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Of seventy four million deaths (that is quite some study) 7.7% of all deaths could be blamed on “non-optimal” temperatures according to Gasparrini et al in the Lancet. But look closely, and 7.3% of deaths were due to the cold and only 0.4% were due to the heat.
This may be part of the reason people retire to Florida, and not so much to Barrow, Alaska.
The biggest killers were not the heat waves that score the headlines, but the moderate cold. Winter kills. (Time to ban winter?)
Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather
Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.
“It’s often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous research focusing on the effects of extreme heat waves,” says lead author Dr Antonio Gasparrini from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. “Our findings, from […]
The new UWA logo?
Bizarrely the UWA debacle has opened many eyes in Australia. People who have never mentioned the climate debate to me are now approaching me to talk about it — aghast that something so tame was treated like an outbreak of Ebola.
The over-reaction to Lomborg’s Consensus Centre is priceless — it has exposed just how much the pro-climate-crisis team are scared of even the tiniest deviation from their religious doctrine. They depend so entirely on their unchallenged “university” authority that the threat of any official dissent could cause the collapse of the whole facade. (What a disaster.)
Figure just how innocuous and banal their target was: The Consensus Centre at UWA wasn’t even going to discuss the climate. Lomborg wasn’t going to work there, he wasn’t going to be paid a salary, and he completely accepts the IPCC scientific position, wild exaggerations and all. He’s not a climate scientist and doesn’t pretend to be one. He is a political scientist who discusses economics. On other campuses and in other contexts, Lomborg tries to find ways to help the environment with smarter spending. Oh the crime, twice removed, to seed an errant thought that doubts the […]
The ambit claims know no bounds. Who else would ask for $89,000,000,000,000? If the evil “more developed” nations pay for their carbon sins, the bill for those 1.3 billion people works out at $70,000 per person by 2030 (babies included).* When the target is 89,000 billion dollars, anything the Global Saviours get, can be painted as “not enough”. (It’s never enough). A trillion in funds is a “tiny”, “insufficient” amount that is “barely adequate”. Compliant journalists will print those headlines. The crowd will pay the money and feel guilty they are not paying more.
Speaking of the loot, the world’s GDP is currently $70 trillion, so asking for $89 trillion is a claim on 8% of all the money turned over in the world economy for a decade and a half. Handsome!
There is a grand array of climate junkets for Global Worriers this year. A gala of red-carpet events culminating in Paris, from November 30 to December 11. The wheeling and dealing is on right now, months ahead — and though they talk about the importance of Paris, I expect that Paris is mostly the cabaret show (like UNFCCC event in Bali that I went to), and it’s the […]
In the latest news about wind-generators, The Australian reports that a new Australian study estimates we wasted $70m on RET* certificates last year because of losses the wind turbines put on the rest of the grid. About a fifth of the CO2 supposedly cut by wind-farms was emitted by the rest of the grid as it ramped up and down trying to cope with the erratic supply from the on-and-off whirly-gigs.
If we double our wind-farms the losses are proportionally even greater (every extra wind farm is even more useless than the one before). With twice as many, all of the wind towers would only be 70% effective. But this is all a wild fantasy overestimate, since the point of wind towers is not to reduce CO2, but to reduce global temperatures, stop storms, and hold back the tides. The 3.5% reduction in total Australian electricity emissions changed global temperatures by 0.00C, hence RET on wind is 100.00% useless, accurate to two decimal places. The Clean Energy Council said they had no answer at all, and wouldn’t talk about it, except to say that Australians like “renewables”.
In other news in from the UK, the new majority conservative government says […]
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7.8 out of 10 based on 30 ratings
Who’s desperate to find the missing hot-spot? Sherwood’s new paper claims to have found it, but after years of multi-layered adjustments, and now kriging the gaps, and iteratively homogenizing, the results of the new data partly “solve” one problem while creating others. There’s no documented, physical reason for the homogenizing and there’s no new insight gained. The raw data was used by airlines, the military, and meteorologists for years, yet the suggested new results are quite different to the raw data. It’s as if we can’t even measure air temperature properly. Somehow we’ve made multivariate complex models work but not simple temperature sensors? The main problem with the old results was that they didn’t fit the models. Now, after torturing the data, they still don’t.
