|
|
Stating the bleeding obvious about climate science earns headlines
Tony Abbott merely states what no real scientist could argue with. Things are not quite as settled in climate science as people say. For this tiny deviation from the permitted line he is isolated and depicted in a headline as “questioning science” when he’s really just questioning propaganda lines.
The editors of both AAP and The Australian could have chosen a different headline: Abbott declares “we only have one planet”. But in headline-world, which is often the only line people will read, Abbott is made out to be saying something risky. Imagine, I am Spartacus, if every single conservative politician said “of course — Climate science isn’t perfect.” But almost none of them have the balls.
Abbott questions climate change science
AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS, The Australian
Tony Abbott has questioned the “so-called settled” science about climate change, a month after dropping his view that Australia should pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
The former prime minister insisted he was a realist when asked about his position on climate change during his election campaign launch in Manly on Friday.
“The so-called […]
The alarmist case is so strong they will Not Discuss It.
Right now, the world is going to hell and expert scientists need to convince the doubting masses that they face a dire threat. They have rock solid evidence. Do they:
Patiently answer questions with graphs and data. or Shout “fire” and ask for 89 trillion dollars, then tar those who disagree as pedophile-nazi-loving-idiots, throw a tanty and refuse to answer questions.
Obviously, expert scientists make mistakes.
Michael Bastasch | The Daily Caller
Climate Alarmists refuse to debate skeptics: “We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real. It is real. We need to act now or the consequences will be catastrophic,” reads the letter signed by 60 self-described “campaigners.”
Beware — balanced articles can kill people, cause floods! Run, Run…
From the letter:
In the interests of “balance”, the media often feels the need to include those who outright deny the reality of human-triggered climate change.
Balance implies equal weight. But this then creates a false equivalence between an overwhelming scientific consensus and a lobby, heavily funded by vested interests, that exists simply […]
Despite 20 years of non-stop propaganda and belligerent namecalling, strangely, expert green policies have achieved exactly nothing of what they said they aimed for. Coal provided 38% of our power in 1998 and it is still the same 38% in 2017. The non-fossil fuel sector has actually declined slightly as nukes decrease.
We spent billions doing exactly what was asked. Perhaps following the advice of people who think the debate is over and “denier” is a scientific term might not be the best national energy policy?
Fuel shares in global power generation for the last 20 years | BP Energy Review, 2018.
Long-term dominance of fossil fuels unchallenged
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
Global demand for coal and gas to generate electricity was back on the rise last year …
Most striking had been the failure of renewable energy to make an impact on the fossil fuels share of power generation, BP group chief economist Spencer Dale said.
“Despite the extraordinary (global) growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in […]
BHP is throwing its weight around to stop the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) saying what most miners want on climate change.
What coal company wants lobbyists not to lobby for coal?
The gauntlet is down — Which heavyweight will blink first?
In one corner — The MCA — the main lobby group for miners. It’s very effective, and wants to dump the renewables target (“yay” say most miners!). In the other corner — BHP –which has just threatened to quit unless the MCA stops being skeptical of climate change.
Thing is, BHP is the largest member of the MCA, providing 17% of the funding. The colossal miner is so big, it can do its own deals. Essentially, the Minerals Council needs BHP more than BHP needs the Minerals Council. BHP is testing it’s power.
A tough test for the MCA
In Australia, the MCA is influential enough that their fierce anti-mining tax campaign helped to bring down a Prime Minister and when industries want to threaten governments they talk of running a campaign “like it”.
If they fold and serve their largest client, effectively burning off almost all their smaller clients, then the smaller clients should quit and […]
Poor Nick Kilvert at the ABC again, finds climate yeti’s everywhere — that imaginary creature, the converted skeptic. This is an important missing link in the fictional narrative — obviously if The Evidence Is Over-bloody-Whelming, there will be a stream of people gradually awakening. Alas, Kilvert doesn’t realize the traffic is all the other way, an exodus, and there is no single outspoken skeptic that has convincingly switched the other way. The best he can do is drag out the self-declared convert Richard Muller who got away with his skeptic facade for while, until awkward quotes surfaced from during his skeptic days where he declared that fossil fuels were the “greatest pollutant of human history”. He was outed five years ago, but alas, Kilvert apparently still hasn’t got an internet connection and didn’t think to look. If only Kilvert could have emailed me?
