Thanks to the Earth’s gravitational pull, the Moon is slightly egg shaped. The closest part bulges out by 51cm towards the Earth, and here’s the weirdest thing, the bulge moves. The same side of the Moon always faces Earth, but if you stood on the Moon, the Earth would appear to wobble around a particular patch of “moon-sky”. And like a tide of rock, the bulge in the surface, slowly rolls around on the Moon — following the pull from the Earth.
The ball of rock called the Moon is 3,474 km in diameter. I’m guessing the Man-on-the-Moon would not notice the tide much.
Though I imagine it will be a right headache for future Moonville Skyscrapers.
Despite the force required to deform a ball of rock that large, and from such a distance, climate models in their infinite wisdom know that the science is settled and the Moon has no significant effect on Earth.
You might recall that Ian Wilson has other ideas, and suggests lunar cycles set up atmospheric standing waves which may seed ENSO patterns.
West Antarctic ice collapse ‘could drown Middle East and Asia crops’ [The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg]
Antarctica’s ice collapse threatens metres of sea level rise within decades [The Ecologist]
Global warming: it’s a point of no return in West Antarctica. [The Guardian Eric Rignot]
“Last week saw a ‘holy shit’ moment in climate change science. A landmark report revealed that the collapse of a large part of Antarctica is now unstoppable”
What else is going on in West Antarctica? Oh. Look where those volcanoes are…
Guess which science correspondent mentioned the word “volcano”? None of the above. Did any of those responsible publicly funded climate scientists mentioned it in their press releases? (A gold star to anyone who can find one). Lucky Antarctic volcanoes are not hot.
Thanks especially to Janama, Jaypac, John, Sophocles and Tom. That is what comments are for!
Locations of volcanoes in Antarctica known to have been active since the peak of the last ice age (the Last Glacial Maximum)
Despite the 95% certainty of doom, it’s not like we have all the data on heat sources in Antarctica either. Until November last year we didn’t even know one particular volcano was smoldering under a kilometer of ice in West Antarctica.
Do volcanoes melt much ice? Could be…
“Eruptions at this site are unlikely to penetrate the 1.2 to 2-km-thick overlying ice, but would generate large volumes of melt water that could significantly affect ice stream flow.” Lough et al 2013
The fastest warming areas of Antarctica — the Peninsula and West Antarctica are part of the Pacific Rim of Fire. Not worth a mention in any “news” service? Not the right kind of propaganda…
Remember — if it’s broadcast on the ABC, BBC or CBC, the whole chain of one-sided-information is fully government funded. They have specialist science units trained not to ask hard questions.
What’s the point of language — especially in science? If you are naive, you might think it’s to communicate a fixed concept so everyone understands and can voice an opinion on the same thing. You would be wrong. The real purpose of scientific terms is to motivate the punters to behave differently (especially if that means “give us more money”). That’s why the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has assigned 5 PhD’s and a guy called Feinberg to spend days, weeks and months analyzing surveys to find out which propaganda term is more “effective”. The simple answer is “global warming” ekes out more fear and pain among democrats than “climate change”; therefore expect to see its use rocket.
The survey sample of 1,657 people, compiled over a two-week period late last year, found a large swathe of Americans turned off by the words “climate change”.
“The use of the term climate change appears to actually reduce issue engagement by Democrats, Independents, liberals, and moderates, as well as a variety of subgroups within American society, including men, women, minorities, different generations, and across political and partisan lines,” the researchers said.
Americans in general were 13% more likely to say that global warming was a bad thing.
The average punter just doesn’t talk as much about climate change, and it isn’t as scary:
[Time] In a new report by the Yale Project on Climate Communications, researchers led by Anthony Leiserowitz surveyed Americans and found that “global warming” is used much more commonly than “climate change,” both in conversation and in Internet searches, and that “global warming” is significantly more engaging than “climate change.” That’s because global warming generated more alarming associations, causing survey respondents to think of disasters like melting ice, coastal flooding and extreme weather, while “climate change” generated more banal associations with generation weather patterns.
“Global warming” was also associated with:
Greater certainty that the phenomenon was happening
Greater understanding that human activities were the primary driver of warming, especially among political independents
A greater sense of personal threat, as well as more intense worry about the issue
A greater sense that people are being harmed right now by warming, and a greater sense of threat to future generations
Greater support for both large and small-scale actions by the U.S. (although “climate change” generates more support for medium-scale efforts, especially among Republicans.)
