|
|
Researchers were sure fatter people would get more dementia, so they studied two million middle-aged people for nearly a decade but were “baffled to find the exact opposite. Their sample included 45,000 cases of dementia and the obese were 30 per cent less likely to be diagnosed with it.
This contradicts previous studies and was not at all what the researchers expected, so they analyzed the data every which way they could think of but can’t explain the results. Need I say “experts” and “consensuses”?
Scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said they were baffled by the results as previous studies have shown that being overweight raises the risk. —Telegraph
Risk factors such as alcohol and smoking made little difference to the results, published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. — Mirror
Dr Qizilbash said the findings held despite attempts to adjust for other causes of dementia and the tendency of obese people to die earlier. “We did a lot of analysis to see if we could explain it but just seems to persist. We couldn’t get rid of it so we’re left with this apparent protective effect,” he said. […]
There’s another more subtle message to politicians from the Gallop poll last week. The headline we discussed was that a whole quarter of the US are emphatic skeptics who don’t worry “at all” about climate change. But the other message is that if the politicans want to show they care about the environment, nearly every major environmental issue is more important to voters than “climate change”: 55% of the population worries about water pollution but only 32% feel the same level of concern for global warming.
On environmental concerns, climate change has the highest profile, but is consistently low ranking in the concern-stakes. People are much more worried about clean water, lakes and rivers, and air pollution rather than “climate change”. There is room here for either side of politics to step over the top of the supposedly greenest left wing parties and win voters by tackling real pollution rather than the fantasy kind. Any party that took serious action on rivers and water would earn environmental kudos and swinging votes. They wouldn’t win the die hard green vote, because those votes are not about the environment anyway. But true swingers shift between the major parties, and they are less […]
1954 Yearbook Brisbane
Here’s an update to the digging through our historic records we discussed a month ago, we can now include nearly twice the stations and the difference between temperatures originally recorded 100 years ago and temperatures today are even smaller.
Chris Gillham has been working with CSIR documents and official Commonwealth Year Books. Last month he used the 1953 Year Book which contained 44 weather station averages for 1911-40 to compare with 2000-14 temperatures, but has since discovered that the 1954 Year Book provides an additional 40 stations with 1911-40 data. The average rise in mean temperatures across all 84 weather stations around Australia over the last 70 years of global warming is about 0.3C. This larger dataset suggests as much as two thirds of the current official trend in Australian warming was due to post hoc adjustments, not heat recorded by thermometers.
These historic temperatures were calculated by the best scientists of the day, using the best equipment of the era (the same Stevenson Screen we use now). Yet again, global warming appears to have a “man-made” contribution. Far more important than CO2 is man-made “pollution” called homogenisation.
When doubling the recorded trend makes “No difference”
[…]
Almost exactly 25 years ago Al Gore, a Democrat Senator at the time, warned us of an ecological Kristallnacht in the New York Times. He didn’t use the term “denier” but he was talking up an unmistakable environmental holocaust. Since then CO2 levels have risen 50ppm, and the global population increased by two billion. Yet much of the article could be rerun today and who would know? He could just change the dates.
The 1990’s are the decade of decision. Profound changes are required.
In 1987, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to surge with record annual increases. Global temperatures are also climbing: 1987 was the second hottest year on record; 1988 was the hottest. Scientists now predict our current course will raise world temperatures five degrees Celsius in our lifetimes.
The holocaust was coming
Here’s the headline and opening paragraphs: March 19 1989
An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.
“Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with our planet. Unless we quickly and profoundly change the course of our civilization, we face an immediate and grave danger of destroying the worldwide ecological system that sustains life as we know it.”
April 7th, 2015 | Tags: Gore (Al) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
Ian Dunlop in the Canberra Times, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald namecalls away, discusses a mythical creature called a “climate denialist” and shows how little research it takes to get an opinion page in the Fairfax mastheads. (Comments are “open” at these sites).
He thinks that PM Tony Abbott ought follow Margaret Thatcher on climate policy, without realizing that skeptics would say “Bravo — Yes Please” to that. Thatcher was a chemist, and no fool. In 2003 she made it clear, when few people did, that she was absolutely a skeptic.
