Divestment protests are astroturf: university students are paid pawns to be political activists

Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) study: Inside Divestment (pdf)

The Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement (FFDM) is running on more than 1000 American colleges and universities, and about 30 of them have “divested”. It’s embedded in the tertiary sector, some 4,000 profs have signed supportive petitions, and some teach it in lectures.

The authors of a new 290 page study on Divestment Campaigns say that it’s not the grassroots thing it poses as, but is driven by professional political activists and funded by wealthy donors and foundations. The organization pushing the US campaign, 350.org, pays and trains students to be activists. Key dates and events are decided from the top down.

It’s all another charade — the holier than thou promises to sell fossil fuel stocks are often just empty PR stunts. Most divestment declarations are empty PR — 66% of the universities are saying they divest but hanging on to some fossil stocks. And four universities have not sold a thing — including Oxford. (Where are those protests?). But in the end, it doesn’t matter whether the divestments actually happen, a mere detail, […]

New Science 19: The invisible nameless model that controls the whole field of climate science

Don’t underestimate the importance of the nameless basic model. It sounds small, but in the culture and philosophy of climate science it’s bigger and carries more weight than the massive hairy GCMs. Like an invisible gossamer web, it’s overarching. It spans and defines all the other models. When they produce “dumb” answers, the basic model holds them in, for thou shalt not stray too far from the climate sensitivity defined by the basic model. It defines what “dumb” is. (It’s just “basic physics” after all.) One model to bind them all. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, apparently. The physics might be right, but the equations are calculating imaginary conditions. The answers might be arithmetically correct but useless at the same time. They miss the real route that energy flows through to space.

By definition, as long as the basic model is wrong, the GCM models can never get it right.

It’s not like climate scientists consult the oracle of the basic model every day, or even once a year… they don’t need to. They were taught it their climate larval stage, often long before they’d written one paper. The basic model shows that the warming of […]

Those policies will cause HOW much cooling exactly? The best case fantasy a mere 0.17C by 2100

Suppose we give billions to the bureaucratic geniuses in Paris. Suppose they are right about how global warming works (though we know they are not). What do we get for all that money?

Combined, all plans, carried out, successful best case, at a cost of hundreds of trillions + : 0.17°C

More realistic more pessimistic case: 0.05°C

If the infra-red reroutes through the atmosphere and climate sensitivity has been overestimated by 5 – 10 fold: 0.02°C

The UN wants us to spend $89 trillion by 2030 to “green up” everything. For that we hope in theory, if we’re lucky to get a reduction of one sixth of a degree 70 years later. Rush, Rush, buy that plan today! Order two, and don’t count the dead.

The real reduction, using the best empirical data, and a corrected basic model, is more likely to be in the order of one thousandth of a degree 9 decades from now.

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Megadroughts in past 2000 years worse, longer, than current droughts

What hockeystick eh?

A new atlas shows droughts of the past were worse than those today — and they cannot have been caused by man-made CO2. Despite the claims of “unprecedented” droughts, the worst droughts in Europe and the US were a thousand years ago. Cook et al 2015[1] put together an old world drought atlas from tree rings data as a proxy for summer wetness and dryness across Europe. They compare the severity and timing of European droughts with the North American Drought Atlas (NADA) released in 2004. Yes, it’s a tree ring study with all the caveats about how trees are responding to several factors at once etc etc. But at least the modern era is measured with the same proxy as used in the old eras.

Something else is causing droughts, something modern models don’t include:

“megadroughts reconstructed over north-central Europe in the 11th and mid-15th centuries reinforce other evidence from North America and Asia that droughts were more severe, extensive, and prolonged over Northern Hemisphere land areas before the 20th century, with an inadequate understanding of their causes.”

The worst megadrought in the California and Nevada regions was from 832 to 1074 CE (golly, […]

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Beautiful to watch: Davies UK M.P. quotes IPCC in Parliament as a reason to be skeptical

This video gives me hope. Finally we are starting to see more sane commentary in western parliaments. David TC Davies MP shows how politicians can master enough of the scientific details on this debate to crush the usual bumper-sticker trite “consensus” hogwash. He talks of Roman warming, the Medieval Warm Period, the Younger Dryas, the age of the Earth. It’s high school science type level, but more than enough to expose some of the silliness. He also counters the “climate change denier” tag. He cites just enough key numbers to back up each of his points. His skill here is in prioritizing the numbers that matter. Here’s hoping a few of the silent political skeptics will feel more confident to speak out. The bullying and namecalling breaks when enough people stand up to it. That’s coming.

No one I’ve ever met has ever suggested the climate never changes…

Even the IPCC is not saying that most of the warming [since industrialisation] is caused by humans …

It is absolutely certain that the more we rely on renewable energy the more we have to pay for it. No politician from any party should be running […]

The mystery of a massive 9Gt of CO2 that came and went — could it be phytoplankton?

There is a mystery peak in global CO2 levels in 1990. For some reason from 1989 suddenly global carbon levels jumped higher than they normal would and by 9,000 million tonnes (that’s equivalent to 2,500 mT of carbon)*. It’s only a little blip in an upward line, but as a deviation from the long steady norm, it’s a dramatic change (see the second graph below). Within a few years the excess disappeared and the reasonably straight line increase in CO2 resumed. The sudden jump is equivalent to nearly half of our total annual human fossil fuel emissions. Nothing about this peak fits with the timing of human induced fossil fuel emissions. These were not big years in our output (indeed it coincides with the collapse of the soviet block when inefficient Russian industry was shut down) .