Among republicans the effect was curiously the opposite: some Republicans have apparently learned to hate “global warming”. But luckily they are irrelevant because they are mostly lost to the faith anyhow — they were never going to convert back. Phew:
It’s a “Political Earthquake” according to the French PM. The EU and British local Elections have been marked by the smashing rise of Euroskeptics, climate skeptics, and skeptics-of-politics in general. (Monckton dares anyone to suggest a more skeptical party than UKip). UKip got 16% last time round in the European elections of 2009, this time it’s looking at something like 28%. “We’re coming for YOU, Red Ed’: Nigel Farage boasts…
Sunday’s UK election results were the first since 1910 in which a party other than Conservative or Labour came out on top in a national vote. That’s to say, Nigel Farage did something nobody from outside the two-party system has done in over a century: he won.
“Try as I might, I cannot remember a time when Britain’s various elites were as united in fury as they are now over UKIP leader Nigel Farage.. The Right and Left of the Political Class Have United Against A Common Enemy: Us”
Mark Steyn‘s advice to the non-UKIP parties (which they didn’t heed):
You can’t keep calling these guys “fringe” “extremists” when they get more votes than you. So instead of shrieking about “fruitcakes” and “loonies” why not try engaging on the issues?
UPDATE: A newer post on Antarctica points out that there is a volcanic chain running under or near the parts of Antarctica that are warming or melting. The scientists and media forgot to mention…
The new-old scare is Antarctica and what a messy situation it is. Only two weeks ago Matthew England was saying that Ocean winds were keeping Antarctica cool, and that Antarctica was stealing Australian rain.
Now a new Cryosat study by Malcolm McMillan et al is generating headlines saying that Antarctic ice is “disappearing at twice the rate predicted”.[1] (Can someone calculate the date it will be all gone?)
Well, at least it’s worse now than it was all of three years ago when the new Cryosat data first started.
Now they finally can record “near continuous 96% coverage of the continent”, with “a fivefold increase in the sampling of coastal regions where the vast majority of all ice losses occur.” It’s good that we have better data, but these are very short trends. Who’s leaping to hit the panic button? If there is message here it’s that ice loss is a complicated beast; it isn’t just about temperature, but also about precipitation, ablation, and wind which vary a lot. Other studies that are 791 years longer suggest the Antarctic action lately is nothing unusual.
Cryosat shows (probably) that West Antarctica is losing ice at a rate of −134 ± 27 Gt per year. But East Antarctica is somehow showing no signs of melting, despite record Chinese emissions, “losing ice” at −3 ± 36 Gt per year (that’s somewhere between a loss of 39Gt a year or a gain of 33Gt a year). The Antarctic Peninsula, which was warming ten times faster than the rest of the world, is melting somewhat: at −23 ± 18 Gt per year. I see The Guardian says the ice loss applies to all of Antarctica. They never were that good with numbers.
McMillan go on to conclude that the melting Antarctic is causing a sea level rise since 2010, of0.45 ± 0.14 mm per year. Here’s a strange implication though. McMillan doesn’t mention the missing heat, but by definition if Antarctica is causing more sea level rise, then the missing heat in the deep abyss is doing less. Has it all gone to West Antarctica?
The material thing here is that the predictions may have changed, but the seas are not rising any faster than they were before the press release. What has changed (possibly) is our knowledge of the cause of the rise. West Antarctica might well be losing ice and raising sea levels, but since sea levels have sea-levels have decelerated since 2004, this begs the question (even more than it was already being begged) of where the missing heat in the ocean went that was supposed to be causing thermal sea level rise? This would mean there is even less sea level rise due to the so-called missing heat? As I warned two weeks ago: “…attributing sea level changes 2 kilometers down to “missing heat” from a trace gas 10 kilometers up is “not obvious”. Occams razor on Vodka.”
When trends are so short the claims that it’s “twice as fast” as they thought are pure hype. Why don’t they also mention that sea levels are not rising as fast as they thought? Where are those headlines, like “Missing Ocean Heat Causes Much Lower Sea-level Rise than Predicted!”. “Scientists Fears on Ocean Warming
The mystery of ice, ice sheets, melting and no-warming
As we see in these latest graphs below, somehow there is more sea ice around Antarctica, and temperatures are not warming over most of Antarctica either. Yet the missing heat has apparently gone to the West Antarctic sheet.
