery makes a statement like these below, it can carry the AAS logo:

For the first time, this global super-organism, this global intelligence will be able to send […]

The Hour of Power: Celebrate Human Achievement this Saturday.

Hello Earthians! It’s time to say thank you to Edison, to Faraday and Maxwell, it’s time to celebrate the Gift of Light.

Saturday night at 8.30 – 9.30pm this week is the Hour of Power

(Don’t confuse this with the splinter group celebrations called Earth Hour, where people sit in the dark — so they can appreciate the glory of luminosity come 9.31).

The Glory! We are the lucky generation with light at the flick of a switch

The CEI gets the thumbs up too. They are running Human Achievement Hour. (Click the image for more info).

In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived the odd ninety thousand year stretches of hypothermic, abysmal ice age. We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years, cowering in corners, listening to drips, waiting for the sun.

There is only one type of Freedom – and all else is servitude, slavery or tyranny.

It’s your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness. Be brave, stand up […]

There go those gravy trains in Queensland & Victoria

Australia is stepping back from the cliff

We shouldn’t underestimate shift that has just taken place. The psychology of Australian politics moved as the large swinging center was revealed. Not only was the Queensland election worse for Labor than anyone predicted, the message was clear, voters rejected the lies, and rejected the carbon tax. The smear campaign by the Labor leader (Bligh) did more harm to her than it did to her target. Finally, the Hype-&-Spin Machine ran off the rails.

This is real progress. Today both Queensland and Victoria are peeling back the warmist bureaucracy. I’m happy.

The new premier of Queensland Campbell Newman, is scrapping many state carbon reduction schemes. Who knew that the head of Queensland’s Office of Climate Change was none other than Mr Withers, husband of former Premier Anna Bligh? Who said the Labor Party nowadays is just about government money for supporters and mates?

Campbell Newman has said he won’t sack Withers. Instead he wants him to unwind all the programs he put in place. Newman is keeping the solar subsidies for household rooftops, but everything else is being dumped.

The showpiece of the Gillard government’s $1.5 billion Solar Flagships Program is now in […]

The people fightback against the ABC (re: Wendy Carlisles Hatchet Job)

The voice of The Ben Bernank debunks the ABC.

This was posted in Sept 2011. I don’t know why I didn’t see it til this week (h/t Jennifer Marohasy’s).

“They want to regulate every aspect of your life, and they are prepared to lie to do it…”

Great job here from 1984Report. (Do please contact me “1984” 🙂 )

On this Monckton tour Carlisle spent hours listening to David Evans and myself talk about errors in climate models, with peer reviewed evidence that the models are wrong, yet she didn’t think it was worth mentioning that to the people of Australia whose government was proposing new taxes based on those models. She interviewed me for an hour and asked for references, and presumably she couldn’t find holes in them, because she didn’t mention them either. She wanted to know where I got my money from. When I explained how pure and untainted my funding was, that I essentially hardly have any, she forgot to mention that too. Character assassination, anyone or is it just a form of ABC Alzheimers?

9.1 out of 10 based on 87 ratings […]

This gold bar is worth its weight in … tungsten — corruption knocks on every door

A gold bar that should have weighed 1,000 grams, weighed 2 grams too little. The owner had it cut in half to reveal that the certified, stamped bar with serial numbers had tungsten rods inserted all the way through it. Tungsten, has a density of 19.35 g/cm3, so is a near-perfect match for gold (19.32 g/cm3) and it sells for just one ten thousandth of the price.

The gold bar was cut in half to reveal the tungsten rods.

The problem of fake gold bars By Felix Salmon March 25, 2012

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this worrying: a 1kg gold bar, certified as 99.98% pure by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) tests, turns out to have been drilled out and largely replaced with tungsten. This bar was discovered only because it was 2 grams lighter than it ought to have been: the forgers failed to add quite enough gold to the outside of the bar to make up for the weight lost when they replaced gold with tungsten. But if they’d gotten the weight right, it would probably still be circulating today.

[Reuters]

Is this a big issue? Who knows? Gold bars are rarely audited. […]

$175k to cheer up Department of Energy and Climate Change staff

Hey, but this is alright when you are spending someone else’s money isn’t it?

Staff at the Australian Department of Climate Change are so depressed, I can’t think why, that the government is spending $175,000 to cheer them up.

Could it be that the poor staff would enjoy their jobs more if they weren’t doing something which was a complete waste of time, and their programs weren’t a vacuous drain? Remember if we all abandon Australia, AND if the IPCC aren’t wildly overestimating the effects of extra CO2, then, and only then, will Australia cool the world by as much as — rounded to the nearest whole number — zero degrees. (Pace Matt Ridley)

Things are so bad, people were ashamed to admit to people that they worked at the Dept of Climate Change. Worse, this study was done back in 2010 – before a round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2011 and then another round of endless-drought-breaking floods in 2012. This was before the worst of the plummeting Labor polling, before FakeGate… just how low do these people feel now?

 

175k to cheer up Department of Energy and Climate Change staff

9.9 out of 10 based on 67 […]

Those devastating Queensland Election Results: Voters hate lies and the Carbon Tax

Thanks to Truthseeker & Anthony Watts

UPDATE: Is this a record? Has there ever been a loss this bad in Australian history? Conservatives likely to win 74 seats of an 89 seat parliament.

Labor was reduced to only 11 seats in 1974, and on latest counting tonight appeared set to retain only nine seats. Some analysts put the figure even lower, at seven. This would mean Labor falling short of official party status and relying on the incoming LNP government to grant it party offices, staff and resources. The Queensland Greens failed to win a seat and suffered a fall in support. [The Australian]

This is thread for all those who want to comment on this election. According to Bolt, things are not just bad, they’re seriously awful for the Labor Party. Newspoll says LNP (conservatives) 55%, Labor 26%. Channel Nines polls says Labor could be left with less than 10 seats!

9.7 out of 10 based on 131 ratings […]

We are all Austrians now

The meme is spreading. Rapidly, day after day, I’m meeting more Skeptical-Austrians, and Austrian-Skeptics. I don’t mean the country, but the economics.

James Delingpole-the-brilliant enjoyed my post: The Ground Zero of Global Corruption: it starts with The Currency. He’s had his awakening a few months back. Just yesterday I was talking to Redmond, a skeptic in Canada who turned out to be founder and director on Mises.ca (you can’t get much more Austrian than that). Martin Durkin (the infamous director of Great Global Warming Swindle) is an Austrian too. Back in Bali 07, even then, that Monckton, Archibald, and Balle were discussing gold and currencies (nearly half of all the skeptics there). I’m guessing Chiefio might be. I hear Ray Evans of the Lavoisier Group is too.

…skeptics of government science are also skeptics of government money…

It’s no surprise, really, that skeptics of government science would also be skeptics of government money. My message to all the sleeping skeptics out there is: get with the game. When I said climate science is the second biggest scam in history, I wasn’t joking.

So James, yes, welcome to the club! Absolutely, I’m an Austrian and so, of course, is […]

Total Body Scam? — Taking your money and freedom, (and coming to Australia too)

Was it just me? Was I the only one who noticed a tiny announcement in February that Airport Scanners were coming to Australia, the land where terrorists haven’t landed (yet), and … wait for it… there would be no (NO!) — opt — out– clause. Did I hear that correctly?

And the crowd roared (about the cricket), nobody said a word about the scanners, and the ten libertarians left who can bear to watch the ABC were too busy trying to save the nation from nastier threats. Australia is getting millimeter wave scanners at International Airports, and if you don’t want to be scanned, you need to leave the country… by boat. (Either that or swim with the crocs across the Timor Sea.)

Metal objects show up on a white body, but not on a black background. Image: Daily Mail and Herald Sun.

With no opt out clause, what happens when the first person facing deportation refuses to be scanned? Well that’s all right then, we’ll just book them on a cruise to Kandahar? Civil Liberties Australia was one of the few to speak up. Maybe those scanners are safe? Maybe? But at least one man with a pacemaker […]

Media Watch witch hunt

“In the old days they would have just bound her, thrown her into the lake, and waited to see if she floated.

Though a primitive method of witch-hunting, it would surely be far more effective than Jonathan’s, and would require much less in taxpayer funding.”

[MediaWatch comment by Preacher]

Jennifer Marohasy belongs to the “wrong” tribe, according to the ABC’s Media Watch program.

Media Watch is panting with excitement because — stop me if you’ve heard this before — she’s a scientist who earns money. My favorite part of the inadvertent expose-of-ABC-bias was the sneering voice-over, meant to be Marohasy or any supporter of her: petulant, petty and childish. The full ABC-festival-of-smug is right on display, thanks, as always, to the Taxpayers of Australia.

It’s so bad, it’s satirical:

MW: But many real journalists struggle when reporting science.

“Struggle?” Mr Holmes? You mean they are so confused about the real world, they think if a US group funds a group who write about a distantly connected topic, that therefore, ergo, and quid pro quo — that tiny funding demonstrates that Lake Alexandrina was always […]

“Conspiracy theorist” – just another form of namecalling from the class who want to be Global Rulers

“Conspiracy Theorist” – the taunt you use when you want to “win” the debate without having to argue your point.

When someone points out that the Regulating Class want to bring on a world government, they’re called a “conspiracy theorist”. When the king-pins of the Regulating Class, or their media apostles, actually admit they rather love the idea of a world government, where are the retractions? They can’t hold an honest conversation, let alone budget, plan and spend your money wisely.

Gary Stix – former Scientific American writer – blogs that he used to edit articles on nuclear fusion and clean coal, but now thinks he ought to have written more on psychology, sociology and economics. (See, when their attempts at logic, reason and evidence don’t win over the crowd, the anointed need to explain how stupid, flawed and selfish people are.)

Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe

Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as […]

The Ground Zero of Global Corruption – it starts with The Currency

The scale of the rot is something to behold. Something is grossly, wantonly wrong with Western Civilization, and lots of people know it, but they don’t know why (and for the next blind rebellion, see, “Occupy”).

But a head of the hydra popped into view last week. First a high profile whistleblower from Goldman Sachs wrote Why I am leaving in the New York Times. Then today (possibly, it’s unconfirmed), an insider from JP Morgan came forward to reveal something far worse, and dark to the core. It’s posted on the CFTC site (that’s The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the market watchdog, or rather watch-puppy). [UPDATE: The CFTC have removed the page after 48 hours, a copy of the text is here, screenshot here.]

A Goldman Sachs Executive Director — Greg Smith — resigned from the 143 year old firm explaining he felt ill with the callous culture where people would boast about how much they had ripped off clients, which they called “hunting elephants”, and calling their clients “muppets” and worse. He said that in 12 years the company had completely lost the culture that made him proud to join it. There was nothing left of integrity […]

Unthreaded Weekend

Plenty to discuss…

7.5 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

Australian temperature records shoddy, inaccurate, unreliable. Surprise!

The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend. The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average” yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time. It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?

We need a professional audit.

 

A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog) has been going through the Australia Bureau of Meteorology records (BOM). They’ve audited some 8.5 million daily observations across 237 High Quality and other close sites in Australia. Shockingly, while […]

Jennifer Marohasy and ABC’s MediaWatch tribal warfare

UPDATE: While MediaWatch (ABC) is hassling Jennifer Marohasy, Marc Hendrickx at ABCnewswatch responds in kind, posting an excellent open letter to MediaWatch, asking if they can outline their own scientific qualifications to judge Jennifer Marohasy’s scientific work. ABC staff want to know her motivations, but Marc wants to know theirs. And “given that they employ 11 staff full time” and produce “one 15 minute show per week”, do they consider that this represents good value for the Australian taxpayer? Touche!

Brilliant Marc. It’s a must read.

—————————————————————————

Jennifer Marohasy has extraordinary influence. She’s so powerful that the ABC’s Media Watch program has singled her out, asking questions about her income and disclosures that they don’t even bother to ask Tim Flannery. Presumably they don’t think anyone still takes Tim seriously.

They sent her a barrage of questions last Friday, which she hammered in a detailed reply on the weekend. I hear they are still sniffing around anyone they can think of who may know something about Marohasy, asking leading questions and volunteering information that isn’t correct.