The headline:
“Once were sceptics: What convinced these scientists that climate change is real? “
To which I might say “Once were journalists: Why don’t these writers do any research any more?”
This is as good as it gets. Muller is the “star” convert. He and his whole team were doubting skeptics:
In 2010, Professor […]
Matt Ridley is about as gentlemanly, polite and sane a man as you’ve ever likely to meet — which is exactly why the mob are so afraid of letting him speak. Ridley even agrees that humans have caused most of the warming in the last fifty years (I shall have to talk to him about that). But this middle position is a potent threat. He’s walking the very ground that threatens the Green Blob — there are no subsidy trains in middle land. There’s no urgency, no gravy, and yet it’s so temptingly sensible, which is why the minions work hard to silence him. He can’t be ignored as “fringe”:
The National Review — Julie Kelly
“I’ve written about many controversial issues during my career,” Ridley said. “Never, have I ever experienced anything like what happens when you write about climate, which is a systematic and organized attempt to blacken your name rather than your arguments, and to try to pressure any outlet that publishes me into not publishing me any more.” A group of activists and scientists is urging the Times (U.K.) to stop publishing a regular column authored by Ridley because his views […]
Dr Duane Thresher who worked seven years at NASA GISS describes a culture of self serving rent-seekers, mismanagement and incompetence. These are the top experts in the climate science field that we are supposed to accept without questioning. Those who say they are working to “save the planet” care more about their junckets than they do about the data or their “best” model.
NASA GISS’s most advanced climate model is run from the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Thresher recounts a story from someone on the inside:
“NASA GISS’s climate model — named Model E, an intentional play on the word “muddle” — is called the “jungle” because it is so badly coded.” I know this to be true from my own extensive experience programming it (I tried to fix as much as I could…).
Thresher writes about how the team was happy to take taxpayer funds and spend it on unnecessary conferences which were “loads of fun” while they scrimped and saved on things like data security and incompetent tech staff. Secretaries and mail boys were hired for jobs they were not qualified for. At one point data was lost when exposed plumbing leaked in the computer […]
Let’s get “certainty” — dump the RET.
Chris Kenny in The Weekend Australian puts almost all the pieces together. This is self-sacrificial, pointless, and the RET is the problem because the subsidies allow renewables to drive out true baseload generation. The so-called hunt for “certainty” is a hunt for high prices because no one will speak the obvious “Dump the Renewable Energy Target”.
Dumping green folly will secure energy future, reboot economy
We are an energy-rich nation. Last year we exported 388 million tonnes of coal (valued at $35 billion) to supply affordable and reliable energy to countries such as Japan, China, South Korea and India. Our liquefied natural gas exports are doubling from 30 million tonnes a couple of years ago to almost 80 million tonnes (valued at $42bn) by 2019.
Australia also remains one of the largest exporters of uranium…
While we happily export our energy advantage, we have deliberately sacrificed it at home.
Turnbull — doing exactly the wrong thing after Trump won:
Astonishingly, less than a day after Donald Trump won the US election promising to abandon Paris, Malcolm Turnbull announced Australia’s ratification. The Prime Minister thumbed his […]
Gore’s a modern day soothsayer with powerpoint
Thanks to CFACT I was lucky enough to get to see Al Gore in Melbourne yesterday (and even luckier to see Climate Hustle the night before and meet some great people!). Gore wanted everyone to spread the word, but banned anyone recording him. (The staff actively patrolled for wayward cameras. We’d love to have helped share Gore’s message, but we would have been kicked out for doing so).
The intrepid Marc Morano even managed to meet Al in an inconvenient encounter:
Marc Morano kindly offered Al Gore a copy of Climate Hustle, (which might have helped him feel a lot better about the future). Gore refused to take it. Possibly, he’s not that interested in climate change.
What I saw was nearly a whole hour of primal weather-porn – gratuitous, non-stop, scenes from the apocalypse, glowing clouds boiled about incandescent forests, and giant drains in the sky emptied massive clouds in a flash. Glaciers crumbled before our eyes. Poor victims were stuck in boiling tar on hot roads, they crawled out of mud slides, and were dragged in spectacular rescues from cars being swallowed by turbulent floods. Biblical is the word.