Paul Homewood has some nice alternate graphs on this. This covers quite a lot of Antarctica. Damn sneaky heat. There is pretty much no warming trend, though a slight recovery to former temperatures might be melting some ice that formed in the early 1980s. How significant is a trend that starts in 2005?
Peer review by anonymous unpaid reviewers is not a part of the Scientific Method.
Once upon a time the fate of a scientific paper was dependent on an Editor whose reputation depended on making sound decisions about what to publish. Modern science shifted responsibility from a single identifiable editor to an anonymous “committee”. What could possibly go wrong?
Melinda Baldwin looked at the history of peer review:
I was incredibly surprised to learn that Nature published some papers without peer review up until 1973. In fact, many of the most influential texts in the history of science were never put through the peer review process, including Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity, and James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA.
A revolution in science happened without formal “peer review”. Who would have thought?
Crucially, journals without refereeing processes were not seen as inferior or less “scientific” than those that used referees. Few scientists thought that two anonymous readers would better judge a paper than, say, the great physicist Max Planck (who was on the editorial board of the prominent German journal Annalen der Physik). Scientists unaccustomed to refereeing did not see it as an obviously superior system.
In 1936, Albert Einstein—who was used to people like Planck making decisions about his papers without outside opinions—was incensed when the American journal Physical Review sent his submission to another physicist for evaluation. In a terse note to the editor, Einstein wrote:
“I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.”
Watson and Crick’s paper might never have been published:
Nature’s former editor John Maddox was fond of saying that the groundbreaking 1953 DNA paper would never have made it past modern peer review because it was too speculative.
This is another example of why I’m so passionate about getting research money out of dead-end efforts to change the weather and into medical research. The extraordinary news broke last week that the Mayo Clinic had used a genetically modified virus to cure treat one woman of metastasized and widely spread cancer – specifically myeloma. There are a lot of caveats, this research is quite risky, and it doesn’t apply to most people or most cancers, it is a proof of principle.
The potential for transformative medical breakthroughs is spectacular right now. Medicine is, after all, just an information game. The information is expensive but the material resources are dirt cheap — all the answers to the holy grail of the fountain of health are found in rearrangements of common elements — like the kind found in the dirt of a pot-plant. For the first time humanity has the tools to hunt and hammer out the information. If people knew what glittering marvels were within reach, they surely would want to channel our best and brightest and all our spare resources.
The main caveat here (a pretty big one) is that the trial had only two people, and it didn’t help the other person very much. Another caveat is that both people didn’t have antibodies to the measles virus used — and most people would. Other problems with viral treatments are that our immune systems attack the viruses, sometimes before the viruses can act, sometimes the viruses just wash away from the site, then there’s the risk that viruses can mutate. Live viruses can also potentially set up chronic low grade infections in unexpected places. Indeed we are playing with fire. Jesse Gelsinger was 18 when he took part in a medical trial in 1999, and was injected with a “safe” viral vector, he suffered a massive immune response and major organ failure leading to his very premature death four days later. This shocked the research world.
On the other hand, cancer is one of the top two killers in the Western World. The weapons we throw at it are awfully blunt. But theoretically even late stage cancer could be cleared within weeks from a body if the immune system (or a virus) could target just the cancer cells.
I find the possibilities tantalizing. It’s why I studied molecular biology and genetic engineering. One day people will visit their doctor to hear they have aggressive disseminated bowel cancer, say, but they will only need to take an injection and spend a week in hospital with ongoing monitoring. Why aren’t we moving mountains to make this happen?
From the Washington Post( hyped and lacking in details that I would like to see):
Her name is Stacy Erholtz. For years, the 50-year-old mom from Pequot Lakes, Minn., battled myeloma, a blood cancer that affects bone marrow. She had few options left.
She had been through chemotherapy treatments and two stem cell transplants. But it wasn’t enough. Soon, scans showed she had tumors growing all over her body.
Five minutes into the hour-long process, Erholtz got a terrible headache. Two hours later, she started shaking and vomiting. Her temperature hit 105 degrees… Over the next several weeks, the tumor on her forehead disappeared completely and, over time, the other tumors in her body did, too.
From the Mayo Clinic: Taming Measles Virus to Create an Effective Cancer Therapeutic
May 13, 2014: In this issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Russell et al4 from Mayo Clinic report, for the first time, the use of a cytolytic replicating MV to completely eliminate widespread tumors in a patient with advanced incurable myeloma.