Ian Dunlop 2015:
It is too much to expect the male-dominated, eminence-grise of the incumbency to rise to the occasion, but women might. There is a precedent. Margaret Thatcher, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1989: “We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their objective if, by their output, they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the wellbeing they achieved by the production of goods and services”. Just so. You may not agree with Margaret Thatcher on many things, but on climate change she was spot on, three decades ahead of her […]
It was 1977. Things looked ominous:
“The argument that we face some long cold years is pretty convincing.”
The story was that some professors at the largest meteorology center said so — we’d had a couple of really cold winters, temperatures are falling, and the armadillo is moving.
“There’s a theory among climatologists that the last two years of battering by winter mean that an ice age is returning to the Earth and ice ages Glaciers Down to the Mason-Dixon Line.”
“…the headlong retreat of the heat loving armadillo from Nebraska to the southwest and to Mexico…”
Climate scientists have come so far in 40 years. They would never make a fuss over a few freak seasons and an armadillo.
H/t to Tom Nelson (he’s back on twitter @tan123, thanks to skeptics) and Heartland. This is a great video originally reported by Julia Seymour at MRC Business report. See that link for the full commentary.
40 Years of Media Hype for Climate Alarmists | Heartlander Magazine“
“Warm periods like ours last only 10,000 years, but ours has already lasted 12,000. So if the rhythm is right, we are over-ready for a return […]
…
8.2 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
Another excuse may be on the rocks. The Arctic ice melt has been a favorite clarion of catastrophists. What will they do if it stops declining? It is early days, but if the missing heat is hiding in the Arctic this pattern is not following the green machine plan.
Cryosphere
David Whitehouse GWPF
A New “Pause?”
Examining the sea ice extent data for the past eight years it is obvious that there has not been any statistically significant downward trend, even though there is more noise (interannual variability) in the data. There are interannual variations but they do not form a trend. For the 2002 – 2006 period the annual differences are mostly in the extent of maximum and not minimum ice cover. The period 1990 – 1996 displays much more interannual variability. The main difference between the ice-curves is that in recent years there has been an increase in the gradient around the beginning of June.
Of the general decline and the interannual variability how much is due to external forcing and how much to internal variability? Estimate from climate models give about equal measure to forcing and internal variability, Kay et […]
I believe we’ve seen this method before, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away:
Thanks to Steve Hunter 2015
Credit Steve Hunter illustrations
Happy Easter to everyone!
9.7 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
UPDATE April 4th: Tom Nelson’s account was unsuspended today. Success!
What fantastic publicity. Twitter suspended Steven Goddard’s account last week, then reinstated it after getting inundated with complaints. Now Tom Nelson’s twitter account is gone, also “suspended”, because he used the word “crap” in response to Gavin Schmidt using the word “crap”.
Those two accounts that have made the all new celebrity Twitmo Hall of Fame:
@SteveSGoddard and @tan123.
The word is that trolls abuse the “report abuse” link to get skeptics silenced. We note Michael Mann recommends blocking and reporting. What else can you do when you don’t have an answer?
So let’s show them that silencing voices doesn’t work. Follow @SteveSGoddard to show that trying to silence people only makes them stronger. To get Tom Nelson reinstated, send your thoughts on this to @Support.
WattsUp calls it abusive censorship. ✔ @MarkSteynOnline wants to know why @twitter “suspended” another climate dissident, Tom Nelson @tan123. See also @iowahawkblog.
Useful hashtags to watch and join in on are #BigClimateEnforcers and #twitterthoughtpolice.
Follow me @JoanneNova
UPDATE: Do you hate twitter? Is it a land you never visit? Read my comment […]
Be warned. Don’t write this off as the usual exaggerated hype from Nature.
Zoology: Here be dragons Andrew J. Hamilton, Robert M. May & Edward K. Waters Nature 520, 42–43 doi:10.1038/520042a Published online 01 April 2015
Emerging evidence indicates that dragons can no longer be dismissed as creatures of legend and fantasy, and that anthropogenic effects on the world’s climate may inadvertently be paving the way for the resurgence of these beasts.
Figure 2: The rise and fall and rise again of dragons. The relative frequency of ‘dragons’ in fictional literature (thick red line), as determined as a unigram probability4, with two historical reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere temperature (decadal smoothing) shown in blue5 and purple6. Global temperatures have been measured since 1855 (thick black line5). Temperature anomalies represent deviations from the 1961–90 reference period. The rising incidence of dragons in the literature correlates with rising temperatures, and suggests that these fire-breathing lizards are being sighted more frequently. As a result, the large-scale ‘Third Stir’ is deemed to be imminent.
Ominous signs are there:
Further work has revealed that the early medieval period was a veritable paradise for dragons. This can be attributed to the […]
During the recent warmest decades on record, Earth suffered under the highest CO2 levels of the last 800,000 years. Life responded to this devastating situation by — flourishing. There are now some 4 billion tons more living matter on the planet than there was in 1993. What a calamity. (And what a lot of carbon credits.)
It has, naturally, got nothing to do with warmth and aerial fertilizer. The researchers tell us it due to that force of nature known as “good luck”. Remember, human CO2 emissions were pollution that was going to afflict life on Earth. After twenty years of predicting the loss of forests and species, it turned out that biology bloomed instead. Notch up another model “success”. The press release headline: Good luck reverses global forest loss. (What else would we expect from UNSW?)
To those who know basic biology — and that almost half the dry weight of plants is carbon, sucked straight out of the air — this is not so much good luck as one entirely foreseeable and foreseen consequence of rising CO2. Acquiring carbon is often a plant’s hardest task. When the sun comes up, a cornfield begins sucking, and by lunch time […]
What to do with the public broadcasters? ABC BBC CBC (Can anyone explain public media in NZ?)
Big-government fans forcibly take funds from all citizens to support big-government propaganda by journalists who predominantly vote left or very-left (see here or here). The question is not whether or not they should do this but whether to privatize the public broadcasters, or to split them in two. I say, let’s forget the submissive plea to get one conservative commentator among a monoculture of “progressives”. Chop the current one in half and call it what it is: pro big-government. Then set up a new counter half to match — the pro-small-government broadcaster with the same funds but new staff. (Game on — let the best team win that ratings war.) Abbott could keep ABC funding promises. ABC-L plus ABC-R equals current ABC-LL+ funding.
Obviously, true free-market libertarians want public broadcasters 100% sold — their incentives are always going to run counter to unbiased reporting and the hunt for the truth. On the other hand, among the populace, the ground is not remotely laid for a big-sell. Many voters remain blind to the bias, and have no idea how filtered the half-truths are: […]
Oops. Who hates “the environment”? Green lobbyists keep revealing how little they care. Friends of the Earth want to categorically rule out one of the most cost effective ways to reduce our carbon emissions. New supercritical hot burning coal plants can reduce emissions by an amazing 15%. But Friends of the Earth and The Guardian hate coal more than they care about CO2.
The green climate fund (GCF) refused an explicit ban on fossil fuel projects at the contentious meeting in Songdo, South Korea, last week.
“It’s like a torture convention that doesn’t forbid torture,” said Karen Orenstein, a campaigner for Friends of the Earth US who was at the meeting. “Honestly it should be a no-brainer at this point.” — The Guardian
Poor old solar and wind power are so useless that the debate is about whether they achieve any reductions at all. Their intermittent power means some kind of back-up base load power source has to run on standby to pick up the pieces when they collapse. The more wind power you have, the less CO2 you save. Solar Power provides “cheaper” electricity to the rich at the expense of everyone else, and potentially […]
…
Thanks to all the readers here who took time to vote. Skeptical sites are well represented in the finalists and winners largely thanks to readers here, at Tallblokes, Realscience and NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat.
Best European Weblog: Not a lot of people know that Lifetime Achievement: Climate Audit Best Topical Weblog: JoNova Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog: The Pickering Post Best Weblog about Politics Breitbart News Network
Congrats to Steve McIntyre who surely deserves every bit of his LifeTime Achievement award. I’m delighted to see Paul Homewood (Notalotofpeopleknowthat) win in Best European blog. He was stiff competition in the Topical category given his role in the Christopher Booker series on the scandalous temperature adjustments which made such an impact around the world. Breitbart was also a favourite of mine, largely thanks to James Delingpole.
Congrats to all finalists like Tallbloke, WattsUp, RealScience (who is moving to RealClimateScience) and NoTricksZone. Tallbloke, the ultimate good sport, was a finalist for the LifeTime Achievement, but announced he’d vote for Climate Audit.
One day, maybe The Bloggies will bring back The Best Science Blog Category which skeptics would obviously dominate at the moment. Repressing a passionate crowd doesn’t work.
For the overseas crowd, Larry […]
Don’t forget Power Hour, your chance to shine. 🙂
8.5 out of 10 based on 42 ratings
I don’t see how this man can possibly get elected. On climate change he is far too sensible.
This is one of the best short video responses by a politician that I have ever seen. Such clarity…
The full video is at the right scoop.
If this man stays in the campaign running for long he will change the dynamics of the whole public climate debate.
h/t to Joe B. Thanks 🙂
9.5 out of 10 based on 134 ratings
You’ll be glad to know the BoM problems are all dealt with. Some hand-picked statisticians met with some BoM people yesterday, and they had a robust private chat about secret temperature stuff at the technical advisory forum (that’s the tea-and-cakes one-day-wonder). I’m so relieved to know it was “productive”. (Imagine if the press release had said it was “predictable, boring and unproductive”?) In a few months we will find out a small, filtered version of what they said and possibly something of what the BoM approved statisticians think about the nameless, unlinked, public-submissions.
We do know that the BoM didn’t want public submissions, but in their good grace, they have given them to the select forum members anyway. (Be grateful serfs, you don’t get acknowledgment or answers, but your dedication in listing and referencing known scandalous problems with our national dataset is worthy of one line in the last paragraph of a press release. Congratulations — maybe. Only one two submissions have been formally acknowledged which means the others, with months of work, might fall off the back of a truck, lost in the mail.*It’s possible. Is it too much to expect officials to send an email receipt with acknowledgment?)
[…]
The new Gallup Poll is out. Most commentators are focused on the worried “a great deal” category, which is back to 1989 levels, but that’s largely noise. The important trend is at the other end of the spectrum, and seems to be missed. The only category with steady growth are the hard core skeptics, people who are worried “not at all”. That’s doubled from 12 to 24%; the trend is up. This is an unequivocal category. One quarter of the population are solidly, completely skeptical.
Given the 4% errors, there are only two clear trends in this table below. Firstly, those who had no opinion have now got one, and it’s skeptical. Secondly, the number of the most implacable skeptics has doubled. After 20 years of propaganda the section of the population that is not buying the scare is steadily increasing. The size of the groups with variable levels of worry flicks up and down as people switch. But the numbers of those who worry “not at all” are steadily rising, and therein lies the death of the scare. It’s a one way ticket from being uninformed and worried to the “only a little/not at all” category.
The “enviro-scare” campaign […]
Richard Tol has an excellent summary of the state of the 97% claim by John Cook et al, published in The Australian today.
It becomes exhausting to just list the errors.
Don’t ask how bad a paper has to be to get retracted. Ask how bad it has to be to get published.
As Tol explains, the Cook et al paper used an unrepresentative sample, can’t be replicated, and leaves out many useful papers. The study was done by biased observers who disagreed with each other a third of the time, and disagree with the authors of those papers nearly two-thirds of the time. About 75% of the papers in the study were irrelevant in the first place, with nothing to say about the subject matter. Technically, we could call them “padding”. Cook himself has admitted data quality is low. He refused to release all his data, and even threatened legal action to hide it. (The university claimed it would breach a confidentiality agreement. But in reality, there was no agreement to breach.) As it happens, the data ended up being public anyhow. Tol refers to an “alleged hacker” but, my understanding is that no hack took place, and the […]
|
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