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This week XKCD (a popular Geek comic site) posted an epic cartoon called “A Timeline Of Earth’s Average Temperature”. It was a cutesy long godzilla hockey-stick — “scary” to the unwary.
It’s easy to make a scary historical-looking temperature graph — so easy that the artist probably didn’t even know how. (Thank Shakun, Marcott, Annan, Hadcrut and the IPCC for doing the tricky part.) First, guesstimate temperatures over last 20,000 years with anything at hand: tree-rings, ice bubbles, coral, fossilized tea leaves, whatever. Blend. Then stop the proxies, tack on thermometer data that was recorded in a different way with different errors and a very different response to faster temperature changes. Finally, launch that line into the future with unvalidated, skillless multivariate models that predict a fingerprint which 28 million weather balloons can’t find. Then take the models that didn’t work for the last twenty years, and run with the errors to the next century… Voila!
I took the 14,000 pixel cartoon and squeezed it to one shot that shows the curve that matters. See the error bars? Me neither.
(But who needs an uncertainty range when you have faith?)
Click to enlarge.
The secret to a good hockey-stick […]
We are ramping up the end of this series because we’ve been informed that both of David’s papers will be published in October — one on the error in the climate models and one on the notch delay solar theory.
There are emphatic (and ignorant) claims that David’s predictions have failed, and a flaw was found — both are wrong. After all that fuss and pointless flamewars, his prediction remains almost exactly the same as it was in 2014. It is still untested. It is a strange coincidence of timing that the theory is up for a critical trial so definitively, so soon, but there it is. The fall in solar radiation that happened in 2004 is one of the three largest in 400 years. We are waiting to see if that will have an effect, after the expected delay of one sunspot cycle. For a real scientist there is no shame in putting an idea up on the chopping block. Hypothesize, test, and observe. As David says: “If the predicted cooling does not eventuate then the notch-delay hypothesis is false.” Without real predictions, it’s not real science.
But prediction is a risky business. There are so many ways […]
It’s another Green market wonder story:
The government announced last year that it would extend grants for electric cars for a further two years but halved the payments to £2,500. Around 17,500 cars were registered in the first three months of the year as motorists took advantage of the grants before they were cut.
… According to Department for Transport statistics, between April and June 4,200 plug-in cars were sold – the lowest for two years.
Biofuels international
— GWPF
Environmental reporters seem a bit flummoxed as to how markets work. When times are booming it’s because of “demand”. (Don’t say the word subsidy)
Green vehicle demand revs up as UK electric car sales quadruple
2014 saw a surge in UK green car sales due to increased choice and a demand for lower costs and higher efficiency, reports Edie.net
When the sales disappear, so do mentions of buyers who want “higher efficiency”. Parliament gets the blame, though it never seemed to get the credit.
Spot the economic genius in 2015:
[Nick] Clegg said: “The extremely low running costs of these cars help drivers save money. […]
Giant climate funds issue giant press releases but not much else.The pledges aren’t being kept, hardly any money is being handed out. The posterchild drowning Islands are being left dangling in danger because the forms are too complicated.
Everyone wants to save the world, but not enough to make the forms simpler: Red tape’ locking small island states out of billions in climate funds
Many small developing countries are so administratively stretched that they cannot fill in all the complex forms needed to access climate money to help them to reduce emissions and adapt to increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather.
Small Pacific Islands will drown in red tape before they drown in a rising ocean:
Although billions of dollars of climate money is theoretically available, in practice red tape and paperwork makes it is extremely hard and slow to get hold of, says the Commonwealth Secretariat, the central institution of the 53 Commonwealth countries, who are among the hardest hit by climate change.
UN priorities? What’s more important — collecting funds to save the Islands, or saving the actual islands…
Fiji’s high commissioner in London, Jitoko Tikolevu, said the process […]
Remember the government funded play “Kill The Deniers”? They’re back!