This is not a cure yet
The Cancer Research UK blog tells us that that Stacy Erholtz forehead tumor disappeared for nine months, which they describe as “an incredible outcome” but it has returned and is being managed by radiotherapy. Which all seems rather important, and ought to be mentioned in all the stories you would think. For those who want more info, the Cancer Research UK post seems to be the most balanced and informed.
The Gallup poll results for May show the environment is not the most important issue for 97% of Americans. Golly, but those naming the environment as the top concern tripled from 1% – 3% from April to May. It’s a blip up in a long term trend that’s falling. H/t to Brietbart.com.
How many times do people need to tell politicians that being a skeptic isn’t the vote killer that some commentators would like you to believe? Even people who believe in man-made global warming just aren’t as concerned about the environment as they are about jobs, corruption, and the economy.
Which politician will make cleaning out corruption their trademark policy?
…
Where’s the balance?
According to some the media doesn’t report on climate often enough. But where’s the “balance” — if 97% of the public are more concerned about something else, perhaps the message should be something else?
For those all-knowing super intelligent beings who protest that the public won’t worry about the right things if you don’t tell them, we can only ask if 20 years of non-stop campaigns, reports, advertising, documentaries, and Nobel Prize winning (flawed) documentaries are enough?
Rud Istvan has taken it upon himself to point out the diabolical dilemma the University of Queensland is facing. They have now claimed ownership of the work for the 97% Consensus paper (Cook et al 2013). In which case, UQ may have published a paper which breaches its own ethical principles (and is now threatening Brandon Shollenberger with legal action if he does what they themselves have already done). Alternately, if there was no ethical approval they are misrepresenting the situation with “grossly invalid grounds” and there is no reason to withhold data and threaten Shollenberger and the said data ought be released immediately.
The paper should be retracted or the data should be released to Richard Tol and Brandon Shollenberger. I would think an apology to Brandon, or to those named in the paper would also be a bare minimum requirement.
Jo
PS: As I said, the question of the participants names is a strawman. The real issue is the other data — like timestamps. Why are UQ risking their reputation to hide the other data (or lack thereof?)
——————————————–
.
Prof. Alistair McEwan
Acting-Pro-Vice Chancellor
University of QueenslandMr. Graham Lloyd
Environmental Editor
www.theaustralian.com.au
………………………………………..
Ms. Jane Malloch, Esq.
Head Research Legal
University of QueenslandProf. Richard Tol
University of Sussex
Prof. McEwan:
On May 20, 2014, you issued a formal statement concerning the
controversy published by The Australian on 5/17/14 surrounding Cook et. al,
2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024, ‘Quantifying the Consensus’, hereinafter
QtC. That statement presents the University of Queensland (UQ) with an ethical
and legal dilemma. I call your attention to it expecting UQ will do the right thing.
Your statement makes it quite clear that UQ considers QtC was done
under the sponsorship of and with support from UQ. This is indisputable. The
solicitation for volunteer raters for the analysis that became QtC was: survey.gci.uq.edu.au/survey.php?c=5RL8LWWT2YO7. UQ released a statement
about the importance of QtC in the UQ News on January 16, 2014 headlined, “UQ climate change paper has the whole world talking.”
Jo says: two Perth councils are drafting policies to cope with sea level rise right this minute. Cliff Ollier can set them straight with Rising sea Level Forecast: Fact or Fiction? Archibald’s book is subtitled: “Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short”.It’s excellent and fascinating. This man does not mince words. What else do you need to know?
Monday 26th May 7pm, Royal Perth Yacht Club, Australia II Drive, Crawley, Perth, more details below.
Does the world owe Australia bezillions of dollars in carbon credits? With years of La Nina rainfall on arid outback Australia, “we” (or rather the citizen plants of Australia) have apparently been sucking down the CO2 at a phenomenal rate: “almost 60 per cent of carbon uptake attributed to Australian ecosystems.” But, sigh, call me unconvinced. I think what this paper demonstrates is that consensus and simulations are not worth much, and that we don’t know where global CO2 is going.
And anyway, the Australian outback vegetation explosion is ephemeral. While there may have been a lot of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere in 2011, as noted in the paper, it quickly gets oxidized and goes back into the atmosphere over the next year or two when the grasses and flowers die. So maybe hold off on those bezillions of dollars of carbon credits.