Gullible, […]
In 2016 67% of meteorologists said that humans have caused most or all climate change and The Guardian headlined that there was a Growing Consensus among Meteorologists. In 2017 that fell to only 49%. The Guardian said nothing.
….
In 2016 29% of meteorologists thought climate change was largely or entirely man-made, but that fell to only 15% this year.
Figure how this result fits with the idea of the overwhelming evidence and 97% consensus. Which group on the planet after climate scientists should be the second profession to “get it” — how about meteorologists?
So either:
1. meteorologists are really stupid, or
2. meteorologists know how hard it is to predict the climate.
8.7 out of 10 based on 88 ratings […]
I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story.
Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that.
Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal is to help people cope with what’s been called “climate grief” — anxiety, sadness, depression, and other emotions provoked by awareness of the planet’s march toward a hotter,… future…
What she found was that feelings of sadness and anxiety, and even literal nightmares, were common. Last year, with the help of her partner, Aimee Reau, Schmidt developed a nine-step program for building resiliency loosely modeled on AA…
But this is big:
About a dozen people attend each session and 50 subscribe to its mailings.
If I get 12 people to my house, and have 12,000 subscribers, do you think Grist will write it up?
Perhaps they have some good results?
Perhaps not:
Schmidt, who now works as an outreach coordinator at the environmental group HEAL […]
The Milgram Experiment. Image Wikimedia.
The chilling Milgram experiments have been replicated, and yet again, 9 out of 10 are willing to inflict electric shocks and pain on another person. In these infamous experiments the power of a white lab coat was enough to get more than half the participants (26 out of 40) to deliver a fatal shock (the participants didn’t realize the shock was faked, and the victim an actor).
This willingness to obey authority is both a great strength of humanity when authority is worthy and yet leads to the darkest abyss when it is not.
By nature, we are largely empathetic creatures: most people really don’t want to cause pain, they get quite upset themselves in the process. Yet many people will override this inbuilt ethical wiring if a person in a position of authority insist they do. It’s time we talked about ways to train people to resist. There is hope as outlined below in a different study from last year.
Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey
Press Release: The title is direct, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?” and the answer, according to the […]
More Fake News from the NY Times
Here’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”.
This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog.
In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’
So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else.
“People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.”
What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”:
Oh the burden! Global Warming Saviours know they are smarter than everyone else
So much of what drives the cult of climate fear is the rewarding affirmation that they are intellectually gifted. “Pat me on the back! Tell me how smart I am!” It fills the low-self-esteem vacuum of a B-grade brain or an untrained naive mind. It’s a sugar-hit to the undisciplined being, looking for the easy road to social acceptance and glory.
The New Nostradamus of the North has caught a Huff Po comedian Xavier Toby suggesting that “maybe we need to lie” for the climate. There is no sign of satire.
In order for us to start acting on climate change then, maybe we need to tell a few lies.
Advertising does lie to us all the time. The only difference with this issue is that instead of trying to convince us to buy stuff we don’t need and is often very harmful to us, by jazzing up the campaign against climate change, we’d be saving the planet and ourselves.
So let’s rename climate change: ‘lower energy bills’, ‘higher superannuation’, and ‘healthier children for generations to come’.
So instead […]
A new MIT report suggests a better way to use coal in power-stations and potentially cut CO2 emissions by 50%. The process involves gasifying coal and producing electricity in one process at the same site. The coal only has to be heated once, and the electricity comes from a fuel cell, not a fire — it’s a chemical reaction across a membrane. The output is potentially much more efficient, and makes no ash. The researchers argue we could get twice as much electricity for each ton of coal burned. Currently coal fired power pulls out 30% of the chemical energy in coal, but coupling these two processes might increase it to 55-60%.
This report is based on simulations, but the separate processes are already well developed and running. The next step would be a fully functioning pilot plant to put the two together and test the idea. If there was the political will it could be done in a few years. There probably won’t be.
The Greens of course will hate the idea because the Evil-Factor of coal is near 100%.