This time they’ve got a talkie-dance video (is it funded by the ACT government again? I don’t know). They’re launching it today in Canberra (Weds 21st). See it below — at first glance I thought David Finnigan was up to his deep game — living satire — where he pretends to mock skeptics while he’s really satirizing the Global Worriers, post modern art, and pointless government funding. It could be, but this one looks more like a therapy session. Let’s work through the pain, and pretend the artistes paid for childish drama are the victims of meanie words…
But cynically, seriously, maybe climate skeptics were the only ones who paid any attention last time, and this is just a gambit for a link from Andrew Bolt?
Note the credits:
Words by Andrew Bolt, Joanne Nova, and Bishop Hill and all the commenters
The narrative is about someone with a bag on their head who gets uncovered, does a big stretch, dances around some cardboard heads, then she stops and they put the bag back on. Plotless. (You expected a plot, you philistine?)
Andrew Bolt is […]
This is what economic growth means, and what some regressives fear so much.
How much would money would you have to be offered to give up the Internet for the rest of your days?
We are all rich beyond the wildest dreams of yesterdays Kings.
Thanks to The Fund for American Studies.
9.5 out of 10 based on 53 ratings
This is the devastating question few surveyors are willing to ask. Survey teams usually use mindless motherhood questions instead, like whether we “believe” in climate change. (Who doesn’t?) Or they ask if we want clean energy… (doh, like I want my energy dirty?) But the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research actually did a nationally representative poll of 1097 adults.
Everyone wants a nice climate, but hardly anyone wants to pay for it:
When asked whether they would support a monthly fee on their electric bill to combat climate change, 42 percent of respondents are unwilling to pay even $1. Twenty-nine percent would pay $20, an amount roughly equivalent to what the federal government estimates the damages from climate change would be on each household. And, 20 percent indicate they are willing to pay $50 per month. Party affiliation is the main determinant of how much people are willing to pay, not education, income, or geographic location. Democrats are consistently willing to pay more than Republicans.
The answer has flummoxed people. Sam Ori in the Wall St Journal can’t make sense of it:
This is […]
Nicolas Sarcozy
This is big. The French press today is full of stories on the former President Nicolas Sarkozy “coming out as a skeptic”. He’s running again for President, and can see the ocean of votes in speaking out against political correctness. Sarcozy will have watched the rise of Marine Le Pen and of Donald Trump. The game has changed.
Pandering to the Global Bullies no longer works. Once the fear of being called a “climate denier” is gone, there is nothing to stop half of the political divide from a phase change. (Well, nothing at least apart from lobbying, donations and gifts from the $1.5 Trillion dollar Green Machine). The Brexit shock spreads. Democracy is not dead yet. — Hat tips to Phillip and to Benoît. ROM.
French voters will get a real choice:
Sarkozy comes out of the closet as a climate skeptic
Presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy reckons that climate change is not caused by man and that the world has far bigger problems on its hands than global warming.
Nicolas Sarkozy, who is fighting to regain the presidency that he lost to François Hollande in 2012, has finally come out of the […]
The Global Cooling Scare of the 1970s was real, there was a consensus, and it was all over the media. It flies in the face of the man-made warming campaign. After World War II there was a massive industrial escalation in the West. And just as coal fired power was going in everywhere, the world damnwell cooled by -0.3°C. It’s obvious that the modern Climate Witches don’t want people bringing this up.
…
Where’s that cooling gone? The modern NASA GISS dataset adjusted it away:
What happened to 40 years of cooling from WWII onewards?
That’s the magic of homogenisation.
In 2008, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck published “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” . The Myth paper “found” that from 1965 through 1979, there were only 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers. It was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), showing how pathetically weak the caliber of review is there. Kenneth Richard searched, found and documents 220 papers, not 7 in the same period. He estimates there are probably many more.
The Connolley there is none other than the William Connolly who abused Wikipedia’s editing rules — barred 2,000 other […]
In his maiden speech as a new Senator, Malcolm Roberts looks sharp, stands tall, and fires his words precisely, and articulately. He oozes determination.
He’s put in long hours for years to be there and he knows exactly why he’s there. James Jeffrey in The Australian described it as “impassioned”, delivered with “the pyrotechnic power of his larynx”:
Roberts gave a speech that left even his leader, Pauline Hanson, with big shoes to fill. He quoted John Cleese, former US president Andrew Jackson and Banjo Paterson, and compared himself to Socrates. Climate change was boomingly dismissed as “a scam”.