Global carbon markets turnover $50-180 billion a year with the aim of changing global carbon dioxide levels. (Yes, that’s what they say these markets are for.) But the brutal truth is that we are still guessing where exactly our carbon emissions end up. The consensus was that probably tropical forests were doing extra global sucking and were the mystery sink. A few weeks ago it was Indian wetlands. Today, this new study suggests it is really the arid lands of Australia. There goes the consensus on land sinks of CO2.
Apparently the sinks are not doing too badly at keeping up with the sources. Those annual rises and falls in both don’t seem to have a lot to do with human civilization.
Figure 1a | Interannual variability of NEE and FPAR anomalies. a, Annual NEE, where positive values represent carbon uptake, blue is LPJ, red is MACCII, and the residual land sink is in grey. The standard deviations are 60.58 PgCyr21 for LPJ, 60.4 PgCyr21 for the inversion, and 60.8 PgCyr21 for the residual (see Methods).
Anyone think its a bad idea to launch global markets based on a ubiquitous molecule produced and used by every bit of Life On Earth, which has a cycle we haven’t figured out yet. Anyone? No mention of this in Nature.
Of the roughly 10 billion tonnes of carbon emitted each year from human activity, only around half remains in the atmosphere, with the rest being absorbed by the oceans and by plants on land. This CO2 sink has been growing steadily, but the situation could change as shifts in climate and human land use intensify.
…the land sinks seems to be highly sensitive to variations in temperature and rainfall over yearly timescales.
Where was that land sink? Don’t tell me the “simulations” were wrong?
The big news from this new study is no news — the public are more bored with climate change than ever, and the trend is down. The fever peaked in 2007, and the last great spike of interest was in late 2009 when ClimateGate finished it off. Though that’s not the way Anderegg sees it.
Anderegg infamously published the blacklist of scientists in PNAS, so we know he struggles with the scientific method. Here, flawed assumptions render the conclusions a wishful fantasy. Anderegg argues that ClimateGate was not a big deal, didn’t affect opinions much, and (yawn) climate scientists need to do better communication. He’s wrong. His study misses the major damage — by assuming that the public are a uniform block his research could never uncover that the real effects of ClimateGate were devastating and irreversible. The scandal changed the opinions that matter — those of the smart engaged thinkers and leaders. I noted at the time that ClimateGate had put a rocket under the layer of influential busy achievers like never before. Suddenly people who hadn’t taken much interest in the debate were fired into action by the fraud. The nodes of influence shifted — as I said in The ClimateGate Virus at the time: “Behind the scenes, well connected businessmen in California, surgeons in Sydney, lawyers in the UK, and top ranking physicists are emailing and linking up.” My site traffic rose like never before and now is even higher. Climategate brought in a new caliber of players. Recent survey’s back me up: the highest proportion of skeptics are in the upper middle class. The unskilled workers, the unemployed and pensioners are more likely to believe in “climate change” (whatever that means).
What followed in the next four years was that the money shifted out of the game, politicians lost their nerve (think of Kevin Rudd), people paid lip-service, but in reality, the faith was sliding as the opinion leaders melted away. By mid 2011 even the media abandoned the meme.
Princeton University and University of Oxford researchers found that negative media reports seem to have only a passing effect on public opinion, but that positive stories don’t appear to possess much staying power, either. Measured by how often people worldwide scour the Internet for information related to climate change, overall public interest in the topic has steadily waned since 2007. To gauge public interest, the researchers used Google Trends to document the Internet search-engine activity for “global warming” (blue line) and “climate change” (red line) from 2004 to 2013. They examined activity both globally (top) and in the United States (bottom). The numbers on the left indicate how often people looked up each term based on its percentage of the maximum search volume at any given point in time. (Image courtesy of William Anderegg)
This is about data they don’t own, that wasn’t secure, is supposedly available, but they want to keep secret.
More bad news for the University of Queensland. The Australian discussed the issue of the bizarre threatening letter that UQ sent to Brandon Shollenberger when he contacted them to let them know he’d found some data one of their employees carelessly left unprotected lying around on the web. Now the acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor is trying to do damage-control by releasing a media statement, but he’s missed the chance to say the legal threat was a parody — with that easy escape gone, he’s defending the indefendable. Brandon has already responded on his site, arguing that the VC is “highly misleading”: the names of the surveyers are not important (and are also mostly known already), but time stamps, and missing papers are still unpublished, and UQ has not explained why they ought be concealed.