In the eco-collectivist-world, cutting “carbon” is important, but apparently not as important as propping up a dependent lobby group […]
Across the West, there is a layer of smart-but-busy intellects who have not been involved in the climate debate. For one reason or another they’ve been too busy setting up IPO’s, doing research projects, or directing companies in perhaps technology, mining or banking, and generally being productive. It is excellent to see some of this caliber adding their brain-power and resources to the public arena. Especially so in Australia, where the debate is almost entirely bare-bones-volunteers versus billion-dollar-institutions, and where the culture of philanthropy is not well developed compared to the US.
This unusual advert was placed in The Australian today. In a normal world, investigative journalists would have already interviewed and discussed views like these, but in the hyperbolic, politicized and religious world of climate-alarm it was simpler for productive people to just get on with it, talk to their peers and make it happen.
Click to enlarge, or read the text below.
Psychology and The New Climate Alarm
Lowell Ponte’s 1975 book warns:
“Global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is […]
UPDATE Dan Kahan has replied in Comment #54.
So much for the theory that skeptics are dumb or uninformed. Fox News reports that a new study shows that when people are quizzed about climate science, the skeptics outscored the believers.
Dan Kahan at Yale did the study on 2,000 people, but with only nine questions, so there is limited insight here, but it fits with his previous study which found people who knew more about maths and science were more likely to be skeptical. Readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments) are likely to have hard science degrees. The world is slowly waking up to the fact that the skeptics are more knowledgeable about science.
In a proper science quiz, the gap would probably be even larger. On two of the nine questions, skeptics got the science right. But believers “outscored” skeptics at repeating the propaganda (which shouldn’t be a question in a survey about scientific knowledge). I’d like to see all nine questions (can anyone find a preprint or the paper?)
Skeptics get science right:
One question, for instance, asked if scientists believe that warming would […]
So much for the consensus. In 2012 The Geological Society of Australia (GSA) was one of the few associations to make a slightly skeptical position on climate. For poking their heads above the parapet they’ve had years of headache and debate, and finally have issued a statement saying they have given up entirely on putting out any statement. The debate is so furious and divisive that no position could be agreed on. (I wonder exactly how many of their members are fans of climate models? Was this the work of just a few zealous believers?) I think I’ve hardly ever met a geologist who wasn’t somewhat skeptical.
The back story is that, like most science associations, in 2009 the GSA chanted the litany. (Their 2009 statement is here). They wrote that governments should take strong action to reduce CO2 and that meant paying geologists more to do research and sit on plum advisory committees. How predictable…
1. That strong action be taken at all levels, including government, industry, and individuals to substantially reduce the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions and to mitigate the likely social and environmental effects of increasing atmospheric CO2.
2. That Earth Scientists with appropriate expertise […]
Look out, Australia might trim a tiny slice from the Tithe to the Gods of Weather (protest coming)
The Australian budget is in dire straits after the Rudd-Gillard years of promised surpluses but exploding arithmetic. The Commission of Audit is here to test public reaction to all the possible ways of paying off the Labor debt. Somehow, it missed the biggest cherry waiting to be plucked. We could save billions if the the Abbott Government become more rigorously scientific. Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.
“Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.”
I expect the Greens will join me in declaring that if the Abbott government cared about the environment it would immediately launch a royal commission, a real audit, or an independent investigation into the effect of carbon dioxide. Only the best science for the planet, right? All funding to environmental programs dependent on unverified research should be frozen until the audit is finished. Easy eh? Let me be PM for a day. :- )
But apparently the sacred carbon cow must […]
It’s one rule for you, and another for their friends. If a coal plant was wiping out thousands of birds and bats you can be sure Greenpeace would be launching a campaign. But when an industrial turbine with blade-tips travelling at 180mph does the killing, who cares?
The law for normals makes it expensive to kill birds and bats:
“Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, BP was fined $100 million for the damage it caused to bird populations in the area, both migratory and resident. — AlaskaDispatch
“Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay $600,000 in penalties after approximately 85 migratory birds died of exposure to hydrocarbons at some of its natural gas facilities across the Midwest. — NY Times
And it was going to get expensive for windfarms:
“Nov 22 2013 Duke Energy has agreed to pay a $1 million fine for killing 14 eagles and 149 other birds at two Wyoming wind farms. — audublog
That was the first time a windfarm got pinged. And it works out to be about $6000 a bird. Could get expensive, eh?
“The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that 440,000 birds are […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments