Coal power provides most of our electricity and despite widespread floods these plants have to keep working day in and day out to provide our baseload power. | This one above is the old decommissioned “New Farm” Coal Power Station (1942) | Queensland State Library
Anton Lang cuts the numbers, and finds that while the Australian floods cut power consumption by 9% on the Eastern seaboard they only reduced CO2 emissions by 0.9%.
Even if cutting CO2 emissions was useful, it’s much much harder than most people realize. Electricity use is so pervasive that even though whole towns were off-the-grid due to floods, and real consumption fell, it didn’t make any difference to emissions. That’s because the baseload consumption is still so high, and is mostly still a coal powered load. Reducing the peak use of electricity by a whopping 9% hardly makes any difference to the total daily curve of electricity demand. The electricity for the peak load comes from natural gas, a bit from hydro, and some from intermittent unpredictable renewables. Coal can’t be switched up and down quickly, and it isn’t efficient to do so, even if it were possible to ramp up or change the massive coal-fired electricity stations on an hourly basis.
Here Anton wrote to me saying how surprised he was that, in the end, all those people who were cut off from electricity at home or at work during the East Coast flooding in January didn’t help reduce the Australian carbon footprint. This perverse result shows that many “green” energy saving projects are a waste of time. The only thing that counts are long term reliable reductions in baseload electricity.
University Climate Researcher to be investigated for unprofessional conduct.
Professor Peter Rathjen, Vice Chancellor of the University of Tasmania (UTAS) has ordered an investigation into professional and academic misconduct by Dr Tony Press, the CEO of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre based at the University of Tasmania.
Lord Monckton, who spoke to 150 scientists and members of the public at the UTAS last week, has complained, in an interview with the Sunday Tasmanian last week, Press had misrepresented both Climate Science and what Lord Monckton said in his talk.
The investigation comes under the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.
Professor Rathjen’s letter to Lord Monckton says, “…the processes will be followed rigorously!”
The Vice Chancellor added that the University strongly supported a culture of courteous, critical dialog on all matters of academic and public interest.
—————————————————–
Christopher Monckton has written to Professor Peter Rathjen, Vice-Chancellor, University of Tasmania to point out that one Tony Press has committed “serious professional and academic misconduct and scientific fraud, contrary to Australian Standard AS 8001 as amended by the relevant policy adopted by your university.”
Monckton is calling upon the University of Tasmania to investigate, as it must when allegations of fraud are made.
Tony Press worked hard to misrepresent Monckton in an interview with the Sunday Tasmanian (full text available here). Press claimed Monckton was wrong to say there was no recent warming, but all the data sets and the IPCC agree with Monckton. Press said that Monckton was cherry-picking short time periods, yet Monckton also talks about 60 years, 155 years, 1300 years, and 420,000 years. Press claimed that the recent warming could only be explained by higher levels of CO2, and asserted that this was basic physics, but ignored the fact that most of the modeled effect was actually feedbacks and not CO2, that many papers and scientists agree with Monckton that the warming could be natural and that feedbacks could be net negative, and that it has never been proven that there isn’t something else behind the global warming of the last three centuries. Instead Press stuck to the usual superficial line that the CO2 is obviously a greenhouse gas and there is more of it about, so it must be that.
Press claimed to be frustrated at the suggestion that scientists were ‘ ….involved in some “massive delusional group thinking”.’ Yet Monckton made no such claim.
Personally I think the most self-evidently silly line is Press’s assertion that there could be no groupthink because scientists are rewarded more “… if they happen to upturn established wisdom.” Does Tony Press think that being mocked, ridiculed, subject to false allegations and called a denier is a “reward”? (If that’s a reward, what is a punishment?)
Read Monckton’s erudite eight page PDF is here, or my shorter excerpts below. Monckton does not give Tony Press any wiggle room at all. Press needs to provide evidence to support his claims (evidence we know the IPCC hasn’t found yet either — don’t you think or we’d have heard all about it by now if they had, over and over, and it would settle the argument?). Either he finds that mystery evidence that thousands of scientists have been looking for, or he is either fraudulent for claiming Monckton was wrong, or fraudulent for putting himself forward as an expert because he does not know his topic.
Monckton’s conclusion is at the end of his letter, but I think, so important, I’ve posted it first. This could apply to many academics who are falsely using the goodwill and good name of honorable scientific work even as they trash the scientific method, Aristotelian reasoning, and any semblance of good manners.
Jo
Conclusion
It is outrageous that any functionary of what is supposed to be an institution of learning should have either malevolently and wilfully lied or recklessly made assertions calculated to be unfair and profoundly damaging without having any idea whether they were true or not. Press’ fraudulent method is to perpetrate the logical fallacy of argument from appeal to his own authority – the argumentum ad verecundiam – by outright misrepresentations and falsehoods and by artful concealment of the considerable scientific doubt that is well reflected in the learned literature but is wholly absent from his allegations.
The founder of the scientific method described the scientist as a “seeker after truth”. Press should be asked whether his remarks published in the Sunday Tasmanian are the remarks of a “seeker after truth”, or whether they are the remarks of a liar and fraudster – a mere seeker after grants at working people’s expense.
The ABC will declare that “most Australians don’t think the ABC is biased” but while half the nation thinks it’s balanced, 30% don’t know, and of the 20% who are sure there is bias, there are three times as many who think it’s pro-Labor as those who think it’s pro-Coalition.
