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You may not have heard of the World Federation of Scientists – it certainly isn’t run with a budget of millions or a professional PR team, instead it’s exactly the kind of organization that outstanding scientists would set up. No flash graphics, no spiffy logo, and no inundation of press releases. It’s only got two colours, but the people who meet and talk there range from world leaders in politics to people who changed the modern world with their science.
It’s the opposite of UN “science”, what it lacks in marketing skills, it more than makes up for in sheer heavyweight scientific brainpower and kudos. The Federation has 10,000 scientist members apparently, including T. D. Lee (parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, Nobel Prize) and Prof Antonino Zichichi (1000 papers in particle physics, first example of antimatter). Former members (until their deaths) were Laura Fermi, Eugene Wigner (Nobel in Physics fundamental symmetry principles), Paul Dirac (Nobel Prize, Dirac Equation, Fermions, theoretical physics, “genius”), and Piotr Kapitza (Soviet scientist, Nobel Prize and superfluidity, “Kapitsa resistance“).
Prof Antonino Zichichi founded the World Federation of Scientists and he’s angry at the state of Climate Science.
Christopher Monckton writes from the World Federation […]
GE — A clean energy revenue machine
GE is so large that its annual revenue ($150 billion) is greater than New Zealand’s gross domestic product ($140.43 billion). But GE stands to profit in solving man-man global warming, whereas New Zealand will just pay.
In 2011 GE generated $21 billion in “clean energy revenue”. (GE Annual Report 2011, p 3).
GE boast that their “technology helps deliver a quarter of the world’s electricity”. “We are one of the largest clean energy companies in the world” (page 18) “GE wind turbines, among the most widely used in the world, will soon power the largest wind farm in the U.S ”
Not just a whitegoods company any more.
In other words, they are one of the largest companies in the world which makes profits that depend on a climate of fear. How much would their wind turbines be worth if western governments pulled the pins on all the subsidies?
Here’s how much:
“Manufacturers of turbines and other components will shed an estimated 10,000 workers in the U.S. this year in anticipation of a slowdown in orders, says the AWEA. If Congress doesn’t extend the production tax credit, that figure will […]
These people are not good with numbers.
In a paper published in Nature Climate Change today, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, together with Greg Rau of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, and Elizabeth McLeod of The Nature Conservancy, say new tactics are needed to save oceans from CO2 emissions.
“It’s unwise to assume we will be able to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at levels necessary to prevent ongoing damage to marine ecosystems,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.
“In lieu of dealing with the core problem – increasing emissions of greenhouse gases – these techniques and approaches could ultimately represent the last resort.”
In addition to using shade cloth over coral reefs, the paper suggests novel marine conservation options, including applying low-voltage electrical current to stimulate coral growth and mitigate mass bleaching; adding base minerals such as carbonates and silicates to the ocean to neutralize acidity; and converting CO2 from land-based waste into dissolved bicarbonates that could be added to the ocean to provide carbon sequestration.
Alistair Hobday Research Scientist – Marine and Atmospheric Research at CSIRO said novel solutions are required. “We need to be mature enough to listen to […]
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In June this year the UNEP report announced that Global Renewable Energy investment reached $257 Billion in 2011. It’s so large it rivals the $302 billion invested in fossil fuel power. But how much electricity do we get for all that money? When the details are pulled from the fog, a quarter of a trillion dollars appears to produce only about 3% of all our global electricity, and even less of our global energy. All that money, so few gigawatts.
The 2012 UNEP report “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment” compares the
“…despite an increasingly tough competitive landscape for manufacturers, total investment in renewable power and fuels last year increased by 17% to a record $257 billion, a six-fold increase on the 2004 figure and 94% higher than the total in 2007, the year before the world financial crisis.”
Renewables growth has slowed somewhat:
“Although last year’s 17% increase was significantly smaller than the 37% growth recorded in 2010, it was achieved at a time of rapidly falling prices for renewable energy equipment and severe pressure on fiscal budgets in the developed world.”
The last couple of quarters have not been good for […]
Got no evidence? Can’t hold a rational discussion? Just call people names — smear them.
David Evans (my other half) pointed out that anyone who opposed the regulating class gets called a racist sooner or later (see those quotes at the end). Now it’s happened to him. Two weeks after getting a mention of climate “feedbacks” into The Age, he’s being called antisemitic. And on what basis? Wait for it… two years ago, on a different topic, Dr David Evans wrote the word “Rothschilds”. Then those who can’t think, but were keen to do a character assassination, leapt to use their psychic abilities, crack secret codes, and drew on their best kindergarten reasoning to call that “antisemitic”. The essay was about banking history and systematic flaws in our currency system, and there was no mention of any religion or any race. But no matter, it’s just another variation of the pathetic Holocaust denier meme. It’s what a smear-artist does — denigrate speakers to try to stop people hearing their message.
As usual, a lack of evidence doesn’t stop the rabid conspiracy-theory-spotters from writing reams of speculation about something that isn’t there and never was. David has never mentioned anything about […]
Simple numbers are hard to get, so when Anton Lang pointed me at the EIA site (U.S. Energy Information Administration), I wanted to give everyone the straight answer to the question: just how much electricity do renewables make on a global scale? The EIA has the only database in the world with a this much accuracy.
The answer is that 80% of our electricity comes from the fossil fuels and nuclear that the Greens despise. Hydroelectricity, with all its pluses and minuses, produces a serious 16% of the total. But all the vanity renewables bundled together make about 3.5% of the total.
Wind power is a major global industry but it’s only making in the order of 1.4% of total electricity. And solar is so pathetically low that it needs to be bundled with “tidal and wave” power to even rate 0.1% (after rounding up).
For all the fuss and money, if the world’s solar powered units all broke tonight, it would not dent global electricity production a jot.
No one connected to a grid would notice.
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These are the total global numbers from the US Energy Information Agency (The EIA) for 2009.
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Naomi Oreskes visited Curtin University in Perth last week. Blessed are those who came to bear witness to the true prophecies! Dr Roberto Soria from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, was there at what he so aptly describes as an evangelistic event. His dry satirical report of that day follows, a very enjoyable read for those who have been at the receiving end of similar sermons. Frankly, I can’t think of a better way to absorb the Oreskes message. Enjoy! — Jo
Naomi Oreskes preaches hatred of sinners
The Parable of Oreskes is epic!
Guest Post Dr Roberto Soria The glorious banquet is coming to an end. For 150 years hundreds of millions of guests have eaten to their hearts’ content at the Banquet of Gaia. But now, the Son of Man has arrived to deliver the bill. The diners are in shock. Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill. Still others deny that they partook of the meal, or suggest that they simply ignore the waiter. But there is no way out. The bill is due now, it is time to pay, or we […]
Matt Thompson was asked for an update from a local reporter in West Australia, and sent this today:
Thank you for your enquiry. We believe that we were treated extremely unfairly by DEC. Through draconian licence restrictions, they made it impossible for us to continue operating Narrogin Beef Producers, after we had received all the required permissions and gone through all the proper processes before and during operation of the feedlot.
We were also in a dispute with NAB over their involvement in destroying our company. About a month ago, we reached a settlement with the NAB which included giving them possession of Narrogin Beef Producers’ physical assets. We still retain the right to sue the State over the destruction of our business, which we are still pursuing. This is our only means of attempting to repay unsecured creditors.
We are interested to see who ends up in possession of our former assets, as these assets would have no value unless the new owners are treated differently by DEC than we were. We remain deeply saddened by the destruction (including abattoirs) of the beef industry in WA, which showed such promise a few years […]
Experiments with Zebra Fish show that if their embryo’s develop in warmer water, they not only are able to swim faster but they cope better in both warmer and colder water. (How catastrophic can that be, I ask you?)
ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2012) — New research by McMaster University biologist Graham Scott suggests that growing up at warmer temperatures helps some aquatic animals cope with climate change, raising questions about the limits of adaptation.
Scott and Johnston found that when embryos raised in warm water experienced temperature variation as adults, they could swim faster, their muscle was better suited for aerobic exercise, and they expressed at higher levels many of the genes that contribute to exercise performance.
The improvements were true for the adult fish in warmer and colder water alike — a finding that surprised the researchers.
“We thought that they might do better under warmer conditions because they grew up in warmer conditions. We didn’t think they’d also do better under colder conditions, but they did.
Their research shows the fish are hardier after being raised in a warm-water nursery, and raises the question of how far the […]
Yet another paper shows that the climate models have flaws, described as “gross” “severe” and “disturbing”. The direct effect of doubling CO2 is theoretically 3.7W per square meter. The feedbacks supposedly are 2 -3 times as strong (according to the IPCC). But some scientists are trying to figure out those feedbacks with models which have flaws in the order of 70W per square meter. (How do we find that signal in noise that’s up to 19 times larger?)
Remember climate science is settled: like gravity and a round earth. (Really?)
Miller et al 2012 [abstract] [PDF] find that some models predict clouds to have a net shortwave radiative effect near zero, but observations show it is 70W per square meter. Presumably, cloud shortwave radiative effect means the sunlight bounced upwards off the surface of the clouds and out into space.
What’s especially interesting about this paper is the level of detail. They test shortwave and longwave radiation, precipitation flux, integrated water vapor, liquid water path, cloud fraction, and they have observations from the top of the atmosphere and the surface. With so much information they can test models against short wave and long wave radiation, to see […]
I wondered who was funding Oreskes to fly all the way around the world to deliver two seminars in Perth to audiences of mostly evangelical believers. Michael Kile (Quadrant magazine) reveals more of the details. Presumably she is funded by the Professors-at-large program at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia (UWA). We still have no details on the amounts.
UWA think achieving “international excellence” is so important they’ve put it in their logo.
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We see below how many of the UWA hosts benefit from climate change grants, and thus would potentially gain from promoting a baseless smear against critics who threaten their funding or status. These hypocrites are happy to promote the untruth that skeptics are funded to speak, when the they themselves are the ones who benefit financially from a dubious scare campaign. The professors-at-large program is supposed to foster public debate, but four of the ten Oreskes hosts signed a letter seeking to silence a skeptic from speaking at another university.
Who would sponsor an expert that is ignorant of 99.99% of their topic?
Oreskes claims skeptics are funded by big-oil, but misses that most oil companies […]
It’s interesting how the message is spreading. David and I have been arguing for 2 or 3 years that the feedbacks are the key gaping flaw, the critical point in the skeptic’s case. (And see this post last week.) It’s the amplification in the models with water vapor and clouds which is the point of highest uncertainty (and indeed it’s not just uncertain, the evidence points towards negative feedback. The models are wrong.)
Patrick Moore shared emails with David in February 2012 saying: “Yours is the best straightforward explanation of the skeptic’s rationale that I have seen, and thank-you for that.”
And now we see an interview with Patrick Moore in the Washington Times, sharing the meme:
“What most people don’t realize, partly because the media never explains it, is that there is no dispute over whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and all else being equal would result in a warming of the climate. The fundamental dispute is about water in the atmosphere, either in the form of water vapour (a gas) or clouds (water in liquid form). It is generally accepted that a warmer climate will result in more water evaporating from the land and sea […]
It’s a start. Paul Bain regrets the offense caused by the term denier.
But there’s no mention of the term failing basic English or it’s unscientific nature. The term has been used by professors, M.P.’s, Prime Ministers and national broadcasters, and none of them have expressed even a hint of regret, but we can nonetheless call this a small win. Notch up one for skeptics, but ten for the fog.
Credit to Paul Bain for being one of the only people drawn into that unscientific milieu who has the strength of character to back out, ever so slightly. He has promised to reply to my last email. I look forward to it. Few who claim to be concerned about the planet have the intellectual honesty to even try to defend their work.
The small win here is not so much the correction attached below (though that is useful), but it’s that the internet fray and the questions will have been noticed by other editors and researchers. In the future, a few of those people will be more careful with their terms.
Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers
Paul G. Bain | Matthew J. Hornsey, | Renata Bongiorno […]
You’d expect a professor to have done the basic research.
Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes is famous (of sorts) for the book: Merchants of Doubt — it seeds doubts about skeptics by saying that skeptic’s “seed doubts” about climate change.
The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Oreskes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.
The hypocrisy of saying that skeptics attack the messenger is lost on Oreskes who specializes in … attacking the messengers.
Oreskes’ work is based on a logical fallacy, inept research, and incompetent reasoning.
What is remarkable is that so many “intellectuals” or journalists can’t or won’t see through her thin rhetoric.
Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes. The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has […]
Ray Evans writes a review below of Robert Manne’s essay in The Monthly entitled A Dark Victory: How vested interests defeated climate science. (Forgive me Ray for slipping in one or two thoughts of my own below). Ray Evans is the secretary of The Lavoisier Group one of the first original skeptical groups in Australia (I’ve put a few notes on that at the base of the article). It was Graham Readfearns review (ABC Drum) that apparently brought the Manne article to Ray’s attention.
