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First they take your money to force their opinions over you.
Then they take your money to hide what they were doing, because they knew what they were doing was wrong.
It was a turning point in BBC coverage. The 2006 seminar with “climate experts” turned out to be mostly a workshop with Greenpeace, industry activists and lobbyists. It was the point the BBC dropped even the pretense of impartial news reporting on the climate. After this “high-level” seminar the Beeb announced it didn’t need balance in the climate debate. Then having made out they were so scientific and honorable, they spent the next six years burning more money to hide the names of the experts from the public that paid for them.
Is there any better argument to explain why state funded media is not just a waste of money, but irresponsible, immoral and unethical political advertising?
There is no saving the BBC. Over the last decade climate change was supposedly the “biggest scientific” challenge for the world, and a massive cost to the citizens who were falsely told they needed to change the weather. More than ever, public funds should have been used to analyze both sides of […]
Oh the dilemma. German Greens have been so “successful” that coal use is rising fast. They helped get rid of the nukes in 2011, punished coal, and subsidized “renewables”. But woe…. energy has to come from somewhere, so the paradoxical crunch comes. Green policies mean that everyone is poorer, but the cheapest energy comes from coal …
The coal industry must be praying for more Green activism:
“IT’S been a black Christmas for green thinkers as Germany, the world leader in rooftop solar and pride of the renewable energy revolution has confirmed its rapid return to coal.
After scrapping nuclear power, Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions are back on the rise as the country clamours to reopen some of the dirtiest brown coalmines that have been closed since the reunification of east and west. The Australian
Though some say the problem is “carbon credits” are too cheap. (We need to be poorer?)
“…new figures show that coal power output in 2013 reached its highest level in more than 20 years. Researchers blame cheap CO2 emissions permits, and demand urgent reforms.
The stats: Germany is using almost as much coal as it did in 1990:
In 1990, Germany’s brown coal-fired […]
Brandon Schollenberger wants to test a theory, so he has made a short poll. He would like a broad sample.
The message:
As you’re aware, Stephan Lewandowsky has written several papers claiming to have found certain traits amongst global warming skeptics. I believe his methodology is fundamentally flawed. I believe a flaw present in his methodology is also present in the work of many others.
To test my belief, I’m seeking participants for a short survey (13 questions). The questions are designed specifically to test a key aspect of Lewandowsky’s methodology. The results won’t be published in any scientific journal, but I’ll do a writeup on them once the survey is closed and share it online.
(click below)
The Poll (closed now)
UPDATE Brandon says thanks, he has thousands of responses. The poll is not open any more.
(Or copy the link — http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=jblyccj8lluam18284546)
This poll has appeared at WUWT and Bishop Hill. Feel free to do it (it is very short) or share the link with others.
There are only 13 points arranged as three questions. Click “Next Page” to finish.
8.2 out of 10 based on 68 […]
Maurice Newman’s frank Op-Ed broke lots of rules last week — he used the words “fraud”, “deception”, and the IPCC on the front page of a major national daily paper. But the response to it has been a lower grade of apoplectic than what we are accustomed too. Which says something about the debate. Tick tick tick…
Graham Readfearn, journalist, has had nearly a whole week to summarize the strongest rebuttals around the world and he’s come up with 600 words of lame names. Newman is a “dizzy” denier, with “tricks on the brain”, and a “conspiracy dial”. Where is the science? Even as ad homs go that is barrel-scraping.
The Readfearn reasoning amounts to saying that Newman is either wrong because he is an old white guy (let’s be ageist, sexist and rascist eh?), or he is wrong because he cited Roy Spencer who is wrong because he’s a Christian. Thus and verily, ergo, ergot and a truffle too, climate sensitivity on Planet Earth is 3.3 degrees C.
If Spencer had been a Muslim would Readfearn have spent 6 paragraphs mocking the awkward conflicts with science and the Koran? Perhaps not. Instead he might have had to fill 6 […]
Matt Ridley looks at pharmaceutical research and finds problems of confirmation bias, lack of access to data, and lack of replication of results. He compares it to the hockey stick debacle which is rising in notoriety to become the new benchmark of bad science. Articles like this are especially useful, because people concerned about Tamiflu might not know anything about the HockeyStick, and might not have read an article about the climate.
In Pharmaceutical research companies may do many studies on a drug but only choose to publish the ones with results they feel better about.
The Australian
PERHAPS it should be called Tamiflugate. Yet the doubts reported by Britain’s House of Commons public accounts committee last week go well beyond the possible waste of nearly half a billion pounds ($913 million) on a flu drug that might not be much better than paracetamol. All sorts of science are contaminated with the problem of cherry-picked data.
Science at a breaking point:
The problem seems widespread. A paper in the BMJ in 2012 reported that only one fifth of clinical trials financed by the US National Institutes of Health released summaries of their results within the required one year […]
Sorry, I’ll be back soon…
6.8 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
Sometimes the consensus deniers are right, which is exactly why the term is so pointless and so profoundly unscientific.
The medical associations were unequivocal. Crash diets were a fad, unhealthy, and only slow sensible weight loss could work. So millions of people were fed expensive drugs for decades, monitored, and some even given risky bariatric surgery. Patients with Type II diabetes were expected to be treated for years, or possibly the rest of their lives. Nearly a tenth of the national health budget of the UK was spent managing diabetes. Fully 8% of the population have the condition in the US.
Now a new (albeit very very small) study cured diabetes in some cases in as little as a week with a diet that was thought to be bad.
In the trial the very low calorie diet was done for 8 weeks. Sticking to 600 calories a day is not easy (some reports say it was 800 cals). It’s about a quarter of what a normal guy would eat. But it shrinks fat in the pancreas and liver, and that seemingly returns insulin levels to normal. The really amazing thing is that the benefits turn out to stay around far […]
It’s amazing what sensible things turn up in the holiday period. The Australian not only published Maurice Newman skeptical discussion: “climate madness, dishonesty and fraud”, but two days later they published a scientist talking about natural cycles. The scandal! He’s introduced a new term into the debate: …”residual” anthropogenic driven climate change. Instead of CAGW*, we have RAGW. It’s a term that I could grow to like.
Michael Asten, professor of geophysics at Monash University, is suggesting the Australian government’s “Direct Action Scheme” ought to start with science. (How radical.) Before we spend $5 billion we ought to spend a small part of that on looking at whether we need to spend the rest of it. It’s a starkly obvious point, but almost never said. More than anything, both the environment and the people of Australia need some action, and it starts with reviewing the research. Where is the cost benefit study on climate action?
Bring science to climate policy
The Australian
THE Senate inquiry probing the direct action scheme to reduce CO2 emissions provides opportunity for a review not only of the Coalition’s scheme but its underlying justification. Just as the National Broadband Network has been subjected to rigorous […]
This really has been a PR debacle of amazing proportions. The ship stuck in ice has captured something larger than I would have expected. Methinks the timing must be apropos.
Good scientists are distancing themselves from the publicity hungry climate lightweights and commentators on both sides of the fence are agreeing in their criticism.
A third effect we are barely starting to see may ripple on for months — that’s when mass-media victims realize that the “Russian Tourist ship” was really a boat load of Australian and New Zealander scientists, paid for mostly by taxpayers and loaded and advised by supposedly “expert” climate scientists. This misinformation was despite the boat having BBC, and Guardian media on board, and Fairfax press in one of the rescue icebreakers. Today I see evidence of the first two effects.
From Skynews. The French chief of polar science calls the Spirit of Mawson trip “pseudo-scientific” and laments the effect it is having on real research.
The head of France’s polar science institute has voiced fury at the misadventures of a Russian ship trapped in Antarctic ice, deriding what he called a tourists’ trip that had diverted resources from real science.
In an interview with AFP, […]
The saga just keeps going. The Chinese Icebreaker is now also stuck, and has asked for help so the Aurora Australis with 52 extra passengers rescued from the Russian Charter boat have to stay nearby to help. Twenty two Russian sailors are still trapped on board the Russian boat — the Akademik Sholaskiy. Plus other scientists in Antarctica still don’t have their equipment. Costs for everyone involved are continuing to rise. Though there is a free-for-all on social media…
Image first seen at Elmer Beauregard@m4gw
But seriously, trom The Australian by Graham Lloyd:
TAXPAYERS will foot a $400,000 bill for the rescue of a group of climate scientists, tourists and journalists from a stranded Russian research vessel – an operation that has blown the contingency budget of Australia’s Antarctic program and disrupted its scientific work.
The Antarctic Division in Hobart said it was revising plans and considering airlifting urgently needed scientific equipment that could not be unloaded from Aurora Australis before the ship was diverted from the Casey base to rescue the novice ice explorers just before Christmas.