Bear in mind ABC1 only has about 10% of the Australian audience, so 90% of the nation prefers to watch something else. Did the survey ask respondents if they watch the ABC? We might find that of the 20% of the population who are familiar with ABC coverage, most think it’s biased to the left. With some probing questions, we might also find that people of different political persuasions define bias very differently. Could it be that those more likely to vote for the Coalition tend to value free speech even if they don’t agree with the views?
On the other hand those more likely to vote Labor or Green seem to think balance means skeptics shouldn’t speak at all. Is their idea of bias just “if the ABC allows skeptics to comment”. The Centre for Independent Journalism had a whole forum devoted to asking whether “balance” meant they still had to report skeptical views. (The panel was made up of one ABC reporter, one Fairfax editor and three academics). The (Labor) Minister for Science, Kim Carr, said (referring to climate skeptics) “We don’t have to accord superstition and wishful thinking the same status as science.” Clive Hamilton, former Greens Candidate lamented that climate denial got any ABC coverage at all.
“ONE in six Australians believe the ABC provides favourable coverage to the Labor Party while one in 20 believe the ABC is favourable towards the Coalition…”
The ABC will be patting itself on the back, but they have disenfranchised a large section of the Australian population.
This research of more than 1000 people shows that 15 per cent of the population believes the ABC’s coverage of the climate change debate leans in favor of climate change believers, a figure higher among Coalition voters of whom 29 per cent believe the ABC is biased on this issue.
Here’s the sleeper… if 83% of the population think the ABC’s coverage of climate change is not biased, imagine how much “upside” there is for anger and outrage to grow when 16 million Australians realize how the ABC has let them down, and fed them science-according-to-Greenpeace.
Of those 83%, how many don’t read any newspaper, or only get the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age? How would any of those people know they were being spoon-fed propaganda?
That’s why word of mouth is so important. Those who only see The Love Media won’t have any idea unless you give them a good natured jibe at the staff BBQ and inspire them to hunt on the web.
You could start by asking them if they know which corporations stand to make the most from a carbon market. Which media outlets and which voters would get that answer right?
“All voices are welcome?” As if.
Mr Scott (ABC managing director) said:
“… unlike some of our partisan competitors, all voices are welcome at the ABC,”
Which is why the ABC calls us deniers right? To make us feel welcome?
That’s why ABC “reporters” ask me how I am paid, but when I turn out to be a volunteer they don’t report it. If I had been paid by Chevron, would they have not-reported that? They’re fishing for dirt, hoping to catch skeptics out. If skeptics make a mistake it’ll be a headline, when they act as the Guardians of the scientific method, catching paid officials making mistakes, or asking questions that ABC journalists should be asking, the ABC doesn’t want to know.
It’s why the ABC goes out of it’s way to find out what the highest traffic skeptical blogger in Australia says by flying a team to her house, interviewing her for two hours, then leaving in just 18 fragmentary words which say nothing of any real content? (Read what the ABC left in, versus what it left out, see the un-cut video in full.)
Helen Caldicott and the ABC have excelled themselves in the Art of Ad Hominem. So much so, that Christopher Monckton is not only writing to the ABC, but also to medical registration boards as well, calling for Caldicotts’s de-registration.
On ABC Radio National(about 25% into the program).Reader Steve, writes that “Helen Caldicott declares that climate change sceptic Christopher Monckton has “got thyrotoxicosis and bilateral exophthalmos”. She gives the impression that such conditions should prevent Monckton from engaging in the public debate. Waleed Aly said nothing to stop Dr Caldicott’s ad hominem attack on Monckton’s alleged medical condition.”
Is she not aware Monckton had Graves?
Caldicott is a doctor and also the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, “an organization of 23,000 doctors”. [See her Bio]. Perhaps she thinks it would be “socially responsible” to start a show where panels of doctors speculated on the medical conditions of celebrities they had never met? They could make fun of fat politicians and disabled sports stars? What fun. How about the laughs of picking on Stephen Hawking?
Stephan Lewandowsky could be a regular guest, pronouncing that non-Labor-Green fans were paranoid conspiracy hunters, and ideated nut-cases. Some ABC viewers would find that most entertaining. The rest will despair at how our tax dollars are being vaporized in the biased billion dollar organization with manners and reasoning at sub-preschooler levels, impoverishing public policy by suppressing non-pc facts.
– Jo
Christopher Monckton writes to the ABC
Christopher Monckton
I should be grateful if the ABC would investigate and respond to each of the following grounds of complaint against it for broadcasting factually inaccurate, biased, inappropriate, offensive and unfair remarks about me on its RadioNational programme “The Drawing Room ” on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 at 7.40 pm.
During the programme a Dr. Helen Caldicott said: “The other thing is, you know, that they say they have to give equal time to global warming, and they have people like this awful – what’s his name? – Monck? Lord Monckton, who’s got thyrotoxicosis and bilateral exophthalmos, but apart from that he’s not a lord and apart from that he doesn’t know any science. This is so important. And it’s imperative to have people who understand science and medicine to be discussing this, and not have these global deniers often who are funded by the oil companies like Exxon in America who spent hundreds of millions in a propaganda campaign to convince people that global warming isn’t a fact. I don’t think the media quite gets it that it’s like medicine: you know, you don’t have a charlatan debating with the doctor about the treatment of a patient, you have to, you know, practise the very best medicine you can or the patient might die.”