Dear All,
Readfearn’s review was a lamentation of defeat and disappointment. So I immediately bought a copy of The Monthly and with eager anticipation began to read Robert Manne’s account of the tragedy which he claims has befallen him and his fellow warmists. It was a disappointing read.
There was nothing new in Manne’s arguments seeking to legitimize his passionate belief in imminent climate catastrophe. His palpable anger, bordering on hatred, of the global warming sceptics, or to use his loaded term, denialists, all of whom were Americans, was unsettling.
“While climate change denial . . . exists almost exclusively in the English speaking democracies . . and although it has spread […]
The Australians must have said something awful.
In the never ending quest to hide information that the taxpayer paid for, the New Zealand trial of skeptics vs alarmists is rising to new heights.
This is a legal case asking for discovery of documents, which is much harder to dodge than a simple FOI. Yet NIWA are putting in an Olympic effort to hide what the Australian BOM (their allies?) have said about their work.
The bottom line is that the NIWA team peer reviewed Australia’s new ACORN temperature set and endorsed it as being “worlds best practice” which (judging by what we’ve seen) it clearly is. What a damning review. The NIWA practice is so bad, that even the Australian BOM can’t return the favor and pretend to say something good about it.
NIWA (New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research) is the official New Zealand organization responsible for climate pronouncements. They pronounced that the country had warmed almost 1°C during the twentieth century, but, oh dear, when skeptics looked, the raw data showed a rise of only 0.23°C in the same time period. And in the full record, the trend was only a 0.06°C per century since […]
Well well. It is confirmed, this site was hacked at about 11am EST Australia this morning (9pm NY Time). We do not know what the motive was. It appears to be an XSS (Cross Site Script) type hack — for those who are interested. There are many log files to go through. News was posted on WUWT also.
Thanks to the expert help of my Webmaster, it’s been mostly restored within only 3 hours.He was onto it immediately and worked non-stop to unravel the mess. (Some comments are still missing from the weekend threads, we hope we can restore them too.)
UPDATE from my webmaster:
“The attack was undertaken over a 9 hour period using proxy servers from around the world including universities, schools and broadband providers. Unfortunately, hackers believe themselves to be smarter than they are. In this instance they have used the web01.defence.gov.au web server as a proxy which is located at the Woomera Air Force Base. No doubt the Department of Defence will be interested in all the data collected by the jonannenova.com.au web server pertaining to its machines. Additional confirmation will be sought from private broadband suppliers who keep detailed logs […]
For all those thoughts that don’t fit somewhere else… –
7.9 out of 10 based on 32 ratings
Firstly — No one wins anything while the people who slag off at scientists get their denigrating name-calling on the front cover of magazines. That said, I’m smiling. Beaming. The man who doesn’t know what science is, admits his team is failing. That has to be good. Real scientists everywhere, smile!
Manne’s argument appears to rest entirely on his mistaken belief that “science” is What The Gods Declare it To Be. For Manne, the Gods are “official climate scientists”. Apparently, only those who are anointed by Government funding have access to The Truth — and their declarations must be obeyed. Manne is so completely under their spell, he is incapable of figuring out how anyone could think anything else.
“For reasonable citizens there ought to be no question easier to answer than whether or not human-caused global warming is real and is threatening the future of the Earth.”
For Manne, planetary atmospheric dynamics are so blindingly clear that only unreasonable citizens could question it. And if there is “no easier question”, then it follows that those who get this question wrong are not just unreasonable but quite possibly, brain dead. Manne’s writing is thick with insults, but […]
UPDATE: Richard Muller, the man running BEST (Berkley Earth Surface Temperatures) pretends to have been a skeptic who “converted” to believing in man-made global warming. But this was a fake narrative, easily shown by his past quotes. Many major newspapers ran with his propaganda, but now are trying to cover up their failure as “fact checkers”. They did not even do the most basic of investigations. And let’s not forgot that virtually none of them (or Muller either) point out his daughter profits from consulting on “Green” projects.
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It appears skeptics are getting to the Fairfax press (finally!)
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age both ran with Muller’s claims of being a converted skeptic who found the world was warming (and the preposterous leap that “therefore” we were to blame).
“I saw past the Hot Air on Climate“ is gone (The SMH and The Age return a 404 error).
The SMH even arranged triumphant artwork, the article was given a big splash. But hello, hello, those articles are disappearing down the memory hole. Presumably neither newspaper is proud of having been fooled by Muller — the articles were so quickly blown away when skeptics pointed out that […]
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