The mystery of the massive CO2 bubble exposes how little we know about why CO2 levels rise and fall, and whether human emissions make much difference. The world is spending $4 billion dollars a day trying to change this global CO2 level of 0.04% (400ppm) but apparently other large forces are at work pushing up CO2, and then absorbing […]

New Science 18: Finally climate sensitivity calculated at just one tenth of official estimates.

Image: NASA

In years to come it may be recognized that this blog post produced the first modeled accurate figure for climate sensitivity. Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity sounds dry, but it’s the driving theme, the holy grail of climate science. The accurate figure (whatever it is) summarizes the whole entirety of carbon dioxide’s atmospheric importance. That number determines whether we are headed for a champagne picnic or a baking apocalypse.

To calculate a better estimate, David identified the flaws of the conventional basic model, and rebuilt it. The basic climate model is the top-down approach looking at inputs and outputs of the whole system. It defines the culture and textbooks of the modern global warming movement. GCMs (the big hairy coupled global models) are bottom-up approaches, doomed to failure by trying to add up every detail and ending up drowning in mile-high uncertainty bands. But the GCMs are ultimately tweaked to arrive at a similar ballpark climate sensitivity as the textbook model for the “basic physics” dictates. Hence this core model is where the debate needs to be. (Everyone knows the GCMs are broken.)

For decades the world of conventional climate research has been stuck in a groundhog day […]

54% of Australians skeptics of man-made global warming, 80% don’t donate to environment or vote for it

The devastating result of the latest CSIRO survey: 54% of Australians don’t believe the experts at the IPCC, and are not convinced that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. Starkly, only 28% of Liberal voters agree with Malcolm Turnbull. Amazingly 40% of Labor voters and even a quarter of green voters don’t accept the IPCC litany. Presumably they think humans have some effect but are not the major cause.

More importantly, even most of those who believe are not motivated. When it comes to spending money on the environment, 80% of Australians don’t voluntarily do it and 80% don’t care enough to change their vote because of this issue. Despite all the relentless propaganda, despite all the government funded groups being in lock-step, the trends are slowly falling for believers (from 2010-2014), though not “statistically significantly”. (Though longer term studies from 1990 to now show that falling trend).

The survey: CSIRO — Australian attitudes to Climate Change, 2015 PDF

Don’t miss below how a climate science professor reveals that most of the people he knows just follow their political team’s fashions. How telling? Also below, see how the ABC spins this to meaninglessness to support the […]

UN wants an ‘international tribunal of climate justice’ — power to tell democracies what to do

Thus do the claws of centralized big-government grow. I’s a committee, then a tribunal, then one day, a court?

An actual international court would end up being corruption-in-a-can — (think FIFA but with more money). The only way any legal system can work is with one law for all. As soon as countries can have individual targets, clauses and excuses, the wheeling and dealing begins. But a climate court won’t even pretend to start with an even playing field.

The danger of a system that doesn’t have “one rule for all” is already obvious in western democracies, where legal rights are being eroded by individual licensing systems. One farmer speaks out, and is slapped with 33 conditions that other farms don’t have to meet — their cash flow is cut and they slowly bleed dry, fighting all the while, and constantly being offered the possibility of better conditions “any month now”. Other farmers become afraid to speak, lest they get targeted. The Bureaucrats divide and conquer and become Kingmakers.

Daily Mail writes on the International Tribunal of Climate Justice — Sara Malm

The United Nations may launch an International Tribunal of Climate Justice which could see states […]

Phillippe Verdier, journalist, weatherman, sacked for daring to be skeptical

How they do overplay their hand.

Is there any better proof of how fragile the facade is? The evidence for the Big Scare Campaign is so pathetically weak that it cannot cope with one weatherman who writes a critical book. They are so afraid they did not even muddy the waters — it’s obvious why he was sacked. Verdier was suspended immediately after he launched his skeptical book. Now a month later, sacked.

From France24:

“I put myself in the path of COP21, which is a bulldozer, and this is the result,” Verdier told RTL radio station in October.

Right now thousands of people in France are wondering why being a skeptical journalist (as he calls himself) is such a crime. They are also wondering how many other meteorologists are skeptical but too afraid to speak out.

One thing everyone knows for sure now is that France24 is definitely not telling them the whole story about global warming. (See Sputnik News, no paywall)

French weatherman Philippe Verdier sacked for being a climate sceptic

A French weatherman has broadcast the news of his own sacking, saying he had been fired for writing a book challenging climate change. […]

New Science 17: Solving the mystery of the missing “Hot spot”

Things are hotting up. After all the hard work of the past few posts, the payoff begins. By solving the flaws inherent in the basic conventional model we solve some of its biggest missed-predictions. And the clincher for conventional models has always been the missing hot spot. Without it, over half the projected warming just vanishes. And if it is telling the tale of a negative type of feedback instead of a positive one, then all bets are off — not three degrees, not even one degree, it’s more like “half” a degree. Go panic about that.

Here David gets into the empirical data — the radiosondes, the satellites, and shows how his model fits their results, whereas the establishment models have repeatedly been forced to deny them. Twenty eight million radiosondes get the wrong results: how many ways can we adjust them? Tweak that cold bias, blend in the wind shear, change the color-scales, homogenize the heck. Smooth, sort, shovel and grind those graphs. The fingerprint of CO2 was everywhere in 2005, though gradually became the non-unique signal of any kind of warming, but it still wasn’t there. It kept being “found”, though it was never reported missing. […]

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