His remarks on climate science are in the first ten minutes: Roberts strength is his reasoning — his focus on cause and effect. He’s right to draw attention to the failed predictions of Flannery and Karoly; he’s right to talk about the pause, and the cooling from WWII to the late 70s.
He’s right to question the sacred institutions like the BOM and their inexplicable and unreplicatable adjustments.
He’s right to keep asking for the data that shows that human use of hydrocarbon fuels affects the climate. Its 2,447 days since I asked if there was any evidence. To […]
Malcolm Roberts will give his maiden Senate speech tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5pm at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra. To reserve seating contact Leon Ashby leon.ashby AT aph.gov.au or phone (02) 6277 3151. He has asked for updated graphs of the UAH data for Australia. His speech may be available via the APH website. (h/t Jim S)
Luckily for us the UAH satellite database can be filtered to track temperatures in the lower troposphere over the Australian land mass. Thanks to John Christy for providing an Australian specific dataset.
We’ve put out a third of all the CO2 homosapiens has ever made in the last 20 years, and it apparently has made no meaningful difference to temperatures here. We’ve put out 60% of all our CO2 since the satellite record began.
Here is the full Australian monthly data from 1979 – now for all seasons graphed below. There are breathless news articles hyping every hot month, every hot week, for records in every little region, and even for a single record hot nights, but no press release to say that temperatures in Australia have not really changed in a meaningful way since 1995.
Thanks to KensKingdom […]
An apt caption:
“PHOTO: The low-lying islands of the Pacific are on the frontline of the fight against climate change. (ABC News: Chris Uhlmann)“
PHOTO: The low-lying islands of the Pacific are on the frontline of the fight against climate change. (ABC News: Chris Uhlmann)
It seems an expensive way to stop tsunami’s.
Still, if you have to run for the not so low-lying hills in the background, perhaps the shiny black sea-walls might still be useful.
But this is what it’s all about. Pacific Islanders play the game, speak the fear, and admonish those who don’t buy them enough goodies. The Chinese heroes offer nice cars and a sports centre. (That’ll really slow the seas and save the corals).
Turnbull turns up to give away $80 million extra dollars of other people’s money, the islanders seem happy, and he is nearly sorta forgiven by the ABC.
It’s hard not to be afraid of climate change when you get free cars.
Australia could still win hearts at climate change forum — ABC
Nearby stood a shiny new fleet of MG SUVs, gifted by China to Micronesia to ferry about the leaders and assorted dignitaries from […]
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9.2 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
Someone needs to manage the Internet, and come September 30, no one is quite sure who will be. Sounds bizarre — an entity worth millions?
Once upon a time, a guy called Jon Postel managed the Net (all the domain names) but he died in 1998 and that job went to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Since 1998, that’s been a part of the US Dept of Commerce. They get to decide who gets to use all the dot-somethings (eg, .com, .au, .cpa). ICANN can award them to groups or run an auction and pocket that cash. It is a monopoly, and there are conflicts there. The contract with the Dept of Commerce expires on Sept 30. In a normal world you’d expect the superpower-in-charge to roll that one over unless there was a big payoff for letting it go, or a foreign army on the beaches.
If the US government isn’t in control of ICANN, it can’t run as a separate monopoly thanks to US antitrust laws. So immediately ICANN is set “free” it will need to find a government to adopt it, so it has exemption from anti-trust laws (and more to the point, […]
The current state of play in the EU, thanks to the GWPF: The Germans have quietly given up on their own hard climate targets. They have 30% renewables, the most expensive electrons in the world, and their emissions are about the same as five years ago. The EU, climate champion, can’t even agree among the member states about how to ratify the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile the Turks are planning to build 80 new coal fired power stations (eighty!) and are subsidizing them up the kazoo. Turkey wants to use its low grade lignite deposits instead of Russian gas. After the recent purges, no one wants to criticize Erdogan, plus the energy minister happens to be President Erdogans son-in-law.
The E.U.’s over-arching ambitions, To change climate by cutting emissions, Is a pointless own-goal, When others use coal, As they please,and with no inhibitions.