The UQ Statement (quoted below) also misses the point and in so many ways.
“The following is a statement from UQ acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alastair McEwan.
“Recent media coverage (The Australian, 17 March 2013) has stated that The University of Queensland is trying to block climate research by stopping the release of data used in a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The data for John Cook’s paper has nothing at all to do with climate research. Cook did a sociological study on key words used in short summaries of papers published about the climate. It tells us nothing about Earth’s climate but possibly gives some insight into the biased, one-sided nature of bureaucratized climate research.
“This is not the case [that UQ is trying to block climate research].
Actually it is. UQ employs John Cook whose main job appears to be to call climate scientists petty names and generally besmirch the reputation of any climate researchers who get results he doesn’t approve of. “Christy’s Crocks” anyone? Cook has a badge for that, and a whole book about “deniers” — just get him to explain the term scientifically? Even he agrees it is inaccurate — but that doesn’t stop him using it. Cook’s main goal with the Consensus Project seems to be to promote the fallacy that science is done by consensus and that a meaningful one exists. If only he had evidence to back him up instead? The infatuation with Argument from Authority is all profoundly unscientific. The University of Queensland science faculty ought be cringing in embarrassment. If the good scientists there are not now, they will be soon.
Then there is a very odd admission — doesn’t UQ know that SkepticalScience is John Cook’s personal site, and the survey participants were volunteers? Do they “own” this research (with all its flaws) now too? Please tell me yes.
The strange case of the Greenpeace FOIA of David Legates (Hydroclimatology prof, and skeptic) at the University of Delaware (US)
The Delaware State Law says FOIAs only apply to things supported by state funding and David Legates didn’t receive any. That should make this story incredibly short, except that, as Jan Bilt explains: “For reasons administrators have declined to explain, a small portion of Legates’ teaching salary was, curiously, placed on the list of state-funded activity shortly before Greenpeace filed its FOIA request in 2009.” In the end a heavyweight, Lawrence White, at the Uni of Delaware leaned heavily on Legates to provide not just everything Greenpeace asked for, but virtually everything he’d ever done — his teaching notes, emails, even ones written on his own time, and on his personal computer. At the same time the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed FOIAs against three other people at the Uni of Delaware who had worked on IPCC reports. The same Lawrence White said simply “No” to those requests. When is a law a law, and when is it merely a tool to fulfill the personal wishes of those in high places? Apparently when it’s on a university campus.
Compare Legates fate with Michael Mann. The State of Delaware is quite “tight” on FOIA, limiting its use, compared to the State of Virginia where Mann used to work. In Virginia all UVA faculty members are subject to FOIA requests. But there the heavyweights pulled out artillery, not against Mann, but against the FOIA — they took the request to court to stop Mann from having to release documents, emails and data related to his research. They argued it would have a chilling effect on research. (As if hiding emails and data somehow frees up scientific discovery?)
David Legates
In other words, an FOIA is Freedom of Information if you have friends in high places, but selective enforcement means the chilling effect of FOI requests can be put to good use for those who do politically incorrect research. The hypocritical excuses are laid bare below… But who will report this? The old media are on academia’s side, though. Through a very curious turn of events, journalists appear to have realized that they stand to lose their precious FOI tool itself if Mann gets away with his court excuses. After years of defending Mann, just weeks ago they flipped and now want those government funded emails. What an ugly precedent it would set if Mann can hide from FOI?
Now imagine we had an independent free media, and it went after White, demanding he explain why skeptics have to respond (and then some) to an FOIA, while IPCC believers can just say “No”. This could all be resolved so quickly. In a month the CEI could have all the answers they were looking for, and White would not look like a hypocrite. Of course the IPCC researchers have nothing to hide… Ladies and Gentlemen, the Media IS the problem.
— Jo
PS: For what its worth, White investigated everything Legates provided and obviously found nothing of any use to Greenpeace. The material was never provided to Greenpeace, and they stopped asking. It’s almost like the UD staff were doing Greenpeace research. Just another way big-government lobbyists help big-government activists.
Solar panels in Queensland and NSW in Australia have been providing some householders with energy in a more concentrated form than they bargained for. At least 70 houses with rooftop solar panel arrays have had solar driven burnouts. The fire risk means that nearly 30,000 faulty solar power isolators have been recalled. The company that imported them went bust on Friday. (Ain’t that the way?)
