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Ross Cameron you have been Deleted — how the Delete-People-Tactic destroys discussion

UPDATE: People are still angry over this on Twitter.Sign the petition.

Unpermitted words have a Weapons-Grade power over useful words at a rate of a billion to one

Speak a Forbidden Term and your entire career can be neutralized instantly. It doesn’t matter how many other useful ideas or contributions you make. Any breach unleashes a tidal wave of unrighteous indignation.  Then the honest players fold like daffodils in a breeze and leap to carry out the judgement of twitter mobs. Why do good people help the Lynch Mob every time?

The permitted word list is defined by the PC mob, it changes at random, and post hoc, and only applies to people who threaten collectivist power. Eminent scientists can be called “deniers” as if they are mental morons, they can be likened to pedophiles, asbestos-pushers and Hitler, and that’s not only OK, those people get lavish taxpayer funded careers and prizes. (Not mentioning any names Stephan Lewandowsky and Robyn Williams.)

Freedom of Speech is under threat —  we have to stand up to this

Tuesday, Ross Cameron said the four forbidden words “slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned“. Rude, yes, dynamite, no. They were better left unsaid, and potentially offensive, but not a sackable offence.

Suddenly the experienced former MP and long time commentator was a Proven Racist, which, like a dose of social Ebola, means he had to be excised lest his condition infect the rest of the show, or even the entire channel. Lordy, deranged Twitter Mobs might call Sky The-Channel-of-Racists! But here’s the thing, they already do that anyway.

As Andrew Bolt points out Ross was defending China. Co-host Rowan Dean told him off for sounding like an advert.

Ross Cameron has made decades of contributions to the national dialogue, with millions of useful words, but none of that counts if we reduce a whole person to a binary dot. In a one-nil national debate you are either a person or a racist! Thus everything he ever says on any topic can now be met with the inane “rascist” namecalling. That is, as long as we let namecallers control the conversation.

Think about the incredible power of these four words. Who died? Which trade deal was axed? The over-reaction (by non-Chinese people) is a patronizing put-down, as if the Chinese are such weak petals they can’t handle a colorful description or an old demeaning cliche.

Kevin Rudd thinks it’s all so important he declared Rupert Murdoch practically employed Ross Cameron to say this. “They knew exactly what they were doing”. Apparently defending China for 6.9 out of 7 minutes is an “extreme right wing view”. Shows what KRudd knows about politics.

Instead of sacking him, Outsiders could have invited some actual Chinese people on the show to reply. Ross could’ve explained himself face to face (if they wanted that, but they probably have more important things to discuss). Let him face that music. Why not find out whether Chinese people preferred Ross’s commentary to Rowan’s. That’s what a national conversation looks like. Not like a witchhunt.

Ross Cameron on Outsiders

A seven minute long monologue from Ross about the importance and achievements of China. Forbidden words at 5:20.

The Punishment Does Not Fit “the Crime”

Sacking him feeds the DeletePeople Movement, giving them a power they don’t deserve and destroying any chance of a sophisticated national debate.

The four poisonous words

Read the quote without the four bolded words. Ho hum. The spirit and intent of Ross’s point is clear:

Keep reading  →

9.2 out of 10 based on 100 ratings

Just another bunch of old volcanoes we didn’t know about, found off Tasmania

A few weeks ago a CSIRO boat mapped out a string of 3 kilometer high seamounts that no one knew about. They are 400km east of Tasmania and sit in water 5 km deep (so no one is going to run into them, even in a military sub.)

But remember, even though 80% of the ocean floor is unmapped, and we haven’t even logged, named or noticed thousands of volcanoes, we *know* that they are not heating the ocean, changing ocean currents, or affecting our climate. Skillless models tell us so. (Pay us your money).

h/t Thanks to Tallbloke

Huge underwater volcano chain discovered off Tasmania

Denise Chow, Euronews

“We’ve only mapped a tiny fraction of the ocean floor,” said Andrew Fisher, a marine geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the new discovery. “We have more detailed maps of Mars, Venus and the moon than we do of the seafloor. Other planetary bodies can be mapped in high resolution with satellites, but on Earth, the water layer gets in the way. The only way is to go out with ships.”

More than 80 percent of the ocean remains unmapped and unexplored, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s because it’s difficult and time consuming to create detailed seafloor maps. Sonar-equipped research vessels like the Investigator must make a series of passes over an area in a process Fisher likened to mowing a lawn.