— Ruairi
Greens are angry that Germany dropped real targets in Climate Action Plan — call new plan a “Toothless-tiger-skin-rug”:
[CleanEnergyWire] The final version of the German Environment Ministry’s Climate Action Plan has been published. But concrete targets included in previous drafts have been removed, prompting the Green Party to describe the […]
It’s “depressing”, “hopeless” and “dismal”
The climate debate is more polarised than ever. David Roberts at Vox is very honest about the challenges believers face to solve the deep partisan political divide. But despite all the grants and funding to solve this problem, the experts miss the obvious. I explain below why polarization will solve itself. Indeed, all their best efforts to reduce polarization in the climate debate are creating the polarization. It takes a sustained effort and millions of dollars to keep a false belief alive.
Now Dunlap and McCright (along with Oklahoma State’s Jerrod Yarosh) have updated their study, giving us a fresh look at public opinion on climate change at the end of the Obama era.
The findings are dismal, if not very surprising: Polarization only accelerated after 2008, the gap between the parties is wider than ever, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores politicians. It tracks the voting records of members of Congress. Way back in 1970 both sides of politics wanted to approve environmental legislation about equally.
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
Public opinion has a similar trend. Here are Gallup poll […]
A survey in Asia found that 69% of financial institutions there don’t bother with assessing climate change risks when considering financing projects. Either these bankers have missed the last 20 years of IPCC messaging (careless inattentive bankers), or they’ve seen it and they know it’s baloney (skeptical bankers). Hmmm. What’s more likely?
Looks like two thirds of Asian banks don’t believe the IPCC:
[The new survey] …undertaken by Asia Research and Engagement with support of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, … found that 31 per cent of the institutions factored climate change risks into their financing operations, with 61 per cent of banks referring to green products and 56 per cent providing some quantification of their exposure.
It said financial institution were factoring climate change risks into their policies and offered green finance products. But only over a quarter of banks referred to climate change factors as a reason to limit financing .…
The bottom line is always where the money goes.
So over two thirds of financial institutions couldn’t care less about those forecasts of beachside apartments sinking under the waves, or cities becoming unlivable, nor of coal mines supposedly going broke. Nor […]
Last year there were warnings from crop modelers in Nature that heat kills wheat and yields were going to fall in the “near future”, if temperatures rose. In fact global warming was “already slowing wheat gains”. What followed was a record El Nino, and 2015 was the hottest ever year, with 2016 vying to beat it. But instead of wheat doom, this month the USDA forecasts a record yield of wheat with bumper crops globally. Wheat output has grown in Australia, the US, Russia, Ukraine, everywhere pretty much, except the EU where it has been too rainy. Where are the mea culpas? h/t to the GWPF
Jan 2015, published in Nature. “Global Wheat Yield May Drop as Temperatures Rise”
“… researchers are now letting farmers know that the world’s wheat yields are excepted decline in the near future, with the world standing to lose six percent of its wheat crop for every degree Celsius that the annual global temperature increases.
“The simulations with the multi-crop models showed that warming is already slowing yield gains, despite observed yield increases in the past, at a majority of wheat-growing locations across the globe,” researcher Senthold Asseng, at the University […]
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7.8 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
Today the Paris Agreement jumped from including 1.1% of global emissions to 39%. It’s part of the performance art, the Grand Act. Including those emissions means nothing as far as emissions go (China will keep putting out more), but it carries political leverage unless we expose the game.
Make no mistake: there is nothing at all legally binding about the Paris Agreement, but it can be politically binding — like a Chastity Vow. Right now, it’s about shame and social standing, not about megatons, but inasmuch as bluff and bluster can pull it off, the UN will eventually want the shapeshifting chastity vow to be treated as a legal force.
This soft vow has the advantage that is completely two faced — it can be all things to all people. To the green-passionate crowd it will be a historic, landmark agreement of the world working together. That’s “momentum”. To the free world, it may look like a failure, but that’s an advantage — it disarms the protests. Watch the Pea — (it’s really a bee). The sting is hidden. That’s ACT III.
After the Copenhagen disaster, the Global Worriers realized that they would have to sneak in a mechanism to […]
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