Sorry about that spot of maintenance. Out of my hands… back up now.
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And you thought advertising or certificates couldn’t get more stupid. Thanks to Christopher Essex for spotting this gem: http://www.dominosugar.com/carbonfree/ You’ll have to click to go to the Domino site to see the helpful man tell you that “This is Big”. They probably paid a lot for that ad. Some of the poor users are not sure what it means. That’s OK, Domino helpfully provides an FAQ page: Is it the same sugar? Will it function the same way in my recipes? Yes, it is still 100% pure cane sugar with 15 calories per teaspoon. And, it functions just like all Domino® Pure Cane Granulated Sugar. Use it cup for cup exactly like the original Domino® Pure Cane Granulated Sugar. Look out. You might think that carbon free sugar would be the ultimate diet-sugar. But it’s not so. Carbon free is not low-calorie. Lucky it is still useable at high temperatures “just like” normal sugar, eh? Just so everyone can appreciate this special-chemistry-moment: in the sugar molecule below, the grey circles with a “C” are the carbon ones. A glucose molecule. C stands for Carbon. … Remember the low-carbon crowd that this product appeals to are the ones who […] Here are the questions Tony Jones could have asked if only he or his billion-dollar organization had the time to use the Internet. Is he a journalist or an activist pretending to be one? And how much does Jones get paid by the taxpayer for allowing McKibben a free pass to say things that are easily shown to be false? The ABC wants to keep that a secret. It wants your money, but not your opinion. The full transcript is on the ABC site, I’ve selected parts below. (My cost to the taxpayer: $0). ABC Lateline “Stop investing in carbon intense industries” TONY JONES: Let’s start with the statement most frequently used by climate change sceptics: the planet has stopped warming since 1998 and started to cool, actually cool, since 2003. True or false? [Tony Jones is offering a blatantly false position for McKibben to knock over…. skeptics most frequently point out that there has been no significant warming (there are 350 million google results for that compared to 10 million for global cooling since 2003). The UK Met office, and the head of the IPCC say the same thing. The issue that matters is the “pause” that […] May 24th, 2013 | Tags: ABC, Jones (Tony), McKibben (Bill) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | UPDATE from Hoyt himself below… I like Hoyt. Two earnest young chaps drive out to meet the slimy-ogre-from-the-hobbit who posts skeptical comments all over the web, and discover, shock, Hoyt is actually a nice guy. He’s not only normal looking, he’s well spoken, and he has good manners. He’s likeable. Watch: The secret life of internet climate trolls: part one – 5 min video They young fans of the climate scare get excited when Hoyt admits he doesn’t believe a Democrat. (Hmm, I suspect they are thinking “ideologue”.) They also got excited when he said he was a prostate cancer survivor, not because he survived (though I say, Thank Goodness) but because it gave them an excuse to talk about “doctors”. There’s an attempt at a James Delingpole-BBC moment coming where they play up a logical fallacy as if it tells us something about the climate. You trust medical science, but not climate science? I do hope Hoyt responded that if his medical doctors had been hiding data and losing records he would have been skeptical of them too. 8.8 out of 10 based on 40 ratings […] The mouth of the Amazon is the worst source of “pollution”. Bad news for fans of The Amazon River. A new study shows that while the Amazon rain forest is the Lungs of The Planet, pulling down gigatonnes of CO2, the river undoes all the good the trees do, and pours all the CO2 back into the sky. Damn that river eh? Lucky it only discharges one fifth of the worlds freshwater. Apparently most researchers thought bacteria couldn’t digest the tough woody lignin of tree debris fast enough to prevent it getting to the ocean*. Underestimating microbial life seems a common affliction, and we hear was a big surprise that only 5% of the lignin actually ends up reaching the ocean where it might sink to the floor and be sequestered. The rest is broken down by bacteria and released into the air. The clues were there for years that the Amazon was giving off lots more CO2 than people expected, but the consensus was that it “didn’t add up”. So much for that consensus. Yet another victory for observations over opinions. Until recently, people believed much of the rain forest’s carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended […] May 22nd, 2013 | Tags: Amazon, Carbon Accounting, Carbon Credits, Carbon cycle, Consensus, Satire & Parody | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Finally the modelers are catching up with the slow-down or pause in global warming over the last decade. Where the best estimate for the IPCC was 3.3 degrees C with a range of 2.0 to 4.5C, Otto et al have revised the best estimate to 2C, with a range of 1.2C – 3.9C. Effectively the power of CO2 to warm just got 30% less, according to a team of researchers, many of whom have in the past have published more alarming papers. Remember “there is no debate” and “global warming is a