Twenty-eight million weather balloons had shown by 1999 that the key assumption in the climate models was wrong. Without feedbacks, the models only produce 1.2°C of warming with a doubling of CO2. With feedbacks the simulations ramp that up to a dangerous 3 – 4 degrees C, and water vapor was the most important feedback. It’s just no fun for the Global Worriers without it.
No hotspot = no water vapor feedback […]
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Forecast the Facts wants newspapers to label anyone who disagrees with them as mentally deficient deniers. Climate change is settled, beyond debate, and the evidence is overwhelming, but the the team with all that certainty seems awfullly scared that the public might listen to their critics.
Look at the first line of their defining statement Who We Are: “Forecast the Facts is dedicated to ensuring that Americans hear the truth about climate change”. In this case the truth is not about the planetary atmosphere so much as “facts” about newspaper word use, opinions of science pin-up personality, and a club with a long nerdy sounding name. The research they want to share is not about the troposphere, but about their “success” in silencing alternate views: can we cancel an ad campaign, or harrass an executive who is not toeing the line?
Forecast the Facts is a grassroots human rights organization dedicated to ensuring that Americans hear the truth about climate change: that temperatures are increasing, human activity is largely responsible, and that our world is already experiencing the effects. We do this by empowering everyday people to speak out in the face of misinformation and […]
Many psychologists are looking at “political ideology” as a predictor of belief in the theory of man-made climate disasters, but I’m convinced it’s the more basic element of personality types that matters more. A new study shows (no surprise) that climate believers are more networked in the Facebook world.
In the press release, the researcher, Juha Itkonen, calls these Facebook connections “friends” as if the terms facebook-friend and friend are interchangeable. Mark Zuckerberg would be happy. Extroverts on Facebook might also agree, but I’d bet the introvert types would not. Sometimes fewer relationships means deeper ones.
Perhaps extroverts are more likely to be group-thinkers, and introverts are more likely to have some inbuilt immunity to mob thought? No doubt it will be reported with the usual shallow semi-narcissistic flare “climate deniers have fewer friends”. So sharpen your pencils, smile, and remind everyone that skeptics have better things to do than spend all day on social media, that Facebook friends are not always real friends, and that having fewer deeper friends would suit people who are deeper thinkers.
Climate change attitudes are reflected on social networks
11 May 2015 Helsingin yliopisto (University of Helsinki)
People who […]
Headlines across Australia yesterday told us the dire news that a new study finds that “Sea level rising faster in past 20 years than in entire 20th century“. A new paper by Watson et al is driving the headlines, but underneath this Nature paper is a swamp of adjustments, an error larger than the signal, and the result disagrees with many other studies and almost all the raw measurements. Paper after paper kept showing that sea levels rates had slowed (e.g Chen showed deceleration from 2004, Cazenave said in the last decade sea-levels had slowed 30% (but argued post hoc adjustments could solve that). Beenstock used 1000 tide gauges and found no acceleration of sea levels over the last 50 years. A different researcher — Phil Watson, found that Australian sea levels rose faster before World War II then slowed down.)
Firstly, hundreds of tide gauges show sea level rising at about a third of the rate than satellites do. Worse, the original satellite raw data showed the same slow rise, until it was suddenly adjusted. The real scandal is that the rapidly rising trend was largely created by adjustments in the first place. These latest corrections just adjust down […]
Never talk about a new world order.
We’re on flak-watch tonight, and pop-guns are going off at the ABC. Jeff Sparrow is firing at Maurice Newman, feeling very superior, and doing namecalling, namecalling, all the way down. Get ready for the Sparrow-personality-test based on tenuous speculative associations with random three-word-phrases. This is the best of ABC-big-gov-lovin’ intelligensia.
The fireworks over Maurice Newman’s opinion on how the UN are using climate for their own powerhungry agenda continues. He not only spoke of “world government” he used the words “order”, “new”, and “world”. You and I thought these were simple words in the Oxford Dictionary, but lo, dumb punters, there is a special secret meaning Jeff Sparrow can reveal. Anyone who uses these words in the correct order is probably also a conspiracy theorist, paranoiac, gun nut, religious fanatic, and survivalist. All that psychoanalysis, and in just three words.
Maurice Newman raised a valid topic, but Sparrow ignores the issue, drops a smoke-bomb to distract loaded with namecalling. As mindless as it is, the ABC editors lapped it up. This is the way the big important issues of national importance get treated at the ABC. What is a geopolitical issue of […]
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8.8 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
UPDATE: And the namecalling goes on, days later at the ABC. Who knew the words “order”, “new” and “world” are triggers for conspiracy-theory-psychoanalysis?