Ground 1: Dr. Caldicott incorrectly stated that I suffer from thryotoxicosis, which is in fact now cured, and correctly but grossly inappropriately stated that I suffer from one of the sequelae of that disease, bilateral exophthalmos. I am entitled to privacy in my medical history, and it is certainly inappropriate that Dr. Caldicott should discuss my health on the air, particularly in a fashion that was, in part, factually inaccurate.
Ground 2: Dr. Caldicott inaccurately stated that I am not a Lord. However, my passport states that I am “The Right Honourable Christopher Walter, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley”. A Viscount is a Lord. When the Clerk of the Parliaments once wrote to say I should not call myself “a member of the House of Lords”, I consulted a barrister expert in peerage law, whose written Opinion concludes that I am indeed a member of the House, albeit without the right to sit and vote, and that I am, in his words, “fully entitled to say so”.
Ground 3: Dr. Caldicott inaccurately stated that I do not know any science. However, I have a degree in Classical Architecture from the University of Cambridge, and the degree course included instruction in mathematics. I was last year’s Nerenberg Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario. I have contributed several papers to the learned journals on climate science and economics, have lectured on climate science at universities on three continents at faculty as well as undergraduate level, and am an expert reviewer for the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC. I have testified four times before the U.S. Congress on climate science and economics.
Ground 4: Dr. Caldicott describes me, offensively, as a “global denier”, with overtones calculated to bracket me with holocaust deniers.
Ground 5: Dr. Caldicott inaccurately implies that I am “funded by the oil companies like Exxon in America.” I am not, and have never been, funded by any oil company. My current tour in Australia, like my first tour here, is entirely funded by the contributions of those who attend my speaker meetings.
Ground 6: Dr. Caldicott unfairly and without adducing any evidence describes me as a “charlatan”, inferentially on the sole ground that she disagrees with me. I do not know whether she has any scientific or mathematical knowledge relevant to the climate debate: if not, then it was doubly inappropriate for her to mischaracterize me as a “charlatan”.
Ground 7: The presenter did nothing to prevent Dr. Caldicott from saying what she said, and did nothing to remedy the situation by indicating to the audience that her remarks – which on their face appear malicious – might not be well founded in fact and were certainly inappropriate.
I am also lodging complaints with the medical registration authorities in Australia, since Dr. Caldicott’s discussion of my health problems on the air is a flagrant breach of the confidentiality to which patients are entitled. I shall be requesting that Dr. Caldicott be removed from all medical registers in Australia and debarred from practising medicine ever again, on the ground that she is not a fit and proper person to respect the confidentiality of patients.
Saturday 23rd February: (7:00 pm) Presentation Wagga Wagga Commercial Club, Nathan Room
Saturday, 23rd February (12:00 noon) George and Paul interview, 954 2UE
Monday, 25th February: (7:10am) Alan Jones interview, 873 2GB
…
Click more for booking details of the other dates this week in Sydney & Newcastle, next week in Perth, and the week after that in Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Pachauri is chief PR officer for the Global-not-so-Warming-Gravy-Train. His job is to say things with a straight face that are the complete opposite of what he’s said before, and to pretend he has never said anything differently.
The IPCC are a government committee who’ve stamped the brand name “science” to their policy wish list. They got away with it by using ancient tribal rhetorical techniques. Call your opponent names, spit on their reputation, spread nasty rumors, and tell the useful idiots who follow you that they are smart, caring, and superior — even as you teach them to chant “denier” in response to the dog-whistle. The good thing about having Idiot followers is that can believe at the same time that “denier” is a scientific term and that they have a high IQ.
It is also handy if you give out plum government jobs and consultancies, to keep your supporters ardent. The power of patronage, what ho!
But the game is changing, skeptics have scored too many points.
Thus and verily skeptics have been hitting home runs by shining a light on the religious attitude of the IPCC which keeps declaring unscientifically that the science is settled.
Pachauri is hoping he can rewrite history and neutralize some of the damage. The Endless Junket must go on.
At this point in the PR-game Pachauri cannot admit the skeptics were right and the IPCC was wrong. His best option in the game is to pretend that the IPCC have always been saying the same points the skeptics are scoring runs with — thus making skeptics seem irrelevant and the points moot. The only drawback is the zombie truth comes back to bite.
Can’t we just pretend the IPCC predicted decades of global flatness?
In 1990 the IPCC told global policymakers that even if they stabilized emissions, the world would warm by at least 0.2C per decade for the next few decades. That was their “low estimate”. Emissions didn’t remotely stabilize, so the warming trend “should” have been even more than that (they thought 0.3C per decade, maybe up to 0.5C per decade). Instead it warmed less.
The pause became noticeable. The goalposts started shifting as the pause got longer. Nothing disproves a climate model (that’s a tautology, by the way).
In 2008 NOAA said that pauses of 15 years or more didn’t fit with climate simulations (so if it went longer, the models would be wrong). Likewise James Hansen was caught in ClimateGate saying that ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’When the pause got a bit longer still, Ben Santer said in a paper it really was 17 years we needed to see. That was 2011.
By 2013, instead of admitting failure, changing the theory and thanking the skeptics, Pachauri now says we’ll need 30 -40 years of the IPCC being wrong before we can say they are wrong. Bold, very bold.
THE UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend.
They won’t make the mistake of making actual predictions again after they failed so badly in 1990. Now they predict warming, cooling, blizzards, droughts and unwarming. All roads lead to a crisis.
Can’t we just pretend the IPCC likes debate and skeptics are useful?
After years of making out that skeptics are “flat-earth-deniers who use voo-doo science“, Pachauri now reverses onto another track (did you know Pachauri is a railway engineer?) and says skeptics are useful and climate science is all up for discussion (apparently):
“..Dr Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that open discussion about controversial science and politically incorrect views was an essential part of tackling climate change. .. no issues should be off-limits for public discussion.”
Dr Pachauri said that people had the right to question the science, whatever their motivations.
By 2010 Pachauri wished skeptics would “rub asbestos on their faces”. Not someone he wanted to invite to dinner then?
So what happened?
Skeptics really are winning. The IPCC realize they look like fools every time a skeptic points out that science is about asking questions and having a debate:
“People have to question these things and science only thrives on the basis of questioning,” Dr Pachauri said.
He said there was “no doubt about it” that it was good for controversial issues to be “thrashed out in the public arena”.
But in 2008 all of man-made climate science was known. Doubters were as stupid as flat Earthers according to Pachauri:
” There is, even today, a Flat Earth Society that meets every year to say the Earth is flat. The science about climate change is very clear. There really is no room for doubt at this point.”
Is this what he means when he talks of “thrashing” out the issue?
Pachauri’s tactic of rewriting history, without admitting any wrongs or acknowledging any errors, will work if lazy or ideologically-motivated journalists don’t point to his earlier statements and put him on the spot. But it fails if skeptics keep reminding the world of the inconvenient truth.
With Wayne Swan, Treasurer of Australia, being man of the moment this week, it’s the perfect time to revisit a comment left by Jaymez where he compares the nation to a household and adds up just how fast the House of Australia went broke. — Jo
Lesson One: Sending the House of Australia Broke (Quick Method).
Imagine this. In the 2006/7 financial year you were on a salary of $118,500 pa. Your total living expenses, all payments and taxes, and even allowing for some retirement savings was $109,500, so you had a decent buffer. You also owned every asset you had with no debts and in fact you had cash in the bank of about $15,000.
Now imagine that since then, you had pay increases up to the end of last financial year (30 June 2011) totalling 39.2% so that your current income is a very healthy $165,000 pa.
Can you imagine that you would allow your expenses to creep up to $185,500 pa, that¡¯s 69.4% more than your 2006/7 expenditure?
Can you imagine that this higher level of expenditure doesn¡¯t even include putting any money away for your retirement since 2006 so that you are now way behind on funding your retirement?
Can you imagine that in ADDITION to this higher level of expenditure, you have also gone out and borrowed money so that your net worth is now -$123,600 and you have no apparent means of paying that debt back? This means you are just going to have to borrow even more money!
That would be a totally unbelievable scenario right?
Yet that is the equivalent of what Wayne Swan, our Treasurer has done while managing Australia¡¯s finances. While there has been a healthy increase in income, he and the Labor Party have dramatically increased expenditure, and have also borrowed billions of dollars we have no way of paying off for a very long time and without incurring some significant pain. As we are talking about online pokies here, have a look at this website that shows list of online pokies games.
And what do we have to show for it? Some new airports and shipping facilities? Some great new highways or railroads? Maybe we have resolved some major social problems such as Indigenous disadvantage, people smugglers and refugees dying or improved the health and education of the nation? No wait ¨C on all of those measures we have actually declined, as we have with labour productivity and industrial disputation! [That’s a bit unfair Jaymez: schools which needed gyms have got libraries, most houses with the speed-installed-pinkbatts didn’t burn down, and at least 0.01% of the population is now hooked up to fibreoptic to watch their football in 3D. Talk about national benefit. – Jo]
No doubt the huge debt will only be repaid, and savings to meet the unfunded superannuation payments of retired and retiring public servants will only be made, when the Labor party has been thrown out of office and all the pain will be blamed on the heartless Coalition Government.
But Greece and Italy and Spain and Portugal and Ireland are finding out the hard way that you can¡¯t live beyond your means indefinitely. The longer you put off financial responsibility, the harder and harsher it will be to recover.
Gillard/Swan 2011/12
Total Government Receipts $330 Billion 39.2% greater than 2006/7
Total Government Expenditure $371 Billion 69.4% greater than 2006/7 Australian Government Budget 2011-12
Note: To equate budget figures with salary figures I just turned $Billions into hundreds of thousands and halved it. E.G. $237B became 237,000/2 = $118,500.
How accurate is a book when even the title describes a group of people who don’t exist? Will Cook stop abusing English?
So he finally admits the banal, that there is no rational explanation for calling skeptical scientists “climate deniers” or “climate change deniers”. Bravo. (No one denies that climate changes, or thinks the Earth has no climate.). But this is terminology he uses everywhere, and it describes a group of people that don’t exist. Has he only just noticed?
We think through our language, and when we use sloppy, inaccurate words, we get sloppy inaccurate results. Abusing our language is what people do when they don’t have a rational argument.
Misleading language is de rigueur for Cook. Even the name of his “SkepticalScience” website is the anti-thesis of accurate English. He’s not skeptical of “official science” in the slightest, and with a gaping hole in his logic (see below), not too scientific either.
Look out for the “fake” tag, too. Since when did a representative of a university call another university academic a fake? Since Cook did. He labels Ian Plimer a “fake” – is Plimer a fake PhD in geology and a fake professor at both the University of Melbourne and the University of Adelaide? He has published 130 “fake” scientific papers (apparently). So what does “fake” mean anymore? It means Cook can’t use English accurately. Who is the fake expert now?
“… (Plimer) hasn’t published a single peer-reviewed paper on climate change.”
Neither has John Cook. So?
Clear speech helps civilization, while misleading speech helps the cheats. And cheat-speak, ultimately, is either incompetent or a deliberate ploy to deceive.
Will Cook start to write accurately?
Will he now correct this deceptive label in his paper “Understanding Climate Change Denial”, or his book “Climate Change Denial”? Will he remove the constant references to it throughout his blog? It all depends on whether he is interested in truth and accuracy, or really aiming for cheap marketing and PR wins. Electronic publications can be changed, and apologies made. But will he?
UWA — Achieving Excellence, or debasing the English language?
Since the term “climate denier” is the wrong term, and doesn’t illuminate anything, why use it? To score a trickster win? Surely Cook, UWA and UQ would not want that?
It is a short-term PR victory, but a loss for science. Casual readers are misled by inaccurate labels. They see Cook’s scientific vocabulary and those university logos, and assume that he has a good reason for calling opponents “deniers”. They don’t realize he slips in and out of accurate terms — weaving science and namecalling — and he may not realize either. Where does the science end, and the PR begin? The end result is a disguised advert for a political campaign, masquerading as a science article.
I and others have been pointing it out for four years, and Cook is now trying to come up with an answer. Skeptics have dragged the debate forward a notch.
But rather than speak in accurate English, he’s trying to justify the namecalling with a new variation of nonsense. Is his “consensus denial” much better? Skeptical scientists don’t deny there is a consensus among official climate scientists either. We deny that it matters more than empirical evidence — which just makes us scientific, and Cook, not so much. Science is skepticism, forever asking for evidence, y’know — nullius in verba, testing assumptions with observations and all, so the scientists who made the biggest contribution were consensus deniers at the time. Not all consensus deniers are revolutionary scientists. But the term is mindless.
In order to rationalize his cognitive dissonance (he thinks he’s being scientific), Cook invents new non-scientific abstractions. He argues that a “consensus” is really a “consensus of evidence“.
What on Earth is a consensus of evidence?
Is Cook twisting words so he might sound legitimate in doing something that isn’t? Let’s poke those terms with a dictionary.
con·sen·sus n. An opinion or position reached by a group as a whole [dictionary]
ev·i·dence (in Science): actual observations [Berkley]
So a consensus of evidence literally means the opinions of the observations. It sorta appears rational, but it boils down to a bunch of graphs and tables sitting around the lab having a chat. The graphs and tables argue and debate, then decide what their public position will be and elect a spokesman. O.K.?
It’s like an experiment in Quantum Rhetoric with the Large Hadron Word Collider. Two useful words meet and destroy each other.
Hang on, you think, trying to be fair on Cook, he did explain that he means “many different measurements pointing to a single, consistent conclusion.” But who decides what is “consistent”? Since data tables don’t decide, ultimately it comes back to the opinions of scientists, but Cook explained that that was not what he meant. He said there were two kinds of consensus, a consensus of evidence and a consensus of scientists. Yet they are the same thing. It’s all opinions, and it isn’t evidence.
Opinions are not evidence — Science without logic is witchcraft
John Cook talks of “logic” but his entire argument is built on a fallacy — Argument from Authority. It’s nice that Cook finally wants to talk about reasoning. But you can’t be a little bit logical. You either are or you aren’t. (A search on SkepticalScience for “logic” turns up an argument for a “consensus” — a fallacy — as the top response.) Science without logic is witchcraft. It may be well intentioned witchcraft, but if you are being bled with leeches, what’s the difference?
Is Cook’s work an example of UQ logic, reasoning and English?
The only thing that will tell us about the climate is data from the natural world. The more Cook quotes “surveys” of humans, the more you know he is scratching for evidence and in political mode.
In any case, the “opinion-meter” doesn’t stack up. All the scientists out there who are nuclear physicists, Nobel Prize winners, experts in tunneling microscopy, spectroscopy, atmospheric chemistry, you name it, their opinion counts for zero in the world of the climate faithful. By ruling out nearly every scientist who has advanced human knowledge in the last 50 years, Cook wants you to believe that only a “climate expert” can spot a dodgy argument in science. The anointed?
Has he noticed this means nearly everyone who’s “opinion counts” is also someone who would find it easier to get grants and junkets if man-made global warming is important, and who have already staked their professional reputations on one theory and one conclusion? An amazing coincidence, no? And before anyone yells “ad hominem”, note, I don’t claim they’re wrong because they have a vested interest. They’re wrong because they don’t have the evidence.
If they had the evidence (instead of just name-calling) wouldn’t most scientists outside their specialty find their evidence convincing, and support them? Instead we know thousands of independent scientists, mostly with no dollars to gain or lose (apart from useless taxes), are risking their professional reputation to put forward their opinions even though the price is that guys like John Cook will call them “fake” experts, imply that they are funded by fossil fuels, or are part of some international campaign to manufacture doubt. Isn’t the simplest explanation of why thousands of scientists are rising up against man-made global warming not due to a wild unsubstantiated conspiracy, but is the most banal idea instead — they sincerely feel concerned that the official science is wrong? Occam’s razor begs.
How do we measure global temperature with Internet surveys?
If the debate about man-made global warming was about adding up scientists on the plus and minus side, how do we add up the numbers? Is one climate scientist worth two retired NASA guys? Cook would say anyone without the “official” title isn’t allowed an opinion (there’s those vested interests again), but ultimately the climate scientists produced models we know fail nearly every test of validity (they don’t even talk about “verifying” them anymore) while the retired NASA guys actually got to the moon.
Who is the “science denier” now?
The NASA guys have a reputation that matters, and since they are retired, have little to gain from speaking out and being called snarky names. Unlike climate scientists, their income and status won’t go down if man-made global warming isn’t a big deal. None of this is any reason to assume that the NASA guys are right, but it’s a reason to listen to their arguments. Cook doesn’t even want you to listen, “Astronauts and engineers are not climate experts.”
Cook’s sloppy reasoning is everywhere
Given that argument from authority is a fallacy, Cook’s writing is practically self-satirizing:
“One way of avoiding consensus is to engage in logical fallacies.”
Like saying, one way of avoiding my favorite fallacy is to engage in other fallacies. Except Cook finds imaginary fallacies, or ones that are not the mainstay of the skeptic group.
The two asteroids were going in opposite directions, so were not related.
While everyone was expecting and watching Asteroid 2012DA14, which missed Earth by 26,000 km (17,000 miles), another asteroid blasted through the atmosphere in Russia, injuring more than 1,000 people (mostly by shards of glass caused by the sonic boom). One estimate makes it out to be a 10 tonner (seems a bit small), traveling at 30 kilometers a second. Another astronomer, Margaret Campbell-Brown, claims ultrasound stations show it was 15m wide and around 40 tonnes. Nature quotes the same researcher talking about 15m and 7,000 tonnes. You can see we have a good grip on what happened. [UPDATE: Now it’s 10,000 tons and 55 feet wide and stone. The largest object to hit in a century. WUWT. What about the ones that fell over the ocean wonders Jo? How would we know?]
It left a “contrail” and a flash that could be seen for 700km (see these videos –why are people filming while they drive?). It only “missed” by 30 – 50 kilometers and nobody knew it was coming. How little we know. One part of it broke off and smashed into a frozen lake, leaving a 6m hole.
The other asteroid (2012DA) was about 60m (150ft) and 140,000 ton or “Tungusta-size”. The 2012DA was headed northwards. The surprise bolide in Russia was travelling south.
So we are watching for the next one?
Have we got these priorities straight? NASA in total gets about $18 billion a year. Though the annual federal allocation for “planetary defense” is only $5.8 million or so (with a proposal to increase it to $20m). But it’s not like there are many objects to watch: “In 2008 NASA’s Near Earth Object Program spotted a total of 11,323 objects of all sizes.” (#&!)
The chance of another Tunguska-size impact somewhere on Earth this century is about 30%. That isn’t the likelihood that you will be killed by an asteroid, but rather the odds that you will read a news headline about an asteroid impact of this size somewhere on Earth. Unfortunately, that headline could be about the destruction of a city, as opposed to an unpopulated region of Siberia. . . .
What are the odds we’ll be hit with man-made deadly weather? Not much according to the evidence, but the US government spends 6785 times as much trying to prevent that:
“Spending to reduce emissions which contribute to climate change was $38 billion” [Energy Budget and Climate Change, 2012, PDF]
Graham Richardson says that a lie is not a lie if you believe what you say:
After the 2010 election, Julia Gillard had broken her core election promise that “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”. Her credibility has never recovered from that moment. But I have never regarded this breach as a lie because I have never believed that she didn’t believe every word she solemnly uttered at the time.
So if I promise to split the pizza with you, but later change my mind, because the pineapple was tinned (how could I have foreseen that?) that’s alright then? You get the bill. I get free pizza.
Can I use this excuse for my tax return? Officer, I really did believe it was true…
Gillard was hit by unforeseen circumstances:
The PM had no doubt never really contemplated the prospect of a hung parliament in which she lacked the numbers to dictate policy.
“On Sunday, the Gary Morgan poll predicted the election would end in a hung parliament.”
“Sunday, Mark Latham commented that “in all likelihood Senator Bob Brown and his Green Party will control the next Parliament”
It would have been so different if she had a law degree, experience in Parliament and unlimited advisors right? Oh wait… (Graham, do you think people will fall for this?)
Thank God for Barack Obama and Greg Combet. For they have The Gift. They can change the weather.
Welcome back to another Golden Era of Climate-Hype.
Obama’s State of the Union speech and all-new legislation in the US is ramping up the debate again. Greg Combet (Australian minister for the weather) is getting so excited at the news, he’s sending out emails to all the skeptics who’ve ever written to him:
Does Combet think that this will change skeptic’s minds? Is he serious? Does he have any idea why we are skeptics? Does he listen?
He even asks skeptics to send him $10 to help. The tax you already are forced to pay is not enough. Is Combet an activist or a government minister?
PS. Can you help us defend the carbon price from Tony Abbott by chipping in $10? We can’t afford to fall behind the rest of the world on this issue.
Obama’s spinified climate statements
When shale gas is good we call it “natural gas” (don’t mention the “frack” word):
Obama: “We produce more natural gas than ever before – and nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it. And over the last four years, our emissions of the dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet have actually fallen.”
Our records are a tiny 150 years of a 4,500,000,000 year history. But we can milk those records for all their scary PR value:
“But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Yes, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense.”
There’s been a big “todo” over a tweet made by Trade Minister Craig Emerson saying that Andrew Bolt was wrong to claim the world hadn’t warmed for 16 years. (Which means Emerson disagrees with the UK Met boys, the latest IPCC draft report and all the major data.) Werner Brozek at WUWT went through the largest global temperature data sets:
For RSS the warming is not significant for over 23 years.