The original press release, October 8, 2018.

Scientists uncover volcanic lost world off the Tasmanian coast

The lost world was uncovered during detailed seafloor mapping by CSIRO research vessel Investigator while on a 25-day research voyage led by scientists from the Australian National University (ANU).

Keep reading  →

9.5 out of 10 based on 85 ratings

Rising seas? Hundreds of Pacific Islands are growing, not shrinking

This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.

Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.

Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.

Sea level rise, climate change, pacific islands.

….

 

No habitable island, none, got smaller:

The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk a resort on, that’s about that is about ten Rugby fields. Conveniently for us, no island bigger than 10 hectares shrank despite the world adding two thousand coal fired plants and a billion cars.

It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size, making this value a relevant threshold to define atoll island areal stability. We therefore propose to use this threshold, first, to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy or exploitation, and second, to assess atoll and atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Using this threshold for future island development (e.g., resort island) would considerably limit the risk for new developments to be negatively affected by island areal and positional instability, on condition of also avoiding any human intervention that may alter island sediment budget (e.g., sediment extraction) and natural dynamics (e.g., obstruction of sediment transport and deposition by constructions)

See the graph. All the larger islands are staying the same size or growing.

Global, sea level, islands, size, change.

Decadal change in island land area for 709 Pacific and Indian Ocean islands. Click to enlarge.

Coming next, panic that rising oceans are shrinking because islands are expanding. And if you can follow that, there is a job waiting for you at the UNEP.

REFERENCE

Duvat, V. K. E. (2018). A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, e557. doi:10.1002/wcc.557

9.8 out of 10 based on 99 ratings

Midweek Unthreaded

9 out of 10 based on 22 ratings

Only 16 countries are even aiming to reach their Paris targets

The Paris Agreement was always fake news

Only 16 countries have set domestic targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are clearly at least as ambitious as their pledged contributions to the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to an analysis published today (29 October 2018)…

Who are these environmental stars and global suckers?

The 16 countries with targets in national policies and laws that are compatible with their NDCs are:

Algeria, Canada, Costa Rica, Ethiopia,

Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, FYR Macedonia,

Malaysia, Montenegro, Norway, Papua New Guinea,

Peru, Samoa, Singapore and Tonga.

“We found only six countries that have set economy-wide targets beyond 2030 in their NDCs – Iraq, Cameroon, Brunei, Armenia, Bhutan and Palestine. Only 16 countries plus the EU currently look beyond 2030 in their national laws, policies and directives…”

The committee writing the report seems to have a thing about “economy wide” targets probably because they are the most expensive, profligately wasteful and pointless schemes, like the Australian carbon tax which cost $5310 per ton of carbon reduced. Economy wide schemes punish sectors which are already efficient, don’t cut much carbon, but they do employ many friends of Big Government.

The report was done by ..”the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, both at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the World Resources Institute.”

I don’t think they realize how useful this kind of report is for skeptics.

h/t Pat, ClimateDepot

Nachmany, M. and Mangan, E. (2018) Aligning national and international climate targets, London School of Economics and Political Science. http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/targets/

9.7 out of 10 based on 60 ratings

80% of Australian don’t want the government to put renewables ahead of costs, health, housing, jobs etc

With boring regularity, when voters are asked to rank their choices, “clean” energy is not a top priority. Only 7% of Australians want the government to promote renewables ahead of other major issues. It’s the same old, same old for years, yet the media and both parties are locked in a death spiral trying to turn it into an election issue. Real people put living Standards above Virtue Signalling, says Alan Moran.

Essential Report Oct 2018: Rocketing into top place is the cost of living. Stuck in the dull middle is renewables.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.

Split voters into left and right, and remarkably they all want the same things. (So we’re all still human, though it says something about the type of questions asked.)

Conservative / liberal voters want to be able to afford stuff, stay alive, have a home:

Liberal voters put renewables at number 10 out of 13.

Essential poll 2018. What Liberal/ conservative voters want the government to address.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address.  Click to enlarge.

Labor voters want to be able to afford stuff too:

Even Labor voters are only putting renewables at number 6.

Essential poll 2018. What Labor voters want the government to address.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address.  Click to enlarge.

The polarising media makes out we are all so different, but it’s remarkable how closely the answers matched. Nearly the same order, nearly the same percentage. Conservatives spread their answers more (are less homogeneous). They care more about state debt and terrorism, but whatever.