Media Watch (aka Witch Hunt) thought this was a question worth asking:

[To Jennifer Marohasy] In your recent opinion […]

Richard Black — the fastest apologist for misbehaving scientists

Black thinks the BBC reported on ClimateGate, instead they rushed to report a “hacking” that may not even have been a hack…

Richard Black thinks the BBC was the first to “report” Climategate in the mainstream press.

@BBCRBlackvia TwitterTired old meme that BBC was slow to report “ClimateGate” is circulating again – for record we were 1st main news org http://t.co/c4sU6puy

But the BBC didn’t report ClimateGate in that story at all. What they reported was a hypothetical hacking of a university in the UK, one which (two years later) still remains a claim that has no evidence in support of. Was it was illegally hacked or legally leaked? Don’t tune in to the BBC for the answer. They don’t even ask the question.

If the BBC had reported on Climategate, we could tell, because they would have reported what the emails actually said, not just the opinions that said “they don’t matter”.

Let’s compare Black’s reporting of Climategate and FakeGate

On ClimateGate, Black waited until after he had a spokesman from the CRU to comment, and having confirmed the emails were from the CRU, Black quoted exactly none of them. On FakeGate, Black posted so quickly that he […]

Climate Coup — The Politics

How the regulating class is using bogus claims

about climate change to entrench and extend their

economic privileges and political control.

Guest Post: Dr David M.W. Evans, 29 Feb 2012, last updated 13 Mar 2012, latest pdf here

The Science

The sister article Climate Coup—The Science (a more mainstream version of The Skeptic’s Case) contains the science foundation for this essay. It checks the track record of the climate models against our best and latest data, from impeccable sources. It details how you can download this data yourself. It finds that the climate models got all their major predictions wrong:

Test Climate Models Air temperatures from 1988 Actual rise was less than the rise predicted for drastic cuts in CO2 Air temperatures from 1990 Over-estimated trend rise Ocean temperatures from 2003 Over-estimated trend rise greatly Atmospheric hotspot Completely missing –> water vapor feedback not amplifying Outgoing radiation Opposite to reality –> water vapor feedback not amplifying

 

The latter two items are especially pertinent, because they show that the crucial amplification by water vapor feedback [i] assumed by the models does not exist in reality. Modelers guessed that of the forces on […]

A GONGO idea – a government funded job destruction program…

For pure, circular destruction of wealth, happiness and prosperity, it doesn’t get much better than this. Not long back Greenpeace and co were busted for planning a six million dollar campaign to disrupt and delay the coal industry — and today The Australian reports that three of the major organisations involved received close to $750,000 from the government, for “public climate change activities” raising doubts about whether public funds had been misused.

The Nature Conservation Council (NSW), Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of Western Australia have received grants of $211,000, $213,215 and $319,420 respectively for public climate change activities since last December.

Environment Victoria and the Conservation Council of WA confirmed yesterday they had backed the development of the anti-coal campaign.

The coal miners are an industry that is legal, employs 40,000 people directly, provides the fuel for more than half our electricity and generates about $13b in tax dollars for the Australian government.

Now if the NGO’s wanted to explain to the rest of us why we ought to decide to reduce our coal mining, that would be fair enough, but they aren’t trying to convince us with reason or debate, they’re trying to disrupt a legitimate economic […]

Prius drivers behaving badly. Upper class more likely to cheat.

Prius drivers may claim they want to help the poor but they are less likely to want to slow down and let them cross the road.

You’d think Prius drivers would hold pedestrians, who emit less carbon, in high regard. But alas, roadside tests show about one third of Prius drivers broke crosswalk laws, putting the Prius drivers in the most-unethical-driver class. (As with all generalizations we ought remember that two thirds of Prius drivers did the right thing.) The common factor among unethical drivers was that shiny expensive cars were three times as likely to plow through the crosswalk. It’s not so much the hybrid, or the greenness, it’s the status…

In a final experiment, the researchers took their hypothesis to the streets. At a busy intersection in the San Francisco Bay area, the team stationed “pedestrians” at crosswalks, with instructions to approach the crossing at a point when oncoming drivers would have a chance to stop. Observers coded the status of the cars’ drivers based on the vehicles’ age, make, and appearance. Drivers of shiny, expensive cars were three times more likely than those of old clunkers to plow through a crosswalk, failing to yield to pedestrians […]