Remember if your house burns down, it is the price we pay to save the planet. It will, unfortunately, blow your personal carbon footprint through the roof. (A point that will, no doubt, grieve you as you sift through the smouldering ruins.)
What bad news for The University of Queensland. Their entire legal staff were on holiday at the same time and this eminent university was protected only by a Law & Society 101 student who staffed the overnight service of FreeLegalAidOnline. A mockfest is ensuing across the Internet. It is so unfair.
A year ago John Cook published another 97% study (the magic number that all consensuses must find). It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (see Anthony Watts view). Cook’s work is obviously impeccable (except for the part about 97% being really 0.3%), but evidently it uses a special new kind of “open data”. The exact date and time each anonymized reviewer reviewed a sacred scientific abstract is commercial and must be kept secret. These volunteer reviewers allegedly stand to, er … lose a lot of money if that data is revealed (they won’t be employed again for no money?). Such is the importance of this that the University of Queensland left the data on secret-secret forum protected by no passwords and then put urls to it on secret forums that were publicly accessible. Brandon Shollenberger had the genius idea of changing the numbers in the url +1, +1, and +1, and voila! For the crime of finding unhidden non-secret data Brandon received a threatening legal letter, and expects the Feds to arrive any minute. You can’t just type any old numbers into a url.
…
Doing the right thing, Brandon contacted John Cook and UQ to give them a chance to tell him any good reason why he should not draw people’s attention to this unhidden, non-secret data (which may possibly save the world by convincing everyone that 97% of honest scientists are believers in a climate catastrophe). Unfortunately the lawyer writing the letter to Brandon was obviously a skeptic plant, cleverly seeded with big-oil funds. It’s the only way anyone can explain why a letter so abjectly clumsy, improbable and ridiculous could come from a university which prides itself on its reputation. Not only could Brandon not reveal the details of how the abstracts were reviewed because they would sue him, but he could not even reveal the letter threatening to sue him, or they would sue him for that too — he would be double-sued.
Apparently the threatening letter was copyright. On that point, Steve McIntyre,wonders about a strange contradiction: “the premise of copyright is the protection of commercial interests. Obviously, the letter from the University of Queensland has no commercial value. ”
I would counter that letter from The University of Queensland does have commercial value (just not the way you might think). They could sell threatening letters to other universities who are trying to hide data and can’t afford real lawyers. Perhaps it has value in comedic theatre? What this is not though (because I’d never suggest such a defamatory thing) is abject panic about potential losses from the grand cash cow that is the climate grants gravy train. UQ are honest, upstanding researchers, who always supply all the data necessary to replicate and analyze work, especially when the health of Planet Earth depends upon the results. Right?
Steve McIntyre points out that The UQ letter raises a variety of interesting issues:
The original Consensus rating project was carried out by SKS volunteers. How did title migrate from SKS to the University of Queensland?
If the ratings data has been owned by UQ all along and the UQ had confidentiality obligations, why did they leave it lying around the internet (apparently) without password protection?
Are there any documents that actually demonstrate the existence of “contractual obligations to third parties”? This is eerily reminiscent of the U of East Anglia.
On what conceivable basis can the University justify its refusal to provide anonymized rater information and datestamps?
Finally, some coverage of the massive amount of money pumping the Big-Green agenda. What is really so remarkable about this is that skeptics are winning, despite the fact that the greens have almost all the institutional, academic, government, and big-media support, and far, far more money. All we have is truth and wits.
Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil
Ron Arnold
Mainstream reporters appear not to be aware of the component parts that comprise Big Green: environmentalist membership groups, nonprofit law firms, nonprofit real estate trusts (The Nature Conservancy alone holds $6 billion in assets), wealthy foundations giving prescriptive grants, and agenda-making cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association. They each play a major socio-political role.
Seeing Big-Green funding means taking a broader view of the money trail:
Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.
That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive to the push of a social media button sending politically powerful “educational” alerts that don’t show up on election reports.
Big Oil doesn’t have that, but has to pay for lobbyists, public relations firms and support groups that do show up on reports.
US environmental activists have access to $13 billion?
I’d like to see a detailed breakdown of that. But if we include government funding to activist-scientists, as well as government grants for all forms of emissions reduction and education campaigns, it’s believeable. Compare $13 billion to funding for skeptical scientists. The Heartland Institute are the largest single group usually named as supporting skeptical scientists. Their total budget (for all their projects, which involve a lot more than just the climate) is about $6 – $7m.