The climate scientists and passengers aren’t free yet, their boat is waiting around to help the Chinese icebreaker.
[…]
It is good news that the climate scientists, PhD’s, children, tourists and media are finally safe on board the Aurora Australia (though I note the webcam this morning still shows that boat surrounded by sea ice). Spare a thought for the sailors still on board the Shokalskiy.
Shub Niggurath writes to me today to explain that the ill-fated ship headed back to an area heavy with ice, knowing a storm was approaching. The ships captain had wanted to get away sooner, but was delayed because the expedition team was late returning due to a mechanical mishap. The details of that delay are below. Further down I note a New Zealand writer argues they were taking “undue risk” because sea ice data and wind data were available that “shows the ice didn’t come out of nowhere – nor from a sudden chill.”
Pierre Gosslin asks on his site why the organizers used a cheap “ice strengthened” boat that was not able to break ice, yet sold berths to inexperienced tourists, and ventured into major sea ice zones.
Looks like the Antarctic team was unlucky to get nice weather with less wind. I marvel that the Commonwealth Bay and Cape Denison area […]
Who could’ve dreamed up the script for this one? If you are following the saga of the climate-scientists stuck in sea-ice-they-think-is-shrinking, the latest patchy news is that the icepack is so thick and so wide that the Chinese rescue icebreaker is also stuck and has been for a day or so. It can’t send out the helicopter to pick up the scientists on the Russian chartered boat, the Akademik Shokalskiy, until it is clear of sea ice, and the wind has slowed. The Australian ice-breaker now is trying to free the Chinese ice-breaker (the Shokalskiy is too far into the ice pack). The 74 passengers on the Shokalskiy are waiting for either the helicopter to come, or, with more luck, the wind to change and the ice to break up.
Never before in modern satellite media communications has it taken so many journalists to say so little, so slowly and so vaguely.
Who would have believed it? The expert climate scientists have a media-crew-on-a-satellite link on-board, but they don’t have a meteorologist with access to the weather and wind information they needed. (If they did, perhaps they might have seen that ice coming?) The stuck scientists “phoned a friend” […]
The giant boondoggle is coming undone.
What makes this article remarkable is the strong language coming from a credible source on the front page of a major national daily. We have crossed another line in the decline and fall of the Great Global Warming Scare. Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council , was Chairman of the ABC, and of the board of the Australian Stock Exchange. He was Chancellor of Macquarie University until 2008. The Op-Ed and news article today sums up the worst of the last five years of climate, and is the first time I can recall seeing a well respected commentator use such unequivocal and damning language and so prominently. There is no hedging here, no pandering. Newman obviously reads skeptical blogs and is very aware of what is going on. Ponder that he was Chairman of their ABC, and if someone of his sensible insight could not clean it up, we need far more drastic action (that’s another topic we will explore soon).
His opinion piece in the Australian (Crowds go cold on climate cost), is discussed on the front page as a news item titled “Climate policies helped kill manufacturing, […]
LATEST NEWS: Aurora Australis abandons attempt to save Akademik Shokalskiy in Antarctica. The SMH headline could’ve said “Another icebreaker abandons attempt to save climate scientist’s boat in Antarctica.” UPDATE: Russia says 54 of 74 passengers to be helicoptered off if weather permits. (h/ tPeter Miller) The Polar Star icebreaker has left from the US to come help. It will take 8 -9 days to arrive. (Guardian)
Welcome to Media-Sport, where we score points watching a part of the media dance around the hysterical folly of an Antarctic climate science expedition trapped in sea ice for six nights (and counting). The Art of Propaganda is not just in the telling of one-sided lines, but is crafted through parts left unsaid.
More global warming, it is everywhere you look. View from Akademik Shokalskiy
With three ice-breaker rescue ships trying to reach them, the latest news is that the scientists and media entourage may have to abandon ship and be helicoptered to safety (though right now even that is not possible due to the very rough weather). The ABC news home page at time of posting this has zero references to “Antarctica”, but does say there are cracks in ice around a […]
It’s just another day on the road back to reality.
The New South Wales state government in Australia has announced it will tell its local councils that not only are they not bound by the IPCC sea-level predictions, they must do their own research on their own beaches. It’s the polite way of saying that no one believes the IPCC predictions anymore, worse, that they are so sure the IPCC is wrong that councils have to get different advice. For the IPCC it’s just one more signpost on the path to oblivion.