The message to Conservatives for the 58th time is that they can drop the whole Paris thing, the media will go crazy, but the public won’t. Obviously it’s no accident that Abbott, Trump and Dean all won. As for the 17% of conservatives who want renewables, that’ll vanish the moment our nation starts a discussion about how expensive they are, and how pointless. Over to you Scott….

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 87 ratings

Don’t miss Dan Hannan in Australia – Perth, Melbourne, Sydney

He’s in Perth Tuesday night. I’ve seen him speak before and he was excellent. I’ll be there. Tickets to Perth here.

“British Conservative Member of the European Parliament Dan Hannan explains why London will soon be closer to Perth than Brussels, and outlines historic opportunities ahead for West Australian entrepreneurs.” With introduction by Andrew Hastie MP.

Dan Hannan In Australia: Melbourne on Wednesday 31 October in conversation with John Roskam and Nick Cater.
Sydney, the 2018 Annual John Bonython Lecture  with the CIS on 1 November.

 

10 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

Interview with David Evans — breaking the impasse in the climate change debate, and why he became a skeptic

David Evans speaks to Emmett at Resolving Reality radio on why he shifted to being a skeptic (4:15 mins), and on the current state of the climate debate and where climate modelers get their “implacable confidence” from (5:20). David discusses the impasse — the standoff. It’s possible that climate modelers can have the physics right but the model paths wrong.

Quite a bit of the interview is aimed at people new to this debate. Regular readers might enjoy more on the Sun’s role (22 minutes). And some of the history, like the rich pickings of working for the Gravy Train  (32:15 minutes).

At 33:00 David discusses the audacious threat to national sovereignty and the near miss of 2009. Useful history to remind us of what is at stake. David goes on to discuss the systematic demonization of non-PC views — he argues that climate change was the test case for the newer more aggressive model of stamping out discussion in so many areas.

David’s research work continues, he prefers to keep a low profile and stay out of the “blood sport” online. I’m not going to put a date on it, original discovery doesn’t work to a timetable, but there is a big book coming, and since the last report of David’s work here, he has added several layers and spent time making sure he understands exactly how the establishment model works. (I say model, singular, because there is only one big overarching theory that bounds the GCM models.) His point about the impasse between skeptics and believers is new, as ultimately is his focus on unravelling the core reasons for the implacable faith that the modelers have in the GCMs which keep failing. We will be revisiting this, opening a new front in the climate debate when we are ready.

More on The Notch. | The Delay.  | Seven possible ways the sun could change our cloud cover David’s research.

 

 

9.5 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

9.5 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Scientist seals himself in plastic tent for 3 days for “climate change” — aborts in 15 hours, foiled by clouds

A 28 year old guy in British Columbia thought it had some message about climate change if he sealed himself in a primitive biodome with 200 plants. But the sun didn’t shine, the plants didn’t photosynthesize enough, and he “felt sluggish”. CO2 levels were a bit high so he had to abandon the experiment just 15 hours later — calling it “a huge success”. As you would, if you had no connection to actual hardship, or actual success.

The BBC thought this badly planned, unscientific stunt failure was newsworthy and lauded him his 15 seconds of fame and advertising for the cause. Proving that any kind of measurable achievement is irrelevant. If it promotes the religion, anything will do.

I challenge anyone to find a lamer stunt in the history of climate panic

Kurtis in a jar. Biodome Man.

Kurtis Baute: Scientist leaves airtight dome after 15 hours

A self-styled “whimsical scientist” who locked himself in an airtight dome with 200 plants to raise awareness of climate change has ended his experiment.

He thanked fans and described the experience as a “huge success”.

While still inside the dome, he explained his mission in a Twitter thread, writing: “#ClimateChange is real, we’re causing it, and it’s a real big deal.

Hmm. He doesn’t say what his “abort” value was in ppm.

 “The messed up thing about my experiment is that some of my abort values (eg If CO2 is too high I escape) are just everyday experiences for many people on this planet. Everyone deserves clean air, but not everyone has it.”

So he pushed his body to withstand levels of CO2 that other people experience every day. Indeed “many” people. Give the man a medal.

It is hard to find a bar set lower than that. It might mean more if he had half a lung, or was really an axolotl.

Scientist sealed in airtight biodome aborts experiment early due to CO2 levels

Despite his three-day attempt falling short, Kurtis Baute says the message about climate change remains the same.

Yes, the message about climate change is that the scientists who are drawn to it are publicity hounds who are not good with numbers.