Yesterday Maurice Newman dared suggest that the real climate change agenda was “concentrated political authority”. I watched his article on The Australian get quickly repeated through the SMH and many other outlets, which wouldn’t always happen. I counted down the hours until Newman was called a “conspiracy theorist” — about 18.
I expect Maurice Newman knew exactly what game he was playing today. Like tapping a knee to trigger a reflex, the words “World Government” always provokes outraged mockery and namecalling as if it were against the laws of physics rather than being the banal, obvious desire of a certain part of the population. There’s a reason there’s no hit song called “Nobody wants to rule the world”.
Was Newman baiting the gullible fans of a man-made catastrophe in order to get his message spread far and wide? If he was, it was successful. Now it’s up to us to pick up the ball and point out that hypocrisy of the sacred taboo — only a certain class are allowed to discuss “world-government” (that’s […]
There is no saving our universities. The Lomborg Consensus Centre has been axed in response to pure emotional hysteria. The Abbott government should immediately set up the Centre anyway, make it independent from the universities, which don’t deserve another cent.
Bjorn Lomborg, who believes the IPCC science but disagrees with their economics, is too “dangerous” for UWA. Poor petals! He wants to get more environmental and human benefit from government spending — which is a disaster for the Green Gravy train. Lomborg commits the unforgivable sin of failing to feed friends of big-government. So he had to be punished, nothing is more scary that “funding a skeptic”. (See Tim Flannery’s reaction). But ponder how they have overplayed their hand: Lomborg is not a skeptic of the science, the Consensus Centre wasn’t going to write on climate change, and yet, it was unthinkable?
ABC news:
UWA cancels contract for Consensus Centre headed by controversial academic Bjorn Lomborg
The University of Western Australia has cancelled the contract for a policy centre that was to be headed up by controversial academic Bjorn Lomborg after a “passionate emotional reaction” to the plan.
There is no free speech in academia, only the illusion […]
… and those with scientific evidence don’t need “names and addresses” instead. Eh?
Two Dutch Arctic Ice researchers were sadly presumed lost last week. You, silly fool, may have thought it was an unfortunate accident in a dangerous profession. Not so, according to “Schatzie” they were viciously murdered by an unlikely cohort of Obama and at least 24 named “climate change deniers”. While “motive”, “means” and “opportunity” are a little thin on — premeditated intent is surely there: skeptics benefit from the PR storm about researchers dying on thin ice… oh wait.
Anyway, those responsible for heating the planet are also all murderers, which pretty much narrows down the guilty to anyone who breathes, double for those who drive, and in the end, Mr Al Gore emits a lot of CO2, right? Indeed, blame the Pacific Ocean, it releases more carbon than even Al does.
Schatzie is looking for names to add to her list.
I ask you to submit the names of known (or even little known) climate change deniers and those responsible for heating up our precious planet.
Who is responsible for heating up the planet? I dug deep to find the real culprits:
All […]
Who knew the opening the door of a microwave oven while it was on could release something like an extragalactic fast radio burst? Astrophysicists at Parkes Observatory didn’t realize for 17 years, then someone noticed these radio bursts only happened in business hours.
Was there a consensus on perytons I wonder?
h/t Manfred
Strange ‘outer space’ signal that baffled Australian scientists turns out to be microwave oven Scientists discover cause of signals detected at Australia’s Parkes telescope, originally believed to come from another galaxy 9.1 out of 10 based on 64 ratings […]
Steve Milloy at JunkScience holds the media and EPA scientists up to the same standards they expect from skeptics like Willie Soon.
The Headlines are everywhere:
” E.P.A. Carbon Emissions Plan Could Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds “— NY Times
And the media go out of their way to make sure everyone knows what independent angels they are:
Peer-reviewed, non-partisan academic study finds that the EPA emissions rule will save thousands of lives (Lindsay Abrams) — Salon
In most articles the study authors were just researchers from Harvard and Syracuse Uni, who declare “they have no competing financial interests”.
Milloy wonders if $31 million in EPA grants could be a competing interest? Five of eight authors are paid grants by the EPA.