“… you do need detailed knowledge to parse Big Green into its constituent parts. I spoke with Washington-based environmental policy analyst Paul Driessen, who said, “U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry — and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops.
“Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that, as demonstrated by the Rockefeller assault.”
Mind-boggling. One hundred billion at their disposal?
Bill Nye thinks science is about opinion polls — not about reason and evidence, and John Oliver (who’s he? A British/US comedian) thought they should take that fallacy and run with it.
Oliver couldn’t quite sort out his opinion polls from his facts. He seemed to think that when believers do key-word surveys of abstracts it’s “a fact”, but when 75 million Americans are skeptical of a theory (which only has key-word surveys to back it up) “who gives a s***?”
He goes on to say: “You don’t need people’s opinions on a fact”. Except the “fact” in question is just some other people’s opinions. Obviously what matters to him is not the number of people who believe something, but whether they are card carrying members of the right club. After all only 62 climate scientists actually reviewed the chapter that mattered in the 2007 IPCC report, but some 31,000 scientists, including 9,000 PhD’s, 49 NASA scientists and 4 Apollo astronauts, and 2 Nobel Physics Prize winners disagree. Other surveys show that skeptics are older, better with numbers and smarter. Two thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics. The obvious conclusion (if you think surveys matter in science, which I don’t) is that the recent warming is more natural than man-made, and that the young and gullible are easily fooled. But John Oliver, comedian with a degree in English, obviously knows more than Ivar Giaevar or Robert Laughlin right?
My point is not that skeptics are right because they are wiser, smarter, better scientists — which they are, but that Olivers method for finding scientific truth fails by its own criteria. The truth about the climate comes from the observations, not the surveys. If surveys mattered, Oliver would be a skeptic.
As a comedian John Oliver probably likes to think of himself as being a bit counter culture and someone who tests political bounds. (Oh boy is he in for a surprize.) Instead he went for the safe impress-my-friends soft form of propaganda — the establishment comedian. Parody for the paradigm. He’s an obedient servant of the climate cult.
Truth actually matters quite a lot in comedy. It just isn’t that funny if its a comment on a fantasy. The art of satire as a political tool depends on the satirist understanding the topic.
Memo to John: great comedians skewer the state sanctioned litany — they don’t produce free advertising. Why don’t you do something really risky and interview Buzz Aldrin, or Harrison Schmidt or Ivar Giaevar — these guys are real scientists. Bill Nye the science guy is the go-to guy for climate propaganda for a reason. The real climate scientists who believe a tax-can-change-the-weather can’t afford to debate skeptics — they have a reputation that matters and public humiliation would blow the facade completely. When Bill Nye bombs, who cares? He’s disposable.
Bill-Nye-the-propaganda-guy abuses science every time he whips out “the consensus”.
Lennart Bengtsson joined the GWPF only two weeks ago. He’s a very well respected Swedish leading climate scientist. But he’s been put under — as he describes it — unbearable pressure to quit. Steve McIntyre calls it a fatwa.
What an extraordinarily raw letter:
Dear Professor Henderson,
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.
I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.
With my best regards
Lennart Bengtsson
Even those within the climate “community” must recognize that end days are near. What an over-reaction presumably driven by fear, and compromising long-standing professional relationships. (Bengtsson knows who his real friends are now.)
The tribal witch-hunt speaks volumes about the strength of their arguments. For Bengtsson –what a back-handed compliment. If he did not have a scientific reputation, the tribe would not have “cared”.
Late thought: I don’t know that those long standing professional relationships will ever be the same. By resigning so publicly and explicitly Bengtsson has made the reasons for his resignation very clear. How many others resigned in the past from other politically incorrect groups and made some pat excuse instead in the hope of buying forgiveness and getting back in “the club”?
What’s the point of language — especially in science? If you are naive, you might think it’s to communicate a fixed concept so everyone understands and can voice an opinion on the same thing. You would be wrong. The real purpose of scientific terms is to motivate the punters to behave differently (especially if that means “give us more money”). That’s why the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has assigned 5 PhD’s and a guy called Feinberg to spend days, weeks and months analyzing surveys to find out which propaganda term is more “effective”. The simple answer is “global warming” ekes out more fear and pain among democrats than “climate change”; therefore expect to see its use rocket.
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