Plus the whole lack of a cause and effect thingy, or any reason for being, reminds us of the IPCC. “Congrats”.

Keep reading  →

9.4 out of 10 based on 82 ratings

ABC-Watch: Beyond fake headlines — 61% of company directors do not care about Climate Change

Fake News Lesson: How to turn the views of a minority into National Headlines

Yesterday’s ABC headline tells the world that Australian company directors have started to “care” about climate change. What the ABC don’t mention is that only 17% of them actually ticked the box saying they think the Government  should make “climate change” the top long term priority. While more directors were concerned about climate change than any other single issue, most directors thought other things were more important.

For every director who said the government should put climate change at number one, there were more than three who didn’t want that.

The Australian Institute of Directors surveys its 43,000 members every six months on lots of questions. In this round 1,252 members took part and answered something like 40 questions. Only 39% put “climate change” in the top five “long term” issues. So 61% of respondents didn’t think climate change even ranked in the top five issues facing the nation in the long run. Are they all skeptics?

The ABC also forgot to mention that in the short term, company directors wanted the government to fix Energy Policy.

This is what non-stop agitprop looks like

First: The loaded headline

Why Australian company directors have started caring about climate change

Nassim Khadem

Step 2: Frame this as a mass movement. Mention big numbers.

For the first time Australian company directors have nominated climate change as the number one issue they want the federal government to address in the long term, according to a survey of more than 1,200 company directors.

Step 3: Mention big numbers again. Then say the survey demonstrates something that was not even asked.

The Australian Institute of Company Directors’ (AICD) biannual Director Sentiment Index — based on a survey of 1,252 public and private company directors undertaken between September 13 and 27 — shows directors are heeding warnings from regulators about the risks of climate change and the fact that they may, in future, be held liable for failing to act.

It’s handy if you can spook other company directors into the impression that lots of other directors are afraid of being sued.

Step 4: Interview someone who has a conflict of interest and don’t mention the conflict.

Regulators including the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) are among those that have spoken out about the threats of climate change and the risks to companies.

Dr Katherine Woodthorpe, chairman of start-up Fishburners and who until recently was a non-executive director on the board at Sirtex Medical, said company directors were not just being influenced by regulator warnings, but also a push from investors to act.

The ABC apparently forgot to mention Dr Katherine Woodthorpe is Chairman, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre. She’s also a Non-Exec Director of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, at least according to their website. Both of these groups get less funds if Australians think that weather control with wind turbines is worthless voodoo.

Imagine the outrage if Sky News interviewed the Chair of a coal plant and told you their former employment, but not their current one?

Given the amount of money poured into unreliable energy in this country it would be amazing if there weren’t 200 renewables directors or friends among the 43,000 members. Of those who answered questions — 3% work in the energy sector, 8% for a public sector/government body, and 34% for a non-profit entity.

Only 17% of directors said Climate was a top issue (for someone else to solve)

Directors could pick five issues, but 60% didn’t even put a number on “climate change”.

Australian Institute of Company Directors

Click to enlarge. (People could rate 5 things, so the percentages add up to a lot more than 100%)

The top short term issue needing care is Energy Policy

If it served the ABC’s purpose, they could have headlined the story “Company Directors think Government top issue is Energy Policy”.

Then they could have interviewed directors who were moving their plants to get away from nightmare electricity prices. The whole story would have had an opposite meaning. Such is the power of The Editor. Why do we give this power to unaccountable non-independent bureaucrats?

 

Australian Institute of Directors, Short Terms Issues Table, 2018

Click to enlarge.

Australians are paying for Labor-Green advertising disguised as “independent” journalism.

Tired of the self-serving Fake News? If you can help support me, together we can push back. (Paypal, or direct).

Thank you!

Hat tip to David B and George.

REFERENCE

 Australian Institute of Company Directors Sentiment Index for the second half of 2018. Full 87 page PDF is available.

9.8 out of 10 based on 57 ratings

ABC-watch: Economist talks unresearched conspiracy science to pretend journalist

Welcome to another $3 million-a-day quality moment on Their ABC

Here’s a Nobel Prize winning economist reviewing scientific evidence — something Nobel Prize winners in physics don’t get to do on the ABC. His interviewer is the star economist Emma Alberici.

The guest opens with near apocalyptic predictions:

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: If more and more of Australia are not liveable because of climate change, you’re not going to be better off.

You know, the future of the world, let alone the future of Australia really is at stake when we are talking about climate change.

These days, wild claims are just introductory wallpaper. Meh.

Who knew, the key scientific evidence was reviewed by economists.

The evidence is overwhelming and I was on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that reviewed the evidence back 1995, …

Which tells you everything you need to know about how rigorous the IPCC science reviews are.

But it would be OK if only he knew something about climate science, the IPCC or its predictions:

…and I’ve kept looking at the evidence and you know, the one mistake we made in 1995 was that we didn’t anticipate how fast things were going to change.

Indeed, things changed so fast the IPCC has spent the last twenty years downgrading its estimates of climate sensitivity and future warming:

Falling, climate sensitivity, carbon dioxide, IPCC, graph, Scaffetta 2017.

Climate sensitivity keeps falling, Scaffetta 2017.  Thanks to NoTricksZone.

 This is not what “faster than expected” looks like

Since 1995, the temperatures didn’t rise for longer than any of the modelers thought was it was possible for temperatures to not rise. Antarctic sea ice set new highs, Antarctic temperatures did nothing, and tropical islands grew instead of shrinking. The hot spot went missing, and never returned, despite multiple search parties combing the data in search of missing upper tropospheric redness. Thus we found out the core assumption driving most of the prophesied warming was wrong.   We also found out CO2 didn’t lead temperatures for the last half a million years, instead, the hallowed ice cores showed the exact opposite. The evil pollutant turned up 800 years late to nearly every warming party there was. So much for “cause and effect”.

A thousand tide gauges showed sea levels rose slower than expected, and had even slowed down. Ocean heat went missing too and instead of being where the IPCC thought it would be in 1995, it’s probably twenty-three light years away, approaching CassiopeiaePredictions of methane growth failed dismally (see here) after the Russians plugged their leaky pipes. The IPCC did not see that coming. But carbon dioxide emissions grew faster than expected, yet had even less effect.

Meanwhile hurricanes over the US stopped for the longest time on record, and hurricanes all over the world became less energetic.

Emma didn’t ask.

Excuses, Excuses — tomorrow will be sunny with weather variability?

Stiglitz: We didn’t fully anticipate some of the effects like the increase in weather variability, the hurricanes, the cyclones and it is I think, fundamentally short-sighted not, not to be thinking about this but over the long term, the real wealth of a country is based on the skills, the abilities, the innovation of the citizens and that is going to depend on the investments that you put in your people — not on coal, not on iron ore.

You know, I spent a lot of time in China. They are beginning to wake up to the dangers of coal. Air is not breathable, that’s the most concrete immediate effect but they too understand the dangers of climate change.

He spent all that time in China, but sadly Google didn’t let him see the secret coal boom, the collapsing solar industry, nor the coal-volcano-trains. He may have missed that when Chinese Crypto companies want cheap electricity, they are buying coal fired power in Australia.

The Chinese do understand the dangers of climate change. They know it’s a scam.

So, I think there will be a global consensus on eliminating coal and that means it is all the more imperative for Australia to get off coal.

Emma Alberici skips the chance to discuss science or economics and asks him a softball psych question instead:

EMMA ALBERICI: I want to know how you explain the politicisation of climate change as an issue, given so many well regarded economists like yourself indeed — the Nobel Prize in economics has gone to William Norhaus this month, who has pioneered a framework for understanding how the economy and climate interact — and yet on the other side we have this politicisation of the issue such that if you want to reduce carbon emissions, certainly in this country, you’re a green leftie. And if you agree that it is all a bit of alarmist nonsense, then you’re really a true conservative.

She works for a tax-payer funded institute which ignores half the country and calls them names, but this ABC senior star can’t figure out why things are “politicized.”

The Nobel prize-winner doesn’t know either, but speculates anyway:

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah, I really, it is a little bit of a puzzle. You know, there are special interests who make a lot of money out of fossil fuel — coal, oil companies — and they have an economic interest to try to persuade people that its hokum, that it is a liberal conspiracy.

Except that oil companies lobby for and benefit from carbon penalties that punish coal more than them, and which also subsidize unreliable power that needs gas back up. If only Stiglitz understood economics…

If only Emma Alberici were a journalist.

h/t George

REFERENCE

Scafetta et al., 2017   Since 2000 there has been a systematic tendency to find lower climate sensitivity values. The most recent studies suggest a transient climate response (TCR) of about 1.0 °C, an ECS less than 2.0 °C and an effective climate sensitivity (EfCS) in the neighborhood of 1.0 °C.”

9.8 out of 10 based on 90 ratings

Midweek Unthreaded

9.9 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Evil Nature caused Swiss Glaciers to melt faster in 1870 (See solar and volcanic effects)

A study on Swiss Glaciers shows that the fastest melting was in the 1860s and 1870s, long before the first coal fired power. (See that steep decline from 1850-70 in Part a in the graph below.) In Part b see the glaciers have been going back and forward in cycles that somehow have no correlation with human emissions.

Climate models can’t predict any of these turning points, don’t understand any of these cycles, but “doom is coming”.

Pay up your money to make glaciers grow again.

From the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI)

Glacier retreat, graph, 1800s, 1900s, 2018.

Figure 8. (a) Cumulative glacier length changes for the four glaciers Bossons, Mer de Glace, Oberer (O-) Grindelwald and Unterer (U-) Grindelwald …); (b) glacier length change rate …(c )glacier length changes compared to surface air temperature anomalies for the summer … Panel (d) air temps and stratospheric aerosol optical depth (SAOD) (Click to enlarge and read the proper full caption).

In Part c (above) — glacier lengths correlate with temperatures.  In part d the brown spikes are the Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth [SAOD] — meaning volcanic dust, black carbon, soot. These were bad years to head to the beach.

In terms of speed, note the lack of any spooky “unprecedented” retreat. The glaciers are shorter now, but the rate they are shortening is slower than in 1870.

Unlike CO2, volcanoes and solar activity do correlate with glacier length

See this longer graph — the red line estimate of summer temperature bottoms twice in 1600 and 1810 which also coincides with volcanic activity and solar minima.

It could get pretty expensive to control glacier length since we have to reduce the suns activity and probably set off some nukes in lieu of a handy volcano.

Glacier retreat, graph, 1800s, 1900s, 2018.

Click to enlarge. Figure 9. (a) black dots are glacier measurements. Grey columns are times of high volcanic aerosols.  The red line is an estimate of European summer temperatures from tree rings. [BB means Biomass Burning if you click and read the proper caption.]

Long glaciers coincide with the solar minima and with volcanic forcing:

Keep reading  →

9.9 out of 10 based on 56 ratings

The largest poll in Australia on Climate Change was the 2013 Abbott landslide election

Left-right morphing sides of politics.The flipping of Wentworth just marks a the morphing of the two major parties which started long ago.

The Labor Party now represents the rich and the welfare dependent. The Liberals represent the Deplorable worker and what’s left of the Middle Class and there aren’t many of those in the seat of Wentworth. Turnbull was the perfect fit for the seat as it transited from being a safe Conservative Seat to a safe Collectivist-Virtue-Signalling Seat. He was the Labor-guy badged as a Liberal. Kerryn Phelps is the “ideal” replacement — the Labor-Green candidate badged as an Independent. This made it easier for doctors-wives, lawyers and journalists to vote for an option which was essentially Labor-Green, but had the appearance of being “smarter” and above all the riff raff.

Kerryn Phelps essentially stands for a Get UP approved Labor Green Christmas Wish List: More renewable parasites, death to coal, pandering to collectivist UN committees, a ban on fossil fuel donations (but no ban for government cronies who take big-government funds and donate it to big-government parties.). She wants to restore funding to The ABC because $3m a day is not enough. Heck, they lost 5% a while back.

The vote in the wealthiest electorate in Australia is still underway, but whatever happens, it tells us nothing much about most other electorates. Should the national policy on energy change because of 1,500 voters in the wealthiest seat?

Labor calls for National Energy policy to be set by 1,500 voters in richest seat in Australia

Labor is calling on the government to embrace the National Energy Guarantee [NEG] following the Wentworth by-election result.

Thus proving that the NEG was really a Labor Policy all along.

Polls show climate and energy policy was a key factor in voters turning their backs on the government in the blue-ribbon Sydney seat on Saturday and electing independent Kerryn Phelps.

The largest poll ever done in Australia was the 2013 election where the only party ever to run in Australia on a blood oath of “no carbon tax” won 90 seats and blitzed the opposition. What’s changed since then? Electricity prices have hit bleeding point, we have more unreliable energy than ever, and watching Australian black-outs has become an international sport.

Liberals could still win the next Federal Election but almost certainly won’t

The hottest two topics in the electorate are electricity prices and immigration. If the ScoMo team grew a spine they could simply copy the Abbott tested formula. It’d be even more popular now than it was then — see Brexit, Trump and Dean.

The Jellyfish-Liberals are trying to satisfy the centre of the climate debate but polls show there is no “centre” anymore. This is the graveyard where losing teams hunt for votes. The centre used to be the place where most people were, but in the artificially polarized climate debate it’s a vacant lot now. The undecideds split long ago into the skeptic camp or the gullible feedlot.

As long as Liberals pretend wind and solar are useful, they can’t defeat the fake claims that wind and solar are cheap. So they get consigned to be the crew that “cause” expensive electricity with policy uncertainty and because they don’t support more renewables. Jellyfish Liberals are called almost the same names they would be called if they were out-and-out “deniers” of the climate religion.  Pandering to the namecallers is a losing game.

Nick Cater:Weird, wealthy Wentworth is not the real Australia

A by-election in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is no place to test the national temperature, any more than dipping your toe into a glass of chardonnay at the Bondi Trattoria can tell you if it’s warm enough for a swim.

Wentworth is a land removed from the daily struggles faced by other Australians, a place where rising electricity prices barely touch the hip-pocket nerve, where God’s own airconditioner blows gently off summer waters, and “action” on climate change, by which they mean “subsidies”, boosts the share portfolio.

Few Wentworth residents could tell you the price of petrol, just as few know the full horror of the word “commute”…

It is home to 210 surgeons but not a single animal slaughterer. If you live in Wentworth, your meat is boned elsewhere.

Wentworth is home to 731 of them [journalists], the third highest concentration in the country, beaten only by the neighbouring seats of Sydney (962) and Grayndler (837).

The Wentworth result shows people are sick of both big parties. But it tells us nothing about solving the energy crisis or changing the climate.

*Headline changed. It was “Labor calls for National Energy policy to be set by 1,500 voters in richest seat in Australia” but after watching the ABC repeat how “polls show” voters care about climate change, the more important message was the line about the 2013 election.

9.9 out of 10 based on 83 ratings

Unthreaded Party

Majority gone. The Liberals are not paying for the last leadership change, so much as the one before.

Picking a Labor guy to run the Party was never going to end well.

Thank Turnbull (and MP’s that voted for him) for turning a 24 seat majority into one seat rule that he then threw away…

Note to Libs: if the ABC approves, you are doing something wrong.

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9.5 out of 10 based on 75 ratings

Despite record heat, six times as many people die of cold in Australia not heat

Australia has had the hottest temperatures for a thousand years (according to some). We’ve “shattered records” yet even so, at the peak of this hot era — six times as many Australians were felled by cold weather. Lord help us when the next ice-age comes.

A study on Australian deaths from 2000-2009 found that heat, cold, and temperature variability killed 42,000 people which was about 6% of all deaths. Of those temperature related deaths 60% were due to the cold. 28% were due to sudden changes in temperature. A mere 10% were due to heat.

Greenhouse gases should help prevent 90% of those deaths (they reduce temperature variability too). Looks like we need to burn more coal. For the sake of the vulnerable and needy.

When are our government and our government broadcaster going to start dealing with real problems, not fake ones?

 

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Attributable fraction of deaths: Heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in 42,414 deaths during the study period, accounting for about 6.0% of all deaths. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61.4%), and noticeably, contribution from temperature variability (28.0%) was greater than that from heat (10.6%).

 

Don’t assume we just got lucky. According to an ABC heatwave panic story, deaths from heatwaves during this 2000-2009 decade were among the worst.

Heatwave deaths, graph, Australia.

The ABC warns us repeatedly of the dangers of a few hot days

Heatwaves are Australia’s deadliest natural hazard and many of us are unprepared

Heatwaves are Australia’s deadliest natural hazard, but a recent survey has found that many vulnerable people do not have plans to cope with extreme heat.

A search for “ABC Cold Death Warning” turns up a story of a dead cook in a freezer.

Mortality, graph, temperature, heat. cold, Australia.

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10 out of 10 based on 51 ratings

Hadley excuse implies their quality control might filter out the freak outliers? Not so.

#datagateThe Met Office, Hadley Centre response to #DataGate implied they do quality control and that leaves the impression that they might filter out the frozen tropical islands and other freak data:

We perform automated quality checks on the ocean data and monthly updates to the land data are subjected to a computer assisted manual quality control process.