Below are listed the article’s authors and the dollar amounts of EPA grants with which they are associated as principal investigators”:
Charles T. Driscoll: $3,654,608 Jonathan J. Buonocore: $9,588 Jonathan I. Levy: $9,514,391 Kathleen F. Lambert: 0 Dallas Burtraw: $1,991,346 Stephen B. Reid: 0 Habibollah Fakhaei: 0 Joel Schwartz: $31,176,575
Now how could Schwartz’s $31,176,575 or Levy’s $9,514,361 or Driscoll’s $3,654,608 from EPA […]
Ooh. Here’s a bit of a backdown. Skeptics must be getting to The Guardian. Smile.
Mocking skeptics and calling them deniers has somehow failed to win them over, so the Guardian is trying a slightly new tack. This time they pretend to be balanced, and post up a list of “Myths to explode” from both sides of the debate. But don’t bring the ear-muffs, or the ambulances — these bombs are pussy-foot puff balls. The air-drops on alarmist camps are so convoluted they manage to support The Big Fear Campaign even as they try (gently-bentley!) to reign in a few excesses of the believers — don’t mention human extinction, and do remember the world has been hotter before, right? On skeptical “myths”, nothing has changed but at least they’ve stopped the namecalling (Bravo!). But it’s hard for author Hannah Devlin — she even serves up a new myth to try to squash an old one. The rate of global warming is apparently “unprecedented”, as in one-degree-in-a-century has never ever happened before, not once. How likely is that we could know the rate of global temperature swings to a tenth of a degree back in the days of dinosaurs and at […]
Guest Post By Tony Thomas*
A keen student, I have just completed Week One of John Cook’s MOOC at Queensland University: “Denial 101x – Making Sense of Climate Science Denial.”
A MOOC is a Massive Online Open Course, and Cook’s course has 13,000 students so far. He is a Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University and author of the notorious 2013 study purporting to find a 97% climate consensus in the science literature.
One normally gets a buzz from study. But my brain needs a shower and scrub to feel clean again.
I was not intending to write about my studies so early, in case that got me prematurely expelled. But one week of it is enough.
For example, in case I forget elements of Cook’s denialist ideation, he provides an acronym FLICC. This covers Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking and Conspiracy theories.
Worse is in store. Cook says, “Next week’s interviews are equally exciting, as we speak to Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia…” Jones is the author of “pretty awful emails” (his words) in Climategate. Other stars in the Cook course firmament will be Michael “Hockey-stick” Mann and […]
Wind Turbines around 7 times more expensive than Direct Action
You would have to be bonkers to use wind turbines to reduce CO2. The Australian RET Review estimates that the cost of reducing CO2 via wind power is $32 – $72 per ton of CO2 avoided, which means it’s far more expensive than the Direct Action plan, which costs $14 per ton. Peter Lang is concerned the real story is even more costly than that, because it appears the RET Review does not account for the way wind turbines become less effective as they supply a larger portion of our electricity grid. The gas and coal generators get less efficient and they ramp up and down and burn fuel on standby, trying to cope with the fickle supply from the wind. The study of the Irish grid shows that nearly half the CO2 savings of wind turbines disappear as rest of the generators on the grid burn more fuel per unit of electricity. From my reading of Peter’s submission the real cost is more like $80 – $100/ton.
The Australian Parliament is seeking submissions to the ‘Senate Select Committee on Wind Turbines’. It closes Monday. Peter Lang has submitted a […]
There’s a message here to politicians from marketers: Grow a spine, stand up for something sensible
Martin Daubney on Breitbart describes a new form of internet-era marketing. Companies that put out provocative ads predictably get attacked by the holier-than-thou. But if they stand up to the thought police, they suddenly find themselves in the middle of a social media war and at the winning end. Because they didn’t cave in to the PC, they get thousands of passionate defenders online, lots of new customers, loads of free PR, and the “wave” breaches the social media world and spills into the mainstream.
For example, Protein World got attacked for an ad with women in bikini’s. They didn’t pull the ad under the condemnation from the usual quarters; instead they baited the “Offendotrons” with a parody twitter pic of a beached whale “Are you Feminist Body Ready?”. In response to the furore, Protein World has “added 20,000 customers and driven revenue in excess of £1 million – in the last four days alone.”
Likewise, BarberBarber, which does men’s haircuts, banned women from its premises. It got death threats, but sales are booming, there are queues to use it, and new branches are […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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