fact” a lot “like gravity”. (And that gravitational constant g could be revised by a third soon, right?) The Australian writes it up as “TEMPERATURE rises sparked by increased carbon dioxide levels will be lower than previously thought, an international research team has found”. The Age tells us that disaster is still coming but it will be slower. “Warming to take longer in reaching forecast levels”. Otto et al looked at the global energy budget which means adding up atmospheric, ice, continent, and ocean energy. They compare it decade by decade since 1970, and argue that the long term equilibruim temperature response need to be revised down. The […] May 20th, 2013 | Tags: Climate Sensitivity, Earth's Energy Budget | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | The oceans as measured by ARGO are warming, but that warming is not only far less than the models predicted, it is far less even than the instrument error. The background of a crucial point … Everyone agrees: 90% of the energy in the Earth’s climate system is stored in the oceans. Rocks and sand don’t transmit the heat down, except at incredibly slow rates. The wil-o’-the-wisp-atmosphere hardly holds any energy. But water covers 70% of the surface, to an average depth of 3,700m, and it can store septillions of joules. Climate models say the Earth’s energy balance is out of whack, and therefore 90% of the extra energy trapped by increasing greenhouse gases is stored in the ocean. The oceans are warming (probably), but the extra energy found in the top 700m of the world’s oceans is not enough. The modelers argued the heat was hidden below, that from 700m-2,000m. Skeptics argue the missing energy was flung out to space. This is the big enchilada, and as far as measuring oceans goes, everything changed in 2003 when we finally got the ARGO system, and that’s why it’s worth a closer look now. David points […] May 18th, 2013 | Tags: ARGO, IPCC, NOAA, Ocean Heat Content, Oceans | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | What does a study of 20 years of abstracts tell us about the global climate? Nothing. But it says quite a lot about the way government funding influences the scientific process. John Cook, a blogger who runs the site with the ambush title “SkepticalScience” (which unskeptically defends the mainstream position), has tried to revive the put-down and smear strategy against the thousands of scientists who disagree. The new paper confounds climate research with financial forces, is based on the wrong assumptions, uses fallacious reasoning, wasn’t independent, and confuses a consensus of climate scientists for a scientific consensus, not that a consensus proves anything anyway, if it existed. Given the monopolistic funding of climate science in the last 20 years, the results he finds are entirely predictable. The twelve clues that good science journalists ought to notice: 1. Thousands of papers support man-made climate change, but not one found the evidence that matters Cook may have found 3,896 papers endorsing the theory that man-made emissions control the climate, but he cannot name one paper with observations that shows that the assumptions of the IPCC climate models about water vapor and cloud feedbacks are correct. These assumptions produce half to two-thirds of […] May 17th, 2013 | Tags: Argument by Authority, Argument by Popularity, Consensus, Cook (John) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Cuts to foreign aid are expected to save the government’s coffers up to $3 billion. But let’s not forget Wayne Swan declared in 2012 that Australia’s 23 million people needed to bail out the 500 million people of the destitute Eurozone, and the basket-case-that-is-the–EU desperately needed $7 billion from us. Is there a better argument to show why big government is a big-fail than just saying, E.U.? It takes real skill to start with 20 successful economies and combine them into one large bankrupt entity — and all this in only a decade-and-a-half. For Australians, seven billion dollars is $320 per man, woman and child. That was nearly $1,300 per household of four. If someone had knocked on your door with a registered E.U. tin, would you have felt compelled to give $1,300 (of non-tax deductible income) to rescue the poor bankers and burdensome bureaucrats of Europe? Perhaps you might have chosen instead to get a new fridge, take the family on a holiday, or pay for private tutoring for your teenager. But thanks to Swan and the force of big government, you didn’t get that chance. As it happens, Australia doesn’t have the cash to pay it anyway, so […] … 6.5 out of 10 based on 24 ratings Who knew? Sometimes you should feed goats to prevent floods and droughts. Other times you should shoot them to get the same outcome. Confused? In times gone by you would need to ask the tribal witchdoctor. Now, in the post-modern period, talk to a climate scientist. Steve Goreham highlights some Global Stupidity in the Washington Times. In case you didn’t know, for writing things like this his books get burned. It could only happen in a centre for higher education. — Jo
Shepherd or Shoot Goats in the Name of Climate Change By Steve Goreham Originally published in The Washington Times. O’Hare airport will finally get its goats. The Department of Aviation of the City of Chicago has awarded a contract to a private firm to provide 25 goats to munch vegetation at the city’s airport. These “green lawn mowers” will help reduce carbon dioxide emissions to sustain the planet. Last fall, when the project was bid, Amy Malick, head of sustainability at the Department of Aviation, commented on the planned use of goats in hard-to-mow areas, “They may have steep slopes, very hard to get to with heavy machinery, and those machines also emit […] May 10th, 2013 | Tags: Feral animals, Goreham (Steve) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Senator Ron Boswell (National Party) makes the case in The Australian today that Australia is losing manufacturing due to rising energy costs, while the US is gaining manufacturing back from China because it has a cheap energy advantage with shale gas. I could make the case that when Big-Government tries to change the weather, it has moved into the realm of witchcraft. There is no empirical evidence that reducing CO2 will measurably reduce storms, floods and sea–levels, and there is no economic calculation that suggests Australia can afford to change the global climate (even if it were possible). Business is doing the only sane thing and shifting to countries that are more rational. Such is the “National Conversation” on these policies, it is impossible to say exactly how much The Carbon Farce has cost Australian business, due to the complexity of supply chain accounting and the rule that the government will put you in jail if you publish an estimate that is wrong. There are other factors at work, but there is no situation where higher energy costs make business easier, unless your business is one of the ones making expensive energy. Energy taxes are the nail in the coffin […] How is the hallowed Green tech industry working out for China? Not so well. Shi Zhengrong was called a “hero of the environment” by Time Magazine. He was a billionaire who ran the worlds largest seller of solar PV cells. But the glory days of 2008 – 2011 are gone. Another bubble bursts. Wiped out in two years. How fast was this fall? Chinese solar panel maker Suntech flames out By Steven Mufson, Published: May 3 The Washington Post, In 2008, CNN named Shi “China’s Sunshine Boy.” In 2009, Fortune anointed him “China’s new king of solar.” That year, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also cited Shi and Suntech as models of China’s green leap forward — which he called “the Sputnik of our day” and a spur for U.S. clean energy policy. Now, however, the Chinese Sputnik has crashed to Earth, and the Sun King has been toppled. … a Chinese court declared the company bankrupt after a petition from eight Chinese banks. On Wednesday, the company announced that its 2012 revenue had plunged 48 percent from the previous year. Suntech — which in 2011 was the […] John, Thanks for the invite to assist with the crowd sourced online survey. Unfortunately I just can’t see this working. 1. The survey is profoundly anti-science, it’s exactly the kind of thing I debunk on my blog. Consensus is the stuff of politics, not science. Science is not a democracy, and we don’t vote for the laws of physics, which are either right or wrong and not “97% popular”. Hence, any answer you get in this survey (and it appears you already have the answers) has got nothing to do with understanding the climate of Earth. It may possibly be helpful in psychosocial analysis of groupthink in modern science, or the effect of monopsonistic funding on scientific progress, but that brings me to problem 2, even if it were useful for that, you are not the researcher to study that. See point 2. 2. You still refer to us as “deniers” in much of your work. You admitted there was no such thing as a “climate denier” a few months ago (albeit after five years of using the term), but you have not adopted a more useful name, or apologized for abusing the English language. Clearly you think skeptics are […] May 5th, 2013 | Tags: Consensus, Cook (John), Denier (the insult), SkepticalScience (debunking) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | For all the things you want to discuss. 7.6 out of 10 based on 20 ratings Australia could be leading the world in research that will save lives and earn money. Instead we lead the world in gullible obedience to an absurd scheme to change the weather. Making human body parts from off-the-shelf or customized cells is a vast improvement on waiting for healthy people to die and donate, and a lifetime of immunosuppressants. Any delay in developing these techniques will surely cost lives and prolong disability. Those who do develop and patent these techniques are bound to profit and be able to afford even more research, and will improve national productivity as well as the quality of life. For those on waiting lists, spending $3billion on solar panels to stop storms and hold back the sea is the cruelest waste. This type of medical work could make waiting lists for organ-donation a thing of the past. The political vanity of supporting useless causes for the sake of symbolism has a ghastly price. Read about what this poor little girl and her family have had to go through. She is two, and had never been home or tasted food until last month. She has not been able to speak, but might possibly one day. This is […] Thermometer circa 1790 UPDATED: Post note below, with a couple of extra caveats… Lüdecke, Hempelmann, and Weiss found that the temperature variation can be explained with six superimposed natural cycles. With only six cycles they can closely recreate the 240 year central European thermometer record. There is little “non-cyclical” signal left, suggesting that CO2 might have a minor or insignificant effect. The three German scientists used Fourier analysis to pick out the dominant cycles of one of the longest temperature records we have. The Central European temperature is an average of records from Prague, Vienna, Hohenpeissenberg, Kremsmünster, Paris, and Munich. The dominant cycle appears to be about 250 years. There is also a cycle of about 60 years, corresponding to the Atlantic/Pacific decadal oscillations. Data is of course, always the biggest problem. If we had 10,000 years of high quality global records, we could solve “the climate” within months. Instead, we have short records, and Lüdecke et al, make the most of what we have. The European records are only 240 years long, or (darn) one dominant cycle, and only one region, so to check that the results are valid over longer periods they also analyze a the 2000 […] May 1st, 2013 | Tags: Evidence, Fourier analysis, Global Temperatures, Global Temperatures (last 2000 yrs), Little Ice Age | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | The Australian ALMOST 150 suspected rorts of the Gillard government’s Renewable Energy Target scheme were reported to the regulator last year, with NSW and federal authorities assisting with the execution of two search warrants as a part of the probe. The Clean Energy Regulator yesterday released its annual report to government on the administration of the RET — a scheme that provides certificates for both large and small-scale renewable energy generation as part of the bipartisan target of ensuring 20 per cent of Australia’s electricity comes from renewables by 2020. The regulator’s audit report revealed that during 2012 it received 147 allegations of rorts, the majority of which related to the creation of dodgy certificates for rooftop solar panels. So far three “monitoring warrants” have been executed by NSW and Australian Federal police. One matter is before the Federal Court as a civil prosecution. One criminal matter was heard last year. …businessman John Testoni of Sydney Solar Eco Solutions pleading guilty to improperly creating $170,000 in RET certificates for 24 non-existent solar system installations in the Sydney area. Fake markets just ask to be scammed. Who can forget the Spanish winter of late 2009 when 4,500Mw hours of “solar” […] April 30th, 2013 | Tags: Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV), Wind Power | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Professor Stephan Lewandowsky Over Easter, psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky moved from Perth to Bristol (lucky UK). He’s the psychologist who is expert in an imaginary group of humans called “Climate deniers”. Neither he, nor anyone else has ever met one but he discovered their imaginary motivations by surveying the confused groups who hate them. As you would, right? None of the so-called researchers can explain what scientific observations a climate denier, denies. It’s an abuse of English, profoundly unscientific, but has some success in shutting down public debate, if that’s what you want. Can humans change the weather and stop the storms? If you know we can, Lewandowsky calls that “science”. If you wonder “how much”, you are a denier. The Royal Society, possibly reaching a tipping point in its rush to abject scientific decay, has immediately awarded him the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. It’s effectively a top-up on his salary for the next five years, just in case the UK might lose him. While Australia is grateful, scientists everywhere, cry. Hat tip to Geoff Chambers [The Royal Society] Value and tenure The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the […] April 28th, 2013 | Tags: Lewandowsky (Stephan), Royal Society (UK) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Voting closes on Tuesday. Look for “Jo Nova“. Click “next” until you get the chance to click Finish, or Submit. Thanks! Overseas votes welcome. This week in stem cell news one research group announced they’d accidentally figured out a way to easily convert human bone-marrow stem cells into brain cells which could in future repair spinal or brain damage. Another group showed that if you happen to be a particular type of old mouse with memory problems, researchers can give you a transplant of stem cells that restore your learning and memoryand help you swim through water mazes faster. But seriously, these discoveries could help a lot of very needy people. Meanwhile Australia, celebrated it’s one millionth roofing panel that provide expensive, irregular electricity. Ladies and Gentlemen — there is a revolution going on, and it’s not the Green one. How much could $2 billion wasted dollars have achieved if it were spent wisely? These two studies fit together quite well — the first shows it’s possible to use stem cells to restore brain function, the second suggests it might be easier to get the right stem cells than anyone thought. Repairing damaged mouse brains How’s this for odd, […] |
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