For UAH, the warming is not significant for over 19 years.
For Hacrut3, the warming is not significant for over 19 years.
For Hacrut4, the warming is not significant for over 18 years.
For GISS, the warming is not significant for over 17 years.
So Bolt was correct.
Was Emerson in denial, or is there something else going on?
In Tuesday night’s show on 2GB, Trade Minister Craig Emerson rang in to defend himself and talk with Andrew Bolt, which is admirable, but in a blink it became an exercise in extreme frustration. It was painful.
The point of the discussion was supposed to be whether or not there was a pause of “16 years” of no significant warming. Emerson’s reply was that since this decade was warmer than the last (according to the same UK Met Boys), he was right and Bolt was wrong. This is a bit like saying 20 years equals 16 years. It’s innumerate: 20 ≠ 16. The numbers matter. In a simple test of “statistical significance”, making the test period longer and sweeping in more data changes everything (more data makes any trend “more significant”).
Emerson appeared to be in complete denial of the data, and the usual experts. Emerson went on to argue that it was “warming” for 20 years, then 50 years, even 250 years, taking an inanity to it’s logical extreme. But warming that didn’t happen after 1997, won’t be “found” in 1982 or 1896 either. Nothing in an earlier year would change anything about the statistical significance of the pause for the last 16 years.
Emerson doesn’t seem to realize that the world could be “technically” warming in the last 16 years, but the measured change could be so small as to be insignificant. If the rise is too tiny, it could be mere chance in a noisy dataset, and no half-decent scientist would claim that the world was warming knowing that it was statistically insignificant.
Bolt fruitlessly kept trying to get Emerson to admit that there was no significant warming for 16 years. He might as well been talking in Urdu. Indeed perhaps they were talking in different languages. With Bolt talking the language of statistics, while Emerson used unscientific English and stuck to the warmist script.
Emerson has an economics background, to PhD level. Is it possible that he didn’t realize the difference between warming and “significant warming”? Don’t they teach statistics in economics?
This tiny warming trend could be meaningless noise. It’s not statistically significant, so it’s accurate to say warming has paused. Graph: David Evans | Source: Hadley UK Met Office.
The peer review system has decayed to the point where the culture of the two “top” science journals virtually guarantees they will reject the most important research done today. It is the exact opposite of what we need to further human knowledge the fastest. Science and Nature are prestigious journals, yet they are now so conservative about ideas that challenge dominant assumptions, that they reject ground-breaking papers because those papers challenge the dominant meme, not because the evidence or the reasoning is suspect or weak.
Watts Up drew my attention to an extraordinary paper showing that billions of dollars of medical research may have been wasted because researchers assumed mice were the same as men. Dr Ronald W. Davis from Stanford comments: ““They are so ingrained in trying to cure mice that they forget we are trying to cure humans.” He found that 150 drugs were tested that in hindsight, were guaranteed to fail in humans. People didn’t understand that mice have a very different response to sepsis (which is any overwhelming blood-borne bacterial infection). Sepsis kills around 200,000 people in the US each year and costs an estimated $17 billion a year. Mice are already resistant to huge numbers of bacteria in their blood whereas humans overreact, our capillaries leak, our organs run short of blood, mass organ failure ensues, and we can die. While mice may have an answer to deadly sepsis (how do they resist it?) we weren’t looking for that in our experiments, we were testing drugs on mice that were never going to help us. Now we understand why.
The peer review system is failing us — Science and Nature missed a whopper of a study
The editors must be kicking themselves now. But what a classic case study of the way the peer-review-establishment responds to a contentious idea. Here was information that could potentially save lives that was dismissed and delayed for the most unscientific of reasons.
The study’s investigators tried for more than a year to publish their paper, which showed that there was no relationship between the genetic responses of mice and those of humans. They submitted it to the publications Science and Nature, hoping to reach a wide audience. It was rejected from both.
The data was described as persuasive, robust, and stunning. Yet both prestigious journals tossed the drafts out. The best excuse they can give is that they reject lots of papers. Oh, well that’s ok then…
Science and Nature said it was their policy not to comment on the fate of a rejected paper, or whether it had even been submitted to them. But, Ginger Pinholster of Science said, the journal accepts only about 7 percent of the nearly 13,000 papers submitted each year, so it is not uncommon for a paper to make the rounds.
Still, Dr. Davis said, reviewers did not point out scientific errors. Instead, he said, “the most common response was, ‘It has to be wrong. I don’t know why it is wrong, but it has to be wrong.’ ” [See page 2 of the story]
If you do revolutionary work, send it somewhere else
Mark McGowan , the West Australian Labor leader hoping to win the election in March and become Premier of WA, announced that he doesn’t like the Carbon Tax. But apparently he does like emissions trading, showing that he’s as keen as anyone to help large financial institutions reap nice profits for little risk, and no benefit.
“It’s no coincidence that the only people who argue for a free market solution are those who profit from it, or those who don’t know what a free market is.” Jo Nova Sept 2010
McGowan is trying to have it both ways but failing to make sense to either group: a kind of fence-sitting yoga. How do you pretend you care about West Australian voters, many of whom deeply distrust the Federal government and the carbon tax, but pretend at the same time that you care about the carbon monster, so you can appease the Greens and avoid the “denier” tag?