I asked John to expand on what Hadley means. He replies that the quality control they do is very minimal, obviously inadequate, and these errors definitely survive the process and get into the HadCRUT4 dataset. Bear in mind a lot of the problems begin with the national meteorological services which supply the shoddy data, but then Hadley seems pretty happy to accept these mistakes. (Hey, it’s not like Life on Earth depends on us understanding our climate. :- ) )

As far as long term trends go, the site-move-adjustments are the real problem and create an artificial warming trend. On the other hand, the frozen tropical islands tells us how competent the “Experts” really are (not a lot) and how much they care about understanding what our climate really was (not at all). That said, we don’t know what effect the freak outliers have on the big trends, but then, neither do the experts.

Below, John drills into those details which show just how pathetically neglected the dataset is. For data-heads — the freak outliers affect the standard deviation and calculation of the normal range. This is a pretty technical issue here “for the record” and to advance the discussion of what Hadley neglected data means. For what it’s worth, McLean can manually copy the process that is documented as the right way to create the HadCRUT4 set, and he can produce the same figures they get. That suggests he knows what he’s doing.     — Jo

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Leaving outliers in the key years means that Hadley won’t filter out real outliers in other years.

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9.7 out of 10 based on 75 ratings

Three out of four living astronauts who walked on moon are skeptics (men the ABC won’t interview)

Charles Duke, NASA Astronaut, Moon, climate skeptic. Photo.

Charles Duke, 1972

There are only 12 men who have walked on the moon, and only 4 are still living. Selected from the best of the best at the time, with impeccable reputations, why would any of them speak out and risk being called names like deniers of “basic physics”. Yet three of the four have: Harrison Schmitt, Charles Duke, Buzz Aldrin. (Plus others like Australian born Phil Chapman (support crew, Apollo 14) and Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7).

Maybe because they hate watching as the good name of NASA gets subverted into a pagan weather changing cult?

And because these are guys comfortable with risk.

The NASA space program was once one of mankind’s greatest scientific and engineering achievements. In 2012 49 former NASA staff including astronauts, directors of shuttle programs, flight operations, and spacecraft maintenance, wrote to NASA warning that GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) was risking NASA’s reputation by making unproven remarks and ignoring empirical evidence.

Harrison has been a vocal skeptic now for at least nine years. So far the ABC has not asked him why, or anything at all on the topic. But then, he’s only a PhD in Geology, what would he know? If he had a degree in international relations and journalism, or law, he could tell us what the climate is going to do all the time.

Schmitt, Duke, Chapman, Cunningham and Aldrin are only a phone call away from our national broadcaster and the ABC gets $3m a day to cover the bill. How many years will it take for them to get curious enough to ask “why”?

If they were climate believers, how many times would we have heard about it?

Apollo 17 moonwalker Harrison Schmitt stirs up a buzz with climate change views

by Alan Boyle

Harrison Schmitt

Harrison Schmitt, December 1972

The New York Times’ Nicholas St. Fleur addressed the elephant in the room with an assist from science writer Betsy Mason. Here’s how the exchange went:

St. Fleur: “In 2009, we wrote a story called ‘Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors,’ where we quoted you, Dr. Schmitt. The story was basically about people who think the moon landing was faked, and here’s someone who’s actually been there and walked on the moon. You were saying that ‘if people decide they’re going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there’s not much you can do with them. … For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education.’

“I’m wondering if you see any irony in your remarks there and your views on climate change, as one of the leading climate change deniers, when there was a huge report that just came out last week [talking about] the risk and what is going to happen … as soon as 2040. I’d love to know if you see any irony in your views on people who denied man walking on the moon vs. your views on climate change.”

Schmitt: “I see no irony at all. I’m a geologist. I know the Earth is not nearly as fragile as we tend to think it is. It has gone through climate change, it is going through climate change at the present time. The only question is, is there any evidence that human beings are causing that change?”

Chorus from the audience: “Yes!”

Schmitt: “Right now, in my profession, there is no evidence. There are models. But models of very, very complex natural systems are often wrong. The observations that we make as geologists, and observational climatologists, do not show any evidence that human beings are causing this. Now, there is a whole bunch of unknowns. We don’t know how much CO2, for example, is being released by the Southern Oceans as the result of natural climate change that’s been going on now since the last ice age.

“The rate of temperature increase on the surface of the Earth and in the troposphere is about the same over this period of time, particularly since the Little Ice Age, which was not caused by human beings. Nor was the Medieval Warm Period, preceding that, caused by human beings. So that’s the only skepticism I have: What is the cause of climate change?

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9.2 out of 10 based on 123 ratings

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8.7 out of 10 based on 26 ratings