The Australian:
The NSW government will order councils to study the scientific evidence for sea-level rise on a beach-by-beach basis, amid fears that many local authorities may be undermining property values by imposing punitive planning conditions based on predictions contained in reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
IPCC credibility has crumbled in so many ways. People were suffering real pain — properties near the ocean in some councils were being denied the approvals to renovate or expand, and their values had fallen. Owners were locked into properties they couldn’t improve and couldn’t sell. The NSW state government told councils last year they didn’t […]
Guest post by TonyfromOz (Anton Lang)
The Peak Power story is that spikes in electricity occur 6 to 10 days a year and we need to cut back on the power we use at home to ease spikes. In Australia, the spikes are on the hottest days of summer, and commentators tut-tut and blame the profusion of air conditioning in our homes. Their story goes that there is no point in building more power stations because the spikes are short lived. [See Western Power, Reneweconomy, The Queensland government, and Urban Ecology for examples of people making out residential air conditioners are to blame. That last link has this hysterical quote “The big mistake was putting air-conditioning in cars.” If people were not used to being cool in their vehicles, they would not demand it in their homes. (Tony O’Dwyer, National Economics)”. Never let the riff raff use the industrial magic tools eh? Keep the air conditioners for the elite academics, pollies and white collar office workers! — Jo]
But here’s the kicker. There’s one day of the year when more people are at home than any other day, so if home air-conditioners were the problem, then Christmas Day should be […]
The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution has a new bright idea. Big-Government is going to take £1 each from people using electricity and instead of giving it to people who make electricity, they’re going to give it to people who don’t absolutely have to have electricity. Those people might be paid for doing no useful work, or indeed, in a fabulous twist, they might be paid not to do no work, but just to be prepared to do nothing. It’s a brilliant left-of-center economic move, guaranteed to help the non-essential part of the economy at the expense of the part that does things that matter.
Expect to see the UK doing more non-essential things in future.
Businesses could be paid to shut down from 4pm and 8pm on winter weekdays, under plans approved by regulator Ofgem
by Emily Gosden
Hundreds of businesses could be paid to switch off their power between 4pm and 8pm on winter weekdays as soon as next winter to prevent blackouts, under plans approved by regulator Ofgem.
Mothballed old gas-fired power stations will also be paid to come back to stand-by so they can be fired up to prevent the lights going out when demand is […]
Interference patterns ripple through clouds at my favourite rock pool.
8.5 out of 10 based on 31 ratings
Reddit is a social media website which calls itself the “front-page of the Internet”. It’s possible you’ve even heard of it (but not from me.) One Reddit moderator proudly announced on Grist that climate change is the hottest battleground in all of science, and actual debate is too hot for Reddit.
I’d like to thank them for sending more traffic to skeptical bloggers as they stop pretending to be on the “front line” in science. Though to be honest, I don’t expect to notice the difference: their “environment” page is positively raging along, with most posts getting only 1-2 comments. “Front page of the Internet” my foot.
According to Nathan Allen, Reddit-science means following consensus polls and doing pop-psychology on your opponents , while allowing people you like to post conspiracy theories, but protesting when opponents do the same.
Here’s a wild idea, perhaps this debate is the hottest battleground in science because a religious theory about the climate has usurped real science, and thousands of scientists are rising up in protest? (If I’m right, the number of skeptics will be increasing and the tenor of the discussions will get more and more acrimonious. Oh look… UK poll suggests there […]
Announcing the all new Solar-Insolation Hiroshima Bomb App, thanks to Dale Kent.
Since 1998, Global Warming has been occurring at 4 Hiroshima Bombs per second, not that we can measure that rate to a statistically significant value*, or that it means anything at all. Every second the sun pours 2700 Hiroshima bombs of energy on the Earth at the top of the atmosphere.
As well as missing the big-picture, Cook and Nuccitelli show us they don’t have a good grip on cause and effect. The world may have been warming, but that does not mean that CO2 caused it. Though they would very much like you to think that.
But if you want to scare people out of their money and impress fools, the Skeptical Science widget is just the thing. As SkS say on their page: “ Put a widget on your blog to let people know that climate change is important to you. ” To which JoNova adds, “The Sks widget performs a valuable service, advertising the bloggers who don’t understand big numbers or trends, and who struggle with statistical significance. If someone wants to show they think-with-the-herd, and not with their brain, the SkepticalScience widget […]
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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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