When researchers Lianne M. Lefsrud and Renate E. Meyer asked geoscientists and engineers their opinion about global warming, they discovered that two thirds of them think that the current warming is mostly due to nature.
They also found out that skeptics are scientifically informed and in positions of power and influence. What they didn’t figure out is why this is bleedingly obvious once you start with correct assumptions. Even though the skepticism of well respected scientists matches the skepticism of meteorologists (think about that) the researchers assume the skeptics are “deniers”.
Of course, polls of scientists are not evidence about our climate. But it is evidence that one of the main forms of argument “97% of climate scientists say man-made warming is real” is not just meaningless, but misleading. It’s PR, not science. The endorsement of “science associations” is one of the main points of “evidence” offered by pro-carbon-market activists. But few of those associations ever asked their members, their endorsement is usually just a committee pronouncement from six networking types on the “climate policy” committee. And few researchers even ask “most scientists” what they think. The one large survey was done by volunteers (and done twice) and they found 31,000 scientists who disagree with the six-member-committees of science associations.
Survey: Geoscientists, Engineers Are Global Warming Skeptics
Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. Nearly two-thirds of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.
The survey results show geoscientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.
The researchers start in the darkness and never find the light
Not to pull punches, this study, like so many, was done by researchers who don’t seem to know what science is, don’t test their base assumptions, and unwittingly build their own mental-contructs around activist PR, mistaking it for “scientific truth”. They use the wholly unscientific and undefinable term “climate change deniers” even though they admit no one seems to deny that the climate changes. If a researcher can’t start with accurate English, what’s left? Namecalling — it’s not a good look for a scientific mind. Couldn’t the researchers see “deniers” for what it is — the bullying and intimidation by people who don’t have better arguments?
The research appears to come from the point of view of trying to figure out how to convert those pesky inconvenient skeptics. Look out for two new junkscience terms “Climate change resistance” and “institutional defence”.
One of the biggest flaws is that Lefsrud and Meyer assume that fossil fuel scientists have a vested interest, but think no one else does:
For obvious reasons, fossil fuel industries’ stakes in this struggle are high and, not surprisingly, they are at the forefront of the opposition to carbon regulation (Wittneben, Okereke, Banerjee, & Levy, 2009).
Did no one wonder what happens to a climate change expert if it turns out that (a) climate change is natural and there is no need to spend billions to try to control the weather (or fund large grants to study it), and (b) the climate scientists were mostly wrong, barking up the wrong tree and not very good at their jobs?
The influence of the vested interests in fossil fuel related work is real but not particular strong. The stakes are not that high. Fossil-fuel-based-scientists know that even if CO2 causes a significant climate shift, it won’t cripple their industry. For the foreseeable future people will still be buying coal, oil and gas because there are no real alternatives (apart from nukes).
For climate scientists, the stakes are all or nothing. If CO2 is not a big problem, many careers will crash. Did the researchers ask the geo’s their opinion on wind and solar, and the likelihood it would threaten their jobs?
Lefsrud and Meyer reckon it’s hard to “gain access” to the minds of deniers:
I saw on the ABC news tonight that Mark McGowan announced that he doesn’t like the Carbon Tax. He’s the West Australian state opposition leader and there are just four weeks left before the State election. Strangely I can find no story, no news headline to confirm this.
What does it matter you say… it’s a federal issue, not a state one. But it says everything you need to know about how unpopular both Gillard and the Carbon tax are. McGowan has dodged the questionrepeatedly for months, but trailing in the polls, he finally chose to dump the policy, despite it making his name Mud with the Federal Government and his fellow Labor compatriots. Peter van Onselen suggested it would pick him up some votes only a few days ago.
He would be the first Labor State Leader to do so.
In May the former Labor premier Kristina Keneally says Julia Gillard should revoke or wind back the carbon tax in order to claw back public popularity. But she’s was safely out of the action by then. On August 9th 2012, the NSW Labor leader — John Robertson told his caucus they’d never hear him support the carbon tax, but publicly announced the very opposite the next day. The Victorian Labor leader Daniel Andrews came under pressure to protest against the Carbon Tax, but declined too.
How much does he object to the Carbon Tax? Not enough to speak up until the election is one month away.
Thanks to commenters Warren L, Sceptical Sam and Daremo for this ABC link to the Greens outrage in response.
So what does this mean? Billions more dollars poured into the uber carbon gravy train? Twenty whole percent?
Current climate spending is estimated at 5-7%. So this might be a big increase. Has the EU gone over the waterfall, or is it more a PR exercise where money that would have been spent on other things is rebadged as a “climate” expenditure.*
The power of a single department may get diffused and spread among lots of departments. WWF are not happy and nor is the European Environmental Bureau. It can’t be all bad. ( 🙂 )
BRUSSELS, Belgium, February 8, 2013 (ENS) – European heads of state and government have agreed to commit at least 20 percent of the entire European Union budget over the next seven years to climate-related spending.
All-night negotiations in Brussels produced agreement among EU leaders on budget proposals for the rest of the decade, from 2014-2020.
“Climate action objectives will represent at least 20% of EU spending in the period 2014-2020 and therefore be reflected in the appropriate instruments to ensure that they contribute to strengthen energy security, building a low-carbon, resource efficient and climate resilient economy that will enhance Europe’s competitiveness and create more and greener jobs,” the final agreement states.
The total budget just got a bit smaller. Oooh. In real terms, that will hurt (if it happens):
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